Word: kitsched
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...think you've heard it all before, chances are you have. Some of the most exciting music today is being created by sound-sampling omnivores whose songs draw from bygone musical eras - take DJ Shadow, Amon Tobin or Mr Scruff. Enter Retrochine. More than a collection of kitsch remixes, this second release by Schtung Music duo Morton Wilson and producer Ian Widgery follows on from their hugely successful 1930s Shanghai Lounge Divas album, but this time ventures into 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong through the classic musical films of the Shaw Brothers...
...least one segment of the economy is booming: the market in Obama kitsch. The dedicated supporter of the incoming President need not content himself with a T shirt or bumper sticker. Also available are Obama coasters, lava lamps, jigsaw puzzles, mugs, skateboards, toy trains, CDs, DVDs and, of course, commemorative dinner plates. Ben & Jerry's is introducing a Yes Pecan flavor in honor of Obama's campaign slogan, and Marvel Comics is running a special Inaugural issue of Spider-Man. Pepsi has created the Pepsi Optimism Project with a red, white and blue logo almost identical to Obama's sunrise...
...just a topic but a genre, one that, at its most reductive, exploits the awful events of that chapter in history to badger viewers, intimidate critics, elicit easy tears and serve as a back-patting machine for serioso directors. The excesses of the genre have spawned derisive nicknames: Holo-kitsch (Art Spiegelman's term) and Holocaust porn (which Taylor cites...
...says Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman and chair of the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "We're not Al Capone's city. We're not the stockyards of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle." These days Chicago is known for blending working-class kitsch - Da Bears and the Cubbies - with cosmopolitan shopping and restaurants on Michigan Avenue. Its graceful mix of cutting-edge, environmentally conscious modern architecture and classic parks and buildings has actually given it a reputation as a model of a 21st-century metropolis, which the city is hoping to use to help...
...Donna and her gal pals don trashy frocks to do Abba's greatest hits and a Greek chorus of villagers materializes as a backup group for practically every number, Mamma Mia!'s flouting of narrative and visual logic starts to suggest a cunning subversion. The film is not failed kitsch but triumphant Dada. It exists in an alternative universe, an Abbaworld, where 40 years telescopes to 20, the Seine is the Aegean, and Streep's outsize cheerfulness is the expression of a soul in mortal panic...