Response to Ornamentally Challenged: Will Success Spoil Contemporary Bunkshooter?
Ummm....no, sublime isn't the word I'm looking for, Bunky. But you do get 10 points for being right for the wrong reason. My scouring of the philosophy and art books suggest that sublime refers to an experience with the vastness, violence and terror of nature and that beauty is on the opposite end of the spectrum of sublimity. So in the sense that humans are natural beings, ok, I concede that sublimity is applicable. But, in my worldview formed by Burke and Kant, sublime doesn't apply.
But here's why you're wrong about sublime - it's because I absolutely loathe that word. Chiefly because of the requisite article in front of it. The Sublime. It makes it sound like it's a noun. It's cumbersome to use other forms of it. "Look at that volcano's ash covering that little Mayan village! I am feeling the sublime!" You can't use subliminal because that infers an absence of sensation and sublimate is to change physical states. The dictionary lists alternate forms as: sublimes, sublimed, and subliming. Quick! Use one of those in a sentence. "That ferocious tiger sublimed me," sounds like a line from Ghostbusters. I want a sesquipedalian word like chiarascuro or epiphany or serendipity or weltschmerz, and the king - schadenfreuede.
Nonetheless I doff my cap top you, Bunky. It never occured to me that I might get tired of seeing beautiful people everywhere. After I thought about what you said, I realized that people would get so tired of beauty that they would begin to dangerously seek out the supremely ugly and then, hell yeah, you couldn't throw a ball without hitting something sublime.
Here's my final thought on your response. I was surprised at the choleric nature of your post. And since, as you say, Christmas is fast approaching, I'm thinking if you penned a Christmas song, it might have a cathartic effect on you. I'm talking about an original. It was good for Elvis, why not you? Even your gods Lennon and Dylan dabbled in Xmas tunes.
Why, Bunky? Why will you not write a Christmas song? Are you afraid of success? Are you afraid you will accidentally write the next Rudolph or Jingle Bells and you will become so fabulously wealthy that your children will not learn the value of hard work?
Labels: beautiful people, Christmas, Dylan, Elvis, Lennon, songs, sublime
posted by St. Fiacre @ 5:29 PM,
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Response: It's a conspiracy!
Thank you, Bunky, for being the first to blog after the Saint’s seed post. I’ve spent days trying to formulate some kind of coherent response, attempting to answer the question, “What is Art?” or at least, “What is Beauty?” or, broken down to its most basic level, “What constitutes an Ornamental?”
Having attempted for years to be included (at least on the fringes) in any kind of ornamental group, I finally gave up and accepted that fact that I’ll always be considered “cute” rather than “hot.” The crease in my nose is there to stay. I stopped growing in the sixth grade, so I’ll never know the joy of being leggy. As for cleavage, I finally experienced that particular aspect of the feminine mystique while breastfeeding both my babies. I’m satisfied with my Audrey Hepburn figure. I’m okay with who I am.
Yet, as I read in popular magazines, many others are not.
That’s why I feel that the possibility of ornamental upstaging, as Bunky termed it, would set a terrible precedent for the young and vulnerable. The pressure to become the outward symbol of societal beauty would be devastating. Training our children to fill this impossibly tiny niche would probably begin from the moment of birth, if not sooner. (Can somebody say genetic engineering?) As it is, I can barely keep from screaming when, shopping at Target, I’m confronted by 4-year-old girls wearing barely-there minis, fishnet hose, and inappropriately-sloganed t-shirts, marketing themselves as “Naughty Miss” or “Jail Bait”. Haven’t their parents heard the term “pedophile”?
But I digress.
It was in a Schlotzsky’s that I had the disquieting realization of how completely we’ve all been bamboozled (by fashion mags, Hollywood, and cheesy romance novels) to believe that there are beautiful people out there on every corner, serving in every capacity: teacher, vampire, toll booth operator, prostitute. But the truth is they just don’t exist. Eating my sandwich, I peered around the sandwich shop and came up with a theory I called Schlotzsky’s People: there are no beautiful people. There are only ordinary people brainwashed into believing there are beautiful people.
In that Schlotzsky’s, shuffling up to order a hot original, were the toothless, the hunched, the chubby, the craggy-faced, the beanpole, the bald, the crease-nosed, the chinless, the cross-eyed, the homely, the short. There wasn’t a single beautiful person in the mix. Statistically, my theory went, if the entire room of people served as a cross-section of America, then there were no beautiful people. It's all a marketing ploy dreamed up by the powerful to get us to buy magazines, go to the movies, or purchase bodice-rippers by the case.
Saint, the very fact that you propose creating a class of paid ornamentals suggests that they’ve gotten to even the highest echelon of critical thinkers. Perhaps it might be best to stay away from grills or sandwich shops until the full effects of the earth-shattering truth sinks in.
Disclaimer: No ordinary people were brainwashed during the making of this blog.
Labels: beautiful people, conspiracies, sandwich shops, theories
posted by Adjective Queen @ 5:25 PM,
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