Word: totem
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...Bill Clinton seeks to understand his quick transit from hero to goat (and hopefully back to hero) -- the roller-coaster common to the modern presidency -- this assessment from a 1983 New York Times editorial has become a totem among senior Administration officials. "Reagan was a goner, right?" says a Clinton adviser. "But then the business cycle took an upturn, and he won big a year later. Reagan's ups and downs remind us to take the long view. Bill Clinton won't be dead until he's laid out with his sax." It's simple, the President himself explained privately...
...that started at the lowest point on the totem pole and worked my way up from there," he said...
Kevin became Baby Insane, and a Crip. As such, his totem color was blue, and his mortal enemies, who wore red, were Bloods, and in particular a nearby Bloods subset called the Skyline Pirus. (Black Crips and Bloods gangs, now nationwide, got their start in Los Angeles in the early '70s.) The bonding ritual was a subadolescent mumbo jumbo of slogans and hand signs, like those used by adult fraternal groups. Car theft, drug selling and smash-and-grab robbery (smash a storefront with a car, wait for the glass to settle, and grab the goods) were agreeable moneymakers...
...mark is seated across the living room, or has just picked up a phone, he has declared himself a co-conspirator in the scam. Ace huckster Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) knows this better than anyone else. Lately, Ricky has been the "closer," the high man on the company's totem pole. And Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon) is the Loman. Vending his unplowed dreams, Shelley woos like a Don Juan of property values. But when the courtship is over or aborted, he looks old, depleted, desperate. He sweats out loud...
Frida, currently in performance at the American Repertory Theatre, brings new meaning to the terms multimedia production. Frida is part film, part puppet show, part opera, part play; in totem it is consummately absorbing, wholly engaging...