It's part of the retro-futuristic dimension of it—stepping back from the high definition fascination culture for a moment.
The high-end fascination with paste and costume jewellery, over and above more exclusive but less dramatic or versatile precious stones such as diamonds, continues apace.
EVER since explorers such as Franklin, Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton drew attention to the Earth's higher latitudes, fascination with these remote areas has grown.
This might be the standard high-brow fascination with all things base, but at least Thorpe is putting it to decent use.
"There is a distinct lack of public knowledge about female gang culture, which results in a high level of fascination," said Mr Taussig.
One feature of the recent coverage of the war in Syria has been the apparently high interest, even fascination, with identifying what weapons the pro-Assad forces have been bringing to bear on Syria's population.
"We believe a key factor of the success of white tea in general is that it meets high-end consumers' fascination for luxury goods and new experiences," Franck Dessain, a director of the Paris-based Mariage Frères, said in an e-mail.
As these paintings show, Watteau had an eye for surfaces, and depicted with love and fascination the high artifice on which performance runs (it also made him just the man to depict the outings, picnics, and society romances of the day) — but he was also a master of psychology, whose images plumb the depths of feelings that those spectacles, whether public or intimate, represent.
But it may be that Toibin's very nature, his own fascination with high tragedy and his admirably fierce moral objection to the kind of secretiveness and closetedness that once ravaged him, as it did so many of us, makes him unable to get to the deep opaque heart of Henry James -- the elusive and frustrating thing that got him going about James in the first place.
For all our fascination with high tech gadgetry, Americans are slow to adapt new technology particularly when it comes to music.
