Word: silken
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...endless market for the country's minerals, gas, technology and brain power. China's soft power is seeping into Australia's cities, suburbs and remote corners. It's changed the nation, and continues to change it. Yet the transformation has attracted surprisingly little attention. Just where is this silken revolution heading...
...cruise. Painting had flourished in Japan for centuries, displaying a flair for landscapes and portraiture, plus a charming disregard for perspective (until it was introduced from the West in the early 18th century). Now, though, Japan's painters began to focus instead on portraying pleasure seekers. Elaborate, gold-drenched silken screens and scrolls depicted, for the first time, ordinary Japanese amusing themselves in beauty spots like Mount Fuji or inside a stately home. The exhibition's anonymous Entertainment in a Residence (1640-50) shows people making music, drinking, dancing, playing cards and reading letters amid golden clouds and elaborate foliage...
...orchestrated the smashing visual effects--Tolkien's bestiary on the march in fantastical realms. In Return, the giant trolls, four-tusked elephants and flying, screeching serpents of Mordor will amaze adults and may startle small children. The spider monster Shelob, creeping up on Frodo and mummifying him in a silken straitjacket, offers a delicious horror-movie frisson...
...series as big a seller as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. How did she snare so many buyers? The stories are gentle and told in rhyme ("'If I had friends like these,' she sighed,/ 'Who'd stay a while with me,/I'd sit them down on silken chairs/And serve them cakes and tea'"), but the illustrations are what seals the deal. Kirk, who majored in art at the Cleveland Institute of Art, paints Miss Spider's rotund little body and curlicue hair in bold, almost hallucinatory colors, with outsize eyes and eyelashes and her world in equally poppy...
...inner sanctum, choked with chanting de- votees, is barred to nonbelievers. But it's possible to gaze down on its gold-plated lotus domes from the second-story window of the Udai Silk shop across the street. Even from the relative concealment of the silken perch, cameras are still strictly forbidden. Once a customer managed to sneak in a shot, but the telltale flash sent police running upstairs. "They grabbed the camera, and ripped out the film," says proprietor Udai. The view is free?that is if you can resist the eager sales pitch. The slightest flicker of interest...