Word: gifts
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...Hirst's gift, when it's with him, is for black comedy, William Hogarth meets Stanley Kubrick - work that's part deadpan joke, part dead serious utterance about mortality and decay. The piece that first made him famous, an open-jawed shark in a tank of formaldehyde titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, offered a giant beast of prey as a belligerent correlative for a universally suppressed anxiety. A Thousand Years is a large glass box in which real maggots hatch into flies that appear to feed on blood (actually red sugar water) from...
...That thesis might not be embraced by the tens of thousands swept away by the Indonesian tsunami, or the like number displaced by Katrina. But Ponyo, which the Disney Company will release in the States next year, is a parable for children, and they're entitled to the gift of hope. Besides, it's the genius of anime deity Hayao Miyazaki, the movie's writer-director, to create elemental images more wondrous than alarming - whether they're the forest demons of Princess Mononoke or the the bathhouse ghosts who transform the heroine's parents into pigs in Spirited Away...
...political journey from banner-waving GOP social conservative to maverick reformer may simply be about good timing. It's what former journalist Bill McAllister, who now works for Palin's press staff, used to call "Sarah-dipity" - that uncanny gift of knowing exactly what voters are looking for at a particular moment. And, of course, the political will to give them what they want. (See photos of Sarah Palin here...
...month of August, which is the cruelest month for Democrats, the month when Republicans go for the jugular, trotting out arguments - some valid, most scurrilous - that paint their Democratic rivals as weak, élite or unpatriotic. This is a relatively new phenomenon in American politics, the Bush family's gift to the process. Ronald Reagan never staged an ugly August. He attacked his opponents, but on the high ground of policy. His most famous advertising gambit was a balm: "Morning in America," a series of ads filled with gorgeous American images that didn't even mention Reagan's 1984 opponent...
...Benedict, himself one of the top theologians of the modern era, was a student of Newman's writings. Knowing this, former Prime Minister Tony Blair brought three photographs of Newman to Benedict as a gift on his last visit to the Vatican, just months before announcing that he - like the English prelate - had converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism. In a 1990 address marking a century since Newman's death, Ratzinger spoke about the profound impact Newman's views had on young German seminarians in the wake of the Nazi regime. "For us at that time, Newman's teaching on conscience...