Word: ersatz
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...limited run ending this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, are a witches' brew of cabaret, silent-movie slapstick, Expressionist psychodrama, Japanese theater, lounge lizardry and high-tech wizardry. What keeps it bubbling is a melodic succession of wheezy parlor waltzes, barroom blues, moon-June pop and ersatz Kurt Weill. What gives it fizz is gallows humor, antiwar mockery, sweet sentiment and an inventiveness that more than honors the imperative laid down years ago by Sergei Diaghilev to Jean Cocteau: "Astonish...
...book Joshua, Son of None, the clone is a real President, John F. Kennedy. And, Ira Levin's 1976 novel (later a movie), The Boys from Brazil, imagines neo-Nazis cloning a batch of Hitlers; luckily the conspirators' failure to duplicate precisely the real Hitler's upbringing leaves the ersatz Fuhrers imperfectly evil...
...arbitrary randomness, programmed chance operations and a nearly value-free definition of what constitutes music a satisfactory basis for an aesthetic? Was Cage the great artist his admirers proclaim, or was he merely an ersatz Dadaist, proudly parading around in his emperor's new clothes as he pursued a whole-grain, crackpot anarchism? "Rolywholyover A Circus," on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles through Nov. 28 and due to travel to Houston, New York City, Japan and Philadelphia over the next two years, provides some answers...
...Coke, the major-league owners voted last week, 27-1, to cheapen, if not destroy, all future September pennant races. Beginning next year, both the American and the National leagues will be divided into three -- rather than the existing two -- divisions. To create an additional, ersatz round of league play-offs as an offering unto the Gods of Television (ABC and NBC, who will split the postseason telecasts), the owners agreed to let losers stumble into the postseason. Wild-card teams (an affront to purity invented in 1978 by the military-industrial complex that is pro football) will now contaminate...
...package of sharp spending cuts, in order to begin the long-overdue job of reining in deficits; those final specifics deviated only modestly from advance leaks. Primarily, the address gave the President a chance to start building support for a program that will face passionate opposition from an ersatz alliance of many interests being hurt, and he seized on it effectively. In plain but strong language, Clinton pleaded with the public to weigh the mild immediate pain of higher taxes against the far greater eventual pain of letting deficits run wild. "Unless we change," said the President, "we will...