Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #50

This week in based and cringe...

GRIEF

I’m about to strike a somber and serious tone, one that might feel alien to readers familiar with my overall body of work. For the last month, my puggle Bibi has endured a rapid decline in health as a result of lymphoma, a blood cancer specific to her breed. It totally subsumed my life. I’ve been incapable of getting work done, socializing, or doing anything outside my care and concern for her. I loved this creature, you see, in a way that was more pure and all-encompassing than anything else in my life, at least until I met my wife. She was, excuse the saccharine nature of this language, my angel. A radiant orb of joy and light in my life. We opted to not put the baby under chemo. She was already 13-years-old, and in my opinion the treatment would have done little more than assure her immense pain for fractionally more time on Earth. Instead, the doctors put Bibi on a maintenance program of prednisone. For the last week, the drugs allowed her to eat her favorite foods and walk and play. A part of me, the self-deluding and naive side, thought she’d turned a corner. The realist in me knew that the behavior was illusory, and that the disease would inevitably swallow her whole. She ceased eating again on Sunday night, and a dread saturated my being. That night, I already noticed her heavier breathing as I drifted into sleep. My wife frantically woke me at 5:30 AM, and Bibi’s breathing was belabored. A death rattle. My wife was concerned that she was overreacting, and I assured her that she was not. I told her we had to take her to get euthanized when the doctor opened – I was sure that Bibi was afraid and, quite possibly, in pain. We tucked her into bed between the two of us, and she rested her head on my arm. I drifted back to sleep. When I woke, I’d noticed that Bibi’s breathing had stabilized, and hoped that the episode had passed. I even ordered her a blueberry muffin for breakfast. I got out of bed, and put a shirt on. As if it was any normal day, I said to her:

”Ok, baby, let’s go for a pee pee".” As I approached the puggle, I went to go pat her awake. Her head plopped down as if it was any inanimate object. I then smelled the mess. She was gone.

I am prostrate with grief. She was more than a pet to me. She was my salvation. The absence of her around our home is nothing short of a divine violence. I used to joke that Bibi wasn’t really a dog, but instead was some kind of angelic supernatural entity trapped in dog form (my wife and I spun some really elaborate personification narratives around this concept.) Her smile. Her energy. Her curiosity. All my friends noticed something strange about her, too. “There’s something about her,” they’d say. Bibi got me through the absolutely worst times of my life – in the early days of my recovery from heroin addiction and through a toxic and emotionally violent relationship. In my loneliest days, she comforted me. We were best friends. She also, however, ushered in the best days of my life. She made my wife and I feel like a family. She completed us as a circle.

As many times as I thought about her death, and as deeply as I understood that her life on Earth would be short, nothing prepared me for the gaping hole that she would leave behind. I can’t write. I can’t think. I keep thinking, “Oh, it’s time to take the dog outside,” and then the memory of her death stabs me through the heart once more. This is grief. It hits in tsunami waves of despair that come and go ad nauseam. I cry, I relax. I remember. I cry. I try to relax. I comfort my wife. She comforts me. But nothing we say or do can truly dull the pain of her memory. To confront the waves of grief, I must let them wash over me. I must tread them, without letting them suck me under and drown me. I need to experience all of it, so I can go back to some kind of a semblance of normality in my existence.

Bibi made me a better human being. She brought out a side in me, a caring, less self-obsessed, and playful side in me, that I had no idea existed. She brought me to my wife. She was an absolute gift in my life and I thank the universe every day for compelling me to waltz into that Long Island shelter all those years ago to take a chance on raising an already five-year-old puggle. Nothing about this is hyperbole. This is the love and pain that I feel.

BASED SAFETY

Feeling ambivalent towards art and literature, to a degree, I turn my attention towards another fascination of the Safety Propaganda universe: extreme sports. The Arnold Classic transpired over the weekend, in perhaps the most stacked lineup of freak of nature genetically gifted bodybuilders the Schwarzenegger-sponsored show has ever seen: Nick Walker, Samson Dauda, Big Ramy, Andrew Jacked, William Bonac, Shaun Clarida and others all took to the stage to present their inhumanly huge and conditioned physiques to the world. In a highly controversial decision, Samson Dauda came out on top, with Walker in second and Andrew in third. The decision made little sense to me, given that Walker is massive and was absolutely shredded to the bone and Jacked too was sub five percent body fat. Dauda, however, looked a little watery and has almost NO BACK, relying on his statuesque structure from the front. Former IFPB pro Nick Trigili points out weirdness in the judges’ score cards here. I see what people are saying when they argue in favor of this Samson fellow, but if structure is all that matters why not just have fat guys on stage? Having the most, hardest, best conditioned muscle has to count for something, right? In any case, bodybuilding is exciting for fans for perhaps the first time since the era of the Phil Heath/Kai Greene rivalry in the early 2010s, and that’s cool.

Jon Bones Jones returns to the UFC after a three year absence driven by bad behavior and PED usage (so tired of pretending that anyone in that league is not using something.) And while many questioned whether Jones would be able to withstand the large amount of weight he packed on to move up to the heavy weight division, his championship bout with Ciryl Gane shut haters da fuck up! My friend, Bradford Kessler, said just before the fight, “This is going to be a long one.” I responded: “Nah, this is going to be over before the first round.”

And it was over in less than two minutes. The fight looked like a brawl outside a bar. Jones simply over powered Gane, ripped him to the floor, and choked his ass out. Glory. Violence. Spectacle. He’s back. He’s champion. Jon Jones is GOAT.

My friend Emmalea Russo writes about Bruce Wagner, a literary hero of mine, and his mind blowing 2022 phantom biography ROAR. “Wagner’s latest is a novel that takes the form of a raucous oral history, finding unquantifiable shards of the sacred in our pornographic, tell-all, screen-fevered, identity-obsessed culture.” Under-valued punk-hippie freak Texan artist Mark Flood, who has long opted for specificity of vision over market savvy, is interviewed by Kaleidoscope. I like the part where he refutes the idea that his use of appropriated ads was “commentary on capital.” Dumb ass art writers gettin’ everything wrong. Wrong. WRONG!

Bifo Berardi tackles the evolution of human desire and the desexualization of desire writ large. Nick Land makes inquiry into Edward Said, Joseph Conrad, and the nature of the English language. More excellent content from NYC arthouse theater Metrograph’s editorial section – Anna Schechtman on the complications of underage desire in Catherine Breillat’s early masterwork 36 Fillette. I like this review of Matthew Gasda’s new play because writer Geoffrey Mak admits to emotionally abusing an ex-girlfriend at the beginning of it. That’s very cool to me. Daniel Miller discusses the misunderstanding of the concept of gnosticism: “Gnosticism can be more or less subtle, more or less violent or mystical, counseling either serene meditation, or revolutionary terror.” After surviving one of the most retarded hysteria scandals of recent memory in which he was accused of peddling pedophilia through his fashion marketing campaigns, Demna Gvasalia (I will never honor a person’s request to be referred to by one name because it’s dumb as fuck sorry) returns to glory at Balenciaga with a paired down, nicely shaped, logo-less FW 2023 collection.

Our friends over at the Art of Darkness podcast have been DFW posting recently, and you should check it out. David, as you might know, is a patron saint at the Safety Propaganda network. Kelby and J. David address one of the best films in Takashi Miike’s vast, occasionally brilliant, and often mid body of work. Yes, we’re talking Ichi the Killer, as well as its manga source material by Hideo Yamamoto.

I have many projects of mine to pimp out this week. Two new episodes of System of Systems by Safety Propaganda: this one, with artist Marika Thunder on drugs and bohemian upbringings, and this one, with Cliff Sargent of the Books Better Than Food literary video series on, well, books, mostly. And bodybuilding. In my February 2023 column for Compact, I discuss early modernist Wyndham Lewis and his assertions towards bohemia and the lies within its mythology. I join Jack Mason at the Perfume Nationalist and, after several appearances discussing obscure French arthouse films, direct my attention towards one of the greatest things to happen this millennium: the Breaking Bad extended universe. Artist, curator, philosopher, mathematician, “polymath”, and noise maker Eric Schmid makes noise dedicated to me.

Finally, I decide to use my passion for and considerable connections within the world of experimental music to launch a record label: Safety Propaganda Records lives. What can I say? I was getting exhausted from writing books. Now, I can work on something else. You can pay me.

First release is by friend of SP and former guitar player of noise punk band Lamsbread Zac Davis. The project is called Clearance. The record is lit. Buy it.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

Cumtown meme artist Cumwizard’s rise to full blown art world infamy has been weird, retarded, and hilarious. We must credit Mathieu Malouf here, for it was he that introduced the anonymous autist to the market with a show at Jenny’s last year. Watching art world big wigs like Sam McKinnis faceplant to try and project meaning onto these memes is, well, really something to behold. Hyperretarded asks: “Why Is No One Talking About the Artist-Daughters?” Somehow, the writer believes the trend of artist daughters tending to sick parents is some kind of an overlooked injustice that needs commenting on and not just, like, a part of life that some of us deal with sometimes. Is there anything that Hyperretarded can’t spin as a marginalized group? Daughters. Ukrainian Nazis. Black uber criminals, or “super predators,” as Hill Dawg puts it. I wonder. Texte Zer Kunste dedicated its new issue to transgender concerns, which is funny. I thought TZK was itself a trans magazine. I mean, they’re always talking about trannies and tranny problems, no?

If there’s one thing that Anti-Fascists (Antifa) and Pro-Fascists (Profa) have in common, it’s the love of breaking statues and monuments. I tried watching Skinamarink on Shudder and quickly asserted that it’s hipster, faux expressionistic, low IQ, dorm room “smart guy” trash going for something akin to E. Elias Merhige’s genuinely horrifying and trashy Begotten but ending up with a nearly unwatchable college film project. And watching this interview with the director discussing “queer horror” confirms my suspicions: avoid libtard hipster art at all costs. The upcoming HBO mini-series The Idol was supposed to be directed by Amy Seimetz, but she was fired form the project by executive producer the Weeknd, also starring in the show. Instead, the brilliant television pop expressionist Sam Levinson, fresh off his tour de force second season of Euphoria, was called in to reshoot the episodes. We are very excited to watch this. Seimetz was clearly fired from the project for projecting her own feminist moral hysteria onto its content, and Levinson was likely called in for his stylish Gen Z sado-modernism being a better fit for the project. We used to call this “creative differences” and it was no big deal. Now, according to Rolling Stone, it’s basically rape. Or something.

Always at the cutting edge, Jacobin attempts to cancel Heidegger and acts like it’s the first time that anyone has ever done this. Vowed to never address the Anthony Fantano problem for fear of giving him even more unearned traffic, but his case for Kendrick Lamar here drives me to the brink. He says nothing here, because Kendrick is ass. He is a boring Obama rapper who no one accept the music blog tasteless faggots that Fantano cultivates as an audience likes. Fantano should be forcibly excommunicated from the discourse, but he’s here to say. This saddens me. Christina Buttons has gotten lots of praise for her measured, credible reporting on gender ideology, and then publicly quits her job at the Daily Wire for fear that it harms her credibility. Meaning, once again, it’s only OK to discuss the chemical castration of minors if libtards say it’s ok. Same as it ever was.

IMAGES:
1. Portrait by Matthew Denicola
2. Andrew Jacked, Nick Walker and Samson Dauda at the Arnold Classic
3. Ichi the Killer
4. Art by Cumwizard