Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Only 34 years old, Ross has an impressive background, having already served as Chief Curator of the University Art Museum at Berkeley. Deputy Director for the Long Beach Museum of Art, and Curator of Video Art at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. He's written and lectured extensively on contemporary art, and has taught at several universities including Harvard, where he now leads a Fine Arts tutorial entitled, "Form Follows Fiction...
...also part of the Beatles family. He served as best man at the Lennon-Ono wedding and rated a mention in Lennon's rocking celebration of that event, The Ballad of John and Yoko. Throughout The Love You Make, Brown studiously keeps himself in the background, while the Beatles are pushed forward into the glare of revisionist celebrity. The book is like a police lineup lit by limelight...
DIRECTOR WRITER John Sayles seems to like his movies heavy on soundtrack, light on plot. In his recent Lianna, a young mother of two decides for no apparent reason to take up homosexuality while a Joni Mitchellesque voice sings about love and other relevant topics in the background. Lianna does a lot of mournful staring out of windows, the crooning puts us--sort of--in the mood, and nothing much else happens...
...very nature of Chekhov's art has often made his plays difficult to produce. Critic Keith Neilson has noted that Chekhov saw reality not as a series of dramatic climaxes, but as a mundane process of day-to-day living in which the crucial events happen unobtrusively in the background. Thus, though The Seagull includes a failed and successful suicide, a seduction, an abandonment, and the death of an infant, all of these melodramas occur offstage--mostly between the third and fourth acts. What we are shown instead is the residue of these events, the effect each incident...
Little can be gleaned about the author himself from the cryptic "biographical" information on the dustcover, which sounds much like the drunken fiction inside. But if his background is unclear, Erofeev's literary heritage is not: his prose is in the great Russian grotesque tradition, hearkening back to Gogol by way of such earlier Soviet satirists as Bulgakov, Zamyatin, and Zoshchenko. There are also traces of authors as diverse as the Symbolist Andrei Bely (in some of the bizarre urban imagery). Rabelais, and J.D. Salinger (whose Catcher in the Rye was widely circulated in the Soviet Union...