Word: enamels
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...last Friday's deadline drew near, the refugees began to mass at the crossing posts along Nigeria's western border with Benin. Their mattresses, chairs, plastic containers and enamel cooking pots spilled out of trailers, trucks and minibuses. Many of those who made it across the border had first to surrender any supplies of sugar, milk and detergents--officially described as "essential commodities"--to Nigerian immigration and customs officials. No one was permitted to leave with more than $22 worth of naira, Nigeria's currency. The scenes at posts along Nigeria's borders with Niger and Chad were much...
...Czar Alexander III asked a St. Petersburg jeweler, Carl Faberge, to make an Easter present for his Empress. The gold and enamel egg so pleased the monarch that he commissioned at least one every Easter. His successor, Nicholas II, continued the tradition, and for the next 31 years, until the Bolsheviks put an end to such inspired extravagance, there was always a Faberge egg in the imperial Easter basket. A gorgeous rooster pops out of the Chanticleer egg to announce every hour; the Peacock egg hides an enameled gold bird that struts on cue and fans its multihued tail; inside...
Once cast, they are patinated in a striking range of mat colors-never quite the colors of nature, always with the volume knob turned high-and then assembled. Since the patinated color may break down under strong sunlight outdoors, Graves also uses fired-enamel colors on some pieces. Accident contributes its share here: because the thickness of the bronze casting varies in an unpredictable way, and hence the heat of the metal and the rate of fusion of the enamel vary as well, the enamel colors run and waver into one another like wet watercolor, somewhat blurring the identity...
...home of Mao Tse-tung, where he made his headquarters in January 1937, preparing to fight the Japanese as ally of Chiang Kaishek. The shrine sits in a dusty courtyard, now gardened and grown with new pines. Here was his bed, says the guide, here the two blue enamel boxes in which he carried his records on the Long March; here is the charcoal pan at which, one day while he was writing, he was so absorbed his sandals began to burn. Next door is another little house, once shared by Chu Teh (with wife) and Chou En-lai (with...
...imagery of the visitors' PX: the white gleam of refrigerators and stove enamel, the iconography of GE and Hoover, so utterly different from the traditional dimness of the Japanese house and the mandatory drabness of wartime, with its austerity colors and nocturnal blackout. On a popular level, the war had caused an immense disenchantment with traditional Japanese architecture, wood and paper: "weak" materials, which burned. Concrete and steel were the substances of a victor culture, and the huge termitary cities of Japan were rebuilt with them...