Word: cosmopolitanism
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Steinberg is a loner, a cosmopolitan Jewish exile, a refugee, a man of masks, languages and doctored identities, through whom the world's multiplicity is refracted as by a prism. In America, he is both outsider and insider: only he could have dreamed up the poster that summarizes the Manhattanite's provincial view of America: Ninth and Tenth avenues wide in the foreground, a strip of Hudson River, a smaller strip of New Jersey, and in the background a few scattered cities?Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago?with Japan and China in the distance...
...almost two generations. Moreover, his motifs are almost subliminally recognizable: the wry face whose nose turns into a detachable line, the worried cats, the Ruritanian flourishes and curlicues, the apocalyptic scenes of street riots and urban breakdown, the setting of the bizarre commonplaces of American life in a cosmopolitan matrix. Such details of Steinberg's work constitute a signature and have subtly altered America for everyone who has seen them...
...shame, and drift back to sleep again. But parental tolerance of the sleep-gorge-sleep regimen wanes quickly, and then, at least in my family, I am expected to fill the 'rents in on the details of life at school: intellectual pursuits stimulating lectures and an exhilerating, whirlwind, cosmopolitan social life. Unfortunately, words fail me here, because much of my life is spent hunched over a typewriter contracting curvature of the spine and shortchanging the glorious intellectual pursuits my family values...
...describes the older professional ski patrolmen he knows as "rural, crusty guys," and he doubts Bob could have long tolerated professional patrolling. "Bob was not a rural, middle-class type guy. He had very expensive tastes, he was very cosmopolitan. He loved good food and he knew a lot about good wine. It might be something that he could identify with as a goal, similar to the 'move out of the East Coast, go to Colorado, get back to nature' type thing. But he wouldn't have been happy in a rural environment, he liked too many big-city things...
...action takes place, of course, in New York, the ultimate hangout for unmarried swingers and upwardly mobile young couples. When Company first hit Broadway almost ten years ago, it had a very chic, cosmopolitan air; that sophistication seems a little dated, but the theme of marital give-and-take versus a less threatening but lonelier single life remains relevant. In the first act, Bobby wanders among his married friends, acting as a straight-man, bringing out their annoying traits and seemingly set patterns. In the second act, he begins to feel increasingly isolated, and this leads to the obligatory epiphany...