Word: market
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most African cities the central marketplace is a carnival, where women mass in daylong congregation, squat amid bundles and babies, haggle over prices, cluck over misfortunes and paw over food for sale. Not in Luanda. Its central market, a dank, echoing, three-story concrete structure, is virtually empty of food. Long, bare counters stretch away into the urine-scented gloom. Weighing scales swing empty in the hot breeze, and the women sit quietly, waiting...
...sudden clash of gears and a loudly laboring engine stir the place into action. Seconds later, as a flatbed lurches into the market, a hoarse cheer goes up and women pour down stairs and out of doorways. The truck is loaded with sacks of potatoes...
...kintandeiras, the hard-nosed Angolan businesswomen who have traditionally bought food wholesale and sold retail at the marketplace. In recent weeks they have been on strike, protesting against the low retail prices set by the government. Swordfish, for example, is listed at about 200 a pound at the market, and is unavailable. But a few lucky consumers get swordfish from fishermen friends, who peddle their catch out on the "island," the curving sand peninsula that protects Luanda harbor from the sea. There, a pound of swordfish goes for about 45¢ or 55?...
...Rifle-toting policemen patrol the downtown banking area because, as one shopkeeper laments, "this is the season of the rateros [thieves], and they know this is a money town now." The better bars echo with the accents of Texas and Oklahoma, since Americans have been quietly allowed in to market equipment and technical advice. Brazilians, Frenchmen and Israelis are also eager to buy Mexico's oil and gas if Pemex does not strike a deal with...
...first category of object whose market was utterly changed by this was the original print-etching, woodcut or lithograph, a strictly limited edition of an image made, supervised and signed by an artist. Some original prints became almost as costly as master paintings. But prints were not reproductions. Photos or postcards could not satisfy the thirst for status. They were not exclusive; they were, in fact, genuinely democratic. Anyone could pin a postcard of a Rembrandt on the wall, for pennies. Hence the invention of another class of object, a chimera begotten by greed upon insecurity: the expensive reproduction...