Word: pseudo
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...many people, body building is a bizarre pseudo sport: part weight lifting, part boylesque. It stands in that curious crossroads of exhibition and self-flagellation where Narcissus meets the Nautilus. If Schwarzenegger really thought this trail would lead to Hollywood, he would have to blaze it himself. Except for Steve Reeves, the Hercules of cut-rate '60s epics, few body builders had been able to work up so much as a sweat in pictures...
Commercial calculation is crucial for pop survival and establishing a persona. Madonna sheds images like snakeskins: the bad-girl boytoy; the sassy feminist; the confused pseudo penitent; the ambisexual flirt; the wistful sex bomb, Marilyn Monroe reborn from a peroxide bottle with a genie inside, snuggling up to Dick Tracy. She is craftier and more gifted than anyone else playing the game right now, but all her identities have one quality in common. They are teasingly, patently artificial. They insist on their own calculation. They revel in it and induce the audience to do the same...
...Harvard this summer, I would like to express my surprise at the disrespect accorded us by other University students. Not only are we often looked upon as over-achieving, obnoxious high-school kids, but we are told we are only here for the summer and are therefore only pseudo-Harvard students. The other day, as I was walking past a tour group in front of the John Harvard statue. I heard the guard proclaim that the students seen around campus "were not real Harvard students" and that they were only "here for the summer as part of a high-school...
...article on art forgeries ((ART, May 7)), Robert Hughes described Hans van Meegeren, who specialized in pseudo Vermeers, as a "talentless and paranoid academic hack." I knew Van Meegeren in the 1940s in the Netherlands when I was a teenager, and his portrait of my father now hangs in my home. He was undoubtedly paranoid. However, he was also very gifted, as numerous paintings and drawings can testify. To judge artists only by the imitations they make is to conclude a priori that they are not original in their...
...Doogie Howser, M.D., is for real. But the easy affluence that is the birthright of Doogie's family might seem representative enough, especially when on the following ABC show (The Marshall Chronicles) the TV father was dressed in a tuxedo for an evening of Manhattan night life. Despite the pseudo-lower-middle- class realism of Roseanne and Married with Children, the implicit message in much of prime time remains almost effortless economic entitlement. For while most of the nation resides in what bicoastal types call "the great flyover," TV characters are never rooted in Toledo or Omaha; instead, most spring...