Knocking Wagner onto the floor

She maintained that she only held on to her assertion that Wagner was kitsch, quoting from Kundera here  -- in fact quoting Kundera's definition of kitsch which was the kitsch that mattered, as she said, in this culture of ours which pretends that kitsch is only the tooth bling of the TV characters Kath and Kim, when in fact it makes grow all our most noblest bad lines and seemingly moving endings -- only holding onto this assertion about Wagner even if she didn't know anything about Wagner -- since she was seized with an urge to destroy. And besides, against her admittedly more knowledgeable friend's flat dismissal of everything she had to say, it was always preferable to knock Wagner onto the floor than do anything else.

The result of a generator

Had I not overheard those nuns in the bus I would never have realised that the smoke rising from the foot of the cross for so-called World Youth Day in Sydney this year was not the kitsch visual effect of a production team who’d spent too many hours in their adolescence watching midday films like Barabbas, but was instead the result of a generator which, having caught fire under the floor, had been doused just in time to prevent too great a reference to other moments in Christian history, such as the burning alive of Giordano Bruno in the Campo De’ Fiori in Rome, or the much larger conflagrations in England or Counter-Reformation Spain.