Star-Spangled Kitsch is a lively round-up, in picture and text, of crass, ill-conceived, incongruous, trivial, muddle-headed, synthetic, meaningless, and embarrassing examples of taste in America. With verve and good humour, Curtis F. Brown discusses and displays mass-produced utilitarian and decorative items, as well as people, ideas, and lifestyles, in which the sublime collides with the banal to produce the ludicrous incongruity of elements that typify American kitsch: Kitsch in politics - from the hoked-up log-cabin image of William Henry Harrison in 1840 to the "just plain folks" style of Nelson Rockefeller in Coney Island. Religious kitsch - from Holy Medal diaper pins and Hail Mary face-powder boxes to Hollywood's Biblical blockbusters and a topless-bottomless celebrant at Pasadena's Hi-Life Social Club Church.^
Kitsch in home decoration - from the blue-blood mecca of a 19th-century Vanderbilt mansion to bogus Aztec living-room ensembles, "Instant Congo" furniture, and Santa Claus toilet paper. Kitsch in advertising - from an early Coco-Cola belt buckle depicting a naked nun to the near-sadistic depiction of water-logged caskets to engender guilt feelings in the bereaved. Architectural kitsch - from nonfunctional wooden church buttresses and Gilded Age palazzi to "the corniest building in America," "the world's tallest shanty," and a leaning Tower of Pizza. Kitsch in "art" - from an 1832 statue of George Washington looking like a Turkish bath patron to phony scrimshaw, Venus de Milo candles, do-it-yourself "primitive" plywood plaques, and Mona Lisa drawings-by-computer. Show-biz kitsch - world's fairs; dance marathons; the films of Griffith, DeMille, and Berkeley; the "music styles" of Lawrence Welk, LIberace, Jobriath, and Alice Cooper.^
Kitschy lifestyles - golf-and-jewel dog collars; breast-shaped ice cubes; hand-sewn, personalized blue jeans; his-and-her camels. Kitsch from birth to death, in sex and marriage - honeymoon hideaways; "virile" jockey shorts; gaudy gravestones; vinyl "sex mates"; wedding cakes, feasts, and kitschuals. Racist, ethnic, and sexist kitsch - 19th-century Negro and Jewish stereotypes; Shaft as Superstud; Fu Manchu as the Yellow Peril; present-day racism for fun and profit. The book culminates in a Kitsch Hall of Dubious Fame a pantheon of the incomparable, featuring, among others, Nixon's Ruritanian White House Guards, a mobile home facsimile of an ancient Egyptian tomb, an egg-shaped "contemplative environment," and salt-and-pepper sets in the shape of a headless torso or of John F. Kennedy. -- from dust jacket.
