Word: mien
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When Commodore Matthew Perry entered Edo Bay aboard the steam frigate Susquehanna just 130 years ago this summer, most of the awestruck Japanese had never before seen such a vessel, much less a whole flotilla of what they called "the black ships of evil mien...
...together with an offhand and improvisatory air, misled some critics into thinking of him as a kind of craftsy '60s bricoleur fiddling with mandalas by the seaside. (The sight of Shields, 6 ft. 4 in., with his shaven bronze dome of a head, nautical beard and Queequeg-like mien, daintily stitching in a studio littered with harpoons and coot decoys, is one of the more striking images of role reversal the art world affords.) In fact, his imagination goes far beyond that: it has a sparkling, lyric quality, which comes not so much from preordained imagery as from...
...Museum of American Art in New York City, suffered both. There was a time when millions of Americans who would never have looked inside a museum knew, from reproduction, one painting of Wood's, American Gothic: he with the pitchfork and faded bibbed overalls, she of the dowdy mien and disapproving eye, in front of that white frame house. For the mass audience it was the most famous painting in the world. The runner-up was Leonardo's Last Supper; and after that, what? The Mona Lisa? The Washington portrait by Peale? It hardly matters; the pre-eminence...
Even Social Democratic Party Leader Roy Jenkins, who would become Prime Minister in the unlikely event of a victory by the centrist S.D.P./Liberal Alliance, dropped his usually temperate mien to blast Thatcher. Jenkins acidly compared her new Tory manifesto to Field Marshal Douglas Haig's message after the disastrous Battle of the Somme in 1916: "Ground gained negligible, casualties intolerable, but press...
Burton's melancholy mien and burnt-out stance would scare any comic muse off into the wings. His has too long been the gravity of a potentially heroic tragic actor waylaid en route to his destiny. His voice is still a casque of gold, but like that ardent Burton fan, Churchill, he seems always to be addressing a constituency, never a person. Of course, the audience for this Taylor-Burton fandango is undeniably a constituency...