Although my too often Gap-based wardrobe and Kylie Minogue-influenced CD collection may indicate otherwise, I've spent years perfecting a certain cultural and stylistic aesthetic. Early on, some of this aesthetic came about through conscious cultivation, but more often than not, my sense of aesthetic selection derived from personal preference, innate or learned, nature or nurture I could not say.
The cultural landscape of my brain defies easy description and orientation, not necessarily because it's so special, but more because it's so all over the map, obscure, and at times trés tacky. Is it north to Swedish pop stars or south to Brazilian jazz and Black Oak Arkansas? Is it east to Cambodian cuisine with lime-based sauces or west to Pennsylvania snackfoods like whoopie pies and pumpernickel and onion pretzels?
Or is it even odder in its direction--slightly to the right and a turn north-by-northwest, a little to the left and then travel east-by-southeast? Brooding Third World cinema and Bollywood extravaganzas, Australian sit-coms and trashy Mexican soaps, '60s "girl singers" and British "garageheads" like the Streets, Lily Allen, and M.I.A. It's all in there, an ass-kickin' party punch of aestethics, a malt liquor-and-champagne cocktail of musings, a Vietnamese beer-and-Boone's Farm wine of mindsets, quickly followed by a citron-flavored vodka of sensibilities and a chaser of Cheerwine to take the edge off.
As if there were a few too many milkshake martinis under the driver's belt, these predilections of taste swoop and swirl drunkenly, recklessly, across a narrow, two-lane black-top of Kultur and couture. Keep your eyes on the road, guys and gals: You don't want to meet this driver head on, crashing and combusting together in an explosion of Hi Test petroleum and high camp glitter. You don't want to be stuck behind him in traffic either, eating his technicolor-hued and strawberry-perfumed dust. And you sure can't rest comfortably if you pass him, at least not without dialing 911 on your cellphone to report his offensive driving. "Hello, is this the Aesthetic Police? I need to report a moving violation . . . several of them in fact."
For example . . .
Movies: Independent films only, please, and not those fake, multi-million dollar star salary motion pictures made by Miramax. British "kitchen sink" dramas from the '50s and '60s, post-"Dirty War" Argentine films, Israeli-Palestinian cinema, aiming-for-arty but still accessible Canadian productions like When Night Is Falling or Heyday! (seen during my recent Canada sojourn on CBC TV), or even Norwegian surf movies.
Give me something grainy in cinematography and grainy like sand in your shorts in spirit, where the ending could be sad, could be happy, but more often is bittersweet and incomplete. Give me something with jumpy edits and bumpy camera work. Give me something Third World or third sex, with subtitles and some slapstick, James Bond or Jesus of Montréal, I don't care, just make it interesting and offbeat--or give me Death Becomes Her.
Music: World music, most definitely, but nothing too folky or "traditional." Think Natacha Atlas, the late Ofra Haza, Dissidenten, Les Negresses Vertes, the Chango Family, or Xavier Naidoo. I once was at a party where the hosts played Japanese koto music throughout the evening and thought I'd shoot myself in the face after an hour's worth. It may work for college professors but for the gästarbeiter among them, nein, bitte! So, no, nothing like that.
What I listen to doesn't have to have street cred--generally, it doesn't--but it's gotta have a beat and some mood, perspective, or attitude, something beyond "hey, boo, I wanna party widju" or "I'm a skinny white boy who likes to look tragic and ironic in skinny black tie and peg-legged trousers and sing tortured love songs about skinny white girls." With guitars. Oh, l'amour. Oh, yawn.
If I go for something downbeat and moody, yet still musical, it would be the French-Canadian chanteuse Jorane, the just plain French vanilla chanteuse Myléne Farmer (how can you not love a singer who sings songs with titles like "Je t'aime meláncholie," "Psychiatric," and "Myléne c'est fou"?), Swedish singer Ebba Forsberg or even her plaintive and poppier fellow countrywoman, Agnetha Fältskog, formerly of ABBA, themselves a somewhat bipolar group. (Don't believe me? Then compare something seemingly insipid like "Ring Ring" with something semi-suicidal like "The Day Before You Came," and tell me you don't pray for the world's sake for good mental health benefits under Sweden's national health care plan.) There's always Kate Bush or Beth Orton, too.
Reading: Used to, way back in the '80s, my literary tastes were informed by Granta, a half-serious/half-hipster literary journal with Euro appeal, published by Cambridge University's for-profit division, that in and of itself a novelty among the lefty UK lit crit set in the Thatcher era. At least so they imagined--I vaguely remember reading about a British communist-socialist political party in the '80s selling designer goods and other capitalist accoutrements featuring the party logo, using the argument that "communism isn't about denial of pleasure," in an effort to make socialism trendy with a bright young Britain. Right on, comrade!
Do not take yourself too seriously folks. It always comes back to haunt you. Trust me on this-- I have the photos of the fashion faux-pas to prove it.
In that era, I favored British style and pop culture mags like The Face, Q, Select, and the poorly proofread i-D. Among American publications, I often read Spy and chuckled everytime they referred to then-upstart real estate mogul Donald Trump as "that short-fingered Vulgarian." Tee hee.
Way back when, I favored multicultural authors (the one-character-trick pony--start with a provocative concept and a hook 'em in the opening line!--of the Iowa Writers Workshop school for scoundrels in the form of a Bharati Mukherjee or the everyone-look-at-me-I'm-riding-a-bucking-bronco! agent provocateur-ness of Hanif Kureishi, by way of explanation) or pretentious, rather tedious international writers like Milan Kundera and Chinua Achebe. Sorry, guys, to me good writing is about story and character first, not theory and philosophy disguised as literature.
Finally, at the end of the '80s, a boyfriend recommended Eva Luna by Isabel Allende, a book I totally loved but which was somewhat critically sniffed at as being a pale (yet somehow more colorful) imitation of kill-me-now-if-I-have-to-read-again authors like Gabriel García Márquez. Here was a story again--one with character and joy and a world of small details to relish and bigger points to make. All done without irony or archness or Annie Liebowitz photo shoots in Vanity Fair. Wow.
Amazing how one book changed my so-called aesthetic life, allowing me to love what I loved all along once again--middlebrow and lowbrow, maybe middlemiddlebrow or even uppermiddlebrow, all rolled into one--without too much shame from the taste in art, music, and literature that dare not speak its name. As the saying goes, ars longa, vita brevis, and boyfriends last about a week-and-a-half, tops. But sometimes they do leave you with interesting parting gifts--and not just of the sexually transmitted or parasitic variety.
To be continued . . .
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