by Spitz, Marc
But there may be virtue here as well, fighting to be noticed as the class and racial divides are slowly parsed and hopefully one day eliminated. Twee, captial T, like Punk, captial P, is not merely a fashion statement or what Winfrey Harris correctly labeled a “lifestyle.” It is all of those things, but only in the same reductive way that Punk was about three chords, torn tees, safety pins, and giving an old person the reverse victory salute. But Punk was also about “freedom,” as Kurt Cobain famously stated, and Twee can be similarly liberating from the pressure to be cool, swaggering, aggressively macho, and old at heart.
“There’s an intrinsic value and appeal,” the writer Simon Reynolds says today of the movement’s prevalent style and ethic. “Beyond saying it’s class bound or race bound, there are intrinsic values and appeals to it. A handcrafting aesthetic is probably nicer than buying things at Target. The idea of being sensitive. The idea of guys not being dicks. The good outweighs the bad as an option or a way of being in the world and seeing yourself. I see the appeal of it. But it gets cutesy-fied. I went to an Etsy-type fair some months ago and there seems to be a big move from owls to narwhals, those whales with horns. Narwhals seem to be appearing on a lot of T-shirts, whereas the previous year it was owls. It does get a bit Twee. You can’t get around that.”
Like the most enduring youth movements, it’s also strongly political; whether it pertains to preservation of a threatened methodology or the championing of green business acumen or simply pushing back against the pricks—virtually all Twee heroes, fictional and real, from Dumbo the flying elephant to Calvin Johnson (the monkish Indie label head) to Morrissey (arguably the King of Twee) to, most recently, Casey Heynes (the Australian teenager who body-slammed a menacing classmate and became a YouTube superstar after a lifetime of suffering for being shy and overweight) and Zooey Deschanel (the self-styled Queen of Twee), make their bones confronting cruelty, sometimes even as they inspire backlashes and voilence by nature of their very preciusness and often proud punchability.
“When I was twelve years old I put on my velour jacket and I wrote with my fountain pen—in my Moleskine notebook, which I had before it was cool—‘Haters gonna hate,’” says actor and author John Hodgman, only half joking, “and I knew I was onto something.” We are now in the era when the free-range, organically fed chickens have come home to roost.
Where there’s an ethos and an ideal, there’s going to be resistance. Twee yearns to welcome a spectrum: all professions, ages, types, and there is a growing awareness that if its reforms are to continue and the movement is to thrive and last, like Punk or Hip-Hop, it will have to address these issues of race and class. Its ethics, however, have remained concrete:
* Beauty over ugliness.
* A sharp, almost incapacitating awareness of darkness, death, and cruelty, which clashes with a steadfast focus on our essential goodness.
* A tether to childhood and its attendant innocence and lack of greed.
* The utter dispensing with of “cool” as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin.
* A healthy suspicion of adulthood.
* An interest in sex but a wariness and shyness when it comes to the deed.
* A lust for knowledge, whether it’s the sequence of an album, the supporting players in an old Hal Ashby or Robert Altman film, the lesser-known Judy Blume books, or how to grow the perfect purple, Italian, or Chinese eggplant or orange cauliflower.
* The cultivation of a passion project, whether it’s a band, a zine, an Indie film, a website, or a food or clothing company. Whatever it is, in the eye of the Twee it is a force of good and something to live for.
These are the values that redeem the true Twee and separate them from the poseurs and hypocrites and weekenders and bad apples and, most egregiously, the cynics, who buy and sell bootleg versions of the aesthetic. A testament to the strength of Twee as a modern movement is the sheer volume of carpetbaggers eager to unload a version of it and the well-meaning, perhaps naïve souls who, knowingly or not, abet them.
“The buyer of $9 jam, after all, isn’t another maker of $9 jam,” the writer Benjamin Wallace pointed out in a New York magazine feature on the rise of this culture, “The Twee Party,” published in the spring of 2012. “It’s the guy whose multinational robotic assembly line spits out jars of $1 jam. Or it’s his trustafarian son, the Global Jam Logistics heir. Or it’s the private-equity guy who just off-shored GJL to a sweatshop in Bangalore,” Wallace writes. Seventies Punk and eighties Hip-Hop were street-hardened and suspicious youth movements. Indeed, Twee is often a too-trusting movement, where the well meaning sometimes do not equal the well informed, those business starter-uppers who have not read Small Is Beautiful, the British economist E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 bible for conscientious and eco-minded business decorum. For every genuinely conscientious Warby Parker, there are plenty of wolves out there in their Warby Parker–style nerd spectacles, emboldened by the voracious desire for curator culture. Thrift suddenly becomes vintage and anything edible can fall under the hard-to confirm-but irresistible term artisanal. The microsuspicions of purity feed the macrosuspicion some hold for Twee; it’s simply too lousy with frauds and impossible to truly purify or regulate. This, again, is no new battle.
“For the rich countries, they say, the most important task now is ‘education for leisure,’” Schumacher writes (again, forty years ago!), “and, for the poor countries, the ‘transfer of technology.’” As the world is Brooklynized will it truly be so, or will we make what Schumacher calls the “suicidal error” of assuming that so long as a product appears artisanal, it’s all good? “The illusion of unlimited powers, nourished by astonishing scientific and technological achievements, has produced the concurrent illusion of having solved the problem of production.” Shilling and collecting faster does nature no favors and remains part of the suicidal error.
Take the classic “Brooklyn Without Limits” episode of the sitcom 30 Rock. Here, Tina Fey’s character Liz Lemon is briefly enchanted by “Brooklyn Zack,” a mystery utopian who “throws pool parties in Dumpsters” and, more important, cuts affordable jeans that make her ass look fantastic. “Big business is what’s screwing up this country,” Lemon tells her mentor, the realist Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin). “I live like a cowboy by buying quality locally made jeans [and] also eating beans out of a can due to impatience.” This exchange perfectly captures the sense of cheap outlaw fix one gets from weekending in what was once a genuine bohemia. Lemon is quickly disabused of the notion that “stores like this are saving the world” when Donaghy reveals that Brooklyn Without Limits (a sort of stand-in for American Apparel) crafts its canvas messenger bags from unused “waterboarding hoods” and is secretly owned by evil empire Halliburton. Lemon must choose between her true personal/political values and the intoxicating smells and temptations of Brooklandia. She chooses the truth.
“We are told that gigantic organizations are inescapably necessary,” Schumacher writes, “but when we look closely we notice that as soon as great size has been created there is often a strenuous attempt to attain smallness within bigness.” Such will be the Zen-like challenge for the jam maker as we head toward what may literally become an endless summer. The gaint banking corporations that sponsor public bike exchanges are part of both the problem and the solution as we strive for some/equilibrium, or kind of Tweequilibrium.
But let’s briefly, and happily, return to the books and records, since that, not fruit preserves or locally fished sea critters, is the real food for the modern tribal Twee—and again, it is a tribe, the Twee Tribe, not a singular generation. It has its elders and its newbies, and this strength in numbers has placed it above other subsets of the macro Indie or a kind of Perma-Punk; dubious offshoots like Sea Punk, Steampunk, or with regard to Hip-Hop, Gangsta Rap, or Booty Bass Rap. All Twee is one.
Naturally trusting (or yearning to be trusting) as it is, the Twee Tribe has already proven to
be a very tricky one, perhaps the trickiest of them all, to join. Unlike Punk or Hip-Hop, an aspiring tribal Twee cannot get there simply via haircut or by turning one’s baseball cap around. You have to read . . . a lot . . . and, generally, alone. You have to make friends with your Crosley suitcase turntable and record collection, your Criterion Collection, your 33 ⅓ books, and your cut-out-and-pasted photos of dead film stars and authors. Simply taking yourself outside of society isn’t enough. Once outside, you have to actually study. Twees cannot kick with the fray unless they carry a lot of cultural history in their heads, or at least on their devices: they are Jeopardy! contestants, boning up on Felt, the Swell Maps, Judee Sill, Anne Sexton, Michel Gondry, Peanuts, Roald Dahl, and The Phantom Tollbooth. And you don’t only have to know those bands and books and filmmakers; you have to formulate an aesthetic around them. Take Belle and Sebastian’s leader Stuart Murdoch. Handsome, pale, and vastly talented, Murdoch is a Gen Twee icon and one of those courageous, sensitive, perhaps too-smart figures we will chronicle farther along in these pages. In the mid-1990s, the Glaswegian dreamer was recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome and had to drop out of school and literally move back into his childhood bedroom. “When you’re down and out, what you want is escapism,” Murdoch told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in 2005. “At the period of time there was a core of groups in music that I listened to that took me somewhere else. And then I got very much into certain filmmakers as well. But then there reached a point where I wanted more escapism and more fantasy, and that’s when I started to invent it for myself.”
To listen to the audio commentary on a Blu-ray of a Wes Anderson film (he is another soul we will meet along the way here) is to enter a sort of confessional booth in which the director cops to shots he’s stolen from dead heroes. This book will create a canon of sorts, and nearly every person mentioned will have a sharp awareness of other, sometimes greater canons. They aren’t randomly chosen or reliant on coincidence or expediency or even the cosmic (perhaps I shouldn’t point out that Holden Caulfield’s middle name happens to be Morrisey, one S shy of the former Smiths’ lead singer’s handle). Many are connected either directly (Peanuts animator Bill Melendez, one of Wes Anderson’s heroes, got his start at the early Disney studios, working on marvels like Fantasia) or via a shared approach, with an adeptness at making original art from the sum of their influences—their imaginary friends and unmet heroes, as it were. Murdoch, Anderson, Dave Eggers, Andrew Bujalski, Miranda July, and, before them, Salinger, Schulz, Sendak, Gorey, Godard, Plath, the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, the Buzzcocks, Andy Kaufman, the Raincoats, the Smiths, They Might Be Giants, Whit Stillman, and Kurt Cobain are all unique and all precocious, impressionable, and, in this writer’s reading, utterly, irrepressibly Twee. They are a kind of heroes’ gallery of pajama people whose work will speak truth to the actually young and spiritually young for all time. They are sad Punks, scared Punks, angry nerds, violent femmes, bedroom sitters, undaunted idealists, and raggedy aesthetes, and they all share another aspect: lots of people hate them.
Even with regard to its artists, films, albums, and literature, and not merely its adherents in their cardigans, nobody is ambivalent about Twee. One either loves Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker’s wry take on the 1930s gangster film with its all-child-actor cast talking like hoodlums and dames (the Tommy guns shoot whipped cream) and its jaunty, speakeasy score by diminutive Twee pop icon Paul Williams, or you think it’s an enervating and endless cutesy-poo. Similarly, a young Michael Jackson’s nasal, clueless rendition of the melancholy, world-weary Sinatra classic “It Was a Very Good Year” (from the Diana Ross television special when Jackson was barely a teen) is either adorable or insufferable. Again, children dressing and acting adult is only slightly less hate-making than adults who won’t let go of childhood. Think about Morrissey, former lead singer of the Smiths, who is obsessed with the past and the passing of time and functions almost outside of society and certainly outside of the music industry as it stands, a sort of pure and righteous deity. Do you know anyone who lacks an opinion about him? The Smiths are either the brilliant band who “sang out to the slums” and “worked wonders for the strangled spirit,” as Morrissey claims in his 2013 memoir, making a half dozen albums, all of them classics, and self-destructing just “as the songs were growing in stature”—or they are unlistenable.
Similarly, there are those who will see every Whit Stillman, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola, Miranda July, or Andrew Bujalski film, know exactly what the pained bit of silence or pregnant pause means in every script, and feel the connection. And then there are the film critics like iconoclast Armond White, who will often dismiss them as pretentious and callow.
There are bibliophiles who purchase every new Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, or Sarah Vowell book and fall asleep with them on their chests. Others roll their eyes and make quickly for the new James Elroy and a bracing whiskey and soda, snarling, “Good Lord, grow a pair!”
Recently some mourned HBO’s cancellation of Jonathan Ames’s Bored to Death after three highly Twee seasons, while others argued that three was three too many. Marc Jacobs unsuccessfully attempted to bring grunge fashion to the masses in the early 1990s, but then perfected his attack with his extremely Twee line of clothes and accessories that connected more organically with the precocious Indie spirit and featured actress Elle Fanning (star of Ms. Coppola’s creeping, ponderous, but sunlit and beautiful Somewhere). Fanning is also frequently seen in Rodarte, another fashion house that is more like a dollhouse. Bookmarc, Jacob’s bookstore, essentially re-creates a discerning Twee reader’s shelves, its book buyers almost freakishly well-versed in the aesthetic. The outlets are now either havens for the smart, shy shopper or scapegoats for everything that’s gone wrong with the ’hood.
If this book is about anything, it’s about those who seem outwardly callow and frail but are secretly fearless. It’s about geeks with guts.In a New York Times feature on the late David Rakoff (another hero of Twee lit), his editor Bill Thomas said this about Rakoff’s posthumous novel in verse: “What is so special to me about the book is that it is the purest distillation of David’s belief that we live in a world that is essentially cruel and indifferent, but there are remedies for that. And the remedies are kindness and beauty.”
“It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate,” Morrissey sang during the bridge to the beloved Smiths ballad “I Know It’s Over.” “It takes guts to be gentle and kind.” He throws a hard g into guts, as if to signal to his many followers that this is the key: Guts!
If Hip-Hop and Punk are about the now—“No future” or “Get rich or die trying”—Twee is decidedly about the then, even as it alters the present, possibly forever and (depending on whom you ask) for the better. And there is no more perfect “then” than an (often-idealized) boy- or girlhood. Of course, almost no Twee would truly want to return to high school, much less grade school, as it really was, but they keep the memory of themselves and their worldview at that time, the same way people carry Saint Christopher pendants. Lena Dunham even has children’s book characters tattooed on her skin. Sofia Coppola nurtured an obsession with and even related to Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight’s fantastic if braggadocious Eloise. Much of the more abstract and smart-alecky Indie-rock lyrics owe a debt to Dr. Seuss and Edward Gorey. Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze nurtured a Maurice Sendak fixation all the way to a megabudget studio-film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are. Bernard Waber’s The House on East 88th Street provides a template for Wes Anderson’s vision of urban romance and precociousness. Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s Goodnight Moon is read or referenced on both The Wire and Mad Men to signify a lost sense of innocence that these younger artists and burgeoning icons are so heroically struggling to grip forever.
Most classic children’s books are told with few words, large type, and perfectly simple imagery rendered in pen-and-ink or watercolor illustrations that make the crazy, churning world seem cal
m and navigable. A good number of these books were literally created to be read before bed to fend off nightmares, and today, it seems they still do, only the nightmare is constant: dirty bombs, cyber bugs, global warming, exotic bird flu. The terror is as real as a Real Housewife.
The only thing scarier than death is the disappearance of youth. The Twee is both fascinated by and aghast at the passing of time as the body breaks down and the earth prepares to take us. Every child star’s adult mug shot is an affront. They know that Wilbur the runt, saved by the obstinate Fern as he’s about to be euthanized, then bottle-fed indoors, is going to be carted off to market as soon as he grows big enough. Five weeks, that’s all he’s got before he’s bacon. But author E. B. White sensed that an out was needed, a bit of magical thinking: a benevolent spider who speaks with her web and keeps the hapless pig somehow eternally special.
In this way, White, Sendak, and Seuss become new romantic poets who all chose to look backward and celebrate childhood, nature, and individualism over herd think and scheming vulgarity and religious hypocrisy while remaining fully aware of how bloody and cruel things could get out there. And those who worshipped nature also knew well that nature itself, our growing and aging and sickening and dying, was the enemy.
There is a scene in the 1961 teen drama Splendor in the Grass where Natalie Wood’s disturbed, horny, and terribly Twee Deanie Loomis rises before her high school class to deconstruct Wordsworth’s ode “Intimations of Immortality,” from which the film takes its title. Deanie stammers, “When we’re young we look at things very idealistically, I guess. And I think Wordsworth means that when we grow up, we have to forget the ideals of youth . . .” She promptly bursts into tears and rushes out of the room, bound for a good, long rest at a sanitarium, but you see her point, and Wordsworth’s. We all have to face the inevitable, and this is what makes Twee so sweet and so controversial. It’s the French resistance, armed with one fight song after another, marching into battle singing, “We don’t have to change at all.”
