Word: pedestrian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rake's Progress, the most depressing waste of a good libretto (by W.H. Auden and Chester Kailman) in 20th century opera. Neither Soprano Elizabeth Hynes' touching Anne Trulove nor Raymond Leppard's sympathetic work with the orchestra could raise the music above Stravinsky's cynically pedestrian level. Strauss's Daphne, written when the composer was 72, is a tired piece, with only one touch of genius: the wizardry of the instrumental passage depicting the mythic heroine as she turns into a laurel tree. As Daphne, Soprano Roberta Alexander sang with an unusually pure lyric voice...
...what television does uniquely, the transmission of experience-what was it like?-is a rare and accidental accomplishment. Television has become something to listen to from the next room. So has television news." Frank scorns "split screens and zooms and star bursts and insets and flip-overs" to give pedestrian words a visual interest, or the trite use of canned "truck shots down the aisles of supermarkets, wheat pouring into a boxcar, a slow zoom into the Capitol dome." He sighs for a past day when the camera was not so much the servant of the word...
...first ripoff, and a pallid one at that. It proceeds at a pace that must seem stately to tots reared on TV cartoons and the current batch of Saturday matinee-type features. It rarely ascends into exhilaration or slumps into camp. The direction of some actors is pedestrian, if not oafish. But as a lavish vehicle for the talents of Effects Wizard Ray Harryhausen, Clash offers delights to the eye and spirit of every moviegoing adult who has wanted to revisit the dreams of his youth...
Perini Corp. contractors for the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) Red Line extension moved the building to ease pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks and along Mass Ave, Paul F. Wheeler, a project engineer for the company, said yesterday...
Nearly every issue contains a major article or two of "fact," as the staff calls anything that is not fiction or humor. "Fact" pieces increasingly run on longer, are more pedestrian in the telling, and are heavily weighted toward the scientific. Shawn acknowledges that some articles can be hard going. "We don't want them to be any more accessible than a piece is that does not distort the science that is being written about." (On that ground, why not staves of music in the music reviews? Shawn smiles: "If it did come up, I'm afraid...