Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #38

This Week in Based and Cringe...

Finding Joy in An Uncertain Future…

I am on the precipice of a major change in life. Had I known that I’d be getting married during the moment of the worst inflation in the United States in decades and staring down the face of a suicidal war campaign in the process of being ramped up by our profoundly irresponsible and ideological leaders, would I have still decided to do so? Of course. The world is fucked. The world has always been and always will be, to varying degrees, fucked. It is a kind of temporal arrogance to think that we are any worse or better off than those that came before us. The “let’s return to tradition” rightoids are every bit as delusional and idealistic as the WSWS Trotskyites who think the glorious proletarian revolution is always around the corner. There is no tradition to return to and even if it was possible the memory of the tradition would be askew. Grow up. Live your life. Commit yourself to those that love you in the here and now. Show courage in the face of social uncertainty and do that which makes you feel like the best version of yourself. There is a metaphysical power in doing that which brings you joy while carrying the intimate knowledge that the world before you is being lit ablaze. To feel the sting of the heat and to shrug it off – that’s beautiful. I can’t believe I’m writing advice columns now. I mean, who wants the advice of a neurotic, sex obsessed Jew with substance abuse problems, anyways?

BASED SAFETY

Gaspar Noé’s Vortex is, in a year that has already seen other masterpieces like Robert Eggers’ The Northman and still has yet to see Cronenberg’s Crimes of The Future, the film of 2022. An astonishing work of art and a career statement, Noé has managed to make a film that is both quite unlike any other film that he has made before and also totally makes sense in the context of his broader filmography. “A normal scene in this movie should be with two [images] in the same screen,” says Noé in this interview with Filmmaker Magazine about Vortex’s unique visual form. “Then, one of the images is missing, and there is a black half. You say, ‘Oh, that’s what it feels like when someone else dies.’” Further promoting the film, Gaspar lists his favorite films here: Solondz’s Palindromes, Un Chien Andalou, and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom among them. In the last Vortex-related item, I’ll highlight Molly Haskell’s thoughtful write-up on the film. “In this bracing confrontation with dying, Noé somehow removes the special onus of Alzheimer’s. We are all some version of He and She: dignity is stripped away, yet we stubbornly persist.”

David Rimanelli, the only writer I’d ever dare to open the pages of the dreaded Artforum to read, profiles the spectacular and oft-overlooked painterly aspect of the great artist and autogynephile Pierre Molinier’s storied body of work: “Even so, Molinier’s works are loving. When guys (especially homosexuals) dress up in women’s clothes, they love it but it’s a mockery. Or so I’ve been told.” Dennis Cooper opens up his blog to the brilliant Italian provocateur filmmaker Marco Ferreri, whose Dillinger is Dead is as close to a total encapsulation of my aesthetic sensibilities as any single artwork I could think of. The great contemporary painter Shannon Cartier Luch, whose terrific 2021 monograph Better Call it Grace includes an essay of mine on the artist’s recent work, speaks to Barrett to discuss the life changes that led to her aesthetic shift as well as her admiration of Simone Weil. The iconic Japanese psych rock institution Les Rallizes Dénudés, whose occulted frontman Takashi Mizutani died sometime in 2020, finally has some official vinyl releases after decades of bootleg only musical engagement.

Filthy Armenian hangs with the undeniably gifted if sometimes rather annoyingly libtarded film critic David Thomsen to discuss, of course, the death of cinema (a conversation I’ve tired of hearing given the fantastic films that have been released of recent but I love FA so give it a go). Julian G. Wallers considers authoritarianism in contemporary politics – how it metastasizes and how it’s misunderstood: “Importantly, when we are talking about authoritarianism, we are referring to a political regime. There is an ongoing terminological tragedy in academia and the policy-oriented press in which “authori­tarianism” means very different things, and consequently gets badly muddled as a concept.” For the first time ever, I’m including a New York Times op-ed in the Based column: kudos to Tom Stevenson for daring to tell anything resembling THE TRUTH about the war in Ukraine.

Finally, my stuff. On System of Systems, we interview one of my favorite poets and writers Sean Kilpatrick to discuss the state of literature, the cultural shift, the force feeding of Toni Morrison, Darius James, Charlie Rose, the Northman, Fresh, Jim Goad, the Gen X cool girl era, the Depp/Heard defamation case and the end of #MeToo. Thank you to Apocalypse Confidential for publishing this handful of poems that I’ve scribbled here and there over the last few years.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

The Madeline Albright appreciating libtard Armenian beauty Ana Kasparian speaks the truth about “the squad” for one whole broadcast and then immediately backtracks it. At a time when government health agencies have proven themselves to be demonstrably corrupt, broken, and financially invested in our own sickness, what does Jacobin advocate? To empower the state to kill our elders. FUCKING TYPICAL! Some obvious Nat.Sec. funded demonic entity emphasizes the belief that by acknowledging that Ukraine’s military is reliant on the brutality of its fascist fighting squad Azov we are, you guessed it, helping the rise of fascism. I’m not an abortion ideologue in either direction. I, like most people, believe it’s an evil that still might be important to the health of a class society and therefore should be protected federally in the first trimester and severely regulated thereafter. And while it’s easy to poke fun at the hysteric “hands off my uterus” libtards on the left, I sometimes forget that abortion hardliners on the right sometimes sound equally untethered from reality and worthy of derisive laughter as well.

Sam Adler-Bell, an insufferable progressive party hack who dedicates his unlistenable podcast to “understanding” (ie, fear mongering) the right, thinks the Democratic Party has some problems – what a profound insight you generic white bread waste of Internet data, you. Nathaniel Janowitz, deep in the throes of severe retardation, assumes that anti-vaxxers are fleeing to Paraguay because that’s where Nazis fled after World War 2. I shit you not: VICE actually published this nonsense. The Wall Street Journal no longer holds any reservations about publishing total maniacs who seem fine with getting vast swathes of the population totally fucking annihilated. Leave it to column regular Hyperallergic to shame the two or three existing art critics who know what the fuck they are talking about in regards to what led to the conflict in Ukraine.

The WSWS, once celebrated for being among the few left wing outlets to break orthodoxy and provide a bit harder-hitting and more substantial reporting on a variety of important issues, stands with MSNBC and CNN in blaming the Buffalo massacre on Tucker Carlson. Finally: the sword wielding mental deficient Talia Levin, who was fired from New Yorker and had her NYU class canceled in 2018 after falsely accusing an ICE agent of having a Nazi tattoo, actually wins a position at Rolling Stone to declare the clinically insane shooter in Buffalo to be a “normal Republican.” Imagine living in a world where you can be as treacherously unethical as Levin and still succeed beyond any of your peers? Well, that’s the world you’re in. Drink up. Light up. Breathe it in.

ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Peter-Paul Rubens “Honeysuckle Bower”
2. Pierre Molinier “The Time of Death no. 1”
3. Inked by Azov