Word: knickknack
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What has been less widely reported is that Mutannabi Street doesn't have so many bookstores anymore. Though low tables of (mostly technical) volumes line the sidewalks, they seem to be equaled or outnumbered by stationery, electronics and knickknack shops. One storefront is stocked entirely with stuffed toys. According to Fufuli, the ratio is now 10% books, 90% other stuff. He is exaggerating, but the change is clear. "Most of the old owners were killed or left because they were afraid, so these stores opened up. Now," he added, with a curmudgeonly frown, "all the Iraqi people want is valentines...
...could say that about the Experience Music Project, Gehry's first major public building to open in the U.S. since he did Bilbao. Located at the foot of that beloved American knickknack, the Seattle Space Needle, the EMP is an "interactive" rock museum costing $240 million (more than $100 million for Gehry's building, the rest for the museum installed within it). The money comes by way of Paul Allen, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder, who has his own rock band, a lifelong thing for Seattle native Jimi Hendrix and enough cash to indulge his pleasures...
...homogenized from some small-town, never-never ideal, Michael's Magic reimagines the swank of transatlantic liners. The cabins, larger than those on competing lines, are handsomely appointed, with burled-wood paneling and dressers shaped like steamer trunks. Don't bother trying to pick up that silver-plated knickknack in a stateroom niche; it's glued to the shelf...
...series of cups followed the eggs, through the 1960s and '70s. In a sense the cups were Price's bread-and-butter work -- they were popular, and no California collector's knickknack shelf was complete without one -- and yet they were consistently inventive and spry, displaying a constant buzz of fantasy and a growing mastery of color. Sometimes, as in Gaudi Cup, 1972, the intensity of the glazes seems to have literally broken down the form of the ceramic into tiny glowing shards. This sense of color as a veneer on a flat surface gets turned into a form...
...second to believe that the door has slammed shut right behind him. A paradise is by its nature a fine and private place, a deserted island or a solitary glade; Adam and Eve would have seemed considerably less charmed had they been surrounded by squawking kids, knickknack vendors and a row of time-share condos. Every visitor hopes to keep his idyl to himself; he's in heaven, and hell is other people. "The place is a Utopia," he's likely to tell his friends, "but there's no point in your going there. I saw it pristine...