Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #30: Special Edition

In the 30th edition of Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda, Adam includes a personal anecdote that holds some relevance given the news cycle (I promise)

A Personal Anecdote with a Purpose (I Promise)

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. – Joseph Campbell

There is no emancipation from the apocalypse of the virtual to the apocalypse of the real, and the more we pursue it the deeper we go inside the simulation – Gary J. Shipley

In the starving sense you worship
The nations of debris
You wear a coat of sewage
That you've never even seen – Darby Crash

I’ve endured a hero’s journey that would make Joseph Campbell blush. I rapidly drifted between the two polarities of human experience, writhing in delirious ecstasy before plummeting into nothing short of existential terror. And now, I am forever changed. So, what happened?

I ventured to Nashville last weekend. A close friend of mine whose made the southern city his home organized a noise concert at a barn on the outskirts of town. I was immediately taken with the city (my second time there, but this was the first time truly experiencing it). It was a joy to be in the south, outside of liberal occupied Yankee territory, and to walk around maskless and enter restaurants and shops without showing medical documentation. With new friends and old, we traversed the city with an exuberance of youth almost passed us by. Delicious food, copious drugs, country music, techno raves, and finally the noise show itself. I hadn’t experienced such uninhibited and transcendent glee in this kind of setting for a very long time.

Throughout the show, I consumed large quantities of [REDACTED], [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] seltzer’s (coke and vodka is for burnout waster’s from the UK), and could feel the music dissolving the layers of my ego set by set. I felt so free, enjoying my recent status as an underground art figure of some notoriety and the people that I found myself becoming fast friends with. But at about 1:30 am on Halloween, just after the final set finished, I reached into my pockets. My wallet was present. My electronic cigarette was present. My keys were present. My iPhone was……. missing. Instantly shaken from my euphoria, I frantically sought my phone around the premises, soon joined in by the helping hands of friends. Nothing. I had a flight to catch in seven hours. I was fucked. Peaking in anxiety, I started dialing my fiancé’s number from an assortment of friends and strangers’ phones. While being driven home, she finally reached me on the driver’s iPhone, and said she’d stay up for when I arrived back at the hotel. I didn’t have my laptop either, perhaps naively planning on a computer-less vacation. A mistake…

This prolonged setup should merely serve in setting the atmosphere of existential dread that would only be heightened by my inability to technologically connect to my family and loved ones, let alone make bookings. The necessity of the iPhone is the exasperation of postmodern terror.

Angel that my better half is, I managed to attain my flight times, numbers, and otherwise while talking to her from my hotel’s phone. No sense in going to sleep, I took a bath and collected myself. I took a cab to the airport at 8 AM, and so far no hassle. Though the American Airlines terminal in Nashville seemed chaotic, I managed to get my boarding passes and endure TSA’s security rape under an hour and 15 minutes. My flight to Washington left in time. Still tripping on the plane, I read some Berserk back issues and fell asleep. I landed in Nashville on time.

At the terminal for my flight from Washington to New York, things got darker. Sweat dripping down my neck from the chemicals slowly vacating my body, I watched the clock. 20 minutes passed boarding time, everyone knew something was up. Now 3:15, the airline employees hesitantly closed the gate and made the announcement: “The pilots are not here today, and the flight is cancelled,” said a heavy, middle aged woman not even feigning empathy for the shit storm the paying customers were now enveloped in. I almost broke down in tears as my situation started to feel desperate. Gathering myself, I was instructed that because I didn’t have a phone to use their fucking APP, that I could wait in the customer service line to change my plans. Given that literally every fucking flight in that terminal had been cancelled due to resistance to the psychotic vaccine mandates, that customer service line now stretched all the way back to security. This would not work. Getting by nearly on the kindness of strangers — a middle aged black woman from Atlanta and a 30-something young white man with a MAGA covid mask from the rural Georgia specifically — I called my fiancé from their phones. Through her tenacity, she managed to book me an Amtrak from Washington to New York (god bless Amtrak, the last bastion of the golden age of American travel). I went down to the bag terminal, and conjured all the drug madness that still simmered beneath my flesh to unleash a torrent of emotional abuse upon the neglectful airline employees so that they would release my bags (and the rest of the flight’s, which two hours after cancellation were still being held due to some unspecified “protocol”, god I fucking hate these airline scum). I took a cab, got on the Acela, and finally got home at 10 PM. Triumphant and relieved, I wept in my fiancé’s arms and snuggled with our puggle.

So, am I surprised that the Democratic Party had its fucking ass kicked electorally last week? Is anyone? This party, now totally at the mercy of its frothing at the mouth, upper middle class, upper educated, unmoored from reality activist base, is utterly incapable of the most bare necessities of democratic governance. While these vicious party sycophants hammer us with Covid hysteria, racial paranoia, and tyrannical trans ideology, they have also eroded our bare infrastructures – you know, the things that when they work we don’t even think about them in such direct ways: trash disposal, supply chains, law enforcement, and motherfucking airlines! Tucker Carlson was right when he said there was a limit to what American voters would withstand. The left and the party it launders consent for, in the Covid era, is leaning about as close to fascism as a bourgeois liberal party could get in the contemporary world (sub in a pregnant man for an iron cross, and what’s the difference? I mean, really?). I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, but if you don’t like living in a world where you have to show medical documentation to the hostess at your favorite dim sum restaurant, I think you know who you need to vote for.

BASED SAFETY
I’m totally forcing this, just so you know. So, just be aware I’m literally looking for links and writing this at the same time. Perhaps, it will garner some new forms, or at least some new bullshit. IM1776 kicks off its “Art and Literature for Dissidents” series, of which I will probably have a piece in soon enough. Be on the lookout for that, motherfuckers! Rob Doyle, the British novelist who I can count as one of the less than a handful writers on big presses worth reading at all (Rob is great), has a new book called Autobibliography in which he shares the countless literary masterworks that have psy-opped him in different directions over the years. Usually I loathe much of what Jennifer Lucy Allan writes, but I simply can’t manage diverting my attention away from her interview with Makoto Kubota, bass player of the mythic Japanese psych and experimental rock institution Les Rallizes Dénudés, on the death of band leader Takashi Mizutani. Partly because Les Rallizes is one of my most obsessed over rock n’ roll bands in history, and partly because HOLY FUCK Mizutani has already been dead for two years? Dennis Cooper celebrates filmmaker Derek Jarman on his blog, reminding us of a time when gay art was actually radical prior to gender ideology demanding everyone be “respected and heard” all the time and ruining everything.

Dr. ‘Fash persists waging his war against the left and its historical castration of Marx, positing here that though the left has, at points, formed coalitions alongside the working class it HAS NEVER been a working class politics as such. Novelist Walter Kirn (not a fan of his writing so much as his Twitter presence, but that’s where we are) discusses the creepiness of our rulers on What’s Left. Father Yarv joins Walt and Honor on Wet Brain and runs down his greatest hits. tPN brings on the homie John Dios to discuss Claude Lanzmann’s brilliant Holocaust documentary Shoah and it’s heartfelt and beautiful. Finally, check out new shit over at our sister audio project System of Systems. In our Halloween special, we bring on reoccurring guest host Bimbo Ubermensch to discuss terrifying films, novels, records, and art works, and in a side project of sorts Alex Bienstock presents a System of Systems series entitled “Collectin’ Scalps with ‘Stock” talking to the most fried of rising art stars.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA
Not that this is a fresh insight or anything, but the NY Times is the enemy of all people and its reporters, ALL OF THEM, should live in deep shame for the utter contempt with which they treat their own professions. It’s almost hard to believe this, but after two years of Covid hysteria destroying communities at the most minute economic levels, this fucking scumbag paper is telling us that Americans are, apparently, flush with cash and just being paranoid that the economy is bad? If there’s a hell (and if there is I’m pretty fucking sure we’re already there), Neil Irwin is going straight there.

More Times evil, here Jennifer Schuessler argues that critical race theory bans pose a threat to free speech, but apparently critical race theory itself is totally cool with nurturing alternative and dissident opinions that oppose it? Is it really so much to ask for that we don’t want young kids being taught to live in Yankee libtard racial paranoia forever? Apparently so. This sick scumbag working at Vox (flocking to his home nest, apparently) German Lopez makes the case for mandating vaccines for children, despite recent research showing that children are literally in so little danger from the virus that it’s impossible to measure. This is crackpot shit treated as mainstream normalcy and it makes me want to vomit! Steve Albini apologizes for his role in inspiring “edgelord shit” and falls on the sword for his role in “patriarchy” blah blah and “white supremacism” blah blah. Can you believe this fucking guy? Now rich and old largely on the back of his confrontational early work, he’s now even further problematizing our right to say and express what we feel. This maggot, who was in a band called RAPEMAN for all those who forgot, is an enemy of art itself. Pushing back on Albini’s psychological warfare, allow me to express myself freely (against Albini’s wishes): FUCK YOU YOU OLD FAGGOT I DON’T CARE WHAT RECORDS YOU MADE YOU ARE A WASTE OF A PUBLIC FIGURE!

Funny shit here, where this zoomer metal fan counts down his favorite black metal records ever, placing inarguable greats (Mayhem, Burzum) at the end and mall goth horseshit like Cradle of Filth at the beginning. I respect it. What else? Agh! It seems Hyperallergic has found itself a woketard angle from which they can report NFTs from, so cool for them I guess. And Billy Anania complains about the displaying of Nazi art, which some journo fuckwit complains about once a year so pay it no mind. All right. That’s it. Keep your fuckin’ heads up.

ILLUSTRATIONS
1. by Adam Lehrer
2. film still from Peter Greenaway’s ‘A Draughtsman’s Contract’
3. by Mihaly Zichy