Word: cheapness
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...quality of speed and verve which was unique and refreshing. Strut Miss Lizzie and Liza, which followed, were progressively poorer. The naivete was gone, the speed became a deliberate mechanical effect instead of a natural exuberance, and the delightful " high yella " and " brown skin " flavor, degenerated into a cheap imitation of white musical comedy plus extravagant caricature of the native jazz tradition. How Come, in the opinion of most metropolitan reviewers, is the poorest of the lot. Whatever redeeming quality it has is furnished by Eddie Hunter, the librettist and comedian, who was hailed by the press agents...
...made a pilgrimage to the Ford plants in Detroit; his enthusiastic admiration was tempered only by a regret at the inartistic character of Mr. Ford's well-known product. " Nothing about Ford or his plant suggests a trace of the finer aesthetic qualities," he stated. " One can make cheap, rapid cars, but they do not have to be ugly." Proposing to give the inexpensive car beauty and form, M. Citroen has announced that he will establish an American plant, designed for mass production, but embodying artistic ideas. The plant will be located near New York, either in New Jersey...
Bernard Shaw once said that ten years of cheap reading had transformed the English from the most stolid nation on earth to the most sentimental and hysterical, but, as with generalizations of this sort, the exact opposite is also true. People who are allowed to satisfy their sentimental and morbid desires, and to indulge their delusions of grandeur by way of the romantic novel, the detective story and the heroic biography, are less liable to exercise them in real life. What the Freudians call a " compensation mechanism " is set up by trashy literature which dissipates the energy of the impulses...
...cities are saturated with the literature of escape. Does an old maid or a Babbitt couple pine for romance, they can find it in The New York Journal, the cheap fiction magazines, or the novels of George Barr McCutcheon, Emerson Hough iand Rupert Hughes. Does a young man long for success and a "strong character," he can imagine he is acquiring these things from the American Magazine. Does a harassed and ineffectual "white collar slave" crave some denial of the harshness of existence, he has but to turn to the sermonettes and pepto-optimism concocted daily by Dr. Frank Crane...
...over the south of Europe. He has the best of service and accommodations; but the weather is always bad, and he doesn't find the expected enjoyment. At Capri he is stricken with mortal illness. At once the hotel manager loses his politeness, hustles the body into a cheap coffin, and it is carried back on the same expensive ship to America. The story is told with vividness and cruel humor. The other stories relate strange and morbid events. All are lone with great...