Word: piers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Well, we can't. Cirque still works, magnificently. From its first moments under the yellow-and-blue big top on the Santa Monica Pier, Quidam (which means "anybody" in Latin) pulls the audience out of domesticity into the ethereum of its wizardly wit. A man and a woman sit in metal chairs, he reading a paper, she knitting. A child sits before them. Then through a door comes a large figure out of a Magritte painting: long overcoat, umbrella, bowler hat, no head. The child takes the creature's magic hat, puts it on--and dreams the three-hour show...
...this street, ya know." The heavyset woman hosing down her trash cans refers to the onrushing traffic to and from the Coast Guard station, where the police, the politicians, the FBI and the press have their separate clusters and where bodies are being brought by boat to the cement pier...
Then, just as we reached the final bars of the anthem, "Oh, say does that star spangled banner yet wave...," a spray of dazzling white light shot up from near the pier...
These apart, perhaps the most beautiful evocation of Provence in Cezanne's work is a seascape, The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L'Estaque, circa 1886. A blue bay, with blue hills on the horizon and a pale, scrubbed blue sky; a pier running into the blueness on the upper left, reaching (it seems) toward a white scarf of smoke coming from a chimney in the right foreground and binding the whole space between; below, the faceted blocks of houses and the lovely staccato rhythm of chimneys. It radiates peace and balance and, above all, easefulness--the sense of being...
...pastoral, unthreatening vision of the disorganized poor, spiced with humor, as in his portraits of tough Irish street urchins or the famous Forty-Two Kids, 1909--not, alas, in this show--depicting a swarm of knobby pale boys horsing around and diving into the Hudson from a broken-down pier...