Word: kitsched
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...these satellite attractions, kitsch battles ferociously with schlock, and the two styles often end up married. Kitsch: Medieval Times, a dinner theater that combines the art of knightly jousting with the bloodlust of pro wrestling. As the Red Knight attacks Blue with his mace and Blue responds with his sword, a spectator cries out, "Your mutha wears chain mail!" Schlock: Gatorland Zoo with its Gator Jumparoo show, in which thousand-pound alligators lurch out of the water to snap their jaws around dead chickens suspended from a wire. For connoisseurs of arcane Americana, the Orlando area also offers an Alligatorland...
...epicene urban subculture, Susan Sontag explained in "Notes on 'Camp,' " her remarkably astute 1964 essay, was reveling in the "great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement . . . The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure." Kitsch is amusing, not threatening. An ironic acceptance of pop effluvia, Sontag wrote, "makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated." Sontag's hip intellectuals did not like cheap science-fiction movies or Fabian: they "liked" them...
...Detroit Industry frescoes. A drawing like Figure Representing the Black Race has a formal strength to match its chthonic allegorical power; it makes you realize what levels of graphic sophistication lay beneath the populist surface. Such is Rivera at his best, but even at his worst the man's kitsch and bad taste have an orotund wholeheartedness that seems endearing. His mock-surrealist landscapes of the 1940s, together with some of his more contrived social portraits, are rubbish, but they do not spoil the cumulative effect of the show...
...exception of the son, are not the sort to learn from their mistakes. But Povod knows his terrain, his dialogue is sharp and colorful yet fits the characters, he never bogs down in exposition, and he sentimentalizes nothing. Bill Hart's direction matches the scuffed-linoleum and religious-kitsch realism of Donald Eastman's set and ensures that low-life pathos never overwhelms the play's bawdy, feisty humor...
...basic kit of pieces was standard, but SITE made the whole restaurant seem to hover: brick walls are cantilevered up off the ground, the roof floats above the walls. Decadent, maybe, but delightful too. In heartland suburbia, the highest of high camp has thus been achieved. When kitsch icons like McDonald's come with their own built-in ironic critique, an epoch must...