Word: totems
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...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...
...paints himself as a phosphorescent dandy with a giant hat, and his father as a massive totem against the overheated landscape of Cadaques. This, one realizes, is the first painting by Dali that actually means something, that opens the Pandora's box of obsession of his later, Surrealist work. What it means is parricide. He sees his father as a dark colossus, a parody of the figures of patriarchy that bulked so large in Catalan folklore. Much of his work thereafter would be devoted to dragging the paternal giant from his pedestal...
Birnes and Norris have divided the serial-killer life into seven phases of activity, a repeating cycle that begins with desire and ends with morose feelings -- aura, trolling, wooing, capture, murder, totem and depression. They kill to satisfy some inner psychological and sexual pressure, and they favor such killing methods as hanging, strangling or stabbing, which put them in intimate contact with their victim. "The only time serial murderers have control is when they kill," says Birnes. "That's why they keep totems." For instance: the body parts Dahmer put in his refrigerator, the victims' jewelry that Rifkin kept...
...loss left the Crimson a dejected prime contender for the bottom position on the Ivy League totem pole...
...eras and two related departments. A better reporter might subject the building to a hard-nosed critique, but this one, dear readers, treats it as a structure worthy of reverence. Call him crazy. Call this the Cult of The Link. Call it whatever; but first, get to know his totem...