Word: pandemonium
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shuddering pandemonium abruptly ended in an uncanny stillness "almost as awesome as the dreadful sound of the quake," William Bronson relates in The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned. Dazed men still in nightclothes stumbled out of dwellings along with women holding babies. The air was powdery. Many streets had gaping fissures. Few residents could get any idea of the extent of what had happened. People milled about, as an observer put it, "like speechless idiots." Beyond view, the injured and trapped began to cry out, and gradually the able-bodied undertook rescues...
Clamor is the usual condition in commodities pits. Last week, however, the soy-bean trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade erupted in pandemonium as the C.B.O.T. issued an emergency order, its first in a decade, that July futures contracts in excess of 1 million bu. be liquidated. In one day soybean-futures prices plunged 5%, to $6.86 per bu. Traders speculated that a single buyer was trying to corner the market or drive up prices. The suspected culprit: Ferruzzi Finanziaria, Italy's second largest privately held company and the third largest U.S. soybean processor since it bought Indiana...
...answers, as might be expected with such a patchwork show, depend on what is onstage at the moment. The pratfall pandemonium of the opening scene of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum makes one long for a full-scale Broadway revival. The dance suite of teen gang wars adapted from West Side Story actually benefits by being divorced from the original's cute, coy lyrics, which in life would not tumble trippingly from the tongues of underprivileged youth. The wide-eyed wonder of city life may never have been more vibrantly shown than among the World...
...children help by acting normal. At the moment, a dozen of them are circulating around the house. They stump in and out of the meeting lugging bottles of apple juice, flinging toys, pulling hair. Amid the routine toddler pandemonium, Helen is talking about the 21-month-old child on her lap. "All of us have a season," she says. "With Denise, we know we'll only have a season. But we make the most of what we have today. You just let the child blossom into your life. Let the joy come out." The doctors said Denise would...
...other paintings of fires, abandoned industrial plants and refineries belching out their pollutants under a Stygian sky, the emotive content of the image (industry as Pandemonium) is at odds with the stolid execution. Few techniques could be less suited to depicting what is fugitive and mobile, like fire and smoke, than cutting silhouettes from roofing tar. Sultan leans toward the mummified sublime. His stage effects of glare and silhouette descend, remotely, from Turner. But he is so used to thinking in terms of figure and ground that he handles the transitions between them -- the midtones, the modulations of light -- clumsily...