Word: middlebrows
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...flipside of Broadway's surfeit of musicals, of course, is the alarming scarcity of straight plays. Aside from the occasional big-star revival (Paul Newman in "Our Town" earlier this season), Broadway seems to have completely lost its touch for the kind of middlebrow entertainments that popular playwrights like Neil Simon used to turn out with ease. But two recent shows have just arrived with hopes of changing that...
With his engaging middlebrow charm, deep religious convictions and deceptive shrewdness, Blair has more in common with a certain Texan President than with some of his British colleagues. And Bush could ask for no more steadfast friend in Europe. But Blair's close ties with America could cost him friends at home...
...heir of Miami Vice, look not to Mann but to Fastlane (Fox, Wednesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.), about two buddy cops who use--and destroy--confiscated sports cars and other pricey toys to catch high rollers. It disproves the theory that TV, a middlebrow medium, is neither as smart as the smartest movies nor as dumb as the dumbest. Fastlane is, blissfully, exactly as dumb as the dumbest movies. Made by the uni-monikered director McG (Charlie's Angels), it reproduces the high-gloss, empty-calorie experience of a summer action flick, down to the loud soundtrack and the black...
...case with the glut of corporate trance, progressive house and “chill-out” tripe on record stores’ shelves, this strain of experimental electronic music is regarded by middlebrow hipsters as “intelligent” fare. Yet it owes everything to the hedonistic sounds originally crafted by inner-city youth...
Relying on pleasure as a standard of judgment, Hickey has endorsed without shame some of the great middlebrow passions of the past century, from Liberace to Perry Mason. His essay on Siegfried and Roy, the illusionists who make whole pachyderms dematerialize, is the best meditation on a pop-culture subgenre since Susan Sontag met Godzilla. He is suspicious of art that claims to transmit transcendent truths. Jackson Pollock wanted his spattered canvases to represent universal psychic turmoils. Hickey loves them but says they are better regarded as freedom made visible. "They stand as permission for certain kinds of human behavior...