Word: vivid
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Last Tuesday, I did not want to think about the political aftermath of the World Trade Center bombings. It was too early. That vivid image of those two colossi collapsing into a heap of flames was etched too firmly in my mind. I could not think of anything except the victims who might be underneath the rubble and their families. My girlfriend lives in New York. Many of my friends work in the World Trade Center and lower Manhattan. As I frantically dialed 212 phone numbers, the rest of the world was a distant afterthought...
Jakes, by contrast, is a man of vivid particulars living in an age suspicious of the phrase "common ground." Some Americans might find him too black. Some Christians would consider him too Pentecostal, and even some Pentecostals question aspects of his theology. Jakes has called homosexuality a "brokenness" and says he would not hire a sexually active gay person. It is a common position among conservative religious leaders (Graham, for instance, called homosexuality a sin), but gay Americans would have no reason at all to consider Jakes their preacher...
...open-mike session in the yard of a run-down stone house in Havana's Vedado neighborhood, several hundred fans waited in the blazing sun for an hour as a crew struggled to get the sound equipment working. The walls of the house were scrawled with vivid slogans--VIVA CUBA, FREE MUMIA and NO MORE PRISONS, next to a painting of the Cuban flag. It was easy to spot the trappings of American hip-hop in the animated crowd--baggy pants, and T shirts splashed with the names of American artists (Mos Def, the Notorious B.I.G.) or record labels...
...that part of Africa. "The promoters asked me not to do that again," she said afterward. Which is too bad, because back home Fassie is known (and loved) for her outrageousness. Ask a South African if he likes her music, and he's likely to reply with some vivid, raucous tale. In the townships, Fassie is nicknamed "Madonna," after the provocative American pop star. Fassie is the protagonist of countless tabloid stories involving drug use, bisexuality and tantrums of diva proportions (one local paper even reprinted--verbatim--an interview with Madonna, replacing her name with Fassie's). Last April...
...aftermath--the blown-up embassy, the ruined barracks, the ship with a blackened hole at the waterline. This time the first plane striking the first tower acted as a shill. It alerted the media, brought cameras to the scene so that they might be set up to record the vivid surreal bloom of the second strike ("Am I seeing this?") and then--could they be such engineering geniuses, so deft at demolition?--the catastrophic collapse of the two towers, one after the other, and a sequence of panic in the streets that might have been shot for a remake...