Word: alienating
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...fetish of national uniqueness. It might seem from the outside that Japanese had remade themselves in the Western mold, wearing Western clothes, adopting Western ideas, imitating Western institutions, but somewhere deep down in the core of every true-born Japanese lay a purely Japanese soul, unsullied by anything alien. The phrase for this was wakon yosai, "Japanese spirit, Western knowledge." Western culture and learning, it was implied, was only for the head; the heart remained resolutely native...
...Long before Japan was a wartime enemy of the U.S., American movies displayed the Japanese as an alien people, with a culture as remote and, in the old phrase, inscrutable as Mars. Hayakawa was the movies' first ambassador from this remote empire. In 1915 he played an Eastern dude in Western garb in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat. All slim smiles and secret sneers, he seduces gullible Fannie Ward with a private loan; later he drops his suavity, attacking and then, gosh, branding...
...exhibit, featuring the work of 2000 ICA Artist Prize winner, Laylah Ali, is slightly more obscure and ambiguous in its aims. Drawings of cartoonish, round-headed figures aptly called “Greenheads” depic confrontational situations that appear slightly amusing until closely inspected. The figures, which seem alien-like at first glance due to their green heads, soon come to resemble human beings in compromising positions. Morbid scenes of violence show lynchings, detached limbs, captivity and fear. Ali’s fine-grained gouache techniques allow her to emphasize disturbing minute details, like Confederate flags on the belt...
...Moonlight” crawls forth like the giant squid that surprises its protagonists—a little slower than the final cut, but tipsy with the same effervescent guitar-coaxed glow. “Alien” lurches forth with snarling blues licks, sneering the same themes of social alienation and sexual obsession that shake the album. Though not included on the original release, its lyrics easily rank among the Moonlight’s most caustic: “And if I see you snooping ’round my farm / I’ll give...
...situations now and then are not analogous. Israel's current Jewish government, unlike the Roman Empire, is not alien to Jerusalem. The Palestinians are not as defenseless as the ancient Jews. And Israeli opposition leader (now Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon's unwelcome stroll last September around the two Islamic shrines that now occupy the Temple platform--a provocation that may have sparked the Holy Land's current strife when Muslims responded by throwing rocks down on Jews at prayer below--has no precise 1st century cognate. Still, the intertwined dynamic of military occupation and religious clash is shockingly familiar...