”There are times when you have to choose between being human and having good taste.”
-Bertolt Brecht
The thing items in ”bad” taste have over those in ”good,” besides being generally cheaper, is that they are almost entirely non-threatening. They do not provoke anxiety, panic or any of the other emotions instilled by attempts to scale the social ladder through conspicuous discernment.
Items in bad taste can be simply enjoyed, mocked, cast aside or run spitefully through a food processor, all without fear of recrimination.
This holds true unless you are the kind of person whose aesthetic sensibility is strung like piano wire-who would, for instance, dump a date upon discovering that her closet contained a fabric of chemical origin, or whose face would turn the color of lime Jell-O if the substance, with marshmallow chunks, were served as the finale to an otherwise special meal.
A cure for this kind of hypersensitivity is suggested in a new pretender to the pantheon of reference books, an encyclopedia devoted not only to information, both common and arcane, but to information specifically concerned with taste, bad.
”We don`t want to be the Mr. Blackwell of taste, pointing a finger and saying, `Bad taste. Good taste. Bad taste. Good taste,”` insists Michael Stern, who, with his wife, Jane, wrote The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, a $29.99 volume probing people, places and things granted, in some circles, on some culs-de-sac, middling to low esteem.
At first glance, it would be easy to come away with the impression that the Sterns are, in fact, being Blackwellian. From all the cultural icons in America, the couple has culled 136, slapped them with the big and seemingly nasty label ”bad taste,” and put them before a public that holds some of these items very dear, indeed.
Earning article-length entries in the book are (to limit this sample to some of the ”b`s”) ”Barbie Dolls,” ”Baton Twirling,” ”Beer,”
”Bikers,” ”Body Building,” ”Bowling” and ”Breasts, Enormous.”
But the Sterns` message is not delivered with head tipped back, sniffing cautiously at various torsos. They are, rather, right there in the mud-wrestling ring, attempting to pin these topics to the canvas through sweat and skill.
This, for example, from an entry concerned with women who pose in private cheesecake sessions for their men: ”In the early 1980s the notion that everybody is beautiful in his or her own way connected with the trendy psychological chestnut that it is good to act out one`s fantasies, and the result was boudoir photography. . . .”
Or this, from one about a product designed to dress up a middle-American staple: ”Hamburger Helper was the zenith of the convenience food revolution that had been gaining momentum through the sixties (see also Aerosol Cheese;
Cool Whip; TV Dinners). . . . The name gave it special resonance. Any cook who needed help even for hamburger meat was de facto admitting sloth, incompetence and defeat in the kitchen.”
The 330-page book practically oozes amusing pictures and illustrations, such as all of those accompanying ”Leisure Suits” and, especially, the one with the ”Bob Guccione” entry, of a terrified-looking Dr. Ruth Westheimer sitting on the lap of the very tasteful Penthouse impresario.
The message, they say, is this: Grapple with bad taste. Embrace bad taste. Clutch bad taste to your bosom, enormous or not.
”I think what happened,” Michael said, ”is, as we saw the `80s coming to an end, we just felt a yearning to celebrate so many of these things that the `80s seemed to want to ignore. And by the `80s I mean the `80s that celebrated good taste and acquisitiveness and, you know, dressing like Ralph Lauren and entertaining like Martha Stewart and acting like an investment banker and all of those things that collapsed only recently. I think we felt an urge and a yearning to basically just sit on a whoopee cushion.”
The reason, he said, is that so-called good taste can usually be defined as ”polite, reserved, conservative and usually boring. . . . What a dull world it would be if there wasn`t Tammy Faye Bakker and if there wasn`t miniature golf and if there weren`t muscle cars.
”This isn`t an advocacy book. This isn`t the `Bad Taste Guide,` and we`re not saying, `Here`s how to live a life in bad taste.` On the other hand, if we encourage some person with an otherwise monotonous life to plant a garden gnome in his front yard and enjoy shocking his neighbors, then I`m happy.”
The Sterns themselves are a curious case. They are possessors of graduate degrees from fancy schools who have made a living examining the kinds of things good universities tend to keep at campus` length.
Their first book was about Jane`s travels with a trucker, and it was something of a sensation: Pretty Yale coed rides in powerful machines with brawny men, that kind of thing. It landed her in a ”Sixty Minutes” segment. They turned that initial success into a career traveling America, trying to uncover and interpret kitsch and common culture down whatever dead end, under whatever stone, they may lurk. Their books ”Roadfood” and ”Square Meals” have had multiple printings despite being concerned largely with the kind of cuisine you eat while parked on a stool, and they`ve written 15 all together.
Their column about American food runs in about 200 newspapers, including a Chicago daily that is easier to manipulate on the train than the Tribune. And they write regularly, from their home base in West Redding, Conn., for The New Yorker, most recently articles on parrots and nudism.
During a recent telephone interview, they gave a clue as to what motivates them. It happened to be their 20th wedding anniversary, a date that happens to be surrounded on either side by their birthdays, and they celebrated the surfeit of holidays by buying-a vacuum cleaner.
”Talk about romance,” Michael said. ”But it`s a great vacuum cleaner. It was so cool because we had no intention of buying a vacuum cleaner. We went into the shop just because we needed vacuum cleaner bags, and the guy who sold it to us was just the greatest true, old-fashioned salesman. He sprinkled dirt on the floor, and then he vacuumed it up. And then he took a bunch of nuts and bolts and put them on the floor and vacuumed them up. It was the greatest demonstration. So we bought it.”
And then, Jane said, ”this morning we kind of put the frosting on the cake by having flu shots.”
They describe their decision to do the book as a sort of natural outgrowth of the collecting they`ve done during their travels. They have in their home, described as an otherwise tasteful colonial decorated in chintz and faux Chippendales, a bad taste room.
It is there that they keep their photos and slides and their 50-odd-year collection of Sears catalogs. It is there that their parrot sleeps at night. And it is there that they would go, in writing the ”Bad Taste” entry ”Gags and Novelties,” to refresh their memory of what fake rubber vomit looks like. Jane refers to the room as ”the nightmare annex.”
They proposed the book two years ago, after completing ”Elvis World,”
their most instantly popular book to date, and one that, like ”Bad Taste,”
would be equally at home on coffee table, in bathroom, or next to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an effort in such good taste that it retains the letter in which ”a” and ”e” are merged, something entirely mystifying to those of us taught that, when it comes to the English alphabet, 26 is pretty much the magic number.
Choosing who and what to include was difficult, sometimes determined by the inability to get hard information (despite the help of as many as five professional researchers) on such topics as bronzed baby shoes and velvet wall tapestries of American heroes, neither of which made the cut.
A topic Jane wanted to include, but didn`t have the time to research, was ”the blue stuff that goes in the toilet bowl,” which ”sort of cues people in that you`re concerned that your toilet bowl is hygienic.”
She found herself being startled, in a mild sort of way, by some of the information they did uncover: that Twinkies were named for a pair of shoes on a billboard their inventor passed. ”What a strange thing that he would look at some shoes and think, `Ah, that looks just like my snack cake.`
”I did not know when we started that Hawaiian shirts were really brought to Hawaii by missionaries who were aghast at looking at naked native chests. And zoot suits were really also a very political issue, in that they were banned by the government” in 1942, the stated rationale being that they wasted cloth necessary to the war effort. (The baggy garments` real crime, the authors write, is that ”they symbolized irreverent youth, dirty dancing, and the threat of `licentious` black culture.”)
”Just the fact that there were serious issues interwoven with the wacky and kitschy aspects of the book always amazed me,” Jane said. ”I think people think these things are utterly frivolous, and, in fact, they`re kind of significant cultural icons. But their heritage . . . nobody bothered to pursue it.”
She said she believes that ”America`s fascination with tackiness is never going to go away,” which is why the thing that most surprised her was that nobody else did the book first. After all, ”we`re dealing with things that are more prevalent than most things that have books written about them.” Although as different as Tom Carvel and huge pepper mills, ”the great tacky items in this book share particular themes of sentimentality or exaggeration or patriotism. I guess the real definition of `kitsch` is
`overexuberance,` ” she said.
”And the vast majority of items in the book are all tied together with that kind of uniquely American sense of overreaching. Even if you`re overreaching to make the most realistic rubber dog doo, it`s still
overreaching.”
