Word: postmodern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Eisenman has finally allowed himself to learn the most enduring lesson of his old postmodern nemeses: the necessity of fitting in with nearby buildings, even the motley, uninspiring ones. Wexner, tucked between off-white masonry buildings, is clad partly in white limestone, and for all its coming- apart-at-the-seams wildness, the building is actually rather low-key, never overwhelming its campus. "We're on the short list for a new building at Yale," says Eisenman, the contextualist-come-lately. The location, he says nonchalantly, as if he had not spent the past 20 years ranting against any hint...
...Postmodern Age" has always been an empty description, and "Postindustrial Age" was a phrase about as interesting as a suburban tract. They are not metaphors anyway, but little black flags of aftermath. An age that is "post"-anything is, by definition, confused and dangerously overextended, like Wile E. Coyote after he has left the cartoon plane of solid rock and freezes in thin air, then tries to tiptoe back along a line of space before gravity notices and takes him down to a little poof! in the canyon far below...
Peter Case, a wondrous songwriter and singer whose recent album The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar is good enough to carry like a talisman into the uncertainties of the '90s, sees the difficulty in broader terms. "Rock 'n' roll has just become a new form of Disneyland," he says. "The whole thing has got mythologized to the point where it's just a bunch of rubbish." Greil Marcus, who writes formidably on popular and radical culture (the recent Lipstick Traces), talks about the "suicidal nostalgia" surrounding a lot of contemporary music: "People have been sold...
...Pogues are not a postmodern incarnation of the Clancy Brothers, however. Only half of them are Irish (MacGowan, 31, was born in Ireland but moved to ! London when he was six), and it quickly became apparent back in the formative days that working up a repertoire of Irish music exclusively, even punked and pulverized, was a dead end. "It was patronizing," says Stacy simply. So instead of the raw Irish musical tradition itself, the band took the spirit of the tradition, which Stacy compares convincingly with rhythm and blues and reggae...
...Sellars did The Mikado with a character vrooming around on a motorcycle, and he set Handel's Orlando at the Kennedy Space Center. But a question remains: Do the elegant and aristocratic operas of Mozart really need to be jazzed up, gagged up, camped up and wrestled into the postmodern...