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bility of this year s presentation. I just don t get it! he moaned, having
decided at some point to make a confidante out of her. Chas is always
telling us, Keep it Light! Keep it Light! This is not Light. This is anything
but Light.
For her own part, Ursula has reserved judgment, but now, watching the
clients opening their Trendpaks for the first time, she admits that Couch
132 Al ex Shakar
may have been right. As they peer into those silver-painted, octagonal
cardboard boxes, their faces drop like those of children finding their trick-
or-treat bags filled with chocolate-covered bugs. Having taken a look at
Trendpaks from previous years, Ursula can understand their dismay.
Normally this brightly colored box comes packed with quirky, entertain-
ing new products culled from stores around the world the latest toys,
crockery, books, 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, intelli-
gence, and social aptitude in growling male and piercing female voices.
And in the case of the few readily recognizable products, the ubiqui-
tous 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 Ven-
geance. 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 bel-
low 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
The Savage Gi r l 133
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 jun-
gle 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 pos-
sessions; 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 citi-
zens whose tragicomic flaws compound your own, ensuring perpetual fail-
ure. 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
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