The Young & the Tasteless

Slugging my way towards sophistication

Who? Who? Who in the world drives around with the bumper sticker If you’re gonna ride my ass, at least pull my hair?

Someone three blocks from my house, that’s who.

I was in a good mood until I parked my car behind a double cab ute this week, near Karori Mall. The sticker was one of several plastered across its rear window, though the others were innocuous (I Love Sushi, and ski-field ads). It’s a bit weird to sticker your car with the message that nobody should be close enough to read the message; but we’ve all seen variations of this slogan. This version, though, was the lowest of the low.

Maybe I needed a second coffee, or perhaps a course of HRT, but this sticker made me briefly furious. It represented the nadir of humanity - our rejection of every opportunity to extend ourselves with knowledge. It was grubby, aggressive, celebrated stupidity, and disregarded anyone unprepared for a nasty sex joke in the daytime (children, for example. Or Quakers).

This sticker was also in the right: the motorist driving behind us should maintain a safe braking distance. But other than agreeing with THAT, and maybe sharing the hairlessness and bipedalism characteristic of our species, I’ve nothing else in common with whoever chose this bumper sticker, because plainly they have poor taste. Good taste being something that, by definition, most of us feel we have more of than other people.

Taste, noun: Something you have more of than all the people you know

Some of us spend our lives distributing our tasteful, superior judgment to others (interior decorators, urbanists and professors of literature). Some feel we don’t have enough of it, so spend our lives striving to acquire it (readers of NZ House and Garden, and anyone with a Penguin Books mug at the office).

There is a third group: the portion of people who couldn’t care less about this psychic struggle for legitimacy, of good taste over bad taste. If these people want stick-on nails or a jet-ski in the garage, they’ll wear stick-on nails with a jet-ski in the garage. This means they privilege comfort and good times more than the people in the earlier categories, and so tend to score higher in happiness surveys.

I mean, fine, if we’ve read it. But mostly, we haven’t.

Still, being uncomfortable is a key marker of the tasteful. Having taste demands suffering of some kind; you have to put in the work. This might mean visiting contemporary art galleries over and over, trying to understand what the fuck is going on; or buying a minimalist sofa, with unforgiving cushions and a hard back, even though everybody knows La-Z-Boys are so softly padded they dissolve any sense of your bony structure when you sit in them. You become invertebrate. This is an amazing sensation, by the way, and totally wasted on slugs.

Truly discerning people order steak rare or even better, want it minced and uncooked with a raw egg cracked on top. I first saw this served at an upmarket restaurant in the early 2000s and couldn’t believe anyone would pay a kitchen $40 not to do their job.

To me, steak tartare was the culinary equivalent of Russian roulette, with mad cow disease and listeria loaded in the chamber. But this acceptance of risk and embrace of the difficult communicated my dinner companions had taste. By ordering chicken and cranberry sauce, I’d signalled I had none.

Sophisticated people can be found all over Wellington, especially at arts festivals but also in the international aisle at New World. There they are in heavy-framed glasses (uncomfortable) stocking up on sauerkraut (challenging). They’re at one-woman plays about sexual harassment (confronting) or browsing the climate science table at Unity Books (depressing). Or they’re queuing for a nut-milk latte at one of those cafes made entirely out of plywood and hanging plants.

I wear heavy glasses, and I went to the theatre this week. Being tasteful doesn’t come naturally to me, though, so now I’m exhausted. To balance things out, I may spend this entire weekend in drawstring pants eating corn chips out of the bag. I’m definitely above the bumper sticker guy in the taste stakes, but not by as much as I’d like to be.

My lack of personal progress in this area is disappointing, but I’m working on it. I don’t have a bunch of time left to get it right (thirty good years, maybe) so I’ve learned that a good way to fast-track one’s own refinement is to keep an eye on what cultivated, comfortably-off dead people are leaving behind for their relatives to flip. In other words, I’ve joined the sale catalogue email list at Dunbar Sloane Auctioneers.

Bids open for this pochette at $12,000. Just saying.

Browsing an auction catalogue is the materialist’s equivalent of reading the obituary section, except there’s no emotion involved. You don’t have to shed a tear; just keep your gimlet eye dry for a bargain. People whose effects are sold by auction houses are generally agreed, at least by the auctioneer’s valuers, to have had some level of discernment. Their stuff has cachet, otherwise it wouldn’t be in the catalogue. In this regard it doesn’t really matter what you bid on because the dead person has done all the brain work for you. Whatever you buy will dazzle your visitors, and single you out as a tastemaker.

And don’t think that you need a spare couple of grand for a Cloisonné clock, Hepplewhite chair or this luxury Hermès purse, either. Auctions are oddly idiosyncratic, and you might pick up something so tasteful that it’s almost offensive for as little as $10.

My husband was onto this way before I was. Over the last few years, weird packages have been showing up on the doorstep. Initially it was chess clocks. I can’t tell you how many chess clocks. Then came a folding Edwardian deck chair, a hinged Victorian box with nothing in it, and a pair of porcelain Chinese horses, one with a chipped ear. These were angry looking, with flared nostrils. I asked him if they were of a particular dynasty, and he said, “I don’t know. But definitely imitation.”

These purchases were making me more uncomfortable by the minute, which obviously meant we must be acquiring more taste as a family. I started browsing the catalogues myself, almost in what I’d call an angry way. My first successful purchase was possibly subconscious revenge for the horses, but I’m now delighted by my winning bid. I feel my taste journey is picking up serious speed.

Bird plates from the German porcelain manufacturer, Goebel. Not that one

Isn’t the owl gorgeous? He’s GENUINELY looking in two directions at once. These plates are now displayed on the wall of our dining room, and the pleasure I take in visitors’ expressions when they see them, and struggle towards some kind of understanding, really is all the reward I need.

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