Word: venal
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...this, his one "race" film, Robeson plays both the venal "Reverend" Isaiah T. Jenkins - an ex-con who wows the faithful with his sermons and woos them with a brutal hand - and Isaiah's saintly brother Sylvester. Of course it's Isaiah who gets the screen time, because Robeson could seize the screen by pouring more of his roguish majesty into the part. Isaiah wows the church ladies with his orations, then sullies their virgin daughters and pockets his victims' life savings (hidden in a Bible!). The actor's playing here is as broad as Broadway, but Micheaux wasn...
Moscow is a city of extremes - gaudy and sedate, sleazy and refined, the sort of place where you can spend $50 to get into a striptease club or $6 for the best seats at a concert in the Conservatory. The brashness of post-Soviet Moscow, combined with venal officials and long immigration lines at the airport, put off many first-time visitors. Don't let them. Moscow is one of the most unusual and atmospheric cities you will ever visit. You just need to get under its skin...
Journalists are a varied assortment, of course--some of them as shabby, venal or self-important as the cast of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, the 1937 novel that is still the most hilarious depiction of foreign correspondents and their publishers in the grip of a vigorous incomprehension of just about everything. In the book William Boot, who writes a nature column for a British newspaper called the Beast--composing sentences like "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole"--is recruited by mistake to join a collection of journalistic mountebanks and hacks in covering coup and countercoup...
...Journalists are a varied assortment, of course - some of them as shabby, venal or self-important as the cast of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, the 1937 novel that is still the most hilarious depiction of foreign correspondents and their publishers in the grip of a vigorous incomprehension of just about everything. In the book William Boot, who writes a nature column for a British newspaper called the Beast - composing sentences like "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole" - is recruited by mistake to join a collection of journalistic mountebanks and hacks in covering coup and countercoup...
...posthumous release of art is often much more venal and often equally selfish. What Augustus wanted was power, fame and immortality; by having the Aeneid published he achieved or helped himself to achieve, all three. What people want today is money and often there is plenty to be made when the artist dies before his or her work is released. A good example—and there are many—is Jimi Hendrix. As we all know, Hendrix had already achieved demi-god status among in the burgeoning rock and roll scene of the late...