Word: mocks
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...know you don't like being praised I for what you only consider your duty," Ronald Reagan told the guest of honor with mock sternness at last week's annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. "Forgive me. I'm going to pull rank on you." With that, the Commander in Chief proceeded to lavish an encomium on Brigadier General James L. Dozier for bravery during his 42-day ordeal as a prisoner of Italy's Red Brigades terrorists. Added Reagan with deft simplicity: "Welcome home, soldier...
...believed in reincarnation, so he asked her what she wanted to be in her next life. A canary, she said wistfully. Roosevelt couldn't resist laughter. "I love it, I love it, I love it," he said. One of his most celebrated bits of clowning was his mock-solemn response to a Republican charge that he had accidentally left his Scotch terrier Fala behind on a trip to Alaska and then sent a destroyer to retrieve it. "Of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them," Roosevelt...
Because of their freight of dismay, White's doomsday sketches are rarely as effective as, his verse. He greets spring in New York ("Pigeon, sing Cuccu!") and rags an author about a fatuous book on farming with a review writ ten in rhymed couplets. Using mock heroic stanzas and plenty of relish he relates how a Chesapeake Bay snowstorm turned back a submarine specially equipped for polar exploration, captained by an explorer who had sold his story to a publisher before even setting out. An almost perfect example of occasional verse is "I Paint What I See." It pits...
...Sellars's updating never interferes with the music. In fact, many of his innovations involve clever exploitation of the Handel score. The bouncy rhythms of Dorinda's first-act aria on the ineffable nature of love--she's the beach bunny, nee shepherdess--become the excuse for an hilarious mock-disco strut. Later in the opera, when Dorinda sings of love's bitterness, it is Sellars's inspiration that she pour herself a stiff drink between repetitions (all Orlando's arias consist of six or eight lines repeated again and again), with the result that her octave leaps slowly become...
...best of the Germans is probably A.R. Penck (born Ralf Winkler), who was on show at the Sonnabend Gallery. An East German emigre to the West, he does mock-archaeological images blown up to "American" size. On a flat ground, flat pictographs: Ariadne holding her thread, Theseus as a stick figure with spear, a Minotaur. This primitivism is meant to suggest a heroic Aegean prehistory, a lost age when sibyls muttered in every cleft, and any scratch or spiral meant something. But Penck's images are mere quotation suffused with graphic charm; they are little more than the husks...