Word: banality
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...Exploring a Shadow World": In order to achieve a more valuable contribution to sociology, Erving Goffman should study more closely the work of his putative intellectual forebears, Cooley and Mead. Surely social life is more than the banal playing out of prescribed social roles by "normal" social actors. Though social order is based upon a high degree of mutual expectation in role behavior, the viability of social life is fruitfully conceptualized in terms of highly frequent, residual rule-breaking by "normal" persons, as well as by supposed deviants. Are all human relationships as disingenuous as Goffman portrays them...
...this by way of pointing out that Any collection of sounds, from the most banal to the most complex and abstract, is enhanced by the right environment, spatial and spiritual. Ordinary music can be transformed into transcendental music if the conditions for it are right, if its purpose is felt at any one instant to be compelling, if it takes the listener's thoughts and sense-perceptions and embodies them in sound. Any music can be good music depending on your mood and the objective circumstances you find yourself...
...more. George Bonham, a New York education consultant, believes, however, that the need is greater than ever just because of the flood of journals. Last week Bonham began the publication of Change, a bimonthly magazine that is pledged to be "an irreverent foe of all that is arcane, banal and irrelevant in higher education...
...Gilbert and Sullivan Players have mounted a thoroughly banal version of Ruddigore at the Agassiz. That the show is nonetheless delightful is one proof more that nothing but a tone-deaf cast and orchestra can wreck these comic operettas...
...swinger with inventive images that linger in the retina. Not all of the film works. Its sometimes derivative surface is equally indebted to Jean-Luc Godard and shampoo commercials. Even Edgar Guest would have been embarrassed by the lyrics that Pop Poet Rod McKuen composed to match his banal score. But Same makes his cast perform with the precision and refinement of a repertory company...