bed and breakfast décor
Music: Robin Guthrie: Imperial (2006)
Last week I visited with peeps at the University of Missouri, where I got to hang out with my friend Melissa Click, her family, and a number of folks from the department of communication. I shared some of my work in progress on the object of speech---specifically, the influence of vocal tone in the last presidential election. I got some great questions and feedback. Folks were so friendly and smart, and walking around the beautiful campus in a real winter environment was refreshing. Ok, well: it didn't snow and was in the 60s on the weekend, but still, it was good to feel a midwestern winter!
I stayed in a delightfully charming but strange bed and breakfast right off campus. My digs were clean, the breakfasts delightful, and the bed soft. This past year, in fact, I've stayed in a number of B&Bs and started noticing something peculiar. It seems for the owners there is a strong desire on to decorate every nook and cranny with something, sometimes thematic, but usually random: plastic flowers, forlorn stuffed animals, playing cards missing key royalty. I don't know why there is an impulse to cover every section of wall space and every shelf with some knic-knac or another, but there is. And the choices for décor are, well, sometimes astonishing, sometimes even downright creepy. Take this curio cabinet/writing desk, for example. It was in my room. Open it up and what do we find? Various shit that seems, at first glance, pretty random.
First up is a trinity of trolls on the upper left shelf. I remember these from grade school. You could play with their hair and sort of mold it, and I think there were pencil topper versions. Note, however, these are no ordinary trolls: they are all sporting nurses uniforms. Moreover, each nurse uniform is different. One is a pull-over, which would render him/her a patient were it not for the hat. One is a skirt, and one looks sort-of like a diaper. These happy troll nurses seem primed to help in the event of an accident in the room.
To the right is a nurses hat with a Missouri tigers logo. On the next shelf there is a lonesome stethoscope. On the bottom shelf there is a flashlight (which was actually in a socket on the wall, but I had to remove it to plug in my computer). Finally, on the bottom right there was a box advertising a "genuine, wireless ice bag." I don't know what that means. To my surprise, when I opened the box there was the icebag---stiff with age, but assuredly wireless!
So, it appears this stuff is not quite as random as it first appeared to me. Obviously, we're dealing with a medical theme. I got to thinking why the owners would choose to thematize this desk in such a way. I could only come up with two conjectures. First, medical care is a form of hospitality, and on the associative, paradigmatic axis serving strangers in one's home is also a form of hospitality. Such a collection of detritus nevertheless is suggestive to visitors that they are being cared for (there's a connection to be made between the hosts and the trolls, but I'm going to play nice).
Second, of course, is the sentimentality of kitsch. Once one goes down the road of kitsch, there is no turning back. As Robert Plant once sang, there are two paths you can go by: the path of knowing embrace, signaled by pink flamingoes and crazy shoes, or the path of "taste," in which kitsch is only allowed in muted tones and absolute earnestness---the way of irony and the way of literalism.
In the dining room I spied three requisite signatures of literalist kitsch: over the dining board there was a woven tapestry of a cottage image by Thomas Kincade. On the top of a china cabinet was a patriotic ceramic flag sculpture. And just outside the dining room, in the hallway, was a sign that pleaded for the Lord to bless "this house." Of course, the entire home was littered with countless signatures of kitsch, but the holy trinity is God, the American flag, and Thomas Kincade.
Needless to say, I was delighted with my lodging. And I must say Columbia was a wonderful place to visit. A gallery of photos from my visit is here (the little boy is Trey, my buddy's cuter-than-words toddler).