Word: realists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Myers is clearly a good fit in that regard, I don?t think this is a lead pipe cinch for Star Wars. As a fellow who knows space very well, he also knows the limitations of it, and while being an advocate for it he may also be a realist for it. Which isn?t something people who aren?t very familiar with space tend to be; they tend to be rather pie-in-the-skyish. I don?t think this guy has that kind of baggage, so that could be a good thing...
...face of it, Thiebaud, 81, is a Realist. He loves material fact, with a preference for inertia. He started off in the 1960s painting gorgeously lush still lifes of kitsch diner food--everything from hot dogs to angel-food cake and gumballs. Then he turned to painting people, or rather embalming them in his characteristic thick, smooth and (when used to make flesh) slightly rubbery pigment. After moving to San Francisco in the early '70s, he took his eye outside and did cityscapes--those strange, plunging perspectives of the hills and highways of the city, translated into gravity-defying slices...
...Backroom political scheming is kept to a happy minimum as Chaykin makes sure to include enough cursing, killing, and nudity (not to mention fouled-toilet-bowl fishing), to keep action fans turning the page. Penciler Laming has a clear, almost photo-realist style that makes the book more reminiscent of a film than a comic. At the same time, the sharp inks by John Stokes give characters a strange, though not unpleasant, porcelain look- almost like Jeff Koons' pornographic sculptures...
...whole, useful. The young man obeys Horace Greeley and goes West; in California, he runs out of America. It is the culmination and extinction of hope. The vision of plenty for everyone becomes a mockery - a process whose impact is amply documented by the 1930s social-realist segments of this show, with their dock strikers and Mexican migrant workers pitted against grasping Anglo bosses. Different cultures and immigrant races swirl around, not in a melting pot as some optimists have supposed but in unappeased opposition to one another...
Even when he is writing about relatively fantastic subjects, like spirit possession in sheep, Murakami's sensibility is that of the skeptical realist. His narrator is inevitably everyman, contemporary Tokyo edition - a thirtyish urban male in a low-key, white-collar job, a somewhat passive fellow who doesn't expect much out of life and takes what comes with jaded equanimity. Like the narrators of Raymond Carver's stories - Murakami is Carver's translator - they are unremarkable men, less driven by the ethic to succeed and less enmeshed in the powerful webs of family and business and community than most...