Word: batik
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...electric presence on the museum, gallery and crafts-fair circuit, logging 40,000 miles on her cultural missions. Just as zealous on the home front, she decided to hang handmade ornaments from 60 U.S. craftsmen and -women-cornhusk dolls, beaded Indians, crocheted icicles, free-form tin stars and batik crèche figures-on the 12-ft. Christmas tree in the vice-presidential mansion. "We will use them all. If we can't squeeze them on, we'll dangle them hither and thither," promised Joan delightedly. Her selection to top the tree: a blue-and-white, stuffed-velvet...
Through his "moderate and dependable" narrator, Theroux produces a complex batik of exotic impressions and cool, clear perceptions. If his book is an appropriate souvenir rather than an imposing artifact, it is perhaps because the author no longer shares those beliefs and urgencies that once dramatized the expatriate novel. Theroux would probably agree with a character in John le Carre's forthcoming thriller The Honourable Schoolboy-a literary agent who observes that "nobody's brought off the Eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can't - too much popery...
...Ramayana, which opened six years ago as one of Manhattan's few Indonesian restaurants, boasts a striking decor: a pedicab parked in the lobby, menus bound in batik, hostesses in flowing Indonesian gowns. At night, when native dancers perform, the restaurant's prices are high, but the buffet lunch is a bargain: for $5.50, guests can take their pick of dozens of spicy (skewered beef) or sweet (banana soup) dishes. For some executives from nearby oil-company offices, however, the food must have a bitter taste these days. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the restaurant...
...step at a time, we too moved up toward the hall, along with some of the other foreign diplomats and guests who had come to pay their last respects to Chairman Mao. All the world was there. Ahead of us were African women in colorful batik skirts; behind, a group of Peruvians. There were grim North Koreans, many in military uniforms, Rumanians, Yugoslavs and thin-faced Albanians, as well as wiry Vietnamese and diminutive Cambodians; all had black armbands and were dressed in their formal best-in bald contrast to the Chinese, who wore their ordinary jackets and pants...
Mobutu personally ordained everything from the country's total nationalization program two years ago to such personal touches as dictating that Zaïreans drop their Christian names for African ones, address one another as "citizen" and "citizeness," and wear a form of national dress-batik sarongs for women, tunic suits for men. Absolute wealth has tended to follow absolute power; Mobutu-whose personal interests include property in Spain and Switzerland -has been widely described as one of the wealthiest...