All this took place under the strangest backdrop.
And for an adoptee, which I am, reminders of family life are not so much about being chosen as feeling kept, enveloped, even ensnared in the beautiful torture and chaos of ties that are supposed to bind – to feel known and related to these people whom you may not like all the time, but who you feel comprise the strange, complicated backdrop of your existence.
The backdrop was strange because UConn was not the undefeated team in the arena.
Against this fraying backdrop, the strange idea of Pentagon brass spending two weeks hop-scotching continents to cajole countries — many economically hard-pressed — into sending a platoon or two looks less outlandish.
When people publish stories about the U.A.E., the country is almost always represented entirely by Dubai, which itself is almost always reduced to a glitzy, two-dimensional backdrop: a suitably strange, foreign Elsewhere, chock-full of easy signifiers of the "very old" (dark-skinned men in robes, desert sand) and the "futuristic" (Lamborghinis, postmodern architecture).
Placing grotesque masks on his children and setting them free, Meatyard captured an un-choreographed mix of childhood innocence amid strange and horror-filled backdrops.
WHEN the European Union's heads of government gather in Cologne on June 3rd and 4th for their summit to mark the end of the German presidency, they will do so against the backdrop of a strange new balance of economic power.
Against that backdrop it was a strange mood inside the stadium, with little sense that the occasion should be remembered with any real fondness.
The landscapes of Water Planet, a new first-person exploration game/music video hybrid by Miami electronic musician Virgo, are both strange and familiar (they could be backdrops for a fairy tale or a Tekken stage).
