Word: weirdly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Weird Display. Sex, however, is far from the only theme of the new theater of the bazaar. One Bendel window showed a woman gone mad, clawing at the walls. Another scene had several women staring at an apparent suicide surrounded by pill bottles. Occasionally everyday realism makes an appearance. One Candy Pratts kitchen scene for Bloomingdale's featured a real smashed raw egg on the floor, which had to be sponged up every night...
Such success has inured window designers and their bosses to the inevitable complaints. Mary Avant, designer for Foley's department store in Houston, put together a weird display called "Black Magic": two male mannequins in black jockey shorts, four females in black evening wear. All the figures were spray-painted black and had limbs suspended apart from the torsos. "A little old lady came in and screamed, 'Oh, God, how horrifying!' " relates Avant. The store manager shrugged off the protest: two days later Foley's had no more of the garments to sell...
...spend and possibly gain a lot more than that--without putting money on it, there just isn't that mush aesthetic interest in watching baying 70 lb. beasts barking, gasping and snapping after a tiny fake rabbit ten yards ahead of them on the track, attached to some weird automatic device...
Once seduced into their weird new world, converts are surrounded always by warm, supportive Brothers and Sisters and are reassured by smiles, friendly pats and handholding (called "love bombing"). Premarital sex, however, is banned, as are drugs, and the moralistic tone of the centers generally attracts those looking for discipline and order. The disciples sleep only five or six hours a day, eat simply and are assigned tasks such as domestic work, proselytizing or selling. In order to peddle their wares they may claim to be helping drug addicts, orphans, anybody-since such lies are merely "heavenly deceit...
...perennial bridesmaids of American fiction. Part of the problem is that the styles Elkin employs are beginning to show their age. His prose is creased by the crow's-feet of '50s black humor, it shows the slight stoop of Jewish realism and the weird droop of the surreal as well. There is no denying, though, that when Elkin puts them together-as he did in Boswell, A Bad Man, The Dick Gibson Show and now The Franchiser-the results are fresh...