Word: iconoclastic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Obituary: Frank Zappa, rock iconoclast, dies...
Frank Zappa surely would have appreciated -- indeed, relished -- the irony ! that his death last week was, as the old show-biz line has it, a shrewd career move. The musical iconoclast, best known for his work with the seminal 1960s rock band the Mothers of Invention, was in many ways the prisoner of his own raffish image: hirsute hippie freak; countercultural sire of prototypical Valley Girl Moon Unit Zappa and her siblings Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva; opinionated crank ("AIDS is a CIA plot"); and First Amendment scourge of Tipper Gore. With his death from prostate cancer, a few days short...
Part of what makes any fiction fun is the inversion of expectations. Kramer, the ruling white, is the team's iconoclast, full of scorn for procedure and authority. He is expedient, intemperate, womanizing and often drunk. Zondi, the oppressed black who for reasons of race earns a modest fraction of his partner's pay, is a convent-educated conformist. By the chronological end of the series he is a dutiful husband, attentive father and slightly stodgy bourgeois citizen. Each is responding to his social position: white Kramer can afford the luxury of defiance, but black Zondi cannot...
...retire, you're finished," a crusty William Jovanovich often told his nail-biting subordinates. Yet last week, after 34 years at the helm of book-publishing giant Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1989 sales: $1.8 billion), the 70-year-old iconoclast finally buckled. He passed his chairmanship to HBJ board member John Herrington, a former U.S. Energy Secretary. "The burden was too great, and Bill had had enough," explains another director. "He was also getting...
...museum named after millionaire iconoclast Isabella Stewart Gardner announced days after the break-in that the works were not insured for theft...