Top 10 TV Shows of 2018

The title's a bit of a lie. The rest of these lists are going to be genuine top 10s. This one is a bit fudged. Because, well, I watched ten TV shows this year. And a lot of Pretty Little Liars, but that's not from this year. So this is less a best of and more a year in review for me. That's why, for instance, GLOW made it on here. You'll see what I mean. Anyway, enjoy!

#10 GLOW (s2)

The first season of GLOW had a slow ramp-up and a pretty wonderful ending. By the last two or three episodes, it became a show that seemed to genuinely appreciate professional wrestling not just as a spectacle, but as a storytelling medium. As someone who has been a fan of the actual stuff, it felt like something that was incredibly obvious finally being done for the first time. A scripted show that respects wrestling! That realizes it for the multi-faceted art form it is, despite its many problems! And it's about women! I cheered.

GLOW's second season said: what about fuck all of that. What if we just reduced wrestling to a spectacle again. Take everything out that even hints that it might be telling a story on its own; revert all of that back to the control of the shitty scenes between the blonde lady and the brunette. Except: pull back on that story too, even though it's way less interesting than anything else going on with any of the wrestlers. Why don't we pull back on the whole ladies thing, too.

GLOW's second season is a brutally boring ten hour long attempt to make Marc Maron's shitty dad character relatable. Fuck this show.

#9 The Haunting of Hill House (s1)

Here are two reviews. The first is me having watched through the whole series. The second is me halfway through the series.

First. I'm sorry to all my friends who I love and respect that y'all loved this show. I'm sorry that y'all got tricked into watching a ten hour Wes Anderson movie that has a couple of shitty ghosts in it. And then second:

The Haunting of Hill House has two things.

One of the two is: every flashback is motivated in the most annoying way possible. A clock turns into a watch in the past. A low-angle shot of someone walking in heels transitions into that same person walking down a hallway from the same angle. A ghost turns into a ghost.

The second is: the laziest Freud. Everything that happens to you at seven is entirely who you will become in the future. All the seeds are there, and there's nothing that happens between your preteen years and your late-20s/late-30s that can change that.

On the positive end: despite looking terrible (Netflix is worse than HBO in terms of house style at this point) and being shot in the most condescending way possible, it does sometimes have a genuine rhythm of addiction that works. And it's nice to see parents being genuine with their children.

Here's the secret third review: I adore haunted houses that are actually about the house, because 2008 happened. Houses fucking eat people. This show takes three of the central pieces of fiction in that genre (Jackson's original, the '63 The Haunting and the '99 The Haunting, all of which I adore) and fucks them into a mess about how to properly set up a match cut and how to revolve a camera in a way to strike a set for scares and how to dissolve the systemic issues with houses into a story of a petit-bourgeois family who goes through strife in order to reproduce families. Fucking oh my god fuck this show.

#8 Devilman Crybaby (s1)

I think I can fairly confidently say that Devilman Crybaby is the worst thing Masaaki Yuasa has ever made. Mind Game is one of my favorite films of all time; Lu Over the Wall and The Night is Short, Walk on Girl both made my top ten movies list last year. Tatami Galaxy and Ping Pong are both excellent, and I know I liked Kaiba well enough, despite not remembering many specifics. He's easily one of my favorite working directors. And that's despite having real issues with a lot of his work. Specifically with his main characters, and how they're often one month on the wrong forum away from becoming MRAs. Which is what I expected to continue to have a problem with here, and instead got the opposite.

Devilman Crybaby is Evangelion with a Netflix budget, which means it's Eva without any of the loose ends that make that show so compelling. On top of that, it's Eva with entirely too much credulous use of Christianity. It's even an Eva that trades "I mustn't run away" with "I must run a relay."

The way that it's the most Eva, though, is the way that Eva is the worst; it's a show that has collectivity boiling underneath its surface, and which instead sides with its most individualist impulses. It's so boring. And it doesn't even look that good.

#7 Aggretsuko (s1)

Sanrio - and all purveyors of corporate kawaii - has always been in the business of commodifying minor movements of revolt. Which is why it makes sense that they would team up with Netflix, a company that seems hell bent on doing for television (and, to a lesser extent nowadays, movies) what streaming services like Spotify have done for music: providing a simple, legal alternative to the internet's grey market in such a way as to fuck artists over just as bad, but make huge amounts of money for a major corporation. Our beautiful technological present is reterritorialization, the same way that kawaii aesthetics were born out of the writing of school girls that was done in such a way as to obfuscate messages from their teachers and other administrators. More about kawaii later, however!

Aggretsuko, as a character and a TV show, is basically the distillation of that commodification. Which is why she's great. As a character, she's the feminist invocation to speak out, and the subcultural aesthetics of death metal coupled cleanly with lean-in corporate culture. As a TV show she's feminist Office Space, when at least the elements of care work are still relevant to a generation lost in the gig economy. It's all capital capture all the way down, and that's one of the reasons I like Sanrio so much.

On the other hand, it's a nice show about solidarity between working women - though not to the point of disrupting the flow of capital, of course. It's about where that solidarity breaks down as well, as embodied in the chatty, gossip-spreading co-worker, the fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants friend who promises a job and doesn't deliver, and the surveillance of search history by the boss.

More than anything it's about what kinds of solidarity you'll seek out and be drawn to when doing reproductive labor. Who will help you pick up the pieces after an exhausting day so that you can make it back. And who, like Retsuko's short-lived boyfriend, won't. They get dumped. Work goes on, you pay the man at the karaoke place for a private place to scream, and you get drunk and do it all again. The pig boss keeps being sexist, HR gives him the slightest talking to, and nothing happens, because capital's got to keep flowing.

It's pretty fun, but not super impactful, honestly. The Christmas episode is kinda lame too.

#6 The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (s1)

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is at its best when it's most reminiscent of Xena: Warrior Princess. It doesn't have enough meat in the central cast - or a desire to explore their friendships in serious ways that don't center Sabrina - to live up to the best moments of Riverdale. It's also entirely too Netflix-produced to be fun and willing to abandon itself to its whims to live up to Xena. Which puts it in a bit of a weird spot; some great tossed-off episodes, barely any character development that amounts to anything, and the fact that nearly every character is assigned a motivation that doesn't at all, well, motivate their actions.

Take the demon that takes over the teacher early on in the season, who we learn at the end (spoilers I guess) is Lilith, Adam's first wife and mother of all demons. It's established fairly early on that her entire purpose is to get Sabrina to sign the book of the devil, and that she is doing so on Satan's command. We also establish, through scenes with the Satanist priest, that she wants to do so by "womenly wiles" or whatever. In other words, through social and emotional manipulation rather than force. In secret rather than out in the open. If I liked this show enough to watch it a second time, I'd have straight-up GIFs here, because the vast majority of this stuff is said explicitly. Here's what she does in the show: saves Sabrina and her family from a nightmare demon; maybe show Sabrina's friends visions?; help Sabrina start a feminist reading group; and summon 13 witches to burn down Greendale so that Sabrina is forced to sign the book to stop them.

You might think to yourself: that doesn't seem so much like an escalating plan as it does one thing that works after a bunch of things that clearly wouldn't work. And I might agree with you. Because, like most of the other people in this show, she definitely doesn't do anything according to the motivations that are loudly proclaimed about her throughout the show's run time. This isn't a thing I hate. It's just really weird how consistent it is. Or, more specifically, if there's anything about it I hate it's how long the show spends proclaiming what each character is doing, when it could have been a much tighter thing that plays in a darker, witchier space and worked well because of it.

On the other hand: the show does some really interesting stuff with the Weird Sisters, especially. Ambrose Spellman works surprisingly well. I'm curious enough about Susie and Roz to be a little worried. All of which is to say that despite having bogus ass motivations, the interpersonal character work is fairly strong, and that's mostly what I want from something like this.

#5 Channel Zero: The Dream Door

The second of two seasons of SyFy's creepypasta adaptation show in 2018 is probably better than the other one that was released, but it didn't do quite as much for me. The basic premise: a newly-married couple move into the man's house, only to find a door in the basement where there wasn't one prior. Opened, it leads to another door, behind which is the woman's childhood imaginary friend. The clown-faced contortionist Pretzel Jack is her protector, in a way that can be a little overprotective. A little less than the back half of the six episode season is dedicated to a new neighbor who turns out to have similar powers, and the creepy obsession he develops with her.

I think the discussion on this episode of Waypoints does more justice to the show than I can, so if you want a (mostly non-spoilery, as I recall) explanation, head there. For my part, I think the themes that resonated with Danielle Riendeau hit me in a similar way, but not as hard. It's a mostly smart look at the way trauma, internalized, plays out in relationships. That podcast also makes a good case for the ways in which the racial politics succeed and don't.

One thing that sticks with me is the chemistry between the three leads. They did a pretty great job with the casting, and developing those sparks in weird, uncomfortable ways.

#4 Laid Back Camp

The things that Laid Back Camp do well seem, on their face, to be fairly easy. This 12-episode anime about a group of high school girls who go camping during one winter season has sprezzatura, you might say. One girl loves solo camping, and runs into another who biked a long way to see Mt. Fuji only to fall asleep before she got there. This girl has just moved and entered the same girl as the first, where she finds a couple more girls who have an Outdoor Activities Club. A drunk lady who subs in for a teacher on maternity leave and a friend of the first girl rounds out the main cast, when they all end up going camping on Christmas. How could you fuck that up?

The answer, of course, is: in a million different ways. Kitsch walks a thin line. And a show that runs twelve episodes with just over twenty minutes of content (skipping the opening and closing songs) is still going to run you over four hours, which is longer than most very long movies. It needs to have something compelling to hold that length. Especially when three quarters of the "action" is basically watching characters cook and eat things outdoors. The other quarter keeps that action compelling, though.

Shima Rin is the girl who likes solo camping in winter, and Nadeshiko Kagamihara is the girl who wants to see Mt. Fuji. Their friendship is incredibly sweet, based on respecting each other's boundaries but also pushing each other to try new things. It gives Shima an arc that's pretty comfortable; she goes from being someone who only wants to camp alone, to being someone who loves camping alone but is okay with camping with her friends sometimes too. She doesn't have to obliterate herself for the social, but she doesn't have to alienate herself from it either. It's just nice.

#3 Riverdale (s2)

I burned through the first two seasons of Riverdale in less than a week, and that was pretty early on in the year, so my memory of precisely what took place is a bit rough. I definitely wrote about two thousand words on it, but as far as I can tell those are lost forever. Back your shit up in a place you can find it, friends. I also haven't seen any of season three yet.

My main memory of my initial impressions, at this far of a remove, are basically that the first season of the show did an incredible job of threading the main characters' relationships together. It knew when to pull out of Archie's storyline and weave in Veronica's, or Betty, or Jughead's. And it did so in a way that lead to genuinely great interactions between women; Veronica and Betty specifically, but secondary characters as well. The second season - the one under consideration here, I guess - did a much worse job at this. It blew the scope way up, and in doing so lost some of that ability to characterize and develop interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, it did give us the brilliant version of Cheryl Blossom that now exists, so it wasn't all a loss on that front.

To quickly go over that difference in scale: Season one of Riverdale was more or less the first season of Twin Peaks, with a little less mysticism and empathy. A small town suffers a death, and the season revolves around resolving the who and the why. Along the way some people hook up or break up, some come and go, and mostly we're interested in the texture of the town. Season 2 is what the second season of Twin Peaks was probably trying to do; with the central mystery resolved, it's all about how that central trauma warps that kind of small town. Instead of pageants and camping trips, though, it's all histories of genocide and betrayal and present-day local governmental manipulations and riots.

The stuff of season two is, frankly, way better than the first season. People aren't just individuals, they're players in a social space, fighting collectively for what they want and need. Tensions among groups bubble and explode and are manipulated in particular directions by the rich to meet their own ends. Shameful secrets produce generational consequences. It's a show with one eye staring hard at how real life works. The individual components, and the interpersonal relationships that worked so well in the first season, are backdropped for the best possible reason. It's still kind of a bummer, though.

Especially because when it does get personal again, as with the reveal of the Black Hood stuff that plagues the first half of the season, it's simply not as good. Season one is so incredibly adept at not just pacing the character growth, but literally cutting between it. The relatively few episodes are cut together so well that I almost never felt like I was getting too much of any one plot line or character. Everyone felt represented, not because the show needed them to be, but because it was worked best at every moment. The second season feels way more uneven; Archie's little fascist neighborhood watch is overwhelming one moment and forgotten the next. Jughead's investigative journalism then itself becomes overwhelming. The worst thing, though, is how little time Betty and Veronica are given together. They have incredible chemistry in the first season, and how they get along drives so much interest. Second go around, they're basically strangers to each other. It's a goddamn shame.

But then, even with that issue. And for a show whose racial politics are pretty busted. And all the other bits and pieces. It's a show that ends in a beautiful, comprehensive riot and that gave us Cheryl Blossom, and that's pretty sweet.

#2 Sanrio Boys

Like most things Sanrio, Sanrio Boys is a stilted, awkward attempt to suss out the nicest story of consumptive production, specifically in regards to gender. This time around, we follow a boy who has a deep love of Pompompurin, based around its association with his grandmother, which is buried under the dual traumas of his being bullied over that love as a kid and his grandmother passing away soon after, which didn't allow him to grow past his transference (in the psychoanalytic sense) of that bullying into anger at her. The show itself follows his induction into a group of self-described Sanrio Boys, and the trials and tribulations that result.

The very basic breakdown: Sanrio Boys is basically two six-episode seasons of television mashed into one. The first introduces Kouta as the protagonist, and revolves around the assembly of the five boys. A soccer player, a flirt, a class president, and a young English boy who is often mistaken for a girl are the friends. The second half of the season sees them assembled and walks through the creation of a theatrical play they put together, which also serves as a framing device for the show. Which is weird in a way I'll get into in a moment.

The first half of the season works surprisingly well. The boys have fairly reasonable conflicts and resolutions, and it moves along. What it's doing, more or less, is positing the possibility of homosocial reproduction through kawaii aesthetics. Boys can be produced through their gendered consumption of Sanrio characters, albeit in ways distinct from how girls are. They have to overcome stereotypes of perversity, instrumentalized femininity, and arrested development, for instance. None of these things are dealt with in any robust way, though, because the goal is to show that overcoming these obstacles is a way to cement the homosocial even more firmly.

This isn't going to be an essay by the way. It's basically bullet points in paragraph form. Call it 7 theses on Sanrio Boys.

The two-seasons-in-one structure is most pronounced, and kind of at its worst, in the character arc of Kouta. In the first half he's a troubled kid, incredibly fixated on that Freudian moment of losing his toy and his grandma, but he's fundamentally about being the glue. The boys assemblage is possible because he is able to see past their various masculine performances, assess what's actually eating at them, and say the things that will help them move past it. His traumatic moment grounds him and makes him good with people. The second half unmoors this character. Kouta no longer has to make impromptu speeches about trusting others. So the second half of the show basically devolves into his psyche, and not in a "final two episodes of Evangelion" kind of way. He simply shifts from someone who gets other people to someone who is in his own head about why he's the only one who doesn't "sparkle." It's boring.

Ryo, the underclassman, is basically a genderswapped version of Mana Fujisaki from Onegai My Melody (which is a much better show than either of the Sanrio anime from this year). More importantly, he's the season's focal point as far as gendered production is concerned. His character goes from a mysterious hanger-on who ogles the class president (Seiichiro) at archery practice to a boy-who-is-mistaken-as-a-girl and who hates being pampered with cute things to a, well, basically the same but a little more accepting of himself, by the end. Ryo's more "unstable" gender is allowed to persist more or less unchanged throughout, which on its face is a fairly good thing. This show being what it is, though, it's a little more complicated than that. Because this show is about friendship.

Sanrio's marketing materials have always heavily implicated the idea that their primary function is to facilitate friendship. Small gift, big smile has been their tagline for ages; for further information, check their corporate about page. Their success as a company is almost entirely reliant on their ability to insert themselves into social situations that require exchanging low-price items. They brand them in order to produce that "big smile;" from recognition or from appreciating cuteness. The more friendship exists, in other words, the bigger the market for Sanrio goods (as long as there exists in those friendships the need to exchange gifts. Which there always is). That means Ryo's not being forced into one or another gendered position has less to do, at the base level, with him learning to accept himself, and more to do with the production of the market of the goods being sold. It's about the consumptive production of gender, in other words.

There's not a lot to say about the play, really, but I did want to return to it. Because it's just such a weird framing device, in that the play is basically a recap of the show (but mostly the first half) that runs over the first episode's opening credits and the last episode's closing credits. Or, it's a three-act version of the three-act structure of the show. It's an artifice that doesn't so much expose the artifice of what preceded as it does smile blankly back at it. I kinda loved it.

#1 Channel Zero: Butcher's Block

It's been long enough since I watched Butcher's Block, the third season of Channel Zero (discussed earlier) and the first that came out in 2018, that I don't know that I can do justice to this weird neat thing. Or rather, the way I want to do it justice is to say: maaaan. Maaaaaan. This fucking thing. This Fucking Thing. And repeat variations on that until people who like the weird, particular shit that I like watch it. I don't know those people though.

Butcher's Block is based on a series of (quite good) creepypasta about forest services individuals, most of which are unified by a few threads of strangeness that they encounter. Most famously, there are the stairs leading up out of the woods, and ending in a door. This season takes that image - one among a handful in the original stories - and runs with it. The protagonists aren't rangers, but two young women who move to a new town to start a new life. They find out what's at the top of those staircases. They are tempted by what's up their to fix their brain chemistry - specifically their genetic predisposition to schizophrenia - at a terrible cost.

It's full of big open shots of fields with a plantation in the background, of painfully literalized psychoses, of angry old gods. It's a season about eating; people eating people, gods eating people, people eating things, society eating people. It's all so on the nose and such a joy. I feel like I should go rewatch it? I'm probably not going to. But I kind of want to.

2014 in Shit: Short Peace

I mostly wanted to see Short Peace because I want to play the videogame associated with it. It was written by Suda51. I still haven't played it.

The big hook about Short Peace, an anthology of four anime short films, was that the director of Akira was involved. I thought Akira was pretty cool when I saw it, but it wasn't ever the anime for me in the way it is for a lot of people.

Otomo's contribution to the anthology, Combustible, is a short about firefighters in ancient Japan. It's a weird love story thing with class resentment undertones, and it's very pretty. It ended up relying really heavily on that love story, though, and ultimately paying it off in a kind of boring way. At least I think that was how I felt about it.

I saw Short Peace while it was playing at the Japanese Film Festival of San Francisco, where I also saw Crows : Explode and Why Don't You Play In Hell? The festival is tied to the J-Pop Summit, which I found out about last year when Anne Boyer was visiting and mentioned it. I ended up going last year because there was a Hello Kitty Kawaii Town booth and I thought that would be a funny thing to go to. When it came around this year I found out about the festival and got excited. Since the 2013 summit, every Sanrio store in San Francisco has closed. At Hello Kitty Con, the chairman of Sanrio Inc and Sanrio GmbH, the US & European subsidiaries of Sanrio, was asked about those closures; his response was basically that the company was trying to get a foothold in Wal-Mart and Target stores and that closing their own stores was somehow tied up in this.

Interestingly, the con happened about five months after Sanrio's stock had taken a quick dive based on wonky information from a Goldman Sachs analyst. The analyst claimed that Sanrio's IR presentation suggested the company was moving away from licensing and toward making their store operation central to their business. Despite being obviously bogus, investors jumped ship. Not for very long, of course, but I imagine that experience is now taken into account at any point that the question of operating a store is brought up.

Shuhei Morita's Possessions is a film about hostile objects. A traveler takes refuge from a storm in a hut where the things revolt against his presence. The space itself reorganizes to confound him. I really hated the animation though. The same could probably be said of Hiroaki Ando's Gambo, but that did have a pretty cool fight between like a polar bear and a demon, I think. In terms of how all four pieces functioned as complete short films, Gambo was probably the best. It's all kinda gross-looking CGI though so I dunno.

The final movie in the anthology, which I think was translated as A Farewell to Weapons, for some reason sidestepping the Hemingway reference?, was a bit stickier. Not that I particularly loved it, but I remember walking out thinking that if I gave much of a shit about the whole drone thing as a locus of the political that I might be a lot more interested in it. Which isn't to say that I don't think the conversation about drones isn't an important one; just that I have trouble staying interested when that seems to be the primary lens through which folks talk about the state of politics or the world or whatever. Kind of like how I get it when people talk about videogames as this magical site of new practices or whatever. Even when I am convinced by their point and glad they found a way to make it, there's a weird triumphalism to the whole thing that just puts me off.

I guess it's also kind of funny that Weapons' director worked on a number of the Gundam series, and that he had a hand in designing the mechs for the most obtuse fighting game I've ever played, Virtual On. Getting it on Dreamcast like six years late without knowing anything about it certainly didn't help but goddamn if it wasn't a game that militated against your engaging with it. Really I should be waiting to post about this movie until I another thing I'm working on goes out (if it does), since that's all about Suda51 and mechs, but this whole project this year has been such a goddamn mess and I saw so few movies and cared about such a small fraction of them it's kind of hard to get it together to do that.

Weapons is about a team in a desert/city environment being sent in to disable or destroy some sort of rogue automatic tank thing. It's also CGI I think? but it looks better. Drone stuff maybe. I dunno. The whole anthology was kind of a let down.

2013 in Shit (BONUS): Hello Kitty's Fashion Music Wonderland & Here We Go!

In 2013, Viz Media started a line of comics licensed by Sanrio. Each of them tells a series of short, wordless stories about Kitty and her friends.

For ComicCon this year, a sort of pre-series comic was released, called Hello Kitty's Fashion Music Wonderland. In October, the first of the actual series came out: Hello Kitty: Here We Go!. I had Fashion Music Wonderland long before I started this series, but had kind of forgotten about it; I only recently got Here We Go!. They're both kind of great, as a person who likes Hello Kitty a lot. So I decided that, even though I read no other comics, they were worth talking about.



It seems like it's been ages since I've discussed any specific piece of Hello Kitty visual art; after I initally wrote about Jason Han's "I Haz Mouth," I had kind of planned to talk at length about some of the other paintings or sculptures from the 35th anniversary, collected in the Three Apples book. I never really got around to it, unfortunately, and I'm certainly not going to be going nearly as in depth here, but it'll be a fun little thing to do.

The first image, above, is from the arc in Fashion Music Wonderland in which Kitty White becomes a famous pop star; it specifically is the panel where she receives the gift of a Rock Band-like system from Dear Daniel, her old friend/boyfriend/husband, or something, depending on the line I guess.

It's a weird image, kind of very reminiscent of "I Haz Mouth" in its replication of Kitty's face. Except this time her "primary" face is actually entirely absent; her back is turned, but the speech bubble has her full face inside of it, and there is a "pixelated" version of it on the screen of the television. Plus there is Dear Daniel, whose face is also Kitty's face.

But then, it's also even more complex in its way; the exclamation point this time is not just in the speech bubble, it is dotted with Kitty's face, and surrounded by the Bang!-like color that also goes around the Kitty-whose-"talking"'s self. And instead of mirror Kitty (or Mimmy, but probably not) there's Dear Daniel looking like a smug-ass dad, which just, I don't even know how to.

In the short narrative, this gift leads to the formation of a band, who go to a talent show and win a record deal, and Kitty goes off to travel the world, even as she pines for Dear Daniel back home. The final panel of the arc mirrors this one, as Dear Daniel is lead to retrieve his gift which turns out to be Kitty herself; given the bizarre way in which Kitty is refracted throughout the objects and expressions here, from linguistically to technologically mediated, her own return as a unified individual gift is, well, really really interesting.

Of course, the whole point of Hello Kitty is that she is meant to be a gift, whether for another or to oneself, so this moment is shot through with that knowledge as well. I've not got a ton to say there, although it should remain an open topic, I think.

More immediately relevant is that, if, like I've been endlessly repeating, ghosts are about a becoming-linguistic of space, then this panel suggests a certain ghostliness to Kitty herself, if in no other way than in her persistent refusal to become-linguistic. I've covered this better in the essays linked above, but her tendency to occupy non-linguistic representative spaces through signifiers of language is pretty well established at this point. Here though, there is the addition, in the form of the "pixelated" face, of the sort of necessary abstraction of language as well as its refusal. It's a real neat panel.



It's not until the main story arc of Fashion Music Wonderland, where Kitty stars in a sorta Alice in Wonderland, that we see ghosts again. There's the Cheshire Cat, of course, but there's also this weird moment, where Kitty is chasing after that cat, and runs through this intersection populated by quasi-human forms that, again, seem to be somewhat digitized. In a weird way, it could almost be a scene out of Serial Experiments Lain, Internet ghosts and all.

Kitty is chasing the Cheshire Cat because Dear Daniel, here in the role of the very late rabbit, has asked her about his gloves and top hat, which the Cat is wearing. She entered Wonderland by way of thoughtlessly wandering into an open manhole, where she transformed into Fashion Music Kitty; it's all pretty adorable. This in Wonderland ends at the tea party, where the Red Queen shows up and looks very intimidating but ultimately invites Kitty in, and they all enjoy themselves. Which is all just to say that this scene is not really even remotely important to the story; it's a pure action sequence, devoid of narrative weight or responsibility, an unnecessary conveyance of how she gets from point A to point B. It is, in other words, a sort of visualization of what's usually left in the gutter.

Of course, these are more obviously ghostly than the reaction shot to Kitty's gift, even if it also obvious that they are not meant to be read as ghosts insofar as ghosts are associated with horror. They are, rather, instantiations or embodiments of space; a crosswalk doesn't make sense without both vehicular and pedestrian traffic, but it can only really project the former sufficiently. So it speaks its form through these quasidigital objects.



The "Deep Clean" short of Hello Kitty: Here We Go! has, incidentally, a panel that almost directly quotes the latter one from Fashion Music Wonderland. In this, Kitty is engaged in spring cleaning when she gets sucked into a deep underground civilization made up of people made of stone who eat gems and drink and smoke lava. As she enters the town, following her new friend, the panel above shows her wonderment and the friendliness of her newfound city's inhabitants.

In this case, the way that the inhabitants function as expressions of the landscape itself; that deep, the folks are made of rocks, of course. There's no crosswalk, because there's probably not a whole lot of need for vehicular travel; the roads are still very much designed for them, though. Here We Go! is very much, as the name suggests, a comic about Kitty's travels; she is depicted variously as a secret agent, an explorer, and a safari-goer throughout the collection. There are a number of vehicles that she drives or rides in, which makes the absence of them here, if not especially pronounced, at least interesting.

This too is why the stone folks inhabitants of this space is interesting on the level of space itself's becoming-linguistic. In conjunction with the quotation of the digitalish ghosts from the earlier collection of stories, here we are dealing with embodiment through possibility; rather, though, than the expression of space through slightly-estranged normative bodies, its through bodies themselves that are expressions of (in that they consist of the same stuff as, abstracted anthropomorphically,) the space. Which again recalls the first pictured panel; when Kitty becomes linguistic, or at least decidedly fails to, its generally through a form of expression which only ever appears as a simple representation of the stuff of which she is made. Her face.

Speaking of Kitty with the gendered pronoun obscures the point here significantly. That is: she herself is not a character. She precedes narrative. Kitty White is neither character nor stuff; she only exists as stuff, but on its periphery, or as a structuring force. Kitty is, that is to say, the way that stuff enters into the realm of representation, that it becomes-linguistic. She is, I suppose, a brand, although I hold some reservations about using that sort of language. Not that it's necessarily wrong, just that I'm not sure it's totally right.

These three panels, across two comics, tell their own story; it's about how Kitty's presence structures the possibility of the stuff which surrounds her. Call it Kitty Correlationism; her worlds are always only epistemological, organizations of being in accordance with the self-image of branded junk without interiority. Without an anchoring subjectivity, space becomes necessarily as expressive as the pseudosubjects which inhabit it. It's the objective correlative writ large; space, in fiction, sure, but mostly in manufactured objects that exist in the world as potentials for exchange-value, is a response to the subjects affective state.



The final image, also from Here We Go!, complicates my tidy little narrative. From one of the one-page shorts with which this title is filled, it is a brief story about Kitty driving around, getting a flat, and using My Melody's unicycle to replace the tire.

The most obvious difference is the style, which is most obviously explicable by way of the little lines that emanate from the characters' eyes. They aren't really expression lines or action lines or anything; they're just kind of there, looking real weird. Especially on My Melo.

But then, here is the vehicle, no longer absent. A car, too, that object which has, perhaps more than any other, totally restructured the way space works in the world for individuals, especially in America. From trucking to suburbs to sprawl, the automobile is sort of the antithesis of the expression of space; it's its silencing, at least in the form of distance. And yet here too is Kitty.

2013 in Shit: Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

The only class that I took on film as an undergraduate was entirely about John Carpenter. I'd never seen any of his movies before that, although I liked Lynch and was interested in Cronenberg. The professor had taught a class on Horror Film prior that a few of my friends had taken, and were pretty effusive about, and I also missed his senior seminar on vampire fiction (I believe it was the same quarter as I took my senior seminar on Proust, but am not sure, and am neither sure whether this was before or after the Carpenter class). Professor Leicester was weird, and I did end up taking a small class on Milton from him as well; as I recall, the research interests listed on his faculty page included porn and country music, and he was one of the only professors in the Literature department teaching film classes at the time (at least as far as I remember).

His readings leaned strongly Lacanian, though I believe (having read almost nothing of her, admittedly) that it was very much a Lacan through Kristeva, and where I had previously thought about film mostly in generalities he encouraged a particular attention that I've since found invaluable. One of the things that stuck with me most of all was his asking the class to reject the idea that the women in Halloween were stupid or objects of a moralizing gaze or to be moralized about, and instead to pay attention to the small gestures or phrases, and to build out of them first before assuming the narrative weight. And he was right about that, I think; that movie has a depth of character that runs in direct contrast to its misogyny. I still think I Know What You Did Last Summer is even better at this, but it isn't a competition; the point is that these texts work against themselves and that this is wonderful.

Another of his lessons that stuck for me was his focus on Carpenter's use of what he called "cool moves;" this was mostly in relation to Assault on Precinct 13, but also (I might be wrong here) discussed in the context of The Thing. Leicester's argument was that Carpenter was borrowing a certain affective move from Howard Hawks, a way of engaging with homosociality and competitive friendliness in an established filmic shorthand consisting of things like catching a tossed shotgun in midair.

Leicester would point these moments out with no little relish, identifying them not only in their ecstatic immanence but in how they were framed, whether these frames were quoted, &c &c. And most importantly, how that framing or quoting or whatever spoke to the moment in which it happened, how it recontextualized certain relationships or reorganized social dynamics or presented new or enhanced aspects of one character's existence within the world and situation of the film. It was an incredibly generous form of criticism, and very precise even as it argued incredibly counterintuitively. That was also the class in which I first watched and began initially formulating my long-deferred theory of ghosts based on The Fog, so it was pretty cool.

The most exciting part of Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters for me was catching Hansel do those cool moves, mostly in the form of jauntily notching his shotgun into his shoulder (though the one instance of him replicating this tic with a large stick really cements how funny it is). Of course, as Professor Leicester strove to show, the coolness here was never in a vacuum; it always relied on and was generative of context.

I don't really remember if it was the same year as the Carpenter class or the year after, but I ended up applying for and winning a small grant at my school in the last year I was there. It was called the Humanities Undergraduate Research Award, and required submitting a proposal for a research project with a signoff by a professor; the winners were allowed to present a paper at the end of the year. I decided that I was going to submit a project called Hello Kitty Everything, which in that form was to be a series of essays about all the major (as determined by, uh, me) Sanrio characters. It was going to begin with an introduction about Hello Kitty, and then move through Chococat, My Melody, Charmmy Kitty, Badtz-Maru, and on and on. I also was going to anchor the project with a vague constellation of ideas, with the most overarching being Brecht's formulation of realism. On some level I've been working on this since, although hardly in the way I proposed. The closest I ever came to completing it in the initially proposed form was my contributions to three different #spamfm Chinese New Year compilations (the third of which I was the exclusive participant of); I don't think you can find those songs anywhere now, but they probably still exist.

The second new year compilation track was titled "My Melody, Remarks History" and was really a bad song. I basically wrote lyrics and sung them (I am a poor singer) and didn't record any sounds otherwise. It was nearly five minutes long, and was about My Melody as myth, more or less. The little rabbit started, allegedly, as a one-off bunny in a little red riding hood special with no name, but her potential popularity was realized and she became a staple. From what I understand, her popularity has had wild swings; the story is that in the 80s it was basically impossible to find merchandise of her anywhere, until a Strawberry News reader poll saw her come out on top; since then she has consistently remained in the upper tier of Sanrio characters, although (from what I understand) regional fluctuations can still be somewhat intense. I've heard, for instance, that her popularity in Japan was at a nadir about the same time as it reached its zenith here, about half a decade ago, but that's just anecdotal, and probably misremembered.

My interest in her, aside from the fact that she is one of my favorite of their designs, was largely in regards to how exactly her origins as an adaptation of little red riding hood affected the temporality of the Sanrio quasiverse. Everything in Sanrio is a bit of a weird timetable, given that their world comes very much after their products and remains unformalized. There are certain constants though, often related to Debord's clarifications on commodity time in Society of the Spectacle. I decided to start thinking of what My Melody occupied as "myth time."

This is complicated in a way that most theories projected on Sanrio characters aren't; My Melo had an anime called Onegai My Melody, which follows My Melo as she leaves Mari Land, her home, to pursue Kuromi, who is engaged in a plot to collect black notes via bad feelings to bring about some unspecified bad thing. My Melo collects pink notes and they race to a hundred; it's a pretty good show, and utterly weird for it to be based on Sanrio characters, whose characterization is exclusively situated in promotional materials, for the most part.

I really enjoy Genevieve Valentine's take on Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, but I want to take a slightly different tack and try to piece together its mythological temporality, instead of relating its historical fuckups; not, hopefully, in some po-faced Academic Thesis way, but because, for me, that was the most invigorating thing about actively watching the movie as a whole (as opposed to the individual moments that were most fun in their cool moves).

I decided fairly early on in Gretel that one way to read it would be in continuity with Xena: Warrior Princess; I believe the impetus there was Hansel's reliance on insulin (he is diabetic in the movie due to the childhood episode in the witch's candy house; the movie could also be productively read as a toychest in the same way I did Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) and Xena's invention of CPR in the season one finale. There is also the scene in which Gretel invents a defibrillator with her steampunk taser, which cements that similarity. The history of medical science in this universe might be the impetus but I don't really have more to say about it than that. Sorry.

This speculative continuity draws out interesting similarities; both Xena and Gretel function as some weird sort of fairy tale consultant procedurals, except without the representation of the material conditions that allows that genre to make sense. In both cases, though, the team of protagonists are clearly operating as reluctant contractors, working outside established power dynamics to achieve a generally-recognized good end through whatever-it-takes means, and both have historical identities that privilege their ability to achieve those ends, especially when it comes to being hired.^[1]

Which is just to say that Xena's warlord past and Gretel's witch-hood are both basically forms of knowledge that construct their capacity to act without structural support. Which is to say that they are both fictions, really, but also that they are fictions which adequately theorize their own status as such in a way that most don't. That they both take place in the My Melody-esque myth time, a strange fusion of the spectacular logic of time organized by commodities with the situated eternality of the fairy tale, pushes them together; one way to say this would be to say that where Valentine sees aggressive anachronism I see acts of refusal, which in effect isn't all that much different except in how the organization of events (worldbuilding) approaches time.

Which is more or less to say that, like Xena, I don't think Gretel gets it wrong; I think it is an argument against the aesthetic assumptions that condition what getting it right can look like. Admittedly it is not an especially strong argument; the ground is already mostly ceded by the use of fable rather than history. But fabular time is relevant to the assumptions we make about historical time, existing neither in nor outside of it. And it is also important to how we think of spectacular (or (late) capitalist) time, which, for all its granularity in the form of management and regulation, is at large exactly the sort of situated eternal that My Melody condenses into cute.

Another strategy that I learned in Leicester's class on Carpenter was how to consciously approach a film as a constructed whole. The elision of elements of a film is something we necessarily do, and it was through, I believe, The Fog that I came to understand how one way to play within this would be to actively declare the bookends of a film, refusing that the whole of a movie was necessarily the first shot to the final, or the space between the opening and closing credits, or etc. One way to do this is to identify a closing frame, and then to reach backwards through the film to identify what that closed. One option, for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, would be to say that it takes place in the space between Blue Velvet and Hellraiser. That cuts out the first half hour or so of the film and everything after the massacre at the blood moon convention.

Part of the point of this framing, of course, is simply to provide a base on which the elided portions can be differently accessed. So if I say that The Fog ends with the return of the golden crucifix, I'm not saying that Adrienne Barbeau doesn't cite The Thing From Another World, but that that citation functions differently than it would otherwise due to its being outside of the frame. It also means, then, that rather than assuming the obvious structure, with the child actors serving as prologue and the introduction of the adults as the beginning of the main story, that everything prior to the camera's delving underground is the pre-Velvet prologue; that is, up to that point the film doesn't have the overtones of an examination of the complicity between peace and violence (to HUGELY oversimplify). Or at least, it doesn't have them in terms it tacitly expects us to recognize.

The closing frame works more as genealogy than anything, though. Seen through visual allusion, it enacts this thematic layering as both a culmination and an initiation; Gretel, then, both closes as Hellraiser and demands retroactively to be read through it. But the conditions of the frame matter as well; it would not close with this allusion had it not opened with (a different) one. In the context of this movie, Hellraiser doesn't exist without Blue Velvet. That itself could form a compelling argument; resonances at the level of the unconscious as structure and horror as affect, dissonances at the level of the contemporary use of the Expressionist toolset and the consequence of objects. Read through Gretel, a more complete picture might be derived, not least in the position of misogyny and specifically (which is to say historically) filmic elaboration of affect in the form of camp. Or, more formally, we could discuss why it is that a quotation of Blue Velvet takes the form of a way of moving the camera, while a quotation of Hellraiser takes the form of costume design.

Or we could zoom back out, and return to the question of time. Because citing Blue Velvet doesn't just mean citing the debates around the film's theme; it carries other baggage as well. And not the least of that is how Lynch's film takes place in the suburbs, in a time frame that is probably only really comprehensible as the fifties through the eighties. Which is to say: the time frame of a situated eternal.

The (US) fifties being, of course, more a construction of the futurity of the thirties just before it failed to bear fruit, and the nostalgia of the eighties as everything began to fall apart. The fifties being, that is to say, a fantasy of infinitely extending stability, of unthreatening and unthreatened growth alongside a security of life and value. A non-time, as it were. Exactly as realistic as a (maybe) German village from (undisclosed) centuries ago with full literacy, steampunk guns and insulin injections, or where Caesar crucified a young warrior princess over a decade prior to the first steps in Homer's bardic career. Or where the profusion of commodities precede their contextualization, even as they are introduced as Little Red Riding Hood.

Of course, Blue Velvet's aesthetic is a mix of horror and melodrama and detective story, which is culturally about as far from the B-fairytale steampunk of Gretel as possible. And this isn't to say that these aesthetic modes necessarily share an orientation toward temporality; but in these specific instances, they do. This is probably nowhere more obvious in Blue Velvet than the scene where Ben pantomimes Roy Orbison's "In Dreams." I think that's pretty self-explanatory.

That the logic of dreams is evident in Hellraiser is useful; rather than the Nightmare on Elm Street approach of dreams as diegesis, Hellraiser is a logic of dreams expressed primarily in forms of architecture. The cenobites themselves, as the citational objects, don't present a contrast with this so much as an extension; less than bodies, the monsters of Hellraiser are designed objects for the inhabitation of space. They kill because they are extensions of a murderous topos. The topos is murderous because it is forever.

I do hope you realize by now that there's going to be nothing resembling a synthesis here.

One of my favorite films in the genre of situated eternality is Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, even if it lays the werewolves as menstruation metaphor on a little thick. That it also derives from the Little Red Riding Hood myth is probably part of it; the scene with the aristocratic gentlemen being transformed into (were)wolves becomes an explicit link between the politics of class (and race) and cute by way of the myth, and My Melody's writtenness on its palimpsest. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters might have nothing to do with the actual myth at hand, or even much to do with Jordan's dark & sparkly aesthetic, but fucked if they don't occupy the same nonspace. Or, to be more accurate, the same absence of time as space. The same (say it with me now) situated eternal.

Here, then, are two lengthy justifications of the weight of Hansel's cool moves; that their performative nature is anchored in not the countertemporality of steampunk, but in the atemporality of myth, and that they draw on a cinematic language of action, horror, and fairy tale simultaneously, pulling them together without a pretense of synthesis. These find their unification in the how the intrafilmic frame is composed of interfilmic moves, with reference to the specificities of the films interpolated, and also in how the former's (in its positive articulation) subsumption of the latter precedes their disentangling. What this provides doesn't necessarily find expression in the Hawksian gesture, which lack is itself a condition of its own ability to produce friction. Or to say it differently: it works to spite all this contextualizing.

Which is maybe just another way of saying that it is what it is. The Hawksian gesture is always a productive site of inquiry into the film's epistemology precisely because of its aggressive immanence, its entanglement with reductive homosociality, its negative formalism. It is necessarily a gesture at odds, a refusal of depth, an indication of aporia. It is an invitation to act disrespectfully, to criticism, to analysis, to a reaction absent humor or charity or sincerity, because it is a preemptive disarming, a smirk or a shrug or a swagger without content.

But then, it being what it is doesn't say shit about where it is, or how it is. So it's an irony, sure. All the more effective for refusing to double itself, or stand outside its own absence. To which, I suppose, there are many responses. Mine just happens to be, alright, fuck it. Lets get it.

























[1] I know I said last time that it was likely the last, but here's one more Easter Egg for you. I'm taking this opportunity to announce that A Truly Blonde Child's first EP Xena: Season 1 will be released on Fuck the Polis! on January 7^th. Feel free to check out the album trailer directed by Tuchus Christ for a short preview.

Review: Angela S. Choi's Hello Kitty Must Die

I hate Hello Kitty.

I hate her for not having a mouth or fangs like a proper kitty.

She can’t eat, bite off a nipple or finger, give head, tell anyone to go and fuck his mother or lick herself. She has no eyebrows, so she can’t look angry. She can’t even scratch your eyes out. Just clawless, fangless, voiceless, with that placid, blank expression topped by a pink ribbon.

Poor Hello Kitty. Having to go around itchy, unlicked, unscratched. Tortured by her own filth.

Having finally read Angela S. Choi's Hello Kitty Must Die, I figured it might be a good idea to throw together some thoughts on it here.

I was pretty disappointed when I realized that the blurbs on the book likening it to Chuck Palahniuk weren't at all wrong; most of the reviews I've seen basically say that it's The Joy Luck Club meets American Psycho, and, without having actually read anything by Tan or Ellis, I think that's basically dead on. Take that comparison as you will, I suppose; I for one was not especially enthusiastic about it.

That said, however, I did enjoy the book well enough, and think it had a variety of interesting things going on. I don't have a copy of the book anymore, so I'm not going to be able to do anything like close textual analysis, but I think the book's stronger points are in its playing with generalizations anyway, so I think I'll survive.

The book's protagonist, Fiona Yu, is a 28-year-old, Asian American private sector lawyer. Its narrative revolves around her meeting up with an elementary school friend who convinced her to beat up the school bully with a lunchbox full of rocks, and was himself sent off to a Juvenile Detention Facility for lighting a girl's hair on fire. He is a hymen-reconstruction surgeon in San Francisco, and they begin a sort of asexual love affair as he reveals himself to be a serial killer, and she starts to follow suit, killing off the men her father sets her up on blind dates with and her boss. This is all, as you may imagine, very fucking transgressive.

I mentioned this book, before I read it, in my essay Hello Kitty Everything & Hostile Object Theory, and I think what I said there still basically applies. In a way, actually, it's even more accurate than I anticipated; when Fiona complains about Hello Kitty, it's mostly in asides like the one quoted above, and her anger almost always fixates on Kitty's absent mouth. I still feel like this particular issue is one that can be worth pursuing, in terms of subversion and reinterpretation, but that it stems from a misreading of Kitty's function, positioning her as a representative object when her real power lies elsewhere.* What I didn't expect out of Hello Kitty Must Die, and was pleasantly surprised by, was the way this particular obsession plays out within the narrative.

Although this connection is never drawn explicitly in the text, to my memory (oh, and, uh, spoilers to follow, I suppose, though some probably preceded as well), it just so happens that when Fiona does start murdering people, there is a distinct orality to the way she goes about it. She plans to murder one boy by eating a bunch of Snickers, then kissing him with a mouth full of the peanuts to which he's deathly allergic; she constantly carries around roofies to dispatch unwanted advances; and there's, well, something weird going on with cigarettes.

One of Fiona's first dates is killed by Sean when he steps outside for a cigarette, and it is after that that she begins to uncover his secret, and advance the plot. Sean is also a smoker, and the climactic moment of the novel, when Sean is getting sloppy and is about to be caught, involves Fiona filling Sean's apartment with gas and taking off, allowing the explosion sparked by him lighting a cigarette kill him. And then she smokes one of his cigarettes, staring at his burned building.

It's a pretty hackneyed moment, as most smoking-as-metaphor moments tend to be, and it's described with (if I'm remembering correctly) vaguely annoying descriptions of how she's ingesting his essence, or something, but there's something else there, too. Because that list of things that he hates Hello Kitty for not being able to do, aren't exactly things she does a whole lot of herself. She doesn't fuck, or give head. She certainly thinks of telling people to go fuck their mother often enough, but she doesn't ever say it. She drinks sometimes, and eats, but it's always in the context of a man, and so a murder being plotted. There is even a moment where she recounts an uncle attempting to molest her, which she fended off, not with a bite, but a fork. Even the date she intended to kill with a kiss ends up crushing himself with a barbell, avoiding the need for her mouth at all.

Fiona's moment with the cigarette, for all she tries to make it a symbolic gesture to evoke Sean, is, I think, the only moment in the whole text where it really matters that she has a mouth at all. Through the rest of it, what's important is that other people have mouths; those are how she gets power over them. And the thrust of making the smoke symbolic is precisely that it takes away her own power, opens her to being invaded by Sean. Getting a mouth makes her vulnerable.

Vulnerability is, of course, a major theme throughout the text. Fiona goes to great lengths to explain that just because she's a lawyer doesn't mean that she's in charge; in fact, her job consists mostly, according to her, of bending before the whims of the partner she works for, and she characterizes him as a real asshole. She is constantly being stepped on, whether by an overbearing boss or her parents, and she exorcises it with more exhibitions of vulnerability, as when she explains that she wears 4-inch Jimmy Choo heels everywhere because of the pain they cause her, and likens it to foot binding. It is made very clear that those things which purport to provide autonomy are really just ways of fostering new dependencies.

This is, I think, and to make a sort of crude rhetorical move, the point of the whole sociopathic narrative. Capitalism gives you two options: play the game, or play the fucking game. Fiona's aspirational diatribes against her heritage and fashion porn fetish-lists aren't evidence of a lack of character, they're how she stays alive. Traditions require space to develop; interiority needs time. And those are two things that you can have, sure, in direct proportion to how often you're willing to not eat. And when you finally realize how fucked over you're getting, and decide to protest against it, your protests are just as conditioned by those two options, else you're shit out of luck. You can play the game, like Fiona has been doing, of private pain, in a crypto-foot binding procedure, or you can play the fucking game, like Sean does, learn to act like those who put money over everything, and prey on people who can barely even play the game in the first place. There's no out, no middle ground, because that's where we all already are, passively abetting a system of exploitation. You can infantilize yourself, you can murder quasi-discriminately, or you can pretend neither of those things are happening while you feed them.

I feel like I'm pretty far away, at this point, from anything resembling a "review." I'll try, for the rest of this, to step back a bit and shut the fuck up about things I want to think about, and end with a couple of relatively brief points, that are a bit more review-y.

Most descriptions of the novel, whether positive, negative, or neutral, are fond of throwing around the word satire. The question they all beg, in their own way, is of course, "of what?" And almost uniformly, they seem to say without saying, being Chinese American. But that seems like bullshit to me, and it taints all the reviews with moralism. Now, I came into this book reading it as Asian American Literature, so what I'm about to say may not be all that surprising, but here it is: in my estimation, if this book is a satire of anything, it's of Asian American Literature.

I have no idea how familiar Choi is with the Asian American Literature canon (insofar as that even exists), but for what I want to say it doesn't really matter. I do think that the tradition she's working in is a lot more Chuck Palahniuk than Frank Chin, but the fact that it's so often likened to Amy Tan is more than enough context for me to feel justified in what I'm trying to say.

One thing that's fairly easy to notice about this book - and I mean book, like the physical object, not novel - is how similar the author's bio is to the story we're reading. Choi's a 30 year old Chinese American ex-lawyer with a parakeet; Fiona a 28 year old Chinese American Lawyer with a parakeet. They're both from San Francisco. Choi's official author bio even says that she "refuses to be anyone’s ... hole-in-a-mattress," a phrase that Fiona uses in the novel.

It is a fact about most, or all, marginal literatures, especially those of ethnic minorities, that they get pigeonholed into a sort of native informer role, and that this means they are heavily stilted toward memoir. White people like Amy Tan because they can read her and feel like they understand the Authentic Chinese Experience, without ever having to interact with a Chinese person. Even something as weird as Maxine Hong Kingston's debut novel, Woman Warrior, gets saddled with the subtitle "Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts." Woman Warrior seems to draw on experience, certainly, but it's sure as fuck not a memoir.

So Choi's ability to keep the specter of memoir foregrounded, even though there is nothing in the text of the novel to support it, and all while distancing herself from it, is relatively interesting in this context. But it is also sort of something that's been done to death. Kip Fulbeck's Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography makes a similar move in the title, and is a book I did not have a whole lot of love for; Suki Kim's The Interpreter is another example, and one which I would much more unreservedly recommend, as is Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker or even more borderline stuff like Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel. Memoirs like Jane Jeong Trenka's Language of Blood trouble this equation from the other side, and do so with absolutely breathtaking beauty.

My point, I suppose, more than that Choi's book functions to deconstruct how Asian American Literature is supposed to function, is that you should probably be reading more Asian American Literature, because there's some fucking incredible shit out there.

And I guess the last thing I want to say, to make this seem like a real review, like I'm really a real reviewer, the kind of guy who you should trust to tell you whether or not to spend your hard-earned dollars on a book, I guess as that guy I want to say, yeah I would recommend you read this book, but while you do it, keep the two songs below in mind, and think about it as if it had been written with them in mind, and how fucking cool that would be.







*The point, though, is that she's misread this way daily, and this misreading creates its own power, which gets transformed into ammunition for noxious stereotypes, and there is an effectiveness to fighting that misreading on its own terms.

Hello Kitty Everything: An Introduction

I

(The Mouth, Between Representation and Image)

“At the risk of enraging French-influenced literary theorists the world over, we'll take a stab at a boilerplate definition of post-modernism as it applies to Kitty. Basically, the PoMo set believes that there are no ultimate truths about things. That's an illusion. Instead, how one views something – a piece of literature, history, or vexing questions such as why Kitty and her twin sister Mimmy appear with mouths in videos, but sans mouths on store shelves – is heavily influenced by history, prevailing ideologies or otherwise socially constructed by bias, yearnings or whatever.”

The most obvious political problem that gets identified regularly with Hello Kitty is her lack of a mouth. The argument generally goes that this character design – whether or not it stems from concerns of minimalism or the relative degree of cuteness – embeds Kitty in an antifeminist discourse which is predicated on and reproduces the idea that women's value is contingent on their silence. This is a question that can't ever be sufficiently dealt with on its own terms, and I think in its own way it can be a fruitful problematic; but for my purposes here, and I think most of the time, understanding Hello Kitty as an object that operates on the level of the politics of representation is not the best idea.

If one takes the painting I Haz Mouth by Jason Han, painted for the Three Apples exhibition, and compares it with Renée Magritte's Les Deux Mystéres, the disjunct between the representative object and the image-object can be made clear. Magritte's not-a-pipe acts according to the rules of representation, in that the most common reading of the famous La Trahison des Images requires that the pipe of the painting is coded semiotically as a representative object, which the painted words then disavow, which actually reveals the disavowal that representation is predicated on. With Les Deux Mystéres, La Trahison des Images becomes simply a component in a larger painting that sees another realistic (at least according to the visual vernacular of advertising) pipe situated in a room with no attached textual disavowal. Without this disavowal, the large pipe can be seen to occupy a very unclear space in relation to the pipe with the disavowal. It is both unclear whether this is supposed to be the real pipe that the previous painting wasn't (although that can't be the case), or whether the presence of this pipe is even less real than the pipe that is disavowed, being some sort of dream of pipe-ness that the disavowed pipe constructs. And underlining this, the new pipe cannot be fixed in space in the painting itself, as the framed pipe with its disavowal can – the new pipe is either very large and presented against the wall, or very small and in the foreground of the painting, or somewhere between. This is all playing with the possibilities presented by the representative object, the thing which encodes in itself the knowledge that it is not what it appears to be, because it assumes the form of a thing which possesses more than form.

Jason Han's painting has an obvious structural similarity to Les Deux Mystéres, with the crucial difference that it pivots not around the semiotic movement of disavowal but instead of iterability. If one were to imagine a strict reproduction of La Trahison des Images, with the only differences being that the pipe was replaced by an image of Hello Kitty and the words were made to read “This is not (a) Hello Kitty,” then this might begin to make sense. The obvious reaction to this painting (barring a self-satisfied smirk at the clever intertextuality) is very different to the obvious reaction to La Trahison des Images - the Kitty version does not offer the possibility of “getting the joke.” To say that this is not Hello Kitty means that it is, most likely, a counterfeit Hello Kitty, or that it is in some other way unofficial or imperfect. And this is precisely because Hello Kitty does not represent; she is simply an image, or an icon, structured not by a knowledge of disavowal but by a constitutive excess, a knowledge that there is something more here that cannot be represented, analogous to human consciousness or agentivity.

In the thought experiment that Han represents in his painting, when Kitty (or Mimmy, if you're going to be a stickler about bow placement) finally gets a mouth, that mouth has no powers of expression – in fact, the mouthless Kitty in the painting is able to express her emotions much more concretely than the mouthed Kitty. When Kitty is given the tools to induct herself into the linguistic realm, her reaction is strictly reproductive; a mouth that speaks itself pictorially in a bubble that looks like a nascent, third Kitty. And to be clear, I would not argue that the preconditions of Kitty are such that she is without language – which is more or less just reiterating the critique of her with the politics evacuated – but that, because she works according to the rules of the image rather than the representation, her induction into the regime of language has nothing to do with expressive capacity and everything to do with the spaces she occupies in relation to other signs.

But, to keep the focus on her expressive capacity for just a moment longer, there is one other point about her lack of a mouth that is worth making, which is crystallized in the incident referred to as the Hello Kitty Murder. A Hello Kitty doll became the receptacle for the skull of a woman beaten to death and dismembered, which was discovered only when the teenage girlfriend of one of the gangsters who committed the crime confessed to the police. This “perversion” of Kitty is, of course, so compelling precisely because it falls – like almost all forms of subversion – within the structural coordinates of the context but outside of the accounted-for possibilities. For on some level, this murder is simply the playing out of the speculation on Kitty's anatomical peculiarity, the question of her bone structure being described without the comfortable cushion of hypotheses. And so her mouthlessness takes on a new meaning, a signifier in its own right of her complicity with human and inhuman systems. So whether you see her as the unwilling conspirator who reveals the plot as soon as she is provided the means to, or as the willing conspirator who stabs the backs of those she conspired with as soon as the opportunity presents itself is immaterial; either way, she is revealed to be complicit with the entire political economy which generates her, no matter what fantasies are applied to exempt her from them.

II

(Capitalism, Realism, and What is Popular)

“[H]er head was cocked innocently to one side, she had a bow in her hair, and she was cradling a very large automatic weapon between her chubby little arms. At first I was taken aback. The illustration was hysterical, but wrong. And the fact that this subversive act was committed by a white male made it that much more perverse.”

The core of this project is essentially an engagement with a round of debates that took place between a few high profile Marxist literary theorists that took place in the 1930s, around the revolutionary potential of Modernism and Expressionism and the fundamental questions of how to approach the popular, and Realism. The two main figures in this debate that I'm interested in applying to Kitty are Lukacs and Brecht.

I take Brecht's call for an alliance between “popular art and realism” as being the rallying cry for this project, and am in complete agreement with his definitions of the two:

“Our concept of what is popular refers to a people who not only play a full part in historical development but actively usurp it, force its pace, determine its direction. We have a people in mind who make history, change the world and themselves. We have in mind a fighting people and therefore an aggressive concept of what is popular.
Popular means: intelligible to the broad masses, adopting and enriching their forms of expression / assuming their standpoint, confirming and correcting it / representing the most progressive section of the people so that it can assume leadership, and therefore intelligible to other sections of the people as well / relating to traditions and developing them / communicating to that portion of the people which strives for leadership the achievements of the section that at present rules the nation.
...
“Realistic means: discovering the causal complexes of society / unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power / writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up / emphasizing the element of development / making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it.”

These definitions seem at least as applicable to our contemporary moment, if not more, than they were when Brecht wrote them. As the debates about postmodernism seem to have exhausted themselves into declaring that it's over, and we see cultural attempts to work through the exhaustion of cynicism and black irony that revolve around po-faced expressions of sincerity and transparency, as philosophical circles begin defining themselves against the anti-realist tendencies that dominated during the same era, realism again becomes a word with some weight. To take Brecht's definition in this case, rather than defining realism according to some aesthetic regularities, is to reject the neoliberal injunction to operate exclusively in the realm of abstraction while disavowing it – or, to put it more closely to Brecht's terms, to reject the making possible of the abstract, in order to extrapolate the concrete from it.

Another way to put this would be to say that, “what we need now is a better sense of the real divide to be drawn, between the realism effect and affective realism, between what we've inherited as the 'look' of realism and what actually nails down and pins, like a shaking butterfly of the present, the feel of our historical moment,” as Evan Calder Williams did in his blog post On Laughter and Realism or The Moral Economy of a Fat Nude Man Running in Slow Motion Through a Shopping Mall Only to be Shot Point-Blank. What is needed, that is to say, is a realism which doesn't just look realistic, like Magritte's pipe, but which feels real, in ways beyond reflection or comprehension, that feels the same way (no matter the aesthetic vernacular employed) that living under the hegemony of financial capital does. But this is not entirely correct either, because it is beyond feeling; realism is, at its core, a question of (un)masking what is real, which is to say that which structures reality.

What Hello Kitty brings to the table in the contemporary search for realism is basically a series of likenesses. The first of these, and most obvious, draws on her closeness with the Pacific Rim discourse, and how she has come to stand as a sort of emblem of globalization. With the Pacific Rim being, as it were, the center of the globalized economy, Kitty's position as being both of and Othered within the Pacific Rim discourse is a good way to see just how this works.

She is of it in a very concrete way; Kitty is the creation of a Japanese corporation, Sanrio, and is very much a product of the aesthetic history of Japan and a product of the cultural moment in which she was created. I'll talk a little bit more about her specifically Japanese cultural heritage later, but it is important to note that Kitty was created in 1974, and Sanrio in 1973 (after having been the Yamanashi Silk Company for the previous thirteen years), which are important years in another Pacific Rim country's history, and also the global development of political economy since then. The coincidence of Pinochet's coup and Sanrio's turning into a company focused on peddling minor, communicative luxuries obviously does not speak to any necessary historical reality, much less a conscious organization of history; it is, however, a fruitful coincidence in how both of these things have developed.

In a review of Belson and Bremner's Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon, Gary LaMoshi gives a summation of the reasons that Sanrio CEO and founder Shintaro Tsuji made the switch from the Yamanashi Silk Company to Sanrio:

“His friends in the government of remote Yamanashi prefecture got him started promoting local silk and vegetables in the 1950s. But by 1962, Tsuji had expanded into rubber sandals that featured a flower design, reportedly observing, "If you attach added value or design to the product, they sell in a completely different way." As a result, he began commissioning cartoonists to create designs, eventually hiring his own to avoid paying royalties. Tsuji also obtained Japanese rights to Snoopy from Peanuts for Japan and exclusive (money-losing) import deals on Barbie dolls and Hallmark cards.”

This basically reads, to someone like me at least, like a (re)discovery of surplus-value. That something might “sell in a completely different way” is, almost certainly, the difference between a product and a commodity, the “added value or design” exactly a description of the aura that allows the commodity an appearance of holism which obscures the real labour relations that went into it, and which aura itself is the product of the originary commodity of labour. That Kitty is created precisely because of this realization is inarguable – but more importantly, that there isn't an immediate translation from the realization (that added value can make things sell differently, or using labour to obscure labour creates additional capital out of nothing) to the execution (of a proprietary character/brand/thing like Kitty). Instead, the attempt is made to deal with commissions, and (more interestingly) to license characters like Snoopy, which speaks to a number of things, but most pertinently given what I've just been talking about the sense in which Sanrio and Kitty operate as both of the Pacific Rim (a character like Snoopy can be imported relatively easily, and there is an assumption that a market for it already exists) and Othered by it (there is still the distance that requires a licensing contract, and the assumed market isn't quite there, and there is always something just slightly off).

To make this brief, I'll only bring up the last couple points I want to talk about in this section without trying to extrapolate them too much. First, I want to briefly quote from an essay by Mark Fisher, “SF Capital,” in which he talks about the trajectory of the “hype[r]verse,” the university of commodities which surround a text:

“Star Wars is metonymically implicated in late capitalism in a way that 2001 never quite could be. What was bought and sold when audiences consumed Star Wars was not in any sense a single (aesthetic) object, but a world, a hype[r]verse. It is, of course, possible to retrospectively transform a single commodity into a series of objects-for-sale, and there are numerous, now very familiar, techniques and strategies that have been employed to this end … Star Wars was designed as a hyper-commodity; not so much a film as a fictional system - a plane of consistency that could be populated with any number of commodities. The switch is from a system of objects to a hype-system, where what is sold is abstract, fictional - but very real.
...
Hype-vorticism has been through a whole series of thresholds since. The simultaneous emergence of the Transformers toys and TV series in 1984 was one enormously significant moment: the toys were designed as 'characters' in a 'narrative', in part developed by Marvel, who also published a Transformers comic book series. What began to disappear here was the sense of an original or primary entertainment 'text', surrounded or 'supported' by secondary commodities, a disappearance that has been achieved almost completely now. Remember that moment in Jurassic Park when you realise that the logo of the theme park in the film is exactly the same logo on the Jurassic Park merchandise you can buy outside the cinema? And, with Disney's Toy Story, the loop between advertising, fiction and commodity achieved an unprecedented tightness: here was a film about toys/commodities, some of which were already-established brands, some of which were established precisely by the film (Buzz Lightyear, Woody) all of which were able to commingle on a single plane of (digital) reality.” (italics his, bold mine)

What is relevant here, of course, is that this “disappearance that has been achieved almost completely now” is very much exactly what was achieved almost thirty years prior, with Hello Kitty. This is what makes Kitty such a fascinating problem for anyone who is interested in how texts work, I think – whether you take the understanding of the marketing world, which Fisher lays out pretty adeptly, that the text is that which unifies otherwise unrelated commodities, or if you take a more liberal understanding of text as, for instance, textile, stuff thats been weaved together, I still think Kitty opens up some serious problems.

The major problem, of course, is that while Kitty doesn't fit chronologically into Fisher's lineage, she certainly is the completion of this trend. Which is to say that we intuitively understand her as operating according to the same logic of something like Star Wars, even though if one were to simply describe her it might seem more obvious to think of her as a logo.

The final point I want to make in this section is that I draw these analogies, particularly between Kitty and surplus-value, with an eye toward the negative spaces they create. This is, I think, the work of the real, no matter which register you are speaking about it in; it is those spaces, like the ones created by the analogy between Kitty and surplus-value, that resist all productive relations, and simply litter the ground like so much junk.

III

(Cuteness)

“In 1974 large numbers of teenagers especially women began to write using a new style of childish characters. […] Cute style began as an underground literary trend amongst young people who developed the habit of writing stylised childish letters to each other and to themselves”

Hello Kitty works in a very straightforward way: she provokes an affective reaction which inspires a consumer to purchase the product on display. The discursive component of this affect is what we call cute.

Cuteness has two primary cultural and economic touchstones, both of which are heavily imprecated into Pacific Rim discourse; on the one hand with American capitalism, and on the other with the Japanese “kawaii culture.” The latter of these is an aesthetic that has been operating in Japan since the 1970s, of which Hello Kitty has been both a forerunner and a mainstay. The culture takes on much more than just aesthetic dimensions; “The cute style extends beyond consumerism as seen in grown-ups with infantile behavior — acting silly, giggling, speaking with a squeaky voice, pouting and throwing temper tantrums.” This kind of acting out, rather than signifying a generation spoiled by its parents and just waiting for “the harsh reality of traditional values [to] hit home,” seems to me to point toward a sort of cultural hysteria, a particularly canny enacting of the roles to which they are subordinated by their objective situation. Not, as the cultural conservatives are fond of suggesting, a willed refusal of responsibility, but more along the lines of “if you refuse to treat us like adults, then we will be children until we die.” This refusal to acculturate oneself to a society which only has it in its interests to alienate and infantilize you is an oppositional stance, but one which can be subsumed under the culture of consumer capitalism which Japan is wholeheartedly importing by the time that kawaii culture becomes a real force, and which is the same time as Pacific Rim discourse is at its peak. But it didn't start as a function of that discourse; as the epigraph to this section points out, kawaii began as a trend in literature, or penmanship. The difference between contemporary cute culture and this “underground literary trend” is enormous and is traceable through a logic of self-determination that consumer capitalism as propagated through the Pacific Rim discourse posits, and it also highlights the power of the commodity form under the society of the spectacle: when as recently as the early 1970s (contemporaneous with the creation of Hello Kitty) it was conceivable to have an “underground literary trend” become the dominant aesthetic, and yet a similar occurrence is unthinkable today, the culprit would fairly clearly be the mystification of societal relations through objects/images.

The way that cuteness operates outside of Japan, however, is as a sort of diluted, partial affect, only able to be completed by the assuagement associated with retail therapy. This kind of relationship to affect can be seen in a broader context as well within American Pacific Rim and post-Pacific Rim culture, especially in formulations like Quentin Tarantino's films which use irony and supposed parody to flatten out all the possible affective reactions to his films into a generic “cool.” This is called a number of things, including “the death of affect” by JG Ballard and “the waning of affect” by Fredric Jameson, and it points to a kind of collapsing of affective reactions into affective potentials, with the ultimate goal (for the most part) of fueling consumption. Because kawaii culture is in some sense symptomatic of Pacific Rim discourse, it is implicated in this affect-flattening, consumption-prone society. The origins of the culture, however, point to the necessary evidence that this is not the only way that cuteness can be brought to bear in the world, however, and that in certain cases it can actually point in quite different directions than the one it currently does.

If the main inspiration for this project was the question of realism and popularity, then the main goal is an attempt at a fundamental reordering of cuteness. Because a critique of Hello Kitty is, at its core, a critique of the affect of cuteness, in which affect must not be understood as a psychological term, but as a material one, not a feeling but a sign inscribed on the consuming body. And this is important because cuteness, with all its baggage of capriciousness, is probably the single most powerful force behind which the troops of capitalism - especially a capitalism which does not just exempt, but actually models itself after, reproductive labour – martial. To be able to understand cuteness as a productively anti-capitalist force, and not just to understand it that way but to force it to become so, without it slipping backwards into nu-domesticities or other reactionary constructions of individualist value-producing units, is the (admittedly fucking utopian) goal of this project. And I've no idea how to do it, but I feel that it must be done.

Hello Kitty Everything & Hostile Object Theory

In light of Evan's Hostile Object Theory appearing in Mute Magazine, I thought it might be productive to take up some of his claims in an attempt to help clarify the broad project I've referred to in the past as Hello Kitty Everything, and perhaps also (audaciously) to test the borders of this new theory of objects.

The central question of HKE is, it seems to me, the question of what happens when capital stops flowing. When the invisible winds of finance cease blowing, and we can interrogate the junk that's dropped from the sky.

These winds must cease, of course, just as the factory must manufacture its shit, and just as the bubbles must pop. But that which finds its wings under the climate of speculative capital (that is, when all industries take finance as the model of their particularity) is fundamentally different than that which flies best in other climates. And since it is what is in flight while the wind blows that comes crashing to Earth when the winds stop, these are our objects.

But, as we know, this junk falls from the sky while the wind blows as well, as capital carries within its structure its own conditions of declension; this is the role of the gift, in our current climate. The gift under capitalism is the moment that circulation is affected by the introduction of an irreducible (to exchange) social aspect to the exchange value. This is social in the sense that encompasses the personal, and includes affective bonds like memories (of the object in question in different contexts, or of the giver, or etc; or even that most rarefied form of memories which we call secrets) as well as more obviously 'social' bonds like propriety, dignity, respect, etc.

Of course, that the gift is the process of exempting the object from exchange is not a hard and fast distinction. The gift can be undermined, as in regifting, and so on; this is a basic principle, not a law of exchange (something might be said here, too, about the perversity of gift cards, not just in their attempt to bring money into the logic of the gift (personalized (socialized?) money), but also the weird sense in which you are spending money not to allow someone the pleasure of a thing, but to allow them the pleasure of spending already-spent money).

The goal of HKE, however, is a development of an understanding of cuteness and how it functions in a capitalist order (and how it might be made to function after one). Hostile Object Theory, on the other hand, is about interrogating the built world of capitalism and identifying the way in which the mode of production persists within and between the objects it creates.

In this context, the Hello Kitty Murder. Her of the mouthless smirk, whose willingness to hide skulls for you is matched equally by her willingness to divulge them; or, to turn it around, whose willingness to play key witness to an atrocity is in no way undermined by her willingness to secret away that very same atrocity within her body. Her objectivity is infinite precisely because her readiness to betray is infinite; she takes sides not as they suit her - as though she could be benefited by politicking - but as they suit the hostility of the system of which she has become exemplar.

She, as the ghost of surplus-value that haunts the machine of commodities, is of course not bodied, no body, an imprint meant to impart objectively the value of the gift or the collectible. She is a form - a bare form, often, without even face to save - not just a cosmetic afterthought to baubles, but a mold to shape them into. And she haunts the children of those maleficent forces who created her, knowing that they will exorcise her; not that she may be freed, forever, from a purgatorial hell, but that she may dissipate into those children, and order them to build her again, when they take control of the world, into a new and more powerful form.

With this formulation, we can see one reason for the impotence of the politics of subversion. Even the examples that are less extreme than torturing a woman to death on crystal meth and sewing her boiled skull into the doll, such as (for example) the popular Hello Kitty Hell blog, or as in the chapbook that Pamela Lu once described to me, with the cover a picture of Hello Kitty all riot grrrled-out, the assumption that (as I've noted elsewhere) Hello Kitty is fundamentally representational misses the point. Which isn't to say that these critiques and remixes don't have a point, aren't doing good work, or even aren't often wonderful pieces of art in themselves - see, for instance, Angela Choi's Hello Kitty Must Die for a great example of this that sets out just why this political struggle is important - but that they only work within a limited sort of political sphere, which is to say not in the sphere of political economy.

A critique of Hello Kitty that operates on the level of political economy would have to take into account some form of Hostile Object Theory. Lacking the,

"conviction that the objects of capitalism aren't just indifferent to us or darkly coherent beyond our intentions. They are structurally hostile, and, more often than we'd like to admit, locally hostile: uncertain, unstable, loathing or loathsome, dangerous, and weirdly incommensurable with the purpose for which they were designed,"

Kitty's utterly bizarre material existence gets forgotten in the quest to ascribe to her certain political attitudes which can then be deconstructed.

Because a critique of Hello Kitty is, at its core, a critique of the affect of cuteness, in which affect must not be understood as a psychological term, but as a material one, not a feeling but a sign inscribed on the consuming body. And this is important because cuteness, with all its baggage of capriciousness, is probably the single most powerful force behind which the troops of capitalism - especially a capitalism which does not just exempt, but actually models itself after, reproductive labour - martial.

Against Graham Harman's claim, then, that cuteness is a product of a sort of fusion of mastery with sympathy for the one who isn't yet a master, I would claim that cuteness is itself at base a form of work. Or, more specifically, of non-work; where Harman's analysis goes wrong is that he misidentifies an aspect of cuteness - its co-optation of something like sprezzatura - with cuteness as such. This can be seen in his claim that the way that adolescents use "cute" is basically synonymous with lovely, with physical beauty. What he neglects is that "cute" in this sense is a differential term, important because it is distinct from beautiful or hot or whatever. And if we were to put these three terms on a continuum of the attractive, cute would sit in the middle, between the girl who looks attractive and looks like she worked to look attractive (hot) and the girl who looks attractive and requires no work to be attractive (beautiful), as the girl who looks attractive and looks like she didn't need to work to be attractive, although we know she did (cute).

And again, it is exactly in this specific conjuncture that cuteness occupies that we find ourselves with relation to work. For if it is the baby - not the baby, it must be reiterated, as sympathetic non-master, which is baby as bawler and shit-machine, but the baby as product of a labour which cannot be acknowledged as labour except through mediation - whose cuteness is the most 'natural,' the most Darwinian, because it inspires in us an empathetic reaction with certain set conditions, then it is Kitty's job, as both commodity and brand, to objectify those conditions, and to reify the mode of production through them. Think, here, of Sanrio's motto: "Small gift, big smile."

What makes Hostile Object Theory so indispensible here - aside from the magnificent analytical tools it provides – is something it shares with Evan's Salvagepunk project. This is a sense of this kind of theorizing not just as a means of "pulling the wool from over our eyes," but as what Rob Wilson might refer to as a "counter-worlding," a way of (re)producing the world to account for subject-positions which the dominant world-position must constitutively leave unaccounted for. For it is in exactly this register that Hello Kitty's secret strength comes to light, associated, as she must be, with those who cannot or do not make a productive contribution to the economy. Whether children or hikikomori, hoarding collectors, Japanese kawaii-culture adherents who "refuse to grow up," Asian-Americans or whoever else, Hello Kitty is found everywhere that the current organization of capitalism finds itself most fractured. And fractured, importantly, not where pressure is already being applied, but where capitalism itself seems to have reached its own boundaries, where capitalisms own perpetual shuttling between the universal and the particular has reached a powerful impasse.