Word: metaphors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rented a rowboat in New York City's Central Park in order to dramatize, according to Mrs. Abzug, the fact "that while President Carter was showboating on the Mississippi, Americans were left up the creek in the fight against rising prices." To itemize that metaphor, the two sailors paid only $3 for their trip, while the presidential excursion cost several thousand. The pair also launched a new political organization called Women U.S.A. and urged their sisters across the land to ship their household bills, once paid, to Congress as a protest. Somehow, however, the ladies of the lake look...
Fellini's crucial error is his movie's governing conceit. Rehearsal is built on a single, restrictive metaphor: the notion that a symphony orchestra can stand as a paradigm of society as a whole. Set entirely in a lovely 13th century oratory, the film ostensibly describes the rehearsal of an unnamed piece by the late film composer Nino Rota. But very quickly Fellini bends his dramatic situation into a cautionary tale about the dangers of anarchy. The musicians begin by goofing off and refusing to play together; then they break into open, violent revolt against their German conductor...
Curiously, British Playwright Tom Stoppard has used the same metaphor to make essentially the same point in his Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), a 70-minute theater piece for actors and orchestra. Stoppard enlivened his schematic political lesson with wit, and so, at times, does Fellini. In the film's first half, a visiting TV documentary team interviews the musicians and gets a lively response. A flutist turns a cartwheel. A drummer attacks the piano as a "chatterbox." An insomniac trumpeter confides that with his instrument, "a clinker is death." Once anarchy takes hold, however, the idiosyncratic individuals...
...have an energy crisis, an urban crisis, growing racial polarization, a moral crisis. You get all these together and you have a civilizational crisis." At another point, speaking to Carter directly about the vulnerability of the U.S. caused by oil imports, Jackson came up with a back-alley metaphor: "Mr. President, we've got our vital organs over the fence and our neighbors have the knife...
...Marley gives substance to the detractors of B.F. Skinner, who say that there would be no art, no beauty in his perfectly conditioned world. Marley does indeed fit the trite metaphor describing how the beautiful marigold grows out of a heap of cow dung. Marley is one of the finest songwriters-singers-musicians alive today, even if he believes that deceased Ethiopian head-of-state Haile Selassie...