Word: fad
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Cult & Industry. Removed from its natural backgrounds, folk singing has become both an esoteric cult and a light industry. Folk-song albums are all over the bestseller charts, and folk-singing groups command as much as $10,000 a night in the big niteries. As a cultural fad folk singing appeals to genuine intellectuals, fake intellectuals, sing-it-yourself types, and rootless root seekers who discern in folk songs the fine basic values of American life. As a pastime, it has staggeringly multiplied sales of banjos and guitars; more than 400,000 guitars were sold in the U.S. last year...
...doctors for continuing to impose "prolonged inertia" on patients with an arterial shutdown in a leg, and on victims of rheumatic fever. Strenuous athletics, he notes, are even recommended for patients with active tuberculosis, provided they are also getting drug treatment. Excessive rest, he concludes, is the same fraudulent fad it always...
...Fad Coming. These were fragments from A Song for the Dance of Death, by the late Belgian Playwright Michel de Ghelderode, performed on CBS's religious series, Lamp Unto My Feet. The program's host hailed Ghelderode as a sort of dark messiah of the implied positive, whose generally malevolent characters actually yearn steadily for God. Other critics have said that in this century of despair, no more despairing voice-they variously compare it to lonesco's and even Brecht's-has rolled through the black caverns of the absurd...
...most of his life in a room full of marionettes, dress-shop dummies, swords, armor and sea shells. His work was somewhat ignored in Europe and almost totally in the U.S. He died last April-and now it seems that he is about to surface as an intellectually fashionable fad...
Every few years, a fashion gimmick sweeps locustlike out of Paris onto the fields of fad. After the "sack look" and the "trapeze line" came the craze for "culottes"-dress-length pants divided in front by a wide pleat and designed to look like skirts. This year, as the release last week of the first photographs of the Paris fall collections showed, the day of the gimmick has come again. Sequel to the culotte: skirts divided in front by a wide pleat and designed to look like pants...