For both the New York Senate aspirants, a glimpse of frivolity would undermine their perspiring presumptions to high seriousness or inviolable earnestness though it would surely make for a zippier show.
Movement became a matter of self-expression rather than codified technique, and perhaps the greatest contribution of this book is to chart that change -- from country to country, from discipline to discipline (or lack of discipline), from one personal vocabulary to another, from high moral earnestness to self-consciousness to self-indulgence.
Still, despite his high skill and earnestness, Mr. Danielpour lets his eager-to-please score lapse too often into passages of soft-focused Neo-Romantic melodrama.
Her eagerly awaited debut album, meanwhile, comes complete with a collaboration with R&B's high priestess of earnestness, Alicia Keys: the closing track, Hope, which with its squelching, knowingly retro synth line carries a twang of early-70s Stevie Wonder.
Critics have been quick to rip into FitzSimons for his allegedly "simplistically sloganeering", beginning with a declaration in his National Press Club speech last August: "For my money, if the republican movement has suffered from one thing over the years, it's been a surfeit of deadly earnestness, of high-brow worthiness.
The sentiments are earnest, but earnestness has its price.
Mr. Parker brought a more straightforward approach to "Angel's Blues" and "Fly High," projecting a folk-rock earnestness; Mr. Johnson took on airs of both exquisite tenderness, as on "Chorine My Sheba Queen," and flinty cynicism, as on "V.D. City".
Incubus can hurtle through odd-meter riffs or sling an acoustic-guitar ballad, while Brandon Boyd's high tenor voice aches with earnestness as he confesses, again and again, to how painfully in love he is: "I need you now/Put me back together, make me right".
Without the increasing level of suspense inherent in crime fiction, maintaining high levels of idealism and earnestness (against all odds) can be exhausting.
Over all, the quotient of earnestness is definitely higher than that of irony, which is kind of refreshing.
