Word: absurdities
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...result, others ask the question and produce a depressingly familiar list of findings: insensitivity to the families; exploitation of the hostages; absurd, degrading deference to jailers; interference with diplomacy; appropriation of the role of negotiator. (David Hartman to Nabih Berri: "Any final words to President Reagan this morning?") And finally, giving over the airwaves to people whose claim to airtime is based entirely on the fact that they are forcibly holding innocent Americans...
Accordingly, Berri led Amal in armed clashes against Israelis, Maronite Christians, Palestinians, Sunni Muslims and former allies, the Druze. "Berri the moderate? That's absurd!" scoffs Joyce Starr, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University. Agrees a U.S. Government source who has dealt with Berri: "He may be in the center but only because the center moved. He's not an extremist, but he's shown that he's quite willing to escalate his language -- and his actions -- to retain his position of authority in the Shia community." Still, there...
...next. One looks at the figures, not the ground. Hence the theatricality of his failures. But, like his successes, these too are the work of an utterly compelling artist who will die without heirs. No one could imitate Bacon without looking stupid. But to ignore him is equally absurd, for no other living painter has set forth with such pitiless clarity the tensions and paradoxes that surround all efforts to see, let alone to paint, the human figure in an age of photography...
...would also learn to take the gambits of surrealism beyond the titillations of the absurd. In Homing Ship, taken eight years after he left Paris, he let a walking sailboat (actually a toy that obscures part of the man carrying it) and an inverted tree (a reflection in a puddle) speak for the yearnings of his own exile. It is a lovely image, unlikely and tender. It also typifies his knack for keeping sentimentality at bay in even the most tempting circumstances. His pictures are sweet-tempered but never pat, heartfelt but not tearstained, legible but rarely obvious...
...hard grip on the eye. Of late, whole figures have reappeared in her work. By all rights, Green Ray, 1984, with its two capering figures in a lurid spotlight on a stage of some sort -- Teddy bears, or Mickey Mice, surmounted by human masks -- ought to look merely absurd; yet their forlorn hoofings imply unwelcome news about the state of being an artist...