Word: upswept
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Miss Leena, my first psychic, ushers me into a tiny parlor plastered with paintings of angels and cherubs. Her expression is brooding, her dark hair upswept, as she ponders my fate as revealed in a $40 reading of the tarot cards. My prognosis is good: successful writing career, marriage, long life. But, pointing to a card of a bushy-haired man waving sticks, she adds grimly, "There's something in the way of your good fortune." She offers to meditate further with crystals and candles...
...surreal videotapes have become hauntingly familiar. Look at the face: the huge, inviting mascaraed eyes, the fluttering false lashes, the layers of professionally applied makeup, the highlighted, upswept hair. Look at the clothes: the hand-stitched gowns, the Princess Di chapeaus, the high heels. Then do a double take over the teensy stick-figure bodies and the immature voices belting out God Bless America and Tomorrow. Like some human optical illusion, JonBenet Ramsey and her besequinned fellow beauty-pageant contestants are not in fact fully developed adults. They are pint-size little women often done up like trick ponies...
...strip joint in my film and the close-up of a decrepit stripper's knee give off echoes of Sweet Charity. Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is a film that means the world to me, and when you first see Cathy Moriarty here, she's wearing the upswept hairdo from Raging Bull." In the audience's mind -- which blends past and present, actress and character -- Moriarty can walk out of Jake La Motta's life and into Cesar Castillo...
...standard postmodern mistake of replicating an old form at inappropriately huge size. The interior spaces are modest (no more than about 14,000 sq. ft. per floor), and an intricately detailed exterior suggests a bygone age, not any particular building or style. Four metal grids, each bolted at an upswept angle to the 60th floor, provide a classically inspired, yet unequivocally modern top. "We picked up threads of the past," says Pelli, "with a contemporary technology and contemporary sensibility...