Word: talisman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mindfulness, as Buddhists might call it, is particularly critical these days as the Dalai Lama finds himself more and more appealing to people who know nothing of his philosophy--and may even be hostile to it. The Tibetan has delivered lectures on the Gospels, celebrated the Internet as a talisman of human interdependence and, especially, mastered the art of talking to ordinary people in ordinary human terms, about "spirituality without faith." As his longtime friend the composer Philip Glass says, "He talks about compassion, he talks about right living. And it's very powerful and persuasive to people because...
...Simpson's acquittal last year were reduced to a talisman, a single object of both concealment and revelation, it would have to be the bloody glove found at the Simpson estate. Once considered the most damning physical evidence, the glove became a symbol of murky police conspiracy and prosecutorial miscalculation. Last week Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki gave the glove a starring role in the Simpson civil-case sequel, ruling that the defense would be allowed to argue that former L.A.P.D. detective Mark Fuhrman planted it--and by doing so, framed Simpson. Judge Fujisaki called the evidence...
...then Mondrian's presence was a talisman to the small New York avant-garde. It was the gift of Hitler. Like many of the Surrealists--whose work he cordially detested--Mondrian had fled to refuge in New York in 1940 as the Nazi threat to "degenerate artists" such as himself became inescapably plain. The mere arrival of this diffident and somewhat reclusive man symbolized the passing of modernist leadership from Paris to Manhattan. Yet unlike the Surrealists, he had few American followers, and none who became painters of the first rank. Part of the paradox of Mondrian was that although...
...distance from the Australian art world-which, by the early '60s, had begun to see him as a talisman of integrity-was only outwardly bohemian; its ori-gins lay in the sort of calm, fanatical pride that cannot bear the distraction of company. One thinks of him scratching around between studio and sea like Shakespeare's exiled misanthrope Timon on the beach: "Come not to me again, but say to Athens/ Timon hath pitched his everlasting mansion/ Upon the beachEd verge of that salt flood...
...semiotical analysis of post-war America. Yet the play's treatment of kitsch goes no farther than to make the point that '50s consumer products would look pretty weird to Victorian dames. For example, during their voyage through time the intrepid adventurers keep coming across egg-beaters. "Totem!" "Talisman!" "Taboo!" they conjecture, and develop the practice of spinning the beaters at one another. They seem to be voiding the egg-beaters of signifying power and revealing them as empty signs, which makes no sense. Yet the two-hour kitsch fest invites this sort of analysis...