Word: gothically
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...York three days before the killing, checked into a Y.M.C.A. nine blocks from Lennon's apartment, and started hanging out in front of the building, waiting for Lennon like any other fan. There were usually fans at the gates of the Dakota, a grand, gloomy, high-maintenance Gothic fortress overlooking the west side of Central Park, because the building houses several celebrities: Lauren Bacall, Roberta Flack, Leonard Bernstein. Fans of the Beatles and Lennon lovers accounted for conversation with
...rooms were chambers of the heart, and the houses their owners objectified. Each room not only has a mood (blue, red) but also is one; and the rooms that are rarely or never entered are like secrets. The great old houses are less like gothic castles than gothic novels, laced with crooked passages and sudden stairs that add controllable menace to ensurable surprise. More child's play still. Even the temporary homes of the rich, the so-called luxury hotels, are homes with a difference. The brand-new Palace Hotel in mid-Manhattan plans a library that will contain...
There are many aspects of Cornell's imagery which seem fey, precious or backward-looking: the Christmas frosting, bats and moss and dingly dells. There is a treacherous line between sentiment and sentimentality, particularly in his evocations of his own childhood. Yet time and again, even his most gothic fantasies and his most fussily reverential evocations of dead ballerinas are plucked back from the edge by Cornell's rigor as a formal artist. The essence of the box is to contain, and within a rectangular grid, at that. Cornell enhanced this with a spare, strict sense of proportion...
A.T.C. explores the aesthetic of cool through these characters. As Earl, Stahl virtually explodes on the stage in the first scene. There is a refrigerator and a coffee pot and a table that wobbles and two people who don't--American Gothic, 1980--and all of a sudden here's this Great Gay Peaco k, a thermonuclear presence, strutting and preening and threatening everyone in sigh. He is what Norman Mailer called the "White Negro," the hipster: the man who sleeps with death, and seduces...
...Industrialized Farmers, 1920, is all rant and bile directed against the country folk whose profiteering helped cause the postwar shortages of food in German cities. Sly, pig-stupid and stuffed with moral rectitude, this rural trio looks like a brutal parody of Grant Wood's American Gothic (in fact, it was painted ten years earlier). Scholz took care to spread his political insult as far as pos sible; Weimar inflation is symbolized by the cretinous child, snot-nosed and snaggletoothed, blowing up a live frog by means of a straw stuck in its anus. In the end, one would...