Word: peddler
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...trying to hawk his damaged instrument. Politely ignored at first, he finally hooked a young woman and carefully played a tune that somehow avoided the twisted stops and smashed keys. She was impressed. What she didn't realize - apart from the dubious quality of the merchandise - was that the peddler was in fact Viorel, the bass player of Taraf de Haïdouks, the gypsy band she had paid good money to see, and that his ditty was in effect the first tune of the evening's performance. Downstairs other band members, a sort of extended musical family spanning three...
...York City hangs mostly unspoken over The Hamptons. But there's an elegiac air amid the sun and glitz here, a reminder of the feeling, even before Sept. 11, that the turn-of-the-century easy-money culture was fading. (One subject, Josh Sagman, an oxygen-bar peddler--he literally charges people to breathe--is the embodiment of cocky boom-era entrepreneurialism.) Even in midsummer, local author Steven Gaines talks about the place in the past tense. "This was the resort that was closest to the financial center of the world," he says. "This moment in time will be looked...
...shepherd. Both women set themselves on fire in protest and despair. Sometimes all the oppressed can do is laugh. In the initially slapstick, then tragic Iranian film Songs of My Mother's Homeland, Kurds pour across the Iran border from Iraq. It's chaos for all concerned - except a peddler whose business is booming. "They bring disease but they also bring money," he says. "God bless Saddam!" The Tajikistan Angel on the Right Shoulder opens on a deserted highway; a man stands there with a sheep. He flags down a taxi; he and his sheep get in. This...
...best. The trick was to paint a heroic portrait, of a person with plenty to hide, and sell it to a columnist who'll sell it to the public. You'd plant or leak favorable items and try to suppress the scandalous ones. Publicity is the peddler's art, whose colors are rouge and noir, whose techniques are wheedling, pleading, trading and - if the press agent is Sidney Falco - lying, threatening and blackmailing...
...After passing banana plantations and coconut groves, we turned into a canal called Klong Bangkok Noi, where Poon spied a hawker in a boat piled high with soap, snacks and sodas. The long-sought coffee peddler set a pot of water boiling on a tiny gas stove. He carefully poured steaming water through what looked suspiciously like a gym sock filled with ground coffee. It dripped into a can already laced with two generous spoonfuls of sweetened condensed milk. In one practiced motion he scooped a plate of ice into a plastic sack, poured in the steaming coffee, stabbed...