A psychic once told The Husband that I must learn to stop worrying or it would likely kill me. “Did you hear? Poor Stephen passed away last night from worry.” Years later I have stopped worrying with the help of meditation, yoga, breathing, hot tubbing & pharmaceuticals. The Husband even suggested that I might want to worry a little bit about something, sometime.
I took him up on his suggestion. Here is what is killing me with worry now. The Husband & I are news & political junkies. In the morning it is the first half hour of The Today Show (we have been watching for more than 30 years) & in the evening we may the TV set on CNN for several hours as we construct & compose in each of our work spaces. I am now unable to shake the worry off the idea that in a matter of months, Israel (& by default the USA) will go to war with Iran. If this conflict should come to consummation, the world will enter a new era, something along the lines of a world war. I had someone reiterate that an epic earthquake was eminent along the Cascadia Fault (Sacramento to Vancouver BC), an event akin to the quake in Japan last year. I am now worried about this & have joined a neighborhood earthquake preparedness committee.
Just terrific, by the end of 2012, The Husband, Lulu, Junior & Stephen might have a new definition of Post Apocalyptic Bohemia.
On the MAX train today I was considering the death of Camp. The baby queers don’t seem to grasp the concept. I tried to explain Camp to the kids at my place of employment & I was rewarded with blank pierced faces. To be fair, I couldn’t provide them with a definition. I can’t explain it, but I know it when I see it. Susan Sontag dedicated an entire book to the subject, where she noted: "Camp is always a way of consuming or performing culture "in quotation marks." Sontag also distinguishes the difference between "naive" & "deliberate" camp. Kitsch, as a form or style, certainly falls under the category "naive camp" as it unaware that it is tasteless, "deliberate camp", on the other hand, can be seen as a subversive form of kitsch which deliberately exploits the whole notion of what it is to be kitsch. John Waters said it better: “Camp is tragically ludicrous, or ludicrously tragic”.
I think that I somehow understood Camp by age 5 when I favored my parent’s Yma Sumac albums. But it really took hold when I was fortunate enough to have stumbled on the Busby Berkley musical film from 1943- The Gang’s All Here when I was 12 years old.
I was sick at home with flu, & my mother had plumped up pillow & blankets in front of the new color TV for me. I thought I was having a fever-dream with everything from Charlotte Greenwood doing her trademarked high-kick routine to Carmen Miranda in a too tall banana headdress & gay Edward Everett Horton gets covered with Carmen Miranda's lipstick claiming it's ketchup & the terrific Greenwood, as his wife, quips: "Yes, & from a Brazilian tomato!". A Manhattan nightclub has a stage large enough to hold a tropical island, for Carmen's Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat number, truly a Freudian nightmare, & a number set in a Westchester backyard features more trick fountains than an Esther Williams flick.
The finale, made me dizzy: a paean to the polka-dot that segues into a ballet featuring neon hoops, massive floating circles, kaleidoscopic effects & finally, an endearingly primitive green-screen trick that shows the heads of all the actors & hundreds of chorus girls bouncing to a reprise of A Journey to a Star. When the film was over my fever broke & I instinctively announced: “That movie was Camp!"
Today marks the 113th birthday of Carmen Miranda. She might not be a Gay Icon, but Miranda is the definition of Camp Icon.
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