Word: shlock
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BITS AND PIECES of Story Theatre, resting on a sound technical basis, work well and bring the tales to life. In other parts however, Prince's troupe buffs the stories with several coats of shlock and the actors can do little to salvage the intended meanings and morals. Confusion reigns at the end of "Henny Penny," as the cast sings and rocks to the Vietnam ballad "What are We Fighting For" while Foxy-Loxy ships the birds off to who knows where. It's easy to suspend cynicism and read between the still-fresh lines of the simple tales...
Hemispheres, which featured organic cooking and a crowded, "culture shlock" atmosphere, as one former patron put it, closed...
...wonder who reads this kind of publication besides myself. Are there other news schlock fanatics out there somewhere, eager to explore a fantasy world more "real" than everyday life because it appears in print? I'm not sure there are. Perhaps most of the shlock readership is made up of housewives, middle-American prisoners of the vacuum and the mop, crying babies over their shoulders and Rice Krispies cookies in their ovens. The Star, after all, is ostensibly for "American Women." The Enquirer and Midnight claim a more diverse audience...
...German occupation of Warsaw, where Benny and friends outwit the Nazis. The humor is often best because it comes so dangerously close to bad taste-people got mad at it when it came out because of the subject matter, but it's nowhere near as vulgar as the respectful shlock made in those years with great legs swooning when the stormtroopers come, or Betty Grable exhorting the troops. As a matter of fact, my most earnestly Zionist friend gets convulsive with laughter at the concentration camp jokes whenever he sees it. With Carole Lombard, in her last role...
Obsession with vulgarity and physical decay? Look around. The bookstores, the grind houses. That's not even sex, it's cold cuts. And the shlock stores are shlockier. I saw a brass statue of a guy rolling a stone up a hill. Underneath it was a label: "That's life." The myth of Sisyphus became a piece of shoddy merch...