Word: plainness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...while. He survives as the last word in a hipster style all the more fascinating for its plain links to squaredom. The minute that grunge thing came along, circa 1990, you knew it was only a matter of time before Sinatra and the Rat Pack came back into fashion. Uncombed hair and flannel shirts cried out for a counterattack of sharp dressing and flip courtliness with women. Thus "lounge music," cool and dressy, then swing music, hot and dressy, plus a bar scene where lounge lizards aren't dinosaurs anymore. Then the film Swingers, about two guys making their...
Cities of the Plain (Knopf; 293 pages; $24) is the concluding novel of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. Like All the Pretty Horses, winner of the 1992 National Book Award for Fiction, and The Crossing, published two years later, Cities tells the story of cowboy John Grady Cole and his trailmates as they drift south of the border to find respite from modern encroachments. The time is 1952, about when pickups started looking prettier than horses. The starting place is New Mexico, nursery to the atomic...
...movie's emblematic sequence, a horse named Pilgrim and an actor-director named Robert Redford stare at each other--the former nervously, the latter reassuringly. They're both handsome creatures, and the high Montana plain where this confrontation takes place is pretty too. But really, folks--endless minutes of screen time devoted to this silent, essentially motionless sequence? You get the feeling that someone is indulging himself and that his name isn't Pilgrim...
...nicotine and tar apparently makes some students nervous. While some smokers are eager to discuss tobacco culture, most are reluctant to reveal their names. They give different reasons for requesting anonymity, among them a fear of mothers who read FM, fear of harassment by health insurance companies and just plain embarrassment. Some didn't want their friends to read about their smoking habits; others were simply ashamed...
Appearances matter--and mostly due to wardrobe. "Pretty" or "plain," "skinny" or "plump," changing how one dresses will do much to radically shape the reactions of others...