Word: plastics
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...course, this was a laugh line. Back then, plastics was the reigning symbol for everything that was ersatz in American life, for the phoniness and stifling conformity of the adult world Benjamin was being asked to join. The word itself was an epithet, as in "Plastic Pat" Nixon or these Jimi Hendrix lyrics from the song If 6 Was 9, talked-sung with a straight face and an up-the-Establishment disregard for grammar: "White collared conservative flashing down the street,/Pointing their plastic finger...
Audiences today still get the irony of the Graduate line, although the aesthetic context has been altered now that, thanks to the rise of the postmodern sort of irony, cheesiness has hip cachet and plastic is no longer anathema. Indeed, the movie's mise-en-scene now has unintended resonances. While the filmmakers' intent was to fashion "a scarifying picture of the raw vulgarity of the swimming-pool rich," as Bosley Crowther wrote 30 years ago in the New York Times (this was an era when commentators were concerned with the social pathologies of the rich rather than the poor...
...Jack LaCovey, director of communications for the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI), puts it, "We had a bad rap, but that's changed now that people realize you can make plastic products with high precision and high performance." Mr. Maguire's advice, generally speaking, was sound: over the past 30 years, the plastics industry has grown faster than the nation's gross domestic product. "The Graduate got it right," says Allan Cohen, who studies the industry for First Analysis in Chicago. "There's a lot of wisdom in that film...
...walls of Christie's salesrooms in New York City are like a faux castle, lined with plastic stone and fake vines, but there were real royal relics up for grabs there last week. More than 1,000 potential buyers, a phalanx of reporters and dozens of young Christie's employees in little black dresses watched Christie's chairman LORD HINDLIP auction off 79 of DIANA's castoffs--some lovely, some dated, some plain hideous. The "Up Yours" dress, right, so called because Diana wore it to stunning effect the night Charles admitted his infidelity on TV, was an early favorite...
...they stowed it in the trunk of Marcel's Buick. On his way back to Roswell, Marcel stopped at his home to show off the booty. Marcel's son Jesse Jr., now 60 and a doctor in Helena, Mont., remembers being awakened by his father and shown tinfoil, plastic, "beams or struts" that seemed metallic, and some strange markings that he thought resembled "hieroglyphics." The younger Marcel was only 10 at the time, but, he told TIME last week, he recalls that his father "was pretty excited, and I kind of think he said 'flying saucers...