Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...glance--and not just at first glance--like a bit of a crackpot, something between a panoramic intellect and one of those "outsider" artists who manically fill in every free space of their drawings. There were too many ideas in his teeming brain, most of them system-wide and cosmic in scale. He was unconfined by the real-world considerations that keep you and me from envisioning massive spherical communities that would float from place to place...
...bring it indoors. In one gallery, a view of woodlands is abstracted--compressed and subdivided--by way of a window wall that looks out across a covered terrace. Outside, a squared archway in a freestanding diagonal wall creates a proscenium that turns earth and sky into a kind of cosmic theater...
...Mayor himself was the one who spotted that first exotic world, and in the years since, he and other investigators have counted about 270 more. But land in the cosmic exurbs is decidedly inhospitable. Almost all of the newly discovered planets were huge, hot and gassy, Jupiter-like bodies lying scaldingly close to their suns. There might have been smaller, pleasanter Earth-like planets out there, but the equipment just didn't exist to spot the tinier telltale wobbles they would cause. Now it does - and it's delivered the goods...
...with 8-1/2 and other challenging films of its time, Synecdoche seems to pose cosmic questions about itself. Are we being shown Caden's imagination or projection of the rest of his life? Is the film fantasy or dread, or is it real? The answer, of course, is that it's a movie, which needs only to create an alternate world, populate it with memorable characters, and be true to its internal logic, however skewed. Kaufman has constructed a most devious puzzle, a labyrinth of an endangered mind. Yet it's one that - thanks in large part...
...title suggests, though, the novel's intended allusion is to India's legendary past. In this case, it's the cosmic myth of Shiva, the Hindu god of annihilation. But the deity's link to Meera (and to India as she self-destructs and regenerates) is labored. If anything, Meera more closely resembles, even fantasizes about being, the goddess Parvati, Shiva's spurned consort and the mother of Ganesh, the elephant...