Word: cult
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Because we don't belong to a larger community ,we base our social lives on exclusionary social clubs and extracurriculars. Despite our rhetoric about openness and acceptance, few can honestly deny the 'cult' of The Crimson--the mystique that makes it just as intangible, incomprehensible and inaccessible to many Harvard students as any final club...
...diva in particular, Maria Callas, is given an entire chapter. "The Callas Cult" discusses what Koestenbaum admits is a gay phenomenon much larger than that of the opera queen. Her life (more, specifically, her affair with Aristotle Onassis) assumed tabloid proportions; she was mainstream enough to be mentioned in Marilyn Monroe movies; and her personality, both bitchy and warm in practically the same instant, is well reputed. He life, in short, was an opera unto itself. In the interview, Koestenbaum agrees that the dead Callas seems even more of a cultural power than she did while she was alive...
Thus, the "Callas Cult" draws from a base much larger in the gay community than just opera queens, that of the professionals in smarmy suits, the successful businesspeople, etc. Koestenbaum, though claiming that his book is "an elegy to the opera queen," addresses the larger question of a universal appeal of opera to gays in general. His last chapter, entitled "A Pocket Guide to Queer Moment's in Opera," is a seemingly random (and highly personal) collection of instances in well-known operas that smack of ambiguity and promise beneath the surface...
...conservative, what is the cult of the 1970s? Is a movement that attempts to turn back the clock 20-odd years "progressive"? What does it say about progressivism's future that its most successful aspect is a revival of the past...
...passed the time test (40 years is forever in pop culture), having been filmed twice as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Don Siegel in 1956 and Philip Kaufman in 1978. The first movie, punctuating California's small-town sunniness with the thunder of deadpan mobocracy, became a cult classic. Both pictures met the horror-movie challenge: they kept moviegoers up all night, ashiver with apprehension...