Word: splendor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Mary Shelley's story, recreated in its late 18th century splendor, is wellknown. A young medical student succeeds in bringing to life a body he has created from a collection of corpses. This new Adam, hungry for guidance from his creator, faces only Frankenstein's revulsion, and seeks revenge on his "father's" loved ones. Bereft of everything except a desire to destory his terrible creation, the scientist chases the monster over the earth to their common doom...
...setting make up just one of dozens of striking exhibits in perhaps the smartest display of Native American culture ever assembled: the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, which opens this week in New York City. The museum is housed in the Beaux Arts splendor of the 1907 Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, which has been elegantly restored and renovated by Ehrenkrantz & Eckstut Architects. Its permanent collection boasts the million-plus artifacts collected by George Gustav Heye, a turn-of-the-century New York City banker who bought out Indian communities much the way William Randolph Hearst...
...stark contrast to this conspicuous opulence, one need only walk to the nearest metro station. Filled with lavish mosaics, frosted chandeliers and archways of stained glass, the metro offered a magnificent expression of Soviet splendor that belied the brutality of the era that produced it. Yet for millions of Muscovites who ride the trains each day, the metro no longer provides a voyage through a subterranean communist cathedral, whose effect is both sumptuous and muscular. Today it is overrun with beggars, reeling drunks and small-time entrepreneurs dragging trollies laden with crates and boxes...
...result is both eccentric and oddly endearing. Kirstein portrays himself as a child with "an inborn greed for artificed splendor," mesmerized by patterns and designs. One of the longest episodes in the book recounts his intense quest for just the right emblem to paint on his canoe paddle at summer camp. Citing an occasion when his father gave him a $20 bill, Kirstein remembers "the papery cash, its tough fibrous thinness inlaid with bits of red and green silk." The dreamy young man did not take much interest in academics, but he passed Harvard's entrance exam anyway. Once enrolled...
...Radcliffe like? Sorry, we didn't drag water in gourds from a well in the Square; but Harvard Square in the early '40s had no Holyoke Center, no sidewalk cafes, no cappuccino, no chic, no beggars and only one subway entrance. Farther off, Memorial Hall (with tower) rose in splendor above wide lawns (now gone, where traffic zooms through the underpass...