Word: tinkertoy
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Gorky, who would spend years appropriating the successive styles of Picasso (plus Kandinsky's and Miro's) until he had them fully digested, apprenticed himself with typical fierceness to The Studio, to its subtracted forms, flat surfaces and shallow space. After the Tinkertoy intricacies of Cubism, this was Picasso glancing in the direction of Mondrian, arriving at something close to the railway armatures of hard-edge abstraction. In 1936, after three years of study and effort, Gorky replied with Organization, his own breakthrough into a new understanding of how soft form could coexist with hard...
...waited for silly mortals to figure out how they all fit together. Last week's talk of a $35 billion purchase of Canada's Seagram by France's Vivendi represents the latest human attempt to make some of these pieces click into a seamless, revenue-generating new-economy Tinkertoy. The toy boys in this deal, Vivendi CEO Jean-Marie Messier, 43, and Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., 45, can't resist the urge to merge Vivendi's telephone company, Internet provider and cable system with Seagram's Universal Studios and Universal Music Group...
...supported it, extended the strange and strained realm of suburbia. To absorb this mobility came drive-in theaters, drive-in restaurants, drive-in banks and, most important, the shopping mall--Main Street reconfigured for cars. Society was transfigured: the automobile brought America to a new frontier made up of Tinkertoy communities full of undefined relationships and spaces, with the car itself an extension of living room, playroom, bedroom, with the whole country viewed through the windshield...
Crick: The structure of DNA gives the game away, once you've seen it. A schoolboy can understand it. It's not something like relativity or quantum mechanics. It's a Tinkertoy, as somebody once said...
That was then and this is now. In the meantime, Challenger exploded, Hubble blurred, and the prospective space station ballooned to a Tinkertoy-looking assemblage bigger than a football field with a price tag of $38 billion, which would require 3,700 hours a year of dangerous spacewalking to maintain. Recently NASA scaled back the space station, shaving, it said, about $8 billion off the cost, but the General Accounting Office pegged the price of this new space station at $40 billion. The long-term cost, the GAO said, could amount to $118 billion, which puts the station...