Word: oracular
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...matter what the exterior looks like, the skyscraper can be a problematic building--isolated, aloof from its neighbors and boring inside, a pancake stack of identical floor plates with a lobby at the bottom and maybe a restaurant at the top. For years now, Rem Koolhaas, the oracular Dutch architect and urban theorist, has conducted an unrelenting rhetorical campaign against the skyscraper. "The promise it once held," he wrote recently, "has been negated by repetitive banality [and] carefully spaced isolation...
...makes one wonder how he will direct Nicole Kidman on a film project that may materialize next year. Wong is teasingly oracular on the plot and setting: "The only thing I want to say is I always conceive of Nicole Kidman as the woman in a Hitchcock film. I think the woman in Hitchcock is always very dangerous, or in danger. And Nicole is both...
...years Koolhaas was far better known as a theorist than as a builder. His 1978 book, Delirious New York, an approving account of the uncontrolled development of the Manhattan streetscape, was that rare thing, a big seller about architectural theory. Even now he remains the very model of the oracular modern architect, given to panoramic pronouncements on modernity ("If space junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet"). His highest goal is to restore possibilities for human interaction of whatever kind. Congestion and sprawl he sees as advantages...
Marianne Moore said poetry is a world of "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Shakur's poetry, spitting out violent imagery with an oracular tinge, was a summary and prophecy of his own brief life: an imaginary Uzi with real bullets. In his work, poignant portraits of ghetto misery (the brilliantly elegiac Brenda's Got a Baby) collided with cop-baiting insurrectionism ("Can't find peace on the streets/til the niggaz get a piece, f___ police, hear them screamin...
...into mannerism in Europe by the late 1930s, and was revived in America by artists who discarded its utopian fantasies and replaced them with ideas related to epic space, primitive ritual, spontaneous gesture and the sublime. But who today still buys the rhetoric that surrounded Abstract Expressionism--all that oracular guff about existential confrontation, tragedy, timelessness and how we're locking horns with Michelangelo...