Word: pastel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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European masters endeavored to create visions of sensual paradise concurrent with the political utopianism of the age by arraying dabs of pastel to convey gardens, canals and the like while subject, style, and color coaxed and relaxed viewers into bubble-bath bliss. American painters such as Walter Farndon, N.A., took a while to learn of the trends emanating from the Romantic school, but were not long to follow suit...
...midst of this profound moral confusion, the Haiti crisis came like a test from on high. Here were good and evil laid out in black and white, or rather, black and creamy mulatto: the pastel luxury of Petionville vs. the dark, bottomless misery of the shantytowns. And in Jean-Bertrand Aristide, here was as Christ-like a figure as ever headed a state: devout, dedicated to the poor, and celibate on top of all that. Yet from Clinton's flip-flops to Carter's flirtation with Cedras, we dithered shamefully. Even after the troops had arrived, it was unclear...
...this haunted fairyland, the director creates images of exquisite rightness from a pristine, pastel palette, lifting the viewer's senses into a delicate rapture. The mood, the pacing, the search for beauty in a harsh society are ever so -- how shall we say? -- Vietnamese. Yet the film was not made in Vietnam. It could not have been: the country has hardly any film industry. So Tran, whose family immigrated to France in 1975, when he was 12, and who describes his film as a tribute to "the freshness and beauty of my mother's gestures," shot the film...
...grim image ought not to fade. As he arrived in Norway, luger Igor Boras confronted video of the assault on a marketplace in his hometown: 69 people died and more than 200 were injured in that worst attack yet on civilians in Sarajevo. A decade ago in that beautiful pastel city, everyone in the world was young and strong and fearless, sporting and peaceful and clean. Back then, so long ago, the harshest stories being told were of how much one had to pay for a beer...
...Cirque du Soleil had its breakthrough run in Manhattan before decamping this year to Las Vegas, and neither venue seemed unnatural. Big rock-'n'-roll concerts nowadays are often as much about wowie-kazowie production values -- giant video walls, neon, fireworks, suggestively costumed young men and women, clouds of pastel-colored smoke -- as music. Michael Jackson's highly stylized shtick -- the cosmetics, the wardrobe, the not-quite-dirty bumps and grinds, the Liberace-like gender-preference coyness -- is so Vegas that the city embraced him at every turn: a Jackson impersonator is a star of the Riviera's long-running...