Furniture and politics
As a graduate looking for his place in Poland right now, there are two things I must, willy nilly, pay attention to: furniture and politics. Oddly enough, these two - or rather, the way they are represented and sold to the average customer/voter - are similar on a strange level. I tried to put my finger on it, but couldn't; perhaps you'll see the point when it's illustrated, step by step.
1.
Bo concept. A company whose furniture is elitist, modern, chic and (surely...!) expensive. Looking at
their living rooms (click the squares above the pictures to scroll) is quite an experience - though, truth be told, they look better on photos than "live". What I feel is, first of all, anxiety. The furniture is, in each case, the focal point of the room, the actual inhabitant. In spacious interiors, it's easy to follow the uncompromising, simple lines of the design, easy to comprehend the closed, complete composition and find its centre. Easy to overlook the human: s/he would sit there, uneasy, temporary, afraid to touch anything.
2.
IKEA. Still considered stylish and luxurious (which it is, when compared to the 1980s furniture in PL - there should be an investigation into communist crimes against aesthetics), but slowly falling into place (more of that later). The most important difference between this and Bo Concept is that it shows you its
use and versatility. The next - the interiors chosen for the photos are much smaller.
This is something I can relate to: I know what it's like, having to make the most of your 20 square meters. I want to know what to clean my sofa with, once the wine's been spilt.
Now the funny bit. There's a political campaign going on in Poland, before the local elections all over the country. Billboards are being filled with posters, new slogans are being invented...you know the stuff. In step with the Bo Concept philosophy, I give you:
1. "Citizen of the Fourth Republic", media campaign by the currently-ruling party "Law and Justice". What struck us in the photos (appearing in the headers across the site, but especially
this lady...) is that you cannot see the "Citizens'" faces! Now, a complete lack of down-to-earth attitudes in politics is something we could get used to - but the blonde lady is a photoshop-ed cyborg, isn't she? The slogan says "closer to the people", but the outcome, in my opinion, is just the opposite - the personas used are, just like the Fourth Republic of Poland, a myth, a terrifying, not-quite-human construct you don't want to grow up to.
I wish for a political movement that would correspond with IKEA in the previous part of the comparison. It was not my intention to end up writing about politics; as I went on comparing and contrasting the two images, more and more analogies were presenting themselves. I wish for a time when the horrible communist furniture fades away. I wish for people choosing IKEA not because it's "prestigious", but because it's practical and suits their needs. I guess I wish for a geniune middle-class; right now, it's either post-communist relics or Bo Concept. Which makes IKEA a luxury indeed. I wish for it to become a mere convenience.
'OI!'
I had a lot of time for thinking, today, and I tried to explain to myself the reactionary discourse used by Polish football commentators during the World Cup games. In the games I've watched, it's fascinating to actually listen to the commentators' babble. What is recurrent in this - and a point of frustration to me as a person who has been reading Postcolonial theory and not much more in the past two years - is a very biased description of teams from different parts of the world. During the game of Ghana vs Italy, the commentator kept remarking on the marvellous physical endurance of the Ghanans, their coordination, tirelessness. To the Italians were left: intelligent play, tactics, ease of communication. Again, in changeless form, the Orientalist discourse emerges: the Others, who likened to children, machines or animals, lack inspiration and creativity and do well when trained and instructed, but lacking guidance become helpless. Us, Europeans, contemplate, plan ahead, do well under pressure, are precise and execute complex thought processes in a flash of an eye. Is it the general backwardness of this country? Is it the fact that in talking about the national representation of a country, one is tempted to use such commonplaces? No matter; the mere fact of hearing those age-old adages repeated with much faith and assurance was disappointing, to say the least. In the competition in which nations are, ideally, to fight each other on a democratic, arbitrary basis, in which talent is key, differentiations like these still haunt the language. How much of this is prejudice, how much genuine recognition of national identities?
That's like, so last century.
I was thinking about time and technology quite frequently lately (my MA thesis was, in part at least, about similar issues), but couldn't put my finger on the thoughts I've been having until we watched
Raise the Red Lantern. There is a scene, somewhere in the middle of the story, of two youger wives and two men playing mahjongg. One of them stands up to play a record on a phonograph - she is an ex-singer, and she plays a piece from a Chinese opera she used to sing.
This, to me at least, was the first clue about the time at which the events were happening. Up to that point, nothing gave the time frame away: the setting was either rural or traditional Chinese (which I knew nothing about - and anyway, the whole film used the surroundings modestly), the costumes also refused to clue me in. The phonograph offered instant, if approximate, time reference: I don't think that any other such clues followed.
If the story was set in a European context, things would be different. I could recognize clothing styles, hairdos, mannerisms, relate to what was shown and judge - or guess, at least - about the time. In
Raise the Red Lantern, all was unfamiliar, either scarce or explicitly ritualized. I suppose that, for an expert in the field, there was a multitude of visual clues: clothing, accesories, styles of writing or speech. For me, sadly and curiously, watching a Chinese movie is a trip into the Never-Never, be it a "serious" production like RTRL or a beat-em-up fantasy like The House of the Flying Daggers.
The phonograph changed it, and put it in perspective. Suddenly I became aware of when things were happening. It's not that I needed that knowledge: rather, I realized that without such references, what I see remains timeless, similar to a fable of sorts. Cramming the scene with mixed-up artifacts, like in
Blade Runner street sequences, does the same for me: I no longer know, nor care, about where and when.
Things are different in Western flicks: I could be given a jumble of James Bond scenes, for example, and be able to arrange them in a coherent chronology, if only the gadgets were there. I'm sure there are people who could do the same, relying on clothes that are worn in the movies (not to mention James' girlfriends).
'Do you mind if I look at you?'
Think about this: a man's body. If it seems an elusive subject, that's because for hundreds of years now civilisation (men themselves, mostly) has worked to make the male body insignificant. The connection between himself and his 'meat suit' seems tentative at best, and if it's not, then it's not documented satisfyingly enough - not to my knowledge, at least.
Stereotypes. Talk about a woman: you talk about her hair, her voice, her skin, her eyes, her breasts. Talk about a man: you talk about his potential, energy, drive (with a car or without - preferably with), contacts, money. The woman, gender theory will tell you, has been associated and conflated with her body for - as it seems - ever. Her monthly cycle of ebb and flow, her womb wandering all over her body and, exerting its pressure, changing her behaviour (hence the word
hysteria, sharing its core with
hysterectomy and
histrionics). Even women you talk about during gender theory class, those who strive to find a place for the woman outside the discourse of the logos and the phallus, hold forth about the white ink she writes with, the voice of the mother reverberating through her (Helene Cixous), about her sex which is not one, about the intricacies of her labia (Luce Irigaray). The woman carries her body with herself at all times, it seems. Female bodies - and, what's more to the point of this essaylet, females in interaction with their own bodies - are ubiquitous. How many women have you seen taking a shower during any given commercial break today?
And how many men?
It is a question of time, it seems, and with it, economy. J. Lo, a gender theoretician if there ever was one, says (I paraphrase): the man who spends too long a time shopping is suspect. Not for being gay, but for being self-involved. This is because, it seems to me, a man who has time on his hands to care for himself is not a man to the core, does not limit himself to the norms of his gender. Neutral at best; if he smells nice and looks like he spent time to replenish himself, to reduce irritation, he's probably gay - or at least, not all of a man.
Male, naked body: the body which gives pleasure to its owner (and to the owner's lover). The male body on tender, loving, careful display. The male body seen in macro, in the haptic vision of the besotted eye which accepts the maybe-not-perfect body unconditionally. Why not? And yet, all around me, olive-besmeared pumped-up hunks without faces, or not much more.
But I see others, happily, who like to look at men the way I like to look at them.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, for example (we share perspective of an amorous subject - Sepuya's words). I feel like giving a nod of recognition to his photographs; they are simple, understated, warm. They take the time to be tender with the male body, and if that makes them 'gay' (as in 'that's, like, so
gay'), so be it. Or the quiet photography of
Laura Lletinsky (for my favourite example, see the fifth photo in that cycle).
All of this passes through my head when I watch W. shave. I watch him watch himself in the mirror, in that absent yet focused way. I watch him attend to himself, devote time to himself, his body. Maybe it's the sheer novelty value of it; I do, however, realise that I am not used to seeing this because for some reason, the man, alone with his body, caring about it, is not a common sight. The man's corporeality is muted, fuzzy, inordinately (it seems to me) concentrated on that reviled phallus (a rhetorical, medical, alien term - nothing to do with flesh and blood anyway). I refuse to believe that is all there is.
I will not interfere with the relationship between the man and his body; it is his affair. What I would like to see, however, is a new way, a new possibility of looking at the man. What does it have to do with
scopophilia, the putatively oppresive, male, limiting way of looking at a woman? I'd like to think that not much. To characterise that way of looking would mean to define the whole relationship between genders. This will come in time, but for now, I am happy that my man lets me look at him.
"Show your face on TV then we'll see--"
The places where I live seem to get more than their fair share of media attention recently. And, sadly, the reasons are nothing to be proud of. The first instance - a roof collapse in Katowice, where over 60 people were killed - was something huge (you could feel the buzz is over when the journalists from all over the world ran out of material and started interviewing one another), but the second reason - a kid going missing in the suburb of a city where I live - was, at first, nothing major. First, on Monday, the boy didn't return home. Around Thursday, posters were hung and the search was well under way. Then, on Saturday, a TV crew appeared. And on Sunday, another one - with a well-known reporter and a penchant for quasi-sensational stories where somebody is usually found guilty by the way the show is presented.
In both cases, it felt really strange to see familiar places and landscapes transformed in a particular way, with some things added and some things lost in the process, but very few things remaining as I used to see them. A certain kind of continuity had to be shattered and replaced by another, as the images had to make sense, but couldn't possibly convey
my sense.
When a place you know becomes news, it becomes a thing to be explained. It is assumed that people want to know about the place, and that the footage is usually not enough. Like most things that require explanation, the place is in need of a context, a story to wrap it up with.
This, in a way, is what everybody makes of their familiar places. Contextualizing. Connecting streets and sounds, houses and smells, finding convenient passages and avoiding unpleasant areas (after finding out first that they are indeed unpleasant). "Exploring by legwork". The context created in this way is personal, immediate and forever present.
Obviously, there is no way to make such context understandable through any medium. A piece of information regarding, say, a street and a particular shop in it where you know a friendly salesperson and get a free apple now and again - this might seem vital to you, but would be a waste of time on TV. What you need on TV is something
anyone can take in, without moving, at once. Something impersonal, virtual, timeless.
The place which becomes news is placed within a broader spatial context. A map is used: a city plan on regional TV, a map of the region on national edition, and - if the news hits global network - a map of the country, with the capital and the place clearly marked. There is usually a verbal description of the place: if my suburb hits the news again, it will probably be a "peaceful, a bit remote part of town".
People are interviewed, usually in the street or at their offices. Their answers are, obviously, too long and fuzzy, and have to be cut down to be of any relevance. Their names are mixed up, or misspelled - unless they are experts or officials appearing in the coverage. If what is covered is a controversial issue, usually spokespeople are found for both opposing views, in order to remain neutral.
Lastly, similar events are dug up to prove that the news is, actually, nothing new. In case of Katowice, the media have compared it with other instances of this winter's roof collapses (worldwide), other construction disasters (in Poland) and, generally, bad things that have happened to the region in the past.
To a local, none of this makes any sense. the plan of my suburb, if it were broadcast, would leave blank the space crucial to the issue of a lost kid: a stretch of unused land, where shortcuts are devised to get downtown faster, a tricky, dangerous place even in the daylight and when it doesn't snow. The people here would probably say different things in front of the camera than in private (it is rumoured that a local hairdresser made a small fortune on the ladies who couldn't wait to be interviewed). A celebrity detective, appearing competent on TV, made a fool out of himself in our eyes.
I didn't think I could ever agree with Baudrillard, but recently - as the "real" places became virtual and vice versa - I've been treating him with more and more respect.
this is a mirror of our LJ blog, http://nanomythologies.livejournal.com *
Channeling Major Kusanagi.
The smell of chlorine reaches you even before you enter the building and gives you a strange sensation in your stomach akin to hunger.
You look down from the surface and three metres below you, probably skimming the bottom with his skinny little belly there is a small fry of a diver, a twelve-year-old, his eyes enlarged by a diving mask. You shift your eyes forward, and on cue too, because a small girl splashes her way right into you, plump and lovely, her dark eyelashes sticking together, her milky Lucy Pevensie skin glistening. You like her, she is intrepid and innocently self-assured, but you wish she wouldn’t be it right there in your lane. People gain grace in the swimming pool; you know you do yourself, having watched your legs lenghtened and smoothed by the flattering ripples on the water, the red polish on your toenails turning almost black in the horrific bright blue of what seems to
be liquid chlorine. It is pleasant to see all those bodies gliding silently through the water next to you, opposite, below and over you; they are at their best in the courteous company of water, which streamlines them into their most aerodynamic. You see concave spines and effortless movements. You involuntarily and opinionlessly assess women's shapes and men's dimensions.
Still, it is your private hour of reduced gravity and touching others, unless you're with a friend or a significant other, is something of a taboo, or at least unpleasant. After all, you go there to experience your own body to the full, to let water flood your ears and confuse your eyes, distance yourself from everything. Bumping against someone reminds you at once of your own corporeality and the presence of other people. There is a completely different feeling, however, when you swim by someone in the opposite direction far enough not to touch and close enough to feel the movement of water, slide into the arm-shaped whirl spinned by someone else's fingers.
Even though the water stands still, it feels like you're leaving everything behind. Every kick of the legs, every stretch of pleasantly aching shoulders under the hot shower afterwards makes you weigh less, makes it easier to surface, face first.
Looking gift food in the mouth.
It has been only recently that delicatessen have appeared in my city. In an interview, the owner of the biggest of them says that they were a sort of a response to the needs of an increasingly aware and well-read group of clients. Those that need what these shops supply are those who have been or regularly go abroad, are familiar with the, say, Jamie Oliver school of cooking and react to the buzzword 'organic'. When I go there - and I go there because I like the food, and I am an overweening domestic cook - I see women and men of leisure, curious people with money to spend, those old or well-off enough to know they can afford the best. I am usually the youngest person there, and the most careful with my money.
I mentioned Oliver because there is something in his cooking that struck me when I first leafed through 'The Return of the Naked Chef':
texture. Oliver's food makes its consumer very much aware if its ingredients. Sauces cling to the food instead of covering it and rendering it invisible. Salads, pastas and risottos display what they contain: the colours and shapes make it is easy to discern what you are eating. Oliver's food presents itself as honest. This is because, just like Oliver himself, it wants you to believe it has nothing to hide. Oliver has, furthermore, been stressing throughout his career: make sure your food is of the best possible quality. This is because even in the ready dish, it will still stand to scrutiny, it will be possible to judge the individual tastes of ingredients. Unlike the cheaper, mass-made food, which is highly processed, minced, chopped into indiscernible pieces, which is precisely undifferentiated
mass, ingredients in slow food stand for themselves. It was already Roland Barthes in the late fifties who wrote of recipes in French
Elle that, because they are targeted for a 'working-class public', they are 'fiction' - 'there is an obvious endeavour to glaze surfaces, to round them off, to bury the food under the even sediment of sauces, creams, icing and jellies'. Readers of
L’Express, on the other hand, an 'exclusively middle-class public' with 'comfortable purchasing power' are those who get reality: 'one can suggest real dishes to [readers] of
L’Express, in the certainty that they will be able to prepare them.' [1]
Consider bread: opposed to the uniform, fluffy white rectangle, in the deli you get an irregular loaf the colour of wet sand, covered with and filled to bursting with seeds and nuts. You look at it and are reminded of 'your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal peoples of wherever' [2]. These objects, like dramatic analog photography, like hand-held documentaries, have
grain.
Slow food is food which flaunts its origin; it is made and packed so that it seems rough, unpolished, untampered with, close to the manufacturer (who is a person, a family - the name so frequently appearing on the etiquettes made of recycled paper). One of the few methods of conservation is making a preserve; you enter the delicatessen and feel like you have entered your grandmother’s larder. There are rows and rows of jars, tightly screwed lids covered with fabric. Time ticks backwards, surfaces are matt; no sign of airbrushing.
What is also important is range (free range, preferably). The customers of delicatessen are distinguished and eat distinguished food; they are able to discern and choose. The ability to choose from a wider paradigm has always been a signal of privilege: 'the act of making distinctions comes to confer distinction on the one who is making them; the classifier classifies herself, showing by means of her classifications that, in vulgar parlance, she has class'. What is interesting, however, that usually distinction means distance from the broadly understood nature: 'privilege both estranges and makes strange' [3]. Here, on the other hand, privilege enables choosing something indigenous; the upper-middle class cook can get a touch proletarian by partaking in something sold as having history, as being
real.
[1] - Roland Barthes, "Mythologies"
[2] - Chuck Palahniuk, "Fight Club"
[3] - Joseph Litvak, "Strange Gourmets".
