Word: alienated
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...treading on dangerous turf when one is a "Resident Alien" (the pleasant INS euphemism for "foreigner") and dares to critique any aspect of Americana. So let me preempt my words by saying how much I love America. If I didn't genuinely love this country and its many magnificent qualities, I wouldn't be here...
...Admittedly one does need stamina to play cricket. Professional games at the local level last three days. And international games between teams representing two nations (a concept which is understandably alien to baseball fans) stretch over five days. There is a reason for this. The English (who devised cricket and exported it to what was then its empire) are not a very spiritual nation. So cricket was invented as a way of defining infinity...
Yorke, the group's central songwriter, is obsessed with the disillusioned and the disoriented: a plastic surgeon in a fool's war with gravity, a crash victim who finds his near death experience makes him feel alive, an earthbound stargazer who dreams of abduction by alien spacecraft. His voice is often sampled, distorted by synthesizers, his lyrics broken into elegiac fragments, shards of thoughts, mantras of melancholia. "I woke up sucking a lemon," Yorke sings on Everything in Its Right Place, and the phrase is repeated again and again in a plaintive sample. Throughout Kid A he returns...
...with his already accomplished style of abstract expressionism. As a respected contemporary of such American masters as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he had won numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation grant and the prestigious Prix de Rome. Still, something was missing; abstraction was increasingly alien and even boring to him. On his gray canvases of the 1960s, amorphous black head-shapes began to appear, laboring to push, as it were, out of the ether behind them. Then, in 1970, he unveiled a complete change. Inspired by the banal, ordinary objects in his apartment and studio...
...complaints are a minor litany and not uncommon. For other Americans of Asian descent, there are sharper reminders that we are not yet considered part of the American context, that our presence is unidiomatic, all too easily aped, too often perceived as too alien to be appreciated as anything other than caricature. When the focus is on the "un-American-ness" of public figures, yellowface can generate the quick laugh. It was the route chosen by the National Review in 1997 when it lampooned the Clintons and Al Gore on its cover during the campaign-finance "Asian money" scandals...