Although occasionally unsophisticated and repetitive, Barracuda ultimately succeeds in painting a deeply involving portrait of failure: of the pain that can result when a mind mired in shame turns against itself.
Characteristically, Pound lit into her, pointing out that Prufrock is the "quintessence of futility" and that his is "a portrait of failure, or of a character which fails, and it would be false art to make it end on a note of triumph" and have him become "a reformed character breathing out fire and ozone".
The good news – or bad news, depending on your point of view – is that Marber's portrait of the failure of men and women to achieve spiritual as well as sexual intimacy seems as powerful and pertinent as ever.
In 2007, an independent review panel appointed by BP and led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, painted a scathing portrait of cultural failure at BP, finding that the company put profits before safety.
The song, which originally appeared on Ochs's 1969 album, "Rehearsals for Retirement," is a stark portrait of regret, failure, and sorrow: And it's all so strange Pictures lose their frame And I'll bet you never guessed There was so much pain So much pain Until the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser Stands rejectedly by the door Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
It presents Barr as a complicated person with a pathology of victimhood – when she loses the nomination to Jill Stein, she blames everyone but herself – and ends up painting an insightful portrait of the failures of third parties in American politics.
It's a fucked and an incredibly powerful portrait of the failures of the American Dream.
The "energetic re-assertions of the Conventional Portrait of 'shortages,' shortfalls, failures of K-12 science and math teaching" are "expressions of interests by interest groups and their lobbyists," he testified at a November Congressional hearing.
He sketches portraits of these failures in countries with different histories and governance problems, illustrating infrastructural setbacks that have enabled cholera to erupt in present day Angola, South Africa, Senegal, and Zimbabwe.
That W. Eugene Smith considered his great photographic portrait of Pittsburgh a colossal failure is a testament not to his modesty but to his hubris.
Ms. Power, then teaching at Harvard, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her highly critical portrait of America's repeated failure to stop mass atrocities, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide".
