Word: plainness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brand names in television have been as successful in recent years as the Hallmark Hall of Fame. Its tony TV movies, usually uplifting slices of Americana (Sarah, Plain and Tall; Promise), have consistently won Emmys as well as high ratings. O PIONEERS! (CBS, Feb. 2, 9 p.m. EST), Willa Cather's 1913 novel about the Nebraska frontier, must have seemed an ideal Hallmark project. It is certainly ideal for Jessica Lange, one of those over-40 movie actresses who are increasingly turning to TV for "mature" roles. As Alexandra Bergson, the Swedish farmer's daughter who tames the "wild land...
...select group of officers to hold on to their privileges while Algeria sinks further into economic decay. "I would not be surprised to see factions of the army break away and begin fighting the officers who are now in power," he warns. Whatever the outcome, it is plain that the military has not imposed a solution -- it has merely postponed the day of reckoning with Algeria's Islamic forces...
...approaching 50, a burned-out crusader for women's causes who had not had time in 20 years to unpack the boxes in her bare apartment. She was nearly eligible for a senior citizen's discount before she bought her first sofa. Despite her confident demeanor, she felt so plain she wondered who that attractive, articulate woman impersonating her on television was. Thin as a pinstripe, she nonetheless felt one Sara Lee cheesecake away from Weight Watchers. Once a lively writer who impersonated a Playboy Bunny to expose Hugh Hefner's cheesy idea of sex appeal and quipped that...
...then, when Pop came along, his reputation was only a little enhanced by it. Davis had delved images from the commercial culture of America before the Pop artists were even born. The classic one is Odol, 1924, in which the bent- neck bottle of a mouth disinfectant is presented, plain and planar -- name brand, slogan and all -- as its own icon, the ancestor of Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes. But Davis' work was grounded in Cubism, as that of the later artists was not; the Cubist scheme of fragments of media culture and packaging (newspaper headlines, labels...
...sovereign members. To dramatize the break from the communist -- and before that, Russian imperial -- past, the Presidents decided that the commonwealth's coordinating bodies, yet to be formed, would be based not in Moscow, the Soviet capital, nor in the czarist capital of St. Petersburg, but in the plain-Jane, utilitarian Belorussian city of Minsk...