Word: urbanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wholesale privatization of American life may give conservatives goose pimples, but it also produces a kind of civic isolation. And Fortress America, ringed with gated communities and checkpoints and motion detectors, is a foreboding example of self-sufficiency. Says urban planner Oscar Newman: ``People who live in these communities tend not to participate very much in the affairs of the surrounding communities. I find that a little scary.'' Privatization is also a lot less liberating for the millions of Americans who can't afford their own private police, schools, street cleaners and country clubs...
...those on the front lines--America's teachers--do not need to pore over test scores to know there is a terrifying and potentially enduring problem. ``You see students for whom the system has failed, and that's what enrages me,'' says Susan McCray, a teacher at Boston's urban Fenway Middle College High School, who struggles daily to convince her students that learning can be thrilling for its own sake--as well as a ticket to a better life. ``It has a real effect on real lives...
...ultimate cost could be larger still. The budget deficit is not only a grave problem in itself, a theft of resources from the next generation, but also one reason politicians feel too strapped for cash to earnestly confront the other leading contender for gravest problem: the existence of an urban underclass. This sort of predicament is what the Founders designed representative democracy to solve. "They saw the public interest as a transcendent thing that enlightened people would be able to see and promote. It wasn't just a question of adding up all the interests," says historian Gordon Wood, author...
...urban battle was at last going the Russians' way, little else was. Televised images of the death and devastation in Grozny continued to flicker around the world, increasing the cries of revulsion. Complaints about errant bombing became accusations of massive human-rights violations...
...through this show one catches such premonitory notes, and one realizes what a big submerged effect Kline must have had on some of the better artists now alive: Richard Serra, for instance, whose dark walls of steel and thickly scrubbed-on black-crayon drawings evoke the same urban-industrial landscape that inspired Kline, or Brice Marden, or Cy Twombly, who lent this show a bunch of Kline's quickly brushed, frail sketches done on now crumbling pages of Manhattan telephone directories. These studies, not incidentally, dispose of the myth that Kline was a wholly spontaneous painter who staked everything...