Word: kitsched
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...album, wedged between two rock heavyweights, is the country-tinged ditty "Co-Pilot" which reminisces over adolescent infatuation. The dreamy song begins a '60s high school love song kitsch and quickly leaps into sappy, swinging obsession with the first lyric. Despite immediately trying to deny "Co-Pilot," escape from the unforgettable melody and the blend of Hanley and supporting vocals, wrapping up the song is impossible...
Visiting Professor of German Eric Rentschler, of the University of California at Irvine, has compiled a varied reading list featuring recent works such as Holo-caust scholar Saul Friedlander's Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, dissecting the magic and myth that have shrouded recollections of Hitler in popular culture; Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, analyzing President Reagan's 1985 controversial visit to a Holocaust cemetery; and Spielberg's Holocaust, a volume of essays analyzing the strengths and limitations of Schindler's List in bridging cinema and history...
...wanting to feel the goose bumps of cosmic wonder. We just pack up our curiosity about the universe and trundle it off to a place like Roswell, N.M., where a few unanswered questions are still allowed to live a furtive life. Though even there the wondrous quickly collapses into kitsch--T shirts and coffee mugs featuring darling little almond-eyed fetuses from space...
...even these exemplary cases suffer from the cloying taint of kitsch. Close Encounters reaches an anticlimax with its hackneyed vision of dainty space guys trooping out of the mother ship. Contact cannot explain its scientist-heroine's obsession without mawkish flashbacks to her childhood as an orphan; and when she finally meets the Vegans, they take the shape of long-lost Dad--to make it "easier" for her. Apparently our kind can handle only so much strangeness at a time: we travel for light-years, down through the raging chaos of cosmic wormholes, only to arrive...
Like Cassidy's first series, the eerie and generally well-crafted thriller American Gothic (1995), Roar is a larger-than-life, good-vs.-evil tale unleavened by campy humor, the ingredient this television genre seems to require. Perhaps because Cassidy spent so many years himself as an object of kitsch, he demands that his television ventures be taken quite seriously. What he is aiming for here (despite the physical appearance of his stars) is lyricism. You see his effort in the lingering shots of seaside cliffs, the neverending play of ethereal Celtic music meant to suggest a world of characters...