Word: crassness
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Some doubt that the drive toward more crass, kinky and violent porn will soon abate. English Professor Joseph W. Slade believes film makers are desperately searching for new taboos to break. It is a paradoxical and intriguing view. Says he: "They are attempting...
...professors have changed too. They now exhibit a "professorial worldiness" marked by "their eagerness to sell their advice, to fly to exotic meetings ground," and worst of all, by "their loyalty to the profession over the institution." As a result of the intrusion of the real world and its crass values upon Harvard's sacred terrain, the University has lost its sense of purpose, and is now simply "a shattered place, a loose congeries of interests and values and ideologies, peopled by men and women who are ferociously defensive of their notions of the right way to make...
Many of our contemporary educational problems and controversies can be understood as part of a persisting American ideological commitment to success-to a firm belief in its possibility, to a desire for proof of its achievement, here and now. Even Cotton Mather, no pagan hedonist or crass materialist or psychologically "oriented" suburbanite, wanted his children to prosper-and saw in such a fate for them a realization of himself. Today many of us fight for our children as if it were heaven itself we have in mind as we roll up our sleeves or bare our teeth. If public schools...
Certain Scrooges will always insist on staying aloof from all the holiday cheer. They will turn up their noses at the crass commercialism of it all, or they'll point an accusing finger at the jump in the suicide rate during the Christmas season. But perhaps the most pervasive, if not the most pernicious, effect of Christmas is the identity crisis it can cause among kids who are not white or Anglo-Saxon or Protestant. Little black kids find themselves on the knee of a big fat white man with a bushy white beard. And little Jewish kids mut live...
...hard to figure. Somehow Walter Hill, who directed Hard Times, has brought out something in Charles Bronson that's never been seen before, and done so in a crass-commercial and silly-ponderous film. ("What did you say your name was?" That's speed speaking, and yes, he's in bed with a prostitute smoking cigarettes after the fact.) The script is cumbersome, the soundtrack amateurish, the crowd scenes lifeless, the final moral conflict dance like and played so badly that you actually oppose the hero's crowning heroics. Yet it is, particularly for director Hill's first effort, stunning...