Word: brac
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...with a sexual life is dressed in some variation of off-white -- and looks cool, stylish and slightly soiled. Two ornate sofas are shrouded with crumpled, much used sheets: this is a world of ceaseless, unsatisfying copulation. Although the sides of the stage are heaped with the bric-a-brac of elegance -- candelabra, statuary, flowers -- the characters seem more at home with simple louvered screens, behind which they peep and eavesdrop. The dialogue is fittingly brittle and epigrammatic. "When it comes to marriage," a much traveled woman says, "one man is as good as the next; and even the least...
...change course at just the moment they become mainstream doctrine. The effect (although not the intention, usually) is to make outsiders and stylistic slow learners scramble to catch up. Thus today, as the giant architectural firms have begun routinely gussying up their new high-rise towers in pseudoantique brica-brac -- fake Corinthian columns, pediments and pyramidal tops -- the cutting edge has glided past. As postmodern cliches become ubiquitous, in other words, the movement is becoming passe...
...Rhinemaidens frolic in Victorian bloomers. Fricka ascends to Valhalla by means of a balloon gondola. The Valkyries ride off to war aboard carrousel horses suspended in midair. Wotan puts Brunnhilde to sleep in what appears to be a cluttered attic, full of ungodly bric-a-brac, and she awakens in a starry mausoleum. Siegfried slays the dragon Fafner by chopping at a gigantic crab's claw and then pushing over a flimsy set of painted flats. The forest bird who guides the hero to Brunnhilde is a taxidermist's specimen, carried aloft on a stick by a highly visible soprano...
...should have such a choice. The incumbent, Charlotte Townsend, 61, is a no-nonsense woman who cut her teeth on the board of the village library. Paul Laub, 41, who has amassed a million or so as Carmel's czar of schlock, purveying T shirts and other bric-a-brac, made his name fighting city hall over issues like illegally washing his sidewalk. A college-trained tenor and restaurant worker named Tim Grady, 27, an echo of the Woodstock generation who has no use for cars, wants to turn Carmel's main street into a horse path. Finally there...
These population shifts change all the bric-a-brac of life. A car in Los Angeles carries a custom license plate that says SIE SIE LI, meaning, in Chinese, "thank you." Graffiti sprayed in a nearby park send their obscure signals in Farsi. A suburban supermarket specializes in such Vietnamese delicacies as pork snouts and pickled banana buds. The Spanish-language soap opera Tu o Nadie gets the top ratings among independent stations every night...