Word: detritus
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THERE are perhaps six buildings left in the town, none with a solid roof. There is no running water or electricity. Every street is shattered by artillery craters and littered with the detritus of a battle that saw a bit of every kind of war. Everywhere you walk you hear the crackle of shifting shell fragments when you put your foot down. There are not more than half a dozen vehicles left that still function, and when I arrived, only one of those, a Jeep, had all four tires. All the others move fast enough, given the condition...
...these questions are raised with subtlety and without polemics in That Championship Season, a drama of searing intensity, agonized compassion and consummate craftsmanship. The play centers on the 20th reunion of a handful of men whose lives were once fresh as mountain springs and now resemble the sooty detritus of a city gutter. A silver trophy stands as a cenotaph for their one moment of glory, when they won a high school basketball title...
Ghosts and Rats. The military's detritus is not confined to the frozen north. Camp Kilmer, near Edison, N.J., is a decaying ghost town of fire-gutted barracks and shattered glass. Unfenced, it is a tempting playground for exploring children. While squirrels and kangaroo rats nest in the bomb craters that pock 10,000 acres of California's Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the area is off limits to human visitors because it contains unexploded bombs and rockets left there 30 years ago, when the Navy used the park as a test-firing range. Although much...
...Gravest Sin. This, Osborne seems to be saying, is what England has come to. These are the people whom Jimmy Porter savaged so mercilessly as the detritus of a doomed civilization in Osborne's first play, Look Back in Anger (1956). But now Osborne, who has shifted to the right in recent years, finds much to mourn in that civilization's passing. The bright, bitchy banter of the sisters-one notably played by Jill Ben nett (Mrs. John Osborne)-is pierced by nostalgia when the old writer reminisces about damp England, colonial days, his own youth when...
...Trash. FORTUNE Art Director Walter Allner sees the everyday detritus of a consumer society in a different light: "I have such respect for the engineers and designers who spend literally hundreds of hours designing products and their packaging that I want to extend the usefulness of things." Allner's Manhattan apartment is full of intriguing results. Crushed tin cans have become fancy wall friezes; a broken wine bottle is redesigned as a stunning rose vase; and huge clusters of beer bottles are glued together to make abstract sculptures. On one wall, a shadow-box assemblage of coffee-can keys...