Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #58

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THOUGHTS

I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated this now years running column, but have expressed my reasons for doing so already. I’m fucking busy, OK: a novel in the editing process, a very difficult to write (mostly) non-fiction book with an ever looming deadline, the debut CD of my band Botched Chadification, looking for a space to stage my new play, and I have a pug puppy the training of which feels like a full-time job unto itself. I’m also depressed that American hero Sean Strickland was robbed of his middleweight championship belt over obvious political and sponsorship based bullshit. Fuck Dricus du Plessis and fuck the UFC. See, I have my reasons. Nevertheless, I appreciate your support. I hope strive to maintain your status within the Counter-Agency of the Avant-Garde. Please subscribe with money. This shit requires my time.

Yesterday, I saw the lowest common denominator of the online right insist that Netflix, with its historical docuseries on Alexander the Great called Alexander: The Making of a God, made Alexander gay. Netflix didn’t make Alexander gay you morons – Alexander fucking lots of men made him gay. These men were pagans, they weren’t burdened by Judeo-Christian guilt . Alexander lived the code of blood, guts and cum. Is it so hard to believe that a great leader, inventor and hardened killer would have a sexual preference for men? The alt-right is dead. I simply cannot tolerate these simpletons anymore, quibbling over basic facts that shouldn’t be in dispute for anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of world history.

Indeed, the “End Wokeness” type accounts of X are, in fact, the revival of wokeness. Like the woke institutionalist bureaucrats they hate, the End Wokenesses of social media disintegrate the complexity of the world beneath a pig headed inflexible ideology, going as far as to rewrite history to suit their narrow viewpoints. All the things that were so repulsive about the woke movement of the 2010s - the morality policing, the obsessiveness, the cruelty, the inflexibility and the insufferable self righteousness - are present in these accounts, all of whom were late to the party anyways.

They showed up in 2021, after people like me had already made pushing back on popular ideology somewhat acceptable, and reduced that work to hallow sloganeering clickbait. Where were they when we were losing jobs and opportunities for simply supporting Donald Trump’s presidency and questioning the narratives being pushed on us by mass media? Waiting in the wind, it seems, so they could profit from the new media machine that was built prior.

Stop getting brainwashed by clickbait. Read a book. Go to a museum. Go train. Fuck, skateboard, I don’t know. Just do ANYTHING that gets your brain out of this muck. Being based is an empty value that I feel semi responsible for imparting onto the world. I’m sorry about that, and encourage you now to embrace your own freedom and develop a sense of self outside the commentary of the day to hallow sloganeering clickbait. There is no value in consuming rage bait all day. There is even less value in selling rage bait beneath the veil of anonymity, cowering behind a screen name so you can protect your precious email jobs where some fat bitch manager is screaming at you in the background.

BASED SAFETY

The Baker Skateboards brand founded by skateboarding legend Andrew Reynolds in 2000, as well as its offshoot brand Deathwish founded by original Baker pros Jim Greco and Eric Ellington, come together release their new joint video Baker has a Deathwish Part 2 ,and it’s fucking mindblowing. While not regularly cited for its influence in doing so, the early Baker videos not only set new standards in the levels of insane street skating would hit, it is also largely responsible for aesthetically pioneering a certain meme-ified, edgelord, aesthetic later popularized on 4Chan. Blocky type fonts, crack heads fighting looped into the skate footage, pro skaters behaving like rock n’ roll stars. The new video is somewhat different. Most of the OG pros are old and in recovery now, so the video has less hard drugs. Also, it focuses primarily on the brands’ younger riders, all of whom are doing shit that I thought was impossible previously. Stand out parts include the tall chad skating of Brian O’Dwyer (his part ends with quite possibly the scariest gap to feeble grind trick I’ve ever seen,) the smooth and fast technical skating of Caspar Brooker, and the nonstop gnarliness of former Thrasher SOTY Jamie Foy who seems to do things that should kill him on a daily basis. The soundtrack has everything from Lou Reed to power violence pioneers Spazz to ‘70s funk gods the Ohio players to a solo track by Suicide’s Martin Rev to motherfucking “Mandy”! The whole video is beautifully edited and watchable as hell, as much a work of art as it is a skate video, as the best skate videos always should be.

Speaking of pop culture entertainment industries mingling with the formally experimental, Jon Rafman’s video for Kanye and Ty Dolla $ign’s upcoming album Vultures is shockingly weird and interesting given its short run time. While we’re on the topic, let’s not forget Kanye’s recent listening party rant. My favorite extreme metal Youtube video essay series, Radio Free Innsmouth, dedicates an episode to the popular Ukrainian black metal band Lucifigum – one of the few things I like about that country, aside from the photographer Boris Mikhailov.

Friend of SP Mathieu Malouf is back on the scene, this time with some major financial backing. His new show at Nahmad Contemporary depicts an assortment of women and, who knows why, penguins:

”Penguins have been lingering in my mind for a while. Unlike women, there are not a lot of penguins in art, maybe in a Sigmar Polke. My attraction to them began as a formal one. They are very aesthetically minimal,” he says.

In more painting news, the former actress, model, star of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void and once extremely unwell dope fiend Paz de la Huerta is painting and I don’t know if the paintings are good but there’s something reassuring about her still being alive and capable of delivering interviews.

Another friend of SP, artist, musician and music video director known for his work with Oneohtrix Point Never Nate Boyce discusses art and music here with Sean Tatol. Beloved Adriana La Cerva, otherwise known as the actress Drea de Matteo, links up with Bret Easton ellis and reveals herself as being so cool it becomes immediately apparent why she’s now allowed to work in Hollywood anymore. She tells Bret about doing heroin with Abel Ferrara, being horny shooting a sex scene with Charlie Hunnam in Sons of Anarchy, and the visionary artistry of David Chase. Oh yeah, she also talks about how she got red pilled, which is awesome. Jack Mason looks back on five of his iconic podcast the Perfume Nationalist.

Speaking of, I recently joined tPN to discuss my favorite film of 2023, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. I was so moved by this film, that I also wrote about it for Compact Magazine:

”Poor Things is simultaneously a work of Rablesian grotesque social satire, an inverted Frankenstein fairytale, and a simple coming-of-age story, all at once. Its wild narrative confronts popular ideas about modern womanhood with the idea that degradation is unavoidable in a life lived freely.”

Given that it’s been so long since I’ve updated this column, I’ve had several other recent media appearances that you can check out. I joined my friends Monica, Veronica, and Cate’s new show The Temple of Friendship to discuss the scheming homosexuals of the films Saltburn and The Talented Mr. Ripley, the latter of which I’m not even much a fan of, intriguingly. Back when the show was still within its first three iconic opening episodes and long before it drifted into magical realist cop-out, I discussed the brilliant Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder series The Curse on Rare Candy. Finally, I joined my friends at the Art of Darkness podcast to discuss a rarely addressed enthusiasm of mine, the 19th Century gothic literature of Mary Shelley and, more specifically, her apocalyptic fiction novel The Last Man.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

The first season of True Detective was always magic. Nic Pizzolatto, in collaboration with his director Cary Joji Fukanaga and stars Woody and Matthew, created something that truly could never be replicated: perhaps the last great exploration of masculinity, heroism, and male friendship in American culture. And yet, attempt to replicate it they did. As my friend Alec the Filthy Armenian notes, the second and third season failed because they failed to reckon with the central propellant force of the first season — the relationship between the detectives — and instead listened to the positive reviews they got about the show’s sense of setting. Its “southern gothicness.” Despite the failures of the second and third seasons, I could not be prepared for the absolute travesty that is True Detective: Night Country. Pizzolatto left the series and HBO gave it to the Mexican retard Issa Lopez, who has evidently made so many bad films that she has 10 of them and no one knows any of them exist. The show makes Alaska look like CSI, and the gestures towards surrealism are embarrassing and deeply embedded with the tendencies of BPD Tumblr art hoe. Issa has gone to war with fans (including me) lamenting the state of the show, accusing us of “review bombing” her disgusting attempt at remaking a once great show, only to have her predecessor give his thoughts on her version of his show concept: they aren’t positive.

Hiring a middle aged white woman and insane looking dreadlocked mulatta to curate it, the Whitney Biennial is upon us again and looking more ridiculous than ever before. And this time, the vaunted survey of American art can’t even be bothered to limit its focus to American art. Jesus.

Have you ever wondered what could be worse than sitting through an entire Kurosawa movie? I’ll tell you what: a Kurosawa movie remixed into a Spike Lee joint. Denzel can’t save you here, this fucker is DOOOMED!

The UFC is going to trash since its deal signed with ESPN. Fan favorites like Sean Strickland are stripped of their titles despite racking up record numbers in PPV buys and bringing new attention and fans to MMA, while charmless, zero charisma fags like bantamweight champ Suga Sean O’Malley are shoved down our throats because Disney thinks their TikTok numbers translate to PPV buys (zoomers don’t pay for shit retards.) Speaking of the imperative of a digitized marketing culture destroying the purity of everything, here’s an interesting interview with the knucklehead Gary Rodgers, who does weekly skateboarding news videos for Thrasher Magazine. For those not hip to such things, Thrasher is synonymous with skateboarding. Such was the brilliant marketing and insight of its late founder Jake Phelps, it represents what it supposed to be the absolute standard of “quality” in that industry. In 2022, there was some controversy when Nyjah Huston, a skateboarder who was sort of a corporate child star, shocked the industry with an onslaught of footage of tricks that had never even been attempted, let alone landed. The idea amongst fans and commentators was that he had simply gotten too good to deny, despite his early corniness and Monster Energy contracts, and that he was a guaranteed winner of Thrasher’s annual Skater of the Year. Nevertheless, Thrasher gave the vaunted industry title to Tyshawn Jones for the second time, despite putting out 1/5 as much footage as Nyjah. Gary Rodgers tells the Nine Club, quite honestly, that Nyjah hadn’t “done enough for Thrasher” to win the award. Even in an industry as niche as skateboarding, you have to kiss the ass of meek suits who can’t do 1/10 of the shit that you can do. Greatness on its own doesn’t earn respect in a world built on a rocky foundation of clicks.

Beware the semi anti-woke libtards like Bill Maher. With elections coming up, they’ll be reminding you oh who they really are who they’ve always been. I’ve discovered one of the great retards of the internet in Mordant Rhed, a black metal old head who wears a leather fetish mask while yelling at trolls in his comments with a fervent intensity.

Finally, how do you pay a prostitute millions of dollars only for her to demand even more? Sure, Vince is a sex pervert. A trafficker? Come on.

ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Alexander the Great headstone
2. Mathieu Malouf at Nahmad Contemporary
3. True Detective season 4