Tuna Melts, Retro Phones, and Imperialism

Time was. Time was when thoughts of fond remembrance were collected under the name of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a very personal sentiment. What we look back upon with a smile in our heart is something very individual, very specific to each of us. For instance, I do not have any special tenderness for madeleines, although I do have a sweet tooth, but I know that certain people can look at one and find in the small, sweet cake cause for a flood of emotions and memories. My friend Adam knows this too. Passing a donut shop on Sepulveda near Venice, Adam noted with a genuine sigh, “Winchell’s Donuts really bring me back to my youth.”

The cuisine which most readily triggers wonderful memories for me is the tuna melt. The remembrance of tuna melts past transports me back to the Milburn Diner in Milburn, New Jersey where I am seated with my best friend, Jeff George, in a diner booth upholstered in resplendent maroon vinyl surrounded by an ambience that can only be described as Greek Revival Spanish Inquisition. The idea of the tuna melt, served open faced on golden toasted slabs of rye heaped with twin mountains of tuna fish rich with mayonnaise, each slice covered with a thin veil of ochrey American cheese, bubbling and slightly browned, opens up a world of lost youth, of old green train cars with wicker seats rumbling past on the Erie Lackawanna line, of waiting out rainstorms after late night movies, of strawberry-blondes in summer dresses. The Milburn Diner tuna melt is the holy grail of cookery, lost to my history, unattainable in my life since moving west. Every California menu that boasts one as a selection holds out false hope. These tuna melts inevitably appear as an exercise in disappointment, thin, pale, closed-faced, even defiled with a bitter crown of sprouts. But the disjointed and random sense-images that the tuna melt brings to mind is as unique to me as my own DNA. It is my time was.

Not that food alone can be the touchstone for nostalgia. A song – for instance the tune "Oh, What a Night," which is itself an ode to the backwards gaze – brings back good memories of trips to the shore that I’d rather not share. But I’ve noticed something happening in the world of nostalgia lately that gives me a sense of dread. More and more these days I come across false memories. I discover them quite a bit in television and the movies, but most of all I have found them in catalogs and upscale chain stores. They come in the form of assertions that some special thing brings to mind a wonderful past, out of my own consciousness, when in fact no such memory exists.

Before me is the catalog for the Restoration Hardware company, a business that has made much of commodifying the past. Here I can purchase a phone that is similar to those phones I remember so well -- designed by Henry Dreyfuss back in 1937. At least, I think I remember them well until I realize that the phones in my past were mostly plastic, 1960’s contraptions more evocative of a late cold-war era Navy training film than the image of Lauren Bacall reclining on a chaise lounge while chatting. No, my family did not acquire black rotary phones until my brother became self-consciously retro sometime in the 1980’s.

Restoration Hardware also promises that the new phone, so evocative of a past that I have been urged to think was mine, has actually, “been made better, infinitely so.” How so, they do not reveal unless it is the push button mechanism grafted on top of the original design to make it usable in this age of “press nine for customer service.” They want me to believe the past is a grand place, but they wouldn't want me to go so far as to stick my finger in it and give it a twist. Just leave the past to them to make it better, infinitely so.

Another gent is hooking up old telephone handsets to mobile phones.

The philosophy of Restoration Hardware and others with similar tactics is to provide things that are “pleasantly familiar.” But I don’t find these things pleasantly familiar after all. They are creepily familiar. They are only familiar because they are supposed to be familiar--as if there was some Jungian Collective Unconsciousness Catalog. These companies are profiting from our anxieties about the future by marketing to our longing for the past, any past, as long as it’s pleasant. To this end, historians would best be avoided. They keep reminding us just how bad the past was, or how different it was from what we desperately want to believe. What the marketers understand is our desire to find a good place in history, but they can’t provide that place bespoke for each of us. Madeleines and tuna melts won’t work because these are highly individualized triggers of lost time. Nostalgia now is generalized, stretched-out, and commodified for mass-market potential. Mass-past, as it were.

Plundering the Other for treasure is one of the oldest stories of commerce. Merchants have long set off to bring us the rewards of our global imperial project: printed cloth from India, bamboo settees from China, tea-sets from Malaysia, ready-made ethnic art from Africa, and deck chairs from the Dominican Republic. A new phalanx of merchant princes, however, has embarked on a mission of Temporal Imperialism looting the the past for artifacts which are manufactured to engender within us a feeling of so-called pleasant familiarity. Instant nostalgia. McSentiment. We don’t even have to work up for ourselves a taste for madeleines because these products are carefully "pre-selected" to tap into some image of the past we supposedly all share.

To the snob, nostalgia is a personal experience and tradition is not found in those objects in need of the resurrection du jour.

Slander, William Blake, and Bugs Bunny

Today I began to write about what to do when you are the subject of lies. I erased what I wrote and decided I didn’t want to write about that. The subject is a quagmire and if you have ever been in the position of defending yourself before an unsympathetic audience, you know that there is little you can do to resolve the situation. I know people who might take a sort of “cosmic” view of this and believe that misrepresentations do not have the longevity of reality, that eventually the truth will reveal itself. This is the theory of “murder will out.” It assumes that a wrongdoing will be exposed and it’s a way for those who have been aggrieved to hold out hope much in the way that poor people have been assured that rich people can’t get into heaven.

I’m not so sure. There are murders unsolved, and more we don’t even know about; character assassination must operate along the same lines. I have no knowledge about the final reward of the rich.

The only sure thing about slander, I guess, is that it tests your friends in a crucible. You could act as if you were in a court of inquiry, present your evidence, make your defenses, but it won’t get you far. Some people will only respond with a shrug of the shoulders and inform you, with a sort of bland disregard, that there are two versions of the truth. You have already lost them. Others will stand and wait, and from what we know about them, they also serve. And others will support you. It will have very little to do with the details of the situation, it will have much to do with your character and the character of your friends.

And so it comes back to the judgment of friends. As for the opinions of others, I give you today a quote ascribed by Bertrand Russell to William Blake (and if you have any better knowledge of where it comes from, please let me know):

The only man that e’er I knew
Who did not make me almost spew
Was Fuseli: He was both Turk and Jew.
And so, dear Christian friends, how do you do?

We all need at least one Fuseli.

I’ll also add, on a lighter note, that today is Bugs Bunny’s birthday (sort of). Bugs is one of the great snobs of animation. Witty, ironic, charming, decadent, slightly effeminate, a concert pianist, disdainful of hunters, probably Jewish (well – he’s kosher, his nemesis was originally a pig, he’s from Brooklyn, and he retires to Beverly Hills – what more can I say?), he is practically the Marcel Proust of cartoons.

Bugs also lets us truly understand the sneering mischief of Blake’s interrogatory. Fearing that the world outside will make us queasy, that hunters skulk, that coyotes lurk, that cowboys are dangerous, that our friends are daffy, we give the public our guarded, mordant greeting . . . And so, dear Christian friends … eh, what’s up doc?

Architectural Disgust and My (Possibly) Broken Toe

I think I broke my toe yesterday. I was walking around my place barefoot, as I like to, and drop-kicked the bedpost for no good reason other than that it was obscured by blankets. If traffic were better, I’d drive down to campus to have it checked out, but I know too well that there’s not a lot one can do about a broken toe, especially when it’s probably just stubbed.

There’s nothing quite like a nagging pain to put one in a misanthropic mood. At least, that holds true for many people. I require nothing to put me in such a mood other than casual observation of the world around me. Today’s bout of misanthropy was triggered by a short perusal through the pages of a recent copy of Architectural Digest.

Sitting on my couch with my leg extended, I flipped the pages of the magazine and began to long for someone to come by and just tie a tag to my toe and get it all over with. Something horrible has happened to Architectural Digest since I last paid attention to it lo those years ago.

When I was younger, I used to spend many nights in the library at the college where my mother taught. I loved to read the old architectural magazines and the ones from the 1930’s and 40’s were my favorites. The articles in these journals were well-written without being pompous and they featured large and modest houses alike, with a focus on design innovation and creativity.

AD appears to have suffered from the bloat of nouveau riche toxicity. The promotional material for the magazine invites one to give a subscription as a "gift of good taste.” But the magazine itself has little good taste to show for itself and the true gift of good taste in this instance would require the kind of restraint unknown by the editors of AD, at least as evidenced by pictures such as the following: a portrait of the house-owners done up in mock impressionism with a gilt rococo frame above a baroque fireplace of red and white marble with gold-plated andirons; a bathroom with gold-plated plumbing fixtures; a Waterford crystal, gold-plated, twelve-arm chandelier costing $24,000. I guess Auric Goldfinger survived being sucked out of that plane and made a soft landing as an interior decorator specializing in the feng shui problems of well-off people with cataracts. For goodness sake, if all it takes is some golden drek to make a décor, why not stack a mountain of raw ingots in the corner next to a La-Z-Boy and call it a day?

Of course, if your home is featured in the pages of AD, you’re probably terribly nouveau riche anyway. First off, these are clearly pictures of houses in which nobody actually lives. These are houses designed specifically to gain the owner social acceptance into a world where having a house in Architectural Digest matters; real living goes on in second and third houses in other places. The people in the photos, if there are any, appear as lost and stiffly out of place in these abominations as they would, say, at a UN conference on human rights violations, or at the downtown public library.

Moreover, no self-respecting minor earl or old-money socialite doyenne would air their bath mats in public. But if you grew up with an aesthetic dominated by the Montgomery Ward catalog and made your money either as a mass-market carpet retailer or an overproduced adult-contemporary diva, then it fits your psychological profile to desire attention from the very middling sorts who considered themselves your superior in those hard, early years (and who eventually made up your customer base) and you now can nourish yourself with the delicious thought of those mere commoners back in Harrisburg dazzled by your golden showers. AD is not a design magazine, then, but a sort of sick exercise in schadenfreude for its subjects who, I am presuming here, delight in the fact that some of us can’t acquire the Pussy Galore décor without ever venturing to contemplate why we would ever want to.

The lesson in all of this is quite a cliché. You can’t buy good taste, but you can acquire it. The trouble is that if you pay for taste without taking the trouble to develop it (which is quite an involved education), your hireling will provide you with all the garish things necessary to delight an aesthetic simpleton such as yourself in an effort to justify his fee. This was half the problem of the Gilded Age – excessive, intemperate, tasteless displays of wealth thrown at the faces of the laboring public out of crass ignorance. In those days the mob did not seem to desperately desire the trappings of the class overlords, but only their fair share of a living wage, and seemed to enjoy simple pleasures more than the rabble of today. Innocent, healthy amusements like reading newspapers, drinking at union halls, and throwing brickbats at stockbrokers have been replaced by the empty promises of reality television and fast-food sweepstakes which hold out to today's consumer the slim chance to mimic the lack of refinement we find in Architectural Digest.

Perhaps now the swelling has gone down enough to put on my gold-toe socks.

On Regret

Sometimes I wish I could lie down in a field of regrets and let the slender grains of the past grow up and around me. This way my mistakes and I could grow slowly indistinct, much like the occasional concrete gunnery stations that appear through the European countryside, brazen errors overgrown in the fullness of nature and time with moss and reeds. If not the pastoral, regret deserves to be accompanied by a nocturne on an old piano in a velvet-draped room smelling too much of jasmine. Regret is a luxurious sentiment; it arrives slow and soft, and it settles in heavily.

At least that is how I sometimes think it could be. These days my regret is clinical and cold like a coroner’s ward. I am called down daily to make an identification like some weepy bystander’s wife in a TV melodrama while drawers slide with hard, efficient sounds. There are the words I said to a lover that I can not make unspoken. There is a lie I told to enhance my status. There is a time I did not stand up for what was right.

There are some people who claim to have misgivings about nothing; that they never look back. I don’t like these people. Perhaps if they did look back they might catch a glimpse of their self-satisfied compatriot Adolf Eichmann, the man who organized Nazi death transports for millions of victims, and who stated during his trial, “to sum it all up, I regret nothing.” A soul without qualms is a soul without qualities.

Snobbery is a path of doubt. The person who asks, as a Snob does, what is best is distrustful of what is worst. Moreover, the Snob possesses an interior voice that borders on the neurotic which relentlessly examines the position and quality of one’s actions, associations, and words within a pattern of understanding. This attribute is beautifully exhibited by one of the great Snobs of all time, Marcel Proust, in a story itself involving one of fiction’s great Snobs, Swann’s Way. Both Proust and his protagonist, Charles Swann, view the world through the anguished elitism which is the burden of Snobbery and which, because it exists to judge, must also, always, reconsider and consider yet again.

The efficient, responsible, middle-brau Eichmanns of the world ship their doubts off to transit camps in execution without judgment. Snob’s Way is judgment without execution. As Proust noted, “There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.”

Regretfully, he can’t.

Dutch Royalty, Doctoral Exams, and the Problem of Neckwear.

A few weeks ago when I took the qualifying oral exams for my doctorate, I wore a coat and tie. My friend Jeff pointed out that I failed to use the “Windsor” knot for my tie. I had chosen instead to use the less sophisticated “Four-in-Hand” knot. Snobs find comfort in such small distinctions.

Allow me to explain my choice with a little anecdote from my reckless past.

Several years back when I was an attorney practicing in that frontier town of Tucson, Arizona – an environment hostile to all neckwear other than bolos and nooses – I was obliged to wear a tie in the courtroom.[1] I have never liked wearing ties to work, and in 117 degree heat neckties tend to operate against the best interests of the gullet. In my view, a tie worn to look good while out on the town, or perhaps while lying in repose during your wake, is a matter of taste. But a tie worn for work is an emblem of coercion. Allegiance to the tie suggests, as Paul Fussell has pointed out, middle-class reliability, respectability, and responsibility. One day, after chafing under the oppressive respectability of a zoning enforcement hearing, I emerged from the courtroom and immediately upon entering the crowded elevator, removed my tie. A fellow lawyer commented and I haughtily replied, “the necktie is the yoke of the bourgeois.”

A few days later, while strolling to lunch through the streets of downtown Tucson in my glorious open collared shirt, a man approached me with great excitement. “You’re the fellow from the elevator – the ‘tie is the yoke of the bourgeois’ guy! You’re my hero!”

I can’t take sole responsibility for the heroism. I was inspired in my act by the gallant Prince Claus of Holland, who during an awards ceremony in 1998 untied his tie and threw it to the ground declaring it a snake around the neck which made a prisoner of men. Prince Claus was able to assume this attitude towards conventional fashion without circumspection precisely because he was an aristocrat, no doubt also the reason he was able to interrupt another speech one day and comment, apropos of nothing, on his profound love for his wife, Queen Beatrix.

But, dear reader, you point out that lowbrow people also have a pretty contemptuous attitude towards the tie. The tie-less snob male avoids a coalition of the swilling by refusing to wear clothing of synthetic fibers or any garment advertising any consumable product of any sort. In this way, some of the most admirable snobs I know – college faculty – are able to assert in the workplace their comparative aristocratic freedom from the petty expectations of middle-managers or so-called “executives” as well as their resistance to the commands of beer company couture. Professors, who routinely earn less than carpet peddlers, are thus a noble breed, not one of whom, thank the lord, wore a tie to my orals.

If you must wear a tie, then, I urge you to consider the most cavalier, most breezy and aloof knot, the “Four in Hand.” It tells the world – or at least the world that knows about such matters – that you are really wearing a tie to avoid making others uncomfortable when occasion demands them to wear a tie, not because you care. If you really do care – and how terribly middle-class of you – I’d be glad to tell you someday about what ties you can and can’t wear. Till then, see http://www.tie-a-tie.net/ to learn just what in the hell a Windsor knot is.

And remember, September 6 is Prince Claus’ birthday. Please don’t wear a tie.

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[1] Tucson's popular Pinnacle Peak Steakhouse, for instance, does not allow ties.

The Essays of Montaigne and Controlling the Homicidal Urge

I went to a bookstore the other day to look for the latest translation of Montaigne’s Essays. I like skillful translations of classic texts and have heard that M.A. Screech’s version, which came out in 1993, is quite good. The essays themselves have been around since the sixteenth century and an English version available since 1603, but reading those early editions is painful and reading Montaigne should be fun. Montaigne practically invented the essay genre and was one of the first great modern skeptics. His prose was straightforward and witty and his subject – his own life – fascinating.

“Montaigne’s essays?” the clerk – a woman who had to be at least 45 years old - asked me from behind her computer terminal. “Do you know who wrote it?”

Montaigne believed that humanity is in no way superior to the beasts. I thought maybe because we had opposable thumbs or could manufacture self-cleaning ovens that we had one up on the animal kingdom. All the claims Montaigne might arrange in his essays to prove his point would not do as much to convince me as that clerk’s question: Who wrote Montaigne’s Essays?

If a device existed that could reveal my Snob brain activity, bystanders might have been happy to see the Snob ‘centers’ in my cerebral cortex turning magenta with overloaded activity, causing synopses in my brain to misfire, and generally resulting in a Snob meltdown accompanied by a mental slideshow of pscychotic ideations depicting various techniques of hunting, killing, and gutting humans in a suburban setting. Externally, I was too stunned to register any immediate response.

This is a Snob predicament. The gentleman or lady ignores intellectual and social trespasses with silent reprobation and outward calm, feeling all the better for their natural superiority. The dandy delights in merry and vain condescension. But the Snob cannot remain quiet at the scene of a crime, and doesn’t fit well in a cloak of petty arrogance. Maybe sarcasm is our last, best hope: a Molotov cocktail to toss at the shock troops of Ignorance. “I believe, perhaps, that Montaigne was the author of Montaigne’s Essays.”

But sarcasm is a dangerous weapon. It overtakes us and turns us bitter. Montaigne may have been on to something when he suggested that human beings are no better than animals. I think though that he is proof enough against his own argument. The trouble for Snobbery is trying to understand the difference between that which is superior and that which is not. This is a qualitative judgment and we are living in a time when qualitative judgments are quite out of fashion.

I am an historian and Snobs have an historical consciousness. History is not a Tsunami; it does not move all at once towards one end. The past, one might say, has many currents. They move in different directions, some glacier slow, others fast. The trend now may seem to overturn canons of judgment, while in the background historical forces are slowly uprighting them: fast currents above slow currents. Today we may be in the avant-garde of the Revolution, tomorrow Robespierre may have our heads for orthodoxy.

The Essays of Montaigne and the book clerks who ask stupid questions both challenge us to probe our own mental state. Snobbery is at heart a form of insecurity – a good form, but insecurity nevertheless. There is nothing smug about the Snob’s superiority. The Snob’s superiority floats with history, and cannot be assumed or certain. Our culture encourages people to ask themselves, “How can I be the best me possible?” as a positive, therapeutic measure designed to promote “human potential.” Yet if that person arrives at the next natural question, “What is the best?” the pale has been crossed. The indulgence of the first question is considered healthy, especially when compared with the impudence of the latter. The Snob occupies that lonely territory beyond the pale, mucking about in history trying to find what is best, hated by both the left and the right, and buying books from people who are forgetting how to read.