Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Eating Machine Sack artfully enlarges his vision of the System as Superscapegoat for the Superstate. Basically the book consists of profiles of four Viet Nam veterans. But it is also a metaphor that has been duly certified by such thinkers as Marx, Veblen, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion (Mechanization Takes Command). The theme is familiar, though no less enticing for having been subject to countless cliches. The oversimplified version goes like this: As technological systems grow more complex, individuals grow less responsible for controlling the consequences...
...through these latitudes that Ponce de León stumbled in 1513, seeking the fountain of perpetual youth. It was not there. Now it is. The Walt Disney World coat of arms-a terrestrial globe wearing Mickey ears, set in a capital D-is no metaphor but a frank statement of intention. The place is the last example of idealized, high-despotic city planning, a rich hick cousin of all the imaginary and perfect townships that architects from Filarete in the 15th century to Boullée in the 18th wrought from their schematic, authoritarian fantasies but never managed...
Where, then, should a painter stop? Jan van Eyck took his scrutiny down to the limit of detail where the smallest legible form seems governed by a single hair of the brush: a painter's metaphor of the universal eye of God, marking the sparrow's fall. Perhaps that option is not open to a modern artist since the assumptions behind it no longer exist. In any case, Raffael (who, like any other young artist in New York in the '50s, was affected by Abstract Expressionism) wanted to keep handwriting-the visible gesture of the brush, done...
...dark enclosure, Merwin has created a very precise use of image and metaphor. This is particularly true of his pastorals, such as "Early One Summer...
Whatever symbolic or ideological potential the story of La Grande Bouffe might have had, whatever opportunity for Swiftian outrage or the savage surrealism of a Bunuel, is extinguished by Ferreri's obstinate insensitivity. It could conceivably be argued that the film is a metaphor for the fate of a society sated by its own prosperity, obsessed by its own comforts. It is difficult, however, to credit such subtleties to a director whose idea of a good visual pun is a man holding a turkey between his legs while a woman cuts the squealing bird's head off with...