Word: damask
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...Italy, they built themselves impregnable and magnificent castles. "This room you see here," Hideyoshi would tell his guests as he gave them a tour of his seven-story castle at Osaka, "is full of gold, this one of silver; this other compartment is full of bales of silk and damask, that one with robes, while these rooms contain costly swords and weapons." It sounds like an Oriental Hearst at San Simeon, but the vast ostentation of the Momoyama warlords had a political aim: to dazzle visitors and cow supplicants. In private they practiced a cult of austerity the essence...
CAROLE Shelley is here an admirable Viola--sprightly, intelligent, and a model of sanity in a world of absurdity. Her diction is clean, and her handling of the "Fortune forbid" soliloquy is particularly distinguished. But there is more beauty in the "damask cheek" speech than she is yet able to convey. (Siobhan McKenna's portrayal remains the yardstick for this part, as for Shaw's Saint Joan and others.) The plausibility of confusion between Viola-Cesario and Sebastian is helped here through Donald Warfield's soft, rather womanly portrayal of the brother (a role once played by a 19-year...
...Florida in the early 1560s. There he saw Indians-and concluded that there had to be a likeness between them and the lost tribes of primitive Britain. Hence the delicate Amazon, who might have stepped out of a court masque. Her tribal body painting is transmuted into an exquisite damask of skin tattoos; every detail of Le Moyne's image, from the green, parklike landscape and the rippling blonde hair to the jaunty flutter of tassel and petal, adds to the sense of a new-minted Arcadia. It is, of course, completely artificial...
Ghana Second. The climax of the ceremony came that night, as the city lay bewitched in the jungle moonlight, and the Manhyia Palace flickered with torches. In a great field near by sat 27 paramount chiefs glittering with gold under huge, richly colored damask and velvet umbrellas. In a secret room inside the palace, observed by only six of his subjects, the King underwent the most sacred part of the tradition. After being ritually cleansed, he was seated briefly three times upon the Ashantis' sacred Golden Stool for the final ascension to power or "enstoolment." Only then...
...much escaped the memento seekers when Manhattan's old Metropolitan Opera House closed down last April. Opera buffs pried off seat numbers, and ripped down damask wall coverings. Not to be outdone, RCA Victor carted away (after paying $10,000) the gold brocade curtain and announced that it would cut the drapery into 45,000 patches and include one in each copy of a souvenir-record album called Opening Nights at the Metropolitan. Of course, the curtain did shrink some in the cleaning, but there was enough to go around as Soprano Leontyne Price scissored off the first snippet...