Word: oddness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...personal trainer sometimes gives me an odd piece of advice during workouts: "Relax your face." For a long time, I found this advice confusing. Isn't physical exertion supposed to be expressed in grimaces? I thought of the face as a pressure-relief valve that helps emit the pain the body is experiencing. But the trainer suggested I think about it the other way around - that controlling the face can help control the mind...
There is plenty of money to go with all this: the prices that museums pay Wyeth regularly break records, and what he gets from the 60-odd private collectors who have his temperas has occasionally topped the museum prices. He may be the world's best-paid painter after Picasso-and part of the reason is Betsy. Once, 20 years ago, when he did a cover for the Saturday Evening Post for $1,000 and seemed tempted to take a contract with the magazine, she threatened to leave him. "It'll be the end of your painting...
...give me goose pimples," he says. His flesh crawls at odd moments. In Wind from the Sea Wyeth opens an upstairs window in Christina Olson's house in a room that has been closed for years, and the billowing of lace curtains lets in a sudden puff of salty air. Wyeth is moved. Abruptly glimpsing his own reflection in a dusty mirror leads to an unexpected 1949 self-portrait, The Revenant, where he stands perplexed and unbalanced in an abandoned room. The amber glass ball on a lightning rod in Northern Point looks to him "as if it were...
...which returns in top form for Season 3. Its premise is just as outlandish: a multiple marriage among religious Fundamentalists in Utah. (On Big Love, a man has three wives; on Tara, a man has three and a husband.) But Big Love quickly settles you into its odd setting. The particulars of the Henricksons' lives--their intrigues and secrecy, yes, but also their familiar family dynamics and sincere faith--are presented, simply and unpatronizingly, as the reality of the show's universe...
...first glance, it seems odd that the period that saw 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the growth of religious extremism in Pakistan, a President caught between the U.S. and Islamic fundamentalism at home, the worst earthquake in the country's history and the imposition of emergency rule would inspire uproarious comedy. But as Pakistan and the world outside go to rack and ruin, all these register as noises off - if at all - in the consciousness of Butterfly, saturated as it is with frequently misspelled brand names ("La Prarry ki face cream and Landscomb ka mascara"), manic socializing...