Word: showings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...conversations between Wing and Sand become less a way to show the process of writing a story than a means for saving the story. When the chapters full of Alcoholics Anonymous rhetoric overwhelm and the words "fuck" and "cock" appear for the thousandth time, Wing interrupts and asks Sand if this isn't all a little ridiculous. Sand reminds her that life is ridiculous and that trying to turn reality into a novel cannot alter the excesses of life...
...marshal vast quantities of visual data, his passion for botany and geology -- and his flashes of provincial vulgarity too, his shameless playing to the gallery. If one wants to understand the 19th century appetite for pictorial mastery as a metaphor of the conquest of "untrammeled" nature, this is the show to start with...
NEIL YOUNG: FREEDOM (Reprise). Typical sore-throat vocalizing but unusually acute songwriting from a still ornery spirit. Along with a timely Rockin' in the Free World, two tunes with Linda Ronstadt singing harmony show that he's kept going these 20 years on heart as well as spunk...
Zealous idealists rarely get a chance to lead, and when they do, they rarely show much aptitude for the give-and-take of politics, the careful timing, the restraint. Yet in an irony more exquisite than any he ever envisioned for the stage, Vaclav Havel became not only the conscience but also the commonsense leader of the mass movement that led to Czechoslovakia's orderly ouster of its communist leaders. Having inspired fellow citizens by his rhetoric and unrelenting example, he heard them demand that he take over as head of state. That was not for him, he said...
...renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess." Yet he had nothing of the reformer, no impulse toward public life. He rarely granted interviews, resolutely declined to discuss his works, rebuffed would-be biographers by saying his life was "devoid of interest." He even refused to show up to collect his 1969 Nobel Prize in literature -- an award he had lobbied the Swedish Academy not to give him. Characteristically, his death on Dec. 22 was kept secret until after a private funeral four days later...