Word: banalized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...admire: a planned hibernation of the spirit in which one evades any commitment to love, hate or passion. Instead of eloquence, the play offers truncated, disjointed sentences. Inertia usurps the role of action; the prevailing mood is torpor. All that Williams seems able to contribute is a little banal philosophizing about how the creation of art saps a man's life. Still, there is an axiom of the race track that a thoroughbred will eventually revert to form. One must never forget that, despite his present esthetic humiliation, Tennessee Williams is a thoroughbred...
...newfound success, McKuen has been called banal; he has also been called the best contemporary songwriter in the U.S. Some put him down as the greatest put-on since Tiny Tim; others insist that he is the only American chansonnier. If being a loner rules out success and commercialism, then McKuen is obviously a phony loner. If it means preferring solitude to stereotyped stardom, then he is at least a contented iconoclast. Or, as he says: "If I'm still alone by now it's by design/I only own myself, but all of me is mine...
...MOST conservative piece of the evening was Leonard Lehrman's String Trio, written with frank lyricism, at times slightly oleoginous, culminating in a strong last page of almost botanical beauty. The work is not wholly successful as its ostinato Intermezzo is banal. The piece is redolent of the elegaic Bartok but would be properly described as derivative rather than eclectic...
...there experienced moments of special intensity, whether feigned or actual. And such spirits are fully capable of interference with the ongoing business of putting on plays. Some months ago, I stood on the stage of Washington's scrubbed and refurbished Ford's theatre, and indulged myself in a rather banal reflection on the impossibility of playing comedy in the house where a hack Shakespearean once broke...
...understand better now why it worked. It worked because the people in charge thought that what it was about was obviously important--since action in our society is so rare, and since everything has its reason. The sit-in worked--not because the kids threatened violence, which is banal--but because they acted. That is all we have to do. And we should do it again, and quickly, if there is anything else we want. Because soon, dreary democracy will be upon the university. And then, people will despise men of action. Action will lose its value, then. There...