Word: motif
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Saddam Hussein's armies last week seemed to be enacting a travesty of the Arab motif of veiling and concealment. In the Arab world, women often veil themselves not because they are punished or shamed but because women, who produce life, must be protected, as a plant in the desert might be. Houses turn inward, the living quarters hidden. The true treasures are concealed. Saddam similarly appeared -- or wished to appear -- to be masking his strength, hiding it in bunkers in the sand...
Actor Christopher Hall perhaps takes his role as Ruiz a bit too literally. In one scene, Ruiz declares to Pizarro that he wants nothing more than to be in Peru with his master. "Being your page is enough, sir," Ruiz says. Submission seems to be Hall's implicit motif throughout the performance, as he is completely unable to assert his character. He is too burdened with flat delivery and inertia...
...next to a copy of the Congressional Record while an announcer reels off her votes. Simon is described as "fighting" for this or that cause, rather than "voting" on anything. The spot leaves doubt as to just who has been in the Senate for the past six years. The motif of fighting for the home folks against Washington shows up in many ads in other states...
...lashing back. Realizing that their flat-earth rhetoric about the "inconclusive" and "tenuous" links between smoking and disease is no longer fooling anybody, their defense has become more shrill, more cagey. Call it a three-pronged attack; the metaphor conjures up images of pitchforks, which nicely complement the satanic motif already inherent in fire, smoke and self-inflicted suffering...
...firm produced as promotional gifts. (Folon's association with the company continues to this day.) During those early years, Folon, inspired by intrusive street signs, drew clusters of skyscrapers entangled in suffocating thickets of directional arrows. In the current show Anaconda, 1968, offers a vivid treatment of this motif. Folon admits that these frighteningly amusing glimpses of modern urbanism were "my revenge on what I had been taught in architecture school...