Word: finning
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...Spring) and practiced, as a matter of principle, a manic cross-fertilization. With Klimt, art became overtly decorative, gold-inlaid portraits masquerading as rich bijoux; with Hoffmann and his Wiener Werkstatte collaborator Koloman Moser, bowls and chairs aspired to art. It was a feverish, unresolved time, and the Viennese fin-de-siecle impulse was to savor the exquisitely confused cultural moment...
...century's opening decade, alas, Hoffmann and some Werkstatte colleagues were retreating into florid ornamental applique and comfortable Sacher-torte treacliness. Sharp geometry had only been a phase. At MOMA, a painted silver box (1910) is hardly recognizable as Hoffmann's work. In Viennese design, the purifying fin-desiecle rebellion had taken place later and then ended earlier than anywhere else in Europe...
Astute museumgoers will supply the missing history for themselves. And perhaps on their own they will also draw the tempting parallels between Vienna's fin-de-siecle and today's end-of-the-century ferment. Sometimes the connections are plain: a brooding eroticism pervaded Viennese art, and today in Manhattan, a well-attended theater piece called Vienna: Lusthaus is heavy with that musky retro scent of doom and libido. The handsome stripped classicism of Loos and Wagner has clear echoes in the architecture of Michael Graves, Andres Duany and Mark Mack. Today as then, the hip bourgeoisie is overeager...
...first awareness of the presence of sharks alarms him hardly at all: "Nothing appears more innocuous than a shark fin. It doesn't look like part of an animal, even less part of a savage beast. It's green and rough, like the bark of a tree." Starving, Velasco manages to capture a small gull: "It's easy to say that after five days of hunger you can eat anything." He cannot stomach the sight of the dead, bleeding bird, torn apart by his own hands. He experiences alternating highs and lows, sometimes throbbing with the will to survive, then...
...tell their father of Joseph's demise in the form of a country-western ballad and protest the innocence of Benjamin to a Carribean beat. The absolute show stopper, however, is definitely "Those Canaan Days," performed with outrageous "Fronch" accents in the style of outdoor cafe singers during the fin-de-siecle. If for nothing else, people have to see Joseph for these great ensemble numbers...