Word: rusticating
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Tolstoy tried to resolve the first through a homegrown faith that amounted to a churchless Christianity. He shunned organized religion and city life for rustic self-sufficiency among the muzhiks (peasants) at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana (Bright Glade). He preached against the evils of meat, alcohol, tobacco and fornication. He believed a Christian should make his own shoes and empty his own chamber...
These characters were not new with Lucas, of course; they spanned epic literature from Ulysses and King Arthur to the Lord of the Rings and Gormenghast trilogies. But Star Wars gave a high-tech polish to the rustic hardware, a kick to the old eldritch machinery. Alas, a decade later, everything new in Lucas' films seems old again. There is a shroud of inevitability, of why-bother, about Willow's chase through the forest (done better in Return of the Jedi), the impromptu ride down a mountain on a warrior's shield (done better in The Living Daylights...
...Holy Family and the saints set up in English churches, jeweled and gilt and encrusted with innumerable votive offerings. The church's answer was that you did not worship the image itself; you worshiped the Virgin through her image -- a nice point apt to be lost on rustic fundamentalists...
Peter Beltemacchi, chairman of the department of city and regional planning at the high-modernist Illinois Institute of Technology, objects to the tendency toward the picturesque and fake rustic in today's preservation % passion. The Rouse Co.'s cleverly conceived "festival marketplace" developments in Baltimore, Boston and elsewhere can seem like sanitized movie- lot versions of real city neighborhoods. Often these days only a building's facade is kept intact and a new structure pasted on, a treacly, offensive kind of faux preservation that violates the spirit of the old as well...
...recorders. The regime's efforts to eradicate all Western influences, and especially such evils as music, dance and free speech, have spawned a thirst for whatever the Islamic republic denounces as sinful. Example: the continuing popularity of a satirical videotaped movie called Samad Becomes the Imam, featuring a goofy, rustic character who emerges as the supreme ruler of the Islamic state...