Word: metaphors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...film. He succeeds in creating a busy visual and auditory atmosphere, but he fails to take advantage of his opportunity for free play on several levels. As just two examples, he throws in a few bits of scatological humor, and completely avoids using the Popeye story as a serious metaphor. A bawdy or allegorical interpretation of Popeye might have potential, if developed. But Altman doesn't take any chances. Given the freewheeling precedents of Popeye cartoons, Altman might have taken more liberties...
...that followed Lennon's death had the same breadth and intensity as the reaction to the killing of a world figure: some bold and popular politician, like John or Robert Kennedy, or a spiritual leader, like Martin Luther King Jr. But Lennon was a creature of poetic political metaphor, and his spiritual consciousness was directed inward, as a way of nurturing and widening his creative force. That was what made the impact, and the difference-the shock of his imagination, the penetrating and pervasive traces of his genius-and it was the loss of all that, in so abrupt...
...stage is the performer's space: it belongs to the actor - or the character - who is always "on." He is the metaphor matador, the tale twister, the verbal bully who mesmerizes those onstage and in the audience with his endless conjury of felicitous syllables. He is the theater's grand gabby old man, the shaman, the incantator, who goes back to Aeschylus and forward to O'Neill and Osborne, Stoppard and Shepard. Put a spotlight on him, and the eloquence swells, the spell continues. He simply will not shut...
...race. Most of the Vanderbilt prophets leave themselves open to the criticism that when they did not behave as if slavery had never existed, they acted as if the slaves had loved it. But in the end, the Agrarians were not political economists; they were poets searching for a metaphor. When they called for a "world made safe for the farmers," surely it was because they believed that such a world would also be safe for poets...
...maestro of absences. Each of his objects ... is the emblem of a presence too elusive or too vast to be enclosed in a box." The extreme examples of this were, perhaps, Cornell's cosmogonies-the "Soap Bubble Sets," made in the '40s and early '50s. The metaphor on which they rely is simple, even banal: a likeness between soap bubbles-quavering, iridescent, ephemeral-and the immutable orbits of the solar system, all things linked together by their ideal roundness. You cannot keep a soap bubble in a box, or fit the planets into one; but starting with...