Word: veneered
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...China: its name is Guangzhou. This southern madhouse of a city lashes the nerves. Noise. Dirt. Pollution. Crowds. Blinding neon ricocheting off mirrored towers. Ceaseless tearing down and building up, with no visible organizing principle, just decrepit neighborhoods vanishing into gaping construction holes. It is Hong Kong without the veneer of British order, capitalism out of control. This is the world of money, money, money; a city that never sleeps, with dress shops open at midnight and vendors hawking at dawn. No wonder its presiding genius is Deng Xiaoping, smiling down from a giant mural...
Someone came up with the less-than-brilliant idea of slapping a '50s-retro veneer on all the singers' clothes and gestures. Rigoletto in hat and coat recalls Willy Loman with a hump; Gilda sports a flaring gray poodle-skirt, a bright red cardigan sweater and ponytail tied with a matching red ribbon. The duke, when he comes a-courting, looks sublimely ridiculous in a red monogrammed vest. Even the courtship scene between the duke and Gilda is straight out of the '50s, reminiscent of that porch swing on a summer night--a worthy tradition...
...last month during our federally mandated Older-brother/Younger-sister Dinner in Annenberg Hall, the last thing you want to do is to give the same blank stare you give your TF in your interdisciplinary section in advanced topology and conversational Mandarin. You want to keep that veneer of collegiate wisdom you have accumulated by spending $30,000 last year. You'll just have to smile, look her straight in the eyes and make something up fast. I did, and here's a partial transcript of that dinner...
...these shows attempt to combine music-video artiness (think jumpy film-to-video cuts) with a veneer of semiupscale erotic swank (think Bob Guccione's bachelor pad). You can tell they offer a somewhat better grade of porn than the local adult video store because they don't star actors named Long or Chesty; instead they feature respectable, if not always heavily-employed, talents like Emily Lloyd and Julian Sands, who played the aforementioned George. Red Shoe Diaries is narrated by X-Files star David Duchovny, who has hosted the series since it first aired, pre-X-Files, four years...
...father's death is tamed by the play's genteel environment. Delivering lines with playful refinement, Scott's performance works best when he banters with Polonius (David Cromwell) or soundly rejects the love of Ophelia (Natacha Roi). But his passionate soliloquies fall flat, failing to tear the polite veneer from his countenance. His only way of communicating unbridled passion is with a hollow scream, which sounds insincere and empty...