Imagery

From the distant vantage point of most of us, the deal-makers' derby played out last week - Disney with ABC/Cap Cities and Westinghouse with CBS - seems almost Olympian: the Masters of the Universe playing dice with the world, or at least that portion of it that shines out from our television screens. Others liken it to the industrial agglomerations of the Gilded Age, when robber barons vied to corner the oil, steel and railroad industries. But in many ways, the giant media and entertainment machines being created by the likes of Disney's Michael Eisner, Fox's Rupert Murdoch, CNN founder Ted Turner, and Viacom chief Sumner Redstone are far more fragile creations.

Botanical imagery has become a prime source of subject matter for a number of artists. For immediate confirmation, check out the exhibition called "Plant Life" at both locations of the Schmidt/Dean Gallery (through tomorrow) or the current Challenge show at the Fleisher Art Memorial. Two Fleisher artists, Rain Harris and Charlotte R. Yudis, draw extensively on plant forms, which coincidentally makes their contributions perfectly complementary. Harris is represented by two bodies of ceramic work, small objects in porcelain and larger ones in stoneware.

Brian Lipstein, 28, of Manayunk, is CEO of Henry A. Davidsen Master Tailors & Image Consultants, which he founded in 2006. From a shop on 17th Street near Spruce, the Penn graduate creates a custom-tailored look that fits the image a client wants to project. Clients have included Flyers coach Peter Laviolette, former Eagle Ron Jaworski and radio/TV personality Danny Bonaduce. Q: How did you come up with the idea for the company? A: I started selling high-end custom suits for $2,500.

Figurative sculptor Arlene Love and expressionist painter Lee Lippman have been married for nearly four decades, but until their current exhibition at the Levy Gallery of the Moore College of Art and Design, they had never shown their work together. Over the years they have traveled frequently to Mexico together, and after a trip in 1987, both artists responded to their cumulative immersion in Mexican culture by producing a body of work that attempted to assimilate the experience.

The sound of the ram's horn marked the start of the Jewish New Year yesterday, and across the region Jews searched the hopeful imagery of Rosh Hashanah to make sense of last week's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Paul Bender, the spiritual leader of Congregation Ner Tamid in Cherry Hill, told his listeners at a morning service that the sound of the ram's horn, or shofar, not only marks the onset of the year 5762, but this year is "the sounds of wailing" of the many thousands who lost loved ones in the Sept.

In Germany these days, one sees swastikas only in history books, museums, and the movies. The public display of the Nazi symbol is banned in any form, for the good reason that unspeakable crimes were committed under it there. I know laws are different in this regard in the United States, for the good reason that the Constitution protects freedom of speech. Still, as a German in America for the past summer of conservative discontent, I couldn't help but find it bizarre to see swastikas on protesters' posters next to the face of the U.S. president - a man who, because of the color of his skin, would have been a certain victim of the Nazis' murderous ideology.

It occurred to a few resourceful young men at the start of World War II that they might escape combat by joining the military in some safe capacity, such as making training films in Southern California. But when these sharp fellows showed up in Hollywood and volunteered for the movies, they encountered a hard-nosed young cavalry lieutenant in the personnel office who saw through their motives and turned them away. His name: Ronald Reagan. "A great many people to this day harbor a feeling that the personnel of the motion picture unit were somehow draft dodgers avoiding danger," Reagan wrote in his autobiography, "Where's the Rest of Me?"

YOU WANT TO focus on the little signs of progress - on the lights flickering back to life, the bulldozers pushing piles of sand, the subways and trains carrying commuters once again. But the pure horror that Hurricane Sandy visited upon the Northeast earlier this week still finds ways to take your breath away. The Daily News on Thursday hovered in a helicopter above Seaside Heights, where jagged pieces of the Casino Pier pointed toward the surf and the twisted remains of a roller coaster that plummeted into the water rested in the wake.

Michael Lonier's exhibition in the hallways outside the Mednick Gallery at the University of the Arts refutes legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's concept of the "decisive moment" in a novel and provocative way. Lonier's poster-scale digital montages express a counter-concept: that photographic images are intrinsically random and accidental, and that none is any more "decisive" or special than any other. His composites juxtapose images of various kinds, from urban close-ups to scenes of nature.

The eternal themes of human existence can be the most difficult to express effectively as art without resorting to conventional religious mythology. Martha Mayer Erlebacher isn't daunted by the challenge, however. Her paintings address such concepts as the origin of mankind, death, the ubiquity of myth, and the power of ritual and emotion through imagery that's as primal as one could imagine. In her paintings at More Gallery, naked human beings are disposed in correspondingly naked landscapes.