Word: perfectible
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wheels of fire; the stars, he thought, were the lights of these fires shining through tubelike breathing holes in the sky. Another citizen of Miletus, Anaximenes, believed the stars were fixed like nails to the vault of the heavens. Aristotle maintained that celestial objects were permanent, immutable and perfect. His notion so influenced Greek thought that when the astronomer Hipparchus spotted what seemed to be a new star in 134 B.C., he attributed his discovery to an omission by his predecessors. He also compiled the first accurate star map so that future sky watchers would be spared his dilemma...
...hungry rebels. Today she appears everywhere in Mexico, from cantinas to taxicab dashboards to countless adobes. But the original remains on Juan Diego's cloak in the basilica. The cloak is made of a crude cactus fiber that usually lasts about 20 years; this one is still in perfect condition...
...What counted more was photography's role in the class struggle. No photographer who, like Callahan, spent his time clicking away at reeds in snow or telephone wires against a blank white sky could be credited with much social commitment. Callahan's desire to rescue one formally perfect image from a thousand failed slices of life seem priestly now, but it must have looked solipsistic then. "His aim," writes MOMA's director of the department of photography, John Szarkowski, "has been not to bend photography to his purposes, but rather to immerse himself in its will...
...Leningrad. Readers did not learn how many people died (Western estimates range from 52 to 72), nor were they told that it was the fifth major Aeroflot crash this year. Still, the announcement was rare confirmation that the world's largest, least-known airline is far from perfect...
...dead man, but, of course, there really was one. He had been dispatched by a whole carload of villains led by a well-tailored richie called Devereau (Patrick McGoohan), who is embroiled in an unlikely scheme to protect his art forgeries. Suspense movies are not supposed to make perfect sense, but it is always nice when they come close. Hiller and Higgins toy with sorting out the plot only for the sake of appearances and waste a good deal of energy reaching for laughs. The result is compounded confusion, relieved only by one novel touch. This must be the first...