Word: dulls
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...ultimate instance of American mixed feelings. Our popular culture? Spiffy, spectacular: Billie Holiday songs, Krazy Kat, Preston Sturges movies, Ernie Kovacs, the Four Tops, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Dylan, E.T., even blue jeans, Whoppers and soda pop. But ask again, on a dull, gray, Spenglerian day, and the view is altogether different. Alarming, appalling, totally awesome. The critic Dwight Macdonald called pop culture a spreading ooze back in the 1950s, when Sylvester Stallone was still just a boy. Today America's righteous pop thug is huge, ubiquitous, swaggering from one medium into the next and the next...
Vigeland fails because he has done no real reporting. For long stretches of the book, he quotes verbatim or closely paraphrases dishwater-dull documents, never showing that he has done the legwork that would enable him to offer some insight into his topic. As a result, Vigeland has had to pad this book with such things as lists of headlines from The Crimson's front page, titles of memos, lots of names, and idiotic descriptions of office buildings--for example, "The carpet is light blue, and there are large windows in all the outer offices, with more glass...
...dozens of his good friends and relatives--could have been to a disquisition on Old Money in Boston and its influence at Harvard. But instead, we get a soft, silly chapter that does little more than recreate a day in the life of George Putnam. And a pretty dull day at that...
...Lopez. His paintings come out of the most patient scrutiny in contemporary art. The panoramic view of downtown Madrid that is the show's centerpiece took eight years to finish, from 1974 to 1982. Muted and austere, almost palpably grimy and smoggy, it sets forth miles of the dull high-rise architecture of Franco's economic boom with a dedication to truth that surpasses Canaletto...
...omitted. Conspicuously absent is any mention of the most recent Harvard crisis of student demonstrations in the '60s. Clearly, such a short book cannot include all significant events in the University's formation. Yet the lack of any detailed examination of some tumultuous events makes Harvard history seem excessively dull and rosy...