Word: crassness
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...slow and fast Shifte Telli (a musical term meaning double strings) to the fastest, ecstatic Karshilama (meaning greetings or welcome). The New York dancers are highly eclectic, varying the pattern with all kinds of personal improvisations, back bends or floor crawls. But they do not strip. The striptease is crass; the belly dance leaves more to the imagination...
Koestler has no patience with the self-deprecating habit of contrasting a contemplative, spiritual East with a crass, materialistic West. The difference, he says, is not between spirituality and materialism but between Western philosophy-love of wisdom-and Eastern "philousia" (from the Greek word ousia, meaning essential Being), which "prefers intuition to reason, symbols to concepts, self-realization through the annihilation of the ego to self-realization through the unfolding of individuality...
...collected stories, the proofs are not always convincing. The compulsive violence that runs through these tales (notably Michael Kohlhaas, The Earthquake in Chile) is not odd in a man writing during the Napoleonic years. What is strange to find in a writer who is claimed by moderns is the crass hand of coincidence in the place of credible invention, the tears that stain letters, the use of brutalized detail in place of character-building...
...book turns luridly melo-traumatic when an interviewer commits rape-murder and suicide. The novel begins with the smile of a spoof-exposé, contorts to a smirk and very nearly ends as a smutty soap opera badly in need of soap. It is notable largely for the crass calculation with which author and publisher can manufacture an almost certain bestseller, as well as for one of its few serious points, made when Dr. Chapman is denounced as the egocentric charlatan he is: "You speak of love in numbers. Human beings are hardly numbers at all. No numbers...
...more reminiscent and easily resolvable tune. But it becomes increasingly cat-and-mousy, with a tune that introduces subtle dissonances, ominous themes, crashing chords. The Harrington family is slightly non-U and wholly nonunified. Father (Roland Culver) is a self-made furniture manufacturer, all the more defensively crass and philistine because of his contemptuously snobbish, culture-climbing wife (Jessica Tandy) and his contemptuous, muddled mamma's lap dog of a son (Brian Bedford...