Word: cartoon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Brooks has plenty to sing about. His wife Holly, their three young children and their Brentwood home were relatively unscathed by last Monday's earthquake. His Anything ordeal is over. His new cartoon series The Critic -- created by Simpsons swamis Al Jean and Mike Reiss -- premieres on ABC this week, preceded by reviewers' raves. The show, with its post-Woody Allenish wit and deft movie parodies, looks like a winner...
...notion of interactive rock is in vogue if not yet in practice. The latest Beavis and Butt-head video, I Got You Babe, has the two cartoon metalheads cackling wildly as they put on virtual-reality headsets, plunge into cyberspace and select a "chick" from a computer screen menu. Among the choices: "sexy," "wild" or "was married to dork." The boys choose No. 3, and out pops Cher...
...mainly because Americans' collective tolerance for vulgarity has gone way, way up. Just a decade ago, "hell" and "damn" were the most offensive words permitted on broadcast TV; today the colloquialisms "butt" and "sucks" are in daily currency on all major networks. Characters on Fox sitcoms and MTV cartoon shows snicker about their erections, and the stars of NYPD Blue can call each other "asshole." Look at Montel Williams and Geraldo. Listen to Howard Stern...
...phony arches, phony pediments, phony columns. Two decades after Venturi proposed, with the intellectual's standard perverse quasi-affection, that Vegas could be a beacon for the nation's architecture, his manifesto had transformed America. Forget the Bauhaus and your house -- it is the Vegas aesthetic, architecture as grandiose cartoon, that has become the American Establishment style. And so the splendidly pyramidal new Luxor and cubist new MGM Grand (both the work of local architect Veldon Simpson) do not seem so weird, since equally odd buildings now exist all over the place...
Antics such as this make it difficult not to treat Zhirinovsky as a cartoon -- a man more deserving of ridicule than fear. That may be a mistake. Whether he believes what he says or not, he is clever, complex, and he keenly understands how to use publicity with devastating effectiveness. Says the Hudson Institute's Richard Judy: "He is a master of the bombastic and shocking statement -- and politically it works...