Word: starkest
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...upward pilgrimage begins with Smith's earliest wood and wire constructions. Already evident is the haunting and haunted poetic imagery that informs even the starkest of his mature works. It was while he was studying painting at New York's Art Students League that Smith discovered the first installments of Finnegans Wake in transition and became fascinated with the parallels between poetry and the visual arts. A crudely constructed, painted Head of 1932 translates into visual terms the kind of controlled ambiguity that Joyce used: its profile simultaneously suggests a dancing woman...
...Chinoise reduces style to static set-ups and simple tracks ("The tracking snot is a political act," says Jean-Luc mystically); color is stripped largely to the primary range. Both decisions complement the didacticism of the young Parisian Maoists by omitting all but the starkest and most basic cinematic devices, also by reminding us constantly that we're watching a movie. Perversely, the lean movements and bright colors give La Chinoise charm and humor (not, I suspect, two of Godard's favorite critical adjectives) and make its polemicism entertaining...
BRITTEN: SINFONIETTA, OPUS 1 and HINDEMITH: OCTET (1957-58) (London). Very early Britten-facile and mannered-before he methodically stripped his musical imagination down to its sparest, starkest forms. It is charming, almost pretty music, and vastly different from the sophisticated complexities of the Hindemith, in which key themes are introduced, transposed in various ways, and then replayed in reverse order. Handled with elan by members of the Vienna Octet...
...direction, if not the path, is clear. The Radcliffe Freshman Register, favorite of serious weekend readers everywhere, offers complexities beyond the starkest dithyrambs of the Courses of Instruction...
WAIF & SAFE. H. L. Mencken called attention to the native U.S. talent for "reducing complex concepts to starkest abbreviations." From O.K. to K.O., Americans have long coined initial-born words. But what began as playful sport has turned into contagion and verbal smog (smoke and fog). Just to describe the new rash of alphabetease, linguists were forced to invent a new word: acronym (from the Greek akros for tip, onyma for name), which first appeared in dictionaries in 1947. Most insidious breeders are public relations experts, adept at spawning the punch word that sums up an organization, then...