Word: eccentricism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stephen Kaplan operates a Long Island vampire-research center and, according to Weeks, has "spent a lifetime studying things that go bump in the night." Then there is Bill Steed of Emeryville, Calif., who dresses like a Wild West dandy, calls himself a professor of frog psychology and, at his...
American politics, with its demands for centrism and conformity, seems to be a sterile breeding ground for eccentrics. This year's presidential sweepstakes is no exception, according to Weeks. George Bush and Michael Dukakis, he believes, are Milquetoasts. Weeks is convinced that demonstrable eccentricity should be a required trait for...
Capote's father, Clarke relates, was a charming con man named Arch Persons, a bad-check artist who worked, when he worked, as a promoter for a carnival performer called the Great Pasha, whose specialty was being buried alive. His mother was a small-town Alabama beauty named Lillie Mae...
That claim can still make some people wince. To anyone conditioned to want every figure bolted into an ironclad composition, Winogrand's images can look limp, slapdash -- shots taken at the indecisive moment. They seem to lack a prevailing mood, leaving the eye to make its way among faces with...
Winogrand would have replied that the very qualities of the camera that conventional taste had discounted -- the embrace of whatever wanders into its frame, the eccentric bunchings of form it collects, the odd instants it can freeze for further study -- were its unacknowledged assets. Given the proper attention, they would...