Word: xiv
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...century," Lagerfeld says. Over in Brittany he has imported fountains, even torn down stands of trees, to restore the house to its original glory. "Anybody who saw him there who didn't know him would say, 'Who's that megalomaniac who thinks he's Louis XIV?' " observes his favorite model and close friend, Ines de la Fressange. "But it's a place that he really loves and where his mother lived until she died. It's a place he really feels happy...
Before his controlling joke ("prefaces that lead nowhere") wears thin, Lem concludes his fictional anthology with a series of pseudo-documents that seem to have a middle and end as well as a beginning. GOLEM XIV is the last in a line of increasingly super computers developed to monitor the U.S. interests in peace or war. Unfortunately, it has grown indifferent to this task, and so has HONEST ANNIE, its superior and supposedly foolproof successor. Says one of the commentators on this debacle: "In a word, it had cost the United States $276 billion to construct a set of luminal...
...society misses the point entirely [SEXES, July 23]. What would you say about a man who wears velvet pants, lace collars, silk stockings, a purse and a perfumed handkerchief? Would you consider him part of the breakdown of civilization as we know it? No, he is Louis XIV of France. History repeats itself, especially fashion history, and that is all this manifestation is, fashion regression...
...Lancret-would embody rococo. But Watteau died in 1721, just over a year before Louis XV was crowned. Thus the artist whose feathery trees and pastoral scenes of gallantry seem the very essence of rococo sensibility only reached the edge of the rococo. His time was that of Louis XIV, the Sun King. If the intimacy of his art seems so far from the bemusing pomp of Versailles, it is partly because his imitators lagged; it took time to convert the scenography of Watteau's fugitive, shadowed mind into a system of decor suitable for the Pompadour...
...left, a lady and a gentleman scrutinizing a painting on the right. The sense of absorption-of a painter spying on people looking at art -is extreme; and so is the feeling for material substance, quiet, glowing, meticulously wrought. On the far left, a portrait of Louis XIV is being lowered into its crate for shipment. This refers to the name of Gersaint's shop, Au Grand Monarque, but also to the death and burial of the Sun King himself. The shop sign is at once an elegy, a work of art criticism (for no painting on the walls...