Word: flat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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September 19, 1987: The Harvard football team gets off on the right foot. The Columbia football team tries to get off on the right foot, but puts its left foot forward instead, trips and falls flat on its face. Harvard triumphs, 35-0, sending Columbia to its 32nd straight loss--two shy of the NCAA Division I collegiate record...
...mass into chest-high octagonal white plywood stockades, called pits. There they can be safely ogled and photographed in all their slithering, tongue-flicking, fang- baring, rattling, coiling, head-rearing glory. The Western diamondback, Crotalus (castanet) atrox (fearful), is indeed a horrible-wonderful creature. Its head is broad and flat, and its close-set, silver gray eyes with black pupils seem fixed and furious. A dry, cool skin of interlocking gray-and-brown diamond pattern leads to a pyramid of hard keratin nubs, acquired at the tail after successive moltings. The ceaseless, disturbed rattling of so many snakes together...
That is Kazan's truest tone -- flat and harsh, undercutting his own attempts at rationalization with the bitterly truthful ring he cannot keep out of his voice. It is the voice of a man with no patience for poetry (he confesses that when he staged Archibald MacLeish's J.B. he simply moved the actors whenever he was bored, which was approximately every three lines) and no patience for ideological impositions, intellectual cant or institutional stability. It is perhaps a peasant's voice, valuing survival above all. But surely it is an actor's voice, one that knows it is impossible...
...made good on strident prophetic claims. He saw himself as both Christ and savage, sacrificial lamb and initiator of cultural mayhem. The whole tangle of the "primitive," so basic to early modernism, begins with Gauguin -- not in Tahiti but in Brittany, "savage and primitive," he wrote, where "the flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting...
This scheme gets in the way when, instead of simple, flat images, he tackles scenes with a deeper space. In a painting like Battery May 5, 1986 -- black, smudgy figures on a promenade in lower Manhattan, a plunging perspective of lamps on the seawall, a livid yellow sky -- the recession is brusquely contradicted by the surface grid of vinyl tiles; the image struggles to break back from the picture plane but cannot. It is a self-canceling effect but not an interestingly perverse...