Word: savonarolas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rabid, The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome. Heads explode, and monsters issue from the wombs of women. In Cronenberg's masterwork, The Fly, one man wages a heroic, doomed struggle against physical and moral degeneration; his body has a twisted mind of its own. The catalog of punishments seems medieval -- Savonarola meets Bosch -- even as it taps baby boomers' fears of decaying vitality and eviscerated dreams. For Cronenberg the body is a haunted house whose rumblings trigger lust, mystery and excruciating pain in the poor tenant. This property is condemned...
...Dominican zealot Girolamo Savonarola who presided over the Bonfire of the Vanities during Carnival in Florence in 1497. Thousands of the Florentine children who were Savonarola's followers went through the city collecting what they deemed to be lewd books, as well as pictures, lutes, playing cards, mirrors and other vanities, and piled them in the great Piazza della Signoria of Florence. The pyramid of offending objects rose 60 feet high, and went up in flames. One year later Savonarola had a political quarrel with Pope Alexander VI, was excommunicated, tried and hanged. His body was burned at the stake...
...Savonarola could not impose morality in the church-dominated Old World, why do the modern Savonarolas-Reagan, Helms, Hatch and Falwell-think they can do it in a society where church and state are separate...
...finally .. . but it would not be proper to reveal Pryor's punch line to the grim joke life played on him; and there are words best left to R-rated movies. Pryor uses them all, relentlessly and with relish. For him-as for Lenny Bruce, the pioneer of Savonarola satire, and Pryor's only true antecedent-profanity serves to give both a salty rhythm to his sentences and a Joy Buzzer shock to his more refeened listeners. It remains for his fearless comic acuity to tell him precisely how much gutter imagery his audience can take...
...them memories of a time in Florence when the touchstones of art seemed as close as the walls. The magic returns in unlikely spots-when, for example, horses "recede into space like the figures reflected in the background bulbs and mirrors of Flemish paintings," or the moralistic voice of Savonarola echoes between sessions at the $2 window. Barich reports that during his six-week betting binge he never lost more than $128-or made more than $192. In fact, he gained far more. He wrote an enchanted book and found a soul-sustaining insight: "What was any renaissance...