Word: makeshift
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...break with modern architectural practice, get out the saws, hammers and nails and build these unusual structures themselves. Since their first project, a child's play structure built to resemble an enormous cockroach, they've painstakingly assembled twelve houses, from San Francisco to New Hampshire, parking tents, trailers or makeshift cardboard homes on site so they could live there as they worked, encouraging clients to pick up hammers and join them on weekends, and throwing parties in partly built houses to celebrate the completion of a foundation or their topping off of a roof. No, the Jersey Devil, which takes...
...first glance the symbolism is painfully apparent. On the set of his 37th feature film, in a makeshift studio 35 miles north of Los Angeles and a world away from Hollywood, the 80-year-old director sits in a chair, watching the action on a closed-circuit television monitor and rumbling orders into a microphone. The jauntiness of his warm-up suit is belied by the clear plastic tube that runs from his nose, behind his ears, down his chest and along his leg to an oxygen tank, a last-ditch defense against the emphysema that has plagued...
...smooth bar of soap, wrapped neatly in a white handkerchief and tucked safely in the breast pocket of a faded leather jacket, is all that keeps George from losing himself to the streets. When he wakes each morning from his makeshift bed of newspapers in the subway tunnels of Philadelphia, he heads for the rest room of a nearby bus station or McDonald's and begins an elaborate ritual of washing off the dirt and smells of homelessness: first the hands and forearms, then the face and neck and finally the fingernails and teeth. Twice a week he takes...
...picture first and foremost, a series of pictures that lodge in the mind with other indelible images of war. The prop wash from a landing helicopter blows the tarpaulins off three bodies, their shrouds torn off, their makeshift graves defiled. In the village, after the slaughter, the soldiers carry Vietnamese children on their shoulders -- G.I. Joes, big brothers to the kids whose village they have just destroyed -- and the soldier who bashed a man's head takes a tourist snapshot of the holocaust. More than any other film, Platoon gives the sense -- all five senses -- of fighting in Viet...
...month-long student demonstrations reached a dramatic climax early last week when a crowd of several hundred students at Peking University burned about 100 copies of the Peking Daily, the local party organ. Some made makeshift kites out of the newspaper, set them on fire and sailed them out dormitory windows. The students charged that the Daily had given a "distorted" picture of their movement. Three days later some 200 African students, who have complained recently about racism among their hosts, staged a twelve-mile march through the capital's streets. By week's end, though, the tough new government...