Paris Hilton makes a cooking show
I’ve never been able to watch cooking shows. I can just about tolerate tiny clips of Gordon Ramsey screaming at people. Since the lockdowns began, however, I have found cooking shows strangely enraging.
This two-minute trailer of Paris Hilton’s new cooking show showed me why cooking shows have gone from being incomprehensible to an actual irritant. I still wouldn’t go so far as to watch the show itself, but the trailer is the first of its kind that has actually made sense to me. Elaborately costumed, coloured and covered in edible glitter, Paris Hilton’s cooking show (trailer) is a surreal work of art that deconstructs the idea of the thing itself. Without those elaborate displays of emotion – crying contestants, screaming judges, heaving, panting etc, the cooking show is nothing more than a sadly aspirational revisiting of the food orgies of the past. It is exactly as meaningless and meaningful as edible glitter. A courageous statement, from a creator who probably knew just how unloved she would be for her creation, but did it anyway.
The pink-masked pink-frocked Paris Hilton walking down a supermarket aisle is pure visual spectacle. Even though she is walking, she looks frozen in time and space, trapped in an ice-bubble. The abundance of the supermarket does not reach her. As is watching her absolute lack of emotional response to the food itself. A beautifully choreographed mmmm mmmm mmm mmm is followed by a spoke too soon. Out of all the things I hated on cooking shows, I hated mmmms the most, so this moment was the perfect revenge.
Image: Priyadarshini John
The mirroring contrast to the pink supermarket scene is in the Russian performance art group Voina’s supermarket performance. A woman walks into a supermarket, and, as unemotionally as Hilton, attempts to put a whole chicken into her vagina and walk out with it. This is a very different kind of supermarket, also. It is not a symbol of abundance. It seems somehow heartbreaking in itself, without the attempt to escape with a chicken.
Both actions are not real – they are extreme representations of an unwholesome reality. A vagina cannot fit a stolen chicken and the pink extravaganza does not have any functional requirement. Both, however, speak an essential truth from their extreme ends of performance. Hilton tells us what cooking shows are, and Voina tells us what an impossible task feeding yourself can be.
The contrasting planets of Little and Plenty
Actually, one planet and its moon. In Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, we are introduced to two worlds. One is Urras, the libertarian, patriarchal planet of Plenty, which is bountiful in resources, plants and animals, and wealth. The other is its moon, Anarres, where an anarchist-socialist community lives in mostly-desert and survives on very minimal resources.
The world of Urras is propertied. In the world of Anarres, nothing is owned, not even clothes. Everything is temporarily used, temporarily lived in, the pronouns of ownership do not exist. Not even in relationships. The people of Anarres were revolutionaries before they were settlers. Urras resolved the problem of the revolutionary by, literally, sending them to the moon, and offering the minimal exchange of vital resources for some moon-mining. Both worlds hated and mistrusted each other, traditionally and historically.
In the world of Anarres, Shevek the physicist made a breakthrough discovery. The most devoted follower of Anarres principle, he did not try to own his work, until he found out that his work was stolen, and then blocked. Now, how does a thing that is not owned get stolen? As Shevek discovers, the perfect principle is always imperfect in execution. In a planet where everyone was equal and no one owned anything, bureaucracies, hierarchies, thievery, and worst of all, punishment, had all crept in. Shevek was punished for shining too bright, by being endlessly separated from his work, and constantly given other work.
Forced by circumstance, he travels to Urras, and becomes the worst of things for his society – a scab.
Before all of these dramatic incidents, though, Shevek, while he was still a student, said something which has stayed with me for many years now:
We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years…
But, he says, there is something beyond it. It’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where the self – ceases.
the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
Everyone suffers. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, the chicken. Me. You. This is a useful knowledge to gain when you are young. And it takes a wonderful writer like Ursula Le Guin to realise that her hero is a prig.
There might have been a brief, bitter and juvenile period when I thought otherwise, but at my core, I never took this as a learning that suffering itself is:
a thing of value
a thing to be desired
a thing to be inflicted
(the three are inseparable. if you think you believe one and not the other, you’re lying to yourself)
I have believed, however, for most of my waking life, that:
– Suffering is inevitable. It does not need to be deliberately and consciously inflicted.
-There is a real value in going through it, all the way.
Then came a dragon
In a galaxy far far away, on Pratchett’s Discworld, in a book called Guards! Guards!, a group of cultists discuss their revolutionary masterplan, created by Supreme Grandmaster. Manipulating his little team, he encourages them to discover their oppression. This is not easy, because the existing ruler of Ankh-Morpork – the Patrician, though not at all trustworthy and as Supreme as Grandmaster, is not particularly oppressive to any particular group.
But still:
“I get oppressed all the time,” said Brother Doorkeeper. “Master Critchley, where I work, he oppresses me morning, noon and night, shouting at me and everything. And the woman in the vegetable shop, she oppresses me all the time.”
“That’s right,” said Brother Plasterer. “My landlord oppresses me something wicked. Banging on the door and going on and on about all the rent I allegedly owe, which is a total lie. And the people next door oppress me all night long. I tell them, I work all day, a man’s got to have some time to learn to play the tuba. That’s oppression, that is. If I’m not under the heel of the oppressor, I don’t know who is.”
“Put like that-” said Brother Watchtower slowly- “I reckon my brother-in-law is oppressing me all the time with having this new horse and buggy he’s been and bought. I haven’t got one. I mean, where’s the justice in that? I bet a king wouldn’t let that sort of oppression go on, people’s wives oppressing ’em with why haven’t they got a new coach like our Rodney and that.”
This is the plan of Supreme Grandmaster: summon a dragon with a spellbook and the support of the oppressed cult. Allow the dragon to ravage the city – particularly a vegetable shop, a landlord, a coach owner. Depose the ruler of the city, plant a king to slay the dragon, crown him, establish him as the new ruler and own him. The bit-part pieces of the oppressed – his cult – get their petty satisfaction, he gets power, the city gets rescued, and they all live happily ever after (except the cult, because who wants so many witnesses?).
Image: Priyadarshini John
Except. Except. The dragon, being a dragon, got out of control. When the spell banished him, he didn’t stay banished. He came back. And when he came back, he didn’t waste his time attacking vegetable-shop-owners. He got rid of the ‘king’, turned Grandmaster into Spokesperson, occupied the palace, demanded a horde. And sacrifices.
It is interesting to note that the cultists who started the revolution are not really oppressed by much beyond gullibility. This is because, though suffering is a universal experience, those who are suffering beyond what is bearable, beyond the point of retaining humanity – they don’t have time to join cults and summon dragons. It’s the midgets-in-between who’re susceptible to manipulation, because, probably, they have forgotten that suffering is a universal experience. They forgot that the vegetable-shop woman suffers, the landlord suffers, the brother-in-law suffers. They only see the object of their envy.
The commonality of suffering
The candy-coated production of Paris Hilton and the green-lit-miserable supermarket performance of Vojna have another thing in common – nudity of expression. Paris Hilton conveys the meaninglessness of the entire enterprise. Vojna’s performer conveys the emptiness of hunger.
This has been a year when sufferings have been piling onto the world like great piles of trash. As I watched the trash piling up, I noticed something else. A satisfaction, even a gleeful undercurrent, running through that part of the world that identifies as left. Since ‘left’ has become a simple matter of chosen identity, it’s a waste of time to figure out what that actually means. As meaningless an effort as licking edible glitter off a floor. But it is useful to see what it implies.
I found an article, though, which made it clear that what I imagined was an undercurrent was, in fact, an overt satisfaction. The writer was talking about the wars between mask-wearers and anti-maskers, lockdown-supporters and lockdown-sufferers. Lockdown-haters, he said charitably, had reason to mistrust the state, and he concluded that it was cynicism that was holding them back from embracing the change. Cynicism, I mean, I get them, but they’re a bunch of black-wearing adolescents that we need to educate, y’all. They got reason to mistrust the state, but we gotta fix that for them, by making them trust the state.
He also made the most naked statement I’ve seen in the past year:
Some on the left, by contrast, have seemed to want restrictions to go on for as long as possible: not just, perhaps, to keep the virus under control but also because life in such conditions has ticked so many of their political and philosophical boxes: a huge expansion of the state, the primacy of “the science”, clear benefits for the environment, and an insistence on collective sacrifice.
Political and philosophical boxes:
- A huge expansion of the state
- The primacy of “the science”
- Clear benefits for the environment
- An insistence on collective sacrifice
The writer says left, and I’ll believe him.
What ticks the political and philosophical boxes of the left:
–A huge expansion of the state. I have no idea how huge this expansion is, but it is interesting to note that it has expanded enough for the state to have complete ownership and control of the bodies of its subjects. The word citizens has become superfluous. Body is property, and the property belongs to the state.
–The primacy of “the science”. The word ‘science,’ like the word ‘left,’ has also changed character, dramatically, in the past year. It has become a thing to be followed. A purveyor of absolutes. Interestingly, though these absolute truths generated by science tend to change every month, week, or every few hours, there is one absolute required response. Each time a changeable truth is conveyed, it must not, must never be questioned, unless the questioner wants to be re-classified and cross over to the dark side. When the new Science speaks its new Truth of the week, day or moment, this is what you must do: fall to your knees, open your mouth and receive it, like the blood and body of Christ. Because the most important thing about these Truths is that you must receive them with absolute devotion, take them into your blood and body. It sounds vaguely familiar.
–The clear benefits to the environment. Here he links to an article that is very unclear about the benefits to the environment, tries really hard to find something beneficial, was written in December, and concludes that lockdown ended so the benefits weren’t beneficial. However, anyone who lives in the real world, might well have noticed that lockdowns never ended. Not even eight months after this article was written. Flights are not ‘back to normal.’ Borders have never opened. Most of the world is still restricted about whether or not it is allowed to buy groceries. And these are the clear benefits I have noticed, just by, well, reading the news and stepping out the door:
- Climate change speeded up to the speed of light. Heat waves, floods, polluted air, wildfires, deep freezes – everywhere, across the world. Boiling seas. Human and animal deaths, from the environmental benefits.
- A new wave of trash, thanks to the growing reach of e-commerce, which can now pile up every street corner with unimaginable quantities of packaging.
- A very large amount of energy, fuel and resources spent on two embarrassingly pointless, irrelevant trips to ‘space’ to make up for all the flights that weren’t filling up the skies – and more to come.
- The destruction and deforestation of places I loved, visited, held in my heart.
-An insistence on collective sacrifice. This is the hardest thing to write about. I imagine that sacrificing visits to your favourite cafe is not easy. Nothing is easy. Suffering is universal. But the people who’re enjoying the little collective sacrifice and giving themselves new hobbies and writing that long-delayed book don’t seem to have noticed that the sacrifices are not equal.
People who were living on the edge of survival sacrificed their lives, livelihood, food, dignity, homes, the right to use public transport. People living in war-torn countries sacrificed the option of escape. Girls sacrificed their right to an education, to become more than the child-property of men. People who provided cheap labour sacrificed the right to not turn into slave labour. People in the riskiest and most unstable professions sacrificed their right to be treated humanely.
Collective sacrifice = we who have the power will collectively sacrifice the poor, the weak and the vulnerable.
In the case of this article, this writer’s particular cohort of diligent leftists lives in a wealthy country, so their sacrificees includes about half the world or more.
What kind of half-human-half-cockroach* would find this ticking their boxes?
In the words of Supreme Grandmaster: Let the other societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the self-confident. He’d take the whining resentful ones, the ones with a bellyful of spite and bile, the ones who knew they could make it big if only they’d been given the chance. Give him the ones in which the floods of venom and vindictiveness were dammed up behind thin walls of ineptitude and low-grade paranoia.
After having witnessed this year of destruction, a lot of people say, we must never go back to the way things were. I always knew the way things were as terrible, but I didn’t imagine that I would ever see such a comprehensive, universal and large-scale violence against people and the earth in my lifetime. We can’t go back to the way things were, because too much has already been broken. Entire landscapes have already gone up in flames.
Image: Priyadarshini John
*I know that this is unfair to a harmless insect, but in my defence, I’m terrified of cockroaches, partly because I know that they have far better survival skills than I do.
Metamorphosis
There’s a moment in, possibly, everyone’s life – I’ve definitely had many, in mine – when your feelers start to come out. When you find yourself metamorphosing from a human into an indestructible insect. That’s the mid-way point between human and cockroach.
Image: Priyadarshini John
It took me a few years of adulthood to realise that your humaneness is a finite resource. So, for years, you might be unhappy, trapped, living in great discomfort, but retain love and compassion. One day, however, you find yourself unable to be happy for people who are happy. You find yourself resenting their joy. You also find yourself taking satisfaction in misery. It seems reassuring.
This has been a useful learning, in telling me that the exact time had come to make a change. The time of metamorphosing from human being to cockroach. This is the time to leave that job, that place, the relationship, that group.
This new wave of collective satisfaction in suffering, however, is unfathomable, stunning to me. It might’ve come from thousands of professional disappointments, personal failures, jobs that were not left, relationships that were not ended. Who knows.
I have been thinking, lately, that I led a charmed life. Because I could see, so clearly, this exact moment of transformation. The point when you must leave, or make a change, to ensure that your misery does not become the beast that eats you.
Priyadarshini John
And what became of the revolutionary planet?
Eventually, Shevek had to escape the utopian Urras and return to the revolutionary Annares, which was, after all, even to the dispossessed, home. And he learned, that being a revolutionary on a revolutionary planet, maintaining integrity, was not the formation of the perfect structure. Like everything else, the structure could and would rot.
He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the center of one’s soul.
Even in a non-revolutionary society, it is useful to remember that the ideal is not to form the perfect structure, but one that persists in confronting the inevitable rotting of that structure.
This story has a happy ending – Shevek’s joyful, anticipatory return home.
And what became of the dragon?
The dragon had a happy ending. She found a mate and abandoned the hoard and the city.
The Brothers had a quick ending. But the real question, the lingering question, for the Watchtowers, Plasterers and most importantly the Doorkeepers of today, is:
Are you sure, really sure, that you can control your dragon?
