Word: mayors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...listening to old friends extol his essential goodness, but he's looking bored and distracted one minute, uncomfortable the next: it's hard for him to cede control of his own story. A black Little League teammate reminisces about the 11-year-old Bradley threatening to call the mayor of Joplin, Mo., if a local hotel didn't rent the black kid a room, and the 56-year-old Bradley chews his lip and looks at the floor. His second grade music teacher sings his praises, and he gazes into the distance, even forgetting to thank her as she goes...
...monologue. "There's justice that this is where the presidency begins," he says, "in a neighborhood, on a front porch, on a summer night." He likes the line so much he repeats it, rhapsodizing about "running for the highest office in the land the same way you run for mayor," and never mind that Bradley never ran for such a lowly post. He offers well-modulated, impeccably timed, quasi-mystical stories about his past and America's future, about his crusade to create "an economy that takes everybody to higher ground," lifting 14 million children out of poverty, covering...
Despite what New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the fiery economy have done to clean things up, smelly garbage, careering cabs and dog poop still assault New Yorkers daily. Most residents become inured to the offal they encounter. It's a survival mechanism but also a matter of pride. So it was a bit embarrassing last week when the mayor got ruffled by an art exhibit, of all things...
...mayor was appalled, most of all by The Holy Virgin Mary, a 1996 collage by Chris Ofili, an award-winning British artist who uses elephant feces in his work. "The idea of having so-called works of art in which people are throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary is sick," said Giuliani. He announced that the city would cut its funding to the museum--about $7 million this year, or a third of the museum's budget--unless Sensation was canceled...
Including the mayor, though he did have a look at the exhibition's catalog. It can't convey all the nuances Ofili intends with excrement, though Giuliani might be mollified if he knew that the artist affixes clumps of dung to just about everything, including Absolut vodka bottles and images of James Brown. It can be hard to take this sort of art seriously--it seems designed only to shock, after all--but it is easy to demonize. For his part, Ofili wasn't talking; his London gallery issued a statement saying that as a Roman Catholic, he wanted...