Word: offhandedly
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...January, as Clinton was preparing for his deposition in the Paula Jones case, the cameras had "caught" him and Hillary in a private moment, dancing on the beach in the Virgin Islands. As the year unfolded, casual friends of the Clintons noticed something a little creepy in the occasional offhand remark from the First Couple--as in "Buddy jumped in bed with us this morning"--whose only purpose seemed to be to signal the connubial geography. Privacy, it seemed, could be auctioned off for the right price...
...unfinished, the rough. One of the masters of the pictorial throwaway line was Ogata Kenzan, best known as a potter. He and his more famous brother Ogata Korin--whose paintings mark the apotheosis of lyrical, erudite Edo painting--left an indelible mark on Edo style. Nothing could seem more offhand than Kenzan's scroll The Eight-Fold Bridge, an illustration of a poem with the poem itself written into it--the planks of the bridge brusquely indicated, the calligraphy mingling with the broadly brushed leaves of water iris as if it too were part of the reed growth...
...that context, Levittown became the anti-Williamsburg: Not a re-creation of some idealized past but a living glimpse of the ticky-tacky future. The social critic Lewis Mumford called it "a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible." Levittown was also tainted at birth by the offhand racism of midcentury America. Though Levittown is racially mixed today, for years Levitt's sales contracts barred resale to African Americans. He once offered to build a separate development for blacks but refused to integrate his white Levitt developments. "We can solve a housing problem...
...still there are those failings. Conyers is prone to meandering soliloquies and absentmindedness. His management style ranges from capricious to offhand. Democratic staff members have lately complained that during preparations for the Starr report, they were unable to find Conyers at scheduled meeting times. His waywardness so concerned minority leader Richard Gephardt that he handpicked Washington lawyer Abbe Lowell to be the Democrats' lead counsel on the Judiciary Committee, with the intent to wield influence over the proceedings through Lowell...
Strange to say about a man who manages to become President of the United States, but Bill Clinton has been an offhand custodian of his fate. Again and again, he drifts into crisis, blames others, wakes up at last and then scrambles to his own defense, a defense in which, sure enough, he's sinuous, subtle and dazzling. This is what happened in 1980, when he lost his first bid for re-election as Arkansas Governor, then struggled his way back to office two years later. It happened again in the presidential election of 1992, when his past kept getting...