Word: velvets
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Cars have become the main expression of the Angeleno's personality. A black man who works in a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard proudly cruises Hollywood in a '56 Chevy covered in fuzzy chartreuse velvet, its wheels colorful revolving bull's-eyes and its fenders painted with slogans expressing the man's feelings (INTEGRATION...
...just off the coast, felt an echo of what was lost to them--the fertile plains of the nation's heartland. They scooped up the dark loamy earth, letting it run through their fingers, they drew deep lungfuls of the jasmine-scented air, they looked long on the green velvet of the hills, the gold velvet of the fields, and they stayed to farm. Still others bitterly surveyed the salty flats of the great desert, the bare sands bleached bone-white, and in their bitterness found a kinship with the arid landscape. They settled at scattered desert springs...
...what unites them is an impassioned love of ornamental detail. Russia's appetite for embellishment could almost be measured in pounds per square inch, as with the extraordinary red velvet saddle on which Ivan the Terrible rode, its seats and flaps uncomfortably encrusted with gold embroidery and pearls. Or with a less overpowering chalice-Italian in manner if not in taste-made for Peter the Great's mother in the 17th century...
...thought of old films rather than old books. Lush Dmitri Tiomkin sound tracks seemed to leap from the obituaries to strike Remarque's patented theme: grand passion, grand despair in wartime. In one's stereophonic memory chambers, violins throbbed counterpoint to far-off guns and the crumpled-velvet whispers of thwarted lovers. It is as if Remarque's art were defined by one of those overstylized love scenes in Arch of Triumph between Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman-two old pros struggling to come through with tears and accents after all those years in Hollywood...
Until recently, the only place that rivaled Saigon as a U.S. diplomatic hardship post was Paris-if one happened to be assigned to the Viet Nam peace talks. Inside or out of the velvet-curtained ballroom in the former Hotel Majestic, where the sessions are held, American negotiators have had little to do over the past three years beyond eating canapes and trying to keep their tempers while their Communist counterparts gleefully played to the grandstands. "For the first time anyone could remember," says one U.S. delegate, "Foreign Service types in Paris were requesting reassignment to places like Ouagadougou, where...