It was lunchtime, and I'd been up all night, carousing and talking bollocks, and I looked at this bathroom covered in limescale, this rock star's stupid bathroom, and I thought, This is a real metaphor for what has happened.
"This is still a place where YouTube is a real metaphor for what's possible, just on a more selective scale," said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, based in Palo Alto.
As with any great board game, there's a very real metaphor to what's going on….
Fact is, we're all so numbed to human rights horrors that Sierra's "real" metaphors seem like small change.
To extend the real estate metaphor, imagine Dan Snyder and Mike Shanahan on the House Hunters television program, with Snyder as the gung-ho, ready-to-move head of the household and Shanahan as the unreasonably demanding spouse ("The ocean view and 8,000 square foot closets are nice, but I had my heart set on granite countertops and a breakfast sconce in our Javanese bungalow").
The only real theatrical metaphor is provided by the huge mirror backing Francis O'Connor's otherwise bare set, in which we see the characters always seeing themselves - but the fact that we live in a narcissistic society is hardly a new insight.
Drawing inspiration from the hulking supercomputer towers and vast digital expanse of the world's data centers, "Infinity" gives form to the omnipresent "cloud" we use every day but have no real visual metaphor for.
The sisters are a marvellous real-life metaphor for all that.
The city was emerging from Pierre Charles L'Enfant's grandiose plan in which, harking back to British landscape gardens, wide avenues were terminated with real classical "metaphors of liberty" — the Capitol and the White House.
Although the vast majority of Americans continue to define the national character via real estate metaphors -- frontier, panorama, province -- Rapaille believes that we will ultimately accept his Freudian interpretation of our inner life.
Like Susan Sontag, who staged the play in war-weary Sarajevo, in 1993, the collaborators presumably found some truth in the bleak, science-fiction-like devastation that surrounded them, a real-life metaphor for Vladimir's observation, near the end of the play, that "in an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness".
