Based Safety vs Cringe Propaganda #18

This Week in Based and Cringe

BASED SAFETY
As some of you, dear readers, will know, there was a time when I was an aspirant visual artist (that is, trying to make a career in the art world proper) working in the mediums of collage, video, and photography. Photographic images were my primary fascination, and all the work stemmed from making them, collecting them, and deconstructing them. I fucking love photography. I love the way it works on your brain, forcing you to look and capturing all your perverse, voyeuristic energy. But that said, photography is in a bad way in the contemporary art world. It’s all the same shit: self-portraits about identity, portraits of genderqueer lovers and their identities, or still-lives of pissed in toilets (or whatever) and how it relates to, you guessed it, the artist’s identity. With all of this in mind, I was absolutely blown away by the work of the Los Angeles-based photographer Mark McKnight when I first saw it. He uses a hyper-contrasted black and white that makes the imagery look hard, sharp and precise, and his subject matter veers between exquisitely produced landscape images to extremely graphic depictions of burly ass bear gays engaged in sexual acts that look every bit as violent as they do eroticized (Bataille would certainly approve). This is some of the best photography, both formally and conceptually, that I’ve seen in a long time. In this article for Mousse, Andrew Berardini writes: “Nothing and everything is hidden in McKnight’s photographs. Every blade of grass has an intense personality, cut to perfection, rendered absolutely itself.”

Angela Nagle, describing the NGO industrial complex as a “new clerisy,” asks if populism started a 21st Century anti-clerisy revolution: “The main reason ‘left-populism’ never worked is because, despite getting off to a plausible and electorally viable start, it quickly became filled with clerics, their values and thus also their collective self-enrichment and power strategies, which the anti-clerical public bitterly resent,” writes Nagle. Too true. Sanders and Corbyn had more parasites draining them of their blood and life force than the high school educators had in The Faculty. Former FDA advisory committee members eviscerate the corruption of their former organization. If it seems like you’re taking drugs with weird side effects OR that don’t seem to work at all – well, you are. Rachel Kushner, one of the less cringe of the major novelists affiliated with the mainstream of contemporary fiction, documented her favorite films for a Criterion list and has excellent taste: Altman’s 3 Women, Pasolini’s Teorema, and Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters are amongst the selected: “One of the most original works of cinema and probably the best film ever made about an artist,” writes Kushner about Schrader’s masterpiece.

Zerohedge shows why inflation is about to explode and life is about to suck even more. Good thing we defeated fascism though! I missed this when Musique Machine published it in March so I’m mentioning it now: this is a terrific interview with the Finnish black metal guitarist and songwriter and founder of the band Horna, Shatraug, who discusses his discovery of Iron Maiden and eventually Mayhem, Impaled Nazarene, and Rotting Christ. Angelicism01 digs up this interview with LD50 founder Lucia Diego, who chronicles the abuse she suffered at the hands of the BPD-riddled Antifa affiliates.

Speaking of LD50, DC Miller is on my show System of Systems; we discuss philosophy, art, propaganda, psyops, Davila, Bill Gunn, and DC’s response to my essay “A Marxist Defends the Great Reactionaries,” that will be out soon in American Greatness. While I still have you, DC also interviews the New Zealand-based experimental writer Jack Ross for Apocalypse Confidential.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

Jacotards Conrad Hamilton and the truly heinous Matt McManus — the exact kind of leftists who spent the last three years canceling Zizek for all manner of cultural transgressions: transphobia, racism, fascism, vulgarity — now want their moronic readers to know, “Zizek is A-OK now!” These people are just horrible, and it’s important to note the nefarious intentions here. They aren’t just trying to “revive Zizek,” they are trying to neutralize him. Defang him. They are subsuming his work and neutering it of any radical potential. And the worst part is: it’s too late. Zizek, whose work IS utterly indispensable, belongs to them now. And unless he takes a firm stance against what the left is and denounces these types, there’s nothing we can do to save him. Sorry Slavoj! It’s been real.

The Bronx Museum goes “against the grain” and rises up against the tyranny of “patriarchy” (which, sorry, doesn’t exist) with its new exhibition Born in Flames. One of the countless female/queer/POC/[insert marginal identity here] group exhibitions you’ll see this year, this one attempts to stand out through its “imagining feminist realities,” or whatever. Predictably, Hyperallergic blows its load to it. A pair of deranged Current Affairs writers, Lyta Gold and Matt Lubchansky, come through with that hard hitting political analysis and imagine alternatives to the “problematic” nature of “gender reveal” parties. I can’t imagine how sick you would have to be to stick your name on something this shitty. Leading the charge of “woke imperialism,” Michelle Goldberg is just ecstatic that Biden’s foreign aid head Samantha Power, “still believes that America can save the world.” I can already imagine future Goldberg articles with headlines like: “Bombing the Syrian hospital was good because America is so moral and queer and Assad is a big bad boogey man.”

Some writer for The Quietus, John Quin, is tasked with covering Matthew Barney’s Redoubt. In true libtard fashion, Quin writes off one of today’s most enduringly fascinating, audacious, and ambitious contemporary artists as “too phallocentric.” There some real synchronicity happening over at The Atlantic, where trad Cath socialist and recent emergent thot Elizabeth Breunig is now a staff writer. People are mad at Ilhan Omar (for the wrong reasons, of course, but you know how shitlibs are…) for equating the war crimes of Israel to Hamas and the Taliban. Fair enough. The irony here: Breunig writes a long piece defending Omar, and yet both of these women are the daughters of war criminals and profiteers. You love to see it, baby! Also at The Atlantic, Cynthia Miller-Idriss argues that “domestic extremism” shouldn’t be treated as a “security issue” but as a “public health issue.” Can you fucking believe this? Perhaps the elites realize that we all remember the Iraq War, or maybe just that we’ve all watched too much Homeland, to know when the fear mongering of security issues is being used to justify repressive and reactionary new laws. But, it seems that when there is a “public health crisis” (ala Covid), we will all literally sit inside and walk around with useless masks on like fucking zombies without complaining for months on end. In fact, when someone does complain, we’ll just call that person an evil fascist and get them taken off of social media. So, it makes perfect sense what The Atlantic is doing here. “Security” has a harsh ring to it, and reminds us of the wars that destroyed these countries. But if “right wing extremism” is a “public safety” issue, then have at it! Restrict our movement! Spy on us online! Take away our rights!! Pass the new Patriot Act! Safety Propaganda, unfortunately, works very well.

I don’t really listen to popular music, or the kind of music that Pitchfork jerks off to. But, there are usually at least some popular artists putting out records that I’m at least looking forward to listening to. But looking through this Pitchfork list of the most exciting records dropping this summer, it’s mind blowing the extent to which I just don’t give a fuck. Besides Lana del Rey and Moritz Von Oswald (veterans who I’ve liked a long time), there is absolutely fucking nothing I want to hear. Pop music is so dead that you couldn’t resurrect it with the most wicked of voodoo.

Culture is dead. Art is dead. But you and me, baby: we’re alive!

Illustration by Mark McKnight