Word: plain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...several years after World War II, the plain seven-story red-brick building that stands on the north bank of the Kanda River in Tokyo's Nihonbashi district housed a women's unit of General MacArthur's Occupation Army. On the outside, nothing distinguishes the building from other office blocks in the Japanese capital. Inside, employees toil elbow to elbow in open work areas illuminated by fluorescent lights, and the air is heavy with cigarette smoke. Yet the modest facade masks the nerve center of a powerful financial empire: Nomura Securities, the largest, richest and most profitable securities firm...
Spain has the Catalan sculptor Susana Solano, 42, whose constructions of sheet iron, mesh and rods are based on the image of baths and attain a weird intensity in balancing the plain, structurally explicit means of minimalism against an atmosphere of secrecy and menace: they could be prison cells or metaphorical labyrinths...
...wouldn't give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn't have a little bit of plain, ordinary kindness--and a little looking out for the other fella...
...Driving Miss Daisy and, starting next month, Rex Harrison in a revival of The Admirable Crichton. Those with a taste for undeservedly obscure classics can see two sprightly, acerbic Restoration comedies at R.S.C. headquarters in Stratford-upon-Avon, George Farquhar's The Constant Couple and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer, plus Noel Coward's Easy Virtue, ably done in the West End. At the National, Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun, a 19th century Irish separatist tract masquerading as a farcical melodrama, proves its author a deft orchestrator of tone and plot...
...first, Carver's plain style sounds a lot like Hemingway in his short stories. (Carver has written poetry but has never written a novel.) There's a similar use of ellipsis. "A Small, Good Thing" has the seductively simple ring of Hemingway titles like "The End of Something" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." And the men in Where I'm Calling From hunt, fish, drink and brawl. But although Hemingway's men adopt a tough exterior in order to hide when life or women get them down, Carver's men remain vulnerable, as husbands or fathers, and risk compassion...