Word: flotsam
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...This isn't to say that Sunday's reports weren't accurate, but with a lot more naturally occurring flotsam whizzing around space than the man-made kind, Earth is always in the path of something or other. A sonic boom is perfectly consistent with anything entering our atmosphere, as is a visible fireball - hence the phenomenon of the shooting star. On any other day, the Texas sightings would be dismissed as nothing more than that. Those rocks don't reach the ground because the atmosphere dispatches them neatly, and it should have no trouble digesting the satellite junk...
Eggleston also doesn't like the term snapshot aesthetic, but from early on, just like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, he's been making pictures that are brilliantly open to the flotsam of the visible world, the little accidents of vision and oddball details that snapshots automatically gather up. He is fascinated by American junk-space, the banal stretches of tract housing and strip malls. But there's nothing camp or ironic about Eggleston's work. The power of his pictures rests on their casual but absolute sincerity, their conviction that small is beautiful. There's something very American about...
...first trip to Ethiopia in 1985 was not encouraging. Eleven years of military dictatorship under Colonel Mengistu and a dusk-to-dawn curfew had all but extinguished Addis Ababa's nightlife. The few hotels in the capital offering live entertainment were mostly the haunt of business and diplomatic flotsam and hookers, while the music was desultory generic pop, played on cheap synthesizers. "It took several trips and several more years before I understood what had happened," says Falceto. "These big bands were dead. They just didn't exist any more." Incredibly, the vibrancy of Addis's musical life...
...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...
...actors confess a weakness for the low-brow—“I still find shitting in your pants hilarious,” Samberg said with a grin— they are very aware of the more subtle ironies that set Lonely Island videos apart from the online flotsam...