Word: modernness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LORD, I WISH I WAS A BUZZARD, by Polly Greenberg (Macmillan; $4.50). This matter-of-fact rendering of a day in the cotton fields is somewhat removed from the modern child's experiences. The illustrations in brown and orange by Aliki catch the polka-dot bleakness of the Southern landscape at cotton-picking time...
...Bill, called an "all-American bullet-headed Saxon mother's son," is a cunningly simple ditty that flashes with hints of America's burgeoning violence and shrinking mythology. Cry Baby Cry demonstrates anew the Beatles' knack for rendering an Alice-in-Wonderland vision in a melancholy modern vein. Dear Prudence superimposes Indian-style drones and swooping tones on childlike lyrics ("Won't you come out to play . . . greet the brand-new day"). It adds up to an invitation to love, to hope, to feel "part of everything...
Last week "The Machine," a ten-week-long exhibit of 220 works detailing the myriad ways in which artists have viewed the mysterious powers that inhabit cogs, gears and transistors, opened at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.* The exhibit (see color pages) was put together by K. G. Pontus Hulten, 44, who as director of Stockholm's Moderna Museet staged one of the first kinetic art shows back...
...ancients, wind and sun, sea and forest grove seemed to be informed by inscrutable spirits to whom, in awe and propitiation, they gave human personality and shape. To modern man, the mechanized gadgets that his own brain has spawned also seem to have cantankerous lives of their own. What adult American has not swatted a flickering TV set? Or made an uneasy joke about the day when the computer tries to take over...
...same kind of confusion hits several other pieces. Chris Hart's "Jumping John" is a nice little parody of the modern-sordid school of writing, but like James Dickson's "The Modigliani Face," it relies for its humor on the dubious assumption that any real-life trend will be funny if exaggerated enough. Now that may be a sure-fire key to effective political satire (e.g. exaggerate the horrors of war and people will get fed up with it), but it doesn't always make for a good laugh. Dickson, by plugging in tidbits of humor-in-microcosm ("Brackley...worked...