Standing in Doorways (SID) is a newsletter dedicated to essays and stories of lingering in those spaces on the margins and along the edges, where decisions build character and challenge notions of access and separation. You can read more about SID here. Subscribe below to follow! Thank you!
This post is Part II of a four-part series instigated by the ocean border, the catalyst for contemplating authenticity. You can read the introduction to this post here.
Recently, I have been reflecting on my works in progress and the multitude of authorial influences on their style and perspective, especially a WIP novel of mine titled Erosion of Certainty (working title), drafted just before Covid-19 shut down the world and opened the door for me to wrap up an MA in English Lit and Critical Theory. While this post is not about the litany of influences from authors to philosophers to professors, I am keenly aware of multiple figures from my education1 who influenced my writing and thinking, and influenced the way my characters observe, reflect, interrogate, and engage in their fictional worlds.
For this post I am expanding on the theme of authenticity in the Ocean Border series relative to my experience with tourist gift shops. In many ways I want to promulgate a vitriolic diatribe against industrialized appropriation of the artistic entombed in those gaudy spaces, but that would be disingenuous. Often, searching in that interstitial space, where consumption seeks to pervert originality, I have found meaning and subjectivity in the sentimental and cheap, regardless of its seeming corrupting influence on the unique.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard provided the functional working label and definition for this capitalist phenomenon that exists in those tourist traps. In his work Consumer Society (1970), he expounds on the preternatural relationship of the industrialized craft masquerading as objects of allure and meaning—especially creative, functional, and cultural—saying:
Kitsch…is produced by industrial reproduction and the vulgarization at level of objects of distinctive signs taken from all registers…and from a disordered excess of “readying-made” signs, has its basis, like “mass culture,” in the sociological reality of the consumer society. (110)
Standing at the window of the colloquially labeled gift shop, I see a bastion of commercialization, upholding a recent and brutal tradition of dematerializing the creative aesthetic into that chimera known as kitsch. The cheapest of the cheap materials for throwaway goods pile on each other, plasticized composite gimmicks, gadgets, and gizmos spilling out of bins or organized on racks in rows liked soldiers of useless trinkets, at the ready to violently overthrow originality, forcing their way to the frontline and fighting for a chance to decompose in some future trash bin.
Items that were previously generated as artistic representations become superficial and ubiquitous. They are constructed of inferior materials aping their original. Devoid of their progenitor’s meaning (and often purpose), this kitsch is mass produced imitation leading to “the reduction of aesthetic objects or ideas into easily marketable forms.” This appears to be a standard of American—or at least Western—culture and drive for status: the hegemonic desire to overpower the interesting and unique, drag it home, break it down into its productive components, and curate it as part of a gallery of mediocrity.
So, how do creatives reclaim that which has been lost by consumerization (not a word?! I dont believe it…) of the aesthetic? And more importantly do we need to?
Okay, let’s swing the pendulum back from the harsh polemic a bit….or a bunch.
One day while wandering the congested spaces of a tourist shop in Maine, observing the untidy spectacle where clever and cute reign alongside holiday theme decorations blended with local culture (ie. a magnet with Santa sitting on a buck jigging on the ice, his cheeks redened by a crisp wind and brandy), pretending to be mementos of the quintessential childhood vacation, as organic a display as a staged Sears family portrait on the mantle, I was surprisingly enamored by a simple ship in a bottle reproduction. They were lined in a row along a metal shelf, imperfect in thing glass bottles with plasticized boat parts, far from the craftsmanship and technique of an actual ship-in-a-bottle-builder.
But for me the object grew as key component of a larger story, a grander narrative imagined by a fictional lead character, suffering from delusions, malnutrition, and drug addiction. I used the “vulgerization” as the catalyst to drive my own creative work, expanding the size of the object to encompass an entire coastal town, where business interests seek to transition a former fishing mecca turned tourist trap into an exclusive haven for the wealthy and class elite. to embody the eyes of a broken transient, working off his debt to society during the day in an unlikely role as a public scribe, drafting speeches for funerals and wedding toasts and love poems. In the evening prowling the dark halls of local lore to uncover a plot riddled gothic love and entangled with gentrification, a maritime plot, and murder.
Maybe that’s how kitsch can be used to recapture the aesthetic, even if the object is mere simulacra.
I suspect this Rage Against the Appropriation is finally complete. The struggle standing outside some touristy store profiting off Eastern, Middle-Eastern, Sub-Saharan, Caribbean, Native American, and Polynesian culture (this list goes on and on…) by the West, and the mass production and consumption of tribal masks, bamboo tables, spiritual idols, pottery, and clever dolls, carved by programmed machines from cheap plywoods and composite materials, draining the last bit of authenticity until it becomes common and mundane, used up the way Western capitalism has used up so many of its laboring automatons for its progress—quant coming from me, I get it, but here we are—to decide if I can embrace the tourist trap and make it my own.
I sometimes feel like Phoebe from Friends railing against Pottery Barn only to discover that the industrialization of the aesthetic didn’t devalue the original but actually exposed the beauty and history to a mass audience, increasing the original’s mystique as well as market price. This leads me to some thoughts about AI generated art and 3d printing, but not for this newsletter.
On the margins, it’s the dusty, slightly damaged pieces that can be found amongst the kitsch that finds a home away from the inauthentic for the creative to be co-opted into something original and, hopefully, marketable. As stated in my previous post “Reflections in an Art Gallery Window,” profit is not a pejorative term, something to be deprecated, but should not be the central focus of the creation of the aesthetic, but a product of generating the original with its own history.
As a special treat, below is an extract from the draft WIP that formed in the hull of that great plastic ship inside the bottle, and carried me to a first ever full draft of a novel and fun write. Never intended for anything more than a fun draft, why not drop it on this page.
Erosion of Certainty
The sign for the antique store branded on the card I had stolen from unknown car was dangling from thin rusted chains on the wooden post in front: Ez-Keel’s Port Town Nautical Gifts. Large bold red lettering painted along thin strips of drift wood bookended by two large crabs. Their open claws snapped at two pasty pale flip-flop ordained heels attached to skinny undefined white legs. I assumed the crafting was fitting with the town ensemble, the strategy of a kitschy remembrance of the sea life.
I was picking at the cracked and peeling paint on the window glazing, incidentally knocking small chunks on the sidewalk when the bell to the door open and man, probably in his early sixties stepped form the interior and hung a glaring open sign from the hook beneath the nameplate. He starred at me for a moment; I was staring into the reflection stealing glances from inside the store, back beyond and from the single pane glass. The pane was reflecting the matted and tangled curly hair which had become a staple of my bandito lifestyle2, the dirt beneath my fingernails being added to by the crumbling lead paint and glazing pieces.
Through the window I could see a menagerie of items, old antique looking standards from the outside, the type of catch all you would expect to see in garage sale of an old deceased uncle.
I leaned my head in against the cool glass hoping to ease the sporadic inconsistent breath, a product of the long sleepless night and the quiet of the early morning town. I was dreaming of the creak of the ships masts shifting slightly and rubbing against the drying deck boards in the hot sun. I was always tired. I was always tired. I sometimes repeated myself more than once unable to catch my words, an interminable effort of repetition, a hallucinogenic effect of the insomnia.
“Can I help you son?”
My daydream interrupted by a stern throat filled with phlegm, a densely packed chest loosening up with the first early morning cigarette of an old smoker.
“I’m sorry sir,” I said pulling my head slowly away from the lean into his front window. The heat from breathing had created a moisture smudge below the dirt smudge left my the oil exuberantly leaking from unclean pores, making a pasty mess with the dust and cobwebs from the squatter home.
I was drawing a smiley face in the moist patch before I realized the man had already head back inside. No doubt already fed up with my odd behavior and the distressed look of tired worn and forgotten soul. What soul? I don’t have a soul.
“Here you go son,” said a gruff voice forced between lips now holding a smoldering filter of smoked cigarette. He handed me a can of glass cleaner and old rag streaked with dirt.
“Clean that mess.”
“Yes sir. I’m sorry sir. I just didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“You look you slept down on the beach in the mud after the rain. Where are you from?”
There was a curious furrow in his bushy gray brows, one eye twitch slightly and struggle to stay parallel as he squinted.
“I am just in town visiting with a couple of friends. We stayed at a hotel a few miles from here. The beach sometime or other. Only here for the weekend and the ocean.”
The man shook his head in wonder saying, “Sounds like every cliché remark a tourist might make. Also sounds like a bullshit lie. But what the hell none of my business.”
“I happened to come across your card yesterday and thought this might be the place to find a large magnifying glass of sort,” I said handing him the wrinkled card. “I have a small trinket I wanted to be able to exam a bit better.”
“Do you think it’s a clue, some sort of map to place of buried treasure,” he was excited and grabbed me by the arm, eyes opened, the lazy one looking to the starboard side as the normal one looked straight off the bow. “Well come on, tell me, show me. Come on.”
“No its not a secret map or a place of buried treasure,” I said softly and with a bit of confusion, uncertain as to whether he was serious or just playing a game with me.”
“Im only playing with you kid,” he said laughing and coughing. He held his chest, gasping as it burned with fire. I could smell the cotton fibers of the filter in the long handled holder burning.
“Holy, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he blurted out as he spit onto the floor at the entry of the shop. The wood boards covered in gooey spit. He used a wrinkled bare foot to grind the spit into the worn boards which reluctantly absorbed the liquid, soaked it up with the dirt and the grime and the beach sand between the cracks. I felt at home as we walked in the door.
“Take a look around son. My name is Jack O’Halloway and this here is Ez-Keels. Yeah I know a bit cheesy but you damn tourists see a couple crabs on a sign, and old lobster pot, and buoy and you just can’t wait to get out your credit cards and your check books and start shopping away. We only take Visa, Mastercard, and Discover. Goddamn American Express fees will put an old crabber like me out of business.”
“You were a crab fisherman?” I inquired. Curiosity and stale old air of nautical antiquities was bringing me awake.
“No less a crab fisherman than you are tourist in this port town.”
******
The smooth glass of the ship in the bottle was pressing against my palm as I lifted the heavy magnifying glass. The patina brass handle and frame were extravagant and the wide lens easy to gaze through. I peered close, wanting to start somewhere on the ship, to see the intricate planking and the intrinsic woodworking details, catch a glimpse of pitch still tacky on the hull, or the axe marks at the rails after cutting away the tethers to escape pirates.
Three sets of sheets and main sails, strung and lined to the deck billowed. I surveyed the boat but I was drawn immediately to the mahogany figurehead. Curly wild hair flowed in tight columns reminding me of dense sprigs. I watched the locks as they rose and sank with the motions of the ship cresting and gliding, the salt spray kept her joints from cracking and opening. Her perfect bosom exposed a shimmering cleavage. My eyes traced the etching of her cheek bones brought forward against pudgy lips. Her dress clung to the round shape of her hips and belly.
She is a guide and a muse for the captain and the crew. A Shakesepearean sprite placed to dispel the mischief of the sea in rough times and keep the Kraken from their bow. She was tied with heavy wet ropes to bow of the ship. The skin of her arms, legs, and breast splayed around the restraints, rubbed raw from struggling to loosen the hemp chains which bound her tight. Her face was somber with an expression of terror. She was tortured with the rise and fall, the cresting of the waves in storms as the captain and crew cheered her drowning, a waterboarding in the pitch dark night, the moon hidden by thunderous clouds. Through the heavy rain, the long burst and bolts would light the sky, just enough to see the next wave pounding and driving her under.
The largest section of influence has come from engaging the intersectionality of postcolonial literature, the incredulity towards grand narratives found in postmodernism, and the multiplicity and diversity of posthumanism. I can safely say the catalyst for influence in these three areas have been a professorial triumvirate that the supported my scholarship and my successful bid for PhD program.
Earlier in the novel we learn the name of a wily group of petty thieves working under the flag of Los Banditos du ete: a linguistic chimeric blend of New Orleans Creole and a South American Spanish dialect—Summer Bandits. Some would call it a bastardization of multiple language. Jealousy is an fickle and grotesque beast.
Fascinating, Brian. Great and entrancing read. I've generally always rolled my eyes at kitsch trinkets in gift shops, but I like your exploration here.
Thank you for sharing the snippet from the draft. I'm very intrigued. It paints a clear and distinctive image and place with so few words.
This line was superb: "My daydream interrupted by a stern throat filled with phlegm, a densely packed chest loosening up with the first early morning cigarette of an old smoker."