Word: rusticity
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What is this -- Woody Allen meets L.L. Bean? The American Jew is supposed to be an urban creature, not a New England rustic. Most synagogues are in cities and their environs. So are Neil Simon and the diamond district. "Our ghosts aren't there," explains Publisher Eno about the country. Rabbi Daniel Siegel of Hanover, N.H., recalls, "If someone wanted to have a garden, people would say, 'So go to Israel...
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...