Word: lyricisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Good news beats the blues. Sadly perhaps, a presidential campaign should not be confused with adult education. Or to update an Ira Gershwin lyric, "Who cares what banks fail in Yonkers, it is the upbeat message that conquers." Look what happened to the Cassandras with apocalyptic new ideas. Jack Kemp's earnest seminars on gold-bug economics went the way of Pete du Pont's Iowa lectures on the evils of farm subsidies. Bruce Babbitt's budgetary bravery proved that press puffery persuades few primary voters. Dick Gephardt's political stock soared only after he softened his overheated...
...observing: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music." Way back when, George M. Cohan spotted the appeal of the man who had "named himself after an English actor and a German city." Berlin, said the Yankee doodle dandy, "writes a song with a good lyric, a lyric that rhymes, good music, music you don't have to dress up to listen to. He is uptown, but he is there with the old downtown hard sell...
...seen by an immense constituency of collectors and museumgoers as the quintessential Jewish artist of the 20th century, even though he was not Orthodox and professed, if anything, a discreet and nonmilitant atheism. He had a lyric, flyaway, enraptured imagination, allied to an enviable fluency of hand; the former could weaken into marzipan poignancy, the latter into routine charm. He left behind him an oeuvre of paintings, drawings, prints, book illustrations, private and public art of every kind, rivaling Picasso's in size, if not always in variety or intensity. The number of novice collectors who cut their milk teeth...
...spirit of their time. A surge in population had fattened the cities and fostered Greek colonies from Sicily to Asia Minor, creating the prerequisites for free inquiry and sophisticated taste: prosperity, cosmopolitanism and leisure. An individual voice was being heard, graceful but down to earth, in the new lyric poets like Sappho and Anacreon. Artists began signing their work. On a red-figure drinking cup that shows a young athlete bending over a washbowl, a blunt autograph bends over the image: "Pamphaios made...
...author's sound instinct is to play against the dramatic. There is no resolution of the brother's predicament. You are missing the point if you try to watch one chunk of carrot in the roil of this Sleazy Street stew (the phrase is from a country-funk song lyric in praise of downward mobility: "It's coffee in the pot and a dirty sugar spoon/ it's towels on the floor of a dirty bathroom/ and a smell like me and a smell like you/ all mixed together in a Sleazy Street stew...