Word: crepuscular
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Girard accentuates this sense of dislocation by taking most of his pictures in those crepuscular moments when Shanghai reveals its private self. Behind the blinding economic razzle-dazzle and throngs of striving entrepreneurs, the city is defined by its intimate sense of neighborhood, what Girard calls its "lived-in-ness." Walk Shanghai's alleyways at night and inhale the smell of braised pork wafting out of a communal kitchen, hear the slap of a shuttlecock struck by a pajama-clad girl, catch a glimpse of a chandelier in a threadbare bedroom-once part of a ballroom in some silk merchant...
...believers. But the history of contact is brief enough that the first local person to fly in a plane - a young woman sent because the chiefs were suspicious of the strange craft - is still alive. The world remains quieter here, the green-leafed silence interrupted perhaps by the crepuscular hum of insects, or the morning call of the cone shell, blown at this time of year, when circumcision rituals are taking place...
...Afterward, in the cool, crepuscular and deserted bar we drink pints beneath photographs of the long departed and the disparu?champions of '66, good old boys of '73. "I think it's difficult for the club," says Gawler. "We're one of the cheapest clubs to join, but the joining fee is HK$30,000, and that's still too expensive really. I don't know who they're going to get. I mean, would you join this for $30,000?" As he says this he gestures at a mothballed snooker room...
PRINCELY DIGS I knew I was going to like the Souvannaphoum Hotel as soon as the rumpled bellboy showed me into its best suite and began pointing out its features. "There's no television," I said, as my eyes adjusted to the crepuscular gloom. "Correct, sir," he replied, beaming. Then he bid me a pleasant stay and turned on his heel, with nary a hint of the smarmy loitering or obsequious entreaties that generally accompany the importuning of tips in expensive hotels...
...eludes me how I'm able to make things come alive," Furst says, then launches into an excited tour of the "astonishingly eccentric" range of research, random and planned, that brings such authenticity to his crepuscular world: the vanity bio of a 1920s Lithuanian, the essays of French photographer Brassai, old Paris Baedekers, and so on. He constantly makes notes of telling details: the cabaret performer with a red light bulb at his crotch that Furst once spotted in a book by Cyrus Sulzberger turns up in Kingdom...