Word: kitsch
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Every Saturday, a long line of students, locals, and tourists snakes around Mass Ave. They are waiting for a crowded table at a hamburger joint that’s soaked in equal parts fry grease and Hollywood kitsch. Don’t they know that there’s a brand-new Qdoba franchise down the block, stocked with burritos, stainless steel, and plasma TVs?Bartley’s Burger Cottage has been packing them in since 1960. “Just good burgers, fast service. I guess it’s an institution,” says Joy Shean...
...themselves exporters of fish or cashew nuts, while in reality coordinating industrial-sized shipment and storage of cocaine from Latin America. One afternoon, an undercover detective drives me around Bissau to point out the mansions where the Colombians live. Erected on dirt lanes, they have Romanesque columns, walls with kitsch pastoral mosaics, and satellite dishes on their Spanish-style tiled roofs...
...Marwaris. Called "havelis," painting the walls and ceilings of their ancestral houses became a way for the strictly vegetarian Marwaris to show off a little. The ceiling of one such haveli, for example, shows the flute-playing Hindu god Krishna frolicking beside a billowing steam engine. A bit kitsch? Maybe, but even if the images can be trite, the hand-carved teak doors and almost accidental details of the havelis rarely disappoint. Before paints were mass produced, for example, Marwaris fermented their dyes from cow urine and plastered them onto walls while the mud was still wet. This deep mustard...
...Serbia, I won for all of you!" the 22-year-old singer proclaimed to the cheering crowd. "It's a new chapter for a new Serbia." If, indeed, there is a tonic for struggling nations to be derived from triumphing in this annual contest of camp and kitsch - won last year by a Finnish rock band in monster costumes - then few needed it as much as the Serbians did. Days before Saturday's Eurovision finals, the parliament chose the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party leader Tomislav Nikolic as its speaker. A divisive holdover from Serbia's tortured past, Nikolic had served...
...indeed, there is a tonic for struggling nations to be had from winning the annual Europe-wide contest of camp and kitsch that has produced such legends as Abba and was won, last year, by a Finnish rock band in monster costumes, then few needed it as much as the Serbs did. Days before Saturday's Eurovision finals, the country almost plunged back into bad old days, as the Serbian parliament chose as its Speaker the ultranationalist Radical Party leader Tomislav Nikolic. Nikolic, a former vice-premier in the government of Slobodan Milosevic, caused an outrage when he vowed...