Word: luciferian
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Mandel's sleazy, Luciferian Deal persona is not exactly friendly, but it befits a show about sex, greed and temptation. And it's a sign of how hosting has changed since the Beat the Clock era. Says Merv Griffin, the former talk-show host and now billionaire talk- and game-show mogul: Time was, "you hired an M.C. who every mother-in-law would love." But in the reality-TV era, talk and game shows allow, if not require, more edge. We've gone from Bill Cullen's genial cheerleading to Gordon Ramsay's four-letter culinary arias on Hell...
...This mix of jealousy and wounded pride proves a dangerous intoxicant; Bartelby later rebukes God, drunk with self-importance. It is this egotism that is God's foe, growing stronger with every ill-conceived rationalization Bartelby spews, until it is of Luciferian proportions. Not until the theophany of the last scene does the sight of the kind, matriarchal God reminds us that Bartelby's self-deification is something other than prideit is frustration with the fact that God loves him differently than She loves man. And we feel for Bartelby,, who is at last a soulful child, vying...
...helps explain why this show is such a poignant experience. Its humility masks a bizarre pride. What other artist could recoil from nature because its order exceeds that of his own art? How could he expect to rival nature? Did Mondrian envy God? Or perhaps he meant something less Luciferian: that nature, to the artist, is like carnal desire to the saint. It is a trap, a lower substitute for higher ecstasy, an occasion of sin. He knows it is beautiful, but he must still banish it from his art (as Plato urged the banishment of the poet from...
...whims of his owners or the demands of the market. His originally nameless father on Krypton, for example, became Jor-L, then Jor-El (and eventually Marlon Brando). His employer in Metropolis, before it was the Daily Planet, was the Daily Star and then the Evening News. His Luciferian arch-enemy Luthor, the mad scientist who wants to conquer the world, once had red hair, then became bald, then reacquired red hair; in the movies he was played as a buffoon, but now he has turned into a reasonably sane but incurably wicked conglomerate tycoon. Superman is also vulnerable...
Causes are forgotten, but effects, like DDT, accumulate in the social system: Jagger's Luciferian image is now absolute, fixed. He is even credited, in some quarters, with having "destroyed" the rock festival as a form through the Stones' famous appearance at Altamont in 1969, when a Hell's Angel knifed a man in the audience. It is an illusion that rock culture died or went sour because of Altamont. That event was merely a peg for a death announcement, just as Woodstock served to announce a birth that had actually happened long before. Yet the myth...