Word: kitsched
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...choir singing carols beneath a light-baubled Christmas tree in a village square. The camera tilts up, slowly and lovingly, to reveal a huge illuminated swastika on top of the tree, dispensing its generous light over the festival. Even today, one cannot laugh at this breathtaking kitsch. It is chilling; no level of folk culture could be impervious to the message. Such was the nature of cultural totalitarianism. Every image was skewed to point to the Führer-but otherwise left intact...
...trash for people who had their fantasies in black-and-white. The perspective is probably more appropriate now. The corruption of the seventies needs to convince itself that it's at least delicious, and the sterile, abstract morality of the supervalues -- for all their McCarthyesque overtones -- provide smugly laughable kitsch. The camp formula is simple: take this gleaming man of steel and turn him into a shambling buffoon...
...with brushes strapped to his ruined claws, he died. At one end there are early works like The Clown, 1868, with the precociously firm, sharp structure of figure and field that the 27-year-old painter had learned from Manet. At the other, one finds the semiclassical and flowery kitsch of Alexander Thurneyssen as a Shepherd, 1911. In between there are girls, girls, girls...
...Sally's only child, Jessie (Pat Ast), who constantly sends her mother into hysterical fits ("You're not a lesbian--it's a temporary thing!"), especially with her half-successful attempts at seducing Joey. And the standard symbolic figures of Hollywood sterility abound: the cliche-laden director of kitsch; the ex-husband, short, stooped and Jewish, armed with empty loquacity and a bulging wallet: the columnist who is a wincing, mincing replica of Rex Reed...
Carved Toggles. Often in the West, miniatures compel the worthless gawking one reserves for Last-Supper-carved-on-a-peach-stone kitsch. Not in Japan, where the image and the scale were one-partly by a happy fluke of social pressure. The Imperial sumptuary laws forbade merchants and samurai to wear excessively rich garments, so male vanity expressed itself in three special kinds of objects: inros, the tiny compartmented cases for carrying seals, or later medicine; netsukes, the carved toggles that fastened the inros to one's sash; and tsubas, or sword guards. The amount of craft lavished...