Word: yellow
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ATTENDING A RETROSPECTIVE of an artist's work has a similar appeal as seeing old movies over and over again. You go to quell your nostalgic urges, to see your time - honored favorites, whether it be the joy of watching Dorothy prance down the Yellow Brick Road for the umpteenth time or the sight of a particular Monet haystack. For the most part, however, new ideas are rarely perceived; you end up looking for your special favorites and tend to ignore the rest. Whatever insights are made usually concern the philosophy of nostalgia rather than revelations about the subject concerned...
...flower on the beaches. They have only one season. The following year, they are replaced by other flower-like faces which, the previous season, still belonged to little girls. For the man who looks at them, they are yearly waves whose weight and splendor break into foam over the yellow sand." The minutes stolen for reflection concern the values of action vs. creation: "I ought not to have written; if the world were clear, art would not exist...
...black face inquires, and your eyes follow his extended hand to a junkyard-special '67 Chevy that is obviously suffering in the heat. Whatever color it may have been originally, time has faded it to a sort of nondescript grey. You start to move, then remember--it's not yellow, it has no medallion form the Taxi Commission, it's a gypsie cab. A hundred newspaper headlines fire the peculiar sort of panic that only the truly paranoid feel. The visions of being driven to some out-of-the-way alley, held up and perhaps shot by this mysterious driver...
...morning a handlebar car was ready, too small a target for the Japanese artillery on the north bank of the Yellow River to shoot at. And thus, bundled in a soldier's padded robe, seated in the cold wind on an open pump-car, I traveled 30 miles that day as if I were a general reviewing his troops. But I was reviewing a famine...
What had happened slowly became clear. The war was the first cause. If the Japanese had not made war, then the Chinese would not have cut the dikes of the Yellow River to stop them by switching the river's course. Then, perhaps, the ecology of North China would not have changed. Or, perhaps, food might have been packed in from food-surplus areas. But in addition to the war had been the drought. That was nature's guilt. At this point, men had become guilty-either for what they did or failed...