Word: portmanteau
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...gave some cues to Gauguin, as did the formal outlining of Japanese cloisonne enamel: that bluish bounding line was the diametric opposite of impressionist blur and pulsation. The swirling abstract patterns it the background of Paul Signac's portrait of Critic Félix Fénéon?with its long portmanteau title, Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Colors, Portrait ofM. Félix Fénéon in 1890?may have begun as a tiny detail of a kimono design in a Japanese print...
Rites of Passage, the portmanteau title for three short films about the painful passing of adolescence, is a decidedly mixed blessing. Most prominently, the program offers two splendid performances. In Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Shelley Duvall brings a graceful vulnerability and unguarded beauty to the role of an ugly-duckling adolescent who is first encouraged in social flirtations, then undone by an attractive, more popular cousin. Director Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street) misses the stronger undercurrents of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original story, just as Novice Director Peter Werner is defeated by the portentous gothic glooms of the Joyce...
...remember him solely for this final volume is like recalling a life by its terminal illness. Indeed when he wrote 1984, Orwell was in the last throes of tuberculosis. The book's pervasive slogan, "Big Brother Is Watching You"; the portmanteau words "New-speak," "bellyfeel," "doublethink"; the inverted graffiti, "Freedom Is Slavery," "Ignorance Is Strength"-all these may be indelible. Nonetheless, if some of 1984's predictions have come true, most have not. If the book lives, it is more as a warning than as prophecy...
Despite the cuts forced by the Met's director, Thomas Hoving, the show remains a triumph of connoisseurship -one of the great museum events of the past 20 years. This is due in no small part to the detail. Rather than being a portmanteau of highlights, the exhibition includes an immense range of underrated "minor" figures like the neoclassicists Jean-François-Pierre Peyron and Jean Germain Drouais. The subject matter runs from the grandest of historical paintings to an eccentric still life with stuffed birds; the figures, from a swooning and epicene Death of Hyacinth by Jean...
...style of The Clockwork Testament should be familiar to all those who read A Clockwork Orange fast, sometimes elliptical, with a rich vocabulary and interesting experiments in portmanteau. But sometimes the prose, which includes filmscript-writing and traceries of stream of consciousness, becomes artificially lofty and burdensome. One chapter, a transcript of Enderby's appearance on the late-night Sperr Lansing Show, is a failed satire of the transcriber's inadequacy, with misspellings like ecommunionicle, kwelled, teetotal Aryan, and Alice in Windowland. And the final chapter, some sort of object-lesson conducted from the future by Educational Time Trips...