Word: polish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lucrative deal was among hundreds struck in the past few years in a booming sector of East-West trade: the hawking of East European talent to the West for cash or merchandise. Polish soccer goalies, Czechoslovak hockey forwards and East German handball coaches are only part of the business. Such athletes have been joined by thousands of other performers, ranging from the likes of renowned Czechoslovak Soprano Gabriela Benachkova, a diva at the prestigious Milan and Vienna opera houses, to Hungarian gypsy bands, Polish striptease artists, Bulgarian pop singers and Rumanian high-wire circus acts. Although the East bloc governments...
...spectacular road show and an accompanying ad campaign, which reportedly cost GM a total of $20 million, are an unabashed effort to polish up the company's rusty image during a period of declining sales and slumping profits and to bolster employee morale after a two-year wave of layoffs. Kicking off the affair with what he called a "progress report," Chairman Roger Smith, 62, asserted that GM is rebuilding consumer confidence in its cars with competitive pricing, superior technology and eye-catching style. The vehicles around him, Smith said, were proof of a "GM that can maintain its world...
...churches have generated something of an architectural renaissance. Drab city centers and run-down villages are sprouting postmodern chapels, delicate Oriental bell towers and high-tech confections of steel girders and stained glass. Not all are distinctive, but Krzysztof Chwalibog, deputy chairman of the Association of Polish Architects in Warsaw, contends, "This is bringing back good design to Poland." Good workmanship too. Unlike secular Polish buildings, which seem to sag and crack even before completion, most churches are being built to last. The same workmen who rarely worry about right angles for the state are lavishing care on ecclesiastical projects...
HUNTING COCKROACHES A vibrant farce by Polish Emigre Janusz Glowacki evoking the plight of refugee intellectuals: an actress who cannot overcome her glottal-stop accent and her novelist husband who looks for his lost sense of context and insight by puzzling over the rectilinear shapes of Western states...
Frank Gehry's buildings are still self-conscious and perverse, but they no longer set out to disturb. Tranquillity and polish are now permitted. For a lakeside guesthouse in Wayzata, Minn., Gehry has created a kind of mixed-media outdoor sculpture. Each room is a distinct object: the living-dining room is a central tower, a bedroom is a curve of local stone, and so on. The forms are vaguely toylike (befitting rooms intended to house the visiting children and grandchildren of the owners), or like the extraterrestrial outpost of puckish, inventive earthlings...