Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #27

This Week in Based and Cringe

RANDOM THOUGHTS

I don’t have much that I’d like to share this week, other than that you should support DC Miller and Nina Power who were AGAIN smeared by DC’s former employer Art Monthly. Read DC’s reply to the smear here. Aside from that, we have more bad news from electronic music. In a year that has already robbed us of Peter Rehberg, who passed a couple of months ago, it has now also been reported that Richard H. Kirk, founder of industrial and electronic music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire, has died at age 65. Kirk stands alongside Throbbing Gristle, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Public Enemy as an act of towering influence over the music of the late-20th and 21st Centuries. When he founded Cabaret Voltaire in Sheffield in 1973 alongside Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, he set out to disintegrate the boundaries between high and low art in a way that was still novel at the outset of postmodernism. Influenced equally by the Dada movement (the group’s name came from the Dada ground zero in Zurich), Burroughs, Warhol, electronic composers like Stockhausen and rock bands like The Velvets and Roxy Music, Cabaret Voltaire’s high concept surrealist electronic music embodied the “rock as art” concept that would be fundamental to the formation of later movements like industrial and power electronics. Early records like Red Mecca and Microphonies still sound disorienting and menacing to contemporary ears. A restless spirit, Kirk’s focus eventually sharpened, and Cabaret Voltaire became a very early proponent of electronic dance music. I could write at length about the solo career that follower CB, or how much those records mean to me. But I’ll just say, Richard H. Kirk was a genius. He was at the center of all the most formally novel music concepts to arise from postmodernism. And he never became a dinosaur. Rest easy!

BASED SAFETY

I wonder if Benjamin Bratton realized how brutal the response to his authoritarian adoring text Revenge of the Real would be. Did he honestly think that his advocacy of technocratic progressive totalitarianism would be widely admired? Did he really think that we were at a place in society in which no one would take issue with this idiocy that he espouses? Who knows? But another week goes by and another terrific Bratton takedown rises to the fore. This one is by friend of the ‘stack Geoff Shullenberger, and is especially funny when he points out that Bratton’s claim that “mask refusal is a ‘refusal of the real’” never even gestures towards the mounting evidence that masks don’t do a FUCKING THING. The aforementioned DC Miller looks back upon 9/11 and the two decades of lies and ugly distortions that followed it, referring to the War on Terror as “the demolition of the democratic West.” Glenn Greenwald discusses the Covid hypocrisy of elites as embodied in the Met Gala which hosted maskless rich beauties being served by masked lowbies desperate for approval. Of course, most leftists were upset that the rulers DIDN’T wear masks, when the lesson should be that NO ONE SHOULD WEAR MASKS. They are a worthless insult to our intelligence and I disdain all who still follow these arbitrary rules. Angela Nagle joins the Good ol’ Boyz Maarek and Bogbeef to analyze some of the hypocrisies of Marxism (many of which I definitely agree with, but not all). Reactionary feminist Mary Harrington goes on What’s Left and proves that certain strains of feminist thought might actually be useful in resisting the most wretched excesses of gender ideology.

On the aesthetics front, my good friend and one of America’s most gifted contemporary painters Julien Nguyen makes an appearance on Contain for a wide-ranging discussion on art, philosophy, and history. Marxist art historian Boris Groys pens a fascinating essay for e-Flux (and it pains me to acknowledge that there’s anything worth reading in that neoliberal bible) on Lenin, and more specifically, the image of Lenin and how it was made immortal and ageless. “Because Lenin has become a bust, a work of art, he has remained eternally alive, since he can now be recontextualized at any time and in any place while still playing a leading, guiding role,” writes Groys. Theater director Logan Barry authors a fantastic piece on Artaud and the role of disease, contagion, and PLAGUE in theater. Dennis Cooper (yes, I’m clearly a fan of Dennis Cooper) is interviewed by AnotherMag to preview his new novel I Wished, which will close out his much beloved George Myles Cycle of novels after many decades.

Artist Shannon Cartier Lucy has an excellent new show of paintings at Lubov Gallery in New York. Accompanying the exhibition is a new monograph entitled Better Call it Grace, available here, which features an essay on Cartier Lucy’s work by both Claire Sammut and YOURS TRULY.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

Branko Marcetic, who was always a dim soc dem propagandist but has slowly devolved into an outright monster over the last couple of years and certainly so in the post-Sanders era, argues that the right wing is wrong that “vaccine mandates are totalitarianism” because, apparently, Hitler lightened vaccine regulations. You know the DNC party line enforcers are losing ground and running out of ideas when they have to call even the most obvious and bare-minimum resistance to regime tyranny "Hitlerian.” Christ almighty, Branko! Surely you can do better than that, right? RIGHT!? Nope, he can’t.

More art museum protests. This past weekend, “Globalize the Intifada” storms MoMA as part of the second wave of the “Strike MoMA campaign”. The protest aimed to dismantle MoMA’s complicity on toxic (assumedly Israeli) funding in the name of Palestine. Now, of course museums take money from evil people. But do these people really think any of this will make an actual difference? I am sick to death of these small-scale, meaningless gestures that AT MOST will only force one museum to slightly change its funding sources. The protestors’ claims that their protest was “CLASS WAR” was funny of course, because it looks to me like these were all bored middle class kids without much stake in an actual class war.

Dorian Batcya, who has never written anything that didn’t at least slightly infuriate me, somehow manages to make The Sopranos, the most inarguably masterful American cultural product of the 21st Century, sound fake and cringe. No man, The Sopranos was not great because it flattered your narrow progressive politics. You are PROJECTING. A truly stunning analysis of the pregnant man emoji comes from Jane Solomon here, which I wished I had never read and because I’m angry that I read it now I’m making you read it. The Hot Topic socialist Hasan Piker is very mad about Nicki Minaj’s anti-vaccine takes being celebrated by Tucker Carlson and to demonstrate this Hasan has to claim that Tucker would deny Nicki’s (and Hasan’s, like dude you’re not white passing you’re fucking white) right to ride the bus, leaning bizarrely into racism to make his case, as the woketards tend to do from time to time. Chelsea Manning shivs Glenn Greenwald over his Tucker Carlson appearances despite Glenn’s years of work and advocacy that helped Chelsea get released from prison. Shouldn’t be too surprising though.

John McWhorter, a linguist and one of the most insufferable humans to ever wear the mantle of “radical centrist” proudly, writes about pronoun usages in our culture — objectively the worst thing to happen to language since they problematized use of the word “retard” as a fun school yard jab — and claims that pronoun misuse and abuse is good because it’s formally interesting. As if that’s the point. Proving how utterly useless the light dissidence and “rational centrism” of the IDW actually is, Claire Lehmann makes the case that Australia’s Covid measures, however brutal, unfair, and violent they might be, are actually ok because they work. Everyone in the media is awful.

I have no idea how we’re all still compartmentalizing all of this. Human beings are wondrously resilient. Against all the propaganda, the lies, the brutality, WE CARRY ON!

ILLUSTRATIONS
1. collage by Adam Lehrer
2. Cabaret Voltaire