Word: journeymen
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...Journeymen coaches have long been part of the sporting narrative, with European soccer managers flitting between rival nations and Eastern Europeans spanning the world to run gymnastics camps. But China has only recently started offering coaches for export. For decades, the People's Republic's state-run sports system was closed, with little chance of either athlete or coach migrating abroad. (Rare defections, like that of a female tennis player in the early 1980s to the U.S., only strengthened Chinese resolve not to let others out the door.) Nor, frankly, would most countries at that time have wanted a Chinese...
...Free craftsmen, not convicts, sculpted the celebrated terracotta warriors and horses guarding Qin Shihuangdi's vast underground necropolis. But as Barbieri-Low debunks, they were not the master artists they are sometimes trumpeted to be. Many were just journeymen, working on component parts upon which they inscribed their names not as Monet-like signatures but as part of quality-control procedures. The names worked as premodern barcodes. Shoddy platters, censers, stone carvings and so on could be traced back to the workshop that produced them, and the artisans could be punished accordingly. The inscriptions also worked as brands, and forgeries...
Mention the words Philippines and musicians in the same breath, and the world reflexively thinks of jobbing balladeers and journeymen lobby trios. Like most stereotypes, these are both true and untrue. Filipino hotel entertainers proliferate across the globe, but they are merely the workaday exports of a culture that, on its home turf, plays louder, harder and in more diverse ways than just about any other. Head out most nights in Metro Manila, and you'll be spoiled for original live sound, be it R&B, indie pop, electro-fusion or punk...
...surprise here. The director's four or five previous features - Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and the Kill Bill tandem - paid elaborate homage to, and ran elegant twists on, action films by otherwise-forgotten journeymen who were in no recognized sense auteurs; they were no-teurs. That's been a tonic corrective to the received wisdom about films: that, yes, there are still pearls worth diving for; you just have to look in ranker, more roiled waters. Hence, Vanishing Point's Richard Sarafian, and John Hough of Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, and a true indie daredevil, H.B. Halicki...
Best Supporting Actor, a traditionally strong category, will no doubt include long-ignored journeymen Chris Cooper for Adaptation and Dennis Quaid for Far From Heaven. The Hours’ Ed Harris is a likely nominee, while Road to Perdition’s Paul Newman and Chicago’s John C. Reilly are less so. Nevertheless, I expect both of them to make the cut, leaving Frida’s Alfred Molina, Catch Me If You Can’s Christopher Walken and Narc’s Ray Liotta, among others, out in the cold...