Word: ancients
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...what's the attraction? Part of it is nostalgia. "Sheepherding harks back to an age when life was less complicated," says Wienir. "There's that ancient sense of pastoral peacefulness." Harried aristocrats from Marie Antoinette onward have unwound by playing peasant, and in flush times the middle classes follow suit...
...over in less than three. The sole exception is the uncut version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice extracted from the original Fantasia, in which Leopold Stokowski hypnotized an anonymous band of Hollywood studio musicians into sounding just like the Philadelphia Orchestra in its blazingly vital prewar prime. Even the ancient paleo-stereo sound track of that sequence has a raw, visceral impact missing from the glossy digital audio heard elsewhere in Fantasia...
Kneeling before a 400-lb. concrete obelisk in the hills northwest of Los Angeles, Maureen Clemmons mutters a prayer to the ancient Egyptian god of wind. An hour passes. Then a strong gust straightens the lines that attach the obelisk to two nylon kites, shaped like the ones used in parasailing. Soon the kites flip the obelisk and drag it across a grassy field. Clemmons and her 12 assistants erupt in cheers...
...Calif., each November, Clemmons recalled that even stronger winds blow in Egypt from February through June. Then she remembered that the Egyptians mass-produced linen for sailcloth, and that some of their hieroglyphs suggest that the pyramids were raised by "invisible gods in the sky." Clemmons concluded that the ancient Egyptians could have used a system of large kites to lift the pyramid stones into place...
...notice that more than a few of them really are a little precious--you have to admit to Rockwell's ingenuity. What the original canvases for those covers make plain is that he was a painter of great if anachronistic gifts. He carried into the 20th century the ancient pleasures of visual storytelling and fine-grained description. These happen to be the same enjoyments that art has largely turned over to photography, movies and television, none of which can offer back the visual world with anything like the mouth-watering delights of paint...