Word: simulacrums
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thespian conspiracy in modern society--the idea that your neighbors, for example, are not really neighbors, but actors hired by realestate salesmen to convey the image of an ideal neighborhood. Leyner calls this the "De Niro-ization' of culture...Migratory shifts back and forth from the real to the simulacrum [that] will calibrate the rest of history." "The Mary Poppins Kidnapping" pokes fun at the over-sensitive parents who worry that all forms of media, even the innocuous products of Disney, are dangerous influences on the impressionable minds of their children...
Despite these arguments, cynics, pundits and alternative-music ideologues were predicting Woodstock '94 would be a corporatized simulacrum of the original festival. A '60s myth would be used to sucker the 16- to 30-year-old demographic. Woodstock '94 was seen as the ultimate musical sellout, the sort of thing that made Kurt Cobain leave this world riding on a shotgun blast. MTV, which televised some of the festival and launched a home-shopping show during it, ran an ad for its coverage with the slogan, "All you have to do to change the world is change the channel...
...genuine strength, energy, sense of possibility, self-respect -- in taking up so old and rusty a cudgel? Very little, one might suppose, if what they were actually pursuing were such necessities as energy, possibility and self-respect. Anti-Semitism does, however, provide the blacks with a simulacrum of toughness -- of all the people they might hit, the Jews are least likely to exact equal retribution -- and as evidenced on every street corner and schoolyard in the inner city, where real strength feels out of reach, toughness will have...
...guidelines with the sly, perverse and influential graphic designer Tibor Kalman. Incredibly, they have persuaded the state and city to get behind an authentically populist spectacle, a potential mix of tourist traps and hip outlets, mom-and-pop shops and name-brand superstores. The goal is not a "themed" simulacrum of honky-tonk diversity but the real thing. Such a splendidly oxymoronic turn: a municipal code for discouraging tastefulness, a quarter-billion dollars spent to conjure a trashy Damon Runyon spirit. The Bizarro-world rules call for, among other things, giant loudspeakers blasting onto the street, commercial signs noticeably...
...emanate from the vicinity of the mannequin behind the wheel. "All right, you folks, I want those two seats," the facsimile driver will say. "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those two seats." In the middle of the bus, a plaster of Paris simulacrum of Rosa Parks will just sit there, a mute symbol of the incident that sparked the epic Montgomery bus boycott. "Look, woman, I told you I wanted the seat!" the mock voice of the bus driver will continue. "Are you going to stand up?" The plaster statue of Parks will...