Word: spectral
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...ghosts of particle physics, so tiny and elusive that a billion could pass through a bar of lead without hitting anything en route. Traveling at the speed of light, neutrinos carry no charge and apparently no mass. Even after they were detected in 1956, they remained curious, spectral bits of energy. As one of the scientists who discovered them, Frederick Reines, explains, they seemed to have "no frills and no complications...
...exist on stage; it's the persona, not the person, that's germane to art, and "kiss-and-tell" histories like Up and Down are supremely irrelevant. As Jagger once told Chet Flippo, "It's the attitude." The endless "Midnight Rambler," rambling forever on Get Yer YaYas Out; those spectral opening chords in "Gimme Shelter," music of nothingness played on the frets of your intestines; the way a song like "Sweet Virginia" talks about the shit on your shoes, there is shit on your shoes, shit on everybody's shoes, but you can scrape it off with your records...
...again, Segal made an identifiable portrait; the show includes the effigies of those New York Pompeians of the '60s, the collectors Robert and Ethel Scull, she complete with sunglasses and Courrèges boots. But as a rule, Segal's figures are not identifiable. They are generalized, spectral presences, muffled in the folds of calcified gauze, their skin roughened with residual abstract-expressionist drips and clots. It hardly matters that the stooped Gerontion in Segal's Hot Dog Stand, 1978, is a cast of the sprightly museum director Martin Friedman; what does count is the peculiar tension...
...populations and their unease, republic of anxiety, seedbed of desire. From Edvard Munch's top-hatted masks parading the streets of Oslo to Francis Bacon's pinstriped executives howling like caged baboons, the City secreted images of alienation. To the eye of modernist poetry it got more spectral as one came closer to it, as the capitals of Christendom did for T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, almost 60 years...
...Charles Playhouse's first tier and surreptitiously took his seat. At first, only the devout, well-weathered theater goers noticed him, but as the program wore on, even the most uncultivated picked up on his being there. By evening's end, it was clear that it was the spectral presence of the ghost of that late, great form of entertainment, vaudeville, which had made the show. Yes, the program contained lively music, and a captivating, even heroic, effort from Joe Masiell, but its recreation of a past era was what set it apart. For those in the audience who remembered...