Word: brasses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...last week, a startling change had come over the city's concierges. They ostentatiously polished brass and industriously sewed rips in the hall carpeting. A tenant's "Bon jour" met with a joyous response instead of surly silence. The concierges suddenly delighted in performing small favors, and mail was distributed in a matter of minutes, not hours. This gracious rebirth of courtesy is an annual event caused by étrennes, the New Year's tips from tenants which ordinarily make up the better part of a concierge's income...
...widow had a huge boulder set near his grave. On it, a brass plaque is inscribed with the signature that finished his works. His top price while alive, $10,000, soared ten times higher. Imitators flooded the art market with works that drooled more like a hungry walrus than like Pollock's. Few ever managed like Pollock to puncture what his favorite author Herman Melville called the "pasteboard mask" of visible reality, to pierce beyond the surface into the reasoning soul of men's minds...
Music education that takes place in the dark classrooms of the movie theater begins with the lesson that love is a violin. Soon the moviegoer learns that modern jazz means trouble in the streets and that war is brass with cymbals. Worry and fear are both cellos, bravery is a trumpet call, and God is the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. Film fans once trusted such associations implicitly, like cobras listening for their charmer's clarinet, but lately they have been startled by the sound of surprise. The new and higher esthetic of the film has made a greater range...
Meanwhile, office workers have to live with the shock problem. In the higher echelons, where the carpeting is lushest, the shocks are worst. To offset this human storage-battery syndrome, some top brass try grounding themselves with door keys, like Franklin's kite. Juniors are careful to pause on metal thresholds before entering the boss's office, in order to discharge accumulated voltage through their shoe soles. "Maybe," says the office manager of a large Manhattan corporation, "we could all trail chains behind us like gasoline trucks...
...dictator's whim. Military personnel were extended easy credit for off-post housing. On trips to the backlands, Betancourt called first on local garrisons. He visited army engineers on remote road-building projects, dropped in for Christmas caroling with the troops, and always had time for a little brass polishing at regimental anniversary celebrations...