Word: disneyland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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True, he recycles the familiar perception of Disneyland as a benign totalitarian community and echoes criticism of the Reform Judaism of his youth as an apology for being a Jew. But Mamet has a fresher approach to the politics of image and empty rhetoric. He equates Ronald Reagan's feeble explanations of the Iran arms-for-hostages deal with the answers of parents whose fogginess hides an implied threat: "If you want to remain a child, if you want to enjoy the privilege of life without fear, do not judge...
...city and the casinos, a task that is just about impossible. The trouble is that the two centers of power have completely different visions for Atlantic City. At one extreme is Trump, who believes Atlantic City should be turned into a giant nonresidential entertainment park on the scale of Disneyland. At the other extreme is Benjamin Fitzgerald, the city clerk since 1985. "Does Trump think people in Atlantic City are going to be just like lemmings and go to the sea and drown?" asks Fitzgerald. "This is an industry that spends over $70 million a year in complimentary food, liquor...
Atlantic City always dreamed of attracting an upscale clientele, and casinos / now respect this myth with frescoes and wax figures of slim-waisted maidens under dainty parasols, promenading on the Boardwalk. But historians insist that even in its glory days, Atlantic City was simply a Victorian Disneyland. A 1909 edition of a highbrow Baedeker tourist guide carried this assessment: "Atlantic City is an eighth wonder of the world. It is overwhelming in its crudeness -- barbaric, hideous and magnificent. There is something colossal about its vulgarity...
...Case, a wondrous songwriter and singer whose recent album The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar is good enough to carry like a talisman into the uncertainties of the '90s, sees the difficulty in broader terms. "Rock 'n' roll has just become a new form of Disneyland," he says. "The whole thing has got mythologized to the point where it's just a bunch of rubbish." Greil Marcus, who writes formidably on popular and radical culture (the recent Lipstick Traces), talks about the "suicidal nostalgia" surrounding a lot of contemporary music: "People have been sold a bill...
California's Disneyland has just opened Splash Mountain, which may be the most high-tech, high-thrill, fastest, longest, tallest log-flume ride in the world. Two thousand passengers an hour can shriek through the swirling path down the watery mountain, at speeds of up to 40 m.p.h. Serenading them along the way are Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Bear and other characters from Disney's 1946 partly animated film Song of the South. Since Splash Mountain opened July 18, visitors have typically waited an hour and a half for the 10-min. ride...