Word: banal
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...book, The Morning After, and Nancy Friday's 1996 The Power of Beauty, Promiscuities represents a tendency among contemporary feminist writers to emphasize reminiscence over research. This can make for lively reading, but not here, because Wolf fails to take her anecdotes to any useful end. The banal stories in Promiscuities are of young women who dated the wrong guys, who wish they hadn't lost their virginity so early, who were forced to deal with unplanned pregnancies...
...everyday life." From a slightly slatternly, stay-at-home bourgeois family (Christian Binet's "Les Bidochon"), to a grumpy, jaded modern student (Claire Bretecher's adventures of "Agrippine"), to a wide-eyed, pompadoured, out-of-place teenage suburban rocker (Frank Mergerin's "Lucien"), Francophone strips manage to make the banal intriguing, a worthy topic...
...Gray Matter, which opened the evening, was very short and nearly plotless. In context, however, that was acceptable. The play was a banal but appropriate introduction to the theme of the evening--exploring the Jewish mind. Ben (Zach Shrier '99), the main character, is a nice Jewish boy, whose Id (David Weiner '00) and Superego (Bede Sheppard '00) fight over control of his body. As the play ran through a standard repertoire of Jewish humor, it was most successful when the punkish, roller blade-wearing Id and stuffy, English-accented Superego take turns in dominating Ben. In these changes...
...doesn't expect Dr. Frankenstein to show up in wool sweater, baggy parka, soft British accent and the face of a bank clerk. But there in all banal benignity he was: Dr. Ian Wilmut, the first man to create fully formed life from adult body parts since Mary Shelley's mad scientist...
...presents us with an enormous collage of mass market postcards. The giant rectangle is filled with alternating rows of cards picturing an idyllic waterfall, crowds praying at Mecca and a fresh-faced Rob Lowe, circa 1987. By multiplying and juxtaposing these vividly colored, incongruous pictures, Gilbert and George render banal the images and provide witty social critique. Signed boldly in red by its co-creators, "Staring World" comments on celebrity worship and the information age's endless proliferation and confusion of images from the spiritual to the pedestrian...