But Mom, Why Does all the Food Wiggle?

Thanksgiving with the Old Aunts

Many people have happy memories of childhood Thanksgivings.  Not me.  From age eight (the first after my family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin) to sixteen (my last before college), Thanksgiving was at best tedious and at worst an ordeal. 

The reason is simple.  Thanksgiving was never at our house.  Instead, it was held at one of my old aunts’ homes, usually at the ones who lived in Menasha, six miles away.  All professional women (three teachers, one nurse) according to their era’s options, they were bright, loving ladies who adored my mother, their first niece.  My maternal grandmother was the oldest of five sisters (and lived in Illinois, so she didn’t have to attend these holiday get-togethers); my ‘old aunts’ (who during the time I speak of, were probably in their fifties) had children later.  These children had the foresight to live far enough away from their parents that their Thanksgiving presence was not mandatory.  My mother’s was, and that meant my father, my little sister, and I were also required to attend these dreary gatherings.

I suppose they weren’t dreary to my old aunts, to their husbands (also middling professionals), perhaps not even to my parents.  My father, as the ‘young’ man in attendance, was always the bartender; his hefty old fashioneds kept the adult spirits high and conversation flowing.  My mother, as the much-loved niece, was fussed over and consulted on all matters culinary.  To her shame: she was a pretty good cook, and the old aunts definitely were not.  But they fluttered around whatever little kitchen was that year’s staging ground and produced, collectively, the worst Thanksgiving meals ever.  For example:

A festive gelatinous ham

It was an old aunt tradition to have ham, not turkey, for Thanksgiving.  And by ham, I don’t mean anything succulent; I mean the kind that came in a tin can with a tiny key on the side, packed in jelly, with the consistency and color of denture paste.  The aunts often tried to tart up the ham with pineapple rounds and toothpicked maraschino cherries (left over from the old fashioneds).  All that did was add more layers of jiggly ick to the main course.

Then there were the ‘molded salads.’  Read: jello concoctions in various degrees of horrid.  The old aunts thought that adding mayonnaise to jello, or mixing veggies with canned fruit, elevated the shimmying mounds to cordon bleu status.  Uh, no.  On occasion, there was a fairly simple jello creation, like lime jello with pears, that was base-line edible.  But not often.

Jello molds were ubiquitous, and bad

The worst wiggly wonder was the omnipresent tomato aspic.  What can I say?  This dish was certainly a Soviet plot to bring the United States to its knees and to borsht.  When one of the old aunts got kitchen-creative, she added sliced boiled eggs to this abomination.  Even my mother’s ‘shut up and at least try some’ demeanor softened in the face of tomato aspic.  And by dessert time (glutinous pumpkin pie), that demeanor disappeared.  My sister and I were free to leave the card-table set up for those who couldn’t fit in the uniformly small dining room.

And go . . . nowhere.  Although my old aunts’ houses looked different on the outside (one Georgian stucco [!], one Tudor cottage, one stone Colonial, one wood siding Colonial), they had virtually the same floor plans.  First floor: decent-sized living room, small dining room, small kitchen, maybe a half bath, maybe a porch of some sort.  Second floor:  who knew, as we weren’t allowed upstairs, but probably three bedrooms and a bathroom.  In other words, we children – and my sister and I were always the only children in attendance – were confined to the first floor, where there was no refuge, no place to read a book or play.  It was almost always too cold to go outside.  So we would find a corner of the living room to huddle in while the adults enjoyed their postprandial cigarettes, chatter, and ‘yes-dear-I-wouldn’t-mind-another-small-one’ drinks.

  

A holiday-sustaining Old Fashioned

I don’t think any of the old aunts had a television.  One, at least, had a basement, but it was off-limits because it was full of that uncle’s ham radio equipment.  Plus, the 50s and 60s did not have the Thanksgiving football broadcasts of today, so watching the Packers slog it out in the snow wouldn’t have been an option anyway, even if there had been a kid-friendly basement rec room.

So.  No turkey, no football, no fun.  As I got older, I tried to join the adults’ conversation – both to be polite and to stave off terminal boredom.  One year (I must have been in high school), that turned out to be a huge mistake, and it also turned out to be the most memorable Thanksgiving with the old aunts.

I should explain that whereas the old aunts were vocal, opinionated, and for their time and age progressive ladies, the old uncles were pretty taciturn.  One was seriously hard of hearing, one was always tipsy and incoherent, one never said anything, and one was dead.  During the Thanksgiving I’m now referencing, the always-silent uncle decided to speak up.  About the nascent civil rights movement.  And his contempt for the . . . well, you can fill in the blanks.

As a self-righteous teenager, I was not only appalled but also felt called upon to argue with him.  Truth be told, probably to yell at him, thereby violating years’ worth of family Thanksgiving protocol.  I remember with trembling clarity how angry I was, mostly because I believed he was terribly wrong, somewhat because I had never really heard him express an opinion before (and this was his opinion? really?).  Also I might have been so extremely tired of these Thanksgivings that I embraced an opportunity for drama, although it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Tomato aspic should be banned before heroin, plastic bags, and transfats

Whatever the causes, I was shaking with rage; a cattle-prodded tomato aspic could not have quivered or excreted more hot melt-down than I did.  My father, experiencing a momentary lull in bartender duties, took my arm and led me away.  We sat on the bottom of the stair steps (the farthest away place that house offered), and he tried to calm me down.  What he said was basically:  you’re right, and you’re right to be angry.  But this is not the right place to show it.  Your uncle will not change his views, and you will upset your family who loves you, most of whom don’t agree with him anyway. When we get home, we can talk about ways you might put your convictions to better use.

Today, I treasure the empathy to me, and to my older relatives, my father showed.  I also wonder whether it was altogether correct.  Aren’t there some times when politeness is trumped by . . . righteous indignation, for instance?  Yet his intervention also made me more aware of what I owed the old aunts (and old uncles):  appreciation for their love of me and my family, appreciation of what they achieved despite the Depression, appreciation of how they were not all, or not always, in thrall to prevailing bigotries.  Negotiating the wiggly room between standing up for what you ‘know’ is right and backing off because of good manners or localized realpolitik has haunted me all my adult life.

And I still wonder if my mother was correct in telling my sister and me to eat (or at least not complain about) the queasily undulating footstuffs served at those Thanksgivings.  Couldn’t she have exercised some influence over the menu? 

Kim Kardashian's Butt Performs . . .

. . . Race, Gender, and Art History

Oh yeah.  And celebrity.  Which is why I was definitely NOT going to write about this.  I mean, other than giving a bottomless pit of opportunity for creative photochopping (and bad backside puns), what’s there to say?  That Kim Kardashian West (or her mother, or her publicist) demonstrates absolute genius for content-less self-promotion?

Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art had to weigh in.  The Met’s clever tweet of a 6,000-year-old steatopygous Cycladic figure made me think about KKW’s shameless publicity ploy in somewhat different ways.  By connecting the soi-disant internet-breaking image to an ancient statue of a fecund woman, the Met opened the door to considering the KKW photo in art historical contexts, which also mean socio-cultural contexts. 

Jean-Paul Goude, “Carolina Beaumont” (1976), "Kim Kardashian Champagne Cover" (2014)

We can start with race.  That the photographer Jean-Paul Goude copied his own 1976 shot of Caroline Beaumont (and referenced his contorted shots of Grace Jones) doesn’t say much about KKW’s own views about performing race.  Nor does the fact that she doubtless knows next to nothing about the centuries of visual stereotypes she mimics.  Most notorious is the case of Saartjie Baartman, the Khoikhoi woman exhibited in Europe as ‘The Hottentot Venus,’ whose supersized buttocks and large genitalia were seen as atavistic links to the great apes.  Then there is Josephine Baker, ‘The Bronze Venus,’ whose banana dance was the toast of jazz-age Paris.  Hip-hop culture has re-exhibited the stereotype in a positive way, if valorizing big-booty-shaking women is considered positive. 

“The Hottentot Venus” (1810); Josephine Baker, “The Bronze Venus” (1925);

Reality TV personalities Joseline Hernandez and Porsha Williams at the BET Hip Hop Awards (2014)

Kim Kardashian West is certainly aware of this last mode of performing race.  After all, she’s married to Kanye and has appeared in his music videos, most notably the ridiculous ‘Bound 2,’ in which her seemingly nude self is being bonked on a bike.  Like other members of her family – notably her father – she likes to bling out her celebrity cred by hanging around with famous black people.  As far as I know, Armenian does not equal ‘black’ anywhere on earth except possibly Turkey; nonetheless, KKW has self-fashioned into a cartoon of the hypersexualized black woman. Or perhaps race is secondary to female hypersexualization itself.

LeRoy Neiman, “Femlin,” created for Playboy in 1955; Camille Clifford, a model for ‘The Gibson Girl,” c. 1905.

Maybe that’s the point of her relentless out-there-ness:  she’s performing gender in a way so blatant that one can overlook it, rather like the big letters on a map.  I’ve seen some comparisons to the Barbie Doll, but those don’t seem apt – Barbie does have a big chest and a wasp waist, but her bottom resembles an anorexic white woman’s slatty rear end.  Closer may be the Playboy ‘femlin,’ whose hourglass figure harks back to Gibson girls and other corseted ladies.  And we can go back and back through art history, from Ingres’ “La Grande Odalisque” to Aphrodite Kallipygyos to the Venus of Willendorf . . . from Baule spirit spouses to Ukiyo-e courtesans to Indian apsaras.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, “La Grande Odalisque” (1814); Aphrodite Kallipygos, Roman copy of Hellenistic original (c. 100BCE); the ‘Venus of Willendorf’ (Austria, c. 25,000BCE)

Baule spirit spouse (early 20^th century); Kunisada school shunga print (early 19^th century); Apsara, Uttar Pradesh (12^th century)

These images are male representations of ideal, or satirized, female sexuality.  When women artists (at least in the 20^th century) have confronted the subject, they’ve tended to focus on female genitals, either through formal and symbolic correspondences (see Georgia O’Keeffe’s vulvaform flowers), through disturbing juxtapositions of female stereotypes (see Meret Oppenheim’s “Object,” which grafts Venus in Furs onto a feminine tea cup), or through assertions of female worth as child bearer and culture bearer (see Judy Chicago’s “The Birth Project,” an installation that acts as a visual midrash on the Biblical creation story). 

Georgia O’Keeffe, “The Blue Flower” (1918); Meret Oppenheim, “Object” (1936);

Judy Chicago, tapestry from “The Birth Project” (1985)

21^st-century women artists are more likely to confront and invert traditional male representations of the feminine, bringing to the forefront the patriarchal politics that ‘normalize’ such representations and the gendered gaze that produces them (see Tracy Enim’s “This is not happiness” or Laila Esaydi’s revisionist “La Grande Odalisque,” where the courtesan’s body is veiled with Arabic calligraphy).

Tracey Enim, “This is not happiness” (2011)

 Laila Essaydi, “La Grande Odalisque” (2008)

Except under a greatly expanded definition of performance art, Kim Kardashian West is not a woman artist nor does she seem to be aware of – or care about – the art historical/cultural contexts her image evokes.  Well, why should she?  She’s laughing all the way to the bank . . . rather like the contemporary artist she (as image, as object) most closely resembles:  Jeff Koons, the master of glossy sensuality in an age of mechanical reproduction and profit-driven corporate aesthetics.  For only $20,000, at Neiman-Marcus you too can buy a limited-edition zaftig pop-art fertility goddess, complete with a bottle of premium champagne.  It’s cheaper to buy a copy of Paper magazine.

Jeff Koons, “Dom Perignon Balloon Venus,” limited edition figure, 2013

Why Democrats Lost: Feral Grumpy Cats Edition

The Power of the Scapegoat

“It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favor, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.”  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“By yourself you can do nothing here.  Have you noticed how tightly we shut out strangers? . . . [We] would reject you in the end.”  Wole Soyinka, The Strong Breed

Last week I wrote about how grumpy the United States electorate seemed.  (http://debsbookblog2194.blogspot.com/2014/10/herding-grumpy-cats.html) Last night that grumpiness manifested itself in all its perverse glory.  Despite the Republican party having an approval rating lower than toe nail fungus, it swept almost all contested races – and some that pollsters thought were securely on the Democratic side of the ledger (hello Maryland!). 

Early this morning, I woke up crabby, with a mild hangover and a typical after-party mess demanding attention (thank god, however, for friends who joined me in debacle-watching and making an otherwise depressing night a lot of fun). Usually I watch some of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” while I shake out the sleepy seed; today, I watched five minutes and turned off the TV.  Not in the mood for blather about the elections, I read a book, cleaned up a little, napped, and thought about the election results.  Not what they may mean for the future – more gridlock, some sort of immigration deal, drastic deregulation, stalling on judicial nominees, total grumpy cat fight over the 2016 presidential nominations (here I’m including Hillary Clinton’s now more precarious run . . . the Clinton magic didn’t bippity-boppity-boo any candidates to victory) – but why endemic grumpiness yielded these results.

Republicans have been adept at what Tolstoy identified as the “easy” manipulation of blame.  For the past six years, opponents have connected President Obama with everything wrong in the country and in the world, be it Benghazi or Boko Haram, Hurricane Sandy or the Carolina Hurricanes’ bad NHL record. The damned-if-he-does-damned-if he-doesn’t illogic (see, for instance, the issue of bombing Syria: Obama is at once too timid, too bellicose, and too late) oddly strengthens the blame claim.  Analysis, discussion, and judgment don’t matter; neither, evidently, do actions and outcomes (see, for instance, the improving economy or lower gas prices).  What’s important is that whatever makes people unhappy, fearful, defensive, confused, or angry is the president’s fault.

Once the president is established as the FUBAR poster child, the next step is also easy.  Identify every Democrat with Obama.  Forget any positions or policies that may differentiate candidates, and confine campaigns to asserting fatal contamination by that horrible failure who incomprehensibly still occupies the White House.  This tactic certainly worked on November 4, and it worked in large part because the Democratic Party bought into it. 

Why did this year’s Democratic candidates run from the real accomplishments of the Obama presidency, not to mention from the president himself?  Why did the U.S. electorate do the same? 

Perhaps the best-known painting of the (biblical) scapegoat, the noble but sentimentally unresisting animal conceived by the Victorian artist William Holman Hunt (c. 1855).

As I was thinking about these questions, I remembered an early play by Wole Soyinka.  The Strong Breed centers on the scapegoat, both on his human individuality and on his social and ritual function.  The figure of the scapegoat, of course, has appeared in cultures throughout the world; Soyinka combines Greek traditions (the scapegoat as the pharmakos with power to sicken and to cure), Christian traditions (Soyinka’s scapegoat is named Eman[uel] and has distinct Christological overtones), and Yoruban traditions (the scapegoat is identified with the deity Ogun, who tried to bridge the abyss between the human and the divine).  In so doing, Soyinka creates something approaching a universal scapegoat, a man who tries to evade his sacrificial destiny but finally and willingly accepts it.

Whereas most scapegoats expiate the sins or misfortunes of their own community, Soyinka’s scapegoat can fulfill his destiny only among strangers.  He himself must be the outsider, the alien, the specter of otherness.  The host group (Eman’s new village, where he is a teacher but always an interloper) can only rid itself of its self-generated “curses” through eradicating a stranger, a rather homeopathic remedy for the estrangement the group experiences from its own lost cohesion. 

This play suggests a reason for the success of the obama-damna-slambama blame game played during this recent election. Barack Obama has been defined as a stranger . . . usually incorrectly and often prejudicially so (a Kenyan, a Socialist, a Communist, a radical Islamicist).  Even putting all this nonsense aside, Obama IS different than the traditional U.S. conception of a president:  he is a non-white, un-schmoozy, coolly intellectual man with a global upbringing that opens him to global sensibilities.  His supporters, who have celebrated these differences, can also run from them, as November 4th demonstrates.  As a socially and politically constructed stranger (a construction that he himself has helped build), he is easily ‘rejected in the end.’

No point in history is ‘the end,’ however.  The ‘hell-no’ Republican caucus may self-destruct, world crises may recede for a while, and history itself will keep revising and reevaluating Barack Obama’s presidency.  For now, though, he’s the scapegoat – in all its knee-jerk, quasi-religious, change-resistant, wagon-circling power – for the country’s anxieties.  Which is why, I think, the Democrats lost.

Feral cats -- probably all cats -- will cannibalize their own, plus anything else that presents itself as food.  They don't even have to be grumpy.

[Note:  obviously, I wrote this yesterday.  Computer problems prevented me from posting it until today.  Also, I have merely poked at the complexities of Soyinka’s The Strong Breed;  those who’ve read the critical literature (as well as the play itself, of course) will recognize that including Holman Hunt’s painting implies recognition of, if not complete agreement with, many informed readers’ problems with the work.]