Word: urs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When instant gratification becomes a supreme virtue, pop culture follows. Siegfried and Roy, the ur-Vegas magicians (imagine, if you dare, a hybrid of Liberace, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Copperfield and Marlin Perkins) who perform 480 shows a year in their own theater at the Mirage, don't seem satisfied unless every trick is a show-stopper and every moment has the feel of a finale. In front of the new Treasure Island is a Caribbean-cum- Mediterranean faux village fronting a 65-ft.-deep "lagoon" in which a full-scale British man-of-war and pirate vessel every 90 minutes...
...granddaddy of all German Romantic operas, with its setting of a folktale about a forester who accepts magic bullets from the Devil to win the hand of his beloved in a shooting contest. For Waits, Burroughs and Wilson, what the opera provided wasn't an Ur-text but a pretext...
...trick pony, musically speaking, can sustain a nearly three-hour opera, however, is another matter, and it is here that Korot's visual contribution is critical. What gives The Cave its real dramatic power is the raw material of Jewish, Arab and American perspectives on one of history's Ur-tragedies...
...1950S THE YOUNG RICHARD Rodriguez left Mexico with his parents to settle in California. Now the Mexican border runs through his brain. On one side is an old country more imagined than recalled, an ur-land of fatedness and tragic history. On the other is a bright, forgetful America, where every sunset takes the day with it. For years Rodriguez has been negotiating the divide in a mood of deep melancholy. In 1981 he published Hunger of Memory, an account of his longings en route through the parochial schools of Sacramento and the university campuses of Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley...
...Mesopotamia the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates, the Chalcolithic people were building the first large city-states -- Uruk, Ur and Eridu Larsa -- in what is now southern Iraq. All grew to be thriving and fiercely competitive commercial centers. City life was centered around a ziggurat, or temple, that served as both a place of worship and a storehouse for surplus food. For the first time people were divided into several distinct social classes according to status and occupation...