Word: bureaucrats
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nose is a humorous stroll through the complexities of czarist Russian society. Kovolyov, one of Gogol's usual St. Petersburg bureaucrat protagonists, wakes up to discover that his nose is missing from his face. As he rushes through the channels of the Russian bureaucracy in vain efforts to reclaim his proboscis, the play treats the audience to delightfully unpredictable morsels of absurdism, such as the scene where the hapless Kovolyov encounters his nose, dressed in the uniform of a state councilor, praying at St. Isaac's Cathedral. "Excuse me, sir," says the nose, "but you are mistaken...
Politics used to be entertaining. But now I find myself gagging uncontrollably each time I hear a candidate's $50,000 TV commercial explaining why I should consider the smiling bureaucrat to be "One of Us". The fact that these candidates happen to be human isn't enough. The day I find out that George Bush is related to me through any connection other than a purely biological one is the day I take a gun to my head...
Frost delivers another classic acting job. Early in his performance, he has a mixture of regality and clumsiness that is as confusing as it is recognizable. His character wavers between a confident, debonair diplomat and a parody of a bureaucrat, such as when he attempts to explain to Susan the benefits of the embalming process. "It keeps the body from exploding at a bad moment," he tells her. When he sees the expression on her face: "Of course, any moment would be a bad moment--that goes without saying." Later, as her husband, he swings quickly and adroitly from...
...task of his successor to undo much of that dubious bequest under pressure from a Kremlin leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who is now promoting many of the reforms that Husak suppressed. Whether Jakes (pronounced Ya-kesh) is the right man for that job is hotly debated. A colorless Soviet-trained bureaucrat who presided over a sweeping purge in the early 1970s, he hardly qualifies as new blood. In an interview with TIME, Dissident Playwright Vaclav Havel called Jakes a "man without a specific face, without his own ideas." On the other hand, said Havel, "in our situation any change is good...
Marijuana use wrecks Douglas Ginsburg' s Supreme Court omination. -- Caspar Weinberger retires, and the Pentagon gets Frank Carlucci, a battlewise bureaucrat less leery of compromise. -- Homely but authentic, Paul Simon is moving ahead in the Democratic presidential race. -- Winds of change in Mississippi...