Word: modernist
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...oversee plans for most of a $3 billion expansion of Universal City in California. Why choose Koolhaas? "I think it's because of his grandfather," says Koolhaas of Edgar Bronfman Jr., grandson of the man who asked Mies van der Rohe to build New York City's first modernist tower, the Seagram Building...
...runs into the blond, her drug deal has gone sour. Does he catch her, or even catch on to her? No: he takes off her shoes as she sleeps, and later she leaves him a message wishing him happy birthday. That's enough for a rapturous moment of modernist romance. He'll hold on to that memory forever. "And if it must have an expiration date," he says, "I hope it'll be 10,000 years...
Whoever programmed the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra's concert last Friday night clearly wasn't looking for crowd-pleasers; there wasn't a Beethoven symphony or Mozart concerto to be found in Sanders Theater. Instead, the orchestra gamely offered up a trancelike Wagner overture, a defiantly modernist Stravinsky ballet and--strangest of all--a bassoon concerto. While Wagner and Stravinsky are hardly obscure, it's not every day that you get to hear the bassoon--an instrument that ranks with the tuba and bass in ungainliness--dominate the stage...
...shrugging them off. For a start, he was a traditional crooner who learned intonation from Crosby and salesmanship from Jolson. Yet there was a hint in his gestures (eyes closed in ecstasy, arms stretched out imploringly) that he was parodying the very idea of crooner; he was a mellow modernist. You could also peg Dino as an anachronism, a Joe E. Lewis saloon-lush type, the party animal in a tux. Or maybe he was the first slacker, elevating sloth to a Zen art. The stupefaction he radiated on his TV show--the Golddiggers dancing around him as wildly...
THIRTY YEARS BEFORE his death in 1957, there had ceased to be any doubt of Constantin Brancusi's status as a modernist master. He devoted a long life to distilling extremes of formal perfection from a narrow range of motifs. This perfection is never frozen: it always contains some organic character, an affinity to life and therefore to change. "I never seek what to make a pure or abstract form," Brancusi said. "Timelessness,'' "wholeness,'' "essence,'' "aliveness": such words inescapably recur in what has been written about him over the past 70 or 80 years. They are well-worn tokens, rubbed...