Word: conceits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seeing real people blown to pieces in Sarajevo is far more disturbing than seeing Tom get clobbered by Jerry. Though Turner could take the point that children--the group which both he and the committee deemed most affected--do not ordinarily watch CNN, his inconsistency betrays the basic conceit of TV-bashing...
...while, the conceit works surprisingly well. Despite the heat he's capable of delivering, young Henry remains a Little Leaguer among the big leaguers -- shy, abashed at performing before vast crowds, befuddled by but eager to join in the adult male rituals of his teammates. There's a beamy gentleness about actor Daniel Stern's directorial debut (he also contributes a version of his klutzy Home Alone crook, this time playing an addled pitching coach), and there are finely tuned supporting performances by Amy Morton as Henry's mom and Gary Busey as a fading pitcher who takes...
...sweet conceit, taking into account both the curious new ways we make connections along our electronic highways and romance's age-old need to crank up passion by placing frustrations in true love's path. Given that many of the + traditional obstacles like class, ethnic and religious differences are readily overcome these days by enlightened people, it's smart to recognize that about the only thing left to distance people is, yes, distance -- good old basic geography...
There are a few worthwhile things in "Aperto 93." One is The World Flag Ant Farm, by the Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi. Yanagi's conceit, a pretty good one, was to make scores of replicas of national flags in colored sand, behind Perspex. These are linked by tubes and populated by a colony of ants, which scurry to and fro between the flags bearing grains of sand in their mandibles. Over time the flags become illegible through migration and mixture; Yanagi's piece has the same concision and elegance as Haacke's in the German pavilion...
...Conjugial Angel" is the weaker half of Angels and Insects. The story's conceit is to pair fictional characters with figures from literary history, and Byatt has much more success in evoking the fictional characters than in breathing life into the historical ones. As a result, the novella has something of the feel of a clumsily-executed insertion of live-action characters into a well-drawn animated piece. Alfred Tennyson, his sister Emily, and the ghost of their beloved Arthur Hallam (his best friend and her fiance, and the subject of the poet's In Memoriam) move through Byatt...