Word: pranking
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...next scene at school shows the regimentation of German education. The classroom's chaos before Jannings' arrival yields to rigidity when he sits at his desk; but a prank subverts his authority and takes him to the entertainment district that night. Here huge shadows and trap-like streets, in the finest tradition of German Expressionism, stress his fears of this setting, fears augmented inside Dietrich's dressing room by a clown and a "professor" of magic who implicitly mock Jannings' position. The impingement of settings and objects on Jannings' security climaxes in a song sequence where Jannings seated...
Presidential Prank. Williams wears a beard, buffalo-skin trousers, patched epauletted shirt, leather jacket and a neckerchief. But there is a lot of the actuary left in the man. He always carries a briefcase, and his workroom wall is covered with precise flow charts that plot work in progress. There are 23 projects pending. Right now, only one of them involves television. "TV," he says, "is not a medium anyone will let you work in creatively any more. People in the networks are afraid of original ideas." He does not disdain TV, however, to plug his book...
WHAT blew their rigid old minds most of all was that Pranksters, hippies, heads, looked so extraordinary. Something startling, the extraordinary introduced into the everyday, is in a way a definition of the prank. The hippies and what they did were like pepper on ice cream for the straight world...
...much of our present situation is the response of fear, of hatred of the unexpected. Wallace's followers are scared of hippies, scared of long hair, scared of blacks, in part simply because they're different. Kesey and the Pranksters could have made a small difference. A prank properly performed could have given people a chance to adapt to the unexpected, to play along with it if they wanted to, to groove...
Perhaps the critic is honestly angry at the artist, or perhaps this is just another way of showing the old anxiety and confusion, an uncertainty as to what he's expected to say in the face of this...this genius?...this prank...this outrage! For every time the critic becomes serious the artist giggles, and when our critic laughs along with him the artist suddenly turns spooky, funeral. The critic feels like a bug and strikes back with "if we should dignify it by the name of art at all in poor taste unwashed ill mannered self-indulgent...adolescent...childish...