Word: banalities
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ultimately the novel fails because Codrescu's ideas are more banal than fantastic. Conspiracy theory, millennium madness, channeling of spirits: these are dated visions, and the date on the can has expired. Angels hovering above New Orleans, Albert Einstein reincarnated in the body of gigolo and pessimistic condemnations of consumer culture no longer have anything to offer us. Perhaps half a century from now a Hist & Lit concentrator writing a thesis on millennium madness will come across this novel as yet another example of kitsch ushering in the end of the world...
...enough to excite the audience to interest; in the case of most television teen soap-operas, what makes the setting unusual is a remarkably generalized beauty, a kind of atmospheric attractiveness that immediately romanticizes the proceedings, however trivial. Here, there's a quite different kind of exoticization of the banal: these post-pubescents are forced to grow up in Israel--and they're Orthodox Jews...
...trends in Springsteen's music. Certainly, he has moved away from musicality and towards narrative, but it seems that--in certain instances, most notably his "Secret Garden" hit from the Jerry Maguire soundtrack--Springsteen has also made moves in the opposite direction, towards slickly produced, saccharine songs with depressingly banal messages...
...second half of the performance was entirely devoted to Richard Strauss's Symphonia Domestica. When the piece was first performed Strauss was criticized for his tastelessness to compose a symphony about the banal day of a domestic household. The program notes state that a critic even went so far as to call it a "joke in bad taste." Strauss's reply was "I did not mean to make fun. What can be more serious a matter than married life?" Strauss's domestic life is anything but dull. In the span of 24 hours the composer had to deal with...
Traditionally, stadium names range from the banal (Memorial Stadium) to the picturesque (Candlestick Park) to the fall-down-weeping-in-the-face-of-true-nomenclatural-greatness (the Polo Grounds). What stadium names haven't been is brand names. But that's changed. San Diego's Jack Murphy Stadium has become Qualcomm Stadium, which is either a communications company or a powerful nighttime cold medicine, depending on whom you ask. The Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis is now the RCA Dome, which no doubt annoyed the city's pilfered Baltimore Colts, who had already changed their letterhead once and would probably prefer...