Word: vacuous
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...meaning parents easily parted from their money. Its vast store of information, most valuable to students with little access to files on fellowships or aid, make parts of it useful. Edelhart's deliberately traditional attitude makes much of the book too trite to be helpful. It is contrived and vacuous instead. A market for this type of book still exists. But until something better than College Knowledge is published, the Unofficial Guide will have to suffice...
...vulnerability that I didn't realize still existed. In her stories she had written about blacks with no overtly racist edge. Now I must look at her stories again, and more carefully. I can only hope that the glib pontificator of that evening, the framer of vacuous sentences, is at odds with the humbler personality of the writer at home...
Five Easy Pieces. Bob Raphelson's depressing story of malaise and alienation, which works devastatingly well on the college audience. The big problem is the caricatures--of course we're going to be alienated when the supporting characters are psychos, ghouls, vacuous chatterboxes, intellectual snobs and snots, or vegetables with fixed, idiot smiles. Jack Nicholson plays--superlatively--a rich, formerly preppie pianist who has abandoned the family mansion--a mausoleum on an island off Washington--and gone to work for an oil company in the wilds of California, as a hardhat. Then he returns home for a visit. Raphelson gives...
...into popular myth. It will be remembered as an emblematic, identifying moment of the decade: a demented American psychopomp in a tropical cult house, doling out cyanide with Kool-Aid. Jonestown is the Altamont of the '70s cult movement. Just as Altamont began the destruction of the sweet, vacuous aspirations of Woodstock, Jonestown has decisively contaminated the various vagabond zealotries that have grown up, nourished and sometimes turned sinister...
Unfortunately, De Chirico had nei ther the technical proficiency nor the mastery of drawing to reach his declared goal: a delayed place in the Renaissance tradition. His mythological scenes, in imitation of Titian, were leaden and vacuous; his nudes, meant to emulate Rubens, had the consistency of overboiled gnocchi; homage kept turning into parody. In the meantime De Chirico railed furiously at the modern movement; Braque and Matisse were "malodorous" and surrealism was a brainless obscenity...