Word: touche
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...easy to compose a parody of the Peterman catalog. Its style, a bubbly kitsch of knowingness, creates surprising little fantasies that are part Harlequin Romance, part Cole Porter lyric, now and then a touch of the bodice-ripper; or when flying high, of Evelyn Waugh--a soigne escapism that is a parody of sophistication, so bad that it is great fun. All that literary ingenuity gone to sell clothes in the mail...and to end up bankrupt, besides. Sunt lacrimae rerum, as an unforgettable 'Cliffie whispered to me that night in the Club Mt. Auburn, just before Joanie Baez came...
...catalog, as art form and selling tool, is to create an idealized world. On the planet J.Crew, for example, it is always the weekend of the Princeton game; translucent blond girls, clones of Mia Farrow long ago, smile at guys who don't tuck their shirts in, and touch the guys (on the calf, for example) in a lightly intimate way that is somehow proprietary. For the summer catalog, the setting switches to some Martha's Vineyard of the mind that, similarly, will know neither death nor gingivitis...
...Bean resembles Maine, with a suppressed memory of hard winters in the woods long ago. Bean's world, robustly cozy, is subliminally less privileged and more autonomously practical than Crew's: the young people are off-beautiful and went to state schools; no undercurrent eroticism here, no touching except for Mom's hugs at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Clothes are called "good-looking" or "comfortable," and at the most extravagant, as an inside joke, "wicked good." A rosy-cheeked geezer and crone trudge around in Thinsulate snow sneakers--this last is a touch of AARP, Mia Farrow in real time, that...
Things happened fast. This is the remix. There were start-up labels like Sugar Hill and Tommy Boy. Then in 1979 came Rapper's Delight--the first rap song most people remember. Grandmaster Flash warned, "Don't touch me 'cause I'm close to the edge." Then there was Run-D.M.C. rocking the house, and the Beastie Boys hollering, "You gotta fight for your right--to party!" and Public Enemy saying, "Don't believe the hype," and Hammer's harem-style balloon pants. Then gangsta rap: N.W.A. rapping "F____ tha police"; Snoop drawling "187 on an undercover...
...that buying an OutKast record is the same as dealing with real people, but it is reason to hope." Ice Cube is a bit more cynical: "It's kinda like being at the zoo. You can look into that world, but you don't have to touch it. It's safe...