Word: totemism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...anticipation of his passing. At this point any recounting of his accomplishments--his unassailable greatness as a singer, his somewhat more assailable greatness as an actor, his impeccable taste as a curator of the great American songbook, his ancillary talents as both philanthropist and thug, his status as a totem of midcentury masculinity--inevitably takes on a dutiful, ritualistic air. So what better way to breathe a little life into the process than with an insult...
...Dead, but pure funk. The Lounge also has its own band, whose members happen to be away for the semester. Several of the rooms house guitars and other instruments, and a variety of art decorates the walls of the building: modern paintings, a bright totem pole, even a questionable headless cupid or two. But residents don't consider themselves a particularly artistic crowd, though that obviously changes from year to year...
...film, for all its simplifications and Hollywoodizations, had a powerful and positive effect on many contemporary freedom struggles. South African antiapartheid campaigners and democratic voices all over South America have enthused to me about the film's galvanizing effects. This posthumous, exalted "international Gandhi" has apparently become a totem of real inspirational force...
Poison experts hope this incident will increase public awareness of mercury's dangers. Some immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean make a religious or good-luck totem by mixing mercury with mop water or burning it with a candle. Doctors believe that mercury vapors from these rituals may be slowly poisoning entire families, in a tragedy more far-reaching, if less dramatic, than the one in Texarkana...
...fact, Hollywood has been Bacharach's biggest promoter. The songwriter serves as a veritable totem of retro-cool in Mike Meyer's Austin Powers, in which Bacharach does a cameo singing behind a candelabraed piano that sits atop a Las Vegas tourist bus. His music is featured even more prominently--even if he isn't--in the Julia Roberts romantic comedy My Best Friend's Wedding, providing for a younger generation the same kind of romantic charge, simultaneously nostalgic and bracingly fresh, that George Gershwin gave when he was rediscovered by the disco generation two decades ago in Woody Allen...