Word: pater
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this production won't gain Gilbert and Sullivan any new admirers, particularly since The Mikado's theme (almost alone among Gilbert's plots) deals with more than minor, absurd social issues of the Victorian age, such as cleaning up salty language (Pinafore), Walter Pater-style aestheticism (Patience), and the House of Lords (Iolanthe). The Mikado, like some of Shakespearian and Johnsonian comedy, is about the impossibility and immorality of repressing the passions. It is the play in which Gilbert moves farthest away from the Victorian center he usually represented and comes closest to criticizing society as well as ridiculing social...
...thinker -the parade of stereotypes marches on. At one moment he struck the Victorians as a prototype of the engineer-hero, a 15th century Brunel or Edison who lacked only the omnipotent semen of capital to make his projects real. At the next, the English 19th century aesthete Walter Pater wrote of his mechanical inventions as mere "dreams, thrown off by the overwrought and laboring brain...
VIDAL HAS WRITTEN another historical novel, Julian, set in much different circumstances. It is the story of Julian the Apostate, a late Roman Emperor, and the novel stands in the Walter Pater tradition. But in Julian Vidal did more than merely ascribe motives to an historical actor--he developed the actor into a rather remarkable character. Burr remains an historical figure, with attributed motives, but little real depth...
That prophet would have more to mock today. Shortly before he died, Duchamp complained: "In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society." The épater la bourgeoisie act gets harder every day. Each new outrage is given a price tag and immediately sold to some collector−frequently as an investment. The vast, despised leviathan−the middle class−has entirely swallowed the artist and his followers. Yet this too is an irony that Duchamp might have enjoyed. As the Philadelphia Museum visitor walks through Duchamp's striking prefigurations...
...Cosmic Pater. By Act III, Adam and Eve have been expelled from the Garden of Eden and Miller gets to the point that he presumably wants to make. It concerns the slaying of Abel by Cain, seen as the harbinger of man's unbroken fratricide through all succeeding ages. In Miller's version, Lucifer incites Cain in the hope of establishing dominion over men on earth, comparable to God's rule in heaven. Thus man is in perpetual thrall to a power struggle between God and the Angel of Darkness, or to the conflicting forces of good...