Word: aping
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...obsessive device: the exaggeration of the aura of consumer objects, a devotion to gloss and glitz. An ice bucket or a set of "limited-edition" whiskey bottles in the form of a choo-choo train is recast in stainless steel; a porcelain effigy of Michael Jackson with his pet ape is slathered in bright gold glaze. Once in a while, Koons contrives an image of curious intensity, such as Rabbit, 1986, a stainless-steel cast of an inflatable plastic bunny, once pneumatic, now rigid and manically shiny, possessing some of the virtues of Claes Oldenburg's work 20 years before...
...child." If there is no village of strong adults, only warring teenage street gangs controlling a few blocks of city turf, then the gangs may do the child rearing. Kevin Glass was 10, a clever, skinny black kid already moving from mischief to larceny, when he began to ape the swagger of a 15-year-old member of the Neighborhood Crips gang, whose street name was Insane. Among older kids, Kevin had noticed already, it was the "gangstas" who always had money, guns, girls, the wary enmity of cops and the fearful respect of "chumps," or civilian noncombatants...
This is not typical ape behavior. In similar situations, the bonobo's cousin, the common chimpanzee, might engage in greetings and dominance interactions with far less libido in evidence. Why then do the bonobos launch into extended orgies of polymorphous perversity...
...around us, drawing to within a few arm lengths. I am flabbergasted. Wild chimps do not react this way to humans in any other part of the African rain forest. But this is no ordinary meeting of fellow primates. For the chimps surrounding us, seeing humans amounts to an ape version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
Ross Perot, the king of content-free sound bites (whose favorite, of course, is "I could sound bite it for you, but I won't"), is preparing his first wave of television commercials. Though filming has yet to begin, Perot's ads will probably ape his insistence that campaign promises are made to be broken, so he won't make any. In other words, as befits the man who seems so far to be running for President of Hallmark, there will be lots of homilies and little else...