Word: steinberg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SAUL STEINBERG plays with your mind. In his world, ornate vases tower over insubstantial people while gunny sacks and trash cans become city streets. His work is intimately contemporary, deliberately shirking any monumentality. With a draughtsman's feeling for line and form, a unique vision of twentieth century civilization and a not unsympathetic sense of satire, he fuses visual and psychological worlds...
...RECORDS. An even farther-out commentary is The Incredible Shrinking God, a long-playing collection of "sermons" by Manitoba-born David Steinberg, 27, a rabbi's son who studied Hebrew literature before becoming a comedian with Chicago's Second City troupe. Not religious in a formal sense, Steinberg's comic oratory is a pop version of God-is-dead theology. Steinberg explains that he picked that title for the record because "the traditional God is becoming harder to find in modern society all the time...
...Steinberg knows enough about the characters of the Bible to put them down with learned insight. Joshua, he says, was "the first real pushy prophet"; Lot was "the first Biblical voyeur"; Jezebel "was immortalized by Frankie Laine." As for the Jonah story, "the Gentiles-as is their wont from time to time-threw the Jew overboard." If Steinberg debunks God as well, it is not the real God but the "pompous image of him created by the clergy." Solemnly, Steinberg intones: "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. The Lord God is an Indian giver." When suffering Job calls...
Many clergymen have applauded Steinberg's non-homilies, on the ground that his satirizing of the wrathful, capricious God of legend is good theology as well as good fun. Steinberg keeps being invited to preach in churches and synagogues. Is he irreverent? Perhaps. But, argue his fans, who can question that God, too, has a sense of humor...
...Evelyn Waugh's, has gone on long enough: too long. An era of great public works is as much needed in America as any other single element in our public life. Magnificence does not mean monumental. That seems to be a point to be stressed. I have heard Saul Steinberg quoted as saying that the government buildings of Washington seem designed to make private citizens realize how unimportant they are, and there is much to what he says. But that seems to me simply to define the special requirements of this age of enormity: to create a public architecture...