Word: zens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Most Mysterious New Car Nissan's Zen-heavy TV commercials for the new luxury sedan Infiniti featured plenty of rocks, trees and other atmospherics. Just one thing was missing: the automobile. After slow-starting sales, the automaker finally changed tack and gave the camera-shy car the starring role...
...ponytail of the past, held back with an elastic band, has been joined by plaits, queues and thin, razor-cut hanks of eccentric design. Gary Margolis, 45, director of a counseling center at Vermont's Middlebury College, believes that hair has once again become a font of Zen expressionism: "How you wear your hair speaks of the inner self." The message may be simpler. For many men, it may just be "I don't have to put up with haircuts anymore." The tyke who protested when he was first lifted into a barber's chair may be the ponytailed...
...conveys the effect of a picture like Black Circle, Time, 1979-80. Painted every inch of the way with a Seurat-like determination to leave nothing accidental on the surface, it is Pousette-Dart's version of the circle that has been used, as a mandatory trope, by every Zen roshi for the past 300 years. It is the circle of black ink on white rice paper that says "emptiness" but also says "fullness," the abstract figure in which one can reflect on the presence of complete being...
quality of an allegory without its depth of meaning. Presumably, this is intentional--the promotions for the play reading "Dorf on Life" announce its vaguely allegorical purpose. The text offers an absurdist vision that is as empty as a Zen koan, as resonant as the sound of one hand clapping. Rob and Bobby's disclosures on Life read like something off a fortune cookie or bumper sticker: "A life full of love is like being a poor person with a refrigerator--you don't have one," and "Life's a marathon and then you run one." Best...
This reductio ad absurdum of TV's talk-show mania has had funny sequences, like Jim Belushi joining in an inept neighborhood game of charades: while the women whiz through titles like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the men are stumped by Jaws. But the Hollywood-meets-the-heartland satire falls a little flat. My Talk Show is too straitlaced and good-natured; it needs a bit of the rudeness of Late Night with David Letterman. Or at least some quirkier performers. Where have you gone, Louise Lasser...