Word: cults
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...anonymity has been as crucial a part of Banksy's mythology as irony and wit. "Anything that's ever been written about him centers around the anonymity - that he's this Batman, this cult figure," says Pedro Alonzo, who curated an exhibition in England to which Banksy contributed. But that doesn't necessarily mean being unmasked would hurt Banksy's popularity. The intrigue over his identity has been a "double-edged sword," Alonzo says, since it has occluded the messages bundled in his art. "His work is a call to action. It's about hierarchies of power, social injustice...
...concept of the "midnight movie" began to change from a Rocky Horror Picture Show cult phenomenon into a routine promotional gimmick in May 1999, when the long-awaited Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace premiered one minute after midnight to hordes of fans who had waited days in line for the opportunity to get a first look. Those showings grossed $7 million. Episode II grossed $6.2 million during its opening midnight screenings and Episode III scored an astounding $16.5 million. The final Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King earned $8 million at midnight screenings. Each...
...emotions, their rages and outrages - into their accounts of the way we lived, publicly and privately, in a very troubled time. The downside of their efforts - especially in Thompson's case - was a highly unreliable subjectivity. It was covered over by Thompson's stylishness and eventually subsumed by the cult of personality that accreted around him. Eventually, Gibney's documentary concludes, it was celebrity that did Thompson in; his personality, more than any event he was covering, became the story, which was not as interesting as he and his acolytes thought...
...What makes the cult of the santos malandros stand out, however, is its moral ambiguity. Santiago Rondon, a "spiritual consultant" in La Pastora, one of the capital's oldest neighborhoods, describes the tradition as a windshield wiper swinging between good and not so good. "It goes this way and it goes that way," says Rondon. "One day the santos malandros help a desperate mother keep her child off drugs; the next day they help you score some cocaine. It's the duality of life, but that's the way real life functions." And there's always the danger, acknowledged...
...santos malandros are the latest pantheon to be incorporated into the broader cult of Maria Lionza. Among the others are the Corte Medica, consisting of doctors believed to be responsible for healing miracles. Its best-known figure, Jose Gregorio Hernandez, is currently in the process of being canonized by the Catholic Church. But inclusion of the santos malandros has raised controversy among devotees of espiritismo (also known as santeros). That's because they are regarded as spirits with a "low light," who, in order to gain redemption in death, must undo the harm they did in life...