Word: detritus
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...ideal of autonomous fine art. "Art is too precious to be misused as a tool," he declared. "I prefer to distance myself from contemporary events . . . But I am more deeply rooted in my time than the politicians." After half a century, Schwitters' constructions, which include every kind of urban detritus--the crumpled sides of a child's tin train, theater tickets, cigarette packs, fragments of type and stenciled numbers, snatches from headlines and posters, feathers, wisps of cotton wool and gauze for atmospheric effect, wheels, burlap, glass, photos, a shooter's target with a neat group punched in the bull...
Gold light slants through tall trees and casts long shadows across the tufted stalks of elephant grass as we arrive at the crash site in the late afternoon. Suddenly, the dense undergrowth gives way to an unnatural clearing of dirty gray sand littered with the half-recognizable detritus of the shattered gunship: broken wheel struts, a bent propeller blade, rusted armor plating, scraps of the fuselage. Resembling patches of smudged snow, remnants of the plane's once white fiber-glass insulating material are scattered everywhere. Earlier, crews of olive-clad Laotian soldiers and Americans in T shirts and grimy Levi...
GREMLINS. What kind of monster movie is this? One that dares to turn on its own young. Joe Dante's impish summertime satire is also a fable that cautions its audience against consuming the detritus of pop culture like so much junk food...
...images the way Wagner used leitmotivs: to unify and clarify complex relationships among ideas and to weave of his various strands a single tapestry. The tree of the first "knee play" is transformed into the astronauts' ladder and finally into the oaken Lincoln of the last act. The detritus of war - the toppling bodies of mortally stricken soldiers, the bombed-out city of Cologne - is swept away by the final "knee play" as a new tree grows from the pages of a book. Wilson's dream world is informed by the perspective of the hypnagogic state: the sleep...
...that an English fossil hunter first identified some newly discovered teeth as the detritus of extinct reptiles. (Dinosaur means "terrible lizard" in Greek.) Ever since that time, experts have been squabbling almost as furiously as did the reptiles themselves. In the 19th century, Yale's Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia, the leading collectors in the U.S., feuded so bitterly over fossil sites in the badlands of Wyoming that their teams came close to combat. Today the skirmishing is more genteel, although no less forceful. Some experts, for example, have contended vigorously that dinosaurs must have...