Word: modishness
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Some treat his reflections on Nazism not as a walk around the rim of the deepest spiritual crater in European history, but as a modish and sinister nostalgia for Hitler. What other motives, the argument goes, can you assign to a painter who at 24 was photographed Sieg heil-ing outside the Colosseum or on the edge of the sea, as though "occupying" these sites in the name of the dead Fuhrer? Plenty, as it turned out. The shot of Kiefer saluting the Mediterranean is an acrid parody, the Nazi as Canute trying to raise himself to the level...
...skittishness of Harvard's history elders about loading the department with tenured people professing current, up-to-date, up-to-the-minute subjects. Surely, above all others, history departments have vocational cause to hesitate to overstock themselves with professors on tenure providing instruction in subjects, chic and modish today, but of slender interest tomorrow, who, given the rules of tenure, alas! cannot be remaindered at half price. Historians require that the subject of a course pass the test of time, and if they do not, they should. There is something perhaps a bit off-putting, but not actually wrong, about...
...soaked environment. "By embracing the intensity of empty value at the core of mass-media representation," claims Lisa Phillips in her catalog essay, "only then can the perennial challenge be met of finding and constructing significant meaning in the midst of declining values for images and words." This is modish nonsense. What becomes more obvious with each passing year of postmodernism is that art's relation to mass media has become an aesthetic blind alley and that only an enhanced sense of the world's concreteness -- opposing the flimflam of manipulation that gets spun about it -- is likely to redeem...
...fading madam who still has jewelry to sell. Pedicab drivers offer Western passengers "beautiful young girls," while street entrepreneurs compete to buy dollars at several times the official (100 to 1) rate. In the black market along Nguyen Hue Street, a few trendsetters wearing body shirts, designer jeans and modish sunglasses wander among stalls crammed with the latest in color TVs and stereo systems...
Amis introduces a contrasting character named Martin Amis, an English writer. He is everything that Self is not: disciplined, patient, and well read. He is also a modish literary distraction from technical problems inherent in plotless first-person narratives. Will Self ever direct a movie? Will he ever finish reading Animal Farm? Will the manna ever stop falling? The answers matter little, since Amis' buffoon is at his best when he is doing his worst...