Word: 80s
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Hollywood is missing out on a great thing: an ingratiating actor who makes hit movies and speaks better English than a few action heroes we could name. In the early '80s Chan gave U.S. films a try (in Burt Reynolds' Cannonball Run capers and two other wooden showcases), then returned to Hong Kong. For Chan there's no place like home. "In Asia I'm kind of like E.T.," he says. "Everybody comes to see my films. There are billions of people in Asia, and they're my first audience. If I get an American audience, O.K., that...
Until the past few years, there has hardly been a lack of them. In the 1970s and early '80s, the international roster included Natalia Makarova, Suzanne Farrell, Gelsey Kirkland, Cynthia Gregory and Carla Fracci. In those days there were also thrilling partnerships that sold out houses worldwide. In Britain the great linkage of Fonteyn and Nureyev was followed by the pairing of Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell. Erik Bruhn and Fracci raced about the world bolstering the box office at various companies. Baryshnikov was the pivot in two blazing partnerships: one with Makarova that reached back to the pair...
This is the emerging trend of the mid-90s. If the 80s were the decade of wealth, yuppies and conspicuous consumption, the 90s are becoming the decade of disturbance. In the 80s, Madonna topped the charts with "Material Girl." Today, Nine Inch Nails has become the hottest ticket in America with songs like "Closer," heavily dependent on feedback, dissonance and violent lyrics ("I want to fuck you like an animal/I want to feel you from the inside out/I want to fuck you like an animal/You get me closer to God"). Dark, chaotic music videos that alternate with scenes of glorified...
...subconscious desire to decivilize ourselves? Every generation has to rebel against the previous one, but all the good things to rebel against--the establishment of the 50s, the wide-eyed leftist political awareness of the 60s, the polyester disco-life of the 70s, the materialistic success drive of the 80s--have already been taken. Grunge-angst, having dispensed with "Greed is good" in the early 90s, now leaves the cutting edge nothing to rebel against but flannel, and what kind of a statement would that be? Nothing is left but to rebel against order itself, to embrace chaos...
...before World War II. More than 5 million died in the Holocaust. After the war a few hundred thousand of the survivors left immediately for Israel, Western Europe or the U.S.; an additional 265,000 managed to emigrate from the Soviet Union between the mid-'60s and the early '80s; and still more headed West when communism collapsed...