It's Good Because It's Bad: Notes on "Notes on 'Camp'"

"Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it," quips Oscar Wilde in Vera, or The Nihilists, to whom Susan Sontag dedicates her "Notes on 'Camp'" -- first published in the Partisan Review in 1964 and then collected in Against Interpretation two years later. For Sontag, Wilde is a "transitional figure" in the history of Camp, which she discusses through a series of numbered "jottings" not unlike Guy Debord's notoriously opaque treatises of "Le société du spectacle," which I'm sure you've read. Sontag's Notes are exceedingly clever, insightful, thorough, and quotable; they bring to light the difficulties and paradoxes surrounding Camp without resorting to frightful jargon. In a moment I'll list a few more of my favorite excerpts, but while the subject is still Wilde I'd like to quote Sontag's #46. (Note: When she writes "dandy," she is certainly thinking of Uncle Oscar as the epitome of that type.)

46. The dandy was overbred. His posture was disdain, or else ennui. He sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation. (...) He was dedicated to "good taste."
     The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp--Dandyism in the age of mass culture--makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

I concur with Sontag's contextualizing of "good taste" by way of consigning it to a not-too-distant past, implying that to speak of such a thing nowadays (still true in 2011 as it was in 1964) is either anachronism or Camp itself. In my view, the pretensions of the wealthy and/or intellectual elite no longer qualify as "taste" as perhaps they once did before the turn-of-the-20th-century; it is usually quite boring to learn that someone has bought or argued their way into an apparently refined style -- even more so that they were born into it. And, as Sontag points out in #46 and elsewhere, the blindfolds worn toward the enjoyableness of mass-produced items represent handcrafted tedium more so than any salvageable definition of "taste."

Movie Review: The Lincoln Lawyer

This weekend I saw The Lincoln Lawyer, but I'm still wondering if it was a fictional film adapted from the pages of a bestselling Michael Connelly novel or a documentary culled from paparazzi footage of its stars Matthew McConaughey, Ryan Phillipe, William H. Macy, Josh Lucas, Marisa Tomei, and John Leguizamo. If the credits don't lie, then:

McConaughey plays Mick Haller, a sweet-talking, morally suspicious defense attorney with pores only slightly smaller than the black Lincoln Towncar he parades around Los Angeles in chauffered by Laurence Mason. (Word of advice to McConaughey: you're too young for the direct path my mind took to the Driving Miss Daisy jokes, so stay out of the sun, Tandy.) The opening scenes show us Haller is street smart (cue shady lawyer talk), street rich (cue envelopes of cash), and street sweet (cue big brother / coke whore scene), while setting us up to wonder whether he'll give "hero" instead of "antihero" when it really effing matters. In a word, he's Hollywood's idea of a lawyer. In another word, he's Matthew McConaughey.

Just Another Touch

I owe over half of my iTunes library to movie soundtracks. Start humming along with me to this song by C&C Music Factory, which I first heard in the film "Sister Act." The sound quality of that clip isn't as good, but it's worth seeing "Just a Touch of Love" lace the montage of Whoopi cleaning up the ghetto.

Now replace the word "love" with "camp," and we've got our theme song, sistah!

Camp Here

Welcome to my blog, a place where you'll Find love, Understand life, Change your mind, and Kiss boredom goodbye -- to your heart's content.

Ever since I was a kid growing up in a small, rural town in Texas, I have been drawn to things partly outlandish, partly mainstream. Amusement didn't seem to follow a logical path to me: what others found engaging I abhorred, what others found abhorrent I treasured. To my surprise, this pattern of cultivating strange tastes continued even as my surroundings radically shifted. At Yale I expected to occupy a niche among the intellectual elite, but the moment of belonging -- despite the rich variety of choice I was offered there -- came only in brief, bright flashes. A year after graduating and moving to Houston, I was hosting a party/poetry reading I called "Waltz Whitman" when a verbally astute, new friend of mine named the pattern she saw in me -- "just a touch of camp." I knew what "camp" was, but for no good reason I'd never thought much about how it related to me. Instantly, however, I saw that she was right. "Camp," strictly defined (which it probably shouldn't be), does not summarize everything about me, but I have found no other word that comes closer to describing the strange yet banal, colorful yet gloomy, anarchic yet precise set of cultural artifacts and aesthetic objects I store in my ever-widening Santa's sack of beloved gifts. More importantly, what had seemed like an increasingly isolated life of re-watching "The Craft," jamming out to The Pointer Sisters, and toting "X-Men" comics to darkly lit dive bars began to seem less lonely. There are untold numbers of campers out there, each of them secretly yearning to kick off their Sunday shoes and enjoy life not for what it could be but for what it is -- ostentatiously, senselessly, fabulously flawed.

Visit often. Leave hungry.