Word: leda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that treated pain and humiliation as sexual turn-ons. But more sweepingly, it forbade showing women "as sexual objects for domination, conquest, violation, exploitation, possession or use." A federal appeals court was concerned that the ordinance might encompass everything from the ! Iliad to Barbarella, to say nothing of Leda and the Swan...
...union of Leda and the swan (a.k.a. Zeus) once caused mankind some problems, including the Trojan War. If Fevvers is truly a second coming, what upheavals lie in wait for the imminent 20th century? Author Angela Carter, 44, keeps this question twirling throughout Nights at the Circus, her eighth novel. Answers dangle out of reach. But Carter's brand of fanciful and * sometimes kinky feminism, already heralded in her native England and gaining admirers in the U.S., has never been more thoroughly or entertainingly on display...
...lion interrupted in his mauling of a woman by a fountain toppling behind him. Altogether too much of the exhibition is pulpy with triviality. Ontani, who dresses in historical costume or mythological nudity and has himself photographed (not only as Dante, but as Christopher Columbus, Don Giovanni and even Leda), is a natural clown. But as a painter he is fatuous, and his watercolors, full of Donald Ducks and magic mushrooms, would have looked dumb on Haight-Ashbury 15 years ago, let alone in New York today...
...humanities. But the humanities can let you down too. He might have used the metaphor of Odysseus concealing himself under the rams in order to deceive the Cyclops, for example, but the purpose of that deception was escape, not gain. He might also have used the metaphor of Leda and the swan, Zeus taking the form of a swan in order to seduce Leda. In this allegory, the country plays Leda, Reagan the swan, and the act plays itself...
This power of detailed synthesis was not the end of drawing, however, only the means. Leonardo could bring a steely exactitude and transparent freshness of observation to a botanical drawing, like the star-of-Bethlehem plant that he drew as a study for his lost painting of Leda and the swan. Yet the consciously serpentine wreathing of its leaves proclaims the image to be formed as much by style as by the impulse to "objective" description. The two work perfectly together. To see why, one may look at the most famous of his water studies, the image of water gushing...