Word: vulgarian
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Over the centuries, there have been two kinds of theater, the elitist and the vulgarian. In Aristophanic comedies, male characters were endowed with huge prop phalli with which they thwacked each other. Early forms of the Kabuki theater were closed down by the shogun in 17th century Japan for encouraging prostitution and inciting lewd homosexual byplay on and off stage. Italy's commedia dell'arte was frequently obscene in word and gesture...
...devotee of cheap Sodom-in-the-suburbs fiction can predict the finale. Walpurgisnacht occurs at a monumental bash thrown by your typical Fairfield County vulgarian. Crocked, randy, and desperate to get "the Lepridon account," Wilson beds down with the wife (Nancie Phillips) of a fellow commuter in the outside playhouse. Sure enough, a TV monitor, installed to oversee children at play, records the grope for the amusement of the guests and the despair of Mrs., mistress...
...Vulgarian's Feast. The true Satyricon is shot through with fragments of poetry. The Fellini Satyricon finds visual equivalents-but often at the price of coherence. Scenes are shifted, new ones are added, characters are blunted or sharpened. Still, Fellini has left the Petronian framework intact. Like almost all his social satire, Satyricon is a picaresque journey through the beds and banquet hails of Rome. Now Encolpius skirmishes for the affections of the young invert Giton (Max Born); now impotent, he whimpers about his "blunted sword"; now he overstuffs his gullet at a vulgarian's feast...
Shuttling between the intriguing past and the insipid present, Richard Young, a priggish fellow, attempts to keep his vulgarian wife ignorant of his new time travel kick but succeeds only in riveting her-and a wary community's-attention upon his strange behavior. Du Maurier's view of both modern and medieval marriage is remarkably waspish, but it is this very connubial bitchiness that keeps the novel from a routine Gothicism and makes it a stylish, contemporary entertainment...
...Products. By comparison, Tillie's life has hardly any fizz at all. Serious, well-trained in sociology, she meets a gimp-legged skirt-chaser and hopeless vulgarian named Pete Seltzer. His public wit runs to doubletalk and the invention of nonsense "end" products: after-shaving mints, dietetic shampoo, reversible mayonnaise. "He thinks Cameroons are some kind of cookie," she reflects bitterly. But they marry anyhow and live together until their nine-year-old son dies of lingering leukemia...