Word: pied
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When White House budget director Mitchell Daniels testified before the Senate Budget Committee this spring, he brought along a plump apple pie--an apt symbol for the government's bountiful budget surplus, then estimated at some $275 billion. But when Daniels appeared before the panel last week, his estimate of the spare cash fell as low as $160 billion. The committee's new Democratic chairman, Kent Conrad, served some baked goods too. He gave Daniels a modest pear tart with the words "shrinking surplus" inscribed in frosting...
...punching up the effect with sharp lines and rainbow profiles of complementary color, a green or a purple, that pulse like halos and throw the whole form into relief. He isn't being hit-or-miss. He is, on the contrary, being intensely thoughtful. The arrays of pie slices or cake stands become Utopian: soft but strict geometry. (No wonder the Pop artist Thiebaud liked best was Claes Oldenburg.) One of the dictators of classical French banquet cooking in the early 19th century, Marie-Antoine Careme, was once asked to name the main arts of humankind. He reeled them...
...doesn't mean much: only that he was and presumably still is intrigued and delighted by the sight of multiple-produced American food. Not so much the package (like the soup can) as the soup itself, or for that matter the sandwich, the cake or the slice of pie, sitting there in virginal garishness, the coconut icing soft and fluffy as a baby angel's wingpits, under the fluorescent tubes in the glass diner case...
...still life making it the only one of its kind. But Nature is a greater mass producer than Culture. The sea is full of sea robins and whiting, all looking the same. The peach tree is laden with identical peaches. So it is with Thiebaud's cakes and pies. He is fascinated by variation within repetition, but he never thinks of repetition as being antipoetic because, in fact, nothing is exactly the same as anything else: two slices of the same pie are never identical...
...even though Roth gets all the credit for being funny, Pynchon is funnier, finding the joke in much harder places than doing an American Pie with a piece of liver. In Mason and Dixon--written entirely in 18th century English, not an easy patois for slapstick--Ben Franklin gives people electric shocks as a bar trick, and George Washington gets high on the hemp from his own farm and speaks Yiddish. In Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop engages in a Malcolm X-assisted dive into a jazz-club toilet bowl that puts Trainspotting to shame...