Word: metaphoritis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Kopit's central metaphor is that of the playwright as detective. Soon enough, Trent's curiosity defeats his hesitation. In a Philip Marlowe trenchcoat, Trent dutifully goes to Washington to search for clues. But the confusion only gets worse as he tries to discover the logic of nuclear policy, as well as why Stone has chosen him for the commission...
...compensations. In Cherries and Cherry Pits (Greenwillow; $11.75), Vera B. Williams introduces Bidemmi, a gifted young black girl who draws a world of apartments and subway stops and ghetto / streets. With her felt-tip pens and knowledgeable left hand, Bidemmi gives those scenes an optimistic glow, heightened by a metaphor: cherry pits. Everyone in the neighborhood, including a pet parrot, eats cherries. The seeds are scattered in the hope that one day there will be a whole orchard on Bidemmi's block, with harvest enough, says the last rainbow illustration, to feed everyone...
...also may not. Hollywood in the 1940s, the last imperial decade of the movie industry, was a dream factory, a sausage machine, a gloriously successful trade conspiracy (till the feds made the studios sell their captive theater chains). It was, for wowsers who cared to moralize, a creepy metaphor of the American soul. Ignorance ruled. Bad taste feasted; genius writhed. Or so genius said. Oddly, though not many superior films were produced, quite a few good flicks got made...
...space was receding into memory by 1920. In its place grew a new myth that supplied one of the core images of American art deco: the conquest of the air, by buildings and machines -- the taming of vertical space. The aircraft, with its fairings and streamlines, became the formal metaphor for a host of products from milkshake machines to staplers. Fantasy piled on fantasy: Bel Geddes, one of the master industrial designers of the period, looked at airfoils and fish and came up with the finned, monocoque body of his Motor Car Number 9, 1933, which was never built...
...work bears is more a matter of spirit than style, an embrace of life's episodes that is as benign and enveloping as eyesight itself. His 1963 picture of children watching a puppet show in Paris is both the consummate example of his close-in approach and the best metaphor for his own excitement in seeing...