Word: mouthings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cocktail lounges are also excluded from the ban. "We understand the relationship between alcohol and cigarettes -- we're not out to reform human nature," explains former City Attorney Steven Rood. As for hotels, he notes, "French and Italian movie moguls can't do business without a cigarette in their mouth." Such reasoning does not satisfy restaurant owners. Vito Sasso, proprietor of the romantic Romeo and Juliet, argues that he too has foreign customers, citing one wealthy visitor who orders several $500 bottles of wine for a dinner tab of $4,000 -- which adds up to a month's rent...
...suspicion that the stories told about all this skulduggery may be exaggerated. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger liked to tell the one about a visit to Moscow when he was a bachelor. The KGB big shot assigned to his tour kept talking out of the side of his mouth about all the lovely girls he could make available to Kissinger at the slightest signal. Kissinger declined each of the three invitations, but he was tempted to say, "Look, send one around, get your pictures and then leave me alone." After that Kissinger carried a "blabber tape" with him whenever...
...ship from Khabarovsk, which created an island psychology and the term Gulag archipelago. The prison ships were crowded hellholes in which thousands died. One survivor's memoir recounts that the prison ship Dzhurma was caught in the autumn ice in 1933 while trying to get to the mouth of the Kolyma River. When it reached port the following spring, it carried only crew and guards. All 12,000 prisoners were missing, left dead...
Working from the principle that too much is never enough, Russell unloads his inventory of weird imagery. Candied corpses and puddles of rancid goo. A woman's nipples that open to reveal eyes. Claire, filthy and feral, a dead rat in her mouth. Stuff like that. In such films as The Devils and Altered States, Russell found a conjurer's balance between sense and surrealism. But with this catalog of chic atrocities he cannot shock, he can only embarrass. For an artist as canny as Russell, that's crazy...
Such colorful eating brings a bonus in human contacts. Waiters and waitresses are especially solicitous, offering to show foreign guests exactly how to convey a jiaozi from plate to mouth with chopsticks so that the dumpling remains intact with no loss of broth. The Westerner who can master the technique may be rewarded with a free meal, plus a tour of the kitchen, where workers grinningly pose for pictures and shyly call, "Hello," the one English word they seem to know...