Halloween in May Continued and the Problems with Anticonsumerism
Springtime Boo to the Frankfurt School, Because Even Marie Kondo Isn't Following KonMarie Anymore
This last Halloween I was sadly pulled into an anticonsumerist ideology, which means I didn’t watch any of the Rocky Horror Picture Show performances like usual. Naturally, as soon as school was winding down, I decided I wanted to make that up as best I could since there were no live performances, and also go buy a bunch of candy even though there’s no Halloween candy and I buy candy during non-Halloween (or Valentine’s or whatever) anyway. I also saw there was a blog called Dracula Daily that I signed up for toward the end of April and Dracula additionally actually starts in May, and furthermore, May is conveniently two months before the more well-established holiday of Christmas in July just like Halloween in October is two months before Christmas in December. This led to me declaring a new holiday of Halloween in May officially when I made my post about one of Stacky’s origins being he was made in a lab.
Halloween in May is a far superior holiday anyway, since we all know you’re not celebrating Jesus’s birthday in July, some people might think it’s February, March, or April for basically astrology reasons plus thinking that there wouldn’t be shepherds tending their flocks in December and whatever, but no one thinks Jesus was born in July, so that just leaves you with Santa kitsch and whatever for Christmas in July. Halloween in May meanwhile means you just get to watch more horror movies and Rocky Horror live and eat more candy and wear costumes in May whenever school lets out, which means it’s a far superior holiday, plus it happens over a month after Easter and gives us more holidays in Spring, even if we need more in summer too, just not ones about Santa kitsch. Though if Tim Burton wants to make a movie called The Nightmare Before Christmas in July I would still watch it, he just needs to give me credit for the idea of Halloween in May and royalties for that idea. It’s good that we live in a society where people have enough affluence and religious liberty to make Christmas kitsch so I appreciate that and don’t complain about it, I just think it’s kind of boring compared to horror.
This has all made me deeply aware that the problems with anticonsumerism is that it’s communist. If you go to r/ConsumeProduct on the horrible site Reddit, you will see a bunch of the quotes in the sidebar are from Theodor Adorno and his ilk. Theodor Adorno is the leader of the Frankfurt School also known as cultural Marxists. Cultural Marxism is indeed a real thing despite sometimes being used as a euphemism for the very not-real idea of cultural Bolshevism, which is a Nazi conspiracy theory. Cultural Marxism is basically Marxism that treats the class dynamics in primarily cultural terms rather than resource-based ones like classical Marxism or identity-category-based ones like the more popular intersectional Marxism.
The hypothesis cultural Marxists have is essentially that “low” culture like reality shows and the Beatles and whatever keeps the masses down. Some people who are ironically close to both actual cultural Marxists and fascists, who have quite a lot in common with one another since Hitler was a failed artist and called his ideology national socialism, think that Theodor Adorno wrote the Beatles songs to try to subvert culture, but Theodor Adorno never would’ve written Beatles songs because he thought they were lowbrow and wanted everyone to listen to twelve-tone music instead. Theodor Adorno himself thought that Beatles songs subverted culture, so if you think Theodor Adorno wrote Beatles songs to subvert culture you yourself are basically a cultural Marxist. To be fair, twelve-tone music certainly has a place and it’s even been used fairly heavily in movie soundtracks in pop culture, ironically for Theodor Adorno. I had my Stanley Kubrick film soundtrack phase too but I didn’t pretend it was going to free the proletariat from the tyranny of Stephen King novels or whatever, as if Stephen King novels weren’t literally just what happens when you take typical New Yorker fiction and add demons, time travel, and telekinesis in the first place. “Oh, there’s this girl who’s hated by her whole class and wants revenge. She can also move things with her mind! Children are growing up and have to face the realities of the adult world. There’s a clown demon in the gutter that holds a balloon! A man reflects on the tragedy of the Kennedy assassination. Then he tries to time travel to stop it!” They definitely hate Stephen King because he’s like a mirror to them.
The fact is I highly doubt pop culture is keeping the masses down or whatever. For one, the richest spoiled brat in the world, Elongated Muskrat, is rather obsessed with it to the point he seems to want to identify with every member of the lesser-known group of superheroes called the Marvel Illuminati simultaneously. On the topic of the Marvel Illuminati, yes, that’s a cool idea, but I think the execution is poor because the authors generally can’t figure out what to do with a group of superheroes that just entirely use their brains to solve problems instead of getting in fights. The question of what would happen in the superhero world that isn’t people punching each other is extremely interesting but that kind of worldbuilding doesn’t seem to have been tackled very much outside of, interestingly, the whole Champions and Hero System thing, and even there it doesn’t seem like it’s been completely fleshed out.
In addition to the Elongated Muskrat who got fired from the X-Men and started the terrible knockoff called X Corps because he was a MAD Magazine or Obvious Plant-style knockoff of Wolverine in the first place being obsessed with those kinds of things (but ironically he never claimed to read X-Men, or X-Force, or New Mutants, the cringey X obsession came from much more banal sources,) there’s also of course Marie Kondo. The thing is that Marie Kondo isn’t even an extreme minimalist like that anymore.
Marie Kondo Abandons Tidying Up (and What We Can Learn From It) - Christian Minimalism
Since announcing that she has moved away from her previous way of living out her own KonMari Method, Kondo has embraced a Japanese concept called kurashi, often translated as “way of life” or “the ideal way of spending our time.”
Kondo expands on her understanding of kurashi:
The concept of kurashi takes [the KonMari Method] one step further: by seeing the world through the lens of what matters most, we begin living our best lives.
Marie Kondo, “What is Kurashi?“
It’s good to not want to have a lot of clutter. It’s freeing to not have to feel like you’re keeping up with the Joneses and whatever. But Marie Kondo was definitely an extremist who just wanted to get rid of literally everything and emptied her purse out every day and other strange, OCD-ish things before realizing that was too extreme and abandoning it in favor of trying to live a cozy Japanese-inspired life which is much better.
If you happened to read Kondo’s first book, it was very clear that her chosen lifestyle was extreme. She lived extremely simply, only keeping those things that “sparked joy.” She encouraged people to only own beautiful clothes, and not own any “around the house clothes.” She famously said that she keeps her book collection to only 30 books (though she later acknowledged that others can own more, she affirmed that she wanted to keep her 30-book-system in place for herself).
When I read Kondo’s book when it first came out, I was stunned by one of her daily practices: she emptied the contents of her purse/bag, every day when she came home. I don’t mean she cleaned it out to get rid of excess stuff (which is, I think, a needed periodic practice, if not every day!)– she literally took out everything she carries with in her bag and put it away, every day when she got home. Then, she’d re-pack her bag every morning before she left the house.
Though she did not impress her extreme lifestyle practices when using her tidying-up method with others (called the KonMari Method), it’s clear that for herself she preferred a very extreme and often Spartan lifestyle.
The fact is it should be OK to have things that you like, just be organized and clean instead of having a lot of clutter. Keep things in containers instead of just having junk everywhere and don’t keep things you absolutely never use, but you can definitely have more than 30 books and have “around the house clothes” and whatever. Also, keeping items in your purse (or your satchel that Indiana Jones wears if you’re a manly man or whatever) is a really good way to store them efficiently and stay organized compared to dumping them all out compulsively, just saying. If being a minimalist means not being a borderline hoarder like most Americans then good, but if being a minimalist means being basically OCD please don’t.
The fact is anticonsumerism is just borne out of people being lazy and stupid and envying people who get to have things. You can practice Aristotelean virtue ethics and just have a moderate amount of things that you enjoy or need instead of following KonMarie that even Marie Kondo has given up on on the one hand or keeping up with the Joneses and ending up in a pigsty of clutter on the other. There’s a reason that the actual Frankfurt School cultural Marxists and a lot of the religiously-inspired wackos are exactly the same regarding wanting to ban aspects of popular culture and that’s because they come from the same place of psychological resentment. They want to just say things they can’t have must be bad.
So, as always, the motives of the Marxists are entirely backwards, and Marxism is keeping everyone down, not lifting people up. I think the motives of the rabidly anti-woke which
and discussed on a recent podcast are exactly the same, just like the motives of the rabid anti-communists and what have you. When you’re just opposing things mindlessly that’s resentment. I don’t want to read comics calling Jordan Peterson Red Skull or read really goofy-sounding things like Squirrel Girl either but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on comics. And yes, Hollywood had a period with a bunch of communist film directors before so none of this is new, it all seems like a phase that happens in culture sometimes, but if you just give up and don’t do anything other than check out CDs and books from the public library of creative works that are basically free because they’re all old enough to be public domain or just unpopular enough to have people lining up to buy them, then I hate to break it to you but you’re just driven by resentment and you’re wallowing in misery. It’s also convenient that Free Comic Book Day is in May just like Halloween in May where we celebrate pulp horror stuff for a month.Happy inaugural Halloween in May mutants and norms! I hope you’ve been enjoying Dracula and that we can soon have enough Halloween in May celebrants to have trick-or-treating, Halloween in May parties, and live horror movie screenings and live Rocky Horror! Have another version!
Tune back in soon for Shakespeare for Supermen, Hypnogogy Revisited, and Metamorphology Expanded!