Word: cliches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cliché of crime reporting that the murderer is described as polite, gentle and law-abiding. Richard Herrin, a courteous, religious chicano who had made it through Yale, certainly fit the nice-guy stereotype-at least until July 7, 1977. That morning, at the Scarsdale, N.Y., home of his girlfriend, Bonnie Garland, 20, Herrin, 23, smashed Bonnie's skull with a hammer as she slept. A few hours later, half-naked and covered in her blood, he surrendered to police in upstate New York, confessing that he had killed...
...idea. To say, as many Americans did after Watergate, that the "system works" is only partly true: the constitutional system, in this case, with a lot of luck, did work. The important lesson that Watergate established is that no President is above the law. It is a banality, a cliché, but it is a point on which many Americans, possibly including Richard Nixon himself, seem confused...
Mention video to some people and watch their faces fall. If the cliché of "modern sculpture" used to be a piece of stone chewing gum with a hole in it, and that of "modern painting" was a canvasful of drips, then the cliché of "video art" is a grainy closeup of some U.C.L.A. graduate rubbing a cockroach to pulp on his left nipple for 16 minutes while the sound track plays amplified tape hiss, backward. Video art has not yet shaken off its reputation as clumsy, narcissistic and obscure...
...word around the corral is that with his new novel, Nobody's Angel, Thomas McGuane rode into town, swung open the doors of the saloon and single-handed transformed the saddleworn clichés of Western fiction. The irony is that McGuane's fifth novel is his first set in the West. The Sporting Club, his debut, occurs up in Michigan, Hemingway country, while his best novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade, takes place in Key West (again Hemingway turf), where McGuane lived and worked. Although McGuane, 42, moved to Livingston, Mont., in 1968, he has not mined...
...fabrics by pattern, texture and color so that clothing takes on for a second the quiet shimmer of a 17th century Japanese print. Surprising combinations of garments-leather pants as part of a suit, a long jacket over foreshortened slacks, a vest worn over a coat-that scramble clichés and conventions into a new and effortless redefinition of style. A functional celebration of fabric. A reshaping of traditional geometry with witty contours, sudden symmetries and startling vectors. A new sort of freedom in clothes. An ease, the Armani ease. And that, as we say in French, is just...