Defining Kitsch

In this piece my social commentary and cultural musings somehow turned out more bitchy than usual (and that's an understatement). I guess Donald brings out the best in me, huh? Not for the faint-hearted! Skip this entry or beware: you're in for a healthy dose of my super-bitch rantings.


So recently, a friend of mine, who happens to be French (fresh-off-the-boat) asked me what the word 'Kitsch' meant and i stopped dead in my tracks, the way most people who have come to know and use a word for decades do when they realize they can't really describe it without using the word 'like' a dozen times:

- uhm, it's like art but like, not very genuine, you know? uhm, like too much of it, like a lot to the point of bad taste. but not like just cheap, like it's not about price, but it could look cheap, you know?

That's how i sounded in my head, so i decided to save myself the embarrassment of of having a public blond moment by skipping the definition and going right for the Examples (that's all that us foreigners understand anyway. seriously, have you ever tried communicating with one of us?)

So in case you're ever caught off-guard having to define the same word, this visual-aid may come in handy: The Trump Towers. And I know my towers! Having spent most of my New York career shuffling between UES & UWS where those hideous structures are splattered.

Actually, why even mention the hideously bombastic towers? The Donald himself is Kitsch, and for that matters, so is his wife (OMG, Ivana Trump? Classic Eastern European Kitsch-on-wheels). Divorcée you say? well, you don't suppose I was going to talk about his current middle-america-Super-Model-before-stretch-marks-ended-her-career new trophy wife, huh? But at least she's a Trophy wife! that's something, right? Zeus knows, i always wanted to be a trophy wife. But no house chores! you know that crap would never work, i can't even supervise a maid without f***ing it up (kidding! I don't have a maid. honest. cross my heart). No, I'll just stick to the sex duties and shoe shopping. I have nothing to worry about, no man ever left his trophy wife because she couldn't supervise the maids...hello? that's why they have butlers!

But I digress. Back to the Trumps: they're so Kitsch, their offspring look like pink flamingos. I mean whatever happened to that rule of thumb, that all babies are cute? whoever made that up clearly never laid eyes on a Trump baby. Clearly those ugly apples didn't fall far from that ugly tree. And then The Donald had the audacity to name his son Barron, Barron Trump! And then publicly announce his chubby arrival to this world (C-section, for sure) on Imus in the Morning. Yup, the show that got canceled because Don Imus called someone a n***y-head. V. Classy.

Nevermind the 10 million tower/eyesores that dot every major city in America (and by America, I mean USA because Canadians know better than to let him build anything, and the Mexicans...well, whatever he built there we probably never heard of because it blends in with its surroundings, i.e other gaudy gold-plated third-world cement-structures)

I'm not even questioning the artistic and architectural integrity of the buildings . I'm just saying that the architect who designed these aforementioned gold-plated gems should be guillotined a la french, so these atrocities never happen again.

And of course, it wouldn't be a Trump Tower if it didn't have the words Trump Tower gold-plated and affixed on its entrance, as if there was some ambiguity. Like a dog who sprays the bushes to mark his territory, Trump marks his by gold-plating it.

Two notable exceptions are the Trump World Towers (called the world towers because they face the U.N headquarters in midtown, which apparently makes the neighboring Trump building by association v. worldy) and the Trump International Hotel (As opposed to what? local hotels? are they made for New Yorkers to stay in when they're just bored of their apartments?)

And I'm not forgetting the hair piece: his sister - a prominent NJ judge - wears one too (how the defendants maintain a straight face, i don't know) I'm wondering, does the hairpiece run in the family? or did they get a family group discount at the wig salon?