Word: rococo
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...executive office in Bangkok's government House is a rectangular room painted a cool shade of blue. Thaksin's vast, mahogany desk sits before a portrait of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, two immense rococo urns and a cabinet of Siamese vases. His work space is clear, save for a Phillips computer and laser printer. The effect of sitting in this room, with its plush oriental carpets and quiet rush of air-conditioning, is a little like being submerged. Voices are muted. Movements seem unnaturally slow. It is as if Thaksin's aura of measured patience radiates outward, catching even his aides...
...public occasions and sometimes in private, too, members of the Meiji Elite discarded their traditional dress, once modeled after the undergarments of Tang dynasty Chinese robes, and began to wear European army uniforms, morning coats, ball gowns and top hats. Courtiers and other grandees adopted European-style aristocratic titles. Rococo, neo-Renaissance and neoclassicist buildings were erected. Concerts of European classical music were performed. A Prussian-style constitution was promulgated, a British-style navy built, a French-style bureaucracy developed and the Emperor, whose forebears had dedicated themselves to culture and ritual in the palatial seclusion of Kyoto, was boosted...
...Miyake and Hanae Mori appeared on the international fashion scene in the 1970s, it was a decade later when Paris really took notice. The era was one of excess: Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler were focused on enhancing shoulders with exaggerated padding; Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent were creating rococo fantasies of beading, silk and ruffles. Amid the froufrous and frills, Kawakubo and Yamamoto rolled out their collections and set Paris on its ear. The clothes were revolutionary, shocking - stark, unstructured and overwhelmingly black. Bewildered critics dubbed Kawakubo's first Paris collection in 1981 - with its frayed seams and misplaced...
...Some speeches fit the man and some don't. This one did. Bush's inaugural was hyperpoetic, filled with rococo imagery of "ghosts in the storm" and "travelers in Jericho." This time, it was plainspoken like the man: A little bit funny, a little bit tough. It was Andover and Midland. It had West Texas touches of humor but also echoes of Bush's grandfather, Connecticut sdenator Prescott Bush. When Dubya said of America "to whom much is given much is expected," he could have been talking about himself and his own privileged background. His talk about the nobility...
...purge needed after the increasingly routine, splish-splosh indulgences of the would-be heirs of de Kooning, Pollock et al. One thing that late AbEx clearly showed was that nothing is easier to feign than the marks of intense emotional feeling. Those marks too become conventional signs, like the rococo trills of an energetically dying diva. You may enjoy them, but not as unmediated passion...