#it's dystopic and miserable in so many ways

[runawaycarouselhorse]

I truly hate modern architecture, it's so boxy and same-y, and that is exactly the point. Apparently, even modern day McDonald's looks so joyless and unfun on the outside, because the same building should be possible to sell and reuse as an office or whatever. And that's a McDonald's! If a McDonald's has to think about its branch someday being replaced, before it's even opened, what do you think it's like for everyone and everything else?

It's a very intentional decision to make everything look the same, replaceable, and lacking in character.

I wonder if part of this is also that it's cheaper than paying actual craftsmen (... what is the neutral term, if one exists?) to make beautiful and unique designs.

Perhaps minimalist design is so prevalent because we no longer have anything to say.

The Cultural Tutor

[not-terezi-pyrope]

FIPTION: There Is A Crack In The World (Review)

So, I finally finished "There Is A Crack In The World", the largest part of my fiction reading trade with @fipindustries. It's taken me a while, and I haven't spoken about it much here as I read, sending my in the moment thoughts to Fip directly, instead. Part of the reason I didn't finish it sooner was because I am abroad, and I've been distracted by not being in my own home, hanging out with my boyfriend, actually hanging out with Fip in person, but regardless; I am done now and here are my thoughts.

Crack in the World is a really interesting book for a lot of reasons. There are a bunch of things I didn't like about it, and a bunch of things I really did like about it, and it's fascinating for me how those things intersect. I'll start with my biggest criticisms; the writing itself is very one-and-done, unedited prose, which, combined with this being a novel written in a second language, results in text that feels fairly sloppy in parts, spattered with spelling and syntactic errors, odd sentence phrasing that needs a second eye making adjustments. There are some moments where I can feel the author had a clear picture in her head, but where the details didn't come out as clearly as might have been liked to the reader. These issues would be the biggest barrier to this getting published properly one day, but it's also arguably the most straightforward to fix; the book just needs a thorough editing pass, either by Fip or another editor. The intent is clear enough that I think someone could fix up these issues without any author input, and indeed I found myself doing so in my head as I read. The core meaning is solid, and so when thinking about the book I am going to largely ignore the typographical stuff, the narrative now feels fairly accurately transcribed into my head where I can prod at it as a consolidated story, and it is that story that I'll be reviewing.

The important context for CitW is that it was written when the author was, per her description, dealing with having been in a pretty bad place, and so the tone that the novel seeks to strike is a pretty grimdark one. According to the aftermath post linked at the end, parts of it were an exercise at writing "unrepentant misery porn". Maybe I am desensitised to dark fiction, but a lot of the book didn't really come off that way to me, but in a way that's almost to Fip's credit; even when she's trying to write a dark and miserable story, Fip's delight in writing about whacky characters playing out dynamic adventure narratives comes through in many places, and so the book's dystopic setting feels more Mad Max than 1984. The setting is dark and grim, but it's a cartoonish kind of grim that is, to be frank, mostly just sort of fun. There's a teenage edginess to a lot of it, which Fip has talked about being an accurate description of the mindset for some scenes. The times when that edginess doesn't work are, ironically, when the book really tries to be dark but in a way that pushes into being too crass to be endearing. There's a lot of blood and gore, which I appreciate, but then there are anal rape and shit jokes, which I do not, it feels a little bit too immature and too aspirationally edgy. I think some of that is regretted in retrospect. It doesn't detract too much from the overall feel, though.

The plot is also surprisingly straightforward, not as labyrinthine as I had expected at its core, a fairly conventional dual-protagonist adventure arc culminating in crossed paths (with several side-vignettes, as I discuss later). The ending is dark and follows up on the themes of hopelessness the most effectively of anything in the novel. After the entire book, I think that the background thematic radiation has built up enough for it to be earned, by that point. The final chapter and epilogues are a little fast and blunt, but not unworkably so.

There are two big strengths to the book, two things that I really liked. The first is the characters; Fip is primarily a visual/comics artist and you can really tell, even via writing alone, that she really likes coming up with cool characters with their own specific emotional vibe, and setting them off to interact with each other. These are guys who all feel like they should come with their own splash screen, tag line and iconic halloween costume. There's something almost superhero comic strip about the iconic identities of the characters, about their specific skills and motivations, true even for those that don't actually have their own "superpowers". But don't get me wrong, there's plenty of superhuman individuals on display, here; we have impossibly tenacious gun-wielding assassins, murderous, practically invulnerable clown girls, jungle mercenaries using anti-air rifles as a personal pogo stick, Russian mobster types, a literal dark lord... It's very whacky and fun when you get down to it, which is what really tempers the intended grimdark tone. You might fear that there's some dissonance there but it merges into something unique and interesting. That said, perhaps a more tightly edited version could change some passages with that in mind.

The second thing I really liked was that the story is used as a sort of... Stage setting for a bunch of smaller, more contained narratives, almost smaller parables (sometimes literal parables) that slot into the story. These are clearly separate ideas that were floating around in the author's head, and a lot of them are more tightly written than parts of the main narrative, more fully formed from the start. The two interlude chapters are the clear standouts in the whole work, and both are examples of writing in the style of these little vignettes. I do almost wish that the rest of the story was more integrated to match, there is a risk a few times of the non-sequitur insertions coming across as a little piecemeal, but this becomes less of an issue near the end - the second interlude is at once its own thing but is deeply connected to the rest of the story, and it makes absolute sense that it comes when it does.

One thing that the vignettes also highlight is the difference between pre-planned narrative trajectory/pacing and the "write on the fly" nature of the rest of the novel. There are some times where, in comparison, the "standard" chapters are at risk of tripping off required plot occurrences by rote without dwelling on them, and it's most notable by contrast. Keeping the little sub-stories in the novel is well with it though, and the pacing issue could be fixed with editing.

Other little things I liked: the bounce back and forth between protagonists in alternating chapters was very fun, and helped keep the pace up. I liked seeing the world from different perspectives, and from characters with very different roles in the world. For that matter, I liked the world itself; the worldbuilding was fun, if a little tropey, and I enjoyed trying to dissect the lore. There were a few things that didn't hold up to scrutiny lore-wise in retrospect, but that's understandable given the serial publishing. On the other hand, there was a lot of cool thematic stuff and character foreshadowing that was clearly planned well in advance and paid off really well. I'm avoiding specifics due to spoilers, but there are a lot of fun surprises in this novel!

So that is There Is A Crack In The World. Not a perfect book by any means, but a lot of fun and vibrant ideas. Fip has been sending me her excellent artwork for the story, which really adds a lot, and that compounds my desire to see this adapted as a sort of pulp graphic novel, given an ideal world. At it is, if there is future development of the story to be had it would be in a thorough editing pass. This is not required, however; the story is a fine artefact as it exists on its own, as rough around the edges as it may be, it tells an interesting and satisfying tale of some very cool characters. It's a shame I didn't get through it faster, but I'm very glad I took the time.

Great job Fip. Next up I read The Milkman (although that may also be slow coming; my preemptive apologies).

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

I've been thinking about Old Boss, Dazai and Mori a LOT, as of late; and I think it would be neat if Old Boss' madness made Dazai so miserable, and that he too thought the only way to stop it all was to kill him. Except this thought made him feel trapped and even more miserable, so much that he tried to drown himself. But he got lucky: he met Mori. A person who can do the job meets a person who can provide the enterance and the cover, isn't it grand? (1)

Hey, sorry it took me a little bit to get to this. I was in the middle of exams and I wanted to make sure I gave your ask a proper answer.

You know, it's really interesting to me - you've outlined this version of events, which is different to what I think went down but I can't really refute or support anything because we just don't know enough.

It's insane how little we know about the mafia in general, actually, given how many of the supporting cast members are a part of it. We get mentions, sure, and little tidbits of info but not nearly as much as we get for the agency. I wonder why it was so important that the mafia be a part of Natsume's framework over any of the other criminal organizations in Yokohama. Is it influence? Power? Or is there some other reason we don't know?

I'll try to lay down what we know for certain, and particular inferences we can make leading up to the old boss's assassination:

The Old Boss:

He was the boss during the chaotic years directly after the war and likely during it as well

He threw the city into turmoil, especially in the slums, through such orders as "killing a bunch of redheads because one vandalized his car" or "poisoning the inhabitants of an entire building because he thought a rival executive might be there"

The end of his reign was so terrible that he turned the city's inhabitants against each other in a kind of Orwellian dystopic "report your neighbours for dissent" command

He has history with Dazai ("If only we could chat about old times" line from Fifteen)

He was suffering from a kind of paranoia from his illness and his orders became increasingly more erratic and needlessly violent, culminating in his ordering of the deaths of anyone who opposed the Port Mafia on his deathbed (roughly 8 years ago)

Mori:

He was a medical doctor during the tail end of the Great War, roughly 14-15 years before the events of the main story (when Yosano was 11 years old and he was 26)

He drafted her with the intention of creating an Immortal Regiment and appears to have advocated for the use and manipulation of abilities to turn the tide of the war

After the war, between 12-14 years ago, he worked as an underground doctor with Fukuzawa as his bodyguard - he was already acquainted with Natsume at this point (they both refer to him as sensei) and interested in establishing Natsume's Tripartite Tactic

How he came to be an underground doctor is not known - was he disgraced after what happened with the soldiers on Tokoyami Island? Was he purposely trying to work his way into the mafia?

12 years ago, he fought with Fukuzawa to try and take Yosano back for his plan to overthrow the Mafia (he was 28, Yosano 13, Fukuzawa 33, Ranpo 15)

Somehow he became the old boss's personal physician. I literally do not know how he managed this.

8 years ago, he approached Dazai, as seen in the recent Fifteen manga adaptation, as his physician, and promised Dazai a painless death if he agreed to "help with one little thing" (which is clearly to be a witness for the death of the old boss)

Dazai:

He wandered for a bit at some indiscriminate time, where the Sheep made an offer to join them. He refused.

His youngest appearance is 8 years ago when he is 14, in the recent Fifteen manga adaptation, where he is shown secured to a hospital bed after attempting suicide - it seems likely this was not his first attempt. He meets Mori for the first time in this scene.

He somehow is close enough to the old boss to be a valuable witness for Mori, someone whose word would be believed by the mafia. He was already suicidal for unknown reasons and was assigned the current mafia boss' personal physician to treat him. Hirotsu assures Mori that Dazai "understands why he did what he did", as though Dazai would have some reason to be angry with Mori over the old boss's death. Higuchi's "your blood is mafia black" line. If it weren't for the fact that he was not part of the mafia at that point, and had apparently not seen death up close before the murder of the old boss and the events of Fifteen, I would say it's practically a given that he's a blood relative of the old boss, perhaps even the "rightful heir" to the mafia. However, given the conflicting info I just gave, I really can't be certain.

His eye is focused on in all adaptations of the scene with the death of the old boss. His eye goes dark in every single one. (The original chapter 30 manga panel is interesting because it looks like the darkness is seeping into it...)

There's so little here for how important this event is. Just as we still don't know much about the great war, we still know very little about the mafia and the old boss - even Mori and Dazai are still very much mysteries.

With how much we still don't know, I think the story may end with us cycling back to the mafia and finally learning the answers to all these questions that were introduced so early in the game. At least I hope so. Thanks for the ask!

[seyaryminamoto]

Why do u wanna leave Venezuela? I'm 'new' here and didn't know about everything that happened in Venezuela and ur circumstances. Could u enlighten me?

Oof... it’s a pretty long story. A story that literally began before I was born :’D

Venezuela used to be one of the most prosperous countries in South America, mainly because of our surprisingly massive oil reserves. Once those were discovered, back 1928, we went from old-school rural country to the hub of development and modernity in South America. Everything looked poised to continue progressing...! But then it didn’t. Slowly but surely, government mismanagement resulted in bad decisions that started Venezuela’s downfall. At the time, those decisions appeared catastrophic. In retrospect, they weren’t even a hint of the hell we would experience during my lifetime.

One president, a rather controversial one, decided he’d raise the cost of gasoline in the country, back in 1989. It may sound pretty casual, but it wasn’t: Venezuela, hub of oil, had always taken advantage of subsidized oil for its citizens. Meaning, gasoline was cheaper than water for us. I’m not even joking, it literally was. But the president at the time thought this couldn’t be sustainable and increased prices.

This resulted in a popular backlash against this decision, which resulted in considerable lootings over the course of a few days, as well as murders, violent protests, all sorts of chaos... eventually, this event became the perfect excuse for a certain, powerhungry, military “leader” to take advantage of and stage a coup to overthrow that president. This military leader’s coup didn’t work, and he was sent to jail (not before him and his cronies killed, in cold blood, an undefined number that ranges between 100 and 300 people in their attempts to overthrow the government).

A few years after the coup attempt, the military leader in question... was released. Despite being the intellectual artificer of the deaths of a number ranging around 100-300 people.

By now, he can be held responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people instead :’)

And that graphic is for outright murder. That’s not accounting for the people who died because of food or medicine shortages, it’s not accounting for the many people the current government numbers have covered up... it’s not all the people who have had to pay with their lives for the absolutely dreadful mismanagement of the country in current times. And what does that military leader have to do with all these deaths? Why would I hold HIM responsible?

Why, because he became president of Venezuela in the year of 1998. That’s why :’)

There’s no easy way of summing up everything going downhill in this country. You could, however, say that every hardship we’ve had to deal with here is a consequence of the absolutely horrid, corrupt, criminal decisions of a government that has zero interest in governing a country. All they want is to line their pockets with blood money and pay for none of the crimes they’ve committed while in power. And they’ll ally themselves with as many dangerous countries and regimes as they possibly can to get away with it, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum (they’re best buddies with far-right and far-left regimes just the same. Kinda says something, doesn’t it?).

Just to put things in context: Chavez, the military leader who became president, committed thousands of awful decisions. He rewrote the Constitution, he set up his goons to handle our Electoral College so that they’d rig the system and ensure he got away with victories in all the elections that mattered, he set up huge restrictions on international trade, to the point where people COULDN’T do any sorts of operations with foreign currency without asking his government for permission first, which became a HUGE source of corruption...

But the likely worst part of it all is what affects everyone, from day to day, all throughout the country. And that is the government’s monopoly over EVERY BASIC NEED INDUSTRY in this country.

Currently, as I type this? My building has had running water for 3 days straight, in the middle of a pandemic (and that’s just my personal experience, there’s a HUGE lot of people who haven’t had running water for MONTHS and have to collect water on rivers or hire water trucks that are more and more expensive with every passing day). Me and my parents are living off water reserves that we must constantly collect whenever the water comes back, because these water cuts happen at RANDOM, with ZERO WARNING, with NO EXPLANATION and you have no right to protest to the water company (if you did, you’d go ignored. If you don’t go ignored, you go jailed. That’s your full spectrum of choices in this situation).

And of course, the vital question: who has the monopoly over the water companies throughout the country? The State.

Currently, as I type this? My WiFi is unstable (heck, it crashed just as I was typing this answer, the irony is strong!), and only three devices can be connected at a time. No, it’s not the router’s fault, because while it could sound as the obvious answer, it’s not configurated to limit the number of users. Only a month ago, all devices you felt like connecting could connect indeed, though the network was unstable anyhow. By now, the network is still unstable, and it can’t support all the devices we should have online.

Who runs the phone/internet company I use? The State.

A little over a year ago, a spree of nation-wide blackouts plagued the country. We spent whole days offline, completely isolated from the world, because not even cellphone networks would function if the cellphone towers were down too. All we could do was listen to radio, and ONLY if you had battery-powered radios. Even then, most radio stations weren’t even offering real information on what was going on, and the one that was got kicked offline earlier this year I think? Because their permit to operate in the country was revoked (the truth? the government has been taking advantage of ANY excuse to get rid of media that doesn’t report about them favorably since 2008, at least).

Who runs the electrical company that supplies THE ENTIRE COUNTRY? The State.

And I could go on, and on, and on... but I think you’ll get the picture by now. Basically, every single issue you find in this country (in 2013, we were ranked the most insecure country in the world, in 2019 the most MISERABLE country in the world) goes back to the people in charge, who have only made choices to benefit themselves and seldom to help the “people” they’ve always claimed to be working for. They’ve broken the laws they wrote themselves, they’ve become internationally persecuted criminals for helming drug trafficking networks, for crimes as outlandish as supplying Venezuelan passports to known, persecuted terrorists (while, btw, making actual Venezuelan people pay about $200 for a passport... when our minimum wage, MONTHLY, is around $1.3? No, that’s not a miscalculation or an exaggeration, it’s further evidence of what I said up there regarding being the most miserable country in the world), they’ve imprisoned and exiled countless members of their political opposition under fabricated charges, commited outright crimes of torture, including sexual torture, on peaceful protesters who were taken (sometimes just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time) by the national guards or police, 98% of actual crime goes unpunished in this country because the government outright instigates, encourages and even SUPPLIES criminals, since they’re basically a perfect method to keep the population at bay...?

Living in Venezuela has rendered me incapable of enjoying pretty much any form of dystopic storytelling. This mess began when I was 3-years-old, and it gets worse and worse and worse with every day that goes by. There’s no end in sight, no likely improvements, no solutions because nothing that has been tried has been any closer to succeeding at liberating this country from the nightmare clutches it’s in.

And of course, the worldwide pandemic only makes matters worse because, while I wasn’t going to be able to leave the country just yet anyhow, I had hoped to get out this year. By now, hell knows when I’ll be able to leave at all.

*sigh* And there you have it. I’m sure, if you’re curious, you can look up some more on the subject, though there’s a lot of false BS online, propaganda trying to paint the government as victims of the international community when that couldn’t be further from the truth, so if you have anything else you’d like to know... feel free to ask :’)

(Found this article too, it seems to do a relatively better overview than I did to explain why we’re in the ninth circle of hell... it’s a longer read than this ask, I suspect, but it ought to answer any lingering questions anyhow)

[queerchoicesblog]

A Few Words On Pride Month 2020

So, pride month has come at last. No matter how crazy it sounds right now as we're experiencing first-hand one of those events that will end up in history handbooks one day.

I'll be honest, it's quite difficult for me to talk about it now when everything that is not Mrs Rhona releted seems so well less relevant than it was before. But I want to share a few words that most likely nobody will read but I'll let them flow anyway.

I watch that video every single year during pride month. It's from a series I liked quite a lot back then, it's called Sense8. The character speaking is a trans woman, an lgbtq+ hacktivist, reminiscing her disastrous relationship with her transphobic mother yet finding strength in her own sorrow. There is a passage I love:

Today I'm marching to remember that I'm not just a me

But I'm also a we

And we march with pride

These words resonate with me: they summarise perfectly the deep empathy and acceptance that I feel should make us stick together. Both inside the lgbtqa+ community and as human beings: "I am a human being, and thus nothing human is alien to me". I'm quoting by heart a Latin playwright named Terentius (Terence in English, I guess?) so forgive me if I got something wrong but what I mean is...we should all care about each other because no matter our differences, our sexuality or color of skin or class, we are human. We are brothers and sisters: I'm an only child but I believe that the definition of a healthy family is one where people overcome differences that don't truly matter in the end, they don't define us as worthy or unworthy of love and respect which should always be given to another human being.

Unless there are valid reasons not to.

As the latest happenings in the world have shown, a hard truth we all know has been reinforced: we live in a cruel, unfair world where, as Nomi said, "hating isn't a sin on that list and neither is shame". A world where people get hurt or killed for reasons which can be hardly called a motive for violence: not being white, not being rich enough, being different, holding a hand or kissing a person of the same sex in the street.

We may comfort ourselves saying these fears were past fears, last century or even Victorian age fears but no, they're still out there. And we can't turn a blind eye.

The current pandemic added new ones, making our lives even more miserable. Speaking of the lgbtqa+ community, I think I can say the social distancing is hitting even harder. Does anybody feel lonelier now? I rise my hand, I do. I'm not referring to the fact that pride parades are cancelled (because we all know there is a freaking valid reason atm), but getting in touch with other people is way harder now. In my personal experience, getting in touch with fellow lgbtqa+ folks was rare even before the pandemic, now it's hella tough. In the street we hide our faces behind masks and don't have the same careless attitude we used to display. Shaking hands and even the lightest touch or proximity are not allowed under the new restrictions: a few weeks ago, over here a couple was charged for hugging each other in the street. How sad and dystopic are these times we live in...

Virtual meetings can help but they're not like in person meetings: the warmth of personal interaction is simply not there. We try but it's not there. Couples are separeted by lockdown rules and so are some families. Lgbtqa+ hotlines are a saving grace and I cannot stress enough how important they are and how anyone struggling with their mental health or literally anything concerning themselves, their gender and sexuality should feel free to contact those volunteers who are a blessing restoring a little faith in humanity.

My thoughts are for those of us who got stuck quarantining with homophobic/biphobic/transphobic etc parents or roommates, and those stuck in abusive contexts. Yes, even relationships because - I know I'll be super unpopular saying this but we can't lie especially to the minor or vulnerable ones- lgbtqa+ relationships can be abusive and toxic too. As I said, we're human and I am sick and tired of the honeyed sunshine rhetoric of lgbtqa+ people and love as an ever right and righteous safe haven. It is a safe haven for us to some extent but we must acknowledge there are problematic issues in our community. We have to be honest with each other especially for the sake not only of each other but for the vulnerable ones and the young. Like criticising or reporting abusers, predators, rapists and so on don't make us all filthy creatures who will burn on a stake for our abominable sins. It just makes us responsible and looking out for each other.

We spend so long dreaming of finding someone of the same sex to be with that when someone shows us any sign of affection our feelings for them grow fast, even when red flags or abuse enter our lives. We stay because we're hungry for love and crave what straighties seem to get so easily: love, acceptance, reciprocity. To the young and everyone who needs to hear this I wanna say: it doesn't have to be like that. Don't ever settle for cheap love only because you feel you will lose your only chance to be loved. There are good people out there too and you deserve one of them at your side. You will find them, your paths will cross: just be patient and never ever forget the importance of respect and consent.

To all those experiencing anything like the relationships or toxicity I mentioned, who feel silenced by the sunshine rhetoric, I say: you are not alone, stay strong and you did nothing wrong, others did and I'm sorry you're going through this cause you don't deserve it.

I share a similar shutout to those struggling with mental and/or physical disorders. If you ever felt pretty much invisible, you're not. I see you, many others see you and we're all rooting for you. You're stronger than you think and you're beautiful.

The not-as-unfortunate-as-the abovementioned but still quite forlorn are the star crossed lovers meeting that special someone in a bad time. Quarantine will see the blossoming of some romances but also takes no prisoners, blowing off others. They don't vanish though, in most cases they turn into those impossible loves and what if we love so much in the movies and hate in real life. I wish I could lay a blanket or pull into a tight hug all those going through this. Your pain is not irrelevant even if there are worst things in the world right now, our souls hurt for things like that. I hold your shaking hand wherever you are as you stare blankly at your phone, waiting for a message or a call that will never come, or you reminisce, listening to a romantic playlist you still have saved on your device. Your suffering is my suffering.

On a brighter side, cause I don't wanna be a complete downer, the luckiest ones among us are blessed with love and I can't be any happier for you, whoever you are. I can picture the one day a few years from now when I will be talking to someone and they will share their story saying how they met the love of their life during the pandemic. How it wasn't easy at first because of all the uncertainty and fears but they kept trying and it all started with a social distancing date at a park or via Zoom. You lucky ones, cherish that and never take what you have for granted: the love you feel and that special someone is showing you is a balsam in hard times. Please cherish it dearly and never stop loving: one day you'll warm these old bones and lonely heart if we ever get the chance to cross path.

Actually I don't have any more wisdom to share, granted what I wrote can be called wisdom, nor giveaway. I considered doing a lgbtqa+ one in honor of the pride month but I feel nobody would be interested. Or at least not by me and I fully agree: writing is getting hard and I feel like I risk of ruining everything I dedicate myself to, as I usually do in my life. I'll follow the tips of a few anons (I think?) and devote this month to educate myself over aspects, nuances or realities I am not fully familiar with: so I'll watch Pose and Sex Education. Hopefully I'll learn something new that might make me a better human being.

Feel free to share further advice: books, articles, movies, series, documentaries...you name it! Drop a message or an ask and I'll make what I'm starting now a lasting project!

That is my advice: if you're stuck inside with nothing much to do this month, find something that might enrich you, even a little thing, and go for it.

As well as reminding yourself the usual stuff: you are not wrong nor unlovable, you're not offensive or dirty for being attracted to your same sex or both or none. Not to quote Lady Gaga, but it's truly is that simple: you are born and beautiful this way.

Stay safe and stay strong, my darlings 🏳️‍🌈

Love,

E.

[eleart2019]

The book of Romeo and Juliet

The book might have been your last communication with me, one I had not the right to answer to. It was notable for one key issue: my total absence from it. Yet the photo on its hardcover was reminiscent of our time together, those three small months. The woman in the picture, although one could not see her face, was me. I was not featured in the book: I WAS I the book. The very texture of it, the life and themes, it was me. Yet you never mentioned me, or our love and that innocence we both possessed. It is true in a sense that we hide what really matters, and I wonder if your wife, who by the way looks exactly like me, even knew of us.

I came to know of your death in a very simple way: you told me. It was evening and I was lying diagonally on my bed; my bedroom cannot be described as pretty, nor does my life. I felt your presence in the room, I suddenly thought of you and it was as if you were there. Did you pay me a visit, that night? I googled your name, something I hadn’t done in a long, long time, and there you were, your death announced as a terrible free diving accident. I thought, you died doing something you loved- and it struck me as peculiar that only a year prior you had published The Book.

It was a collection of stories, imaginary or real, you were teasing your reader into guessing if you were describing something that happened to you or not. But I knew better. You were a surgeon, a successful doctor who treated something called “allux valgus,” bunions in layman terms. Day in day out. You travelled all around Europe and more to bring your science, yet you were an artist at heart: there was a song in you that waited to be written. Your stories kept me glued to the pages. You wrote them in airport stops, long travel and waiting times: those hours where the silence of idleness stopped the masquerade of your life. You, my dear, judged me and cruelly so. You never fully understood my suffering, yet I always understood and justified yours. In death, I know that you forgave me. Did you think of me, when your last breath left you, there in the deep of the sea? Did you see my face? Do you understand, now?

The stories, according to you, were born out of boredom: this is not strictly true. The true reason is revenge. I feared when I knew you had published, because I knew you would find a way to be cruel.

We were a dark version or Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers poison each other with words. In the last conversation we ever had you said I was “acid" because for the first time I stood up to you. You fed on my life and stole my innocence: or, was I doomed anyway? There are so many ways to tell a story.

The first story in your book was about your great passion, freediving, which is where you ultimately found your peace. You had everything in life yet there is a sense of something missing, something you cannot even quite describe. In this story reality blends with fiction. Freediving into the beautiful sea of southern Italy is a metaphor for diving into your subconscious, reaching the dangerous boundary of madness: the diver runs out of oxygen and something happens down there, you speak to Azzurra whoever she is. I think this is somewhat ironic. I wonder what happened down there, when you really run out of breath - when I read the news I even thought you may have done it on purpose. Perhaps your unhappiness was more well hidden than we all thought.

Another story was about you on the operating table, your job, "a job like any other, " you write " with the potential to become routine and boring." You hated routine, that’s why you needed all your little adventures: freediving, free climbing, running - but you were trapped in a golden cage of bunions to repair. And that’s what you did, day in day out. The story describes how during one of your surgeries you start hallucinating, of all things smelling boar sausages and beans because you are hungry. I tend to believe that this has actually happened. The fact that you have lost all passion for your work is transparent to me, and I feel that you are really not appreciating what life handed to you on a plate. Your father gave you his successful practice and you, admittedly, turned it into something bigger. But you write: "A job like any other, at the end of the day." A cash cow.

The other story was cruel. You describe one if your past loves ( thankfully not me), a biology student turned fat and miserable by the wrong marriage and by impending single-parenthood. "You have eaten a lot, these past years," these are your inner thoughts as you visit her in the old house where you consummated your love and lust. "Sadness and an air of stale bread was in the atmosphere: so long gone was our love, in contrast with your today," you write. Not only there is no compassion for the woman who cheated on you and discarded you for a better fit ( so she thought), you are using these pages to show how far you have come, and how deep she has fallen. You revel in your victory over your past. But my question is, if you are that happy why do you need to do this?

I am really wondering about you and if you were different things to different people. Who were you to your wife? In another story you describe how you fell in love with her land, in southern Italy and how she was everything: not once though you say you love her or you describe what you actually love about her. You see, I notice the small things. You, you married a system, a place, an opportunity. It could have been me: for many reasons, it wasn’t.

I was 15 when we met. To be honest, I had been stalking you for a while, even engeneering a meeting with you through one of your "friends". I don't think though that you had real friends, you were to them, an outsider. You were 23, the dashing young senior in the local scout section. I was so shy about liking you, but I had a massive crash on you. From where I am standing now, I would see this relationship as inappropriate. 7 years difference at that age: you were crazy to even think of me as someone you could date. You could have ended in prison, perhaps you should have: you were my world for 3 months. And then it ended, I think I did, because my mother advised I should. The scouts also felt they could no longer keep you as an example to the younger ones: they simply threw you out of the organisation. At that time, I could not totally appreciate why.

I felt free in the beginning but then I felt empty. And then as the years passed I tried to look for you in many ways. But this is not the point: I never stopped to look at how you saw this whole thing. You thought I was to blame, or really I was the easiest thing to blame. Truth said, I was a child who had no one, not even you.

I wanted to become a doctor before I met you, after what happened I purposely avoided that, because of you. It’s a shame, I would have had the passion to do that, it would never be routine to me to change a person’s life. Honestly: I think we were poison for each other, like two dystopic Romeo and Juliet.

I don’t fully understand what I feel if anything at all for you. You are long gone and perhaps I too have seemed to find you again and again in any partner I had. Why does your wife look like me? There is perhaps a need to give closure to our story. I feel we began to write it but it was never fully finished and polished. The fact is, I was scared of you in the end. I talked to you a few times over the years, and it was like the curtains had come down on you. It was you, but the person who has those big dreams was there no longer. You had become hard and cynical: I think you stopped believing in love.

And now that It’s all so final, in your premature death, I actually think you died at the right moment, before you could become someone who has lost any trace of humanity. How many women have there been within the sanctity of your marriage? I can see it on your face. I am sure things are different when you see them from spirit, quite sure if that.

The day you died you called your wife, to let her know you would be in for dinner, so said the newspaper. I wonder if it was your way of say I g goodbye. Your friend, who didn't see you come back and called for help, was beyond himself. I would be too. I you were, surprisingly so a very private person. And I know that there are things you never told me too.

[tygerbug]

Who Reviews

Doctor Who: The Witchfinders, written by Joy Wilkinson. In the history of Doctor Who we've had three stories both written and directed by women. The last was Barbara Clegg's Enlightenment in 1983, an unusual story which stands out from its era and is easily one of the best of the 80s. The Witchfinders is a very solid tale, and you might say it succeeds as a traditional Doctor Who story more than any other this year. I've seen someone on Twitter call it the best so far and I can't concur with that, but this is a good opportunity to look at what's really been happening with Doctor Who this year overall.

Chris Chibnall as showrunner has brought us a Doctor Who which functions better as Genuine Adult Drama (GAD) than the Davies and Moffat eras did. You can feel the influence of Davies, but they've shaved his trademark silliness off the whole thing for a more muted feel to the proceedings. This is paired with an anamorphic desaturated feature-film look to the visuals. At times the series even feels bland and flavorless, but at its best we feel the weight of the adult concepts the TARDIS team are faced with - American racism in "Rosa" and the British-sparked conflict between Muslims and Hindus in "Demons of the Punjab." The Witch trials of the King James era are a weighty, depressing subject, and it seems a little bit of a shame to bring traditional Doctor Who alien monsters into it. To the episode's credit, it goes full horror movie with this. There's some CGI but it's mostly makeup straight out of a zombie film - specifically the Evil Dead series. It feels too scary for kids, and Doctor Who should occasionally feel like that. And oh, let's talk about King James. Russell T. Davies established the traditional of the "celebrity historical" where The Doctor meets a well known historical (or sometimes fictional) personage, often played by a recognizable guest-star actor. So here's Alan Cumming, a big-name actor coming in to play his part as an absolute lark. Openly gay and affecting a comical upper-class Scottish accent of some kind, he's a delight throughout, whether flirting with Ryan or trying to learn The Doctor's secrets. The half-comedic performance does undermine him a bit as a threat, but it's nice to see a guest actor having fun with a part. Cumming is a smart enough actor to never go fully over the top with it, pitching his performance at the right level so that it doesn't break the scene. The three companions have been reliably good, but not in a showy or cartoonish way. They only occasionally get standout moments. There's a lot of humor and energy to Jodie Whittaker's performance as The Doctor, which is not unlike David Tennant's popular Doctor, but it often feels like that energy is muted by everything else around her, as if she's acting in a tank of water. The Witchfinders is the first episode to show The Doctor struggling to get anyone to take her seriously, due to her gender. King James doesn't recognize her as being in charge, and she's sentenced as a witch and drowned. I'm glad an episode dealt with this, but it also speaks to a fundamental, and peculiar, powerlessness inherent to Jodie Whittaker's version of The Doctor. In the 60s-80s series, it was common for The Doctor to be mistrusted by everyone at the beginning of a story, and locked up until he could prove his worth. Jon Pertwee's Doctor spends much of Frontier in Space going from one prison cell to another. The faster-paced post-2005 series rightly dispensed with that as padding they didn't have time for. Psychic Paper was introduced to give The Doctor credentials and credibility at the beginning of a story, along with other tricks often involving the Sonic Screwdriver - which by this point is an all-purpose tool but can also be used for its traditional purpose of opening locks to get The Doctor - and the writer - out of a dead end. The Psychic Paper fails The Doctor in this one, as King James doesn't respect a woman's authority. It was usually easy for The Doctor, as played by Eccleston, Tennant, Smith or Capaldi, to talk his way into a position of authority, and Whittaker's Doctor managed that in her first scene. But increasingly it's become apparent that The Doctor is not doing an amazing job of solving every problem in an episode like an all-powerful God, or kid's TV hero. The Davies and Moffat eras often wanted to show you how amazing and powerful The Doctor is. This Doctor keeps ending up with endings in which some immediate threat has been vanquished, but larger societal problems linger, and people we care about are dead. Last week's episode, Kerblam!, set up an apparently dystopic capitalist future, where an Amazon-like retailer had replaced 90% of employees with automation, and was required by law to keep a 10% human workforce. The employed workers were treated like machines, and were miserable, and the unemployed were apparently living in even greater misery and poverty. The episode couldn't, or wouldn't, imagine an automated future where the unemployed are cared for. Capitalism can't imagine that either. The Doctor sees that misery and doesn't do much to help. She solves the immediate problem that is killing workers, so that the company can keep on running, more or less as it did before. This has been something of a running theme. The Doctor doesn't fix anything for citizens of this galaxy at large. The Doctor can't improve the racism of 20th Century America, only observe it and make sure that Rosa Parks' protest happens as scheduled. You could say the same about the border dispute tearing India apart in 1947. History isn't changed, only observed and mourned, and the role of the colonizing British in creating his situation is not dealt with in any overt way. Grace dies in the course of The Doctor's first adventure. The Doctor feeds the dangerous Pting, calming it for awhile, but sets it loose afterward. We never see The Doctor deal with the giant spiders or, more importantly, the toxic waste that created them. That waste was itself the product of deregulation under the laissez-faire rule of Chris Noth's Robertson, an uber-capitalist narcissist psychopath who is compared to Trump (though not as vile). The Doctor and Ryan are seen to trap the large spiders for a natural death, but what happens after that is not dealt with onscreen. Instead we get this companion team officially joining The Doctor in the TARDIS. In every episode this year, we witness a very messed-up situation, often caused by some intersection of capitalism and racism. But it's not a situation The Doctor can fix by the end of the episode. She can only mitigate the stranger, monster-based elements, the threat that they're facing immediately in the moment. She removes whatever is gumming up the gears of progress so that the actual horrors of the society in question can continue unchallenged. Of course in the more historically-based episodes it's too much to ask that The Doctor Solve Everything, in capital letters. Is she supposed to solve racism? But the more fantasy-based episodes like Kerblam! have much less excuse. It's telling, I think, that these episodes overall are better at dealing with America's failures than Britain's. The Doctor is powerless to deliver a truly happy ending, or even to show she's trying for one, and I wonder if that's intentional or due to a lack of political consciousness on the part of the writers and showrunner. This year on Halloween, the leftist Youtube channel Philosophy Tube did a piece about the horrors of the witch trials, and how they were used to break the power that women had in a feudal agricultural society, including traditional medicine, and how this led to modern capitalism. He covered the same material on Twitter, and I'll link to that here. https://twitter.com/PhilosophyTube/status/953277894813536256 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmk47kh7fiE "The Witch-Hunt is classic Divide and Rule: paint women as dangerous so the new proletariat are busy fighting 'witches' instead of joining together and fighting the rich. There are massive rollbacks of women's rights … Records were often kept of how much land or money was seized from them, but not how many were murdered." It's an interesting take on just how bloody the transition to an industrial capitalist society was, and how the people and their "old ways" had to be broken for this to happen. It was a means of controlling women's options, and the options of the average worker, something that's still relevant to today's society. In some ways we still live, today, in the cages that the witch-hunters built. Today's politicians like Mike Pence are just witch-hunters in different clothes. And that's something this Doctor Who story doesn't deal with. I've mentioned this, but when the Rosa Parks story was announced, I saw a lot of people on Twitter, who aren't Doctor Who fans, assuming that a Doctor Who take on Rosa Parks would by nature have to be a disgusting exercise in tastelessness. Maybe they thought The Doctor would be taking on some kind of Racism Monster. Apart from introducing The Doctor and a villain into the proceedings, "Rosa," as an episode, was tastefully done. While it didn't show clearly that Rosa Parks planned her protest beforehand, it did show that Parks was an activist who planned her actions alongside others (including Dr. King), which is more than many history books do. But their fears were not unfounded. It's common for pop culture to create extended and elaborate metaphors about bigotry as if they're making some grand statement, but also reinforce that bigotry as somehow justified along with it. In Disney's Zootopia, there are classes of predator and prey animals, and the predators are discriminated against and find it difficult to get ahead in society. This is a metaphor about racism, but it would be entirely justified for a rabbit to be afraid of a fox. In the wild, a "predator" would eat the "prey" animal. If this is truly taken as a metaphor for white racism against black people in America, it's an offensive one. Race is a social construct, and racism as we know it was created to enforce slavery. It established people with dark skin of African descent as an underclass, to exploit in order to grease the wheels of capitalism in the centuries before the Civil War (and afterward, if we're being quite honest). Black people and white people are genetically identical, and without the shadow of slavery (created by the rich to enrich themselves) would have identical rights. Foxes and rabbits are not genetically identical. One is likely to eat the other. In the X-Men series, mutants are feared and shunned by society. They have superpowers from birth, and are genuinely extremely powerful and potentially dangerous. So if the public fears them, that's actually entirely justified. The mutants are different from "normal" humans and could assert their power in very dangerous ways if they wanted. Wolverine is virtually an immortal with knives for hands. Phoenix could easily destroy the earth. The endless comics, TV series and films featuring the X-Men have positioned Xavier and Magneto as the "Dr. King" and "Malcolm X" of their story, in that Xavier wants mutants to have equal rights and is more palatable to the mainstream, while Magneto is "too radical." But this is an offensive metaphor when you break it down. Of course neither Xavier nor Magneto are black Americans. Both Dr. King and Malcolm X were considered extreme radicals in their time, and they agreed on many concepts. Dr. King spoke out for worker's rights generally, and for class consciousness. He was murdered for his beliefs. Magneto has magnet powers and runs a club called "The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants" which seeks to dominate over humanity. He's a bad guy who does bad things and constantly emperils the world in general. Comparing him to a 60s civil rights leader is an offensive metaphor, unless you accept that the X-Men series just wants to touch on the history of bigotry in America as subtext without accepting everything that comes with it, which is fair enough. It's not a history lesson. But like almost all sci-fi stories, it makes no sense without our understanding of how black people and other groups have been marginalized in America, but makes the story about white people instead, like a cartoon fox played by Jason Bateman. The history of slavery, oppression, bigotry, Nazism, fascism, and so on is the subtextual backstory for pretty much all sci-fi media. So many villains are based on the Nazis, but this rarely takes into account the racist ideology behind fascism. Hitler came to power after Germany's economy had collapsed, partly due to the Great War. The average worker was living in hopeless poverty, and either they were going to develop class consciousness and tear down capitalism, asserting their rights as a worker, or they were going to need someone to blame. Hitler gave them someone to blame. He rounded up the socialists, communists and Marxists who were preaching against capitalism. He blamed it all on the Jewish people, who traditionally had been excluded from many professions and were often involved in banking. It was apparently easy to make up conspiracy theories about them Actually Being in Charge of Everything. He rounded up the LGBT people, burned gay and trans literature. He targeted the Romani "gypsies" who had been marginalized for centuries. There was no logical underpinning behind this. There never really is, with racism. Hitler only wanted power, and he saw that the people had lost faith in the world, with capitalism and their government. They were being oppressed by economic depression, and had a general unfocused rage. He used that anger and directed it toward groups that were already marginalized in some way. He distracted the people and consolidated his power by giving them something to hate. He slaughtered six million Jewish people in an apparent bid to wipe an entire religion off the face of the Earth - the religion which gave us Christianity, for that matter. Since the 80s, Capitalism and greed has gone unchecked by any desire to actually help people and have a functioning society. After George W. Bush's trillion-dollar wars for oil, the economy has crashed and not really gotten better. People are noticing. The rich are getting obscenely so, as if they're being gifted the equivalent of a brand new car every few seconds. The poor are begging for scraps. There is a general unfocused rage. Donald Trump, a fake billionaire, has gotten a large chunk of America to blame it on non-white minorities, such as people from Mexico. This is what Hitler did. I've gotten way off topic, but for a reason. The people who burned witches in the 17th century and thereabouts were not actually killing people who had any magical powers. They were murdering their neighbors, and consciously or not it helped the world change. The world's economy was changing. Land was being seized. Power was shifting. People were losing rights and property they had previously been entitled to, as part of a series of steps which led to factory work in the 19th century. They killed women to kill off the old ways. And I'm watching a rather good Doctor Who episode about that, about killing witches to "fight the powers of Satan," and it turns out that in this episode they actually have good reason to be killing off their neighbors, or to fear the powers of Satan, because there's actually some evil alien stuff going on, and it's infecting people and raising people from the dead and it all looks very scary and supernatural. If you're in the mood to be offended it does feel a little like a Witch Trial but with Actual Witchcraft, portraying the witch-hunters as absurd and awful but also somewhat vindicated by the events of the story, not unlike our X-Men and Zootopia examples. So it's a good Doctor Who yarn, but as a metaphor it doesn't even get started. The episode isn't that interested in the larger societal issues at play here, although it does deal with sexism, which covers a lot of that territory in a general sense. It largely focuses on female characters (except for King James), and both the writer and director are women, for the third time in Doctor Who history. And that's been due to sexism. There haven't been a ton of women writing Doctor Who, or directing it (despite the big-name appeal of Tank Girl director Rachel Talalay). And that's a problem. And it's a problem the show has temporarily solved, by hiring women for this week only. The larger cultural problem remains. And the show keeps fighting for diversity, this year. British writer Malorie Blackman OBE handled "Rosa" with real sensitivity. And Vinay Patel handled "Demons of the Punjab" with full awareness of its historical background. Between them they've probably delivered the two best episodes this year. Indeed these have all stood above the episodes credited to Chris Chibnall. The diversity this year has been welcome, as it's resulted in some good television. But like The Doctor's actions in these episodes it's just a band-aid placed over any larger cultural issues. She can stop the problem of the week, but she really can't fix everything. Which is fine. Realistic, even, which fits the tone of this year in general. My question is, does she want to fix everything? Are The Doctor and her writers socially aware enough to use these larger issues responsibly? So far, in terms of social consciousness, this year's Doctor Who raises a lot of questions it can't actually answer. Not in a way which satisfies the kids, or the adults - for different reasons. It's still very good television, and I'll give it points for asking some of these questions in the first place.

[jemimaboultonflipside]

Evaluation

I was interested in utopia/dystopia flipside theme as the future is one of the scariest things for me to think about, and at the moment it seems as though we are going in a dystopic direction, in which we are all going to become radioactive nightmare fuel fragments of people in a thousand years. 

The pieces of artist research that impacted my art the most are Neffeffeff’s cardboard layered mixed media pieces, Lewis Rossignal’s distorted presentation of faces, and the painterly approach Elena Rossato takes towards watercolour. If I had not seen Neffeffeff’s art I may not have been as experimental in using so many different mediums on cardboard and my final outcomes may have been extremely different. Rossignal’s art pushed me to find a way to distort these futuristic figures and make them even more dystopic, without straying away from general human features. Rossato made me consider them impact the colour scheme I choose has on my art and how even subtle changes in hues can sway the audience to taking a different perception of the art being displayed. This made me more careful and my final outcomes are stronger for it.

The piece of wider world research my flipside project is heavily linked to is the novel The Time Machine by H.G Wells, in which a man travels to the future and finds that there are two races which have evolved from humans, the Eloi, which are utopic and live on the surface, and the Morlocks, who are dystopic and live underground. The imagery I experienced when reading about these two races is what heavily influenced the way I present utopia and dystopia in my project as the contrast in colour and silhouette that these creatures have was very clear to me and is something I took and used to my advantage to ensure clarity in my messages when creating utopic/ dystopic artworks. The novel encapsulates my ideas and concepts in this project, as it is themed around how humans could evolve in the future to become utopic or dystopic.

I learnt the process of woodblock printing during this FMP, which in turn led me to experimenting in the style of cubism. From this I learned how to simplify shapes and body parts down to their most distinctive components, and that sometimes the simpler the design the better, as with cubism it’s all about shapes so they need to be right for the object they are trying to display or they could easily be mistaken for something else. I also learnt how to use Adobe Illustrator to manipulate lettering, which in turn meant I learnt how to make words and letters fit my themes just from the shape, disregarding the word that the shape is made of.

A piece of art I made in this project that was the most valuable to my learning was the first piece I did on cardboard using collaging techniques and oil pastel. It was extremely valuable to my learning as I really enjoyed the process and therefore I pushed it further and included these mediums in my final outcomes. The use of cardboard changed the way I viewed different canvases and it gave me an outlet which is inexpensive and informal, which therefore encourages me to be more experimental since I can afford to be.

If I could display my work at any time in history or anywhere in the world, I would display it thousands of years into the future, so the people who are living in the time which I am trying to represent in my art can be baffled and compare themselves to what people in the past thought the would evolve to be. I would like to be somehow brought to life to witness them viewing this for myself and confirm for myself whether I was going in the right direction in the way I presented these people to be. The whereabouts of the viewing is the least important part of all this, but I believe it would be best if it is done in a country which is very forward with science, as this country could then compare my art to the predictions as to what they think humans could look like even further into the future.

10 words that I would say accurately describe my final outcomes would be grisly, otherworldly, quixotic, perceptive, shrewd, pioneering, euphoric, cryptic, arcane and insightful.

If I was to pick a piece of music to be the soundtrack to my outcomes I would choose Shostakovich’s Piano trio No.2 in E Minor, due to the way the instruments all fight against each other in a way which is ahead of it’s time, in other words it is futuristic and dystopic, Shostakovich’s way of communicating to us in the future, similar to what I am trying to do with my art. I also picked this music based on the history behind it, as Stalin did not like Shostakovich’s a music, and censored it from the public, starting a conflict between the pair. This is relevant to my message and ideas as in dystopian future there would be much censorship and limitations to art, in a way reminiscent to what Stalin did here.

At the start of this project I could not use Illustrator, but now I can and I have a good grasp of many of the features and their uses. I also have a much better understanding of colour and the way out brain links colours to certain feelings and moments, which helps with art since I now understand that the choices I make regarding colour can be the difference between someone finding a piece of art happy or miserable.

My final outcome ideas did not actually end up straying too far away from what I said I would produce in my proposal, and I am glad of this, since the fine art outcomes produced are very representative of my initial ideas and how they developed. The research regarding how the politics of the Time Machine affect the world today helped me develop from my proposal and widen my view as well as becoming more educated in subjects which help push the message I was communicating forward.

[marcjampole]

From Al Bundy to Trumpty-Dumpty: The spiritual part of the war on Christmas was lost in the days Trump was failing as a casino owner

I started feeling under the weather at around Noon the day before Christmas, so I spent much of the late afternoon and early evening drifting in and out of sleep while the television blared Christmas-themed episodes of “Married with Children,” the 1990s dystopic situation comedy about a lower middle class family of selfish, self-seeking, uneducated, ignorant individuals who think only of material possessions.

All the Christmas episodes revolved around the father of the house, Al Bundy, trying to get his hands on money to buy Christmas presents, and each time coming up short. His various part-time jobs and schemes all backfire, or he fails to get to the bank in time or he gets drunk and buys drinks for the house at the bar where he ends up after a stint as a Santa, with all the other poor blokes playing Santa in Chicago. That one has a bizarre ending, as Al uses his one positive trait—his athleticism which combines strength, agility and speed—to take possession of items from the bar, all labeled “Ray,” and give them as presents to his family. Best gift: A gold necklace with the name Ray on the gold medallion to Peggy, the wife Al loves to hate and hates to make love to.

Along the way, the Bundys, and most other characters, display vile and venial behavior and say many cruel things, all of which is hilariously funny, because they form a harmless exaggeration of the real world. In none of the episodes do any of the characters consider anything about Christmas other than the tradition of buying, giving and receiving presents. Virtually all the action not in the Bundys’ seedy home occurs in the marketplace: Al’s shoe store, next-door neighbor Marcy’s bank, the department store and other mall fixtures. No spirituality. No finding the true spirit of Christmas. No affirmation of traditional values. Even the parody—no, travesty—of “It’s a Beautiful Life” in a misogynistic, misanthropic vision in which his wife and two children are all better off in every way if the miserable Al had not been born. We laugh because we recognize in the extreme meanness and venality of the Bundys a parallel to our own lives and the people we know.

In Al Bundy’s world, love, friendship and every other emotion can only be found in money and material possessions, the values of American consumerism.

Also in the world of Donald Trump. All his talk about a war on Christmas involves the public market of commerce and has no spiritual element. It’s as if anything having to do with the religious aspects of Christmas—the story and its meaning, going to a mass or other church service, volunteering to feed the homeless, even caroling—has been consumed in a miasma of commercial values.

From Bill O’Reilly in 2012 through Donald Trump this year, the war on Christmas has always reduced to the secular marketplace. Do clerks and cashiers say “Merry Christmas” and thereby manifest their religiosity or do they utter the blasphemous “Seasons Greetings” and risk eternal damnation? Do the decorations have images of the Christ child and the legend “Merry Christmas” or do they rip all Christian doctrine to shreds by interspersing “Happy Hanukkah” and menorahs among “Seasons Greetings” placards and sundry Santa Clauses, sleighs, decorated trees and colorful wrapped-and-bowed packages? Instead of letting the marketplace operate without constraints, like conservatives are supposed to, those who believe that Christians must fight back in some religious war propose to regulate the market by stressing their one holiday. The authoritarian plea is meant to intimidate other cultures by stressing the primacy of one religion as a means to establish it as a de facto, and (they hope) someday de jure, national faith. This intimidation is a kind of softening up of all minorities for other assertions of Christian dominance such as refusing to bake wedding cakes for gay weddings, making abortion as hard as possible if not illegal, buying into a global war on Islam, and tampering with science and history text books.

Many pundits have already detailed the many reasons why conceiving of a war on Christmas as a Trojan horse for a war on secular values is wrong. Briefly, we are a secular society founded by fairly unreligious rich folk. Furthermore, Christmas iconography already dominates most celebration, even if has ceased to have or never had religious significance. Moreover, making potential customers feel uncomfortable is never good marketing. As a Jewish atheist, I won’t shop in any store, online or brick-and-mortar, once someone has said “Merry Christmas” to me. I imagine many other Jews, Muslims, Hindi and Buddhists have similar feelings. The idea of secularizing Christmas in the marketplace makes good business sense, and it doesn‘t disturb the private celebrations of Christians. Let’s also consider that making “Merry Christmas” the standard greeting debases its religious connotation, because it turns the phrase into a secular greeting that everyone gives everyone.

The rightwing media has taken up the battle cry against the war on Christmas for five years, but most mainstream media has recognized it is a false issue, a fake war.

So who else but a charlatan to declare victory in a fake war? It makes perfect sense that Donald Trump would claim that he had won the war on Christmas by re-instilling Christian values in the marketplace, from which secularists (read: liberal, feminist, gay, immigrant and minority) had vanquished it. At his rallies over the past few weeks, The Donald has been patting himself on the back for bringing Christmas back. Now, a nonprofit started by former Trump aides is going to run a Christmas day commercial in which a series of everyday Americans thank Trump for what he has done since his administration took over. Among the many faces of casually dressed people in various locations, mostly white but a token number of people of color —all manifesting traits associated with working class people—is a beautiful young white girl who says, “Thank you for letting us say “Merry Christmas” again.” Someone should tell that little girl that it was never against the law to say “Merry Christmas”; it’s merely thought in polite company to be poor manners to assume someone you don’t know is Christian. Unless, that is, if she’s an actress playing the role of grateful little girl.

Of course, they don’t really care about Christmas as a religious holiday, not Trump, not Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, not Meghan Kelley (who insisted both that Santa Claus was a real historical figure and that he had to be white), nor any of the other rightwing shills who said secular forces were destroying Christmas by their continuance of the decades-long American practice of marketplace recognition of other religions. They have all proved themselves many time to be committed to the values of conspicuous consumption and consumerism. But as elitists and authoritarians, they like the idea of giving the ignorant something they can be angry at other than the greed and acquisitiveness of their corporate masters, and in Trump’s case, fellow rich folk. All of them supported the mean-spirited tax overhaul, which Trump is publically calling a “Christmas gift” to the American people, knowing full well that it only the gift to the wealthy He has admitted as much to his rich friends at Mar-a-Lago.

Here in New York, we see very little evidence of more people saying “Merry Christmas” and fewer people saying “Seasons Greetings,” no stripping signs of Hanukkah from decorations, no increased religiosity in the sentiments people express in public interactions. Beggars in the subways make sure to include everyone in their solicitations. I did see one group of young men, mostly Hispanic, in seminary garb roaming together in the East Village saying “Merry Christmas” to everyone and being greeted with typical New Yorker’s scorn by the people with whom they tried to engage. I have also seen collections of Orthodox Jews publicly celebrating their version of Hanukkah in the streets to the same reaction.

But it may be different in the hinterlands.

In any case, let Trump have his victory, a hollow one because the more that people focus their celebration of Christmas in the marketplace, the more the true spirit of Christmas suffers. That was the lesson of “Married with Children” two decades ago, and nothing has changed since then. The marketplace long ago Bundyized the celebration of Christmas.

[juushika]

I’m doing another co-read with Missy, George Orwell’s 1984, a reread for both of us. He read it in school, and hasn’t reread it since then; I read it ages ago and many times since--but not in the last few years, so I suppose I was due.

My copy is inherited/gently stolen from my mother, and was published in 1961; there’s a typo on page 17 (“her sweep supple waist”) and pencil notes on the first page, an about the author, to underline Orwell’s name and list “Winston--the everyman; Julia--the everywoman”; it has that distinct almost-musty scent of used books of this specific page weight and quality and era; it once sold for

95 cents; I remember reading it as a ... preteen? young teen? while accompanying someone else’s trip to a college campus, and feeling very smug that I read literary canon of my own volition & and that’s why I, too, would belong in college some day.

It’s impossible for me to have a discrete experience with the book, to judge any sort of objective or relative quality or how it’s aged (objectively, relatively); I’m still tied up in that early encounter, because what I took away wasn’t the value of literary canon--rather, it was that the Important, Classic novels I would one day read for school* were also speculative; that genre was literature. It was the first time I encountered that overlap, between “real” books and speculative books. As speculative books go, it’s the definitive opposite of fun, even though dystopias have their own “what if” hook; it’s a weird book to memorize, to fondly recognize all these scenes were people are miserable, miserable in grindy petty banal ways atop the high-concept stuff. But there’s a perfect fondness: the velvet-smooth worn paperback, that distinctive scent, returning to a novel that literally changed me as a reader.

* I never did read it in school, but I did do projects comparing it to other dystopic novels!

[oscopelabs]

Personality Crisis: The Radical Fluidity of Todd Haynes’ ‘Velvet Goldmine’ by Judy Berman

[This month, Musings pays homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to film we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Over the next four weeks, Musings will offer its own selection of tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

Like the glam rockers it gazes upon through the smoke-clouded lens of memory, Velvet Goldmine is most beautiful when it descends into chaos.

Stolen, the way great artists do, from Citizen Kane, the skeleton of Todd Haynes’ 1998 film is a chain of interlocking reminiscences of Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a David Bowie-like glam rocker who fakes his own onstage death in the mid-’70s. A decade later—in that most dystopic of years, 1984—his ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette) and former manager Cecil (Michael Feast) relate their bitter tales of betrayal to a journalist (Christian Bale) whose assignment has him reluctantly reliving his own teenage sexual awakening under the influence of Brian’s music. Between the interviews, musical numbers, and onscreen epigrams, there’s also a mysterious female narrator who sometimes surfaces, like a teacher reading a subversive storybook, with dreamy exposition that reaches back a century to invoke glam’s patron saint, Oscar Wilde.

The film climaxes with a propulsive sequence of scenes that are exhilarating precisely because they merge all of these points of view, subjective and omniscient, into one collective fantasy. Brian and his new conquest, the Iggy Pop/Lou Reed composite Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), ride mini spaceships at a carnival to Reed’s “Satellite of Love.” Two random schoolgirls, their faces obscured, act out a love scene between a Curt doll and a Brian doll. In a posh hotel lobby, Brian’s entourage, styled like Old Hollywood starlets on the Weimar Germany set of a fin-de-siècle period film, recites pilfered sound bites about art. Then Brian and Curt are kissing on a circus stage, surrounded by old men in suits. They play Brian Eno’s “Baby’s on Fire” as Haynes cuts between the performance, an orgy in their hotel suite, and Bale’s hapless, young Arthur Stuart masturbating over a newspaper photo of Brian fellating Curt’s guitar. Stripped of narration—not to mention narrative—the film seems to be running on its own amorous fumes, its story fragmenting into a heap of glittering images as it hurtles from set piece to set piece.

Visual pleasure aside, it’s a perfect way of translating into cinematic language the argument that underlies Haynes’ script—that glam’s revelations about the radical fluidity of human identity go far beyond sex and gender. As the apotheosis of teen pop audiences’ thirst for outsize personae, fictional characters like Ziggy Stardust (who Velvet Goldmine further fictionalizes as Slade’s alter ego, Maxwell Demon) melded the symbiotic identities of artist and fan into a single, tantalizing vision of hedonism and transgression. Kids imitated idols they didn’t quite recognize as pure manifestations of their own inchoate desires. Musician and fan became each other’s mirror, and both could become entirely new people simply by changing costumes or names.

But it’s pretty much impossible to imagine Velvet Goldmine’s distributor and co-producer, Harvey Weinstein, appreciating this as he watched the film for the first time—or seeing anything in it, really, besides an expensive mess.

Haynes and his loyal producing partner, Killer Films head Christine Vachon, had already been through hell with Velvet Goldmine by the time they delivered a cut to Miramax. Bowie had refused Haynes’ repeated requests for permission to use six Ziggy-era songs in the film, claiming that he had a glam movie of his own in the works. And in a production diary that appears in her book Shooting to Kill, Vachon points out one unique challenge of making a film about queer male sexuality: “The MPAA seems to have a number of double standards. Naked females get R ratings, but pickle shots tend to get NC-17s. Our Miramax contract obligates us to an R.” She also mentions that an investor pulled $1 million of funding just weeks before filming.

The shoot was even more harrowing than the two veteran indie filmmakers could’ve predicted. As they fell behind schedule, a production executive started nagging Vachon to make cuts. “Todd is miserable,” she wrote in her diary the night before they wrapped. “He says that making movies this way is awful and he doesn’t want to do it.” In an interview that accompanies the published screenplay for Velvet Goldmine, Oren Moverman asks Haynes, “Was the making of the film joyful for you?” “I’m afraid not,” he replies. “We were trying very hard to cut scenes while shooting, knowing that we were behind and we didn’t have the money for the overloaded schedule. But there was hardly a scene we could cut without losing essential narrative information.” It’s remarkable that he managed to capture 123 usable minutes’ worth of meticulously art-directed ‘70s excess (and ‘80s bleakness) in just nine weeks, under so much external pressure, on a budget of $7 million.

When the film finally reached Harvey Scissorhands, after months of editing, Weinstein told Haynes it was too long and the structure didn’t work. “He made suggestions that I didn’t follow, and then he just buried it,” the director told Down and Dirty Pictures author Peter Biskind. What happened next comes straight from the Weinstein playbook: “Even afterward,” Haynes remembered, “they threw out a DVD, they didn’t ask for a director commentary, my name wasn’t on the cover of it, it was buried in the minuscule billing block. He can’t even do the really small things that don’t cost anything—he never shows any respect.” (That Haynes never found a distributor he preferred to Weinstein, with whom he reunited for I’m Not There and Carol, speaks volumes about the way Hollywood treats ambitious filmmakers.)

After it failed to blow audiences away at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, Miramax effectively dumped Velvet Goldmine. It debuted on just 85 screens that November, ultimately grossing about $1 million stateside. Its ridiculous theatrical trailer might well be a glimpse at the movie Weinstein was expecting: a “magical trip back to the ‘70s” with 100% more murder mystery and 100% less gay sex.

Critics were just as ambivalent about the film as festival audiences. While forward-thinking reviewers wanted to love it for its visual beauty and openly queer aesthetic, many lamented that its plot was slight and its characters hollow. David Ansen of Newsweek complained that “Haynes is unwilling to get too close to his characters. Slade, in particular, is a blank”—failing to see that Brian is a cypher by design. Like the Barbie-doll Karen Carpenter of Haynes’ debut feature, Superstar, and the fragments of Bob Dylan diffused across I’m Not There, Velvet Goldmine’s Bowie is less a portrait of the real person than a screen on which fans project their own fantasies about him.

At The Nation, Stuart Klawans rightly identified Arthur, not Brian, as the film’s protagonist. But he also wondered why he grows up to be such an unhappy adult. “Why is Haynes so tough on Arthur?” Klawans wanted to know. “Why, through the character, is he so tough on himself? It’s apparent everywhere in Velvet Goldmine that Haynes, like Arthur, loves Glitter Rock. He, too, fell for a mass-marketed product, which was no more likely than Mr. Clean to carry out a world-transforming promise. But instead of honoring the truth of his enthusiasm, so that he might look back on its object with a smile and a sigh…Haynes does penance for being a sap.”

Others found the film’s collage of ideas and allusions cumbersome. “Velvet Goldmine is weighed down with self-important messages, but it’s also splashily opulent,” Stephanie Zacharek wrote at Salon. “It’s as if Todd Haynes had plunged his hand into a pile of clothes at a jumble sale and come out with a handful that was half velvet finery, half polyester rejectables.”

All of these reactions make sense, coming from adult critics who had probably seen the film just once, after reading months’ worth of reports about its troubled birth, in the sterile environment of a press screening. But what’s clear from a distance of nearly two decades, during which Velvet Goldmine has become a low-key cult classic, is that few films are so poorly suited to be judged on the basis of a single dispassionate viewing. If you’re looking for tight plotting and complex characters, you’re not going to find them in this mixtape of music videos, aphorisms, and waking dream sequences. There is no actual murder mystery, and Arthur’s investigation into Slade’s disappearance isn’t a source of suspense so much as an excuse to keep contrasting an incandescent past with a dull, gray present.

I’m lucky enough to have first encountered Velvet Goldmine under what turned out to be ideal circumstances: at age 15, on premium cable, late enough at night that it easily bypassed my rational mind en route to my adolescent subconscious. I had no idea how many details it cribbed from the biographies of Bowie and his contemporaries, or how much of the dialogue was quoted from their (and their heroes’) most memorable utterances. I bought the soundtrack without realizing that it put ‘70s originals side-by-side with contemporary covers and new songs by younger bands like Pulp and Shudder to Think in yet another glam pastiche. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to find the 1984 scenes unsatisfying because I got so instantly immersed in the ‘70s spectacles that they barely existed for me.

Not that the film only works on an emotional level. Haynes’ ideas about fandom, politics, sexuality, and identity become even more profound once you can see the organizing principle behind what might initially seem like a jumble of indulgent images. Like the death hoax Brian Slade uses to escape a fantasy life that’s grown too real for comfort, Velvet Goldmine’s loose plot is classic misdirection, obscuring a tight and purposeful structure that delays the resolution of the ‘80s storyline until it’s primed you to feel the loss of the liberated ‘70s viscerally. But you’ll never get that far into dissecting the film if you don’t fall in love with it at first viewing. And that’s easiest to do when you’re as impressionable as young Arthur, who watches Brian Slade flaunt his queerness in a televised press conference and imagines himself shouting to his parents, “That is me!”  

Revisit it as you grow older, though, and you might discover that the disillusioned 30-something characters now feel as rich as their idealistic former selves. Velvet Goldmine is often called a gay film, but that obscures the universal resonance of its queer coming-of-age narrative. Better to think of it as a bisexual film that uses non-binary sexuality as a metaphor for the boundless possibilities of youth—the promise of a future constrained only by the limits of one’s own ambitions and appetites. Its characters can’t achieve permanent liberation by “coming out”; to maintain lifestyles that match their desires, they would have to reject the monogamy that defines adulthood for most people. Particularly amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, which haunts the film’s dreary present on a purely subtextual level, it’s obvious why they (like the real glam rockers they’re modeled after) retreat from the liberated lives they staked out for themselves.

But you don’t need to buy in to the incendiary claim Brian makes at his press conference, that everyone is bisexual, to see how this storyline reflects the many kinds of disappointments that await most starry-eyed fans in adulthood. Klawans’ objection to Haynes’ treatment of Arthur feels naive because it assumes people should be able to peacefully coexist with their shattered dreams. Why shouldn’t he feel bitter about having joined a sexual revolution that didn’t, finally, set him free? “It gets better” for Arthur when he leaves his homophobic family to move in with a latter-day glam act in London, but sometime after he hooks up with an unmoored Curt Wild at a tribute concert called the Death of Glitter, “it” just gets boring as the world gets worse.

And the world really does sometimes get worse, though audiences in the relatively peaceful, prosperous late ‘90s might have forgotten about that. Watching Velvet Goldmine for perhaps the 25th time, two weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, at the end of an era that has brought unprecedented freedom of sexual and gender expression, I was struck by how vividly Haynes captures a culture’s flight from progress, and how rare it is to see that kind of transition depicted on film. His argument about fluidity turns out to be even more potent when applied to societies than individuals (or, at least, it seems that way in 2017). Our capacity for transformation may be infinite, but that doesn’t mean those changes are always for the best.

[jemimaboultonflipside]

Diego Bellorin

This artwork makes me uncomfortable due to the clean yet crowded nature of it. This is because it reminds me of the scary images I used to see as I tried to go to sleep at night of white images moving in ways I’m not even sure I could explain through animation. This therefore evokes negative emotions within me. The use of many colours and shapes gives this artwork a very experimental look, especially for something that includes lines similar to scaffolding and architecture.

This piece appears to be made digitally, which a heavy focus on geometrics. My eye doesn’t focus on any particular area, which reinforces the idea being portrayed, that all things in a dystopic universe would blend together and mirror each other in how similar they would all be. However, this does remind me of the London underground maps, as it has colourful shapes and lines on a clean white background. Could this mean we have already begun to enter the dystopia we all fear?

M C Escher

Escher’s art makes me feel very unsettled, due to the way it shows a seemingly normal scene at first glance, but the more I look the more I notice how the place isn’t as it seems. My eye follows the stairs round and therefore the multiple perspectives is confusing and jarring. This could be to represent how the world is not all it seems on the surface and there is more happening behind the scenes than first meets the eye. A good example of this idea could be the government and how they are passing laws and changing things without our knowing, as we only know what they want us to know.

The use of black and white within all his art means every piece is dark and horror like, almost washed out and lifeless. The people all seem as though they have no personality, especially due to their lack of faces/unique clothing, which is where personality is usually shown. This links to the idea of dystopia, as though these people have become drones to the system.

The way the stairs complete a loop reinforces this message, for it is as though these people live life on this sort of conveyor belt, with no escape. M C Escher may have been drawing this to show how he perceives humans to be functioning already. The rooms on the landings of the stairs give the illusion of free will, but realistically there is no escape and the cycle will always continue.

Flipped landscape photos to create surreal imagery

After looking at these artists, I wanted to create some surreal landscapes of my own. I took photos of landscapes and  multiplied them in a photo editing app, positioning so they mirror each other and the sky acts as a background so the landscapes appear as a floating island. This fits with my theme as these islands could be what the world ends up as in the future, since we humans are slowly destroying it.

I played with space by trying to create a balance in this first image by not just mirroring this image, but rotating it so the base of both images touch and the large area of sky balancing this image by being in opposite corners. I also did experiment with having the image directly mirrored, but this ended up much less balanced and appear much more cliff like, which doesn’t reinforce my ideas regarding a dystopic floating island. The flipping of the image in this way is heavily influenced by the way that Escher flipped the stairs in an unnatural and gravity bending way in his art.

The natural trees contrast with the unnatural buildings in this image which proves that in the future nature can never be truly abolished, and it always wins one way or another no matter what we try to do to overtake it, in our denial that we are part of nature. The nature actually also takes the foreground, to demonstrate that it is the most important thing to preserving the future of this earth and that we should focus on it more.

The way the textures of the vines wrap around and combine/ intertwine in these dystopic flipside edits reminds me a lot of the wires we use in all of our electronics and our everyday life, proving that even if everything is technological, it is somewhat informed by our natural world and things like this can’t be controlled, as everything we have, even if it is manmade, came from a natural source in one way or another. The blue sky in these first edits implies a happier utopic earth, but in the second edits, the sky is grey and miserable, with the outcome being a reflection of that mood caused by nature.

In this second image, the manmade buildings are framed by the natural trees and bushes. The blank sky enhances and draws your eye to look between the trees at the buildings, which may have gone unnoticed if the sky was more visually appealing. The mood of sullenness was caused this day by the horrible weather, and therefore I wanted to enhance this in my own edits.

When I reflected this image, it reminded me of the way a lake looks on a clear day, when the trees and such are easily identifiable in their reflection in the water. Depth is indicated by the manmade houses and towers appearing tiny compared to the vast textures and colours seen in the trees. This furthers the message that natural things will always find a way to overpower human made things, even in a human dominated dystopia. some geometric shapes can be seen at the mirror line, which emphasises that everything is mathematical and planned to some degree.

I turned this image black and white and enhanced the contrast as part of my experimentation. This turned out looking rather monstrous, with all the lines and branches from the trees reminding me of lots of spindly insect legs. The symmetry emphasises the bug likeness of this as insects commonly are symmetrical in their patterns and they also commonly have the same amount of legs on both sides. Some of the patterns in the middle where the houses are visible make me think of moths, which would definitely be part of my dystopia, as I am terrified of them.

 The use of black and white was also heavily influence by Escher as I saw him experiment with monochrome and was curious as to how this would look if I implemented it in my own work. It makes my work much more horror based and captivating, as though if you look too hard you could be sucked into the middle of this piece.

[marcjampole]

From Al Bundy to Trumpty-Dumpty: The spiritual part of the war on Christmas was lost in the days Trump was failing as a casino owner

I started feeling under the weather at around Noon the day before Christmas, so I spent much of the late afternoon and early evening drifting in and out of sleep while the television blared Christmas-themed episodes of “Married with Children,” the 1990s dystopic situation comedy about a lower middle class family of selfish, self-seeking, uneducated, ignorant individuals who think only of material possessions.

All the Christmas episodes revolved around the father of the house, Al Bundy, trying to get his hands on money to buy Christmas presents, and each time coming up short. His various part-time jobs and schemes all backfire, or he fails to get to the bank in time or he gets drunk and buys drinks for the house at the bar where he ends up after a stint as a Santa, with all the other poor blokes playing Santa in Chicago. That one has a bizarre ending, as Al uses his one positive trait—his athleticism which combines strength, agility and speed—to take possession of items from the bar, all labeled “Ray,” and give them as presents to his family. Best gift: A gold necklace with the name Ray on the gold medallion to Peggy, the wife Al loves to hate and hates to make love to.

Along the way, the Bundys, and most other characters, display vile and venial behavior and say many cruel things, all of which is hilariously funny, because they form a harmless exaggeration of the real world. In none of the episodes do any of the characters consider anything about Christmas other than the tradition of buying, giving and receiving presents. Virtually all the action not in the Bundys’ seedy home occurs in the marketplace: Al’s shoe store, next-door neighbor Marcy’s bank, the department store and other mall fixtures. No spirituality. No finding the true spirit of Christmas. No affirmation of traditional values. Even the parody—no, travesty—of “It’s a Beautiful Life” in a misogynistic, misanthropic vision in which his wife and two children are all better off in every way if the miserable Al had not been born. We laugh because we recognize in the extreme meanness and venality of the Bundys a parallel to our own lives and the people we know.

In Al Bundy’s world, love, friendship and every other emotion can only be found in money and material possessions, the values of American consumerism.

Also in the world of Donald Trump. All his talk about a war on Christmas involves the public market of commerce and has no spiritual element. It’s as if anything having to do with the religious aspects of Christmas—the story and its meaning, going to a mass or other church service, volunteering to feed the homeless, even caroling—has been consumed in a miasma of commercial values.

From Bill O’Reilly in 2012 through Donald Trump this year, the war on Christmas has always reduced to the secular marketplace. Do clerks and cashiers say “Merry Christmas” and thereby manifest their religiosity or do they utter the blasphemous “Seasons Greetings” and risk eternal damnation? Do the decorations have images of the Christ child and the legend “Merry Christmas” or do they rip all Christian doctrine to shreds by interspersing “Happy Hanukkah” and menorahs among “Seasons Greetings” placards and sundry Santa Clauses, sleighs, decorated trees and colorful wrapped-and-bowed packages? Instead of letting the marketplace operate without constraints, like conservatives are supposed to, those who believe that Christians must fight back in some religious war propose to regulate the market by stressing their one holiday. The authoritarian plea is meant to intimidate other cultures by stressing the primacy of one religion as a means to establish it as a de facto, and (they hope) someday de jure, national faith. This intimidation is a kind of softening up of all minorities for other assertions of Christian dominance such as refusing to bake wedding cakes for gay weddings, making abortion as hard as possible if not illegal, buying into a global war on Islam, and tampering with science and history text books.

Many pundits have already detailed the many reasons why conceiving of a war on Christmas as a Trojan horse for a war on secular values is wrong. Briefly, we are a secular society founded by fairly unreligious rich folk. Furthermore, Christmas iconography already dominates most celebration, even if has ceased to have or never had religious significance. Moreover, making potential customers feel uncomfortable is never good marketing. As a Jewish atheist, I won’t shop in any store, online or brick-and-mortar, once someone has said “Merry Christmas” to me. I imagine many other Jews, Muslims, Hindi and Buddhists have similar feelings. The idea of secularizing Christmas in the marketplace makes good business sense, and it doesn‘t disturb the private celebrations of Christians. Let’s also consider that making “Merry Christmas” the standard greeting debases its religious connotation, because it turns the phrase into a secular greeting that everyone gives everyone.

The rightwing media has taken up the battle cry against the war on Christmas for five years, but most mainstream media has recognized it is a false issue, a fake war.

So who else but a charlatan to declare victory in a fake war? It makes perfect sense that Donald Trump would claim that he had won the war on Christmas by re-instilling Christian values in the marketplace, from which secularists (read: liberal, feminist, gay, immigrant and minority) had vanquished it. At his rallies over the past few weeks, The Donald has been patting himself on the back for bringing Christmas back. Now, a nonprofit started by former Trump aides is going to run a Christmas day commercial in which a series of everyday Americans thank Trump for what he has done since his administration took over. Among the many faces of casually dressed people in various locations, mostly white but a token number of people of color —all manifesting traits associated with working class people—is a beautiful young white girl who says, “Thank you for letting us say “Merry Christmas” again.” Someone should tell that little girl that it was never against the law to say “Merry Christmas”; it’s merely thought in polite company to be poor manners to assume someone you don’t know is Christian. Unless, that is, if she’s an actress playing the role of grateful little girl.

Of course, they don’t really care about Christmas as a religious holiday, not Trump, not Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, not Meghan Kelley (who insisted both that Santa Claus was a real historical figure and that he had to be white), nor any of the other rightwing shills who said secular forces were destroying Christmas by their continuance of the decades-long American practice of marketplace recognition of other religions. They have all proved themselves many time to be committed to the values of conspicuous consumption and consumerism. But as elitists and authoritarians, they like the idea of giving the ignorant something they can be angry at other than the greed and acquisitiveness of their corporate masters, and in Trump’s case, fellow rich folk. All of them supported the mean-spirited tax overhaul, which Trump is publically calling a “Christmas gift” to the American people, knowing full well that it only the gift to the wealthy He has admitted as much to his rich friends at Mar-a-Lago.

Here in New York, we see very little evidence of more people saying “Merry Christmas” and fewer people saying “Seasons Greetings,” no stripping signs of Hanukkah from decorations, no increased religiosity in the sentiments people express in public interactions. Beggars in the subways make sure to include everyone in their solicitations. I did see one group of young men, mostly Hispanic, in seminary garb roaming together in the East Village saying “Merry Christmas” to everyone and being greeted with typical New Yorker’s scorn by the people with whom they tried to engage. I have also seen collections of Orthodox Jews publicly celebrating their version of Hanukkah in the streets to the same reaction.

But it may be different in the hinterlands.

In any case, let Trump have his victory, a hollow one because the more that people focus their celebration of Christmas in the marketplace, the more the true spirit of Christmas suffers. That was the lesson of “Married with Children” two decades ago, and nothing has changed since then. The marketplace long ago Bundyized the celebration of Christmas.