Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...time is long past when he was regarded in New York as a California artist, with the slight condescension that implies. He is, quite simply, one of the best painters America has ever produced. He began as an abstract painter, making organic, landscape-like images in an idiom related to abstract expressionism; one of his inspirations, though in the end an adversary one, ! was Clyfford Still, a colleague at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in the late '40s. Then in 1956 he turned to representational painting, believing that his work could only develop...
...Brahms?" asks an old joke making light of the composer's changing musical idiom. But if the composer had always written music like his three sonatas for violin and piano, the witticism would never have gained currency. Far removed from the composer's youthful sturm und drang, these autumnal pieces represent a tempered and philosophical old master...
...Skinhead Hamlet is precisely what it sounds like: a telling of the classic tale transported into the idiom of British skinhead punk rockers of the late 1970s. The play opens with Hamlet (Dean Norris) spray painting the misspelled setting--"DENMAK"--on the wall. This Hamlet spends his time fighting, swilling beer and watching television, so, apropos of his offspring's habits, the Ghost (John Bottoms) grabs his attention by pre-empting an episode of Wheel of Fortune...
Donald employs new biographical sources, and he makes a persuasive case for Wolfe's idiom and energies. But he also acknowledges that his subject "wrote more bad prose than any other major writer I can think of." The only disputable word is major. The quotes from the novels -- not to say the novels themselves -- suggest the literary equivalent of a dinosaur: vast in structure, unoccupied by thought and, after all the ponderous effort, wholly extinct...
...grownups, we must regard John Hughes as her successor. His movies, like her young-adult novels, have good qualities. He knows what the teens' Top 40 moral issues are, and he places his stories in palpably realistic contexts. Not only do his kids speak up-to-the-minute adolescent idiom and illustrate the latest dress code perfectly, they attend clangorously class-conscious public high schools, whose unexamined values the protagonists must always challenge -- and defeat...