Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #33

This week in Based and Cringe...

I apologize about the lack of content, but I assure you that I am planning and working on quite a few things that will leave your beliefs shaken and your minds de-programmed. Happy New Year. It’s 2022. The Scamdemic rages on, despite all evidence pointing to the fact that there’s very little we still need to be scared of. I was recently at a party at my friends’ gallery 15 Orient. Alongside a coterie of my talented brothers-in-arms, I was sniffing a lot of Ketamine. At one point, a young European woman walked up to me. She was wearing a mask. She asked if it would be ok for her to sample the horse tranquilizer. I said, “Of course!” I racked up a line on my iPhone and put it down on the table. She walked up, pulled her mask below her mouth, grabbed the same exact rolled up tenner that I was using, and put it into her nose to blast a line. She then put the mask back on, and walked away. This madness is everywhere.

I don’t use hard drugs anymore, of course. I just wrote an entire book grappling with my past addictions to opiates (not to mention, cocaine and speed), and would feel like a flat failure to divert towards my old ways so soon after writing it. But, I still do use psychedelic drugs in moderation. I consider Ketamine a specific kind of a psychedelic drug, with very bizarre, insightful, and even frightening effects. But it can show you things, if you let it. At that same party, I ended up doing one line too many, and the entire room collapsed in front of me. All the visual stimuli lost narrative meaning in my brain. I was terrified. I walked into the bathroom, and this bathroom is itself rather psychedelic and covered in mirrors, and saw mine own image refracted and multiplied through millions lenses. I also couldn’t recognize my own body and visage, but still mechanically was able to urinate as I watched myself from above, like I was my own ghost. As I was peeing, I felt like a voyeur watching a strange alien man taking a piss through millions of small lenses, like seeing the image of myself through the eyes of a bug. As soon as I got home though, the intensity of the high dulled, I managed to write 10 pages of the novel that I’ve been crafting. There is a creative spark in Ketamine, and when used with caution and respect I’d recommend it.

Furthermore, I am now going to start paywalling content. It’s time to cash in on the work that I’ve been doing. I’ve earned it. Thus, if you’d like to continue having access to ALL of the Safety Propaganda digital content, I suggest you upgrade to being a paying member now. Make me fucking rich, baby!

BASED SAFETY

Filmmaker Amanda Milius, otherwise known as the Based and the Beautiful, appears on Tucker Carlson’s daytime program to discuss her time working foreign policy for the Trump admin, the insufferable politics or urban centers, and her film The Plot Against the President. Brother Barrett is interviewed by the talented writer (and SP contributor) Sean Kilpatrick, and declares that “Politics is Hollywood for ugly people.” Fair enough, amigo. While on that, the same website also interviews Zeroh HP Lovecraft, the one writer to emerge from rightoid Twitter that I think actually has some artistic chops (BAP is hilarious but it often feels more like a bit than an art work, no?).

For American Affairs, James McElroy (NOTE: it has come to my attention that I royally fucked up in reading the author here as James Ellroy, the pulp writer, for which I am a retard and please forgive me) discusses the new book The New Female Antihero, but more importantly, compares the great (YES, she’s great) Lena Dunham to Carl Schmitt (the fact that Mcelroy’s piece shares magazines space with some libtards doesn’t dilute my enthusiasm for it). Friend John Dios joins Aimee and Oliver to talk about his work with and the things he’s seen in a soup kitchen as its head chef. Friend of SP and artist Benjamin Kellog and artist Lara Joy Evans have a really trippy conversation on Contain about dystopian Arnold film End of Days, body mod, and sacred architecture. Laurie Rojas asks the burning question: “Why there is no good NFT art (Yet?).” And while I agree with most of its points, I’d argue that it’s still too early in the medium’s lifespan to write it off entirely, and also that David Cronenberg’s NFT art was, perhaps, good art. Rick Owens, perhaps the first, last, and only surrealist to command a billion dollar empire, introduces a new menswear collection with light fixture head pieces that allude to Dan Flavin sculptures and ancient Egyptian headpieces (weird fucking shit bro!). I want to shout out, for the first time, the Radio Free Innsmouth show that does incredibly deep dives into extreme metal sub-genres, with each episode tackling a new band. Beyond that, the creator of the show has a head fuckingly vast range of knowledge on the loud and the obscene sounds of metal AND outwardly rejects the Antifa bullshit antics of the vast majority of online shows dealing with similar content (during a show on Satanic Warmaster, the host says the Finnish black metal musician is a bit problematic because he is corny, NOT because of his right wing politics: “What kinda bitch ass nigga you think I am?” he says). I would start viewing the show with this newish episode on the vastly underrated Slovenian black metal stars Malokarpatan.

Sorry to dump all my content on you, but it’s been a while and I’ve been quite the little Internet slut these days. On the fantastic literary podcast Art of Darkness, I discuss my novel Communions, Burroughs, Kavan, junk addiction, and psy-warfare (my favorite topics really). My friend Filthy Armenian follows me as I trud the libtard hellscape that is the New York art world while recording me. As I was high on edible cannabis, I kept forgetting that I was being recorded. The results are transcendent. Finally, SP’s audio misinformation arm System of Systems has gotten off to a fantastic start to another blistering year. Filmmaker Michael B. Bilandic joins to discuss his recent films as well as a shared appreciation for Nick Zedd and the Cinema of Transgression. Next, for another editions of Alex Bienstock’s SOS side project, him and I talk to one of our best pals Bradford Kessler, who is planning a career evolution from sculptor to filmmaker. Finally, I contributed a literary treatise on the transgressive fiction writer New Juche to Apocalypse Confidential, analyzing prostitution as a state of abjection impossible to access for most of us in the first world.

Finally, let’s say good night to some fallen real ones. Tom Smith, lead singer and conceptualizer of long-running noise/”free glam” band To Live and Shave in LA, has passed on after a bout with colon cancer. Tom was a tremendous artist with a totally singular approach to cultural production. Despite the very large political differences between us, I was glad I got to know him these last few years. Also, Thierry Mugler has died, and we salute him for a career in sexualizing women and aesthetic misogyny.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

Let’s kick of 2022’s cringe with Doomscrolling – Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston’s extremely labor intensive woodblocks with over libtard themes. I mean, that’s a lot of work they’ve put into being libtards, when you think about it. The forgettable Asian girl who does Jacobin’s videos does a segment on the astonishing number of voters who have fled the Democrats. She mentions, of course, the Democrats’ decades long failures to deliver working glass gains. Well, yeah. But that doesn’t explain the RAPID shifts in party lines these last years, but true to her limited soc dem viewpoint, this lady makes no mention of the REAL reasons for voters registering as Republican: the scourge that is transgender ideology, the manipulative worship of black people, AND THE FUCKING COVID HYSTERIA! That’s why Republicans are winning. That’s why I’m now a Republican. Deal with it or don’t learn a thing.

Financial Times admits that they think psy-ops are actually good because they are necessary weapons in the war against misinformation. Well, OK, at least they’re admitting it, now we know what we’re dealing with and we can psyop these faggots right back, right? Neil Young, insufferable shittard that he is, threatens Spotify with the removal of his music from their catalog less they deal with the misinformation being espoused by their top client Joe Rogan. Never mind how wrong Neil is, does he really think Live Rust is more valuable to them than the most popular show in the world? Resident Advisor, cementing itself as an urban radlib lifestyle guide, introduces its wellness guide, because we all know the foundations of raving were built on a healthy commitment to wellness, right? Certainly not the mass gobbling of psychoactive drugs and dancing until you overheat and puke, right?

Artnet shouts out my Paul Chan takedown only to pretend that they don’t know what offends me about Paul Chan so much. It’s not that hard to figure out though: he’s an insufferable radically centrist libtard who is selling his shitty propaganda drawing for obscene amounts of money to some member of the ruling class. He’s a self-obsessed, narrow-minded loser, basically. A very weird piece in e-Flux here that seeks to combine Derrida’s hauntology theories with anti-racist, colonialist mumbo jumbo, which seems helpful for the state going forward whenever we seem to run out of racist problems and might have to actually do real politics and then the state can tell us: “Sorry guys, we’re still being haunted by racism, therefore we can’t raise wages this year.”

Whoopi Goldberg has a panic attack over Bill Maher’s sensible contempt for Covid hysteria. The CDC is asked by lawmakers to release “long Covid” stats on communities of color, which to me sounds like exactly the king of thing that middle class white women would do so they can feel validated in their hypochondria. The Democrats are pushing through a bill that would all but guarantee a most ridiculous and absurd war with Russia over fucking Ukraine, and Intercept seems concerned even though they’ll endorse this admin again in a few years. Vice explores the effect that climate change could have on the global drug trade, and I still can’t manage to give a shit about climate change. The Rami Malek Academy Award of Novel Price winners Paul Krugman claims he’s not trying to downplay the horrific role that inflation is occupying within the decay of our political economy, but of course that’s what he’s doing here.

IMAGES
1. To Live and Shave in LA 2004 poster
2. art by Benjamin Kellog
3. Thierry Mugler and his bitches
4. Gabber boys
5. Sister Act