Word: milieu
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...open.) Wills, who did not own a driver's license, sometimes enlisted his mentor to rent the trucks that hauled his booty. Palamarchuk, who has never served time despite nine arrests, was happy to oblige. Even today, after his star student's fall, Palamarchuk makes no excuses about the milieu he inhabited. "What are you driving?" he asks, single-eyeballing a reporter's rented Chevy Corsica in a parking lot in his hometown of Bensalem. "Ahhh, that's easy to steal." Palamarchuk has raging gray hair, grungy clothes and the thick, menacing fingers of a man who's been plundering...
...Ironizing, certainly, on the idea of the portrait as effigy of virtue. But also -- despite his often repeated claim to reject tradition absolutely -- paying complete homage to an earlier French artist: Honore Daumier, whose tiny clay effigies of politico-literary notables known as Les Celebrites du Juste-Milieu, wizened, compressed and distorted, are the obvious and inescapable grandfathers of all Dubuffet's turnip...
This situation and this relationship are both rooted in traditional romantic comedy, and it would have been interesting (to say the least) if Singleton could have imposed its generic conventions on this unlikely milieu. But that's beyond him. He doesn't offer any scene that convincingly suggests the kind of authentic mutual attraction that might overcome the couple's superficial differences. He doesn't know how to coax a performance out of Jackson, who relates to the camera lens as if it were a mirror. He never finds a way either to put an interesting spin on the incidents...
Above all, as Congress and the states debate gay civil rights and President Clinton prepares to certify the role of gays in the military, many gay writers see their milieu as inherently dramatic. Like Jews, blacks and women in prior decades, gays have promoted their struggle for equality into the spotlight. Says Angels author Tony Kushner: "We're at a historic juncture. In a pluralist democracy, there's a moment when a minority obtains legitimacy and its rights are taken seriously by the other minorities that together make up the majority. That's happening now for gays and lesbians...
...more modern artists: the massive strong men and pathetic acrobats of Picasso's Rose Period are already in Daumier's carnival scenes. Giacometti was deeply influenced not only by Daumier's drawing but by his series of tiny, malignant caricature-sculptures in clay known as Les Celebrites du Juste Milieu...