Word: nouveau
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Comfort and practicality dictate each stitch of the chef pant. From their elastic waist to their tapered ankle to their baggy leg, these products of utilitarian chic can make or break the cooking experience of any nouveau chef. Traditionally made from swatches of dense checkered cloth or European hound's tooth, the pants' durable fabrics hide the tell-tale stains of sizzling sauces, sauteed entrees and crackling oil. Although such traditional patterns do add to the lifespan of any uniform, they also connote a certain type of old-school chef network that many younger chefs wish to move away from...
DIED. NATHALIE SARRAUTE, 99, experimental novelist whose book Tropisms (1939) jump-started the Roman Nouveau move ment; in Cherence, France. She ignored traditional approaches to plot and character, focusing on fleeting human reactions she called "movements...on the border of our consciousness...
...about humanity is much too ambivalent to be truly farcical. One leaves the theater unsure if it is trying to appeal to the audience's sense of justice or be a lightheaded comedy. By the end of the movie, no one has won--not the docile Pignon, not the nouveau riche Bronchant, not the show-stealing Daniel Prevost in the role of tax inspector Cheval. What starts off as a simple reversal of roles, with the idiot turning the tables on the yuppies, ends up not being a reversal at all; if anything, these characters seem more locked than ever...
This "fairy tale" disintegrated into a cafe-society postscript. Living in exile in France, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as they were officially styled, benefited from air fares and hotel suites paid for by nouveau riche hosts. They decorated the best nightclubs, the Duke always looking a bit bewildered. (There is a photo of them at El Morocco wearing matching paper crowns.) When the Duke died in 1972, he left Wallis 3 million [pounds] and a small tribe of pugs. She lived into a sad senility...
Still, based on reading the script (hasn't everybody?) and seeing scraps of the film, we get intimations of something fresh, handsome, grand. Naboo's golden underwater city glows like an Art Nouveau chandelier, while the Jedi knights' home base, Coruscant, could come from a spiffier Blade Runner. The new sidekick, a computer-birthed frog boy named Jar Jar Binks, is a vexing, endearing mix of Kipling's Gunga Din and Tolkien's Gollum, and speaks in a pidgin English ("Yousa Jedi not all yousa cracked up to be!") that will be every kid's secret language this summer. Even...