Word: eight
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Flesh & Abstractions. Along with his other activities, Mankowitz' stage successes have brought him a handsome St. John's Wood house in London and an eight-acre, 16th century manor in Kent. His real rewards, says he, are to have achieved "independence, privacy and space." Despite such serene surroundings, he insists, "I have more in common with any other freelance, from a prostitute to a delicatessen owner, than the stiff, abstract tedious people from the literary world...
Indian-Mound Garage. Big Sur is challenging country. The land is periodically shaken by earthquakes, battered by 80-m.p.h. winds; rainfall can total 72 in. in three months, and termites abound. To cope with these problems, Owings designed a kind of concrete saddle over the ridge, anchored by eight caissons reaching down into bedrock. On this he secured a rigid A-frame, surrounded it with cantilevered balconies carried around the outside to exploit the spectacular view. For roof beams he bought 60-year-old redwood timbers of a demolished bridge. A four-car garage was dug partially out of bedrock...
...Eight hours of Orff is simply too much!" The speaker, a tall, lank-haired man in tweed jacket and maroon wool shirt, was none other than rehearsal-weary Carl Orff, Germany's most famed modern composer. Hours, or even minutes, of Orff have indeed often proved too much for some tradition-minded audiences in Europe and the U.S. But last week crowds were thronging to the Stuttgart Opera House for a solid week of Composer Orff's works, including his latest: Oedipus der Tyrann, a highly individual dissertation on the Sophocles tragedy...
...chordal theme, varied only with starkly primitive rhythm in the orchestra and percussion-punctuated declamation by the singers. The work was typical, too, in its close welding of music to text (by 18th century German Poet Friedrich Hölderlin). The oddly assorted orchestra-which included four pianos for eight players, four harps, a glass harmonica, marimbaphone, xylophones, bongos, congas, gongs and no strings except for nine double basses-served less to score Sophocles' tragedy than to underscore it. Every word of dialogue took precedence over the music...
Instead of cylinders and pistons, the Wankel engine has a single combustion chamber shaped like a fat-waisted figure eight (see diagram). Inside, it is a three-cornered rotor with curved sides. A shaft passes through the rotor and makes it move on an eccentric orbit by means of two gears. All three corners of the triangle stay in contact with the wall of the chamber at all times. To make the contacts gaslight, each corner is tipped with an inset metal strip that, as the drive shaft revolves, is pushed tight against the cavity's inner walls...