Word: banality
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Lionel Nowak's Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Cello provided the evening's novelty. Nowak, who also teaches at Bennington, uses a lively semi-atonal style that is immediately appealing without being banal. The unique combination of instruments creates unusual timbre effects, and the performance (except for some excessive violin scraping) did the work full justice...
...back on reincarnation as a basis for farce, and told of a sculptress and an art critic who-after all sorts of meetings and matings, B.C. and A.D.-finally meet and marry in 1952. The play, which promptly closed, had only some scattered Kaufman wit to recommend it. A banal farce, it made the even worse mistake of being an altogether brassy fantasy that wisecracked wide open, hours before...
...London failed to find much true artistic classicism. Instead, without the usual nightmarish litter to distract them, critics and gallerygoers were spotting some old Dali shortcomings more clearly than ever. The London Times dismissed Dali's recent work as "trivial and irreverent . . . singularly banal." In the Daily Express, Critic Osbert Lancaster applied the most devastating label of all: Victorian. In his "laborious accuracy and painstaking attention to detail," said Lancaster, Dali reminded him of some "minor academician" of Victoria's Royal Academy...
...Ariane Allen Ross asked a Manhattan court for separation and alimony from craggy Editor Harold Ross of The New Yorker. His "mental cruelty," charged Mrs. Ross, who graduated from college a Phi Beta Kappa at 17, took several turns. Among them: calling her a "stupid, mediocre, banal bore." Furthermore, he refused to take her on social calls because he said her "stupidity, boring chatter and lack of poise embarrassed him and injured his reputation...
Mostly, Webster pictures the radio & TV audience at its moments of greatest strain: clubbed senseless by commercials, drowned in the soap-opera flood, lacerated by thrillers, held slack-jawed and limp before the endless, banal assault on ear and eye and mind. When his characters are caught with their sets off, they exhibit every nuance of the Walter Mitty syndrome: grandmothers speak to one another with the accents of private eyes; moppets dry-gulch their parents from behind the furniture; housewives confront "their startled husbands with all the teary grandeur of John's Other Wife...