Word: woode
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MICHAEL OVITZ Former H'wood titan sacks half his TV management co.'s staff. A power broker without power...
...Singapore for what they say is a total lack of cooperation. Despite its squeaky clean reputation, they say, Singapore's patrols never follow up on their alerts when a pirate they are pursuing slips into Singaporean waters. They add that the city-state is a hub for smuggling - oil, wood, rattan. But all agree that the dire state of the Indonesian economy - and the accompanying erosion of law and order - has pushed piracy to such unprecedented levels. "The salaries for sailors have gotten lower and lower," says the captain. "And it's getting more and more difficult to get legal...
...Before leaving Cochin, I return again to the Chinese nets. I read that old plaque. The nets were brought to Kerala between 1350 and 1450. I watch eight men lower one of the nets - a giant wood-ribbed umbrella, suspended from a 30-m wooden spine by a complex system of ropes and stone counterweights - into the water, hold it there for a minute, then haul it out by pulling the ropes like some ancient tug-of-war with the backwaters. The men win, but the prize is paltry: a few eels and some nondescript fish, no more than...
...Chinese have little interest in how Westerners live. When the 15th century Admiral Zheng He first sailed across the oceans, he returned to China with stones, ivory and wood. But when Marco Polo traveled to the Middle Kingdom, he brought back to Italy a wealth of information and discoveries. If he were to go to China today, he would probably return with no more than a Beijing opera mask and a badly stitched cheongsam...
Which other artists did he resemble? Not many, it turns out. Miro, in brief flashes. You could think of Westermann's strand of buckeye Surrealism and make him out to be a wood-butchering cousin of Joseph Cornell's, except that he didn't have Cornell's haunted preciousness, his extended nostalgia for a dream Europe. While Cornell was fantasizing about long-dead French courtesans like Cleo de Merode and building mossy palaces for paper owls, Westermann was chopping dovetails, perfect ones at that, and constructing scary, haunting emblems of death, loss and love...