Word: silk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...recurring themes in John K. Fairbank's work is the American perception of China. Since 1784, when the first American merchant ship sent to Canton returned with spices, silk, and a 25-per-cent profit, that perception has resulted in Americans' continual fascination with the vast, rich, mysterious nation. That same perception also launched many later ships laden not with goods to trade but with missionaries determined to remake the Chinese in their own image. We have never been able to see China through Chinese eyes, Fairbank teaches, but only through our own. Fairbank titled one of his many books...
...catalogue, "has been purified and transformed by the dignity of its costumes." The motifs of a robe's design establish the mood, the period and the place of the action. Thus-to a Japanese theatergoer who knew the rules-a costume like the karaori robe in russet silk (see color] would at once suggest a Heian-period court, somewhere between A.D. 800 and 1200. The balls, woven with exquisite precision in raised white silk, refer to a Heian court game called kemari, an aristocratic and pointless kind of football with no rules. The game consisted of several players kicking...
...this is melancholy, the mood was never more lyrically conveyed. The robe is an anthology of natural observation, with seven types of plants rendered in a marvelously clear, springy line, through gradations of color that result from the separate tinting, part by part, of each of the thousands of silk threads. Where the brown, gray and blue rectangles of the background meet, the threads are aligned slightly out of register, producing a shimmer of one color into another...
...like soap-opera dialogue, which probably is half their purpose.) In the second section, with the projection equipment shut off, the three dancers begin to emerge as distinct personalities: Connie Chin flirts with a fold-up chair, Tom Krusinky with a push skooter, and Lise Newcomer with her own silk dressing gown...
...Book of Common Prayer when it becomes obvious that, notwithstanding Harper's excerpt, this is not just another Patricia Hearst fixation. Indeed, Harper's selection from the book does not do Didion's novel justice. The book centers on a wealthy family--a radical chic lawyer, with a Warhol silk screen of Mao in the living room, rather than a newspaper magnate--and their newly-converted revolutionary daughter, whose rhetoric makes little sense and at best serves to separate her from her wealthy background, the FBI and a steamy, dull, white-washed country in Latin America that undergoes one internecine...