Word: plastic
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...wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841. And so believes American Composer Earle Brown, 42, whose music bears an unmistakable relationship to the plastic arts. Brown's work owes a debt to the mobile sculpture of Alexander Calder and the abstract expressionist painting of Jackson Pollock. His scores are graphic in their detail and precision, but he believes in a certain improvisation or mobility within a performance itself. Therein lies the influence of Calder, whose mobiles are made of 15 to 20 parts moving freely in space and changing their relationships with one another from minute to minute. Pollock...
...Thursday evening, several dozen people gather inside a dilapidated loft building, doff some of their clothing and begin a strangely primitive ritual. Joining hands, they wind around the room in a silent processional. Or they playfully hold one another aloft. Or they scurry, like lab animals, through a huge plastic maze. Rites of an oddball religious cult? High jinks by residents of nearby Haight-Asbury? Not at all. These outlandish ceremonies are actually "myths" performed with audience participation by Ann Halprin's avant-garde Dancers' Workshop...
...Atonement, the audience remained mournfully silent for an hour. In Masks, there was so much comic facemaking that the occasion literally turned into an orgy of laughter. Occasionally, Halprin's mythical world makes its own social commentary. In Maze, for example, the participants first filed docilely through a plastic labyrinth. Then they inexplicably destroyed it. Finally, after much indecision and floundering, they created an entirely new one. Explains Halprin: "I try to deal with ideas that are very common, basic and ordinary-sexuality, conflict, bewilderment, the sharing of tragedy...
...They Did It. The Rockefeller researchers, Drs. Robert B. Merrifield and Bernd Gutte, began their experiment with a tiny bead of plastic, onto which they hooked a 124-link chain of amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids, and, because all proteins, including enzymes, are made of amino-acid chains, the acids have been recognized for many years as the "building blocks of life." The exact sequence and identity of successive acids in the ribonuclease chain were recently established, and the Rockefeller team's job was to link them, one at a time. The painstaking process involved...
...surprisingly, Shiffert turns up his nose at Pampers. He points out that the plastic outer covers have to be removed before the paper filler is flushed down a toilet, and that it sometimes clogs up plumbing. P. & G. executives contend that clogging seldom if ever occurs. Some time ago, Shiffert's group hired a Manhattan market-research firm, Drake Sheehan/Stewart Dougall, which concluded that the No. 1 need of the diaper service is to develop an odor-free container. That task has been entrusted to the Arthur D. Little Inc., a management-consultant firm, and Shiffert claims that such...