Word: monsterous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...right. Modern history teems with tales of the potential usurpation of mankind by its own technology: John Henry vs. the steam drill. Dr. Frankenstein vs. the monster. Linda Hamilton vs. the Terminator. The genius of chess lies in the sublime tension between logical analysis (call it Truth) and human intuition (call it Beauty). Our fascination with Deep Blue derives from fearful wonderment at the possibility that computers, which have already surpassed us at the former, may soon produce some chilling emulation of the latter. Kasparov, the latest standard bearer in humanity's war against our own obsolescence, is stoical...
...Part of the thing with the Defense Fund is [it wants to] seem like the 'big monster,'" he said. "It wants people to pay homage to it first" before presenting plans to the Planning Board...
...told him if he did Cry-Baby, we'd kill that image," he says. "So he parodied himself by playing a teen idol, and it totally worked." Then Tim Burton gave him the opportunity to bury it for good with Edward Scissorhands, in which Depp played an abandoned monster with cutlery where his digits should have been, trying with sweetly contained but (considering his weaponry) dangerous eagerness to adjust to suburban normalcy. Everyone from moony adolescents to case-hardened movie critics could read the silent, yet somehow unsentimental, plea for succor emanating from his deep obsidian eyes, wonderfully...
Lives of the Monster Dogs...
Here's a strange fable--if it has talking animals, it must be a fable--that clanks awkwardly in its mechanics but leaves a melancholy stillness as it is put back on the shelf. Kirsten Bakis' supposition in Lives of the Monster Dogs (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 291 pages; $23) is that in the year 2008, a tribe of large dogs, surgically and genetically altered, with prosthetic hands and voice boxes and with the intelligence of humans, arrives in Manhattan. The dogs walk erect, using canes, and wear costumes patterned after military uniforms and ball gowns of 19th century Prussia...