Word: gifts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most of the week in Geneva by teams of U.S. and Soviet diplomats. The final issue was minor, and the butt of much diplomatic banter. The chief CIA man on the U.S. delegation had presented his KGB counterpart with a T shirt emblazoned: FREE THE TYURATAM EIGHTEEN! The gift was one of those arcane jokes that are best appreciated by SALT technicians. It referred to 18 heavy-missile launchers at the Soviets' Tyuratam test site in central Asia, which the Soviets claim are used only for tests and therefore do not count as strategic weapons. Well past the eleventh hour...
...pair of porcelain "Doves of Peace." The sculpture, made by the New Jersey studio, Cybis, ordinarily would cost $3,500 to $4,000, but this was a special and more costly design; the turtledoves were passing an olive branch from one to the other. Brezhnev's 'return gift to Carter? A surprise, said the secretive Soviets. And so it remained as the meetings began...
This patient construction, this sense of the intrinsic worth of seeing, combines with Chardin's second gift: his remarkable feeling for the poetic (rather than didactic) moments of human gesture. It permeates his genre scenes and portraits, especially the portraits of children; the gentle muteness that Diderot perceived often turns into a noble ineloquence, as though Piero della Francesca were visiting the nursery. In some way Chardin's absorption in the act of painting paralleled the absorption of children in their games, which he painted. One has only to look at the figure in his portrait Little Girl...
...highly conservative Vatican Curia have known for months: this Pope not only sings, but he sings out. He also kisses babies, cuts red tape, says what he thinks, has an actor's (or a politician's) delight in an audience, and a former laborer's gift for gauging the common touch of a crowd...
...film does gently remind us of past pleasures, now missed, and it is rather handsomely produced. Maybe, since its creators lack a true-that is to say Mel Brooksian-gift for parody, they would have done better to play the whole thing straight and let us have our nostalgia unalloyed...