Word: themes
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...trying. More fun than the viewer, sometimes. While embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he gets to fire a rocket launcher. His reaction, and you could have guessed this: "That was awesome!" He also has advice for the locals. To attract tourists, Spurlock suggests, they should build a theme park. "You could say, 'Come to Tora Bora. It's da bomb!'" Sometimes he's most engaging when he's most jackassian...
...Singapore-born and San Francisco-based writer Wena Poon is nevertheless banking on the continuing appeal of émigré literature with a debut collection of short stories that takes as its theme the Singaporean diaspora. Given that the latter has been so infrequently explored, Lions in Winter has a greater chance of being fresh than a comparable Chinese or Indian work - but instead, it lapses, at least in part, into the clichés that bedevil stories of Asian deracination...
...COMPUTERS Again, two: an official campaign desktop and a Sony Vaio notebook (complete with a James Bond theme) that he takes on the road. At work, he uses one mostly for e-mail and one for the Internet...
...paintings, The Second of May and The Third of May. The latter, focusing on a white-shirted guerrilla with his arms stretched out in terror before a firing squad of French soldiers, is a classic of anti-war iconography, often interpreted as a 19th century take on the biblical theme of the slaughter of the innocents. The painting has been displayed before alongside The Second of May, a depiction of the previous day's battle, in which Spanish militias viciously attacked Napoleon's Mameluke soldiers. But an earlier, insensitive attempt to repair damages to the canvases had dulled the poignant...
Nevertheless, few subjects escape the artist's bleak skepticism. Still lifes tend to comment on the transience of things, but Goya's piles of lifeless fish and game lend unexpected violence to this theme: the white fur of a rabbit's belly exposes the wound where it was shot; the blank eyes of a lamb's skull look disconsolately at its butchered torso. Equally unsettling, a large painting of The Taking of Christ is notable less for the sorrowful figure at its center than for the jeering, crazed mob that surrounds him. The same menacing irrationality appears in disturbing later...