The sight and smell of his ever-present hash and NorCal bud smoking rituals were the backdrop for all daily household happenings.
His 1967 novel The Exquisite Corpse took its title from a surrealist parlor game in which stories are formed out of random sentences; in Chester's novel, characters change identity from chapter to chapter, alternating masks and genders while engaging in erotic, violent rituals against the backdrop of an otherwise prosaic world.
Those sculptures formed a spiritual backdrop for ritual bathing, prayers, and offerings that played an important role in many Hindu stepwells, and, despite a lack of accessible groundwater, a number continue today as active temples e.g., the 11th-century Mata Bhavani Vav in Ahmadabad (Ahmedabad; east-central Gujarat).
But the mythos is there in the background: it's part of the furniture, rather than part of the action – in the same way that windows of stained-glass martyrs, or narrative frescoes of the Passion, serve as a backdrop to ritual observances in a cathedral.
The stucco objects, 15 feet by 9 feet, appeared to be identical anthropomorphic images of the Maya maize god, probably used as the backdrop for elaborate rituals in about 150 B.C. Dr. Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Vanderbilt archaeologist, also reported finding a carved stone monument from 300 B.C. depicting the accession of a king whose name has not yet been determined.
Sculpture was a tool both to show off the technological prowess of an individual company and to provide a backdrop for the urban rituals of the middle class.
Yet this time there is no mourning ritual, and a very starry sky on a backdrop has the hip flavor of the accompanying jazz recordings.
Most of Majak's portraits are captured against a standard grey backdrop, allowing the women's colorful ensembles and ritual implements to stand out.
Commenting before the release of today's results, the General Secretary of teachers' union the NASUWT, Chris Keates, said: "The publication of this year's A-levels results will once again be against a backdrop of uncertainty, not only from the impact of recent qualification reforms, but also amidst the now seemingly annual ritual of claims about inaccurate marking and questionable standards.
