Word: staling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Today Porter's love songs often suggest stale valentines: "So taunt me and hurt me,/ Deceive me, desert me,/ I'm yours 'til I die,/ ... So in love with you, my love, am I." His comic couplets are another matter. "Good authors too who once knew better words/ Now only use four-letter words/ Writing prose,/ Anything goes" has the secret of eternal impudence...
...catastrophe, the Post also resembles the British popular dailies on which the Toronto Sun was modeled. Complains one Post veteran: "It looks like a newspaper in a clown suit." Others share the view of a reporter who says, "It is like having somebody let fresh air into a stale room-we needed it, but some people find it a little cold." Advertisers too are hesitant. David Huskey, senior vice president of marketing and sales promotion at Joske's, a department-store chain, says, "I do not buy advertising based on graphics and color. We are going to have...
...significant prop or two, or else labyrinths of neo-Bayreuth gloom where spotlights jabbed accusatory fingers through banks of theatrical fog. This design orthodoxy, based on texture, shadow, "sublime" cavelike space, was a necessary reaction against older conventions of the painted background: the unenchanted tempera forest with every stale leaf in place. But it left out color, and the main reason for Hockney's success onstage was that he was able, with dazzling virtuosity and conviction, to put color back...
Likewise, the filmmakers offer up a stale love triangle between the three friends, whereby one (Hackman) is torn between a television career and a woman (Cassidy) who in the meantime is falling in love with a mutual photographer friend (Nolte). While the whole menage a trois sounds as though it has possibilities, it is not developed too deeply and in the end it gets rather tiresome...
...which may at first appear stunningly obvious as we sit munching on stale popcorn in the air-conditioned civilization of some urban movie theater. Ballard's remarkable achievement consists in translating this awareness, seemingly so self-evident, into images that work powerfully on both aesthetic and intuitive levels...