Word: iconoclastic
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...Confessions of an Iconoclast" (May 3), G. Brent McGuire writes that I "explained that, in considering whether to write a letter about Peninsula's response to campus feminism, [I] `decided not to stoop to their level."' He asks, "But what is our level--complete English sentences?" While I congratulate McGuire on his ability to string together nouns, verbs, and adjectives, I need seek no further than his own article for examples of precisely what "his level...
Schnittke's rise to prominence is a tribute to his artistic integrity. His slight frame, perilous health (he has suffered two strokes and a heart attack) and diffident demeanor mask a revolutionary sensibility. As an iconoclast in a country of enforced artistic conformity, Schnittke represented for many of his Soviet countrymen a kind of artistic glasnost long before Gorbachev made it permissible. Stylistically unpredictable and resolutely uncompromising -- there are no "Socialist Realist" elements in his music, no compositions celebrating factories at work or peasants at play -- Schnittke's music is fundamentally deconstructive. It uses the past as raw material...
Obituary: Frank Zappa, rock iconoclast, dies...
Frank Zappa surely would have appreciated -- indeed, relished -- the irony ! that his death last week was, as the old show-biz line has it, a shrewd career move. The musical iconoclast, best known for his work with the seminal 1960s rock band the Mothers of Invention, was in many ways the prisoner of his own raffish image: hirsute hippie freak; countercultural sire of prototypical Valley Girl Moon Unit Zappa and her siblings Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva; opinionated crank ("AIDS is a CIA plot"); and First Amendment scourge of Tipper Gore. With his death from prostate cancer, a few days short...
Part of what makes any fiction fun is the inversion of expectations. Kramer, the ruling white, is the team's iconoclast, full of scorn for procedure and authority. He is expedient, intemperate, womanizing and often drunk. Zondi, the oppressed black who for reasons of race earns a modest fraction of his partner's pay, is a convent-educated conformist. By the chronological end of the series he is a dutiful husband, attentive father and slightly stodgy bourgeois citizen. Each is responding to his social position: white Kramer can afford the luxury of defiance, but black Zondi cannot...