Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Clannish, often introverted, programmers labor over problems that demand logical thinking (though not necessarily mathematical background) and painstaking attention to detail-yet defy solution by any standard or scientifically disciplined approach. "Some call it an art and some call it black magic," says A. W. Carroll, RCA's manager of systems programming. Whatever it is, the talent is scarce enough that many companies show great tolerance for "wild ducks." "I overcame my prejudice against working for IBM," says full-bearded Manhattan Computer Expert Larry Josephson, 28, "when I was interviewed by a man dressed in a musty old suit...
...Such a background gives Barenboim a fresh and unabashed outlook on some of the challenging peaks of the piano repertory. Most pianists refrain from tackling Beethoven's 32 sonatas until their ripest years. Barenboim had learned them at 14, played them in a cycle of concerts in London last spring, and is now recording them all on the Angel label. "If you could work to an ideal interpretation, then you'd have to wait to record everything on the day before you die," he says. "All music is something that's made at a certain time...
...Americans agreed with him. When his collection of 143 Pre-Raphaelite paintings was shown in New York in 1860, critics panned them decisively as "weak and fettered," "the crude expression of Genius grappling with superstition." Snorted one Victorian gallerygoer, viewing a Tuscan religious panel with a gold-leaf background: "More of these d-d ridiculous Chinese paintings...
...founder of "Group f/64" with Edward Weston, became an advocate and practitioner of "straight" photography. Nevertheless, his pictures at times achieve the character of abstract paintings. The enlarged wood-grains of "Detail of Old Wooden Cross' are the strokes of the painter's brush. The suppression of the background of "Rain Forest Kileuea" into middle grays sets off the few black tree trunks in the foreground and gives the jungle a surrealistic quality reminiscent of the paintings of Rousseau...
...costumes, which belong to no one period. For the most part they are of gray and black, though Macbeth and his wife are symbolically garbed in blood-red on their first entrance as king and queen. There is rather too much of John Duffy's dissonant and ominous background music, for which Houseman's Hollywood career is again perhaps responsible...