Word: motifs
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...users once again of Microsoft's corporate muscle: you will be forced to log in to XP. At home, where I share my PC with my three daughters, we now all have our own "accounts" that arrange our desktops. Ella, who has a thing for cows, has a bovine motif, for instance; Zoe prefers a King Tut theme. When I'm allowed on the machine, I hit Windows-L and instantly hot-key into my own account (a desktop built on a Daniel Clowes comic). Whatever programs my daughters are running continue to run, invisible to me but waiting...
...only other theatergoing experience I had in D.C. was attending a performance of the national tour of Kiss Me, Kate at the Kennedy Center. When I was able to look at the stage (and away from the dreadful red velvet motif of the auditorium), I saw what looked very much like a national tour of a show currently on Broadway. Same book, same songs, slightly scaled back set, medium level stars who were inferior to their Broadway predecessors, and an audience who loved it all-the-same. Truth be told, if Brian Stokes Mitchell, Marin Mazzie, Amy Spanger and Michael...
Yamamoto agreed to collaborate with Adidas last year, impressed, he says, by the functionalism of sportswear design, and by the way the brand's three-stripes motif has endured for more than 50 years. Using those stripes as his muse, he has fused his own choice of fabrics and colors to Adidas' technical expertise. The result should put a bounce in any fashionista's step...
...game is power, with sex as an amateurish sideline. The high school game also is about power, which expresses itself in coteries, and in sometimes savage rituals of bullying. Sex in Washington, in any case, has an adolescent, high school quality: the Big-Man-on-Campus-Hits-on-Intern motif, the stolen feels in the White House, as if the Oval Office were the front seat of Dad's borrowed Grand Marquis...
That's pure Spielberg: the story of a stranded or abandoned child searching for signposts to home, for the reunion of the nuclear family. This Hansel-and-Gretel motif has been playing from his first feature, The Sugarland Express (two young marrieds struggle to rescue their child from foster parents), through half a dozen other films he has directed or produced (Poltergeist, Back to the Future, The Goonies, Empire of the Sun, Hook, Saving Private Ryan). That's a pretty full gallery of lost boys and girls. And what is that little parchment-pated E.T. but a precocious kid, light...