Word: kitsch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...culminate in November. Enthusiastic tourism officials predict that the number of out-of- state license plates on the roads will top last year's by as much as 10%. Roadside wax museums, water slides and reptile farms abound. Yet with some advance mapwork, visitors can reach well beyond familiar kitsch to centennial exhibits that speak directly to the westward movement and the nation's astonishingly recent past...
What politics he had were the product of his native Niagara Falls, New York, a largely blue collar town known less as a conservative hotbed than as a vacation site and source of gift shop kitsch. Through his father, an ardent Democrat who works in the state's department of labor, Granieri absorbed a suspicion of Republican politics. "When Ronald Reagan was elected president," says the younger Granieri, "I was under the impression it would be the end of the world. My father hated...
...Show, you desperately improvise sound effects to accompany a comedy thriller, then dub your voice to match the moving lips of Clark Gable or Jean Harlow -- and listen in giddy horror to the results. Sit in a formica booth at the Prime Time Cafe, a gorgeous riot of '50s kitsch, and waitresses dressed like early TV moms dote on you as if you were Wally and the Beaver...
STILL, the balloons bounce on. After an introduction to Cafe Ole, the action moves to a living room done in Italian kitsch, with marble busts of pizza chefs. Gangleader Don Ianmarie (Andrew Gardner '89) attempts to allay his Italian mama's concerns with some of the evening's best lines, "Mama mia, calzone, Lamborgini, genitalia, guapo..." He explains that her lust for fine cuisine was handed down from "Grandpapa Domino" and "Great Aunt Regina...
Unlike Picasso, however, Dali in the last few decades of his life produced little but kitsch. The perfunctory replays of images from his inventive youth -- the burning giraffes, androgynous St. Johns of the Cross and nudes with chewing-gum hips -- were printed in tens of thousands of "rare" or limited works; this was art sleaze, surrealism pathetically embracing the ethos of the Franklin Mint. Dali's last years, surrounded by flacks and barracuda (from whom he was, to put it mildly, not protected by his wife Gala, who died in 1982), were a cautionary horror. Several years ago, when...