Word: flatcar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...flow of discourse about experience that art is meant to sustain, but it makes the price part of the subject of the work, separating it, by implication, from everything else ever painted by Velázquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped at. To most people visiting the Met, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, bought amid vast publicity in 1961 for $2.3 million, is still "the two-million-dollar Rembrandt." It is removed, none too subtly, from all other Rembrandts. In the meantime...
Also last week, a 101-car Illinois Central Gulf train jumped the tracks in Cades, Tenn. Among the derailed cars was one filled with caustic sodium hydroxide. Two days later 33 cars of a 91-car train, including one flatcar with a truck trailer containing 200 cases of flammable insecticide, derailed near Bowling Green, Ky. In neither accident were there any deaths or injuries...
Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us opens with a gentle pan from the hazy skyline of a Mississippi morning across a field of grass along the tracks where a chain gang's flatcar rolls through a thicket, and to the pond where two convicts paddle a boat ashore and escape into a car which pulls into view as the camera completes its circle. All the way around, it pans a whole expansive environment, a distance of soft green and damp air which will dominate the film, cushioning the violence of its bank robber heroes like their own lonely needs...
...same place twice running. The keeper will find your footprints, and the next night he'll be waiting for you." For all his precautions, Thorpe found the law waiting on more than one occasion. Once he escaped by hastily loading 25 geese onto an abandoned railway flatcar and pumping it down the tracks to safety. Other times he resorted to force, and as the middleweight boxing champion of Lincolnshire in his youth, he was a mean man to reckon with. Once when a warden caught him by surprise, Thorpe scored an easy K.O. with three straight lefts...
That is precisely the spirit that the first of the stopwatch-toting efficiency experts, Frederick Winslow Taylor, condemned in 1911 as "the greatest evil with which the working people are now afflicted." In a yard where laborers were loading 12½ tons of pig iron each aboard flatcars every day, he taught one worker named Schmidt to load 47½ tons by changing the movements he used to lift the 92-lb. bars and the speed at which he walked to the flatcar.* Taylor's ideas were expanded by Frank Gilbreth, who contended that there must be "one best way" of doing...