Word: customs
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Director James Ivory manages against many odds to intermingle scenes from the two time periods without detracting from either story. He mixes scenes which dwell on common themes, such as the infusion of British custom into the complex Indian society, and the heroines' search for emotional and physical fulfillment. Unlike The French Lieutenant's Woman, which presented concurrent plots clouded in fantasy and misty symbolism, Heat and Dust successfully intertwines the two plots such that both seem real and vibrant on their own. Yet it is only when they are considered as parts of a whole that the true power...
...bulls came all at once when Maass ran with the young men of Pamplona through deserted city streets chased by a dozen half-ton animals in the annual "running of the bulls." The custom precedes a bullfight in the town's central arena and is a historic test of bravado...
...Bach on the harpsichord that offended, or his way with celestial navigation, or the servants, or the phone calls from Ronald Reagan. No: his worst affront seemed to be the custom chopped-and-stretched chauffeur-driven Cadillac with the partition and the special back-seat temperature control. It was not even the fact that William F. Buckley Jr. rides around in such a car, like a Mafia don in his land yacht, that gave some reviewers eczema. It was the way that he wrote about it, with such a blithe air of entitlement. No right-wing intellectual...
Snobbery is always preposterous but also sometimes useful. "The use of forks at table," observes the English writer Jasper Griffin, "seemed to our Tudor ancestors the height of affectation, so, the first to follow that Italian custom doubtless did so, in large part, to impress their neighbors with their sophistication. Evolution itself is a process of rising above one's origins and one's station." The writer Sébastien Chamfort located what is surely the ultimate snob, a nameless French gentleman: "A fanatical social climber, observing that all round the Palace of Versailles it stank of urine...
Indigenous ruburbanites have developed interesting ways to remind migrants of their presence. Inner-city inhabitants carry ghetto-blaster radios to announce themselves, but ruburban teen-agers favor, as the weapon of aural aggression, the 1973 Pontiac Trans Am with full-throat custom muffler. Rubber is applied to Main Street far into the night, accompanied by rebel yells and the shattering of beer bottles. Newcomers create different problems for the police. Although such naughty amusements are passe in the suburbs, the police chief of Harvard, Ill., had to ask the host of a nude cocktail party to pull the shades...