Word: bric
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...largely 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...
...life," Tom Lehrer is a fairly tall, modest man who looks about twenty-five, and is mild-mannered enough to bring home to Mother. His apartment on Sparks St. is not arty, just a little crowded. Books and records are stacked around the room and on the mantelpiece stands bric-a-brac suggestive of his work: a rubber "dead hand" (I Hold Your Hand in Mine), a skeleton, a model of the "World Tree" in which he has stuck a dustmop, and a flowery piece of crockery labeled "Opium" (The Old Dope Peddler). He has a much pleasanter voice than...
...snug, overstuffed parlor of early 19th century optimism, Poe played Hamlet to his own ghost, and it is sometimes difficult to separate the poet from the poltergeist who tipped over the stuffed birds, broke the bric-a-brac and put the ladies into a flutter. It is the thesis of Veteran Biographer Frances Winwar (Coleridge, the Wordsworths, Byron, Shelley, Keats) that Poe's "ghoul-haunted" imagination has contemporary validity. For all its outmoded idiom (castles, princesses, etc.) Poe's death-obsessed verse speaks true today. In this admirable biography, Author Winwar lets a hundred well-informed witnesses speak...
...hottest form of advertising promotion is the giveaway. This year U.S. businesses will hand out $16 million worth of appliances, cars, cameras and bric-a-brac on 22 network shows seen by most of the nation's 43 million TV homes, and 250 local radio and TV programs. So popular are the shows that this week CBS and NBC each will add three new TV giveaway programs. NBC and ABC will start two more later in July...