Word: oilcloth
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...perhaps one of the first ever lifestyle brands (the Courier-type logo, which was inspired by a magazine headline, dates from 1954 and has been stamped on clothing and home wares ever since). The company was started in 1951 by textile designer Armi Ratia, whose husband Viljo owned an oilcloth-printing company that was struggling as a result of postwar shortages. Ratia was determined to set about turning the scarcity of fine fabrics, caused by postwar rationing, into an advantage by hiring designers to create inexpensive screen-printed cottons emboldened with color and exuberant pattern. That May, Ratia staged...
...Huron Avenue, is a jewel in Boston's somewhat chintzy crown of Italian restaurants. Aside from its pleasant atmosphere and consistently excellent food, Trattoria Pulcinella boasts the additional advantage of proximity. The restaurant's warm, rustic interior is cozy on slower nights but can become cramped as the oilcloth-topped tables are filled with people. Ochre colored sponge-painted walls lend warmth to the room, and empty Chianti bottles swing demurely from the wooden-Vegas ceiling. The highly romantic effect is heightened by a solid wine list. Appetizer specials include mixed greens topped with diced truffles and juicy slices...
...direct mail evoked only two names: Montgomery Ward and Richard Sears. Ward, a Midwest traveling salesman, had a simple idea: "Sell directly to the consumer and save them the profit of the middleman." In 1872 he published a one-page listing of 163 items, from red flannel cloth to oilcloth table covers, and mail order as we know it today was born. Fourteen years later, Sears, a Minnesota railroad-station agent, decided to mail a few $12 watches to his peers for $14 apiece. When the ploy worked, Sears hooked up with a Chicago watchmaker named A.C. Roebuck to establish...
Nowhere is its delight in the ironic life of overlaid signs made clearer than in the use of collage, which Picasso invented and Braque rapturously extended. The caning in Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, is mechanically printed oilcloth, and its presence in the tiny painting -- worked over with that fierce slanting clutter of painted images, newspaper, glass, cut lemon and so forth -- is a double play with signs, not the insertion of something real into a fiction...
...grit and the incidents for flat-out comedy; it stolidly refuses to kindle the spark of romance between Kay and her swains; and while her girlfriends at the plant seem ripe to make an oddball ensemble, Director Jonathan Demme deflects their few chances for feminist fun. Through the oilcloth of nostalgia one can still spot some fine performances. Hawn unerringly registers Kay's every emotion with the wide-eyed intensity of a six-year-old; Christine Lahti is a delight as the tart cookie who lives next door; Holly Hunter shines as a brand-new war widow. With their...