Word: moorish
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Through Jan. 16, the Frick Collection in New York City is marking the 400th anniversary of Velazquez's birth with a small but choice loan show--six paintings from New York museums. Some are well known, like the portrait of Juan de Pareja, Velazquez's Moorish slave and studio assistant. Others are less so, such as the fierce authoritarian portrait of Olivares, Philip IV's chief minister for finance and war. The show is an anti-blockbuster and not to be missed by anyone who cares about painting...
...best in the world. But when did Arabs last win a war? Or the Italians, who have given the world the Gaggia and the macchiato? Indeed, the Muslim states are the best case in point. Arab power was done in for good when Ferdinand and Isabella demolished the last Moorish stronghold on Iberian soil in 1492. This was no accident, comrades, as the Soviets used to say. It so happens that qahwa came into widespread use throughout the Islamic world in the mid-15th century. Fifty years later, Arab power was finished. And soon after, so was the Ottoman Empire...
...Hall was surprisingly American. He commissioned paintings from America's leading modernists, designed hundreds of furniture pieces in novel forms and added new materials--tubular steel, Bakelite, aluminum foil--to the design vocabulary. Up to that point, the fashion in theater decoration might have been characterized as Italian Baroque Moorish Greek Renaissance Pagoda. Pick any two, and you had a movie palace. Deskey resisted Rothafel's bludgeoning insistence on "Portuguese Rococo" and instead dressed the place for Fred and Ginger, crafting a sleek temple dedicated not to Old World solemnity but to machine-age speed and sheen...
...even in Hollywood, would have ventured out with a show based on the preposterous premise that during the Civil War, an English nobleman of Moorish descent somehow winds up in America, where he maneuvers himself into a position on Abraham Lincoln's kitchen staff, unless he or she were intoxicated. Once they sobered up and checked out the pilot episode--a heavy-handed, totally unfunny spoof of the current White House scandal--they would have asked themselves, "What were we thinking?" and pulled the plug on the series out of sheer embarrassment...
...just glomming the architecture and atmosphere. That is truest in Animal Kingdom. The backrests of park benches are carved as turtles, eagles, crocodiles. Harambe, the African "village" near the safari ride, is not idealized in Magic Kingdom fashion. It is stylized: worn, with cracked pavements below buildings of a Moorish-Disney design that might be called "mosqueteer." For visitors with an antic mind and a free year or two, Dinoland offers a trove of comic minutiae, including "Chester and Hester's," a garage full of dino-doodads...