Word: banality
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...problem isn't with taking nude photos of minors per se, nor is it with acknowledging that they are sexual beings. Sally Mann and Jock Sturges are two photographers whose unobjectionable work plies the same waters with, respectively, provocative and banal results (New York Times critic described the typical subject of one of Sturges' photos as "just a J. Crew model with no clothes to sell"). Their work, however, has also been the subject of recent protests, and one of Sturges' books, Radiant Identities, is cited in the Alabama indictment...
...tradition--as if we needed more. Happily, however, the Coens have established a tradition of their own: deeply weird characters (let John Goodman's great portrait of one of those paranoid know-it-alls who actually know nothing stand for the mad multitude this movie contains) embedded in profoundly banal settings (much of the film is set in a bowling alley). So even when they don't achieve the glorious farce of a Fargo, there is always something fascinating about following the Coens' rapt gaze as they peer into the American nut bowl...
Each ethnic group is a square in the multicultural patchwork that is Harvard, each with its own bright colors and designs. Nguyen, in his attack on the "self-segregation" of ethnic groups on campus, attempts to mute the brilliance of our individual colors by blending them together into a banal, uniform fusion--and he does this, ironically enough, in the name of multiculturalism. BETH A. GOLDSTEIN...
...face that statement may sound so banal as to be meaningless. Everyone knows sex is involved. My point is different. Sex is the whole ball of wax. If the scandal mortally wounds Clinton, it will be because the public understands the relationship he is alleged to have forged with Monica Lewinsky. It will be because they had sex and because of the kind of sex they...
...comic is set in a banal yet bizarre near-future world, in which voodoo dinosaur zombies can run amuck in a 24-hour convenience store, or the clerical error of some guy in shipping can cause you to wind up wearing the right arm of a lycanthropic astronaut. Schrab calls this aesthetic "surreal"--indeed, one of the book's slogans is "Surreality just got funky!"--but that doesn't seem quite the right way to describe it. The key to understanding the "logic" of Schrab's universe is to realize that it's not the same sort of causality that...