Word: crass
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...detective (James Naughton), a rumpled knight of the tenderloin who lives by a code of honor in a world of thugs and well-heeled thieves. Moments later the story shifts to the office (coyly labeled a "cell") where his creator labors as a hireling of a movie tycoon more crass, smug and fascinatingly awful than any envisioned by Nathanael West. As the tycoon (Rene Auberjonois) lays down the law (no social criticism, no politics, no hint of kinky sex), the moneystruck young writer (Gregg Edelman) peevishly retypes his scenes -- and, in an inspired bit of playfulness, that action causes...
...Larry have recently lost their roommate, Robby, a gay dancer who died in a boating accident. They are left to deal with personal grief and to grapple with the tragedy of the death of a talented artist. It becomes an even more difficult task when Robby's angry, crass brother Pale (Brian Gaspardo), continually crashes their apartment, disrupts their life and finds comfort in having sex with Anna...
Americans have grown inured to crass commercialism taken to excess, with corporate sponsorship profaning everything from bowl games to the Bill of Rights. But somehow Thanksgiving has resisted the blandishments of an age of avarice. How the greeting-card sharpies and the flower-power florists must lament a national holiday in which they are doomed to play such a minor role. For if one cares to send the very best, one flies home for Thanksgiving. Even the TV networks have never figured out a way to transform Thanksgiving into a prime-time pageant, which is why the Macy's Parade...
...grace under the carver's blade have fascinated humanity. Ivory anklets and combs have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and King Solomon is said to have sat upon an ivory throne. In its myriad forms, ivory has been a medium expressing both virtue and vice, creativity and crass extravagance. It has been used in rosary beads, pistol grips, lutes, dice, scepters, toothpicks, prayer wheels, fly whisks, mah-jongg tiles and chopsticks. In the past century, traders greedy for ivory attacked and burned African villages. Natives were sold into slavery and forced to shoulder the tusks out of the interior...
...communicate. "I'm seen as terribly abrupt and abrasive," says Nevin. "If you're very direct, you're admired in American culture. The Japanese culture is much more subtle. I can never get them to tell me what they actually mean, and they may think I'm rude and crass. But both sides are only behaving in ways familiar to their own cultures...