Word: trappings
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...ignored her biting mockery as I tumbled headfirst into the popular culture trap and went anyway. And I have to admit--a part of me missed the swagger, the belligerence, the Milennium Falcon, the too-quick trigger finger and the stupid hyperdrive that never worked. Everything else about this movie was perfect. And maybe that was the problem...
...calls his swanky law office "the house the Mob built." Its walls are decorated with newspaper stories about acquittals he won for alleged organized-crime figures. A toy rat lies dead in a trap near the fireplace, and a pair of steel balls given him by two reputed wiseguys hangs over the door. His name is Oscar Goodman, and he could be the next mayor of Las Vegas. As he tours Sin City on the campaign trail--gloating over its tacky exuberance, making love with it--I ride shotgun...
...American Century" makes proper acknowledgments to minority artists without making excessive claims. There is, for instance, a small section on the art produced by the Harlem Renaissance in the '20s and '30s, but the show doesn't fall into the trap of pretending that the artists concerned have to be the equals, in their field, of great black writers like Langston Hughes. Nor does it indulge in the kind of sentimental feminism that would have you believe that Georgia O'Keeffe, say, was a sacrosanct culture heroine and as good a painter as others in the Stieglitz circle, such...
...power of the diametric opposite of nature--industrial imagery, seen as the essence of 20th century experience and as belonging more vividly to America than to any other place. If God was present in the mountain lake, he could also be uneasily satirized as a plumber's grease trap by the New York Dadaist Morton Schamberg; if sublimity was in the mountains, it was also in the skyscrapers of New York City and in the relentlessly massed geometric forms of the Ford auto plant at River Rouge, Mich., which Charles Sheeler, who painted and photographed them...
...other times, Mora becomes too engrossed in writing in a folk tradition and falls into the trap of sentimentality and kitsch. "Corn and trees glow in the sunset, grace manifest May our work enrich the earth. Hear our request/This night and at our death, en paz may we rest," she writes in "Saint Isidore the Farmer." Such passages lose the transcendent quality that should mark them as religious poetry. They are too focused on this earth. More often than not, though, Mora manages to find the right balance between religion and reality, between the glory of the next life...