Word: sepia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...exquisite sense of reality. The matter is more complicated than that. It is true that Van Gogh applied the formal system he preferred to the Provencal landscape: the rapid, shifting notation of dots, speckles and slashes in the drawings, with the white paper burning like noon light behind the sepia ink; the characteristic spirals of the paintbrush, which link back to the decorative line work of Edo Japanese screens and point forward to the whiplash rhythms of art nouveau. But this handwriting was not mechanically stamped on the landscape, as the style marks of mere obsessives tend...
...President, dwarfed by a giant sepia photograph of OSS Founder William ("Wild Bill") Donovan behind the rostrum, paid generous tribute to these erstwhile practitioners of the dark arts of spying, espionage, sabotage and behind-the-lines derring-do. The OSS's achievements, said Reagan, were of the sort for which "praise and thanks can only come from history and not your contemporaries." But he tried to make up for the slight, saying, "We honor you, we salute you, we thank you for a job well done...
...Immaculata Cuomo came to America by boat from Naples. They had little money and no English. Mario, their fourth and final child, was born in the urban equivalent of a log cabin, the room behind his father's grocery store. Cuomo has turned his early life into a sepia-tinted parable of a polyglot neighborhood of hard work and love. He can spin out stories about everyone on the old block: Lanzone, the baker; Kaye, the Jewish tailor; Kelly, the Irish scrap dealer...
While in prison, Molina diverts Valentin, who is stingy with his pleasures (a stereotypical Marxist?), by recounting scenes from a Nazi propaganda film. These sepia-toned passages tell the preposterous tale of a French nightclub singer (Sonia Braga) meeting and loving a ranking SS commandant and are intended to showcase the salvation that is the movie theater--a promising motif. Unfortunately, the film-within-the-film is a let-down, unamusing...
...kinetic energy of new combinations is changing the U.S. today as profoundly as it did at the turn of the century, in the sepia-tinted days of Ellis Island. The faces are different now -- mostly brown and yellow. Twenty years ago, more than half of all immigrants came from Europe and Canada. Today, most are Mexicans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, Indians, Chinese, Dominicans, Jamaicans. They scramble up across the border near San Ysidro, Calif., in the middle of the night. They get off their jets and stream through Customs at Kennedy. They arrive in the trunks of cars or wash...