We see them as any human would see them who is impressed by royalty and its fripperies – slightly blurrily, as if our eyes are dazzled by the sumptuousness of it all, as if our spectacles are a little fogged by overmuch emotion.
Our spectacle-centric lives capture and distort authenticity at once by putting it on view.
We too often say that something that happens to us is "like a film," making ourselves the audience to our own spectacle and audience to our own emotions, which eventually wear out on us -- like second-string contract players and undistinguished character actors, when we need them to be as alive as Cagney.
"Zodiac" may well be the last word on serial-killer films, less because it's a work of genius than because it directly engages with our obsession — our moviegoing, spectacle-seeking, bloodletting obsession — with serial killers.
"So now we begin our international spectacle, and we'll see where it takes us," said Njabulo S. Ndebele, one of the nation's best-known writers and educators.
Just when you thought our electoral spectacle could not get more surreal, labyrinthine, incestuous and conspiratorial, we now have Jeb's legislature joining W.'s lawsuit before Daddy's old Supreme Court.
What was otherwise overlooked in her excellent article was how frustrating it must be for the central subjects of our media spectacles to be legally silenced.
Laurence Ross lives in New Orleans, where he is at work on a book-length project concerning the lives and deaths of our cultural spectacles.
He added: "Birds of prey are a key part of our ecosystems and a magnificent spectacle in our countryside.
Are the rest of us wise enough to temper our need for spectacle?
I don't mean contemporary sculpture, whose fashionable stars (see Koons, Murakami et alia) pander to our appetite for spectacle and whatever's new.
