The book contends that young girls and Botoxed TV "housewives" all want to look 19; that hipsters in their 40s cultivate the affectations of 20-somethings, to the delight of marketers; and that apocalyptic types just want to opt out of time altogether.
That "rustic" affectation, usually encountered in pubs attempting to evoke a sense of farmhouse honesty (or is it grinding rural poverty?) in their cooking, is massively flawed for the one obvious reason: it minimises the surface area of the bread that you can butter.
Instead, his direction is calm and selective, extremely artful in its affectation of detachment.
And as such, it is created in Mr. Morris's modern manner, in which affectation — or what he frequently derides as the American notion of fake aristocracy — is banished in favor of something more direct.
Selling umpteen million albums hasn't puffed up the Blowfish--the Blowfish--the Blowfish--the South Carolinaphenomenal debut, "Cracked Rear View," is so lacking in affectation that you could imagine these guys making the same album if their last one had sold just a few thousand.
Nor does it ever feel like the kind of exercise in smart-arsed affectation that enables people who like smart-arsed affectation in music to apply the prefix "meta" to it: behold my ingenious generic juxtapositions, everyone, aren't I clever?
His translator, Lydia Davis, deserves to be congratulated on her success in reducing this affectation of French avant-gardism to relatively readable English.
That scene, like the rest of "Prima Donna," is sung in French, an affectation that Mr. Wainwright bizarrely insisted on, at the expense of losing as a collaborator the Metropolitan Opera, which originally commissioned the work and wanted it in English.
On the YouTube video "V-Nasty Gettin Out of Jail," which depicts V-Nasty getting out of jail, Kreayshawn slips in and out of affectation, while V-Nasty owns the role.
In terms of foodie affectation, such splashy attempts to reinvent this wheel are topped only by those poseurs who insist you should be putting real meat in your mincemeat.
Around the time the Rhinemaidens retire from the motel pool and order cocktails, however, it becomes evident that Castorf — a director long associated with the Volksbühne, a radical theatre in Berlin — has no interest in bourgeois affectations of narrative.
