Word: motif
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Autobiographical tidbits reinforce the motif. Michael Dukakis tries to overcome a bookish mien by telling a TV audience that he ran a "pretty credible 57th" in the 1951 Boston Marathon and was "always out on the ball fields and playing fields." Albert Gore in most speeches cites his Army service in Viet Nam. Bruce Babbitt, who has pedaled his ten-speed across Iowa and climbed a mountain in New Hampshire, is described in one of his TV commercials as "coming from a frontier family that lives by simple truths...
Writers have often thought of the Constitution in nautical terms, a motif probably suggested by the image of the ship of state. In 1857 Macaulay told an American, "Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor." (A foreigner's elegant remark. Others suspect that the Constitution has entirely too much anchor -- too many checks and balances -- to make any headway at all.) The sociologist David Riesman likens the Constitution to the shallow keel of the national ferryboat, on which the passengers keep shifting from port to starboard and back again. One might also suggest the image of a trimaran...
...Harbison. His music is approachably tonal without being obvious; a Harbison tune is less a hummable melody than a strongly profiled motif designed to forward the musical argument, not seduce the ear. His structures are sturdy,his orchestration is crisp and clean. Yet this is not the dread "Princeton School" music of baleful repute, the arid note spinning that often characterizes the works of Ivy League composers like Milton Babbitt. Harbison, who as a teenager played jazz piano and who at Harvard led the Bach Society Orchestra, is an academic with a heart...
Together they skewer just about everyone and everything in sight, first by mocking the 1950s feminine ideal of the "pretty little thing," then by carrying the motif through the next three decades. The 50s woman parades before the audience in fashion-induced euphoria, troubled only by the urgent need to find a husband. But the 60s woman is not so superfluous: she's the "active pretty little thing," equipped with a "pretty little scarf" to keep out tear gas. The 70s bring the "independent pretty little thing," liberated to the point that she can say "fuck you" over and over...
...comparing any Salle image with its art source -- his feeble paint-by- numbers rendering of details from Gericault and Ribera, for instance -- one is struck by his inability to put any vitality at all into the relation between the motif and the traces of the hand, to create an interesting shape, or even to model a form convincingly. But there is an out: Salle's graphic ineptitude is praised by his fans as a kind of fallen representation, as though it were a critique of affectlessness. Thus his work is credited with exposing what it merely embodies. This...