Word: gimcracks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...unlikely gimcrack that for years has been the hottest-selling art object in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost big island, is the small plaster bust (price: $1) of a stern-faced New England schoolmaster who died in 1887. William Smith Clark stayed only eight months on Hokkaido, but the visit, in 1876, was long enough for him to be enshrined by the islanders as something between seer and saint. On leave from his job as president of Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts), Clark helped found the school that was to become the outpost island's pride...
...gimcrack stage tilted tipsily toward the footlights, and gusts of damp winter air surged from the wings. The piano plunked like a loosely strung mandolin. But the audience listened to the big, barrel-chested baritone with the rapt concentration of buffs at the Metropolitan Opera. They stomped lusty approval of arias from Tannhäuser and The Barber of Seville, art songs by Delibes and Debussy, lieder by Karl Loewe and Schubert...
...English villages, to create a kind of Arcadia with a British accent. George Stubbs, Britain's finest horse painter, turned out landscapes populated with jockeys, grooms, owners and thoroughbred racers that not even hard-riding country squires found it possible to fault. One of Stubbs's best, Gimcrack with a Groom, shows Lord Bolingbroke's small, dark grey champion (27 firsts in 35 starts) being groomed (at left) and winning over the Newmarket course on July 12, 1765 (at right...
...bend with the political winds. He fought for passage of the 1954 farm law that substituted semiflexible price supports for the Democrats' rigid supports, but agreed to limit the range of flexibility so that actual supports did not drop much. He once considered the soil bank a Democratic gimcrack, now embraces it as a painless way to cut surpluses. And in the 1958 budget he asked for an unprecedented $4.9 billion for agriculture, the largest farm outlay in U.S. history. Benson's vigorous program to sell off surpluses at home and abroad has worked; the surplus cutback augurs...
...Serafina Delle Rose (Anna Magnani), a hearty peasant wench transplanted from Sicily to the Gulf Coast. Since the death of her husband, a small-time smuggler, she has turned into a sort of moral worm crawling in and out of his memory. She keeps his ashes in a gimcrack vase in their shanty parlor, and has long, sweaty daydreams about his body ("like a young bull"). "I was the peasant," she cries, "but I gave my hosband glory." One day reality in the improbable form of Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Burt Lancaster), "a bachelor wit' three dependents," breaks into Serafina...