Word: staling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...idyllic vision, and Reed provides only one song--the bitter, funny "Turn to Me"--that offsets his "new sensations. As a result, most of the songs on the album remain too thin to merit lasting listening pleasure, instead merely showing a Reed content to rest on a by-now stale formula...
...developed between Carll and Jessie's father, an oldtime Communist who once left his family for two years on party orders and who now spends his time grumbling about his wife's bourgeois taste in furniture. The coincidence of husband and father immobilized by idealism gone stale is interesting. But in the end it hurts a novel in which there is no adult male with substance enough to cast a shadow. This is true even for minor characters; an interracial couple friendly to Jessie and Carll consists of a black wife who is a shrewd, forceful lawyer...
...staved around Harvard long enough to see the American Repertory Theatre's staging of his play Angel City. It's a classic example of wasted potential an accomplished director and cast took on a superb modern play then backed down when the going got tough The play criticizes stale, warmed-over fare posing as art, and that is exactly what the A. R. T. has dished up. Their production, while competent, lacks the vitality and even the horror central to Shepard's vision, and it lacks anything remotely like courage Shepard has a phrase for this kind of safe, deadly...
...jazz and creative improvisation is ignored by the movie producers as they stagnate in their own deathly juices Shepard looks for artistic form of expression with the elusive quality of "presence," describing it as a realization that comes to the viewer when he encounters something that's undeniable." Stale Hollywood movies and chicken-shit plays don't have that presence improvisational music, he says sometimes does...
...they aren't mouthing their political philosophy, most of the characters are engaged in stale, macho talk or puffing up with the self-important rhetoric of their tasks. "Christ you're a cold son of a bitch," says one character to Converse. "Ice, Commander," he replies...