Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #32

Announcements:
I apologize for the infrequency of posts in the past two weeks. I have my reasons. Last week, I was busy planning a late release party for Communions (still available for purchase here you cheap fucks) at Montez Press. It didn’t take long after the announcement, however, for some anonymous, bottom of the barrel, Antifa-affiliated Instagram account to start lighting up the direct messages of the poor people at Montez to “tip them off” about my numerous fascist traits: my support for Kyle Rittenhouse, my occasional voting for the GOP, and my passionate contempt of gender ideology among them. In any case, we handled it. We took public promotion of the reading and party offline and I self-promoted it instead. It went terrific, and thank you to all the friends and fans who came out to celebrate the release of the book. Beyond that, I am working on the outline of a new book project that is eating up some time. I plan on getting back to more regular posting after the holiday season and have a few texts ready to drop — some on here and some in other publications — over the next few weeks. Now, back to regular programming.

BASED SAFETY:
In Art Review, Byung-Chul Han expands upon his theories on surveillance, smartphones, and what distinguishes what the neoliberal regime from what Foucault called the disciplinary regime:

The disciplinary regime works with commands and restraints. It is oppressive. It suppresses freedom. The neoliberal regime on the other hand is not oppressive, but seductive and permissive. It exploits freedom instead of suppressing it.

I’ve noticed ever more frequently that some of these newer, edgier right wing publications that appear (at first) to be capitalizing on the renewed interest in dissident energy that has metastasized throughout the pandemic are almost equally beholden to shadow political backing and niche interests as are the left-dominated media spaces that have all but cancelled any expression that doesn’t emerge forth from the sanctified voices of black trans women and other media beloved victims. I’ve noticed this both in personal experiences with some of these outlets and in observations. In any case, Katherine Dee here explains what some of the contradictions are that are limiting these outlets in her response to IM1776’s “Art and Literature for Dissidents” series: “This ‘Art & Literature’ series is basically vaporware. It’s a headline, but that’s about it. And that’s because I suspect that while he says he ‘works in entertainment,’ it’s obvious to me that he has some major blindspots with respect to the scenes he’s trying to critique.” That said, I actually thought BAP’s book was great fun and well-executed in the way that he seems to psyop allegedly straight right wing men into fetishizing homosexual aesthetics, and his essay here on sci-fi and liberal misconceptions of it is great reading.

America’s greatest active noise artist Worth joins the White Centipede Noise podcast. Typically, these noise podcasts are immensely boring for a multitude of reasons. For one, noise is made by anti-social types who probably don’t relish the opportunity to explain their work. For another, it’s nerd shit. But Worth is good enough for me to want to recommend all of the genre’s listeners to listen to this. Bardo Methodology re-publishes its interview with Polish black metal extremists Mgla (pronounced, according to Dominick Fernow, “emmGua”) and the band explains some of its process working on its 2019 release for Mikko Aspa’s Northern Heritage label No Solace. “I see myself more as a producer than a musician, so proficiency in any particular musical instrument is not an aim in and of itself,” says band leader Dismal.

Despite David Velasco having led the devolution of ArtForum into a dismally anti-intellectual pamphlet for redundant and fraudulent social movements, I keep paying the subscription fee for access to the archives and its treasure troves of art criticism by the likes of Agamben, Gary Indiana, Dennis Cooper and countless others. But, at the end of the year, I am rewarded for my poor frugality when John Waters drops his annual top 10 films of the year. His list for 2021, as ever, is surprising and full of movies I’ve both watched and liked (like Annette, which I wrote about here, is chosen as his favorite of the year), movies I want to see (I am so excited to see Gaspar’s Vortex that it’s impacted my ability to think and write about any other art), and sadly movies that I’ll probably never get to see (Waters hilariously chooses Tom Six’s distributor-less follow-up to the Human Centipede trilogy over the new Almodovar film, despite Waters having proclaimed Pedro previously as our greatest living filmmaker). We’ve had a lot of Dennis Cooper coverage on this column this year in the run-up to his new novel I Wished, but now that the book is out and easily the greatest work of fiction of 2021 (Zac Davis told me Communions would be be the book of the year if not for Dennis having done his thing, which is the best compliment I received in 2021), here’s one more interview with the literary genius.

Speaking of Zac Davis, my much maligned and much beloved noisemaking best pal and I appear on the Rare Candy podcast to discuss theory fiction, pseudo-intellectualism, and the revolutionary evolutions in hip-hop transpiring in the mid-’90s. Furthermore, my crew (Zac, Mathieu Malouf, Alex Bienstock) and I met up at the SP HQ for a guitar riff contest and shambolic conversation about nothing with Barrett of Contain. Finally, The Perfume Nationalist ends its excellent third season with a show stopping finale episode featuring Zach of I’m so Popular and filmmaker Amanda Millius to discuss Fleetwood Mac’s bizarre, coked out masterpiece Tusk and John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust, arguably the most disturbing film of all time (and it and its Nathaniel West-written source material are thematic influences on my next project, oddly enough). Highlight for me is learning that Amanda and I share Royal Trux as our favorite band.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA:

In a case of “least shocking news ever,” it turns out that only 2 percent of latino Americans prefer to be referred to as “Latinx”. Amongst those polled, it is shown that over 40 percent of them are at least somewhat offended by the use of the academic-fried, libtarded “Latinx” moniker. Love when these contradictions manifest so clearly. Left academia is about as close to a paternalistically white supremacist, bourgeois institution as one gets, and under the auspices of abolishing hierarchy they do little more than enforce an incoherent, top-down disciplinary politics that, NEWSFLASH, everyone hates! Now the Democratic Party, trapped between the psychosis of its activist base and the lived reality of its masses of voters, has no fucking clue how to calm down the crazy. May I suggest that you, like vast swathes of your Latino countrymen, vote Republican down ticket election after election for no more than spite? It’ll feel good, I promise you.

Benjamin Bratton persists with his anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and transparently dishonest commitment to Covid control society in this article. He specifically warns against the “dangers” of the laissez-faire approach to Covid policies demonstrated by Florida: “Arguably, the world capital of this global pandemic of reactionary-anarchic stupidity is the American state of Florida,” writes Bratton in his typically arrogant and contemptuous voice. “Home to many genuinely wonderful cities and people as well as some of the most flamboyant examples of human weakness.” That’s fucking rich, Ben. Florida has some of the lowest if not the outright lowest rates of both Covid transmissions and mortality, so how can anyone take Bratton seriously on this issue? My assumption is if someone did a deep dive into his pay stubs, they’d find some sketchy firms with vague ties to Big Pharma. Bratton is a scumbag and a whore for state capitalism.

Marquis Bey (pronouns they/them, no fucking surprise there, am I right?) explains the ideas in his new book Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism and nothing about it makes sense even after the explanation. I have no idea what Bey means when equating a state of “blackness” with a state of anarchy, nor do I think that the anarchist tendency to further fragment people down to a state of discreet signifiers is wise or honest. This is like all the worst academic tendencies in leftism rolled into one. Bey’s next book is Black Trans Feminism which the author posits is a concept that could upend all hierarchies…. Um, how? How is a hierarchy dismantled by, like, .2 percent of the global population?

Sound artist Naama Tsabar claims that she only works with “gender-nonconforming” people or women and somehow I suppose that is going to make us interested in her music? Jacobin, after years of telling heretics to log off and touch grass, admits that social media is politics which is rich given that we all know that social media ideological confusion is the politics best practiced by left media outlets like Jacobin. I wonder how embarrassed Bhashkar feels on the inside? At least a little, I would hope.

Juicy takes the witness stand at his trial and does great….. Just kidding, this psycho admits that he got jerked off by one of his assailants at a bathhouse while persisting in his commitment to being presented as a victim and face planting spectacularly under pressure from the prosecutor. Jussie Smollet is actually my favorite news event of the last few years. His choice to pay Nigerian men to hate crime him is almost Situationist; the sheer bizarreness of it demystifies so many ideological psyops at once that we basically owe him a service. But yeah, he’s probably going to do some jail time. Speaking of Juicy, it appears that none other than CNN’s king libtard Don Lemon tipped Jussie off about the investigation into his fake hate crime – this is news that comes at a most inopportune moment for “America’s most trusted news source” on the heels of the network letting its ratings king Chris Cuomo go for his advising of big brother Andrew Cuomo during the former Governor’s (totally fake) sexual harassment scandal. The advising of Andrew of course feels like small potatoes against Chris’s CNN-sanctioned decision to allow his brother do nightly propaganda for himself during the beginning of the Covid crisis, or Chris’s numerous ethically bankrupt stunts when he contracted Covid himself. Can we abolish this network already?

Though I don’t regularly read Pitchfork and haven’t for over a decade, its countdown of this year’s “best” records is particularly awful this year, like the site’s criteria for good music has less to do with form or aesthetics than the identity signifiers of a seemingly endless stream of industry planted pop, R&B and rap stars. Though, admittedly, I do like Brooklyn rapper KA and slowcore legends Low, I can’t find one more record on this list that I actually give a shit about. Likewise, Time Magazine’s 100 (there’s no way there was one fucking hundred good books this year) is full of plausibly made up ethnic sounding names slapped onto works of fiction that I guarantee no one will actually read.

To combat the multiculturalist extremity of arts media listicles, Safety Propaganda will be doing some “best of” lists of its own.

ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Collage by Adam Lehrer
2. Gaspar Noé’s Vortex
3. Juicy