Sometimes this is called place-making, and amounts to extravagant marketing exercises that seek to brand (or rebrand) an area, to follow in the footsteps of the advertising industry and sell not just a product, the bricks and mortar, but an entire aspirational lifestyle.
For all the baroque movement of the story, the language is an exercise in extravagant control.
She is, after all, beyond harm (even by a service so extravagant as to be an exercise not of mourning but of vanity).
I AM CUBA Filmed in 1964 but largely forgotten until a screening at the 1992 Telluride Film Festival, "I Am Cuba" remains one of the great U.F.O.'s of the movies, a stylistic exercise so inventively extravagant that it still provokes gasps of amazement.
Elizabeth continued to make brilliant speeches, to exercise her authority, and to receive the extravagant compliments of her admirers, but she was, as Sir Walter Raleigh remarked, "a lady surprised by time," and her long reign was drawing to a close.
Every spring, in an extravagant, costly display, the U.S. and South Korea stage military exercises as a warning to the North (and Japan and China, too).
It's a compelling exercise to try to connect the tormented soul with the willful optimism of his extravagant, populist collaborations with Oscar Hammerstein II.
