Word: banalized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Autumn of 1997, Yau Leung was just starting to earn a minor artistic reputation when he slipped off a ladder in his studio, hit his head, and died. That the light should have left the eyes of Hong Kong's greatest photographer in so banal a manner makes contemplation of his passing especially difficult. If photographers are not felled covering disgraceful coups or scrappy jungle wars, posterity likes them to advance to gurgling senility, feted by models, retrospectives and hand-numbered editions. There is no romance in death by lapse of concentration - especially not in a man whose defining artistic...
...Chanda also draws plenty of parallels with our own day. It's hard to tell whether these comparisons are contrived, elucidative or banal, but they mostly entertain in the way that popular history can. For example, he writes that today's sprawling multinational corporations are modeled on the crown-backed trading houses of England, Portugal and Holland, whose empires themselves followed a continuum stretching back to the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia. He contends that the silver and gold bullion mined in Mexico and Peru and shipped across oceans in galleons by the conquering Spanish preceded the convertible currencies and credit...
...chatting men notes, the tart fumes coming from smokes like his own signal that tobacco isn't the only substance being inhaled here. "This," he says, gesturing with a hashish-stuffed joint, "is becoming almost as common as this," raising a glass of red wine. "It's so banal anymore that even cops scarcely notice so long as you don't blow the smoke into their face," he says in a blas? tone. (When asked for his name, however, he snorts derisively "Tamere," the French equivalent to "Your mama...
...Svengalis are a noble and often valuable tradition. Berry Gordy was notoriously tyrannical during the heyday of Motown Records, but compare the timeless, distinctive singles the Four Tops or Diana Ross did for the label with the banal, forgettable ones they did after they left. Spector, for his part, brandished a gun in the studio, intimidating everyone around him. But the hits he crafted for the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers are the music equivalent to the Sistine Chapel; the flimsy singles those acts (and many others) released after they broke with him are paint-by-numbers pop. As much...
...need only occasionally scan the Crimson editorial pages to see our overwrought campus political culture in action. To follow up on his banal campaign promises, UC President Ryan A. Petersen ’08 wrote a February op-ed proposing an e-mail “hotline” to monitor more close the quality of teaching fellows. To record her unwavering advocacy for greater “gender equality,” Dems President Brigit M. Helgen ’08 authored a pair of ho-hum editorials supporting more women in leadership positions. And, most self-serving...