gaudily

He ran into the storeroom and brought out a gaudily painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart began to play like a whole band.

Their dark sunburned faces, and long flowing hair, their legging, flaps, moccasons, and richly-dyed blankets, and their painted horses gaudily caparisoned, gave them so much the air and appearance of Indians, that it was difficult to persuade one's self that they were white men, and had been brought up in civilized life.

Looking next round the walls of the room, I recognized old friends wherever my eyes happened to rest--the gaudily colored prints; the framed pictures in fine needle-work, which we thought wonderful efforts of art; the old circular mirror to which I used to lift Mary when she wanted "to see her face in the glass." Whenever the moonlight penetrated there, it showed me some familiar object that recalled my happiest days.

The platform, as well as the caves of the house, were surmounted by gaudily painted railings, and the genius of Hiram was exerted in the fabrication of divers urns and mouldings, that were scattered profusely around this part of their labors.

We wish to become rich men, not in order to enjoy ease and comfort--all that any one man can taste of those may be purchased anywhere for 200 pounds per annum--but that our houses may be bigger and more gaudily furnished than our neighbors'; that our horses and servants may be more numerous; that we may dress our wives and daughters in absurd but expensive clothes; and that we may give costly dinners of which we ourselves individually do not eat a shilling's worth.

As a preparatory initiation ordeal he had to parade the principal business streets of Kingsport for a whole day wearing a sunbonnet and a voluminous kitchen apron of gaudily flowered calico.

Each had a yew or hazel stave slung over his shoulder, plain and serviceable with the older men, but gaudily painted and carved at either end with the others.

An ink-stained table, littered with pens, papers, and almanacs, an American cloth sofa, three chairs of varying patterns, and a much-worn carpet, constituted all the furniture, save only a very large and obtrusive porcelain spittoon, and a gaudily framed and very somber picture which hung above the fireplace.

REGRETS: Will's fame was brief; WILL HUNTING: Gaudily dressed Christine Hamilton lands a smacker on student Will Goodhand at a drunken party after the dinner (inset); SUNDAY; YESTERDAY

And this is far from the finest hour of Robin Wagner, the veteran Broadway set designer whose ground-breaking work was seen in shows such as "A Chorus Line" and "Dreamgirls." He seems to be on autopilot here, producing a series of uninspired setpieces that are neither evocative nor gaudily dazzling.

Other glamour poses include a 1950s Hollywood-style starlet on the beach and a gaudily made- up 1980s model in see through plastic shorts.

By now, Polke's puddles of paint, pools of color, tireless (and cliched) nineteenth-century steel-plate illustrations, modern benday newsprint imagery, gaudily patterned fabric, slack gesture and smudge are a dog's lunch of scarcely provisional indexes for paint and brush, surrogates equaling Ego, not Edit.