Word: mordantly
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...busy, uninviting, but important. Heartfield's One must have a special disposition toward suicide. It illustrates the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg by the Freikorps--an event which put an end to any realistic hopes for a Communist revolution in the Weimar Republic. Heartfield lays Liebknecht's mordant head among a sea of German newspaper clippings from anti-Communist papers, subtly picturing the Freikorps in one corner. The effect is a man drowning in newsprint--a valid object of sympathy, but probably not what Heartfield intended. Although this piece is perhaps the least presentable of the exhibit...
...this the hushed lyricism of Jenny Giering's I Follow and the mordant merriment of Michael John LaChiusa's Mistress of the Senator, and you've got a collection guaranteed to make intelligent theater-music fans prick up their ears. There's only one catch: Way Back to Paradise contains scenes, arias, and even full-blown art songs. But nostalgia-hungry listeners will search in vain among these determinedly theatrical post-Sondheim musical monologues for anything resembling the straightforward, crisply turned lyrics and incisive 32-bar melodies that for decades defined American popular music at its best...
...trio of actresses at the center of the narrative. Mitchell has the largest role, and she nicely manages the role of the seeming innocent drawn so far into this circle of sirens that her presence creates tensions felt by the whole group. Clarkson impresses mightily as Greta, whose mordant wit is an obvious retort to a life and a lover she feels have abandoned...
...impasto of alliterative adjectives got slathered onto public men. George Bernard Shaw was "mocking, mordant, misanthropic." General Erich von Ludendorff was "flagitious, inscrutable, unrelenting." The intent was novelistic. As Luce explained it, "No idea exists outside a human skull--and no human skull exists without hair and a face and a voice--in fact the flesh and blood attributes of a human personality. TIME journalism began by being deeply interested in people, as individuals who were making history, or a small part of it, from week to week. We tried to make our readers see and hear and even smell...
Whitehead has a reputation for following his own path. By the standards of the religious right, he qualifies as a bit of a cultural maverick. (His taste in music runs to the only-sometimes-spiritual U2 and the intricately ironic Beck. His favorite artist is the mordant British painter Francis Bacon.) Although the institute has never taken up a sexual-harassment case before, he says he accepted this one because it was a "human-rights issue." And because "I think she's telling the truth...