Word: middlebrow
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...decades, however, an avant-garde of populist architectural historians has been looking at the strip and its larger-than-life iconography without conventional middlebrow contempt. The movement's manifesto is Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi's examination of crowd-pleasing architectural symbolism and buildings designed primarily for drivers. The irony is so American, so pop: cultural highbrows celebrating unself-conscious lowbrow vulgarity...
What follows is not mostly Mozart but mostly Hildesheimer. His book is an exercise in middlebrow beating that challenges the accepted premises of biography: a life is a story with a beginning, middle and end that exerts a satisfying dramatic unity and humanizes its subject. Such notions are wishful thinking and Philistine romanticism, says the author. His own view is that the meanings of Mozart's life and music are completely separate, that Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus in fact hid behind his nonverbal art. The author paraphrases Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni: "Don Juan is not someone who creates himself...
...that may seem a large order for what is, after all, a small picture, but, as everyone remembers, the old Star Trek television series was adept at wrapping up even bigger issues in an hour. This film represents a reversion to that agreeably middlebrow mode rather than a continuation of the first Star Trek movie's overweening manner. This time no one is out to zap the teen market with an imitation Star Wars. The special effects, for example, are modest and traditional, mostly models bopping around star fields. There is an easy sureness about Nicholas Meyer...
...also carry discreet institutional advertising, a combination that some viewers may nonetheless find excessive. Forty percent of its selection will come from the BBC; the rest will consist largely of children's shows, foreign films and Broadway and off-Broadway plays. The Entertainment Channel will have enough middlebrow programs, claim its executives, to make it something broader than the other cultural cables. But those services will probably be its competitors nevertheless...
...Cary Grant, but both seem to be trying in their odd ways...The Attractions have to fill a lot of gaps here, which they do stunningly. Steve Nieve puts some jolly tinkling all over the album, but I can't help feeling that he's a bit of a middlebrow even as he's sending up middlebrow music. That's okay; I'm a bit of a middlebrow myself, and Elvis loves Cole Porter and Burt Bacharach. So "You'll Never Be a Man" comes out a dandy pop tune, Elvis blithely propositioning a poor woman who's "under...