Word: cliches
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Revolt Against Pomposity. In the view of his followers, Mort Sahl represents a new and growing feeling, described rather breathlessly by Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as "a mounting restlessness and discontent, an impatience with clichés and platitudes, a resentment against the materialist notion that affluence is the answer to everything, a contempt for banality and corn-in short, a revolt against pomposity. Sahl's popularity is a sign of a yearning for youth, irreverence, trenchancy, satire, a clean break with the past...
...masterpiece on hi-fi ends with a family living in their garage and using the house as a speaker. When he read that people were daubing themselves with instant skin tan, he moaned: "If you can't believe in the sun, what can you believe in?" Psychoanalytic clichés are seldom spared. Once, says Sahl, a bank robber slipped the teller a note saying: "Give me your money and act normal." The teller replied: "First you must define your terms. After all, what is normal...
...Bayreuth, Wagner's grandson Wolfgang was up. to his old tricks: stripped down, sparsely lighted productions designed to free the stern old gods of Valhalla from heavy, cardboard-shield and plaster-throne cliches. But by now, this once revolutionary style has produced some bothersome clichés of its own. The basic stage set of last week's Ring was an eight-ton, segmented concave disk looking somewhat like a huge radar antenna. In the second and fourth Rheingold scenes it was used intact, tilted toward the audience to suggest the rugged slopes of Wotan's mountain...
...STARS IN THEIR COURSES, by Harry Brown (362 pp.; Knopf; $4.50), is based on an intriguing idea. The author evidently meant to rescue the cowhand from the raunchy cliché of sex and six-shot violence, hoping to demonstrate that the Western hero can hold his own with the Homeric. Arch Eastmere, the tall, silent type home from a couple of seasons of dark adventure in the South, is a mean hand with a hair-trigger .45. He makes a natural enough Achilles. Percy Randal, the grey old rancher, proud of his sons and his stock-rich kingdom, is clearly...
...this year stocks have twice rebounded strongly after piercing the 600 mark on the Dow-Jones industrial average, leading Streeters to believe that that was probably the market's low for the year. Equally important, Wall Streeters were beginning to have doubts about the coming "1961 recession," a cliché believed in a few months ago as if it were an established fact. What gave them pause was the steadiness of the economy, the prospect of more defense spending, and easier credit engineered by the Federal Reserve...