• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 489 0

CDs, fabric blends and prints, fun little items they can take home for their spouses and children to play with. But this year most of the items aren’t so playful; some of them aren’t even readily identifiable; and the tags that come attached to them on gold threads usually only deepen the mystery. There is, for example, a headless, unclothed Barbie doll, her slit-open torso filled with wires, with a tag that says The Controlling Machine. The tag attached to a bent butter knife reads Surgical Instrument of the Tall Grays. A gob of soft red plastic is tagged This Is the Color of Electronic Blood. As Any Child Could Tell You. There is a microcassette recorder with a tag reading The Voices in Your Head, which, when played, sporadically whispers put-downs about the listener’s appearance, intelligence, and social aptitude in growling male and piercing female voices.

And in the case of the few readily recognizable products, the ubiquitous tags serve only to defamiliarize. Thus a Burt Bacharach CD is tagged This Is Not Camp. Irony Is beside the Point. A key chain of the Pokémon character Pikachu is labeled I Am Your Aborted Child. I Cry Out for Vengeance. I Order You to Kill! Kill! Kill! A photo of Jay Leno, autographed to “Frances,” is tagged Frances, You and I Are the Same Person, and We Both Know It, and Any Apparent Difference between Us Is Illusory, a Mere Divergence of Angles. Not Something to Be Proud of, for Either of Us, But There It Is.

Several explicitly primitivist products have been thrown in for good measure, including a “sacrificial” animatronic Barney doll, rewired to bellow in pain and then speak in tongues; a wooden box containing sealed canisters of “authentic, 100% organic warpaint”; and a book on Santería with a highlighted instructional chapter on the making of charms and spells.

Two of the items come with lengthy explications. The first is a chrome, egg-shaped beeper whose attached scroll reads:

This product will alert you when your attention is required in any one of your various virtual lives—when, for example, one of your cities is being besieged by Mongol hordes; or when your manager secures a multialbum deal for your rock band; or when your guardian spirit comes under an enemy black-magic assault; or when one of your virtual children is arrested for drug possession; or when you are needed at an urgent meeting of the Council of Jedi Knights.

The other is a set of holographic stills from the TV series Gilligan’s Island, one of each cast member, oscillating strangely among three stages of a characteristic facial expression, the trees and thatch huts of their jungle island in the background. At the bottom of each picture is printed the name of a deadly sin: the picture of Gilligan is labeled “Sloth”; the Skipper is “Anger”; Ginger is “Lust”; Mary Ann is “Envy”; the Professor is “Pride”; Mr. Howell is “Greed”; Mrs. Howell is “Gluttony.” The pictures are about the size of tarot cards; they come in a shallow cardboard box to which is attached an accompanying document:

A scuffle due to egotism causes your flare to fire into the sea; the search plane passes ineffectually by. Your raft sinks under the weight of your possessions; the cargo freighter disappears over the horizon. If you cup a conch hard against your ear, you may even hear the laughter—mocking, disinterested, divine. As a citizen you are trapped in hell, among other citizens whose tragicomic flaws compound your own, ensuring perpetual failure. The only escape from the situation comedy of a dystopian society is into the audience, the position of absolute exteriority. Only insofar as you choose to be purely a consumer, limiting your expressions of freedom to acts of consumption, do you remain free.

At the bottom of the Trendpak box is the trendbook, a manuscript bound by three gold rings. A facsimile of the trendbook’s glossy cover is projected on the screen behind the lava-rock podium. The text reads:

THE LITE AGE

A Trendbook for Survival

in a Bold New Era

TOMORROW LTD.

The title arcs in rainbow-striped letters over a computer-generated