Word: silver
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Will's evaluation of President Ford is similarly balanced. He contends that Ford, like any politician, "wouldn't know a principle if it were handed to him on a silver plate. He's been in Congress for twenty years, and no one can believe anything after they've been in Congress for twenty years." But Will argues that, from his point of view, Ford's instincts "are basically right." He ticks off a list of Ford's accomplishments: "He has identified the principal long-term American problem, which is living off the seed corn of the future, that is, government...
Listeners often squirm at Smith's more explicit songs. In the title track of her Horses album, which is an incantation of violence and brutal sexuality, she sings of "white, shining silver studs with their noses in flames" and of a suicidal lover who "picked up a blade, and pressed it against his smooth throat." Redondo Beach, set against a catchy reggae beat, tells of lesbian love. Other Smith songs like the hard rocker Free Money are easier to take. In surrealistic blues like Birdland, her mordant fragments of verse can be evocative...
...earliest is a battered 5th century silver votive lamp, dedicated to St. Sylvester and found, half eaten away by corrosion, in a church garden in the 17th century. From such crude, fragile souvenirs of primitive Christianity, the range expands: 10th century enamels, 11th century ivories, medieval reliquaries of silver and gold containing various fragments of sanctified bodies, and so on, to the ecclesiastic baroque and rococo confections produced from the metals of the New World...
...reliquary has no such value. We do not know whether the wizened and musty tissue that presumably lies inside the silver casing was ever attached to a historical personage named Mary Magdalene. The odds are against it, since the relic has no written history older than the 17th century. Instead, the quasi-magical object has become a fine piece of mannerist silverware, culturally almost as distant from us as an African nail fetish...
Such is the fate of culturally stranded objects. Perhaps the most extreme example of it in "Treasures of Sacred Art" is a 16th century reliquary from the Collegiate Church of Calcata, north of Rome. Two elegantly slim silver-gilt angels hold up a casket surmounted by a crown, studded with rubies and emeralds. It is traditionally believed to contain the only relic left on earth by Jesus Christ. True, Christ ascended bodily into heaven before the eyes of the astonished Apostles after his resurrection. But he had been circumcised in the temple as an infant, and the Holy Foreskin, preserved...