Word: motif
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Revitalization is quickly becoming a motif of the modern American metropolis. City after city is trying to rejuvenate decayed downtown and waterfront areas. Skyscrapers rise like phoenixes where factories and tenement houses once stood. In Baltimore, a decrepit harborplace was turned into a yuppie shopping and eating complex in just a few years. New York's waterfront suffered a similar facelift with the creation of South Street Seaport, a shopping plaza akin to Faneuil Hall. And the trend has spread to East Cambridge...
...school do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, they do believe that the man from Galilee might well have seen himself in that light. In fact, a number of lesser religious figures of Jesus' era also believed this about themselves. As for Jesus' death, Flusser interprets it within a motif of martyrdom that stemmed from the Maccabees, rather than from the belief that the Crucifixion would take away the sins of the world. "I am sure," says Flusser, "that there were many Jews, when Jesus was crucified, who believed this innocent victim of Roman cruelty would stop the anger...
Cant phrases, such as "quality time," have found their way into the vocabulary. A motif of absence -- moral, emotional and physical -- plays through the lives of many children now. It may be an absence of authority and limits, or of emotional commitment. A mother writes in the New York Times: "What I see emerging is an entirely new category of professionals who spend little, if any, time with their children. There appears to be a new form of neglect: absence ... Recently my six-year-old daughter exclaimed, 'Look, Mom, Sarah has a new babysitter.' The 'babysitter' was Sarah's mother...
...formative early influence on him was the 1907 Cezanne retrospective in Paris. Cezanne's slow chewing at the motif, his persistence, his anxiety, his search for a sculptural grandeur in bodies and landscape (faceted on the surface, dense as limestone below) became, for Braque, a moral absolute. Cezanne's greatness lay in his "classical impersonality," opening a way to what Braque called the "total possession of things." A weakness of the Guggenheim show is that it contains none of the paintings from 1908-09 with which, at L'Estaque in the south and the village of La Roche-Guyon outside...
Sponsored by Piedmont Airlines, the concert's "free stuff" motif conjured up exotic images: a round-the-world ticket, a spring break trip, perhaps even a week with the Dins in Bangkok on their 1988 summer tour. What the Dins' peers, parents and other sophisticated patrons received was much more creative: cucumbers, Dippity Doo, a can of tuna and a thousand other trinkets...