Word: cliches
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...grooves, and the guitar playing is predictably spectacular, but in the process of stretching the songs Clapton strips them of their intensity. Billy Preston's bouncy keyboards make 32-20 Blues sound like a Country Bear Jamboree performance of Chopin's Funeral March, while the snare hits and harmonica clichés on Traveling Riverside Blues sound like Johnson channeled through a Michelob ad. Clapton's vocals don't help matters. You can tell he's ecstatic to be covering his idol, but his exuberance increases the disconnection between the music and the material. Johnson was one dark dude; when...
...tales about sex, drugs, divorce or delinquency, it's little wonder many young readers scurry off to the fantasy section instead. But one writer of teen fiction has proven herself both frank and frankly worth reading. Malorie Blackman's 2001 best seller Noughts and Crosses transcended the kid-lit clichés even as it staked out disputed new turf for youth fiction. Its 13-year-old black hero, Sephy, starts out French-kissing her 15-year-old white boyfriend, Callum; encounters racism, alcoholism, depression and suicide; and ends up pregnant and alone when Callum is hanged for terrorism...
...more "democratic" ones, is that the former works. A manageable number of students actually show up in a classroom designed to accommodate them, bringing with them the books from which they can actually learn. If it ain't broken, don't fix it, goes the old American cliché, the flip side of which may well be more pertinent to the French: if it is broken, why not go ahead and try? The French system of higher education is broken to the core. At the level of higher education at least, it seems to me high time...
...French, however, know a literary sensation when they see one. Le Ventre de l'Atlantique (The Belly of the Atlantic), a bittersweet account of immigration and exile, is currently at the top of the French best-seller lists. The French daily Le Figaro gushed: "There are a thousand clichés about immigration, and in one novel Fatou Diome sweeps them all away." Diome, 35, has created a headstrong heroine, Salie, with a more than passing resemblance to herself. The character leaves her native Senegal for France where, after years of struggle and isolation, she eventually learns how to straddle...
...than what's on the plate? That really is putting a fresh stamp on Paris. The idea has taken root. Goodbye wicker, hello chintz. Café owners across Paris have been imitating the Costes' haute-design blueprint to the point where it risks turning into a new café cliché. How much does the Costes formula bring in? As a patchwork of private companies - or "an informal network whose members have been tied to one another since birth," as Gilbert, 54, puts it - they're not required to say. Pressed, Gilbert figures the whole collection throws off some j100...