Word: vacuous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...signs and meanings, and to praise what all good little deconstructors would call their "refusal of authoritarian closure," meaning, roughly, that they don't mean anything in particular. It's as though those who bet on him can't bear to face the possibility that his work was vacuous to begin with, so that the charade of admiring the acuteness of his "strategies" can keep going, despite the quasi-industrial repetitiousness with which he recycles his rather small idea...
Such is Chicago's plot. But this play is more accurately a series of vacuous show tunes set back-to-back, with only the sparsest of dialogue separating musical numbers. And while a few of the tunes are catchy ("Razzle-Dazzle" and "Cell Block Tango" are both amusing), most of the dialogue seems flat and humorless. One exchange between Roxie and her lawyer is particularly foolish. When Roxie tells Billy, "You treat me like some dumb common criminal," he replies, "You are some dumb common criminal." Couldn't book writers Ebb and Bob Fosse have done better than this...
...book The Plug-In Drug, gave a memorable, if rather alarmist, description of the trancelike state TV induces: "The child's facial expression is transformed. The jaw is relaxed and hangs open slightly; the tongue rests on the front teeth (if there are any). The eyes have a glazed, vacuous look...
...testify as expert witnesses, hoping to persuade the jury that pictures may resemble porn but also affect the viewer in the more complex manner of art. "These photographs are not meant to titillate," says Arnold Lehman, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. "They don't have that vacuous anonymity that pornography is so much about...
...Quayle serene merely because he is vacuous, preferring drift to ideology? That view obliges one to explain how, in politics, he drifted often and early to the top. Even his friends admit that his success was not by any blaze of intellect. Says M. Stanton Evans, the ex-editor of the Indianapolis News, who helped Quayle get his first political appointment: "There is a cycle in all of his offices. When he comes in, he is underestimated -- too young, too inexperienced -- and then he surpasses people's expectations." In other words, Quayle first gets the job and then gets qualified...