Word: cardboard
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lazy in crafting the characters he describes, some of whom retain the strange, menacing darkness that would fit better in a Dan Brown novel. Selfish, conniving, and sometimes senselessly cruel, these characters seem inappropriately one-sided alongside the other rich characters who populate the novel. Still, what would be cardboard cut-outs in another author’s hands seem almost real in Docx’s. “Be as charming as champagne,” one solely conniving character thinks to himself as he winds himself up for extortion. His eloquently worded thoughts almost make one forget...
...society as a whole seems to function in the same way. His grandfather avoids memories of Djata’s father by refusing to speak with his mother, while Djata’s mother doesn’t ask where Djata is going when he leaves the house with cardboard armor or his blowgun. Even Djata’s father spent his last minutes with his son talking about the sea as the police ushered him into the van to take him to a camp.This disconnect from their lived reality and the one the reader sees in the novel seems...
Domingo Ramirez is a cutter on the tie-factory floor. He unrolls silk fabric from a long bolt and smooths it out on the cutting table. Then he lays down a cardboard pattern, draws a chalk outline and cuts the material with a circular knife. Like cutters around the world, Ramirez does this a hundred times a day. But unlike almost all of them, he does it in the U.S.--in New York City, specifically, just a 15-minute car ride from the Madison Avenue headquarters of his employer, Brooks Brothers...
...while Democratic rivals Obama and Hillary Clinton couldn't set foot in Florida in January, John McCain and his Republican competitors campaigned there and scored valuable face time with Florida independents, with McCain even winning the endorsement of the popular Crist. Despite all that, Florida Democrats campaigned with cardboard cutouts of Clinton and Obama and then turned out to vote in record numbers for the primary election, which was remarkably blooper-free by Sunshine State standards. All the while they were convinced that in the end the DNC would never shut out their delegates, especially with Clinton and Obama running...
...then there is today's wave of success-renouncing, degradation-favoring art, much of which takes the form of listless flotsam-assemblage sculpture, things built from chunks of Styrofoam, torn cardboard or bits of twisted wire. It's piled together with some measure of deliberation, but who can tell how much? Its heart may be in the right place, but it emits an awfully faint pulse...