Word: terras
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Menopause is not exactly terra incognita. Edith Bunker dithered through a few hot flashes on All in the Family. Kathy Bates' mood-swinging character in Fried Green Tomatoes tore down walls and built them back up again while Jessica Tandy exhorted her to "take those hormones!" and get on with her life...
International TV programming is the great terra incognita for American viewers. The occasional British mini-series or Australian soap opera makes its way to these shores, via PBS or cable, and news sometimes filters back about the latest hit on Japanese TV or those funny foreign versions of Wheel of Fortune. But for most of the U.S. audience, TV in the non-English-speaking world remains trapped in the twilight zone...
Given the high finish of his marbles, the roughness of his terra-cotta models comes as a surprise. In the first heat of exploring a motif, Canova worked as quickly and directly, almost, as Rodin, squeezing and knifing the clay to slab out the shapes. On occasions, he could compress a remarkable charge of emotion into these little studies: in one of them, the curve of the long neck of Antigone weeping over her dead brothers has much the same shape and, in miniature, some of the same tragic force as the woman's head in Picasso's Guernica...
...Museum is good-size but hardly expansive. The interior is lucid and properly restrained. It is, in Venturi's famous phrase, a "decorated shed." Around the front doors, the facade is a riot of color, pattern and material: red granite topped by green, blue and yellow tiles, zigzags of terra cotta, bluestone squares and vaguely Moorish arches in sandstone. A grand staircase runs the length of the building, paralleling the street outside; in fact, the stairs become something of an interior street, giving on to an open-front mezzanine cafe three-quarters...
Most perplexing of all was the terra-cotta bath scrubber, a $5 cookie-shaped object with the texture of a cheese grater. Its purpose is to scrub off skin flakes. This object seemed to symbolize the Origins mentality: "Look at me! I'm mortifying my flesh even though I'm also indulging in expensive toiletries!" Maybe the bath scrubber would make a good gift for your favorite ascetic, but a real cheese grater would work just as well--and be more useful around the house...