Word: blanding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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DICK CHENEY Secretary of Bland is charming, winning debate. Big time. But did he overshadow his boss...
MERLOT "A step away from rose; sulfur; kerosene; a hint of strawberry; bland." --Glenn Vogt, general manager, Windows on the World
Miles Harvey's The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (Random House; 405 pages; $24.95) is the fleshed-out version of an article Harvey published in Outside magazine in June 1997. His topic then was a man named Gilbert Bland who had made a career in crime out of visiting major U.S. libraries and cutting maps out of valuable old books in order to sell these stolen treasures to unscrupulous collectors. Harvey's topic now has expanded to include accounts of how he researched and wrote both the original magazine piece and the subsequent book...
...fact that Robert Towne, the man wrote Chinatown for God's sake, was apparently uninspired to do anything more with the screenplay than rip off Notorious and throw in a limp virus thriller. Then you can blame Tom Cruise, who, despite his rogue's haircut, is stuck in extra-bland mode as superagent Ethan Hunt (when the Cruise mask is ripped off in the opening sequence, I was praying Chow Yun-Fat and his charisma would be underneath). And how did a television show that always revolved around the 'team' concept become the Tom Cruise vanity show anyway...
...When was the last time "nice" was the dominant trend in pop culture? Maybe when I was a kid, in the '50s. Back then, the mainstream was bland, solemn, reassuring, and I was a part of it. I thought that "Father Knows Best" was a documentary - that its ethos of domestic civility was the overwhelming norm. But I was also exposed to, and invigorated by, lots of what would now be called "transgressive art" - popular works that exceeded or demolished the official standards of probity. I attended horror movies, read vivid comic books, gorged on a diet of rock...