Word: mainstream
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Prevailing fashions in architecture, being fashions, tend to change course at just the moment they become mainstream doctrine. The effect (although not the intention, usually) is to make outsiders and stylistic slow learners scramble to catch up. Thus today, as the giant architectural firms have begun routinely gussying up their new high-rise towers in pseudoantique brica-brac -- fake Corinthian columns, pediments and pyramidal tops -- the cutting edge has glided past. As postmodern cliches become ubiquitous, in other words, the movement is becoming passe...
From his first eminence in the early '50s as the rage of syndicated TV, Liberace was a vision out of a closet yet to be opened in mainstream show business. The silken singsong voice, the candelabrum, the welded dimples and fluty presence, the references to his sainted mother Frances, all made him a conversation piece, a figure of fun -- the Gorgeous George of mid-cult music. As Michael Herr observes in his new book The Big Room, "Never before, at least knowingly, had a man ever had the big steel balls to show himself like that, and on television...
...Italy or South Dakota's Black Hills. Asian Americans cannot "assimilate" into the American way of life because already are American--that's why we love pizza, hate the Unions' pu-pu platter, cheer the Red Sox and boo the Mets (or vice versa). We cannot "separate" from the "mainstream" because we already have visited Disney World, attended St. Paul's Academy or the Harvard School, and cannot help but dream of B-School then Wall Street success. Lewison...
...including Dick Francis and Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, 66, has gracefully shattered the rules. In her best and most ambitious tale to date, A Taste for Death -- her ninth mystery novel in 24 years -- James has become a kind of Le Carre of crime, blending the calmer depths of mainstream fiction with the white rapids of the genre, to produce something quite different indeed...
When not teaching, Buchanan runs a 400-acre farm near Blacksburg, Va. He was rumored to have been a candidate for the Nobel award in 1984, but this year, he says, "I had no premonition this would happen. I was shocked." So were some mainstream economists who have paid little attention to Buchanan's work. One M.I.T. professor last week called public-choice theory "unsophisticated." Buchanan admits that his ideas are "not standard" but points out that many of his theories are "simple applications of common sense that the academics all forget about...