Word: avant
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...There's not a whole lot of the radical 1960s and 1970s thinking going on anymore. But the owners of 1369 want the classic avant-garde jazz," Broadman said. "And the irony of it all is that just as they were beginning to become successful with that, it's being taken away...
...this kid kingdom, Pee-wee Herman is the prince of prepuberty. For almost a decade, Actor-Writer Paul Reubens, 35, has presented himself as Pee-wee, a gawky, geeky child. The spectacle is both corny and hip, retrograde and avant- garde. It turns Pinky Lee, the '50s kids' show host, into a subject for performance art. At first Pee-wee was a coterie favorite of adults, but with his 1985 film Pee-wee's Big Adventure and his Saturday-morning TV show, Reubens has gained a huge peanut gallery. Even for those who found the Pee-wee persona grating, there...
...smash it into the ground at an outdoor exhibit. Such has been the fate of Russia's modernist art at the hands of dictators bent on enforcing their philistine tastes with the whole armamentarium of the totalitarian state. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has found that the tradition of putting down avant-garde art dies hard among cultural bureaucrats. As a result, the visual arts have been far slower than literature and music to benefit from glasnost...
Hispanic elements can also bring contemporary relevance to distant, avant- garde work. For the La Jolla Playhouse's stunning production of Odon von Horvath's Figaro Gets a Divorce, a satire of dictatorship written at the height of the Nazi era, the action was shifted to a mythical region populated by figures reminiscent of Imelda Marcos, Anastasio Somoza and Fidel Castro. Harvard's American Repertory Theater relocated Jean Genet's The Balcony, a transvestite dream of sexual corruption in high places, to an unspecified Latin city gripped by revolution. Says JoAnne Akalaitis, who staged The Balcony: the Latin flavor imports...
That Vanity Fair, one of the most celebrated avant-garde magazines of the 1920s, would once again be a trendsetter was exactly what Newhouse and Conde Nast Editorial Director Alexander Liberman hoped when they revived the long- defunct magazine in 1983. But after one of the most heralded debuts in recent publishing history, the new magazine collapsed under the weight of its own pretension. Eleven months and two editors later, Newhouse and Liberman hired Brown, an Oxford graduate whose spunky editing had turned around the British satirical monthly Tatler...