Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Siberia has come to mean a land of exile, and the place easily fulfills its reputation as a metaphor for death and deprivation. Even at the peak of midsummer, a soul-chilling fog blows in off the Arctic Ocean and across the mossy tundra, muting the midnight sun above the ghostly remains of a slave-labor camp. The mist settles like a shroud over broken grave markers and bits of wooden barracks siding bleached as gray as the bones of the dead that still protrude through the earth in places. Throughout Siberia, more than 20 million perished in Stalin...
Perhaps the ultimate in isolating technologies is television, especially when linked to a VCR and a coaxial cable. Harvard professor Robert Putnam, in a recent and much noted essay titled "Bowling Alone," takes the demise of bowling leagues as a metaphor for the larger trend of asocial entertainment. "Electronic technology enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully," he concedes, but at the cost of the social gratification "associated with more primitive forms of entertainment." When you're watching TV 28 hours a week--as the average American does--that's a lot of bonding you're not out doing...
...quote neuroscientist Dr. Rodolfo Llinas as saying colors and sound don't exist outside our brains, concluding that if a brain doesn't perceive color and sound, then they don't exist. He was using the famous metaphor of a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it. I couldn't disagree more with Llinas' conclusion. Light is the energy given off by a heated or excited object in the form of photons. Sound is the vibration of molecules in a medium caused by an object. Just because there may not be receivers around to pick...
...burly, bombastic Judge Dredd, based on a popular series of British graphic novels, is best seen as a metaphor for the movie wars. As policeman, jury and executioner in the 22nd century, Joseph Dredd (Stallone) is supposed to be one potent dude, but he is manipulated and programmed by a ruling council. This Mega-City is fascism as fashion statement; Dredd's uniform has enough leather and metal to stock an S&M boutique. But he's just a soldier for hire, or a star looking for his next project. Dredd's warped mirror image is a renegade named Rico...
Most of the abstract painting coming out of the School of Paris in the late '40s and '50s, except for Serge Poliakoff (sometimes) and the still somewhat underrated Nicolas de Sta?l, was either self-consciously pious (religious stained glass was a favored metaphor) or mock convulsive. A hideous array of bravura squiggles by Georges Mathieu, whom French critics, for a while, regarded as Europe's answer to Pollock, reminds you how shallow this rhetoric could...