Word: avant
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...cameraman, a little punchy like the rest of us, is waxing avant-garde. He or she is focusing tight on the state of Florida, marked "too close to call" on the electoral map. There's a red tint to the picture, and the state is colorless, ringed in a bright line. The camera has a bit of a fuzzy focus effect, so that the state appears to be etched onto the map by a luminous ring of fire...
...milk/ eat grapes," she raged. "Robert De Niro/ sit on my face." Raw, dark, witty and extremely sexual, Harvey had critics panting, and it's no wonder. But people who actually pay for records stared at the frequently naked form on her album covers; heard the heart-laid-bare, avant-garde songs about frustration and denial; and ran into the welcoming arms of Sarah McLachlan albums, wondering whether Harvey was a singer, a performance artist or some unfortunate combination of both...
...such lousy TV. From D.C. to Dixie, it's the same vocabulary of ominous synthesizer music, phony-sounding testimonials, graphics worthy of public-access cable and canned punch lines ("Wrong for the court. Wrong for our kids"). It wasn't always so. The 1964 "Daisy" ad was practically avant-garde. Today, while Madison Avenue produces some of the most sophisticated programming on the air, most political ads remain stuck in the Stone Age. Nader looked like a philosopher king simply for doing a couple of funny parodies of MasterCard and Monster.com spots. Both appealed smartly to voter cynicism about...
...then there is Ono's music. She took seriously the example of the avant-garde composer John Cage, who incorporated actual noise into his work. For the soundtrack of Fly, Ono simply makes a succession of nerve-jangling vocal sounds--ululations and sudden shrieks, weird cooing and feline melismas--that are unworldly but unmistakably human. To put it mildly, her voice is not the ideal instrument for mainstream pop, but it can have the cracked charm of Neil Young's or Kurt Cobain's. If she had not been too famous by the late '70s to make a name...
...Blue Man Group is a milestone, probably the closest thing to avant-garde theater ever to make it in Vegas. The three original creators, Chris Wink, Phil Stanton and Matt Goldman, spent the first couple of months appearing in the show themselves (a whole cadre of new Blue Men have taken over in the group's three other companies), and seem unfazed by their encounter with the schlock-entertainment capital. It was Penn and Teller years ago who first suggested that the Blues take their show to Vegas. But they didn't seriously consider it until they began developing...