Word: bric-a-brac
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...Opera Tenor James Melton accepted, wound up selling his whole shebang of oldtime Americana to the host. Melton's collection, one of the finest privately owned "autoramas" in existence, includes both antique and classic cars, an 1829 steam locomotive, an 1893 steam-driven stage coach, enough other bric-a-brac to extend its inventory to 30 pages. Estimated price on the lot: about $250,000. Rockefeller will house the collection in a special building to be erected at Winrock Farm, charge admission fees, which will go to his charitable Rockwin Foundation...
...press release on the event last week, it tactfully announced: "We invite the press to name this new art form for us." The press was at a loss too, for much of the "new art form" is a bewildering jumble of horrors: tortured junk and bric-a-brac, flattened tin cans and old clothes, or simply an old chair with its innards ripped...
...their mysterious drives. Even after he died, she carried on those expeditions alone. She seemed to have plenty of money, and the occasional visitor to her home, which she_ kept surrounded by two fences, could catch a glimpse of what she spent it on-Chinese bric-a-brac, 18th century books, and antique card cases that she had persuaded her amenable husband to adopt as a hobby. But what of the "pictures" she once maintained she was after? No one ever saw more than two or three...
Mankowitz' affectionate attack on the cheerfully amoral operators who are London's buccaneers of bric-a-brac, the antique dealers of Portobello Road, sparkled with the vitality of the underworld he has taken for his own. "One specializes in the people nearest one's personal archetype," says Author Mankowitz, "dealers, agents, toughies, whores, pimps, gamblers, all freelances like myself-people who work in a mètier, vestiges of primitive capitalism. These are my people...
...upon characterization. Through repetitive statements that indicate they are perchance victims of some sort of mental imbalance his characters are carefully and knowingly sketched. Jack Houseman ("It's all the same--what does it matter") is very wealthy, very sick, and a collector of hideous Victorian furniture and bric-a-brac. His wife, Whiffy ("It's crazy! It's crazy!) doesn't really believe in collecting things, yet collects match covers avidly, wants to sell Jack's Victoriana for money, yet is terribly bored with money...