Word: mythical
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...unnaturally empty. He imagined all the stadiums padlocked, their sweet geometries of green so still that one could hear the Astroturf growing. The lazy summer inevitability that has always been one of baseball's charms (the continuum of it, the meticulous formality of its records, the lovely mythic accessibility of the sport's past to its present) now grew disheveled. Local TV stations ran ancient episodes of Gomer Pyle instead of ball games. Somewhere in a high-rise Manhattan hotel, Mammon and the Grinch negotiated free-agent compensation, the main issue in the major league players' strike...
...productivity, once the exuberant engine of national wealth, has dipped to an embarrassingly uncompetitive low, Americans have shaken their heads: the country's old work ethic is dead. About the only good words for it now emanate from Ronald Reagan and certain beer commercials. Those ads are splendidly mythic playlets, romantic idealizations of men in groups who blast through mountains or pour plumingly molten steel in factories, the work all grit and grin. Then they retire to flip around iced cans of sacramental beer and debrief one another in a warm sundown glow of accomplishment. As for Reagan...
...kind of scene may get by-marginally-in the movies, but at ECM Records it would be considered strictly for the tourist trade. There is a sort of house high-seriousness about all the diverse jazz on the ECM label. For its sessions, one must attune one's mythic misconceptions accordingly...
...carved African figure of a leopard she remembered from the Musée de l'Homme in Paris: "It was the first time I recognized the power of that animal, not as an animal, but the power of its forms." Nevelson was drawn to what was mythic and magical in sculpture just as a yearning for the primitive, the instinctively efficacious, was diffused throughout the American avant-garde in the 1940s. It was the root of Jackson Pollock's and Mark Rothko's early work and became an essential part of abstract expressionism in general...
...format of this Chapelle aux Dames is a huge table in the form of an equilateral triangle. On each side there are 13 place settings (a reference to the Last Supper, with Christ and his twelve Disciples). The 39 settings commemorate mythic or real women, goddesses and culture heroines, from the Bona Dea of prehistory to Georgia O'Keeffe. Each consists of a porcelain goblet, porcelain cutlery and a large plate, all reposing on ornamental cloth runners. Most of the plates bear designs based on the female genital organs, though one of them, representing English Composer Ethel Smyth...