Entry tags:
Kim Kardashian's Ass, the Sandinistas, Genocide Art, and Modernity
I've been watching television for more than half a century now. The first time I ever saw an ass jiggle on camera was a couple of nights ago, on reality television, watching Kim Kardashian walk away from the camera in her pajamas.
The first time I ever saw T and A jiggle in high art, on a ballet stage, was during a dress rehearsal of the Miami ballet under Balanchine protege Eddie "Prodigal Son" Villella. The ballerinas were of all kinds of interesting Latino flavors, including China Latina, and I think I remember a Japo-Peruviana. Not only did they not meet the 60-year-ukase for the Balanchine conformation standard -- tiny head, long limbs, shortest possible torso -- they had no armor around lateral movement of the rib cage, as Latinos who dance do not, and while they didn't exactly samba during Eddie's more Balanchine-inflected classics, the vision of these being danced by women whose breasts jiggled and who could, even if they were not, roll their rib cages from side to side, and whose energy visibly emanated from the kundalini snake at the base of their spine and not from the Balanchine master puppet string being pulled tight out of their solar plexi -- you are standing erect on a base and not aspiring toward a higher power -- the vision was like a thunderclap.
Just so with Kim's bottom. Like everyone else in the universe, I love Kim Kardashian's bottom. It is reality television alone, and not the aesthetic standards of magazine and Hollywood gatekeepers, who have brought us this lovely earth-shaking sight.
Now comes Alessandra Stanley, a TV critic of the NY Times, reiterating a Manhattan aesthetic I've heard before.
It is tempting to view “Jersey Shore” or any Kardashian sister as the knell of civilization’s end.
I believe it was my nemesis, Daphne Merkin, the most-published worst writer (MPWW), who last assayed this trope in the pages of the NYT. One of the things that's ghastly about Merkin is that she is a kind of Rorschach blot, or pillhead revenant, for the stupidest, creepily sexist ideas of the New York Times editor class, one of the reasons she is MPWW:
Much as we might rag on it, the awful truth must be looked at head-on: Reality TV, that fiction of verisimilitude, is, even for people who read W. G. Sebald and enjoy grim Scottish films with subtitles, supernally addictive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/t-magazine/25remix-merkin-t.html?scp=1&sq=daphne%20merkin%20reality%20television&st=cse
Without getting into the peculiarities of -- let's call it the Merkin ethos -- why a certain kind of over-share, is not TMI, whereas reality TV, another kind of over-share, is TMI to those who are literally showing their hideous popoes in the public prints, with the approbation of creepyass editors whose credo is All the news that's fit to print, I would like to address this idea that reality television is the end of civilization.
Both these remarks come at a time when I am thinking about the private life (non-political) blogs, Youtube, the online comments sections in major grey lady newspapers, the digital paparazzi like TMZ, and reality television itself, and trying to characterize the revolution in the canon they represent. I wish I knew or understood, as some of you like![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
oneroom do, philosophy better than I do, of spectacle, of mediation, of DeBord, and how to fit all of this into that. All I can do is report what I've been interested in all my life, and that is in what, I suspect, Virginia Woolf called "the lives of the obscure", or Foucault, the voices murmuring outside the walls of history, the entire nouvelle vague history movement, which is perhaps the single most revolutionary advance in my lifetime, in short the voices and stories of people who are not what Graham Robb calls the tyrants of history -- 300 white guys in Paris. The most revolutionary, as well as life-changing thing I have read in the past year was on the blog of an inner-city Baltimore high school teacher, a blog so obscure he has posted for years without comment. I love you, Baltimore, the same Baltimore which produced the best fiction ever on television, The Wire, the creation of a journalist, who was told by New York editors that what happened in Baltimore was so far outside the pale that it wasn't news and could not be produced or published in New York.
As a child I was gripped by Ann Landers, sensing that the letters she got were the real stories in the newspaper. I first saw MTV in the middle 1980s when somebody was carrying a camera through the jungle with -- I don't know, maybe Sandinistas -- and my eyes popped out of my head. I was glued to MTV, and the Real World just the way I had been to the Louds when they, their divorce, and their coming-out-of-the-closet son, Lance, took over television discourse in 1971. I was gripped in the same way by the unbelievable Norman Lewis book about war, Naples 1944, which is pretty much the only one you need to read, and if you want to go high art again, by Goya. Aged six, at the Prado with my mother, she lost me. She found me standing in front of this, one of the paintings with which the former court painter defined and inaugurated what we call modernity:
Without knowing this story, I circled back to write about this painting in the 1990s, as one of the progenitors of genocide art. You could call it reality television, and without rendering either banal or ridiculous, put Kim Kardashian's unprecedented television ass jiggle in the same moral universe. Rigid standards of what you are allowed to look at are being shattered, and the voices murmuring outside history are being let in. I was struck the other day, looking at some pen art by the Navajo Geeky GURL, how much like Goya's Desastres de la Guerra drawings they were. He gave up the Spanish court to travel Spain and record war art, an unprecedented shattering of the proscenium around easel art, and perhaps the first, and finest, war journalism.
I have to think some more about why Stanley's analysis of reality television, which took some thought and care, is so way off the hook.
Watch this space.
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
August 20, 2010
THE TV WATCH
Yes, They’re Sleazy, but Not Originals
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
It is tempting to view “Jersey Shore” or any Kardashian sister as the knell of civilization’s end.
The second season of “Jersey Shore,” which takes place in Miami, is even more popular than the first, and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” is returning on Sunday for a fifth season, carrying in tow a spinoff about publicists, “The Spin Crowd.”
There is no need to panic.
Reality shows that exalt indolent, loud-mouthed exhibitionists may seem like almost biblical retribution for our materialistic, celebrity-obsessed age. But actually, these kinds of series are an extension of a time-honored form of entertainment, one that reaches back to the era of landed gentry, debutantes and social seasons in places like Newport, R.I., or the French Riviera.
More than a century ago, ordinary people avidly followed the follies of the idle rich in the society pages and passenger lists of liners like the Atlantic or the Mauretania. (The maiden voyage of the Titanic was a style story — until it hit the iceberg.)
There were celebrities back then too, and their claims to fame were not so much nobler than those of Kim Kardashian or even Mike, a k a the Situation, of “Jersey Shore.” Women and men made news by spending money frivolously or having grand weddings with millionaires or titled Europeans; they became infamous in lurid sex scandals and even murder cases, as when Harry K. Thaw killed the architect Stanford White in 1906 out of jealousy over White’s affair with his model-actress wife, Evelyn Nesbit.
News judgment, even then, skewed toward entertainment. The New York Herald was the first American newspaper to use the wireless telegraph in 1899 — inventor Guglielmo Marconi was invited to New York to report not the conclusion of the Dreyfus affair or the start of the second Boer war, but the results of a high-society sailing regatta, America’s Cup.
Celebrities of yore wore more clothes and had better manners, but then, as now, they went to a lot of parties and were often famous for being famous.
Television merely invades the process and broadens the social pool. “Jersey Shore” is often condemned, at least by many New Jersey residents, for hitting a new low by elevating the riffraff of tanning salons and sleazy nightclubs. But it’s important to remember that “Jersey Shore” is on MTV, a youth-oriented cable channel that has a hortative streak: series like “Teen Mom” and “If You Really Knew Me” carry a strong “don’t try this at home” message.
So, in a way, does “Jersey Shore.” The antics of Snooki, Ronnie, Vinny and the other housemates are a reality show version of a children’s poem in Gelett Burgess’s “Goops and How to Be Them,” first published in 1900:
The Goops they lick their fingers
and the Goops they lick their knives
They spill their broth on the tablecloth
Oh, they lead disgusting lives!
Bad behavior serves as a warning but succeeds as entertainment.
When they first appeared, the cast members of “Jersey Shore” were a Bart Simpson-ish tonic after the bland chic and relentless blond perfection of “The Hills.” They are loud, vulgar, salon-tanned and gym-bulked numbskulls who drink, brawl, belch and use foul language. This season the housemates have taken on a semblance of work in a Miami ice cream parlor — but it’s a silly gimmick. Their vocation is vacation.
And they have become so entrenched in the vernacular that even President Obama mentioned Snooki in a recent speech. She has smoothed down her “pouf” this season, but for a lingering moment that retro hairstyle was a cultural artifact like Jacqueline Kennedy’s pillbox hat.
Reality shows are staged, scripted and heavily edited, but for some reason there is still a frisson of authenticity behind the artifice: real people seem to have more staying power than established celebrities who are cast in reality shows.
The amateurs who turn into semi-professional actors on “The Bachelorette” keep finding an audience. Dina Lohan, the mother of Lindsay, and Denise Richards, the ex-wife of Charlie Sheen, bombed on their reality shows, mostly because they turned out to be deadly dull, unwilling or unable to tap into their inner sitcom personas, as Ozzy Osbourne did so successfully in his pioneering reality show, “The Osbournes.”
And so, however improbably, have the Kardashians. The women of the family have molded their exotic beauty and blank personalities to fit into comic soap operas, including the spinoff “Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami.”
They deliver dialogue that is so deliciously inane that no “As the World Turns” writer would dare type it. “We have, like, a great relationship,” Kim tells Jonathan Cheban, a publicist-confidant, explaining why she and the football star Reggie Bush broke up. “We just kind of realized it’s not working.”
In Sunday’s season premiere a newly single Kim won’t let people into her new house — a huge and impersonal faux-Mediterranean villa — for fear of scratches or stains. “I’ve worked so hard for this,” she tells her stepfather, Bruce Jenner.
It’s a laughable statement — she is the high priestess of red carpet parasites — except that Kim did make a go of doing almost nothing. She began as a national joke, mocked for having an odalisque figure but no visible talent, and has transformed herself into an international brand and tabloid fixture. Now she is also an executive producer of “The Spin Crowd.”
And that show, about Hollywood bottom-feeders, makes the “Jersey Shore” crowd seem reserved. Jonathan runs his company, Command PR, based on the “Swimming With Sharks” school of management — bullying a young new associate to have collagen lip injections, haranguing female assistants to look even more slutty — if that’s imaginable.
There’s nothing new about coaxing celebrities to promote products; the actress Lillian Russell endorsed Coca-Cola at the turn of the last century. But Jonathan has to persuade a Hollywood hunk to be a spokesman for a line of self-tanning lotions for men.
And the surrealism of show business is what makes this a marketable reality show.
“That sounds sort of in the makeup-world kind of deal — that’s not really me,” Mario Lopez, a host of “Extra,” tells Jonathan. “So I don’t know if it’s really true or authentic to what I am about.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy Terms of Service Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map
The first time I ever saw T and A jiggle in high art, on a ballet stage, was during a dress rehearsal of the Miami ballet under Balanchine protege Eddie "Prodigal Son" Villella. The ballerinas were of all kinds of interesting Latino flavors, including China Latina, and I think I remember a Japo-Peruviana. Not only did they not meet the 60-year-ukase for the Balanchine conformation standard -- tiny head, long limbs, shortest possible torso -- they had no armor around lateral movement of the rib cage, as Latinos who dance do not, and while they didn't exactly samba during Eddie's more Balanchine-inflected classics, the vision of these being danced by women whose breasts jiggled and who could, even if they were not, roll their rib cages from side to side, and whose energy visibly emanated from the kundalini snake at the base of their spine and not from the Balanchine master puppet string being pulled tight out of their solar plexi -- you are standing erect on a base and not aspiring toward a higher power -- the vision was like a thunderclap.
Just so with Kim's bottom. Like everyone else in the universe, I love Kim Kardashian's bottom. It is reality television alone, and not the aesthetic standards of magazine and Hollywood gatekeepers, who have brought us this lovely earth-shaking sight.
Now comes Alessandra Stanley, a TV critic of the NY Times, reiterating a Manhattan aesthetic I've heard before.
I believe it was my nemesis, Daphne Merkin, the most-published worst writer (MPWW), who last assayed this trope in the pages of the NYT. One of the things that's ghastly about Merkin is that she is a kind of Rorschach blot, or pillhead revenant, for the stupidest, creepily sexist ideas of the New York Times editor class, one of the reasons she is MPWW:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/t-magazine/25remix-merkin-t.html?scp=1&sq=daphne%20merkin%20reality%20television&st=cse
Without getting into the peculiarities of -- let's call it the Merkin ethos -- why a certain kind of over-share, is not TMI, whereas reality TV, another kind of over-share, is TMI to those who are literally showing their hideous popoes in the public prints, with the approbation of creepyass editors whose credo is All the news that's fit to print, I would like to address this idea that reality television is the end of civilization.
Both these remarks come at a time when I am thinking about the private life (non-political) blogs, Youtube, the online comments sections in major grey lady newspapers, the digital paparazzi like TMZ, and reality television itself, and trying to characterize the revolution in the canon they represent. I wish I knew or understood, as some of you like
oneroom do, philosophy better than I do, of spectacle, of mediation, of DeBord, and how to fit all of this into that. All I can do is report what I've been interested in all my life, and that is in what, I suspect, Virginia Woolf called "the lives of the obscure", or Foucault, the voices murmuring outside the walls of history, the entire nouvelle vague history movement, which is perhaps the single most revolutionary advance in my lifetime, in short the voices and stories of people who are not what Graham Robb calls the tyrants of history -- 300 white guys in Paris. The most revolutionary, as well as life-changing thing I have read in the past year was on the blog of an inner-city Baltimore high school teacher, a blog so obscure he has posted for years without comment. I love you, Baltimore, the same Baltimore which produced the best fiction ever on television, The Wire, the creation of a journalist, who was told by New York editors that what happened in Baltimore was so far outside the pale that it wasn't news and could not be produced or published in New York.As a child I was gripped by Ann Landers, sensing that the letters she got were the real stories in the newspaper. I first saw MTV in the middle 1980s when somebody was carrying a camera through the jungle with -- I don't know, maybe Sandinistas -- and my eyes popped out of my head. I was glued to MTV, and the Real World just the way I had been to the Louds when they, their divorce, and their coming-out-of-the-closet son, Lance, took over television discourse in 1971. I was gripped in the same way by the unbelievable Norman Lewis book about war, Naples 1944, which is pretty much the only one you need to read, and if you want to go high art again, by Goya. Aged six, at the Prado with my mother, she lost me. She found me standing in front of this, one of the paintings with which the former court painter defined and inaugurated what we call modernity:
Without knowing this story, I circled back to write about this painting in the 1990s, as one of the progenitors of genocide art. You could call it reality television, and without rendering either banal or ridiculous, put Kim Kardashian's unprecedented television ass jiggle in the same moral universe. Rigid standards of what you are allowed to look at are being shattered, and the voices murmuring outside history are being let in. I was struck the other day, looking at some pen art by the Navajo Geeky GURL, how much like Goya's Desastres de la Guerra drawings they were. He gave up the Spanish court to travel Spain and record war art, an unprecedented shattering of the proscenium around easel art, and perhaps the first, and finest, war journalism.
I have to think some more about why Stanley's analysis of reality television, which took some thought and care, is so way off the hook.
Watch this space.
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
August 20, 2010
THE TV WATCH
Yes, They’re Sleazy, but Not Originals
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
It is tempting to view “Jersey Shore” or any Kardashian sister as the knell of civilization’s end.
The second season of “Jersey Shore,” which takes place in Miami, is even more popular than the first, and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” is returning on Sunday for a fifth season, carrying in tow a spinoff about publicists, “The Spin Crowd.”
There is no need to panic.
Reality shows that exalt indolent, loud-mouthed exhibitionists may seem like almost biblical retribution for our materialistic, celebrity-obsessed age. But actually, these kinds of series are an extension of a time-honored form of entertainment, one that reaches back to the era of landed gentry, debutantes and social seasons in places like Newport, R.I., or the French Riviera.
More than a century ago, ordinary people avidly followed the follies of the idle rich in the society pages and passenger lists of liners like the Atlantic or the Mauretania. (The maiden voyage of the Titanic was a style story — until it hit the iceberg.)
There were celebrities back then too, and their claims to fame were not so much nobler than those of Kim Kardashian or even Mike, a k a the Situation, of “Jersey Shore.” Women and men made news by spending money frivolously or having grand weddings with millionaires or titled Europeans; they became infamous in lurid sex scandals and even murder cases, as when Harry K. Thaw killed the architect Stanford White in 1906 out of jealousy over White’s affair with his model-actress wife, Evelyn Nesbit.
News judgment, even then, skewed toward entertainment. The New York Herald was the first American newspaper to use the wireless telegraph in 1899 — inventor Guglielmo Marconi was invited to New York to report not the conclusion of the Dreyfus affair or the start of the second Boer war, but the results of a high-society sailing regatta, America’s Cup.
Celebrities of yore wore more clothes and had better manners, but then, as now, they went to a lot of parties and were often famous for being famous.
Television merely invades the process and broadens the social pool. “Jersey Shore” is often condemned, at least by many New Jersey residents, for hitting a new low by elevating the riffraff of tanning salons and sleazy nightclubs. But it’s important to remember that “Jersey Shore” is on MTV, a youth-oriented cable channel that has a hortative streak: series like “Teen Mom” and “If You Really Knew Me” carry a strong “don’t try this at home” message.
So, in a way, does “Jersey Shore.” The antics of Snooki, Ronnie, Vinny and the other housemates are a reality show version of a children’s poem in Gelett Burgess’s “Goops and How to Be Them,” first published in 1900:
The Goops they lick their fingers
and the Goops they lick their knives
They spill their broth on the tablecloth
Oh, they lead disgusting lives!
Bad behavior serves as a warning but succeeds as entertainment.
When they first appeared, the cast members of “Jersey Shore” were a Bart Simpson-ish tonic after the bland chic and relentless blond perfection of “The Hills.” They are loud, vulgar, salon-tanned and gym-bulked numbskulls who drink, brawl, belch and use foul language. This season the housemates have taken on a semblance of work in a Miami ice cream parlor — but it’s a silly gimmick. Their vocation is vacation.
And they have become so entrenched in the vernacular that even President Obama mentioned Snooki in a recent speech. She has smoothed down her “pouf” this season, but for a lingering moment that retro hairstyle was a cultural artifact like Jacqueline Kennedy’s pillbox hat.
Reality shows are staged, scripted and heavily edited, but for some reason there is still a frisson of authenticity behind the artifice: real people seem to have more staying power than established celebrities who are cast in reality shows.
The amateurs who turn into semi-professional actors on “The Bachelorette” keep finding an audience. Dina Lohan, the mother of Lindsay, and Denise Richards, the ex-wife of Charlie Sheen, bombed on their reality shows, mostly because they turned out to be deadly dull, unwilling or unable to tap into their inner sitcom personas, as Ozzy Osbourne did so successfully in his pioneering reality show, “The Osbournes.”
And so, however improbably, have the Kardashians. The women of the family have molded their exotic beauty and blank personalities to fit into comic soap operas, including the spinoff “Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami.”
They deliver dialogue that is so deliciously inane that no “As the World Turns” writer would dare type it. “We have, like, a great relationship,” Kim tells Jonathan Cheban, a publicist-confidant, explaining why she and the football star Reggie Bush broke up. “We just kind of realized it’s not working.”
In Sunday’s season premiere a newly single Kim won’t let people into her new house — a huge and impersonal faux-Mediterranean villa — for fear of scratches or stains. “I’ve worked so hard for this,” she tells her stepfather, Bruce Jenner.
It’s a laughable statement — she is the high priestess of red carpet parasites — except that Kim did make a go of doing almost nothing. She began as a national joke, mocked for having an odalisque figure but no visible talent, and has transformed herself into an international brand and tabloid fixture. Now she is also an executive producer of “The Spin Crowd.”
And that show, about Hollywood bottom-feeders, makes the “Jersey Shore” crowd seem reserved. Jonathan runs his company, Command PR, based on the “Swimming With Sharks” school of management — bullying a young new associate to have collagen lip injections, haranguing female assistants to look even more slutty — if that’s imaginable.
There’s nothing new about coaxing celebrities to promote products; the actress Lillian Russell endorsed Coca-Cola at the turn of the last century. But Jonathan has to persuade a Hollywood hunk to be a spokesman for a line of self-tanning lotions for men.
And the surrealism of show business is what makes this a marketable reality show.
“That sounds sort of in the makeup-world kind of deal — that’s not really me,” Mario Lopez, a host of “Extra,” tells Jonathan. “So I don’t know if it’s really true or authentic to what I am about.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy Terms of Service Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map