Word: potente
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Martin Guerre is the big news and the big disappointment in a London season filled with intimate epics (all of War and Peace in 4 1/2 affecting hours!), incandescent stars (a ragged but potent revival of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman with Paul Scofield and Vanessa Redgrave), one thrilling biodrama (Pam Gems' Stanley, on English painter Stanley Spencer) and lots of musicals about dead pop singers (Buddy, Elvis and, for Pete's sake, Jolson...
Sometimes, however, it's hard to separate the cause from the effect. "Futurism isn't prediction anymore," says Rushkoff. "It's state-of-the-art propaganda. It's future creation." As he sees the process, two of the futurists' most potent tools are terror and exclusivity. "They put their clients in a state of fear and then explain that they hold the secret knowledge that can save them," says Rushkoff, whose own shrewd brand of high-tech utopianism earns the 34-year-old New Yorker six-figure book advances and up to $7,500 an hour strategizing for the likes...
This conclusion becomes even more apparent through a comparison of the weakest installation, "Presence," which relies entirely on the spoken word, versus the most potent installation, "Interval," at which visual images are presented so quickly as to defy cognition. "Presence," in which the audience sits on a bench in a dim room while an audiotape of a woman's fretting over her childhood is played at varying levels of volume and clarity, is a tribute to the most banal of self-help confessionals, rather than focusing the audience's attention on a little examined sense, the nature of sound. "Interval...
...religious faith are even greater. "Faith in the medical treatment," he writes, "[is] wonderfully therapeutic, successful in treating 60% to 90% of the most common medical problems. But if you so believe, faith in an invincible and infallible force carries even more healing power...It is a supremely potent belief...
Though a lay reader may get lost amid the dense references--who knows the difference between Jehoiakim and Jehoiachin or the meaning of tohu-bohu?--the basic argument is clear. Each conquering faith must contend with the potent presence of its predecessors, and none have fully succeeded. Construction is ideology: building has always been employed, also unsuccessfully, to cement permanent ownership...