Word: fins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...takes its place at the breaking crest of the retroculture. It is a two-hour-long tribute to a vanished time that may never have existed, packed with period songs and pseudo-period original music, as well as more Fifties inconography than you can shake a De Soto tail-fin...
According to Di Natale, the toxicants have polluted over 75 percent of the Harbor's clam flats, and the water's shellfish and groundfish populations have developed fin disorders and malignant tumors...
...architect, Victor Laloux (1850-1937), did not approach the genius of men like Charles Garnier, who created the Paris Opera, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, France's supreme engineer. But he gave the Gare d'Orsay all he had, and that, backed by the decorative and engineering resources of fin de siecle Paris, was quite a lot: a vast semicircular barrel vault of iron and glass, stretching 150 yards from end to end, with elliptical-domed side vaults along the Quai Anatole France facing the Seine, all encased in a wrapping of richly carved limestone facades whose swags, cartouches, urns, allegorical...
Also new on the Manhattan scene is Maxim's, the legendary fin-de-siecle set piece on Paris' Rue Royale, now owned by Pierre Cardin. In the New York outpost, the semi-nouvelle French cuisine has been more memorable for its price ($65 for prix-fixe dinner) than for its excellence. The cream of mussel soup known as billi-bi, a Maxim's invention, is decently turned out, but stale-tasting duck pate and the overly complicated, overcooked saddle of lamb with basil cream could not even be considered near misses. The gaudy interior, a bad copy of the Paris...
Astute museumgoers will supply the missing history for themselves. And perhaps on their own they will also draw the tempting parallels between Vienna's fin-de-siecle and today's end-of-the-century ferment. Sometimes the connections are plain: a brooding eroticism pervaded Viennese art, and today in Manhattan, a well-attended theater piece called Vienna: Lusthaus is heavy with that musky retro scent of doom and libido. The handsome stripped classicism of Loos and Wagner has clear echoes in the architecture of Michael Graves, Andres Duany and Mark Mack. Today as then, the hip bourgeoisie is overeager...