Word: ax
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After watching their men sleep for the better part of a week, the BLM administrators gave the order to fight a fire 150 miles out in the wilderness. Each firefighter picked up a pack, a plastic tent, a sleeping bag, and a huge, double-edged Pulaski ax or shovel and climbed into a rickety DC-3. The air was so filled with smoke that for much of the flight, the men could barely see the wing tips. At the bush landing strip, they saw sooty veterans who had been swinging their axes for 15 hours a day, lying exhausted...
...Ax. Born in Berlin 51 years ago, Tichauer indulged a youthful interest in anatomical engineering by watching brewery horses pull their heavy load up the city's slopes. The lithe movements of the big cats, pacing their cages at Berlin's Tiergarten, riveted his attention for hours on end. Studying the exhibit on paleolithic man at the Museum fur Völkerkunde, he pondered the relationship between that brawny prehistoric arm and the stone ax it brandished at onlookers. After earning degrees in science and mechanical engineering, Tichauer decided to investigate for himself...
...gnomes, and pixies. Some are so tiny that they can hardly be distinguished beneath leaves or behind other fairies' shoulders. And most have peculiarly distorted heads, eyes, breasts or calves. All are watching the fairy feller, who is about to cleave a hazelnut in two with his mighty ax...
Some critics have suggested that a spell lies over the entire assemblage, to be broken only after the blade descends. Yet only an ax that severed the canvas itself could destroy the weird, calligraphic network of garlanded vines and leaves, giant blades of timothy and field grass that binds the picture together. It is as though the artist were striving to piece together a shattered world, unite natural and supernatural, impose method on madness. He hardly succeeds, but the effort carries its own fascination...
...buying weeks beforehand on goods and services that they expect to be hit by new taxes. They are urged on by shop-window posters that read "Beat the Budget." Because of Britain's economic difficulties, the guessing in recent years has been over where-not whether-the tax ax would fall...