Word: masterful
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...Likewise, two rooms from the early 20th century by a master revivalist named Tanryo Murata demonstrate the frame-breaking creativity possible when an artist is allowed to use entire sets of rooms as his canvas. In one room, Murata painted scenes from a deer hunt?a common Kamakura-period pastime that frequently took place at the foot of Mount Fuji?in the finely detailed and colorful Yamato-e style, which emphasizes the horses' musculature and bowmen's straining faces. But look through a doorway created by parting two screens in the hunting room and the viewer sees that the next...
...from various periods. One fascinating show is a retrospective of the work of Yuichi Takahashi, one of the first Japanese artists to adopt Western oil-painting techniques. His still lifes and landscapes, from the second half of the 19th century, are a fascinating glimpse of an artist struggling to master a new and foreign style while remaining traditionally Japanese in his subject matter...
What he fails to mention is that Dunster and Mather, though badly in need of renovation, were not even tentatively scheduled to be renovated until action was taken by Dunster House co-Master Ann Porter this summer...
...modern tricks of the wizardocracy--polls and focus groups--are not inherently malevolent. They are only as banal as the people who read them. Bill Clinton was a master: it was a focus group that taught him that it was better to "invest" in education than to "spend" on it. Clinton also knew when to ignore the polls, as he did on the Mexican bailout. Most pols aren't so clever, though. This year John Kerry and George W. Bush are relying on ancient market-tested formulations like (in Kerry's case) "Health care is a right, not a privilege...
...Hart conduct a focus group of more or less undecided voters. Focus groups are a powerful political aphrodisiac: civilians tell the wizards how to rub them the right way. But they are also an insidious reversal of the political process, turning followers into leaders. Watching Hart, a pioneer and master of the idiom, trying to elicit responses from a surly group of citizens, I began to wonder whether focus groups have outlived their usefulness. The group was almost entirely predictable. They said Bush was a regular guy and Kerry seemed aloof. They said they wanted more specifics from the candidates...