Word: scrawl
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's how alien Michael (Quinton Aaron) appears to most of the students and faculty at Wingate Christian School. The abandoned son of a crack-addict mom (his father vanished and was murdered years later), he's the kind of kid for whom a written test looks like a scrawl in hieroglyphics, as foreign to him as a quick pass to the wideout might be to a more studious child. It asks him to strain muscles he has never been encouraged to use. His teachers dismiss him as stupid, illiterate, unteachable; his classmates shy away from him; and the ladies...
People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore," he says. (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution...
...what would that kind of art look like? In that same year, he provided one answer in Tribulations of Saint Anthony, a pandemonium crammed with the kind of scribble-scrawl images the world would not see again until Cy Twombly came along more than six decades later. Around this time, Ensor also started bringing his masks and skeletons out to play on a regular basis. From then on, personal and social relations in his work would be a dark comedy, performed in disguise and in party colors, with the Grim Reaper making regular entrances to rattle his bones in your...
...fill out two ovals. They'll mark one candidate's oval in ink, try to erase that mark and then put their initials next to their correction, even though there's a law on the books forbidding voters to sign their ballots, to prevent voter bribing. They'll scrawl something about taxes in that oval, or about lizard people. You spend enough time trying to figure out the intentions of some voters, and you'll learn their real intention is to be put into special care...
...Civil War South. But in Italy, another old world still coming back to life after World War II, he sifted the rubble for a pictorial language that could reach back much farther, past civilization itself. Like the French artist Jean Dubuffet, he found it in graffiti, a scrawl that felt older and wilder than antiquity. In Twombly's paintings hectic scribbles and smudges of color might share the canvas with a crudely drawn word or phrase that harks back to the classical world - Hérodiade, Leandro - but always dimly, a fading signal, the remnant of a broken order...