Milan Kundera: Surviving Kitsch
 "We really don't search archives for attractive information for the media." said Vojtech Ripka in an October New York Times article. He was referring to findings by the Czech-backed Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes that outed author Milan Kundera as a one-time informer for the Czech Communist regime in the 1950s, which the reclusive Kundera, now 79, angrily denied.
A word I learned (or thought I did) by osmosis, "kitsch" is defined by Kundera in his 1982 book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" as "the absolute denial of shit."
In America we hear kitsch in the same sentence as camp, and both words are most often used adjectivally to describe low-brow art; things magneted to refrigerators, propped ironically in hutches and on altars, things described as "guilty pleasures."
But Kundera puts kitsch in context, first through his character Sabina, an artist who dismisses all untruths and fights to recognize and suppress her own (and our own, Kundera says) sentimentality. Then, through the lens of the 1968 "Prague Spring" and occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet forces, Kundera extols kitch's virtues as a political tool.
Totalitarian kitsch, Kundera says, is the sentimentalization of the country, the party, the government. A government that only distinguishes between "good" and "better"; a government that denies its own shit.
And "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" defies narrative kitsch, too. The characters vacillate. Where we want and expect Tomas to be a Howard Roark figure of principals and sacrifices, he is that only part of the time. Where the final resolution would be - had the novel been written by someone else – here occurs in the middle of the book. The narrative is turned on its head, with Kundera popping in now and then to remind us that the book is an invention.
But the recent allegations, which if true reveal that the then-21-year-old student Kundera made a police report about a man who was later convicted of spying against the Czech government, provide a whiff of narrative kitsch of their own.
Because Kundera, it is suggested, was a "true believer" in Communism as a student and young man, and only cooled on it when his government made a hash of the philosophy. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is populated with characters who inform on others and who justify atrocities in service to totalitarian kitsch. "We didn't know," Kundera quotes them. The denial of shit.
But if the definition of kitsch can be extended to the pat phrase and the easy answer, the conventional, doesn't the widespread acceptance of an iconoclastic work such as Kundera's threaten it, too? Think of the lesser (or greater) imitators of Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs": we can't even watch the originals now without lamenting their dissolution.
So haven't meta-projects like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "Pulp Fiction," and "The Sixth Sense" become kitschy, too? And is the subversion of Kundera's own dissident character by a 58-year-old police report just the narrative anti-zing we've come to not-expect?
And once we start, the kitsch keeps coming; it kitschochets between the book, the author, and history.
First, we kitschily apply the words of one great author to the life of another. "If it were true, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar answered it" says Antony in "Julius Caesar." If it were true, Kundera committed an act out of ignorance ('We didn't know") that sent a man to 14 years of labor in uranium mines.
Then comes Life Imitates Art. While it is convention to graft the author onto his stronger protagonists, Kundera has instead become his character Tereza, who unwittingly cheats on her husband with a Communist spy only to realize later that the interlude had been recrded as potential blackmail.
While Mr. Ripka denied fishing for damaging information on Kundera, it is no secret that the author is not loved in the former Czechoslovakia, which he fled in 1970 for Paris. The Czech Republic lives uneasly with its puppet regime past.
The unearthing of the 1950s police report is the clearest echo from the book, as Kundera the narrator points out that damning information was often collected by the Communists to be released at just the right time. Calling the allegations "pure lies" last month, Kundera said they amounted to "the assassination of an author."
We will defy kitsch by refusing to end this article with Kundera's assassination. But we must also by all means forgive what Kundera denies ever happened, so where does that leave us, narratively?
Buy The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Buy "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" movie
See also: Report Says Acclaimed Czech Writer Informed on a Supposed Spy, The Big Website About Milan KunderaLabels: authors, books, europe, kitsch, milan kundera, news, politics
A World with Hair On It: Petite-Squirrele's Velvet Vision
 The text accompanying Black Velvet If You Please, a retrospective of Dimensionally True paintings at Pasadena's Colorado Wine Company curated by Jeremy Rosenberg: It is a cliche' among the scholarly that, even as cybertronics, microwaves, and vacuum-sealed foods bring us closer to the image of our maker, we have less need to blame or credit an originator with various lobes, the appendix, the butter-catching philtrum. Instead, we hurtle fearfully, hands across our eyes as if dogs expecting blows, toward a perfection that earlier ages anticipated with joy. It is with this fear of success that Dr. Lemt Petite-Squirrele (1895-1978) embarked on his collection of velvet paintings in 1940. "Montezuma sum et edit cioccolatam," the Doctor declared. The Spanish Civil War was over, and on the first anniversary of the Fall of Valencia Mdm. Petite-Squirrele bought her husband a velvet representation of a conquistador.  Every painting in his collection was obtained at a farm stand in Clovis, CA. "In our lives," he observed, "We add the dimension of wisdom to the dimensions of height and weight. But the wisdom constantly betrays us . It is a false dimension. We seek other ways achieve dimensional truth." Dimensional Truth, a school of philosophy that would occupy the Petite-Squirreles for the next 30 years (until their deaths in a silage combustion pact), focused on the attached velveteen dimensions that made images of sailing ships, snow scenes, crying children, noble, brutal aboriginal savages, and poppy-fiends "realer," fabrico-anthropologist Jens Burl has written, "and better than those things are when you meet them on the street."  Ethnographers, dowagers, beatniks, astronauts, lesbians, sculptors, the owner of a salmon hatchery, cultural illiterates, men, rustics, production assistants, various laureates, and racetrack sharpies were all of different opinions about the Petite-Squirreles' work. Was it Minor? Worthwhile? Insensitive? "Hot"? Outsider? Incendiary? Provocative? Creamy? Dark? Before we answer these questions, we need to ask ourselves if we're here for the art or for something else. What is our Dimensional Truth? The cheese in orange and yellow cubes? The toothpicks with cellophane flairs? The wine in plastic cups? Or John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," which is undoubtedly playing right now? -Martin Barrett, author: "A Nation Rubs Art on Its Face at the Gas Station"1That year the Petite-Squirrele farm yielded a bumper crop of prunes rather than raisins. "We wanted plums," the doctor told a reporter for the Fresno Bee And Ant 2If by "different" we can also include the lack of an opinion Black Velvet If You Please opens Saturday, November 8. More details here. See also: Colorado Wine CompanyLabels: art, events, jeremy rosenberg
Scratched and smudged, ill-used and reflective of bulk purchases made without the consumer in mind, DVDs available at public libraries remind us of the state of the world economy. Market Decline Movies gives us an accurate reading of the mood of the nation via its free two-day rentals.
Gone Baby Gone (2007)
 Starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, John Ashton, Amy Ryan, Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver
Directed by Ben Affleck
Amy Ryan, though born in Brooklyn, is note-perfect astounding as the pathetic, pleasure-seeking brute Masshole mother of a kidnaped girl in Ben Affleck's directorial debut starring his brother, Casey, as a private dick on the streets of Boston.
Characters in GBG are less believable than the other Boston-area adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel, Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. There is a suspension of disbelief the audience must embrace before accepting the young detective's career choice (though green, he outmaneuvers career cops by knowing the streets) and Amy Madigan's accent is a slap in the face to anyone who has ever changed planes at Logan. Furthermore, a low-rent drug kingpin who acts as a red herring in the movie is utterly out of place, despite supplying the title.
But perhaps Madigan made the cut as a barren, self-righteous sister in-law to Ryan as a package deal with Ed Harris, Madigan's real-life husband who plays a crooked cop in the movie. Her accent is reminiscent of that of Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. Now you're thinking, "Ben Affleck only wrote and starred in Good Will Hunting - he couldn't have been expected to act as Mork's dialogue coach, too." But Madigan's accent is all the more egregious because it is the lone bad example in a very deep, rich, and faithful cast of superb Bostonian characterizations.
(There is a history of Hollywood carpetbagging its Massachusetts accents: Let us not forget Jack Nicholson in The Departed, more southern Connecticut than Southie. But Ryan shares my vote for most compelling Masachusetts accent with Harold Rusell's Worcester-bred amputee in The Best Years of Our Lives.)
As the movie progresses, certain things fall into place. We see why the police at first grudgingly welcome young Affleck's involvement, because they think he's a lightweight who won't get to the real answers. And the real answers are as close to the heart of Boston's class struggle and color-awkward hierarchy of privilege than any film depiction of the city.
The real victim of this movie is Michelle Monaghan. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, she sparkled. Here she isn't given much of an opportunity to shine. In fact, Monaghan is to Gone Baby Gone what Amy Ryan was to Dan in Real Life - an actress not allowed to show her stuff.
As accurate and flawed a depiction of Boston as The Departed, as full of twists as a drive through the North End, as filled with moral ambiguity as James Michael Curley's election from jail, Gone Baby Gone is a glorious debut.
How it reflects the economy: Wealth transcends racial lines every time, so if you are a childless bi-racial couple who can afford property in the Berkshires, you have what it takes to steal a white child and make a major metropolitan police department do your bidding.
Buy Gone Baby Gone.Labels: Amy Madigan, Amy Ryan, ben affleck, Casey Affleck, Ed Harris, John Ashton, MDM, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Titus Welliver
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Editor: Marty Barrett
Contributors: Frank Martin, Gram Ponante, Jose Aguilar, Esme Alarcon, Steve Rubinek |
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"We really don't search archives for attractive information for the media." said Vojtech Ripka in an October New York Times article. He was referring to findings by the Czech-backed Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes that outed author Milan Kundera as a one-time informer for the Czech Communist regime in the 1950s, which the reclusive Kundera, now 79, angrily denied.
