Kitsch goes to the Guillotine

With homage to Susan Sontag's essay, Notes on "Camp"

1. A trip to Paris is incomplete without a jaunt to Versailles. Versailles is, hands down, one of the most opulent and ostentatious palaces on the face of the planet. Little did I know that the art of Jeff Koons, the post-modernist artist oft categorized with Andy Warhol and dubbed the King of Kitsch, would be on exhibit while I was there, due in large part to a wealthy French collector who pushed to have his works displayed. Or something like that.

2. I went to see Koons' work when it was on exhibit at the MCA in Chicago, not out of interest but intrigue. He was plastered all over the CTA, so I figured why not? I did not expect to run into a porcelain figurine depicting Michael Jackson cuddling Bubbles the Chimp at Louis XIV's old pad, or see a blow up toy in the shape of a crab at Versailles, hung from a ceilings detailed with paintings of Apollo, and Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. I've seen the exhibit two times now, and I can't decide whether I love or hate it.

4. Many people considered the placement of the exhibit to be tasteless and gauche; some might even go so far as to say it represents the end of culture itself. All that was needed was a sad French mime in white gloves.

3.Jeff Koon's ex-wife was a member of the Italian Parliament and a porn star. How's that for third wave feminism?

4. As I made my way to the great hall of mirrors, where a massive metallic heart balloon (translation:a work of art, i.e. a sculpture) was festooned to a marble wall reflecting the magnificence of Louis' most narcissistic of rooms, I noticed this: be they serious looking scholars or hordes of Asian tourists, Koons work garnered more attention than the magnificent portraits or meticulously embroidered pillows of former French aristocracy.

5. I came to this conclusion: kitsch is underrated.

6. I have voluntarily engaged in kistchy activities many times over: tons of musical theatre, donning ridiculously outlandish Halloween costumes of Madonna and Marilyn Monroe complete with blond wigs and fire engine red lipstick, lip syncing to YMCA at faculty retreats,putting fruits on my head and singing 'My name's Chiquita Banana,' attending a Kylie Minogue concert, and the list goes on. But I think you get the point.


7. I don't like to be associated with kitsch because kitsch generally keeps bad company: the noveau riche, poseurs, those who lack substance, imagination and verve are all constant companions. The stylistically obtuse and superficially satisfied. Those who don't know a floral print from a potholder. I don't consider myself any of these things, yet still, deep down, I am drawn to kitsch, which makes me feel slightly vapid. Why?

8. Here is something Milan Kundera had to say about kitsch: "As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition."

9. Kitsch has become an aesthetic in and of itself: it represents the anti-elitist middle class that simply can't afford not to be kitsch.

10: Kitsch is easily identifiable but hard to define. When I see it I know it, but I can't come up with a decent definition. In that case, Kitsch is anything cutesy and faux fancy. Kitsch is dressing up your kids as elves on your Christmas cards. Kitsch might even be those airbrushed glamour shots you can get at the mall. Kitsch is a cousin of camp, cheesy, and twee. If Sarah Palin were an aesthetic, kitsch would be it.

11. I'd like to think I'm above kitsch, but I'm not. If you draw a hear in the sand with your toes and put our initials in it, a part of me will cringe. Another part of me will feel warm and fuzzy inside. Sometimes I want to look at something and know exactly how I am supposed to feel. Sometimes I don't want to search for layers of meaning or think about composition and the object's relationship to its subject. Sometimes I think my boredom with taking things at face value stems from a fear of being average. We all know being complicated and multi-faceted is so in these days. Therefore we disdain those who are so literal and base as to need a symbol - a heart or a box of chocolates or a shiny rose - to say I love you.

12. How can something as reproducable as kitsch be juxtaposed againt the essence of culture, the authenticity of French aristocracy? That is the point,of course. Or perhaps nowadays, maybe there really isnt't a difference between authentic culture and authenitc kitsch anymore.

Adaptation

Culture Shock is the name of a club I belonged to in high school. Once a month, my sheltered suburban friends and I would take a supervised field trip to an ethnic restaurant or artistic venue around Chicago with the intention of expanding our cultural horizons and temporarily popping the bubble in which we lived. Thanks to Culture Shock, I ate Thai and Ethiopian food and watched profanity filled theatre for the first time. I wasn't fazed. I was inspired. I wanted more than just a culture shock here and here. I wanted permanent cultural electrocution.

A new colleague of mine is experiencing culture shock. Her extreme awe upon the oh-so-many things one must adapt to in order to acclimate to life in Turkey brought me back to the days a lifetime ago when I was a bright-eyed new teacher gung-ho about embarking on the adventure of a lifetime before I went through culture shock myself. As she navigates through the major roadblocks that now appear as anthills in the road here, I began to wonder when exactly I became used to....everything. As I am reminded on a daily basis, being a foreigner here is not always easy. You can always turn to your friends, another colleague advised: efes(Turkish beer) Smirnoff (Russian vodka) and, worst case scenario, raki(it'll grow hair on your chest).

As I tried to give my friend some advice on coping with her new surroundings that did not involve alcohol, the questions nagged at me: how did I ever get past the first semester? What had I done to survive the personally jolting paradigm shifts and schema altering experiences?

Well, that's easy.

I let go of my firm footing on the truth and learned to function in a moral vacuum, where I developed a fluid sense of self in order to cope with the uncertainty of my everyday existence.

But really, its not that bad.

However, writing this post requires that I grab my pint of Ben & Jerry's New York Chocolate Chunk, the one that cost me 15 lira. I'll be back.

*****

I only find myself ruminating on the nature of my existence in situations like this: while eating a plate of salty doner kebap with oily rice and washing it down with ayran, a thick salty yogurt drink that tastes so rich it could've come straight off the cow's teat were it not in a blue plastic bottle.
My thought process goes something like this:
My, what a slippery slope I've traveled from veggie burgers and soy milk to red meat and fatty dairy products.
Not only do I eat this stuff, but its the lunch I look forward to all week.
I've abandoned my principles and everything that defines me as a person.
What's become of me?
Who am I?


If I were define my character by the foods I ate, I just might determine that I am an equivocating flip flopper without much of a backbone. I'd rather not look at myself that way. So instead of taking myself as tried and true 100 percent Alizah, I can't look at external manifestations of my character as diamonds that will last forever. Rather, they are just cheap accessories that I can mix and match to complement my geographical coordinates.

Case in point:

Outside observer #1: "My, your ability to defer to authority and tread lightly across surreptitious social landmines hidden in the ancient history of a nation far below the epidermis of westernization is so becoming on you! That take-it-all-in-stride attitude, your knack for dealing with the unpredictability of everyday life without demanding better customer service or letting your American sense of entitlement get the best of you (because in Turkey, the customer is not always right)is so you! And you refrain from showing cleavage in public to boot! It all goes so well against the backdrop of that second world country still trying to figure itself out under the weight of tradition, the allure of secularism and modernity, and the opposing pulls of extreme nationalism and religious fundamentalism."

Outside observer #2: "But wait a minute, what about your outspoken cavalier attitude and penchant for challenging the status quo? You are a maverick with a desire to think outside the box and define yourself as a unique individual, are you not? Did your progressive liberal arts education mean nothing to you? Plus, that cleavage looks stunning against the backdrop of cultural imperialism, consumerism, and freedom and equality for one and all.

Riddle me this, my multicultural peeps and citizens of the world. How else could I deal with the fact youtube and imeem are blocked by the government due to questionable content? How else could one contend with all that seems completely ludicrous, illogical that leaves you dumbfounded, fuming in frustrating, or on the verge of tears without at the very least changing my character accessories?

So if I sit in the dark because I don't know the word for bulb, or eat the flesh of dead animals as I said I'd never do, or break my budget to buy overpriced gourmet ice cream because it gives me comfort, I try and tell myself its not because I'm lazy, or weak, or a pushover.

Call me flexible, call me a social chameleon, call me a poser if you will. At some point in life you are supposed to call into question everything you believed to be true. That's just par for the course. But still. Being able to adapt and fit in everywhere is a hefty price to pay for never being able to completely fit in anywhere, ever again.

Don'cha Think?

I have a small bone to pick with the clever literary device turned pop culture iconoclast formerly know as irony.

Irony is overrated. Irony has become the character trait de jour, just like selfishness in the 80's and sexy sauciness around the time Sex and the City first premiered.

Now don't get me wrong. I love me some irony: a burly biker in leather chaps and a pink tutu, Romeo killing himself when he perceives Juliet is dead right before she wakes up from a drug-induced stupor, a crackhead singing about going to rehab, a Presidential candidate who complains about celebrity then goes and chooses a running mate based on her celeb appeal, the scrawny guy with acne and skinny black jeans wearing a tight "sex symbol" T-shirt, the game show champion who misses breaking a record because he incorrectly answers a simple pop culture question in final jeopardy.

Irony is discerning and discreet: she only works in the right context and is most effective when you least expect her to work her magic. Irony is right up there with love and slapstick: the timing needs to be just right for it work out.

But somewhere along the line, incongruence - between physical appearance and character, between words and actions, between personal expectations and the fate of the cosmos - has come to be equivalent with the overly educated urban hipster. Its as if by being dissonant and quirky, one screams, "Look at me! I am complex! You can't judge me by my cover! I am so multi-faceted and unique! I embrace my contractions and I am so secure in them that I advertise the fact that I am a macrobiotic vegan who is also a chain smoker. I am highly evolved, and you are just one notch above a chimpanzee. I am human, and I am ironic."


Irony has also become the litmus test for cool. God forbid you wear pastel baby barrettes or strap up your converse with hot pink laces and mean it. You'd better have your lip pierced and a skull tattoo hidden somewhere if you're going to wear that Little Miss Sunshine T-shirt. Pay no attention to the fact that ones wardrobe or even their ability to use sarcasm in a sentence says very little about the depth of their character. Irony is easy to accessorize. You might find cynicism, sharp wit, and a sense of humor drier than an old white wine come part in parcel with irony.


Now, a sensitivity to the surrealism of real life and the subjective nature of reality is just as important to me as it was to Ayn Rand. I value a sense of levity and appreciate the absurd as much as Nabokov and all the other stalwart Russian novelists. But this is what I mean, and this is what I hate. Is this irony, or is it self-aggrandizing ones intellectual prowess masquerading as irony? Is it irony, or a justification not to cultivate your own style and sense of self? Is it irony functiong as cultural currency that buys a new sort of elitism and intellectual snobbery? Irony as an excuse to reference literary figures as a means of determining how smart others are and therefore making a snap judgement as to whether they "get" you?

The kicker is that such attempts at inventive irony have become so predictable and formulaic that they are really rather pedestrian. Truth be told, ironic is banal. If being ironic was supposed to place you outside the box, then it might as well be sandwiched between cardboard walls, duck taped and shipped off to another decade, along with all those ironic T-shirts of yours.


So just remember: irony is a literary and dramatic device that is supposed to show us a thing or two about human nature and life. If you decide to wear a mullet and grow your sideburns down to your jawline just to be ironic, it doesn't make you cool. It only makes you hideous. If you think you're ironic because you'd rather watch reruns of Twin Peaks and discuss German philosophers than go to a bar and watch the game, you're uniquely incongruous, just socially awkward. Finally, in honor of Alanis to whom I owe my inspiration, irony is not a black fly in your chardonnay. A black fly in your chardonnay is just shitty.

Political Partying

I can watch CNN and read the news online until the cows (or in this case, the elephants and the donkeys)come home, but there's nothing like being in a country while its elections are taking place. So not being in the U.S. during the presidential elections is kind of like being amidst palm trees and sunshine during Christmas. It just doesn't feel right.

In any event, I attended my first meeting of Democrats abroad. A life-sized statue of Obama stood in the corner. The leader of the group had recently returned from the Democratic Convention and schlepped an entire suitcase full of Obama paraphernalia home with him: boggle head Baraks, a copy of Goodnight Bush (a spoof on the famous children's book Goodnight Moon) and of course those snazzy t-shirts with Obama's face fading from red to white to blue with the word progress underneath. I socialized. I felt inspired. I developed a heat rash due to the extreme weateher and bad white wine.

The majority of the meeting was spent discussing the nitty gritty. The process of applying for absentee ballots and mailing in new ones. Where to watch the candidate's speeches online. While you can request an absentee ballot via snail mail for your state, there is also a generic emergency ballot for the presidential election only, just in case the one from your state gets lost in transit (which is not such a stretch with the postal system here being a black hole with cute postage stamps.

"Last election bush won by something like 500 votes. I really think it will be up to Americans abroad to bring home the vote," said our fearless leader. I kind of felt like I was back in college, back in the days when I felt one person really could make a difference.

There was a collective look of surprise when it was mentioned that a Republicans Abroad group actually existed. Wasn't it the progressive, open-minded people who value cultural diversity that went abroad in the first place? How could you live in another culture, glean a global perspective on the world, and not see that our country is having having a political crisis of confidence as we sink deeper into an economic quagmire? But that's the thing about the illusion of the American security blanket. Its like a nasty little cartoon storm cloud that hangs over your head and follows you wherever you go -if you let it. Its so easy to be subsumed by it, but so hard get rid of.

So in a way I was hesitant to reenlist in the ranks of my fellow countrymen (albeit for a good cause) simply because there is a way of doing things that is so quintessentially American;a way of doing things that I have come to be quite critical. I haven't been in a room with so many Americans since I've been here either. The lack of extreme formality, the joviality, the rabble-rousing, the gesticulating and verbosity, all these struck me as strange and yet oddly familiar. Then there was the modelesque woman carrying her miniature rat dogs (who happened to be wearing doggie Obama shirts) in a Louis Vuitton carrying case (screaming I am absolutely desperate to feel absolutely fabulous), the middle-aged woman on a Fulbright to study Nationalism who had lived in Turkey on an off for over thirty years, and of course a hefty contingent of teachers, some of us whose return to the states will be determine by the results of the upcoming election. As we fraternized with many others who had come for the first time, my friend remarked that we were motivated by fear. We laughed knowingly, perhaps forging the sort of solidarity that grows from a fighting against the same force.

The gathering spilled into the cafe downstairs, where we were joined by Turks, Canadians, and Aussies. For a brief moment, I thought that maybe things really could change.

The Impotence of Ideas

This cartoon from The New Yorker pretty much sums up the way I feel about most of the things that run through my head.