Word: mordant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fashion photography. And there is something valuable about looking at Avedon's work apart from what we know about the charmed kid who blew into the offices of Harper's Bazaar in the late 1940s and set the superexotic Dovima against a trio of dancing pachyderms. Nevertheless, Avedon the mordant portraitist cannot be understood without reference to Avedon the fashion photographer. From his work for Harper's and Vogue he learned how much of what goes on in front of a lens is sheer performance, and he learned the extent to which a photographer can draw out of that performance...
...Lewis, who was reared in England yet carries an Irish passport, there is a strong streak of Eire: the tale-spinning, the mordant thoughtfulness, the smile in his soft voice that lightens his remarks with a puckish irony. His father Cecil was the Irish-born poet laureate of England. His mother is actress Jill Balcon, whose Baltic Jewish father, Sir Michael Balcon, ran Ealing Studios, Britain's renowned comedy factory. Daniel's sister Tamasin, four years older, is a documentary filmmaker and writer on food...
...Broadway sensation. Critical and popular response to All in the Timing, an evening of six Ives caprices, has cued a stampede to New York City's tiny Primary Stages, from whence they will soon move to roomier quarters. But Ives is more than a Manhattan fad. He is a mordant comic who has put the play back in playwright...
...this might be impossibly fey were it not for the down-but-not-quite-out sensibilities of the two writers. Waits, the bard of last-chance saloons, has never taken deader aim at the line that separates the mordant from the maudlin. On the one hand, there's November, a bitter hymn to the month that "only believes in a pile of dead leaves/ And a moon that's the color of bone." On the other, there's I'll Shoot the Moon, in which Kathchen, daydreaming about her lover, vows to "be the pennies on your eyes" and "build...
...nuisance," he decided to become a writer. His literary hero was Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who, after reading White's first two books, proclaimed him his favorite American author. White's fiction, like Nabokov's, is marked by the combination of a baroque linguistic sensibility with a mordant picture of middle America. White says he has always written as "a representative member of my generation of gay men." That purpose has not limited his work, which ranges from the lyrical abstraction of the early Nocturnes for the King of Naples to the more straightforwardly autobiographical...