Word: exaltation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...traditional maternal look. To look pregnant is to look bowed in the middle, practically bulbous; to be pregnant is open physical defiance of prevailing fashion form. The usual course around these dire sartorial straits has been to sail into great billowing garments of soft prints that try to exalt maternity by sentimentalizing it. The expectant mother, shrouded in a calf-tickling Laura Ashley fantasy, becomes a late-Victorian artifact, like a sprite from a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph. A woman who wanted a certain modernity of fashion to complement a contemporary pregnancy, who wanted to be comfortable with her appearance...
...romances. Yet the only alternatives contain no message at all: norror, comedy, and adventure all start from the proposition "what if..."/ and ask that you leave the real world at the ticket booth. Arthur Penn has had trouble dealing with America's failure to face facts. His early films exalt the gangster, the loner who lives above and beyond society despite the tragic consequences. Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, show compassion and humor while revealing the ugliness of American mythology. Yet 1976's Missourt Breaks shows confusion, and worse, a lack of anything...
Later architects, from Robert Venturi to Michael Graves, may seem to be coming out in favor of vernacular, complexity, decoration, memory and whatnot-the whole postmodernist bag of tricks, from Cape Cod shingles to Roman arches-but are all pointy-headed clones of the Compound, still seeking to exalt the Word (theory and manifestos) over the Act (workable buildings). Real populist architecture has no chance. Within the taste centers, Wolfe says, "there was no way for an architect to gain prestige through an architecture that was wholly unique or specifically American in spirit." What was this spirit, this ignored Zeitgeist...
Fleur flourishes, finishes her novel, and retrieves it after Sir Quentin steals it because he believes it libelous and very un-funny. She humors Father Egbert. Satan and the rest, continuing to exalt, "How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century...