Word: silk
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Today Brando's silk-walled, Japanese-style house atop a hill on Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills is again a prime tourist attraction, and sightseeing buses nose past it daily. The house remains, however, as much a fortress as it was when Brando took it over in 1961 from the previous occupant, Howard Hughes. Despite, or perhaps because of his renewed flush of popularity, Brando still insists that "privacy is not something that I'm merely entitled to; it's an absolute requisite." He still holds to his old credo that "conformity breeds mediocrity." And although...
...certainly have been more about the men in the film, who are shadows and ciphers. The single most shattering scene in the film becomes, for this reason, unnecessarily oblique. Preparing herself for bed one evening, Karin takes a shard of glass and lacerates her genitals. Raising the frail white silk of her nightgown toward her waist, showing her husband the blood running down her thighs, she grins in triumph and with a hint of perverse satisfaction. Because we know so little of her husband, though, Karin's act is neither thoroughly motivated nor sufficiently provoked...
...chasuble used in liturgical celebration developed out of everyday Greco-Roman clothing; an enveloping cloak (Latin name: casula, or little house), worn over the tunic, was adopted by the church some time after the 4th century A.D. Made of wool at first, the chasuble-with the increasing availability of silk around the 10th and 11th centuries-gradually acquired a dazzling sumptuousness. The epitome of this was opus Anglicanum, or "English work," a taxingly intricate method of embroidery that flourished in London guild shops during the 13th and 14th centuries. The Met possesses one rare example, the so-called Chichester-Constable...
Embroidery is essentially decorative. As illusion, it is hobbled by the pattern of stitches, which could never attain the fluidity of line and shading that paint or wash gave. Refined as it is, with its or nue or "shaded gold" method of gold thread couched with varicolored silks, a roundel like the 16th century Spanish Adoration of the Magi (based, probably, on an unidentified Renaissance painting) is almost too limited in technique for the painting style it simulated. But in flat pattern, Renaissance and later embroiderers could and did achieve magnificent results-sometimes lighthearted and almost naive...
...army Jeeps, to whole schools of motor scooters. It takes a little while to discover that something is not quite the same as in most cities. Then one gradually notices that the driver of the black Mercedes is a beautiful Laotian girl wearing the traditional skirt of glossy silk, heavily embroidered in gold, and that the driver in the Jeep behind her, wearing a pair of smart Levi's, is also a girl. Then one realizes that there are far more women drivers than one would normally see-except, that is, in a small country that is losing...