Word: duking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...could illuminate a Book of Hours. But the fabrication of a hanging might be farmed out among dozens of looms under the supervision of a master weaver. The fact that one of these entrepreneurs, Nicolas Bataille, who took more than three years to make the Angers Apocalypse for the Duke of Anjou, could still deliver five tapestries to the Duke of Burgundy in the course of a year argues a none too primitive form of mass production. The locus of this industry was northern France and the Low Countries, and its centers shifted: Tournai, Brussels, Paris, Bruges-and, of course...
Tapestry was to northern Europe what fresco was to Italy, or the refulgent gold-leaf screens of the Momoyama period were to the dark castle interiors of 16th century Japan: the main form of large-scale decoration. Moreover, it had two advantages that fresco did not possess: a duke could change his hangings, and they warmed his drafty abode in winter. And yet the appetite for tapestries went beyond all questions of use and ornament. They were collected with manic extravagance. As the Cluny Museum's chief curator Francis Salet points out in his catalogue introduction, Philip the Good...
...presents John Wayne in civvies, which seems a little like dressing Gary Grant in bib overalls. The Duke messes around casually with playing the title character, a Seattle cop who quits the force to press a vigorous one-man investigation of his partner's death. His searches lead to discoveries of gangsterism in the import business, corruption in high places, lax moral standards in corporations and other illuminations that come as more of a surprise to Wayne than anyone else...
...action sequences are frequent but arthritic. Colleen Dewhurst - whom one hardly expects to find in such company-provides an agreeable cameo as a roundheeled cocktail waitress with a taste for cocaine. The Duke remains amiable and unruffled throughout, but it is a bit troubling to see him poaching so obviously on Clint Eastwood's loner-cop territory...
...find comfort in an astonishing fact that I noted while working on a book about the Apollo moon-landing program. Of the 29 astronauts who flew the Apollo missions, no fewer than seven are lefthanded: Walter Schirra, Donn Eisele, James Lovell, Michael Collins, Richard Gordon. Edgar Mitchell and Charles Duke...