Word: abstraction
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...jackpot for Powerball, the obsession-inducing multistate lottery, climbed past $250 million last week, few could resist the urge to make all those dollars seem less abstract. What could a quarter billion dollars actually get you? TV and radio news spots gave us a hint: the Chicago Bulls! Breakfast, lunch and dinner at McDonald's for the next 3,500 years! Half as much money as Michael Eisner earned in 1997! We also learned that the odds of winning the grand prize are equal to the odds of getting struck by lightning on 14 occasions in a single year...
...failed to apply "Bonfire of the Vanities" to the real world in the particular, this summer I think I might have succeeded in the abstract. The image suggested by Wolfe's title exists in the daily routine on Park Avenue: there, people sacrifice efficiency to pretense and ceremony. While the bonfire is not the conflagration that consumes Sherman McCoy, it is kindled by petty vanities...
...Shore softens his features and gestures, but doesn't camp it up, and when he kisses Romeo (Greg Shamie) full on the lips, you are forced to see their love not as the linking of two particular people, or even two particular genders, but as love in the abstract, the essence of all-consuming passion...
...musiccovering rainbow of topics, there is just notenough space. From love songs ("Who Would'veThought") to pleading peace among races andstereotypes, from questioning American values toattacking international social problems("Warsaw"), every subject and approach are worthclose attention. The familiar personal stories ofaddiction and relationships ("Hoover Street") areeasily followed by abstract digs ("Cash, Cultureand Violence") and thoughts on global resolve...
...doorway, a sweatshirt hood drawn over his pale, thin face, is Dracula. That's what the others call him, and he answers to it. Trembling, high and radically withdrawn, Dracula refuses to speak a word, but he does show off an arm full of tattoos. The intricate, dense, almost abstract blue-green filigree seems to say, "This is your brain on crank." The next show-and-tell item is the eyeglass case in which Dracula keeps his syringe and razor blade. The case's interior is obsessively decoupaged with tiny, interlocking pictures snipped from magazines...