Word: banality
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...popular appeal regularly did a decade or more ago. True, his work is grounded in illustration and often fails to transcend it. Not a few of the images of Helga lying naked on a bed or tramping resolutely through the snow in her Loden coat have the banal neatness of things done for a women's magazine. Some of them, like the technically impressive watercolor In the Orchard, 1974, are as deadly in their "sensitiveness" as greeting cards. But there are some fine drawings here, moments of vision caught with attentiveness and precision, that have a lot more visual oomph...
...clearly legible in his three-eyed face. I was disappointed: Adolf Eichmann seemed quite normal, a man like other men -- he slept well, ate with good appetite, deliberated coolly, expressed himself clearly and was able to smile when he had to. The architect of the Final Solution was banal, just as Hannah Arendt had said...
Unfortunately Rushdie rests his case on banal political rhetoric; what little analysis The Jaguar Smile does offer makes a Big Mac look like a cordon bleu original...
Rhodes' digressions into the strategies and technologies of World War I and the saturation bombing of cities 25 years later demonstrate how those martial rules became a grisly form of accounting. It was a matter of cost per thousand, the fewest dollars for the most kills. In this banal light, a nuclear bomb is the pinnacle of efficiency, a macabre paradox because it was brought about by the best minds working within a great humanist tradition. For the sake of spiritual harmony, it could be said that The Making of the Atomic Bomb recounts the second greatest story ever told...
...resounds with remarks betraying his utter contempt and distaste for the entire experience. Who was so cruel as to force this assignment upon him? Most perplexing, however, is his description of not Bye Bye Verdi, but the musical genre itself, as "an art form that is perhaps the most banal and vapid vehicle in the American cultural desert...