Word: postmodernism
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...conundrum: A gain for one team is a loss for the other. One side's good, pari passu, is the other's evil. Such are the stakes. One side has "possession." Who, or what, then, is "possessed?" And with what satanic implications? This is a question that drives postmodern man to crush an empty beer can on his forehead--and even to open another...
Leaping the Atlantic in the '70s, Doonan ventured into the continent that was to prove his postmodern paradise. There was a stint doing the storefronts of avant-garde Maxfield in L.A. and a collaboration with the legendary Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute of the Met. Then in 1986, his notoriety well-established, Doonan was snatched by Barney's New York, where he has graduated from window dresser to creative director. His justification for being is in creating windows which inhabit the realm somewhere "beyond the valley of gorgeousity...
...sneering libretto tells the scabrous story of the decline and fall of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll (the "Mrs. Sweeny" of Cole Porter's You're the Top), who liked to do the Full Monica on her male servants. Ades' score is a glib farrago of sour, splintered vocal writing, postmodern pastiche and cartoony sound effects. Is this the music of the future? No, just further proof that the now exhausted classical-music avant-garde is repeating itself--this time as camp...
...Pilobolus Dance Theatre, and Bill Wade, director of YARD (Youth at Risk Dancing), a company of teenagers drawn from the student body of the Cleveland School of the Arts. It's hardly the first time The Nutcracker has been updated: Mark Morris' raucous The Hard Nut is set in postmodern suburbia, while Donald Byrd's Harlem Nutcracker uses Duke Ellington's swinging adaptation of Tchaikovsky's score. But An Urban Nutcracker has a special ring of authenticity: the libretto has been completely rewritten to reflect the everyday lives of the students, and the choreography, based on long sessions of group...
Surely there are ways that we can think about making educational reforms. Yet purging our souls of postmodernism is undoubtedly the wrong way to go about affecting change. We'll have to wait to see whether "postmodern" will prove to be a useful and enduring literary term. But Paglia's use of the word as an expression of her own vague disgruntlement-however justifiable or unjustifiable her anger may be-does a disservice to the issue she would like to address. As a means of discussing problems within our educational system, grumbling that everything has become too "postmodern" just doesn...