Word: briskness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...discussing costs in advance with the mortician.) There is a section coyly called "Sex ... and ... Money" that offers suggestions on how to shop for and reduce the costs of an abortion. Glossaries help to explain insurance, stock market and real estate terms that Porter calls "bafflegab." Her style is brisk and hortatory. Porter warns her readers: "If you need a spring rain coat, don't stop off at the section reserved for bathing suits and buy a bikini at top price. I've done this sort of thing plenty of times, and I bet you have...
...magnet of the evening is Maggie Smith as Carson's wife Ruth. She seems to have slithered out of a Noel Coward comedy. Sophisticated, weary of it all, and restless, Ruth is given to brisk interior monologues, like "Help!" or "Watch it Tallulah!" Stoppard has given her a tasty collation of epigrams, and her delivery is succulent. Of her one-night London stand with Wagner, she notes that "hotel rooms constitute a separate moral universe." She develops a sensual fantasy crush on Milne and is heart-wrenchingly crushed when he is killed. Seductively comic, and amusingly seductive, Smith must...
...actors and the high-society whores delicately known as "les grandes horizontals," was something to shun at all costs. It was the portrait that condensed fame and status, and to do so it needed to be painted by one of the lions of the medium, those astonishingly facile and brisk painters who plied their trade in the upper reaches of a society through which they moved on almost equal terms with their clients-Paul-César Helleu, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Anders Zorn. In England and America, the most successful of all these virtuosos was John Singer Sargent...
Beuys' answer to this is, in effect, a brisk substitution. If art cannot affect politics, we shall designate everything that happens in the world as art, as a form of "social sculpture." Since in the present intellectual climate of Germany nearly every act can be read as political, the artist assumes the stature of a revolutionary prophet. The result is Beuys as political Luftmensch, reeling off harmless Utopian generalizations about social renewal through universal creativity, supporting the Free International University, and engaging in squabbles with the Düsseldorf Academy. This, however, is less social sculpture than social packaging...
...Cody got all of it, and, aided by a brisk wind, the kick split the raindrops and the uprights with yards to spare and gave Harvard a 3-0 lead with 4:11 gone...