Banal

It upset me greatly to see the Los Angeles Times' reporting on Christo's press conference almost exclusively concerned the issue of liability. What a banal reduction for such a visionary project. What a sad commentary on our society in which the focus of a tragedy becomes its potential for litigation. CARLTON CUSE Burbank

An appealing and capable cast keeps the flicker of hope alive that Joanna Murray-Smith's play "The Gift" will be worth our time despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. But by the end of this 90-minute comedy even the actors seem done in by the effort of sustaining the illusion that there's something important going on. Murray-Smith, you might recall, is the Australian playwright who gave us "The Female of the Species," the low-wattage farce starring Annette Bening in the Geffen Playhouse's 2010 production.

If anyone still believes that Madonna possesses any veritable wit or charm, one only had to witness her pathetic "bad girl" persona with David Letterman. She was not only unattractive physically but personally and intellectually as well. What is most pathetic, however, is that she apparently believes she is acting clever by using the F-word or licking her lips repeatedly in a ribald and banal fashion, or delivering (for 35 minutes) third-rate adolescent sexual humor. Even sixth-graders at recess or high school football players in the locker room would have been more inventive and entertaining.

  Up until the moment he was sentenced to essentially life in prison, former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky spoke in defiant terms that showed no remorse, insisting that he was innocent of sexually abusing any child and that he was a victim of a conspiracy. His rambling 15-minute statement in Centre County court Tuesday reflected what some said was the sense of denial Sandusky had exhibited all through his trial, even when his victims described the pain, humiliation and mental torment of sexual abuse . “Others can take my life,” Sandusky, 68, said before his 30-to-60-years sentence was handed down.

As a former Voice of America correspondent, I would like to commend your Oct. 11 editorial, "An Honest Radio Voice." It's the most accurate description of what VOA does that I have seen published anywhere recently. The people of Afghanistan need the truth, not banal propaganda. The VOA needs and deserves greater understanding in this country, especially in Washington, of what it can and should do in times of crisis. Wayne Corey Laguna Niguel

One reader's opinion: "My Best Shot" used to be one of my favorite features--seeing the unusual through the eyes of fellow travelers. Has a new editor been assigned to this task? For the last few months, the images selected are most banal. SHERYL SADEGHI Los Angeles From the first page to the last page, the Travel Section is the best part of the Sunday Los Angeles Times. KEITH JOHNSON Los Angeles

Madonna , a "Taste Maker" ("What's Material to the Goddess of Pop," by Kristine McKenna, Dec. 20)? Was this some bizarre joke? Surely the notion is too absurd. But my rage gave way to reflection: Madonna--crass and classless, mediocre and manufactured, banal and brassy, self-obsessed and soulless. Alas, maybe she is the embodiment of the '80s. GREG PALMER San Dimas

Donald Kuspit complains that postmodern art "blurs the boundaries between art and life, to the detriment of the aesthetic" ["Back to the Drawing Board," March 6], then cites Coleridge that "the artist is about ... finding the moment of transcendence in the everyday, the moment of the lyrical in what looks banal." Wouldn't the very postmodern art that Kuspit decries fit this description? If the role of the artist is to find moments of transcendence in the everyday, how might Kuspit explain his choice for his exhibit of an almost pornographically depicted image of a naked woman standing in a barn leaning suggestively on the back of a donkey?

This was the worst season ever for TV programming--it was better when the writers were on strike. There were a lot of shows on hiatus, only to come back later in the season on a different day and time and then only for a few weeks. Except for a few new shows that arrived in the second half of the season ("Twin Peaks," "Equal Justice," "In Living Color," "The Marshall Chronicles"), the networks must really think we have mundane, banal minds. The 1990-91 schedule is just around the corner--I'm not holding my breath.

An economical (for the citizenry) near-term solution has two parts: Raise the speed limit to 80 mph in all but the right-most freeway lanes, and abolish the ludicrous imbecility of the diamond lane. The air fills with smog from accelerating and braking cars. The freeways and our lives are crippled by absurd exercises in social engineering. Los Angeles lives or dies by its effortless traffic flow, not by its banal political rhetoric or its venal dreamspinning advisers. ALAN M. SCHWARTZ Irvine

Through a fortuitous series of events, because someone knew someone who knew someone, I watched Friday's remarkable opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games by way of the BBC - which is to say, without commercials or Ryan Seacrest and with relatively little intrusion from the commentators. Later, I saw what the United States saw. Fellow Americans, you have my sympathy. Titled "Isles of Wonder" and conceived by Danny Boyle, the director of"Slumdog Millionaire," it was by turns moving, bizarre, funny and exciting and often surprisingly dark.

By Nightfall A Novel Michael Cunningham Farrar, Straus and Giroux 238 pp., $25 Revolving around Peter and Rebecca Harris ? fortysomething aesthetes in Manhattan's SoHo, he an art dealer and she the editor of an independent art journal ? Michael Cunningham's "By Nightfall" wants to be a novel of ideas, an inquiry into the relationship between beauty and meaning, but it can't sustain the weight of its own self-consciousness. Partly, that's because of Peter, who is an empty vessel, "a small figure on an undistinguished corner in Manhattan ?

If motion pictures that astound you or break new artistic ground are the reason you go to the movies, "Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief" is not for you. But then you already knew that, didn't you? As directed by the risk-averse and reliably commercial Chris Columbus, "Percy Jackson" has standard Hollywood product so written all over it that the fact that it is unadventurous and uninteresting can be figured out from the film's advertising and promotion material alone.

Why not abolish student fees at the University of California? And in exchange, how about requiring graduates to pay the university a percentage of their income for a while after college? That may sound outlandish at a time when UC is substantially hiking student fees and the state budget crisis has left the 10-campus system strapped for cash. But that's precisely why UC Berkeley public policy professor Robert Reich raised the idea to a commission trying to chart the university's course into the future.

No one disputes that the 1975 exhibition "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape" was a landmark show. Attendance at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., wasn't huge, and the presentation didn't introduce any unknown talent. But the show put a name to a phenomenon -- the proliferation of straight, seemingly uninflected photography of the banal, built environment -- and that name stuck. What remains cause for discussion is what exactly New Topographics meant and why the term and its attendant attributes have had such an enduring influence.

Every once in awhile -- not often, but it happens -- a film appears out of nowhere that doesn't go where you expect it to go or do what you expect it to do. "The Maid" has that particular gift of leaving you off balance in the best possible way, and whenever something like that comes around you owe it to yourself to check it out. To be honest, "The Maid" doesn't exactly come out of nowhere. It got two nominations, including best feature, at the Gotham Independent Film Awards earlier this week, and two key awards at Sundance: the jury award for world drama (besting "An Education" in the process)

Why is it not surprising that a sportswriter would want to dumb down the notion of what Arthur Ashe embodied by critiquing a sculpture? In describing the sculpture of Ashe at the U.S. National Tennis Center as offensive, perplexing, beautiful and ineffective, J.A. Adande [Aug. 30] never states what he thinks the mission of the artwork or the commemorative garden is in the first place. When he quotes the viewer whining about having to go into a long explanation to kids about what the sculpture "means," I couldn't help but think that artist Eric Fischl had done his job well.

I was delighted to see the feature on the great actress Gong Li ["China's Finest Exports," Aug. 6]. Here was an actress who took her time to enter the U.S. market because she didn't want to be viewed as just a "China doll." To my dismay, Rachel Abramowitz chose to objectify the actress in exactly such a way in the very first sentence of her article. I should have deduced from the article's title that Gong was to be treated as a commodity. I just didn't think that an actress of such immense talent and high stature would be likened to anything as banal as a noodle.

There's something unexpectedly poignant about Paul Shambroom's color photographs of factories, offices and nuclear weapons. Seen through the lens of economic free fall and the constant, ill-defined threat of terrorism, his meticulously composed images of production floors, cubicles and missile silos -- dating from the mid-1980s through the 1990s -- seem like documents of a bygone world, one that was industrious (if bland) and globally dominant (if plodding). It certainly wasn't the good old days, and Shambroom's project has never been nostalgic.

Wolfgang Tillmans is not an artist who operates from project to project, in distinct, consecutive series, but who proceeds, rather, along multiple interweaving paths at once -- some personal in nature, some sociological, some political, some highly formal. Though grounded in photography, his work assumes myriad forms and explores a near schizophrenic array of genres: snapshot, documentary, portrait, landscape, still life, even abstraction.