Word: baum
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...Frank Baum was a populist who tried to get his views across in many less oblique media than children's stories but failed until he wrote Oz. Adaptations usually make changes that obscure his intentions--Dorothy's slippers were silver, not ruby, in the book. The Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryan, who never went far enough, for Baum, towards removing the farmer from his "cross of gold." The Wicked Witch of the West, then as now, is the Republican party. And the Wizard of Oz is none other than Grover Cleveland, who promised free silver and then told...
...eager quiz-show contestants, Zed and Boorman are not bashful about flaunting their education. Bolstered by his psychic seminar. Zed drops quotes from Ecdesiastes, T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche, whose idea of a superman he now suggests. For himself, Boorman borrows -and cunningly acknowledges-a crucial image from L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. The trouble is that none of these sources is assimilated; they are like footnotes without a source. Fortunately there are some bright intervals of self-deprecatory humor that lighten the occasional pomposity of the material...
...SUSAN BAUM...
Anti-taste is still an attitude; one can sustain it well or badly. A lot of the work shown here, from Seymour Rosofsky's clumsy paintings to more overtly "aesthetic" objects like Don Baum's lumpen-surrealist assemblages of dolls' limbs or Cosmo Campoli's inert tributes to Brancusi, is a wretched thesaurus of cliches. But subtract them and a deposit of vitality remains...
...EDGAR S. BAUM...