Word: flower
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Perhaps Spring Snow's most attractive quality is a strain of humor seldom found in Mishima. His Tokyo aristocrats are amusingly caught between East and West, lavishly mounting their ancient rituals and becoming expert billiard players. When Satoko becomes engaged, the palace discreetly passes the word that this flower of culture, versed in poetry and calligraphy, must learn to play mah-jongg because that is her future mother-in-law's favorite diversion. As for her fiancé, the Imperial Highness, his only known opinions are on Western music. When his proud mother asks him to "play some...
...defines him, is not just an exaggerated version of the neurotic, afraid to walk under a ladder. He is the new man, free from either anxiety or remorse, cold, bored, self-isolated, adventurous, seductive when he wants to be. Or as Harrington lists some types: "Drunkards and forgers, addicts, flower children . . . Mafia loan shark battering his victim, charming actor, murderer, nomadic guitarist, hustling politician, the saint who lies down in front of tractors, icily dominating Nobel Prize winner stealing credit from laboratory assistants . . . all, all doing their thing...
Whether this phenomenon is triggered by fire or bulldozer, it is manifested in flower, fruit, cone or propagating root. But be it relatively mechanistic or biologically complex, it elicits the same response from man's subconscious - when threatened by disaster, life sees to its own perpetuity...
Beside Paschke, relatively straightforward Chicago surrealists like Kerig Pope seem serenely traditional. Pope's Two Infants Observing Nature, 1962, with its odd transformations of vegetable, flower and corncob into a glossy wonderland of Popsicle colors, is a confectioner's version of vintage Max Ernst. It could serve as a visual text to Pope's views on Chicago's painting and his own: "The thing that interests us and delights us is the strangeness of the world, its surprises and mysteries, the impossibility of explaining it. I don't go along with science when it looks...
...pity-and grateful to get out of the house-Wilson enters the hos pital for an operation that checks his on coming blindness but leaves him only barely sighted, though able to draw. His first opus after the operation is an antiwar parable, actually Thurber's The Last Flower, which the film makers have seen fit to animate. When Wilson's young stepdaughter visits him one day and sees the cartoon, her stammer is cured. Reconciliation with Terry can not be far behind...