Word: banality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...almost continuously since he was a teenager, and his buildings are Californian -- brash, unpretentious, ad hoc, construction-worker constructivist. For him, imperfect construction details and urban sprawl are now American givens: the challenge is to make buildings that are compelling in spite of off-the-rack materials and confused, banal surroundings...
...Brancusi, Miro, Calder, Giacometti and others -- but because they did not want to serve the social consensus in the way that statuary did. Consequently, few public commemorative sculptures made in the past 75 years have any real importance in the modernist canon; and conversely, modern public sculpture is mostly banal in the extreme...
Looked at analytically, Me and My Girl should not be so infectiously exhilarating. The lyrics are banal and devoid of wit; the songs, though hummable and winsome, tend to have the same simple beat; and the narrative -- a reworking of Pygmalion in which a cheerily crooked Cockney finds himself heir to an earldom and a fortune if he can learn to behave like a swell -- is comic but farfetched. Yet the gaudy $4 million production has an unabashed desire to please, touches of sprightly invention (a mounted suit of armor abruptly walks offstage; ancestor portraits come alive and tap-dance...
Their marriage seems idyllic. Rachel is happy being a housewife and even more happy being a mother, and Mark remains in love with her. The two renovate a house together, perhaps the ultimate demonstration of yuppie love, and throw dinner parties for their friends. Of course such banal eighties-style romance could not last forever, especially with a man who (pre-maritally) would bring his girlfriends to his best friend's house for lunch...and leave them there. Rachel is about eight months pregnant with their second child when she discovers Mark is having an affair...
...tribal rhythms, proved to be a big hit at the recent Amnesty International benefit concert. But old Gabriel fans are going to hear little or none of his former complexity on So. Instead, Gabriel has filled this album with a bunch of love songs that are equally pretty and banal. In short, this will probably be the best Phil Collins album ever made...