Word: homespun
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...Courbet would hardly have survived the attacks of the critics of his day. What was realism to his enemies? Atheism, socialism, materialism, crudity: a denial of all decent control. An audience that doted on the rococo peasant had insuperable difficulties with Courbet's frieze of worn faces and homespun black suits in Burial at Ornans, 1850. He painted, someone gibed, the way one waxed boots. He was seen as a dangerous socialist, a besmircher of the ideal, a bucolic thug from the Franche-Comte trampling all over the classical tradition with his wooden clogs...
Then I encountered George, a homespun Armenian philosopher in a green nylon jacket decorated with a red-white-and-blue American sticker showing clasped hands. He told me of a relative in Leninakan who lost two children in the rubble; a third child had her legs severed at the knees. He reflected on Armenian hopes to regain Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, and told how his six-year-old son can already sing patriotic songs about his Armenian homeland. "We already have had our share of grief this year," George said. "And now this new disaster promises...
...unaccustomed to life in the lap of luxury that the uses the toilet in his suite and then puts the paper strip back on. But like Peter Sellers' Chance the Gardener in Being There, Gino coasts like a charmed figure, convincing everyone through his affable personality and his homespun platitudes that he is the genuine article...
...general store with a deep inventory of oddity, inspiration and wonder. The records sounded as if they had been made out in a field, as indeed they sometimes were. All done up in a sturdy cardboard sleeve, they even felt different. But in the midst of all this homespun, Folkways achieved what other companies bring off by accident: it got history on record...
Natives see a certain irony in the sudden cachet of their homespun style. "Originally people built adobe homes, which are really mud huts, because the materials were cheap and available," explains Santa Fe Architect Michael Bodelson, 33. "It was a vernacular architecture, low technology." These days, he notes in amusement, only the rich can afford to build adobe homes, since authentic construction can add about 15% to 20% to the cost of a comparable wood-frame or brick home...