Word: kitsched
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...ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BAD TASTE by Jane and Michael Stern (HarperCollins; $29.99). If it weren't for bad taste, most people wouldn't have any taste at all. That seems to be the thesis of this arch and witty catalog of American kitsch. A sampler: Nehru jackets, vanity license plates, bell-bottoms. The authors treat their subject with affection and condescension; in other words, they are tasteful about bad taste...
...Boitano held out for two years while pondering how to put together his own ice show nouveau: a romantic and theatrical evening with a minimum of props and kitsch and a maximum of athletic daring. Along the way came a TV special for ABC and another for Home Box Office that won three Emmy Awards, both starring his title-winning counterpart, Katarina Witt of what was then East Germany. The TV shows taught Boitano that he and Witt, although trained since early childhood as solo skaters, could enjoy the different discipline of working as a pair and, more important...
...whale -- also drew figures like slugs. Still, when you look at the figures in Ryder's The Story of the Cross, whose "awkward posture and flattened quality" the catalog rather optimistically likens to Duccio and Cimabue, you know that any such comparison is impertinent. The Ryder is pious kitsch...
Hitchens has a wonderful eye for zany manifestations of Brit kitsch. In 1890, for example, some idealistic Shakespeareans decided to release in New York City's Central Park every bird mentioned by the bard -- more than 50 species in all -- that was not already native to the region. Instead of filling the city's air with the song of larks and nightingales, the experiment introduced to America the common European starling, a dirty, prolific pest that soon ousted New York's native bluebirds from their nesting places. If there is a moral here, Hitchens refrains from drawing...
...most of the other actors, a motley crew culled from the director's pet sources -- kitsch movies of the '50s, tabloid headlines of the '70s and '80s -- who could have met nowhere in the world but on a John Waters set. Surfside heartthrob Troy Donahue. Media minx Joey Heatherton. Ever fashionable Polly Bergen. Andy Warhol icon Joe Dallesandro. Punk pioneer Iggy Pop. Legendary bad actress Susan Tyrrell. Norman Mailer's son Stephen. As a smarmily sadistic guard, Willem Dafoe. The parents of slutty Wanda (Traci Lords) are assayed by Ozzie and Harriet's own David Nelson and, in her movie...