Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #56

This week in based and cringe...

THOUGHTS

I’m in the early phases of so many long-term projects that I’m, well, a bit overwhelmed. I’m organizing a Safety Propaganda live event for October 25, headlined by Alex Bienstock and I’s conceptual “pump metal” project Botched Chadification (more on that soon.) I’m curating an exhibition. I’m giving a lecture. I’m towards the end of a long and grueling editing process for a novel. I’m at the beginning of an arduous and painful outlining stage of another novel. I’m researching and attempting some actual on the ground reporting for a political themed work of non-fiction, with a surrealistic bent, with a rapidly nearing deadline (feeling fucked on that.) Now, with all of this, you might assume I’m working my ass off. To be honest, however, the planning stages and the research phases of creating art and spectacle is the time where I’m at my most relaxed. I love when creativity is little more than a glimmer. A prophetic dream. All I see is possibilities – reality hasn’t yet beaten me back down to cynicism. So, yes, I’m working. But not as much as I’ve been training, and traveling, as it turns out.

Just over the weekend I ventured upstate to Ithaca for the Harvest Fest. It was my lady’s birthday and, indeed, the lady is something of a pot head. So, I thought, why not take her and some friends to an open field in the glorious north where we can sample the most powerful marijuana strains in the world (legally) and consume some psilocybin mushrooms in various cooked permutations (likely illegally)? I don’t take many psychedelics, so believe me when I tell you: I was delirious. Shockingly, however, I never dipped into the territory of the bad trip. Something about the atmosphere of the Harvest Fest prevented me from descending into the inner hell of the mind. What was it that shielded me from the abyss? After all, I did feel rather out of my element surrounded by all that tye-dye and failure. As much as I hate to say it, I believe it might have been a certain kind of smugness. It’s hard not to feel like you’re doing OK when faced with the reality of “The Wookies” – otherwise known as bearded, dreadlocked, alcoholic and drug addicted, aging hippies who smell like Chewbacca.

The Harvest Fest is comparable to something like Amsterdam’s Cannabis Cup, albeit a bit less well organized and lower stakes. During the actual judging of the 18 marijuana strains — I remember amnesia haze and tart pops and a hybrid of old favorites white widow and AK47 being pleasurable but given how high I was at that point it’s difficult to ascertain which strain was activating which effect — I learned that there would be no panel of judges. Instead, a man who looked suspiciously liked the late Dr. John and Radio Raheem announced the strains and threw out rolled joints of said strains into the crowd while a kid who so badly wanted to be Bradley Nowell played weird cover songs of weeded out pop hits. The crowd of wasters smoked the joints and passed them around, struggling to remember which strains they were actually smoking so they, THE PEOPLE, could judge them. It was chaotic. The Dr. John lookalike spouted the usual weed activist lines, and quickly I began to ponder the failures of the hippie’s political imagination.

These types are remarkably low information, instead seeming to badly collage together often contradictory ideological slogans and then somehow regurgitate them back in ways that are clearly indicative of the deep cope of a perennial loser mindset. During the first day at the fair, I went up to a table with all manner of goodies: paraphernalia, several strains of weed, mushrooms. I bought some weed. Instead of a quick transaction, I was treated to a story by the salesmen, an aging wookie. He told me about the five years he spent in jail. About the indignity of having done time for a drug that would soon be legalized anyways. He said he’s confident that he won’t go to jail again, because “how would a prosecutor find 12 (jurors) to put me back in?” I didn’t think he should be so confident in that belief. He left me with a doozy.

”I feel bad for illegal immigrants, man,” he said. “As a white man, I really know what racism feels like.”

Somehow, the man had managed to suffuse the pieties of wokeness into his own brand of LSD-fried white boomer seethe. While fascinating to ponder, such interactions leave you off-kilter. I’ve always understood the seduction of drug culture, of living outside the lines. But the problem with it: is there’s often no escape from it. It comes to define you, and suck your life dry. It leaves you confused and out of touch with reality, castrated. At the fair, there were as many late stage alcoholics and junkies as there were people making a legitimate and happy life growing marijuana. Maybe more. Among those happy growers, however, I promised I’d shout out Julia and Callan of Patchwork Progress. Lovely people, and they sold me phenomenal hash as well as a beautiful western shirt, pictured above.

BASED SAFETY

My other recent trip was to Los Angeles for my friend Filthy Armenian’s live event. The French poet and Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov said: “You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends.” This is especially true, however, in LA, where almost every block has been immortalized in our imaginations through cinema and pop culture. The ghosts aren’t even abstract or hard to see, they’re plain as day, often blinking at you in neon. I spent my first day there, after arriving to the shithole that is Downtown LA, in Silver Lake. My friend and gallery owner Grant Tyler gave me a tour of that neighborhood’s history in the Occult: a ranch once overseen by the Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky, a gnostic church with abstract paintings for stained glass windows where biblical images would normally reside, and the general magic that permeates that air. My second day I spent with a whole different assortment of ghosts in Venice, at the mecca of bodybuilding Gold’s Venice. I trained chest, shirtless of course, surrounded by the images and remaining DNA of some of the greatest athletes the sport has ever given us. So, yes, LA is a very exciting place. All its absences are utterly present.

As for the show which took place at an elegantly wide open venue, cool California breeze maintaining a comfortable air temperature, in the Arts District, it was spectacular. The Armenian performed a provocative and heartfelt ode to his Angeleno homeland. He then interviewed Jack of the Perfume Nationalist about men and the origins of their gayness. Mommy Milkers discussed the life and work of Angeleno whore and writer Eve Babitz. I debuted a short play that I’ve written called, Celebutante Rape Therapy. The entire magical night beneath the stars can be listened to here, and my play can be watched here.

Harmony Korine is back and, seemingly transformed. In this GQ profile, the artist has started a new design and production company called, fittingly, EDGLORD: “It’s a design collective; it’s a creative factory; it makes movies that are not really movies, movies that are closer to video games, that sometimes are actually playable as video games.” Excellent. Harmony is also soon to release his first film since The Beach Bum; AGGRO DRIFT was shot entirely in infrared and stars Travis Scott. I recently saw Harmony’s solo show at Hauser and Wirth’s LA space which turned stills from the film into paintings, and was smitten. They bode well for the film. AGGRO DRIFT premiered at the Venice Film Festival which, evidently, debuted a shitload of other promising new films as well. The most exciting of those, for me, is David Fincher’s The Killer, which stars Michael Fassbender as an assassin experiencing a crisis of conscience. Fassbender details the rigors of performing for a Fincher film in this short video. In the massive build-up to his upcoming film Fillers of the Flower Moon, Marty Scorsese is doing bundles of press. Usually he’s affable to the point of being annoying so I don’t watch, but I couldn’t resist when it came to watching the auteur tell tales from behind the scenes of all of his best films. Last thing for cinema related news: a very eloquent profile on Mickey Rourke written by Nick Pinkerton around the release of Rourke’s greatest performance in The Wrestler.

Since the last column, Russell Brand has been dragged through the mud over the “claims” of several women who said he acted, you know, rapey or whatever. More #metoo bullshit thinly veiled as a work of investigative journalism, the thing that doesn’t fucking exist. And by investigating, they mean they kept asking women Russell has fucked whether he forced them to do so or not until they could come up with a small handful of them out of some 200 women interviewed. DC Miller on the accusations: “Anonymous accusations of sexual impropriety work as a powerful smear tactic for multiple reasons. People are naturally sympathetic to women, and naturally jealous of promiscuous men.” Brand is a stand-up guy. You know who else is a stand-up guy, it seems? Thurston Moore. Though a corny boomer leftist, Thurston is an admirably gifted and fundamentally decent man. He’s about to release his memoir about his lift in rock n’ roll and the avant-garde. You know what the book isn’t about? His marriage to ex-wife Kim Gordon. While Kim used her memoir to absolutely trash Thurston’s husbandry, Thurston refuses to do the same: "I don't want my 28-year-old daughter to have to read what her father has to say about his family, his relationship with her mother,” he says.

While on the topic of rock n’ roll, Bardo Methodology continues the digital roll-out of its new print issue with this fantastic interview with Australian black metal behemoths Bestial Warlust. My own band, the great “pump metal” pioneers Botched Chadification, has its album-length video Masculinity Under Threat exhibited at Australian gallery Bus Projects. Writer Douglas Maxted recognizes our sheer genius and masculine glory: “A New York band plays next. Punks as cops with flaccid guitars who take off their clothes. Masculinity under threat. People are into it.” Finally, the lead singer of Japanese punk band GISM, Sakevi Yokoyama, is dead. The man was a brilliant artist and an undeniable counter-agent. He used the power of myth to bolster the magnitude of his presence – fans believe to this day that he threatened to kill or perhaps killed record store clerks for selling unauthorized bootlegs (hell, maybe it’s true.) GISM was an incredible band that played hardcore so dirty that it often drifted into the terrain of the abstract, and Sakevi’s vocals were so shrill and menacing they often sound like they belong to the second wave of black metal. My favorite video essayist of extreme music Radio Free Innsmouth details the sonic power of GISM here.

Newly crowned middle weight UFC champion Sean Strickland has a new podcast and it’s, predictably, totally fucking honest. In the second episode, he discusses feeling bad for breaking Izzy Adesanya mentally before recalling being assured by Francis Ngannou when the two fighters found out they were eskimo brothers. Ngannou told Sean to not worry about the cock size differential between the two. Bodybuilder Nathan De Asha, a proud son of Liverpool with an accent so cockney it might as well have made Sid Vicious sound posh, is back competing after losing years from his sport due to bicep tears. He’s back now, and fucking massive and peeled, having already won two out of the three shows he’s competed in in Europe (the one he lost was bullshit) and will likely be competing for a top 10 spot at this year’s Mr. Olympia, which is the most stacked it’s been since the late 1990s. Here, De Asha discusses his return and his glory.

In SP-related news, writer Dan Baltic comes on System of Systems by SP to discuss the release of his great debut novel Nutcrankr. Spreading the love, I appear on Dan’s podcast New Write to discuss my pursuits in counter-ideological brainwashing, bodybuilding, and my stance on Hunter Biden’s iPhone photography. In a breaking development, I’ve added “world class fashion journalist’ to my resumé after securing the one and only exclusive interview with New York wunderkind fashion designer Elena Velez for my Compact column.

To finish the based, I’d like to highlight the work of a great artist who died too young and is remembered by basically no one. Adam Cooley was a Columbia, Indiana based musician and record nerd who used to populate various experimental music message boards. I also used to frequent those boards, and this guy put me on to god knows how many of my favorite artists: Sun City Girls, Slowdive, Thinking Fellers Union Local #282, JANDEK, Cereberus Shoal, and so many more. He also knew a lot about films, and made video art. He had a very particular sensibility that he seemed to find in all his artistic touchstones, a sense of freedom in autism. Yes, he was perhaps the first gifted autist I’d ever come across online. He also had two excellent bands. Robe. was his duo with one Kyle Wiley and they played a particularly abstract and bleak form of drone music that they called “ghost sludge”. Scissor Shock was a head fuck of a solo project that managed to channel so many of his influences, from Skin Graft era Chicago no wave bands like Yowie to Jandek-ian crackling beauty to math rock to various forms of computer music. Not sure what made me think of Adam, but I want his art to be better known and for his existence to be better remembered. He was a real artist. He died in 2014 of acid reflux complications, only a year older than me. Here is a great interview with him.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

I almost opted to leave this portion of the column blank because of all the death and violence happening everywhere. “Cringe” feels like a father vulgar term to apply to rape as a weapon of war and beheadings and what have you. Then again, vulgarity is what I do best…

So, signaling the absolute death of interest in supporting Ukraine’s senseless and self-destructive refusal to surrender against Russia, Canada decides it’s a great idea to honor Ukrainian SS official, I shit you not, Yaroslav Hunka, people were predictably and mercifully (I was waiting for libtards to create some new plot line about SS thugs being “victims” of Hitler, or whatever) pissed the fuck off. While the Canuck involved with bringing the brute before the Parliament has resigned in disgrace, CIA hack Keir Gilles writes this article: a piece of libtard Nazi apologetics and just using that phrase only heightens the hyperreal dimension of this most strange debacle. Gilles, seemingly without shame or restraints, claims Hunka wasn’t a real Nazi because he fought Soviets. That’s all he says in defense of his absurd position. After a decade of labeling anyone antagonistic to the mainstream political line a “Nazi”, the CIA is now once again laundering Nazis for moral consumption. Accurately knowing that his time as the West’s superstar war time leader is coming to an end, Zelensky uses Hamas’ attack launched on Israel to remind everyone about Putin, who has nothing to do with Hamas, This is your reality. Breathe it in. Feel its intoxicating qualities.

Despite all those pictures of some of the dumber ones among them, the Democrats finally concede to the reality that we probably do need a longer border wall. In more cruel twists of irony, “poet and activist” Ryan Carson was stabbed to death in the streets of Crown Heights by an 18-year-old sociopath with poor impulse control. Yes, there is of course some cosmic irony in the senseless death of someone who heavly lobbied to defund the police, but I’m not getting any further involved in that debate. We need cops, period. I don’t want to add too much to the full-scale war breaking out between Israel and Palestine after brutal Hamas fighters broke into the country’s borders, we all know it’s happening, so I’ll just point out some of the tangential ridiculous bullshit that has transpired in response. The former porn star who constantly prattles on about the “rape culture” of pornography, Mia Khalifa, apparently isn’t entirely unsympathetic to Hamas, who proudly uses rape as a weapon of war. She then loses her job at Playboy, which might be unfair, but come on… It’s PLAYBOY. DSA, as bad at politics as ever, makes sure to affirm their support for Palestine with the clunkiest phrasing ever. Speaking of how bad at politics they are, the most famous candidate they ever endorsed AOC is stabbing them in the back in plain sight over the clunky statement. Idiocy all the way down.

Moor Mother is one of the worst artists alive. She used the “edginess” of noise branding to build her market identity before going onto rail against white appropriation of black music in her shitty jazz and rap projects. I’ve yet to meet someone who likes her music in real life, aside from boomer liberal white musicians like the great Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, etc) or the also great Kevin Martin (The Bug) who make records with her so they don’t have to read Quietus articles about their past associations with Matthew Bower or the Broken Flag Records crew or whatever. And yet, I feel like I’ve now seen three covers of The Wire with Moor Mother. Why? Well, come on: you know why. Speaking about people who use their race as a means of accruing success and status and success in the face of having very little tangible talent, comedian Hasan Minhaj apparently has never told a single true story about himself on stage. All those times he’s claimed to be a hero for racial justice? Fake (yeah, no shit that guy is fucking transparently scummy.) Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic is being revisited which means art media is polluted with that guy’s marble swarm, mumbo jumbo, big words saying nothing retardation for a few weeks. Just watch his interview with David Velasco and learn how profoundly Foster has faked it until he made it and then faked it some more. The most overpaid artist in the world, Wolfgang Tillmans, has another exhibition. And he’ll likely have hundred more until you die. HIV can’t stop him so I assume nothing can. What a touched existence. Fuck.

Some sports cringe to somewhat brighten your day up. In the lead-up to his fight with Youtube sociopath Logan Paul, former Jiu-Jitsu champion and Conor McGregor’s former Jiu-Jitsu training partner Dillon Danis drew attention to Logan’s fiancé Nina Agdal’s posts that, quite frankly, made her seem like a total whore. Despite Dillon not pulling anything from private, all the posts were already made publicly, Paul is breaking a century of fight ethics by having his slut wife sue Danis with hopes of “bankrupting” him. Now, it’s well known among fighters that they DO NOT SUE each other, especially during the lead-up to a fight which is their only time to make money. No one would know this more than veteran MMA journalist Ariel Helwani, but does that stop Helwani from giving Paul the most weak ass, lob ball interview in history of pro fighting? Nope, Ariel is a fucking worm and Paul is a billionaire. Do the math. The aforementioned UFC Middleweight champ Sean Strickland just proved he is the best middleweight fighter in the world by beating its champion, right? Well, not according to ESPN, which somehow still has Strick as the FIFTH best middleweight fighter in their totally “objective” rankings. How could they possibly come to this conclusion? Despite the wonky justification, I’ll assume it has to do with that libtard network doing everything in its power to putting off promoting the outspoken and defiantly dissident Strickland.

ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Me with new shirt
2. Harvest Fest
3. Me Training at Gold’s Venice
4. Filthy Armenian crew
5. Grant Tyler at Gnostic Church, LA
6. Harmony Korine at Hauser and Wirth, LA
7. GISM
8. Scissor Shock
9. Yaroslav Hunka
10. Mia Khalifa
11. Logan Paul