Word: clays
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...wasn't aiming at abstraction. Benton's way of composing, with its heftily twisting figures and buckling, scoop-and-bump space, was based on 16th century Mannerism--Midwestern El Greco and Tintoretto; he even adapted the Mannerist device of reducing the figures to geometrical dolls, sometimes modeling them in clay. This vehemence, locked up as a system, appealed to Pollock as a container for his own emotional flailing. Though some painters show early signs of genius, or at least of facility, Pollock showed none. After you've seen his early drawings in this show, it seems barely credible that...
Like a good dramatist, Remnick centers his whole story on one amazing night when Ali proved his claims, cashed in his chips and changed his identity for good. Up until his epic first fight with Sonny Liston in 1964, Clay and his chatter had been just a good joke. Suddenly he was the heavyweight champion of the world, a position that, like Queen of England and Archbishop of Canterbury, carried certain moral responsibilities. So was Clay planning to be yet another credit to his race, like Joe Louis and Floyd Patterson, or was he going to be the other kind...
...floated like a butterfly around such cliches. Instead of a saint or devil, why not both in one package? Or why not just go crazy and leave them guessing? On the day of the Liston fight, Clay summoned all the thespian training he had picked up in the rings of Louisville to go so thoroughly crazy that his vital signs went crazy too, and Liston was scared out of his mind. The worst mistake you can make in writing about Ali is to leave out the boxing, but Remnick's account of the fight that followed is so vivid that...
Something else changed after that night. Whereas Cassius Clay's jests had all been geared strictly to boxing, Muhammad Ali's tongue became valuable advertising space, and it began to beam Black Muslim messages that jarred strangely against the fight hype and made Ali some real enemies, as opposed to the make-believe ones of sport...
...Parkinson's-induced silence, Ali has had time to sift through the Muslim blarney and has returned to the more generous wisdom of the late Malcolm X, whom he regrets having deserted. "Malcolm was a very, very great man," he tells the author in his now halting speech. Odessa Clay's sweetness has manifestly overwhelmed Cassius Clay Sr.'s blather, and there is nothing left about their son not to like. At which point Remnick trips, for the first and only time, on his way out the door by tacking on a routine death-of-boxing editorial that is simply...