Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #51
After a long absence, Adam sorts through the Internet's offerings for a 51st time
THOUGHTS
As promised, Safety Propaganda resumes regular programming. I never planned on taking this much time away from this platform, but I had some dreams that I needed to make reality. I’ve completed the second draft of a new novel; by far the deepest, longest, and most offensive project that I’ve willed into existence. If all goes according to plan, that will be ready for your reading pleasure by the end of Summer 2023. I can’t wait for my fellow Counter-Agents to be able to consume it, to dissect it, and to hopefully be able to extrapolate its insights and regurgitate them into your own information warfare. Second, I am now one of the world’s most successful rock stars due to my conceptual rock n’ roll duo Botched Chadification, which I play in with Alex Bienstock, and the release of our debut 7 inch: Masculinity Under Threat. I’ve been working on visual art projects, too, and will have two pieces in an exhibition this summer in Norway at Centralbanken, curated by friend of the network Eric Schmid. Furthermore, what time would I have between all this and my intense, high volume bodybuilding regimen? We’re talking over 20 sets a week per body area, and two hours of conditioning. But, given that I’ve already stacked on 20 pounds of lean tissue to my frame, it’s time to chill. So, I’m currently off cycle and detoxing the body, letting my body AND my mind heal. And I’m bored, god damn it. And if there was ever a time to get back to taking a Substack project seriously, it’s when the boredom eats at the soul. NO MORE. LET’S FUCKIN’ DO IT!
BASED SAFETY
I saw Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid on opening night at the Nitehawk in Prospect Park, which used to be the grimiest, scuzziest, and most deplorably kept AMC in the city, and has now been restored to a kind of postmodern, hipster glory. Enough about the theater, however, I want to talk about the film. I was, I’d say, skeptically excited to see Aster’s new work. Hereditary floored me when it came out. I was sure that I’d witnessed a debut film by a wunderkind artist who would rise to the top of his industry. Midsommar, on the other hand, failed to connect with me. I couldn’t help but have the feeling that it was both not scary enough AND too sympathetic to its female protagonist and not enough with its male “antagonist.” So, Beau is Afraid…
It took me 15 minutes — specifically the scene when Beau is being chased by an MS13 member down his apocalyptic, Tenderloin-esque city block littered with criminals and Fentanyl bombed freaks — to realize that Beau is Afraid is a work of art of near unparalleled genius. It is Aster’s most personal project, and Joaquin’s heroically abject performance becomes a kind of avatar of Aster’s neurosis and alienation. The film is abstract and dream-like and yet simultaneously totally direct and legible in what it communicates. It’s a film that looks at the decay of modern life and doesn’t mystify it, but does indeed recoil with disgust when faced with it. It’s a film in which a misogynist paranoia is given form. There are reactionary implications to it, as well as idealist ones. There is so much going on in this film, that I was left stunned and hypnotized throughout its substantial three-hour run. Aster taps into the central purpose of artistic production – to give form and image to his own alienation. BRAVO! Aster has done a large press junket in support of the film, but I like this interview with W and I’m sure this conversation between Aster and Scorsese was utterly validating for the young auteur.
Upon the re-release of his turn of the millennium art world novel Do Everything in the Dark, Gary Indiana speaks to Chris Kraus about what that novel meant as well as the “artist as con man” trope. Late Japanese sci-fi writer, once lover of Japanese free jazz saxophone master Kaoru Abe, and supremely sexy subject of many Araki photos Izumi Suzuki’s avant-garde literary fantasias are finally and definitively translated into English with the new book Hit Parade of Tears. Nick Land looks back upon centuries of right wing failure and asks himself: where did it all go wrong? In a well-written essay, Blake Smith diagnoses Andrea Long Chu’s transition to being a woman as a male, cisgendered self-hatred and thinly veiled misogynistic attempt at becoming the Chinese ex-girlfriend that Chu once wrote at length about fetishizing: “Chu has transitioned again, shifting the themes of her writing to race, and particularly to what she now identifies as her Asian-American-ness—completing the process of becoming her ex-girlfriend, who is now not only fetishized, objectified, and exoticized, but taken as a model for a fantastically appropriative form of imitation.”
The great Houston-based cult artist and punk musician (of Culturcide fame) Mark Flood is profiled by Patrick McGraw for Kaleidoscope, who pinpoints the substantial influence that Flood’s challenges to the art world have had on today’s MFA-fried yOOths. Kudos to Tara Downs, the New York-based dealer, for having the courage to FINALLY give Deanna Havas a solo show. Havas, who largely had her ascendant career destroyed by being the first New York artist with the courage to point to the hypocrisy of the left and affirm support for the Trump 2016 campaign, earning the ire of the now irrelevant but still rather demonic British “artist” Luke Turner in the process. Havas left New York for Budapest and her exit from the Internet has been good for her. Now, she’s getting her do. She will show “a series of paintings partly inspired by themes from Vincent van Gogh’s late works, interpreted through a combination of freeware graphics, unlicensed commercial stock photography and Photoshop effects,” according to Lukas Wagner.
Aerosmith, a band I love because they are hometown Boston heroes who sound like if Led Zeppelin was more concerned with wigger rhythm and American blues licks than being nerdy Brits obsessed with Tolkien, are going on their final tour. I desperately want to go but likely won’t – decent tickets are already selling for thousands (Fuck Ticketmaster!) While on the topic of gods of rock n’ roll sleaze, friend of SP and much beloved uncle figure Dominick Fernow collaborates with none other than German power electronics pioneers Genocide Organ. The subsequent album, Carte Blanche, is unquestionably the most ferocious and transcendent music that the stagnant genre of PE has produced in a very long time. More Dominick news, his label Hospital Productions announces a collaborative music festival with the influential extreme metal label Nuclear War Now! Productions in Osaka fucking Japan. And HOLY SHIT is this lineup a doozy: Japanese noise pioneer Masonna, Canadian war metal progenitors Blasphemy, and none other than Finnish black metal freaks Beherit will be playing their first show since 1994. I already got my fucking ticket, so see me there! Don’t know how he does it, but the filthiest Armenian alive manages to converse with a shared hero of ours, Greil Marcus, on the legacy of the blues and early rock n’ roll that the aging cultural critic wrote about so evocatively and poetically in his legendary book Mystery Train.
Speaking of the Armenian, I join he and friend Glen Rockney on their Backwall sports podcast to discuss my experimentation with anabolic steroid usage all while watching the epic rivalry between legendary bodybuilders Phil Heath and Kai Greene in the 2013 Generation Iron documentary. Our System of Systems by Safety Propaganda podcast has been busy: curator and art critic Grant Tyler joins the show to discuss the mechanisms of the art experience, beauties and gal pals Eva and Elena Sullivan guest to discuss their fashion brand Sullivan Clothing, and artist and curator and autistic genius strangeo Eric Schmid and artist/musician Connor Tomaka come on to discuss….I don’t know. Just listen to it, I guess.
Finally, my monthly Compact column lacerates the arrogance of failed comedian Hannah Gadsby and the Brooklyn Museum’s decision to give her free reigns to piss on the legacy of Picasso.
CRINGE PROPAGANDA
Somehow the dirtbag left has found its most perfect art critic in Eileen Jones. A critic who can watch something as deep and transcendent as Beau is Afraid and can’t come up with a take more insightful than: “Whoa, I don’t know about this, like, I don’t really get it, it’s like so cruel and um, like, mean.”
“Aster’s whole sensibility is foreign to mine. I watch his stuff unmoved, or worse — embarrassed, snorting, laughing in derision, and eventually numbed by scorn,” writes Jones, which is the film critic equivalent of: “Yo, this is word salad my dude, touch grass.” This is awful writing from someone who is only watching these movies through the prism of her retarded democratic socialism, the enemy of art.
Major media shakeups this week. First, we have the controversial firing of Tucker Carlson, the host of the biggest nightly news program in the world. In the interim, Fox has put out a full blown character assassination of the anchor, while Pentagon officials openly admit that they’re happy he’s gone because “it’'ll be easier to garner support for the war.” MY GOD these people are fucking ghouls. Tucker, in my opinion, was a net positive. Sure, his constipated owl face was annoying. Sure, he had blind spots when it came to platforming some of the dullest minds of the online right, and left. But, he also interrogated political orthodoxies on platform of extraordinary/unprecedented size. That had value.
Next, VICE media is bankrupt, but who didn’t see that coming? When VICE was just a magazine that you could pick up at American Apparel, it was amazing. Sorry if you missed it. There was nothing like it. The first issue I picked up was the drugs issue, filled with images and articles of aesthetic degeneracy. It was creative and reactionary. It was undeniably fresh. I wanted to work there. When I finally did, as an unpaid intern (LOL) in 2012, it was in the process of becoming a corporate woke behemoth, and the culture markedly shifted. Without Gavin, the whole vision fell apart. It just became another news network with a more millennial centric market and soon developed a parasitic relationship with the mainstream media after being purchased by Disney, Murdoch and others. As much as it influenced the major networks, it also was influenced by them, and soon there was nothing unique about it at all. It was a piece of shit staffed with total retards. And it failed. Good riddance.
Cultural critic Claire Dederer’s Monsters chronicles what to do when appreciating “art made by monsters.” Some of those monsters are, according to her: Michael Jackson, Polanski, Hemingway, and fucking JK Rowling. Apparently, Rowling’s rejection of the “trans women are real women” dictum is as monstrous as Michael Jackson’s sleepovers, but I digress. How do you enjoy art made by monsters? By just looking at the art, you dope! No one cares about this shit anymore! This book comes out a decade too late. Adolph Reed writes for The Nation now so dirtbag leftism is totally and completely mainstream. The comments on his essay here are funny – libtards who think he uses too big a vocabulary and other mid-wits voice their pain. John Ganz writes for Artforum now? Who am I kidding? Of course he does. If any critic with a Substack was going to be absorbed by that rapacious media apparatus it was most certainly going to be the most libtarded of the bunch (Crumps probably considered too unwell for these kinds of gigs.) Nevertheless, here’s Ganz on Richter, because if there’s any new perspective I need on Richter it’s Ganz’s, right? No. Speaking of Artforum, artist Josh Kline is the most pretentious fucker out there. Guy reads one accelerationist text and then makes whole art projects about how working from home is radical utopianism or something. Like, no, it’s not. It’s just being a rich kid and not needing a real job.
I’m dedicating the end of this column to the recent writings of one Cement Greenberg, an art critic so utterly incapable of looking at aesthetics objectively that you’d think these articles were in response to pamphlets, so poor at grammar that the texts appear to be written at a third grade reading level, and so brainwashed by MFA libtardism that every art exhibition is judged merely upon the identity of the artist who made it. I honestly quite like reading these columns because, in reality, “CEMENT” does the sort of propaganda shilling that all art critics do now, but does so without any of the intellectual veneer that these losers typically cloak their brain rot in. In this one, he’s mad at my friend Will Sheldon for being a white dude who paints hot girls – GASP the horror. In this one, he suggests that Tom Burr’s white homosexuality of a bygone era isn’t quite libtarded enough, especially given the fact that Burr isn’t disabled. Perhaps if Burr takes a tire iron to his own knees, Cement Greenberg will see the value in his art? In this one, he’s mad that queer bodies are being used as eye candy, or something, in Eglė Budvytytė film piece: “Sexual identity and the relationship with one’s body should not be limited to the ornament of an artist’s practice, let alone a career,” says this anonymous critic who is so ridiculous with these takes that I can’t even tell if he/she/it/they/fuck if I know is trolling or not. “Queerness means inclusivity,” he continues. Does it though? Wouldn’t that mean that straights and ciszesssss or whatever would be included? Good job CultBytes: you have achieved the real bottoming out of cultural criticism. It can’t get any worse than this.
ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Amy Ryan and Joaquin Phoenix in Beau is Afraid
2. art by Mark Flood
3. Art by Deanna Havas
4. Tucker
5. VICE “The Drugs Issue”