Word: deadpan
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...been, for ten years now, a cool hand at bringing up all manner of crawly things from just below the surface. Byrne and the Heads made music that examined some of the oddest, spookiest manifestations of modern emotional life, sang songs that turned grim tidings into deadpan jokes and disaffection into disarming social parables. Byrne's lyrics played four-wall handball with anomie and, floating all around the band's cunning and enterprising rhythms, moved the Heads past punk and over the crest of rock's new wave into a forefront they had sharpened up for themselves...
...life, Geller's eventual demise need not produce such a dire result. The truth is that, by now, much of his daily broadcast is canned. He has recorded more than 400 hours of programming, and he broadcasts these tapes in a cycle that is repeated every few months. The deadpan patter is there, and so is the music, the voice of angels, Geller's own secret voice. It is a thought that must give the people over at Grandbanke the willies: WVCA-Geller could go on like this -- forever...
Color sends its messages too. Most photographers now take to it comfortably enough. At the very least, fierce tones give a second life to black-and-white cliches -- what better than a heated format for rewarming old chestnuts? But color also has special advantages for dealing in deadpan ironies. Even before the eye takes in the subjects of Mary Ellen Mark's photo essay on Miami, the sheer chromatic punch says that Florida is a great setting for the human comedy. The lemony sunlight, the all too scrumptious blue of the sky: even the elements are in on the joke...
...wherever he happens to be. At home in Atlanta, he heads for a local bookstore that carries the city's largest assortment of out-of-town publications and buys $80 worth at a time. "The clerk is always happy to have me do it," Jaynes says in characteristic deadpan manner...
...from the '60s, which, ironically, seem more nostalgic now than they did then. Unlike other pop artists with whom he was classed, such as Andy Warhol or Claes Oldenburg, * Rosenquist was not an ironist. "He rendered his blue-collar view of American things without mockery," writes Goldman, "with a deadpan literalness and a directness that suggested innocence...