Reading diary.

- Twee: The gentle revolution in music, books, television, fashion and film. Marc Spitz. A careful examination of about 70 years of pop culture that lead us all to a certain culture characteristic of the twenty-first century —that of “precocious youths who act like adults and adults who act like children”, or of a certain “bespectacled, art-obsessed precocity”… that of people who want to make the world safe for butterflies and ice-cream vendors. The “gentle revolution”, as the book’s title informs us. 

Spitz carefully examines all sort of major pop icons of the twentieth century seeking the roots of this movement that he dubs “Twee” (while conceding that any other term you personally choose for this aesthetic / life philosophy probably works as well), some of them at first glance unlikely influences —the likes of Edward Gorey and Nirvana’s Curt Cobain, for example. Or Anne Frank. And Holden Caufield. All those at first glance would seem ill-fitting next to the likes of Belle & Sebastian, Wes Anderson, Maurice Sendak and Pee Wee Herman. Yet Spitz presents a convincing, carefully constructed argument about the thread that joins those and several more seemingly disparate artists (to say nothing of tv shows that range from “Twin Peaks” to “My so-called life” and “Daria” to “Portlandia”): A certain taste for whimsy and preciousness, oftentimes wielded as a shield against an often dire, cruel world. 

But this book is neither mystification nor demonization: It presents the critiques that this movement has been subject to, with a special emphasis on it’s occasional sliding into an aesthetic that likely only privileged white kids could really practice and survive. It also presents a few counter-arguments (leaving the readers to decide for themselves). Spitz’s own position is presented in the closing pages: A certain skepticism, yet tinged with the hope that the best traits of it (the kindness, the willingness to embrace new ideas) will prevail. 

Spitz himself died rather young, at 47, and only barely saw what his country became in the last three years. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that this book should remain as a testament not to a time gone by, but to an ideology we all might seek to analyze and perhaps recapture now and then.