Word: tableau
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...must have had blue eyes. And they spoke the King's English: King James', with an assist from any screenwriter willing to gussy up his fustian. In these prim tones, the heart's revolution that Jesus preached became an Oxford don's lecture, and his ghastly, redemptive death a tableau painted on velvet...
Carl Lewis, alone, taking his mark in an empty stadium, strikes a gentle tableau. This is his chance to make amends for 1984, when he only won four gold medals. In the long-limbed company of swimmers, the little tadpole Janet Evans seems to represent all the early mornings and late suppers of all the tiny racers in all the neighborhood pools. The great Olympian John Naber laughed wonderfully when someone suggested that age-group swimming is just another kind of phenobarbital prescribed by parents to drain their children of excess energy and make sure they go to Yale...
...such charge can be leveled against Kupfer. In a striking final tableau, after the old order has been destroyed, he populates the stage with a crowd dressed in formal clothes -- like the Bayreuth audience -- mindlessly watching television as the conflagration subsides. The drowned Hagen lies unnoticed, a beached whale in black leather. Despite the music's glowing promise of redemption by love, no one seems to have learned a thing: only two innocent children make their way, hand in hand, out of the carnage. A forgetful human race ensures that, in Kupfer's moral universe, history repeats itself exclusively...
...summit with Jackson, like everything else during the convention, clicked perfectly for Dukakis. Afterward, he and Jackson posed with the designated vice-presidential nominee, Lloyd Bentsen of Texas. The Three Amigos wore happy smiles that belied the quirky nature of the tableau they presented; somehow the nominating convention was giving birth to a trio of party leaders rather than the usual ticket of two. For the moment, Jackson stood ready to submerge his agenda for that of the party. But the three's-a-crowd awkwardness revealed fissures along racial and ideological lines that could someday threaten the foundations...
...earned from Empire of the Sun, he commissioned an artist to re-create two paintings by the Belgian Paul Delvaux that had been destroyed in London during the Blitz. One of these large canvases sits in Ballard's front parlor, and the other presides over his workroom, an unsettling tableau of dream maidens and bare breasts in an otherwise comfortable setting. "Sadly," Ballard says, "the only surrealists around these days are psychopaths. But we all need to fight off the growing suburbanization of the soul. I want to see the sane become surrealists...