Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...artists were comic-strip heroes, Horace Clifford Westermann would be Popeye. The gimlet stare, the laconic speech, the cigar stub jutting like a bowsprit from the face, the seafaring background and fo'c'sle oaths, the muscular arm-all are there. He signs his work with an anchor; and Westermann's age, 55, is about right too. What the comparison lacks, of course, is the talent. Westermann's retrospective of 59 sculptures and 24 drawings, which runs until mid-July at the Whitney Museum in New York and then goes on a tour of museums...
Glass's musical background is strictly classical. When he was eight, he began flute lessons at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, his home town. At 14, he passed an early entrance exam for the University of Chicago and subsequently enrolled. After Chicago came five years at Juilliard as a composition student. Glass copied the cutting-edge modernists and won some prizes. But he wasn't satisfied. "To me, all of modern music sounded terrible," recalls Glass."It was purely theoretical, and I saw music as more accessible, as a sense of community...
...Some of the musical numbers are staged, for no particular reason, as white-on-white stylizations, à la Busby Berkeley, while others are shot realistically - and sloppily - in places like the high school lawn. Chorus members are not even given attitudes they can maintain when they are in the background of a shot. Camera work is film school simple, and movement within shots does not even reach the levels we are accustomed to in TV, whence Kleiser sprang or, more properly, stumbled. Even the lip-sync in the musical numbers is terrible...
...course, these three isolated events do not tell the whole story of the past year at Harvard. Libraries were still budy, pre-meds still tuned into the organic joys and tribulations of Chem 20, students still managed to shrink into the monolithic, protective background of mass-production academia. It would be wrong to devise some theory of mass student activism to describe life at Harvard--the changes of the past year were anything but revolutionary. They were, instead, just beginnings, intriguing shifts in direction of momentum, little crevices in the facade of a community grown comfortable with statics. What...
Gibson does not foresee keeping her present jobs for more than a few years. If she eventually decides to enter college administration, her post in Epps's office will provide her with useful background, although she realizes Harvard "isn't about to promote a staff assistant to dean, or even assistant dean for that matter." A deanship is not "an immediate concern on this employment level," she adds. A few of her counterparts in the other deans' 'offices have landed administrative posts at other schools, and most of the staff assistants, whatever their eventual goals, do view these jobs...