Quirkiness vs. "Quirk"

One commenter to this blog recently said, about the Helvetica documentary and related press,

“…a lot of this strikes me as literary narcissism. Is this just about writers talking shop or is there a genuinely worthwhile cultural conversation happening here? Do we think Luc Sante is a man of egalitarian principles because he uses a font that accords the same amount of space to each letter, "which I think is only fair to the i and the l"? Not particularly.”

To this I have to say, what do you have against literary narcissism? I may not think that Luc Sante is a “man of egalitarian principle” but I do find his attachment to a font endearing and revealing.

This brings me to the recently ubiquitous bitching about "quirkiness."

Take Michael Hirschorn’s recent tirade “Quirked Around.” I don’t understand the impetus to glorify his preferences via an ironic elitism that favors Judd Apatow over Wes Anderson. Hirschorn is affecting a contrarian snobbishness—the kind that drives people to talk about a surprisingly good “big” comedy as though it is the apex of contemporary art, while dismissing cult favorites for the very things that make them beloved. In this case, his normally gleeful populism (he is a programmer for VH1 after all) feels forced. He forgets that the elusive quality of quirkiness came before the cute aesthetic neologism “Quirk,” and if it is the driving force behind certain entertainments, maybe that’s because it makes people’s work unique and gives it style. That’s why people listen to This American Life, not because it’s cool. Public radio may now be nerdy-chic, but don’t forget the nerdy still comes first. And to criticize the show for having a formula…isn’t that tantamount to picking on the very idea of having an aesthetic style altogether?

I don’t think that’s what Hirschorn means to do. I think he is trying to pinpoint a specific “genre,” and he’s on the right track, connecting TAL with Anderson’s films, but he has opted lazily to write the whole thing off via rambling criticisms of these two examples rather than do the painstaking anthropological work of flushing out the categorization. Let’s face it, everyone loved Knocked Up, but it says more about a person that they love Ira Glass, or Helvetica. And Wes Anderson’s aesthetic is hardly in danger of taking over all of cinema.

Hirschorn recently asked, “Is there an easier position to take in polite society than to patronize reality TV?” Now it feels like he is taking the easy way out by joining his fellow appliers of quotation marks on the derision bandwagon. But “Mumblecore” hit on something. Even Melvin Jules Bukiet’s spurious whine about “Brooklyn Books of Wonder” offers a little bit of the pleasure of recognition in its specificity. I suppose the very process of defining something involves a bit of tearing down, but that makes it all the more important to have a subject a little more manageable than Indie-ness in general, i.e. weird stuff that not that many people like in the first place.