This Queer is wonderfully Twee yes, but so is the wall paneling
An Empire-less Britain would be just a ‘cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herring and potatoes’.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
Twee is Empire. Twee is the English buying Libertie’s of London for home decor. These floral Indian designs brought back with the kamasutra by Richard Francis Burton and the old Orientalists. Don’t go absurd and douche the whole rag flat with it. Just add an accent to the gold trim, please .
Twee is very similar to Hick as a sensibility. Very similar in its aspiration to something greater than itself. Hick is as insecure as Twee. Only that Twee specifically aspires to Empire. While Hick aspires to be Classy. The Hick has an indistinct and terribly vague notion of what classy is and tries vainly and sincerely and fails, while Twee knows exactly what wealth looks like and does her best cheap impersonation in her own modest and petite bourgeoisie home.
Hick is the Indian inclination to support their native yoga practice with the Olympic movement and pseudo science like cakras and kundalini. Hick is Kuvalayananda aspiring to science. Hick is Krishnamacharya borrowing the Danish Gymnastic form from Iyer and calling it yoga.. as deeply insecure as a West Virginian.
Schmaltz isn’t Twee. Schmaltz is rendered goose fat. Schmaltz is the musical form of Kitsch.
Twee.. the aspirant to the blue blooded class that inherited the Empire generations ago. Like Gore Vidal sick and bored of its own trite vulgarity. The Hick here being Truman Capote.
Trump is also this himself. Not to beat a dead horse, but he is an aspirant to class and an antagonist to those elites who reject him as alien and as out of place as the immigrant on the lawn. Trump feels this. He resents being the jigaboo and his raspberries come with a venomous snake oil.
Yet a Republican in wolf’s clothing.. hmm. Rather the inverse.
In England Twee is a sensibility. I can list a set of objects that are Twee. They are not quite kitsch though also quite guilty of trying to arise or contrive a sentiment. But Twee is a narrow form of kitsch that explores one’s love and favor for an hereditary power.
Faux crystal chandeliers
Louis XIV furniture reproductions
Marble and Trompe L’oeil
Gold leaf
Plaster Corinthian columns especially interior
Rococo wallpaper
Twin set and pearls
Chrome horse and diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
This indulgent Twee sensibility is ornate and yet horrified by the Vile. Violence has no place in the home nor in the heart of the cashmere. It pretends that the violence necessary for Empire is invisible and divine in origin. It is as distinct a conflict as Kashmiri Shaivism to the Brahminical order of Vaishnavites. It is the Racaille again, the Rococo response to the unnecessary and puritanical self-restraint of Martin Luther.
Trump manages to be almost Twee even though he has the leverageable finances to afford quality. His aspiration to be legitimate underscores Twee. Twee has an instinctive insecurity to hide one’s meagerness. A meagerness of class, and of education, of wit, of depth. A meagerness of sophistication. A sophistry of elegance. That is to say he thinks he is Classy. It is his essential vileness that turns him ultimately from Twee to Hick. He might as well have a gold piano in his parlour and a green shag rug ceiling.
Graceland Elvis’s perfect acoustical Jungle Den
Kindness and thoughtfulness come from abundance.
An abundance of compassion, of wherewithal, of love, of time. He has time to care. That man is of a class. That’s Class. That is the Twee sentiment of patriarchy, that is the caricature of Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby. There is a tension there between Twee and Classical according the essential and historical violence of the Plantation. Or is that all in the past, now?
A debauched and degenerate sophisticate, or aristocrat, or the whole of aristocracy has given up caring. Twee is an aspiration to that which the ruling class is bored.
That Prince Charles goes to bed at night wishing he planted another tree demonstrates great class though it is sentiment and endearingly so.
He is not twee, just tweedy. These people should be celebrated for their super human efforts towards Decorum. Diana was truly a mess. Deserving of her namesake. Killing men and hunting them and skinning them and letting their dogs eat of them on account of her virtue that once was spied on. Her fig exposed in the moonlight rages of the Bacchante. Diana causing a commotion again.
By Sontag’s definition Queen Elizabeth is of course naturally camp as she is unselfconsciously maternal and fabulous in the most unaffected way. Though more nice than camp generally speaking.
Trump is not tweedy. (which he no doubt mistakes for elite.)
Twee has this inclination like neoclassical architecture to hide its joints and facets with décolletage. Underneath that heavenly bosom is an armpit, boob sweat, and an urgently pink nipple like a pigs ass. The little bows and lace are Twee.
I saw a young Albertan Maenad today with a massive exposed cleavage like the fucking Red Rock Canyon and unselfconsciously self-conscious she still habitually pulled at the bottom of her shirt so as to hide the fact that her bosoms have a bottom or a cup in any way. That.. is an obscenity.
Or as Sapolsky says of culture choices like this.. a polite hypocrisy. God forbid we see an inframammary fold when just underneath her belt the Lululemon gluteal fold and subsequent ten pound camel toe artfully dance and mock our attention like a sugar plum fairy in the naked streets.. looking for soul food and a place to eat.