Kitsch Corner, Tshwane

The Great City of Tshwane has its very own Kitsch Corner.

In Hatfield, in the east of Pretoria, at the corner of Jan Shoba (Duncan) and South Streets, are two buildings that seem to represent concentrated essence of kitsch.
This one looks vaguely like a church, or an office building got up to look like a church. It’s rumoured that somewhere inside there is a church.

On the other side of South Street is this/ It’s a shopping centre/office block of sorts, very 1990s in design, but it is surrounded by fibreglass statues of animals that look quite out of place in the urban or suburban setting.

Looking south along Jan Shoba (Duncan) Street, you can see both buildings adding kitsch upon kitsch. It is clear that the whole is kitschier than the sum of its parts.

One plastic giraffe might have been acceptable, a nice decoration for the parking lot, but add the lion and the elephants and even the poor old giraffe looks ridiculous.

On it’s own, and looking from the front, even the lion on the roof doesn’t look too bad, but when you see it from the side, or in relation to the rest of them, it looks over the top.

Back in the 1950s people used to travel to Pretoria to admitre the architecture of the office buildings, which seemed so much more imaginative than those in Johannesburg. Now those buildings are rather decayed and down-at-heel, and would excite no comment. But would people come from far and wide to see these ones? I doubt it, unless they came to laugh.

So  there it is, in all it’s glory. Kitsch Corner, Tshwane. I wonder if anyone will add to it? But as long as they keep it all in one area, at least it will keep the rest of the city free of it.

 

Twittersheep – who’s stalking whom?

I tried Twittersheep, which gathers information from the bios of one’s followers and extracts a cloud of keywords. The biggest key words were Christian, Church, Orthodoxy and Love.

That’s OK.

The key words I dread seeing are Marketing and Entrepreneurship.

When I see them written large in tag clouds, my interest flags. When I see them as tags in blogs in MyBlogLog, I know I’m going to find it boring. But most of the entrepreneurs and marketing geeks have stopped blogging and gone Twittering. And they are the people who like following (or is it stalking) other people and collecting more followers than anyone else.

When my son graduated from Pretoria Technikon (now called the Tshwane University of Technology, or something like that) he was a bit reluctant that we should go to the graduation ceremony. Afterwards it was obvious why — he found it too cringeworthy and embarrassing.

The vice-chancellor (or his stand-in) made a speech in which he proudly announced that the Pretoria Technikon was the first tertiary educational institution in the world to include the word “entrepreneurship” in its mission statement, and at the end the lights dimmed, and there were spotlights on the new graduates as they all recited the Entrepreneurs Creed in unison. It was the essence of kitsch.

But as the global recession deepens, and the great god Entrepreneurship turns out to have feet of clay, I wonder if they will still be reciting it now.

Chrsitian kitsch

Someone wrote on the alt.religion.christian.east-orthodox newsgroup

Check out the 12 animated GIF images of Jesus given in the link below. Its very hard to find good animated images of Jesus Christ on the web.

Just what we need — more “Christian” kitsch.

So someone else responded with this one.

Shall we have a contest for the Christian kitsch of the year web side, 2009?