"Dimestore Integrity"

Lust for Ecstasy is my most ambitious attempt since my last film. The actors didn’t know what was going on. I wrote many of the pungent scenes on the D train, and then when I arrived on the set I ripped them up and let my emotional whims make chopped meat out of the performances and story. It’s more fun that way and then the story advances without any control until you’ve created a Frankenstein that destroys any subconscious barriers you’ve erected to protect yourself and your dime-store integrity. Yes, Lust for Ecstasy is my subconscious, my own naked lusts that sweep across the screen in 8mm and color with full fidelity sound.

--George Kuchar--
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/26/kuchar2.html

I was really struck by the bit about "dime-store integrity." Electronica composer Malek Lopez recently introduced me to Genshiken, a discontinued anime about the sentimental education of a Japanese otaku, and Kuchar's phrase resonates with one of the anime's themes of the necessity of acknowledging and exploring one's impulses/loves/drives/preferences, no matter how disreputable they are. "Dime-store integrity" simultaneously characterizes and dismisses certain kinds of moral/aesthetic objections as cheap, mass-produced artifacts; the sort of taste Picasso was thinking about when he said "Taste is the enemy of creativeness."