At the book's heart lies the sad story of the humorless Andre Breton, indefatigable writer of manifestos, whose obsessive devotion to the movement ultimately alienated those closest to him.
With Mr. Hussein's obsessive secrecy about his movements heightened by the certainty that American surveillance satellites are seeking to track any sign of his movements, official accounts did not say where he held the meetings with other leaders at which he rejected the demand for him and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, to leave Iraq.
This kind of obsessive rigor — the repetition of movement that changes slightly over time, focusing our attention on tiny details and changes in timing — has a long history in modern dance, but it has mostly been allied to a rather purist aesthetic: simple clothes, basic lighting, no scenery.
As often is the case in his work all standard ballet steps look like wow-making stunts, regularly postponed while the dancers return to obsessive head shakings, staccato birdlike movements, knock-kneed positions and spastic jerks.
He and his players uncovered the slightly obsessive quality of the songful slow movement, with its droning repetition of tonic-dominant bass patterns.
She was targeted by the GamerGate movement with an almost obsessive fervor after she had lent her voice to the opposition against the organised hate campaign.
Dancers skitter across the floor while chanting about cracks and mothers' broken backs, engage in group screams, repeat jerky little movements like obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and knot their bodies around one another while yammering non sequitur commands.
It's a movement of purists (no flavorings, please) and obsessives (bags of micro-lot beans are labeled with the latitude, longitude and elevation where grown).
Ecomodernism, he said, was a reaction to "the environmental movement's apocalyptic doomsaying, soft-energy utopianism, and obsessive moralizing about consumption".
