Word: objection
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Until last week, the service had hedged its bets on the condors' survival, taking the position that only three of the bald, beady-eyed carrion eaters should be brought in from the cold. But officials had become increasingly worried about the giant birds, which have been the object of an intensive six- year, $6 million preservation program. Since the fall of 1984, six of the known wild condors have been lost. One died from eating a lead slug in a carcass that was left behind by hunters. The others, which may also have succumbed to lead poisoning, have simply disappeared...
...William Steig seems to have found the secret of eternal freshness: compose a children's book nearly every year. For 1985, it is Solomon the Rusty Nail (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $12.95). A jaunty rabbit finds that he can turn himself into the useless metal object any time he wants to. But Solomon shows off once too often, and he is captured by Ambrose the hungry cat. Although the rabbit avoids becoming a dinner by remaining a nail, he is trapped in that role when the angry feline hammers him into the side of a house. The nail whiles away...
...world view is considerably sunnier on Amazing Stories. Creator Spielberg sees the supernatural as an object of wonderment and a source of fun: in one clever installment, an actor portraying a mummy wanders off a movie set and encounters a real mummy. Too many episodes have strained for comic-book laughs revolving around TV in-jokes (some teenagers contact an outer-space civilization that is reproducing old TV sitcoms). Yet even the worst shows have had moments of wit and a let's-try-anything charm...
...faith in technology, popular notions of the future became specific and potent, all the more so as fantasy antidotes to the Depression. A gyroplane for every family! Aluminum sidewalks! Houses made entirely of Bakelite! During the late 1920s and early '30s, a remarkable new aesthetic took hold: for an object to look modern, it had to look as if it had been retrieved from the future. Among a good many designers, sentimental nostalgia for the picture-book past --Gothic, Tudor, American colonial--was supplanted by an equally romantic infatuation with the future, nostalgia in reverse...
...timeless, spacy mysticism. In the late 1940s streamlining and art-deco angularity were abandoned in favor of more approximate, biomorphic forms from nature--lamps shaped like bubbles, coffee tables shaped like amoebas. Too bad. The slick Radio City elegance had been a bit hokey, but at least each object made obvious sense: hard angles, parallel lines and parabolas are precise, mathematically simple. Except for the work of a very few artists, such as Isamu Noguchi, most biomorphic furniture is like free verse, the lines undisciplined and arbitrary...