Twee Magazine

Scouting New York: Sometimes finding buildings that might have been built by cult leader Ivo Shandor.

 Nick Carr's blog "Scouting New York" would be worth reading were it simply a document of his profession: He is a film scout in New York, and so spends his day searching for locations for film shoots and events. And so Carr can speak authoritatively about the fact that it's almost impossible to find the ruined and barrel fire-lit New York alley that every filmmaker seems to want (he wrote in the Guardian than Manhattan actually only has three or four of the sorts of alleys filmmakers want). Also impossible to find: The sorts of Chinese restaurants seen in movies."[W]hile I really wish just one holdover from the 1940s or 1950s had survived into the modern age as a historical relic, they’re kaput," Carr writes, "and no amount of scouting will bring them back."

Carr also has a very enjoyable habit of tracking down where old films were lensed in New York and what the same location looks like now: His research on "The Godfather's" locations is as epic as the movie itself. Carr is obviously a man who takes his job seriously, not simply by investigating possible NY locations, but also by being a cineaste.

And all that would make for an outstanding blog anyway, but we mention it here because Carr is one more thing: He's a bit of an obsessive amateur detective. If there is a door that has been left open, he will peek inside it, and if he discovers something unexpected, he will investigate. New York is filled with the eccentric, the unexpected, and the occasionally inexplicable, and Carr is dogged about finding as much of it as he can and telling its story.

So while there is nothing inherently twee about location scouting, or movies, or New York, when it tips over into blog posts that retrace the route of Ichabod Crane through Sleepy Hollow, or detail a very strange lawn zoo on Staten Island, or a mouse hole with a bright red door across it, we now have an author with a taste for surprise, whimsy, wonder, and delight, and where these things hide themselves in one of the world's greatest cities.

Best still, because Carr has the impulses of a detective, he doesn't just find astonishing locations, but often the astonishing stories behind them. So a gorgeous lobby turns out not merely to be gorgeous, but the building it is on turns out to have been built by Freemasons in 1927 that was intended as a "true-to-size rendering of King Solomon’s Temple."

One of Carr's most heartbreaking stories was the result of him discovering a plaque embedded with spare change. As it turned out, the change was from the pocket of a small boy named Stephen Baltz, who had been in an airplane that crashed into another airplane above a building in Park Slope. Everyone else was killed in the crash, but Baltz plummeted 5,000 feet but somehow managed to survive, but died the next day. Before dying, Stephen described his view from the airplane, looking out at New York: "It looked like a picture of a fairy book. It was a beautiful sight."

The change embedded into the plaque was the pocket change Stephen had carried onto the plane, still in his pocket when he tumbled to the ground.

"Rushmore": There may be a ghost in this image.

"Rushmore" was Wes Anderson's second feature-length movie, but the first that felt truly like a Wes Anderson movie, thanks to Anderson and co-author Owen Wilson, inspired by the writing of Roald Dahl, setting the movie in a slightly heightened reality. "Rushmore" is still fondly remembered, and is a frequent fan favorite.

The film would also begin a long series of collaborations, including 17-year-old Jason Schwartzman in the lead role as the precocious but academically challenged Max Fischer. Schwartzman had never acted before, and was instead the drummer and songwriter for a band called Phantom Planet, but he's terrific fun in the film, mannered, smirking, and willing to completely throw himself into whatever the film asks of him, which is plenty. Schwartzman is also from America's most accomplished cinematic family: His mother is Talia Shire, who is, of course, Frances Ford Coppola's sister, and he came recommended by Frances' daughter, Sofia. Anderson would later have a series of fruitful collaborations with Sofia's brother, Roman, who collaborated with him on "The Darjeeling Limited " and "Moonrise Kingdom."

This was also Anderson's first of many films featuring Bill Murray, who liked the script enough to do it for scale and became one of Anderson's biggest supporters, most famously by offering to underwrite an expensive helicopter shot in "Rushmore," but also by appearing in every single subsequent Anderson film, sometimes just as a cameo. And Murray's affection for the filmmaker is understandable: His character, the aging and bitter millionaire Herman Blume, managed to transform Murray from the sorts of jokey manchildren that dominated his early career to the sorts of wounded older men he now specializes in.

"Rushmore" is also, in a lot of ways, the essential text for modern twee cinema. Although the marvelous cinematography by Robert Yeoman (who has lensed almost all of Anderson's films) draws largely from the French New Wave, the film's storyline feels borrowed from mid-20th century prep school movies, the soundtrack is almost entirely British invasion, and the troubled spirit of the movie seems lifted from 1970s films. Anderson was one of the first filmmakers that deliberately referenced filmmakers like Robert Altman, Miloš Forman, and Coppola (there's even a line in "Rushmore," "Couldn't we just let me float by? For old times' sake?, that deliberately borrows from Tessio's death in "The Godfather." (Even more directly, the teenage Max Fischer has a habit of mounting absurdly ambitious films based on 70s films and events, including "Serpico.")

For many, myself included, there was something essentially appealing about the story, in which a child and an adult man go to war with each other over the affections of a woman that rebuffs them both. Additionally, unlike the often cynical films that inspired it, "Rushmore" closes on a third act in which Max Fischer tries to make amends, mostly through small gifts and preposterously oversized gestures. Anderson's heroes, despite their abundant flaws, often earnestly want to be decent, and his films are filled with heartbreaking acts of decency as a result. This fact is the reason why Anderson's was labeled the leader of a movement called "New Sincerity," although it was never really a movement, he wasn't actually the leader, and the term fizzled.

Nonetheless, for all its affectedness, there was a genuine heart beating at the center of "Rushmore." This was undoubtedly informed in part by the fact that the film has a lot of autobiographical touches. It was inspired by Owen Wilson's own experiences of getting kicked out of a prep school and having to relocate to a public school, as well as Anderson's own young adulthood of staging school plays. There are hints of the film's creators throughout, such as Fischer sitting in class reading a newspaper, which Owen Wilson actually did in a playwrighting class he shared with Anderson. The filming location for Rushmore, St. John's School in Houston, Texas, was Anderson's alma mater (and, oddly, the location that acted as the film's public school, Lamar High School, is directly across the street from St. John's.) Anderson and Wilson had extensively mined their own experiences and then enlarged them to slightly cartoonish levels, and then set-dressed and costumed them within an inch of their lives.

The film's meticulous art direction isn't excessive or incidental, although they would contribute to an ongoing criticism that Anderson builds dollhouses instead of making movies. Instead, Anderson seemed to have latched onto an observation offered by French film theorists (and later New Wave filmmakers) that American studio filmmakers hid a lot of narrative details in art direction. It was director's way of introducing additional themes and story elements into films constrained by the studio system, but Anderson seemed to realize that it also gave him the opportunity to tell much of his story visually.

So let me discuss some of the visual elements of "Rushmore" and mention how they contribute to the story. Unlike the rest of the students at Rushmore, Max Fischer insists on wearing his school jacket with its Rushmore patch, which he has additionally decorated with two pins with bees on them, rewards from the school for attendance and punctuality. These pins have become something of a fetish item for fans of the movie -- it is possible to buy replicas of them online, and its no wonder, as they are a marvel of costume design, a marvelous icon in red, black, and gold. But the bees recall the fact that Fischer was the president of the Rushmore Beekeepers, one of the many clubs he belonged to. During Fischer's conflict with Blume, he makes use of these skills to fill Blume's hotel room with bees -- in fact, it is the incident that starts his war with the older man. Later, when he makes up with Blume, he offers him one of the pins as a peacekeeping gesture.

And there is more embedded in this pin. There are two ghosts that haunt the film: Fischer's mother, who died years earlier of cancer, and Edward Appleby, the deceased husband of teacher Rosemary Cross, who is the subject of Fischer's unwanted romantic affections. They aren't ghosts in the traditional sense, but their presence haunts the movie anyway, a source of submerged but occasionally visible pain for both the teacher and the student. Fischer's mother was responsible for Max's entry into the school -- he wrote a play and she submitted it to the prep school, gaining him entry and a scholarship. Fischer makes occasional visits to her grave, and she gave him a portable typewriter inscribed, heartbeakingly, with the words "Bravo, Max!"

Appleby, in the meanwhile, has an entire room of his own, his childhood room, where his widow lives under his awards and photos. (It is Owen Wilson in the photos, by the way.) Appleby drowned, and this is represented by a book by Jacques Cousteau that he gave his wife and she passed on to the school library. But Appleby, who attended Rushmore, is represented in one last way: He founded the Rushmore Beekeepers, and is therefore the source of the bee that now is Rushmore's logo, and is on their pins.

There is one last detail regarding the pins that I especially like, and it is this: Max Fischer is never on time and frequently simply leaves class to do something he is more interested in. There is no way he could have received awards for punctuality and attendance. But Fischer is also skilled at manipulating his teachers and the school administration, and so it is entirely believable that he would have gotten the pins anyway, just because he wanted them. As they would be for audiences, the pins were fetish items for Max Fischer.

I want to mention the Jacques Cousteau book as well. Never mind that it inspired "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," or that it is one of the first of many books to appear in Anderson's movies. It becomes meaningful to Fischer because he finds a handwritten note in it. And never mind that Anderson loves handwritten notes. These are just the specific form the art direction has taken. It is important because Max Fischer also writes in books: When he first meets Blume, it is at a chapel meeting, when Blume is lecturing the students. Fischer grabs one of the prayer books and jots down excited notes about the lecture.

The subject of Blume's lecture is class. Despite being a millionaire, Blume comes from a troubled past, including a tour of duty in Vietnam. And so he tells the students to take aim at the rich kids, "Get them in the crosshairs. And take them down." Aside from the fact that he is using military metaphors to encourage class war at a prep school, it is a prep school his twin sons attend, and he despises his twin sons. After the lecture, Fischer hurries to Blume to tell him how much he liked the speech -- inadvertently outing himself as one of the poor kids, although he'll spend most of the movie pretending his father is a brain surgeon.

Through Fischer's notes in a book and Rosemary Cross's notes in another, a disastrous (and, for Cross, unwanted) love triangle develops. More than that, they lead to events in the rest of the film: Fischer does take aim at a rich kid, although the kid he chooses in Blume, and Fischer also decides to make one of his oversized gestures to Cross by building her a multi-milllion dollar aquarium. "You think Edward Appleby would've built you one?" he asks Cross. (He's also likely inspired by another visual in the film: Cross has a number of smaller aquariums in her class, and Fischer helps her feed the fish when they first meet.)

Parenthetically, the ghost of Edward Appleby actually does make an appearance in the film, sort of. One of the early shots of Fischer has him in goggles, seated at a go-cart, inspired by a fanous photograph by Jacques Henri Lartigue. Several people in the background rise go-karts around a circle, and one of them is Owen Wilson, the movie's Edward Appleby. And I'll note there are two autobiographical elements in this scene: Firstly, it is no accident that the movie recreates a famous photograph: Owen Wilson's mother is Laura Wilson, herself a professional and rather extraordinary photographer. Secondly, Anderson had a childhood love of go-karts, and he's in one of the other karts in the shot.

I'll leave off here, but I don't really need to, as there are so many additionally visual elements in the movie that communicate a wealth of information about the films story, from the stage curtains that open the various scenes to the Russian fur cap that Fischer wears when he's especially depressed (it's the same one he wore in Rushmore's student UN.) The film is filled with what Guillermo del Toro calls "visual protein," and Anderson would increasingly rely on this to deepen his stories and sometimes provide a counterpoint to the unreliable narration in his film's dialogue.

But this increasing reliance on art design as a storytelling tool is, I think, part of the reason Anderson finds himself often subject to criticism that his films are shallow and obsessed with style. It's very hard to read a film in the same way you would a painting -- viewers don't have the time to luxuriate on small details as they rush by. Or, at least, they don't on first viewing, and most directors can't rely on their audiences to watch films twice, or dozens of times, to catch the nuances embedded in the mis en scene.

I don't know if it's deliberate, but, nonetheless, Anderson's tendency to fill the art design of his films so full of fetish items (at least, to tweer audience members) serves the purpose of encouraging viewers to watch his films repeatedly. We may be doing it as a sort of cinematic version of Pinterest, mentally pinning wallpaper and books and songs and costume elements in order to buy them later. (At least, I am.) But nonetheless, we end up absorbing these nuances, and Anderson's films become richer on each viewing as the secret language hidden in the wallpaper, books, songs, and costume elements reveal themselves.

"Twee," by Marc Spitz.

Marc Spitz's "Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film" wasn't that well received when it came out, and I think the criticisms of the book were fair. Spitz argues that twee (which he always capitalizes) is a legitimate youth movement, a sort of softer version of punk (also capitalized). He places its spiritual center in Brooklyn and creates a cultural narrative for its creation, as Greil Marcus did for punk rock in "Lipstick Traces." Spitz sees twee as originating with a number of artists in response to the horrors of World War II, including Walt Disney, Dr. Seuss, and J.D. Salinger.

Critics have accused Spitz of overreaching, in part because he includes such unlikely characters in his story of twee as Anne Frank and Kurt Cobain. He early on points out that while everything twee is indie, not everything indie is twee, and then proceeds to ignore his own warning. It all reads as sort of wrong to me, but, then, it may be that we're defining the word twee differently. The Brooklyn hipster scene doesn't strike me as essentially twee, and of every name on the list above, I think only Salinger really fits my definition, although Disney, Seuss, and Cobain had twee moments. (Anne Frank, in the meanwhile? No.)

But, then, I don't think twee is a movement. Not yet, at least, and it may never be. Twee seems more like we have taste buds for aesthetic taste, and some flavors of art and culture just sort of taste twee to us, if you will. There's never really been an overarching movement called "cool," either, but there's a sort of loose consensus around the idea of coolness, and there are artists who are self-consciously cool.

There was cool art before we had the word cool --  Gene Sculatti's 1982 book "The Catalog of Cool" included decadent literature and the philosopher Heraclitus. But "cool" is sufficiently loose an aesthetic to include things that predated the word, because they influenced the modern idea of cool, or they strike modern observers as cool. It's the same way with twee, and so, if one criticism of Spitz's book is that he overreached, I think it is fair to say he underreached as well. His history of twee extensively details the post punk and indie world -- competently, I would say -- but virtually never touches on the arty rock music of the 60s, or children's music from the 40s, or singing cowboys, or any of the myriad other musical forms that seem twee nowadays.

His placing the origin of twee at the end of World War II feels like an invented history to me. Yes, Salinger saw action, and Dr. Seuss ran the animation department for the US Air Force, and Walt Disney likewise made animated movies for the war effort. But only Salinger seemed strongly influenced by his military experiences, and, as I have said before, while Disney and Seuss may have influenced modern twee art, their influence hardly feels dominant. The work of Charles Schulz -- especially the splendid animated television shorts based on Peanuts -- is far more locked into the DNA of modern twee art, and while Schulz was in World War II, he barely experienced combat, never fired a gun, and mostly oversaw surrendering German forces. His work is far more influenced by his childhood and young adulthood in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

(While I may simply feel this way because I am a native Minneapolitan, Minnesota's Twin Cities strike me as being more essentially twee than Brooklyn. I mean, our minor league baseball team is owned by twee godfather Bill Murray, for Pete's sakes.)

But this may be a product of differing definitions. Spitz may, in fact, have done a bang-up job breaking down the influences that go into the making of a sort of Brooklyn hipster. If you think Lena Dunham is inherently twee, then, yes, this book may offer some insights into the world of people like her. Even still, it feels lacking. I'll note that crafting has exploded in Brooklyn, and while the book occasionally mentions Etsy, it fails to offer a history of the growth of this hobby, or that it was largely instigated by women in the Pacific Northwest.

Although Spitz recognizes that some of the criticisms of twee come from people who consider it somehow unmanly, he nonetheless focuses on the sort of arts that have largely been dominated by men and neglects those primarily associated with women. So not only does crafting get short-shrifted, but fan art, online cartooning, Tumble-blogging, the rise of the confessional journal, and other examples of creative spaces claimed by women go unexplored, despite the fact that there is as much twee to be found here as anywhere else. Admittedly, any book on a single subject will leave something out just for the sake of space, but, honestly, if you write a chapter on Kurt Cobain and neglect to even mention Kate Beacon's "Hark a Vagrant," you're working with a definition of twee I don't understand. And there's no Lynda Barry at all. I just, I really don't, it just doesn't.

To Spitz's credit, however, he seems to be the first to notice a sea change and to attempt to capitalize on it: It does feel as though we are exiting a time when artists were accidentally twee and entering a time when they are self-consciously twee. The building blocks of twee art are established enough that somebody can create a new assemblage from them, making, as an example, a film about unhappy but precious children and unhappy and childlike adults featuring an indie soundtrack of music made by wistful nerds, arch dialogue, and stylized camerawork borrowed from the French New Wave by way of Wes Anderson, and there you have it: A film that perfectly mimics twee affectations and ignores content. There are a lot of movies like this nowadays, and they're not often good. For every genuinely great film, like "Submarine," there are five passable films, like "Juno" and a hundred mediocre ones, like "100 Days of Summer."

That's generally how it goes in art, especially when art has a signature quality that is easy to ape but hard to duplicate. Sometimes art doesn't survive this sort of transition, moving from a fringe aesthetic to a popular one to a marketing ploy. I don't know how twee will fare -- at its worst, it can be mindlessly cutesy poo, and at its best it can be aestheticized in a way that many find irritating or alienating.

Nonetheless, it has been correctly identified as a genuine taste, and that sort of thing tends to have legs. After all, we didn't really recognize umami until 1985, even if we were nonetheless tasting it (and fearing that taste, as demonstrated by the hysteria over monosodium glutamate). Now it's hard to imagine cooking without factoring in this decidedly savory flavor.

In the same way, twee has been around for a long time, even if we have just given it a name. It may be that it falls on the dustbin of aesthetics, like kitsch or schmaltz, but I find that unlikely -- too many artists have found twee useful in interesting ways for it to be completely disregarded. But the history of twee is still being written, and its prehistory is still being discovered, despite what Marc Spitz might think.

Cat Stevens, "Mona Bone Jakon," 1970.

I have an article from the Washington DC Evening Star, dated August 15, 1970, in which Cat Stevens discusses a two-year disappearance from the public eye. He was hospitalized, specifically for tuberculosis, which had collapsed one of his lungs. "That was the result of pressures on my life then," he told the paper. "I was too hung up on what I was doing to worry about my health, and I just let it get to a head, and it got to a stage where another four weeks in the state I was in and I would have copped it."

Stevens has long described this as a transitional event: Trapped in a featureless hospital room, facing down his own mortality, he began to write new songs. Upon his release, he forced an end to his contract with Decca (Wikipedia claims he did so by pushing for increasingly expensive arrangements and recording sessions.) He signed with Island Records, which, thanks to having signed the Spencer Davis Group, had started to spotlight British folk talent, which was ideal for the folksier turn Stevens wanted in his music.

Stevens teamed with producer Paul Samwell-Smith, bassist for the Yardbirds, as well as arranger Del Newman, who would work with Stevens on six albums and whose influence on Stevens I think has been underestimated. In the Evening Star article, Stevens credits the classically trained Newman with shaping the final recordings. The songs on the resulting album, "Mona Bone Jakon," feature extremely limited instrumentation -- often just guitar, double bass, and piano. They are nonetheless exceptionally well arranged. With so few instruments, each part becomes its own character, and Newman's arrangements favor tasteful fingerpicking and bluesy guitar fills and piano parts that alternate between Tin Pan Alley-ish to pounding. 

The songs also make better use of Stevens' distinctive voice than his previous two albums had. Although Stevens was barely 21 when he made this album, he sounds much older thanks to a natural gruffness, and his songs send his voice through all its registers, from a deep growl to a frantic, high howl. Stevens will especially jump into his higher registers when his songs reach their emotional peak, and its the register in which Stevens sounds most like he's about to lose vocal control and just start tunelessly shrieking. He never does, but it gives the recordings an undeniable thrill. 

I start with the production because I suspect this is what first plucks what I will call the twee chord in listeners. There's an undeniable theatricality to the songs, with Stevens pulling from both his love of sobbing R&B and West End theater to produce songs that feel less intended for pop charts than movie soundtracks. In the Evening Star, Stevens admitted that his goal was to write for film, and its a goal he immediately fulfilled, with two of the songs from this album finding their way onto Hal Ashby 1971 twee classic "Harold and Maud." One of "Mona Bone Jakon's" standout tracks is "Trouble," a howling yawp of despair written directly in response to Stevens' illness, and it wound up being the song that plays over "Harold and Maud's" maudlin climax. It's a perfect match of music to screen action that many filmmakers would later try to duplicate, often using Stevens' music.

Lyrically, I think "Mona Bone Jakon" is less a break from Steven' past songwriting and more an elaboration on themes. Several of the songs detail a troubled, several-year-long relationship Stevens had with actress and model Patti D'Arbanville, who was then still a teenager (as was Stevens). It sounds like a typical teenage romance, and ended when D'Arbanville returned to New York for a month to work. She has told interviewers she knew the relationship was over when she heard the song Stevens wrote in response, "My Lady D'Arbanville." 

The song is perhaps the most theatrical on the album, with Spanish guitars behind a madrigal melody, and it sounds like the theme music to a meeting of the Society for Creative Anachronism. In it, Stevens imagines D'Arbanville dead and in a coffin, which, since he wrote it about the same time he had consumption, is so Victorian I can barely stand it. At least one other song by Stevens was inspired by the breakup: "Wild World," off his next album, which, with its frantic guitar fills and punchy piano, couldn't be any clearer in its heartbreak, especially when Steven sings:

Now that I've lost everything to you
You say you wanna start something new
And it's breakin' my heart you're leavin'
Baby, I'm grievin'

It's a terrific song, and, since Stevens sounds much older than he is, suggests a more mature heartbreak than a teen romance would produce, as does "Maybe Your Right," from "MOna  This song, sung over a tinkling, almost ragtime piano piece and gently strummed guitar, starts off sensibly, with Stevens admitting to joint responsibility in the end of a relationship: "I put up with your lies like you put up with mine / But God knows we should have stopped somewhere."

But then, at the song's climax, soaring strings join the song, and Stevens' voice pitches upwards, the clarity of his lyrics breaking down to something approximating sobbing as he calls out, "It won't happen again. Never Never. Never. It'll never happen again." Like a lot of the songs on this album, this one ends with an unexpectedly ambiguous open chord, as though the song hadn't so much ended as it had just evaporated. 

Although Stevens occasionally touches on the mysticism he had previously experimented with (especially in "Katmandu," a song featuring flute playing from none other than Peter Gabriel, but sounding like sort of cod-Indian flute that appears in movies when something magical happens), for much of the album we find Stevens either heartbroken or sardonic: He offers a song called "Pop Star" in which he sounds like he were performing entirely in that "neener neener" voice children take on when they are teasing each other. The album's title song, "Mona Bone Jakon," an ode to Stevens' penis, is sung in a salacious, bluesy growl, like someone delivering a salacious joke. In fact, Stevens most overtly mystical song on the album, "I Think I See the Light," which sounds like the soundtrack to a religious conversion, is, in fact, a love song. "Sine, shine, shine," Stevens sings with a full chorus joining him, talking about a light that has given him supernatural vision, and the source of it turns out to be a girl who goes completely unsubscribed in the song.

The album ends with a series of songs that bleed into each other, like a miniature suite: A weird, discordant piece for guitar and voice called "Time," a love song called "Fill My Eyes" that is the most classically folky Stevens has done (with a chorus that sounds like a campfire song). Finally, there is "Lilywhite," which seems to share its guitar part with "Maybe Your Right," but tells of a woman who came, went, and will be back again, featuring a bowed bassline and what sounds like a full string quartet sawing away behind Stevens. Eventually, the strings take over completely, playing in a sort of fugue state, as though Stevens had been whisked away by a cloud and the strings were attempting to represent what it looked like.

Later in 1970, Stevens would put out a second album, "Tea for the Tillerman," and I actually feel this album and that would should be viewed as a matched set, with the later album acting as an elaboration on the one the preceded it.

The Nottingham Goose Fair.

Like food itself, foodyism comes in a lot of flavors. Hippies have a sort of foody culture that largely focuses on food as medicine, offering up ancient grains and vegan recipes as cures for physical and social ills. Hipsters have a foodyism that is part international adventure and part affected nostalgia, combining meals from far-flung countries with deep-fried Oreos and cheap beer.

BBC Radio 4's "The Kitchen Cabinet," now in its tenth series, offers a vision of foodyism for the terminally twee. The show borrows from a rather common English broadcast format, the panel show, in which a group of experts or comedians gather around a microphone to entertain. In fact, "The Kitchen Cabinet" lifts heavily from a specific panel show called "Gardeners Question Time," in which some very serious garden specialists traveled around the British Isles to give advice to locals.

So "The Kitchen Cabinet" travels the same paths, but the results are quite different. In part, it's because the show's panel is deeply eccentric, led by author and food critic Jay Rayner, who once wrote a novel in which a hostage situation was complicated by the fact that it took place in a restaurant and one of the criminals instantly developed an obsession with the business of fine dining. Rayner sardonically poses questions to guests such as food historian Annie Gray, who specializes in ancient cookbooks and often shows up with 300-year-old recipes that the rest find inedible. Another frequent guest is Glasgow-native Rachel McCormack, who has developed an absolute obsession with Catalan cooking but retains her Scottish churlishness -- in one recent episode, she hollered at an Irish audience about the superiority of Scotch whisky. Guests sometimes include food scientists, food psychologists, and an endless rotating assortment of specialty chefs.

Because the show travels, it demonstrates a great interest in the culinary history of wherever it ends up, and so listeners discover such oddities as the Nottingham Goose Fair, featured in a recent episode, which dates back more than 700 years, which started as a market and quickly turned into a carnival, and where you can buy candies shaped like cockerels on a stick. ("Yes," says the manufacturer in a long, deadpan monotone, "they are shaped like cockerels on a stick.") Because the show's chefs are absolutely barking mad, they often regale their local audience with tales of slow-roasting sheep in their tiny gardens, or dragging trays filled with blood through London's tube service, or filling an entire cow with hundreds of tiny sausages.

They also take questions from the audience, which means that a farmer in Shropshire, asking about nettles, is liable to learn that they make a very good Catalan Suquet de Peix, or might be frozen with CO2 and then added in to ice cream, or as filling for a rolled up cow's face, or something equally puzzling.

The Guardian recently asked how twee is too twee in food presentation, complaining about the fussiness found in modern food presentation, such as heavily decorated cupcakes and rainbow deviled eggs. But "The Kitchen Cabinet" is a show for people who feel that those examples don't go far enough -- that its entirely natural to cook a bird inside another bird inside another bird, or that its reasonable to discuss digging your own caves to preserve cheeses, or that blood is a profoundly underutilized ingredient. There's an abundance of what Dr. Peter Hughes Jachimiak once called "a hyper-real version of Englishness" and "Middle-English tweeness." And it's irresistible.

 

A classic anorak.

If there are two overcoats most associated with twee, and there are, they would have to be anoraks and duffle coats. Each became a de facto uniform for a specific expression of British twee, and, as a result, have jumped the pond to America, or, in one case, jumped the pond back to America.

The anorak, after all, originated with the Caribou Inuit of the Northwest Territories, and the modern version of the parka looks very much like the ones they created from caribou or sealskin, even if they are now made with synthetic fabrics. They're immediately recognizable for their frequent fur-lined hoods, and were widely used by the British military, leading them to become common in surplus stores, which, in turn, lead to their adoption by everyday citizens who thought they might have to spend extended time in the cold.

Two early examples: Trainspotters, or obsessive railway enthusiasts, who might spend hours at a station, watching trains roll by in the hopes of spotting an obscure locomotive or example of train equipment, which could them be ticked off from a data book, much in the way birders spend hours in the wild hoping to catch site of a rare bird. Anoraks were also popular among fans of offshore pirate radio stations in the 1970s, who would wait at port or charter boats to visit the pirate radio ships in the hopes of meeting their favorite deejays.

As a result of this, "anorak" became a popular expression for an obsessive hobbyist or fan; in the 90s, it was especially applied to indie music fans, who would often show up at shows wearing the fur-lined parkas, which was sometimes also worn by the bands onstage.

The signature duffle coat from the movie "Submarine."

The duffle coat is probably more correctly called the duffel coat, as it was originally made from a coarse wool called duffel in a Belgian municipality called Duffel, and may have been popularized by a family named Duffel. The long, hooded coat with horn toggle-fastenings was originally popular with the British Navy, and then, as with the anorak, became popular with the larger population via surplus stores.

The coat became a sort of signature look for British lefties in the 50s and 60s, but was also widely adopted by students, giving it a sort of moddish, young, counter-cultural look. Paddington Bear famously wore a duffle coat, as did twee superstars Belle and Sebastian and every single member of Oasis on the cover for their single "Roll With It." It was also the uniform of the two vaguely malfunctional teens in the movie "Submarine" and the schoolgirl played by Carey Mulligan in "An Education," so it's association with twee British independent films continues.

Flappers.

Flappers were among the great twee prototypes. They were the first modern female youth movement, and the disputed origins of the name itself radiates twee: It might have come from the word for a young duck or partridge, presumably because of the amount of flapping they did when they learned to fly. Or it may have come from Northern English slang for a young girl, because she had not yet put her hair up and it flapped as she walked. Or it may have had to do with a style of boots popular among girls before World War I -- high boots are sometimes still called ankle-flappers.

Whatever the case, flappers first made their appearance in the Edwardian era in both England and America, defined by her youth, her flirtatiousness, and her sense of fashion. The flapper quickly became a popular stage character, and by the 1920s it had exploded into an international trend, often represented by fun-loving young women in short haircuts, straight-waisted dresses, close-fitting hat, kohl-rimmed eyes, and almost incomprehensible girlish slang.

It is to the slang we will address ourselves now, although we shall likely return to the flapper again and again. But flappers had a particular affection for cutesy, smart, and often wickedly funny slang phrases, some of which have stuck with us. What follows is an incomplete collection, cobbled together from numerous sources:

A

Airedale: Homely man
All wet: incorrect
Ankling along: taking a walk
Appleknocker: A hick
Applesauce: Flattery or bunk

B

Balled up: confused, messed up
Bank’s Closed: No petting allowed; no kisses
Barney-muggin: Love-making
Bearcat: a hot-blooded or fiery girl
Bee’s Knees: See “Cat’s Pajamas”
Berries: Great
Billboard: Flashy man or woman
Biscuit: A pettable flapper
Blouse: let’s go
Blow: Wild party
Brooksy: Classy dresser
Brush-ape: Anyone from the sticks - a hayshaker
Butt me: Give me a cigarette

C

Cake basket: A limousine
Cake-Eater: A wearer of tight clothes, belted coat with spearlike lapels and one button, sausage trousers, low quick fitting collar, greenish pink shirt; and one of those jazzbo ties that gives you the giggles.
Cancelled Stamp: A wallflower
Cash or check?: Do we kiss now or later?
Cat's Pajamas: Anything that's good
Cat’s Particulars: The acme of perfection; anything that’s good
Cellar Smeller: A young man who always turns up where liquor is to be had without cost
Cheaters: eye glasses
Copacetic: excellent, all in order
Corn-shredder: Young man who dances on lady's feet
Cuddle-cootie: Young man who takes a girl for a ride on a bus

D

Dapper: A flapper's father
Dewdropper: Young man who does not work, and sleeps all day
Di Mi: Goodness
Dimbox: A taxicab
Dog Kennels: Pair of shoes
Dogs: feet
Duck’s Quack: The best thing ever
Ducky: General term of approbation
Dud: A wall flower
Dumb Dora: Stupid girl

E

Edisoned: Being asked a lot of questions
Embalmer: A bootlegger

F

Face Stretcher: Old maid who tries to look younger
Father time: Any man over 30 yrs
Feathers: Small talk
Fig leaf: One piece bathing suit
Fire Extinguisher: A chaperone
Flat Tire: would-be Flapper over 30
Floorflusher: Inveterate dance hound
Flour Lover: Girl who powders too freely
Fluky: Funny, odd, peculiar; different
Frog's eyebrows: Nice, fine

G

Gasper: cigarette
Get a wiggle on: get a move on, get going
Giggle water: booze
Gimlet: A chronic bore
Goat’s Whiskers: See “Cat’s Particulars”
Goof: Flapper's sweetheart
Goofy: To be in love with, or attracted to. Example: “I’m goofy about Jack.”
Green Glorious: Money and checks
Grummy: In the dumps, shades or blue

H

Half cut: Happily intoxicated
Half seas over: drunk; also "half under"
Handcuff: Engagement ring
Hen Coop: A beauty parlor
High hat: a snob
Horse lineament: bootleg liquor
Hush money:  Allowance from father

 I

Iron one’s shoelaces: to go to the restroom
Ish kabibble: a retort meaning "I should care!"

J

Jake: great, i.e. "Everything's Jake."
Johnnie Walker: Guy who never hires a cab

K

Kippy: Neat or nice
Kitten’s Ankles: See “Cat’s Particulars”
Knee Duster: Flapper’s dress

L

Lap: Drink
Lemon Squeezer: An elevator
Low Lid: The opposite of highbrow

M

Mad Money: streetcar money in case of a row with your fellow
Mind your potatoes: mind your own business
Monkey’s Eyebrows: See “Cat’s Particulars”
Mug: To osculate or kiss
Munitions: face powder

N

Noodle-juice: Tea
Nosebaggery: Restaurant
"Now you're on the trolley!": "Now you've got it!"
Nunnally Cowboy: cake eater, lounge lizard
Nut Cracker: Policeman’s nightstick

O

Orchid: Anything that is expensive
Out on Parole: A person who has been divorced

P

Petting Pantry: Movie
Petting party: Social event devoted to hugging
Pillowcase: Young man who is full of feathers; see: feathers
Plastered: A synonym for pie-eyed; oiled; intoxicated
Potato: A young man shy of brains
Princess Mary: girl about to be married

R

Rain pitchforks: a downpour
Ritz: Stuck-up
Ritzy Burg: Not classy
Rug-shaking: shimmying
 

 S

Screaming meemies: the shakes
Seetie: Anybody a flapper hates
She’s gottem: knows the ropes
Show Case: Rich man’s wife with jewels
Smoke-eater: A girl cigarette user
Snugglepupping: spooning, petting
Sod Buster: An undertaker
Static: Conversations that mean nothing
Stilts: Legs
Strike breaker: Young woman who goes with her friend's "steady" while there is a coolness

T

Tell it to Sweeney: tell it to someone who'll believe it
Tomato: Good looking girl with no brains

U

Umbrella: young man any girl can borrow for the evening

W

Whangdoodle: Jazz band
Woofy: in place of nothing else to say; generally meaningless

Y

Young Otis: chap from the country