Word: ornamentation
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just in time for the holidays, Broadway has a festive new ornament, an all-black musical version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is a Harlem slumlord with a goatee and an Afro, Marley's ghost marches through eternity in sneakers, and the three Christmas ghosts are high-stepping disco dancers. Even Dickens' capacious imagination could probably not have envisioned such sequins and flash. Taken on its own good-natured terms, however, Comin' Uptown is a high-gloss package that should bright en everybody's holiday...
Chardin's prolonged meditation on brown crockery and the spiky fur of dead hares took place in the midst of an efflorescence of luxury art-pink bodies, swirling fronds of gold ornament, rinsed allegorical skies: the rococo style. It pervaded his milieu, and he did not despise it; but it was alien to his temperament...
...rounding a turn in the stream, both canoes struck a tree that had been mostly obscured by the flood. The lead canoe tipped its passengers and then righted itself, floating out of reach of the boaters. The second wrapped itself around the tree and stayed there, a bizarre Christmas ornament one holiday late. Rescuers in Guerneyville picked up five of the six canoers within three hours of the accident. The next day they recovered the body of the sixth. Joseph Richmond Levenson, Sather Professor of History at the University of California, my father...
Other songs on the album go the opposite way--tones and squeals ornament the chillier lyrics about sanitized society. On "Green Shirt," an obstinate bass pulse and the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun drum hover behind these lyrics...
...might say that the essential subject matter of the International Style was the end of history. Its "functionalism," which correctly saw that mass production was destroying handcraft and, with it, ornament, was always colored by this millenarian fantasy. Johnson, whose relationship to Mies van der Rohe is complicated and Oedipal, argues that "Mies believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, especially of his architecture: that it was closer to the truth than anyone else's because it was simpler and could be learned. He felt it could be adapted on and on into the centuries, until architecture bloomed into...