Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #10

This Week in Based and Cringe

BASED SAFETY
Caesura Magazine publishes an English translation of surrealist photographer and sculptor (and one of my biggest creative influences) Hans Bellmer’s text The Anatomy of the Image, in which the artist described the psychosexual neurosis that provided the foundation of his dolls and the photographs he made of them. Father Zizek declares the radical potential of the GameStop stonk warriors for the Reddit autists’ talent for, even if for a brief moment, destabilizing a faction of global capital. My pal Geoff Shullenberger hosts “BASED Deleuzian” and Other Life host Justin Murphy on Geoff’s Outsider Theory podcast. This is the clearest I believe Murphy has ever been about his own politics, and it’s quite interesting–well, I dug it anyways…

American artist Alex Bag and British writer Charlie Fox debut their collaborative video collage “I’m the Slime,” that brilliantly aestheticizes the digitally induced brain melt that we’re experiencing during Covid libtard authoritarianism. On his blog, king Dennis Cooper beautifully juxtaposes the great writer of literary evil Comte de Lautréamont with Surrealist pop king Salvador Dalí. Inspired by Safety Propaganda’s interview with Alastair MacKinven, Gio Penachietti explores the temporality and surface of the painting. Matt Taibbi anoints and congratulates security state propaganda diva Rachel Maddow for establishing herself as the new Bill O’Reilly (you go QUEEN!).

JJ Charlesworth explains why the art world is having such a tough time with the rise of NFTs, and thinks they doth protest too much, indeed! After Biden agrees to fulfill TRUMP’s desire to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan, Communia examines where American imperialism will be directed next. Finally, I want to verify here that I am not sold on Michael Lind’s class analysis, nor his theory of political change. Much of what he says fails to reckon with the fact that economic development cannot be rewinded, nor that FDR social democratic reforms will not have the same weight now that they once did. HOWEVER, this is an excellent piece that dispels much of the dubious Ta-Nahesi Coates line about “redlining.”

CRINGE PROPAGANDA:
”Artist” Brad Downey (though I’m deeply skeptical of the idea that the designation actually applies to whatever it is that he makes; street signs placed together in “odd” arrangements or something) heads to Trump country to wave his prissy, bougie, liberal finger at Trump supporting shop owners, never stopping once to ponder if he is in fact doing “the things” that make people hate urban, bourgeois liberals so very, very much. Way to go, Brad! I admire Alice Neel’s paintings quite a bit, but Ben Davis’ essay on how important “communism” was to Neel in the creation of these paintings seems dubious. For one, he points out how loose she was in her Marxism in the actual piece (seeming to discredit his own argument), that what she liked about Marxism had more to do with gender and race politics, and the whole thing just seems a bit cringe and not the point. Who cares? She’s a bougie artist. A great bougie artist! That’s enough. Most artists have reductive, incoherent politics. No skin off my ass! Current Affairs writes about how bad landlords are…….. for women especially (men apparently don’t have landlords as much as women or some shit, typical). Meanwhile, leftist journo dork on the rise Ken Klippenstein gets called out by Yasha Levine for failing to report on Silicon Valley billionaire Pierre Omidiyar, Klippenstein’s boss, for funding Ukranian Nazis. Klippenstein’s excuse: Russia stuff is “too boring.” Too boring? TOO FUCKING BORING? This guy claims the greatest security state propaganda conspiracy of our time is just too boring to write about? That does not check out. Jimmy Dore lambasts the geeky Klippenstein here.

Trans-feminist Marxist (a fake ideology brandished by overpaid intellectuals as credentials) academic McKenzie Wark guest edits the new issue of E-Flux, and stuffs it to the rafters with content related to transgender and other identitarian concerns. Her opening op-ed that introduces the issue talks about how most of the liberals who feign support for the trans community are doing so for mostly aesthetic reasons (yeah, no shit!) while also demanding something like a whole separate media ecosystem for transgendered academics, err, I mean people (almost like Wark is more concerned with establishing herself at the top of a new media ecosystem, hmmm, interesting). Her other essay in the issue references Mulvey’s work on the male gaze and “subverts” it with some trans theorizing. This shit is exhausting. Academics hate all normal people and they are taking over the world!

But at least Wark is genuinely intellectual, and her work at time is even quite interesting to read, and well written. The world of Zero Books under publisher Doug Lain on the other hand…… God damn am I glad that I’m not trying to have a book published by this guy because he is a true absurdity! In this video, Lain offers a vigorous defense of the left, except the vigorous defense actually sounds much more like an advertisement for his most anti-intellectual albeit Breadtube friendly writer Ben Burgis’ retardedly named book Canceling Comedians While the World Burns. Lain tries to burn Aimee Terese, but acknowledges none of the substance of her ideas while also doing all of the things that Aimee accuses the online left of doing: doing discipline for the left and letting its worst tendencies off the hook so as to not alienate its juicy online patronage. PaFUCKINGthetic!

Illustration by Hans Bellmer