Word: garishness
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Died. Polly (real name: Pearl) Adler, 62, longtime (1920-45) Manhattan madam whose garish parlors were a house away from home for those who found the scarlet parrot on her business card an invitation to expensive pleasure; of cancer; in a Hollywood hospital. At Polly's midtown bordello, amid Louis XVI, Egyptian and Chinese furnishings, and a Gobelin tapestry of Vulcan and Venus "having a tender moment," Racketeer Dutch Schultz took his ease, barking orders to henchmen from under a silken canopy, while in nearby rooms Social Registered patrons reveled, and off-duty cops romped. In retirement, tiny...
Caricature Capitalism. Both Weill and Brecht, recalls Weill's widow, Singer Lotte Lenya, were fascinated by the America they knew "from books, movies, popular songs, headlines-the America of the garish Twenties, with its Capones, Texas Guinans, Aimee Semple MacPhersons, Ponzis, and the Murderess Ruth Snyder." The mythical city of Mahagonny (pronounced mah-hah-ge-nee) was a symbol of that imaginary America, and the city's reason for being was summed up in the name of its principal hotel: the Here-You-May-Do-Anything Inn. The opera's songs marked a turning point for Composer...
Taste Surrendered. From the workshops of Rome came a shower of rings, earrings, necklaces, brooches, buckles and tiny busts. When the capital of the empire moved to Constantinople, its jewelry became garish and showy; and when the barbarians swept away the glory that was Rome, taste made its final surrender to superficial glitter. In the 1,000 objects in the Milan show, vanity and art started out as allies, ended as enemies. But rarely has the jeweler's hand produced objects of such intimate charm as it did when the alliance was in full flower...
Died. Candido Portinari, 58, painter laureate of Brazil who sought to capture his country's garish blend of poverty and promise in giant murals done with a fiery palette mixed from Brazilian earths; of a stroke following cumulative lead poisoning induced by his own pigments; in Rio de Janeiro. An Italian immigrant's son who once painted signs for mule carts, Portinari was the first South American ever given a one-man show by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, and, though an avowed Communist for much of his career, accepted commissions for a portrait of former...
...Cambridge merchants' belated and dissembling tug-of-the-forelock to the venerable Kringle will neither amuse nor bemuse. For, quite plainly, their hasty stringing of garish lights across the city's principal intersection is but a clumsy provincial imitation of those enlightened mertopoleis where Christmas is a real festival. Here, five days after the event, the meagre decorations will be thrown upon a heap of slag...