Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #49

This week in based and cringe...

THOUGHTS

Traveling expands the mind rarely… – Hans Christian Anderson

I’ve just returned from a brief journey to Cartegena, Columbia. It was for a wedding, but I managed to get some sightseeing in, go surfing, some jet skiing, and may or may not have used the lax pharma laws to stock up on anabolics. Overall, however, I wasn’t overly impressed with the place, despite its obvious beauty and its colonial architectural charm. Maybe some people can get into the vibe of people getting shitfaced and dry humping each other to bachata music every night, but I can’t say that I’m one of them. We’ve all dealt with crime and solicitation on vacation before, but this was to the level of a kind of absurdity. As soon as I walked outside of our Getsemani located hotel (basically the hipster neighborhood if such a thing could be said to exist there,) I’d be swarmed by an endless assortment of sketchy looking bastards adorned in soccer jerseys that were far too small against their frames, man tits squeezed against the fabric in a way that made the situation all the more clownish.

”Hey, amigo, quieres un sombrero?”

”No,” I replied.

”Si, what about some heroin or cocaine?”

And so it was. Nevertheless, this wouldn’t have been such a buzzkill had traveling into the country not been such a hyper-Kafkaesque nightmare. Perhaps it has something to do with the election of IMF-backed pseudo commie Columbian President Gustavo Petro, but I’ve never seen anything like this. As soon as we got off the plane we were swarmed by airport security demanding we put on masks, which no one of course had, and I realized then that Columbia was still operating on Covid protocols from 2020. From there, we waited in a customs line for two hours. A friend of the groom was actually sent back to the States after being told that his passport had been “reported stolen,” which made no fucking sense given that he had already gotten scanned back at home. This is, I suppose, what it’s like to have DSA run the infrastructure of an entire country. Getting out of Columbia was even worse: five security check points each with full passport scan and the third degree given by storm troopers in military garb. Finally, just as I was starting to relax and enjoy the new John Frusciante album on my air pods, I realized that airport employees were calling the names of not dozens but hundreds of passengers demanding that they acquiesce to full searches of their checked-in bags – I was for sure quite nervous during this ordeal for reasons I’d rather explain in private. Traveling has been a nightmare for a long time, but this was out of this world. It dampened my mood on the whole trip. Ease of travel IS a criteria that should be used to evaluate a vacation, and when security state protocols leave you feeling exasperated and depressed, only the most magical locations will alleviate that frustration.

American airports, by contrast, have become infinitely more relaxed in terms of security protocols. This, I believe, is where Trump’s presidency is most underrated. He vowed to make small fixes to institutions that play major roles in our lives, and he largely did so. Even during the height of Covid, TSA opted to look the other way on vax cards and masks. While I’m getting strip searched and disease tested to get some fucking Chinese food, I’m breezing through JFK. And aside from the cancellations caused by staff walkouts (a result of Biden’s vaccine mandate,) airports have steadily improved even since then. It took legitimately less than five minutes to pass through American customs the other day, and why would it need to be any longer than that? This is the extent of my political horizon as of 2023: let’s fix the shit that we need to use before it drives us all fucking insane.

BASED SAFETY

It’s the (relatively) slow months for new music, but my favorite record of 2023 at this early juncture is none other than a solo album by my favorite living musician John Frusciante, : I I .. The Chi Peps’ virtuoso guitarist is working with an entirely new sound here that his little to do with any of his other solo material; it is not the avant-folk of Niandra las Des and Usually Just a T-shirt nor the electro-pop inflected post punk of How to Record Only Water for 10 Days nor is it even the surprisingly elegant acid house of his last album Maya. No, this record seems to straddle the far out electro-acoustic work of artists like Oren Ambarchi and even the dark ambient of Thomas Koner or Philip Jeck. And it’s awesome. One must come to grips with how astonishing this is. The artist has spent the last year releasing two albums and touring the world with one of the most commercially successful and beloved legacy rock n’ roll bands in existence, and still manages to create an hour and a half of ultra warped, alien experimental music. Furthermore, the record is neither corny nor try-hard. No other artist is able to work at the height of the mainstream AND the scourges of the underground without seeming like a poser. Frusciante is the greatest alive. The duties of Frusciante’s high-paid day job, however, are not being neglected, if this decent enough 60 Minutes segment is to be believed.

In this excellent text by one of the great remaining art critics, Travis Jeppesen bemoans the devolution of art criticism from a creative literary form towards a pseudo-intellectual, half-baked critical theory. Speaking on the visual arts, here’s a piece about artist Hank Willis Thomas and his horrendous homage to MLK and Coretta Scott King in Boston, which literally looks like a man eating the pussy like his mama made it. Honestly I didn’t even read the essay but I’m glad to see Thomas getting slammed because the MLK statue isn’t even close to the shittiest and most retarded work of art he’s ever made. Though I try not to share noise-related content here, I am genuinely impressed by the artistic philosophy of Stefan McCune of new noise project CYESS AFXZS. Here, the artist demonstrates a shocking level of knowledge of both modern art and avant-garde music history all while expressing his qualms with noise’s absolute refusal to evolve as a form. I don’t agree with everything he said, and he does come off as pretentious, but at least there’s some acknoeldgement here that noise music shouldn’t be a stagnant form. Homie filmmaker Michael Bilandic interviews none other than filmmaker and cranky anti-Western imperialist Oliver Stone for Metrograph to discuss his recent documentaries as well as his beloved narrative films. “I love energy, chaotic energy,” says Stone. “The chaos, the madness of the situation—rock ’n’ roll breeds that, mob scenes breed that, public frenzies.”

Bret Easton Ellis is once again enjoying literary fame with the release of his metafictional “memoir” cum serial killer fiction story The Shards. I haven’t read it yet because I spent the majority of the pandemic listening to Bret himself narrate the novel as he wrote it on his podcast (it was awesome.) Nevertheless, Nate Freeman follows Bret around some for Vanity Fair and the author opens up about his unsuccessful detour into screen writing and suffering a mid-life crisis: “Hollywood, working on this film, and getting involved in all the myriad difficulties that it takes to make a movie—I was kind of shattered by it all.” Moreover, Ellis gives an interview to Unherd where he discusses what made Gen X different than millennials. Another of my favorite writers and an Ellis friend, Bruce Wagner, gives a rather prickly interview to discuss getting a book deal canceled for refusing to remove the word “fat” from his last novel. Dark. Finally, a remembrance of the great Jew of 20th Century American literature (one of the many few, anyways, but my favorite, certainly,) Norman Mailer by David Mikics: “Mailer amply deserved his stardom,” he writes. “He could be crude, silly, or even brutal, but more often he hit his targets. Mailer told hard truths about male violence, fought against conformity, and denounced the nightmare reign of technology.”

An episode of Red Scare for the ages here: none other than the greatest living fiction writer Michel Houellebecq shows up to discuss his recent text on state assisted suicide with the ladies, refusing to speak in English. But never fear, friend of SP and noted French-Canuck painter Mathieu Malouf comes through with the translation. The Gladstone Gallery director, writer of macabre ruminations on celebrity and true crime, and C-Word podcast co-host alongside Lena Dunham Alissa Bennett heads to Jack Mason to talk about the nihilistic Charlize Theron vehicle Young Adult. I used to know Alissa some, and weirdly enough the last time I saw her (at an art fair I was showing mid art work at) was the day that I met my wife. Strange occurrences indeed.

Now, time for me to whore myself. I write about Nicolas Winding Refn and his new Netflix series Copenhagen Cowboy for Compact, finding both fault and beauty within Refn’s vision. We elaborate upon it in a new episode of our audio misinformation arm System of Systems with Rare Candy co-host Glen Rockney and artist Bradford Kessler. Finally, I appear on Rare Candy proper to discuss Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and the David Robert Mitchell film Under the Silver Lake, and I also promote the Morbid Books released Safety Propaganda Conceptual Manifesto for Psychological Warfare, which we’ve just launched a new promotional campaign for (see above.)

SIDE NOTE: Couldn’t help but notice this NYT op-ed that, for me, suggests a massive shift in the manner with which the MSM is covering Ukraine. A small glimmer of truth, perhaps.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

ArtForum seldom covers fashion — ‘tis an art magazine after all — so you’d think that when it does, it would cover fashion designers with an outsized impact on society’s overall aesthetic: shifts in how we dress, new images and silhouettes, and a tight conceptual design thesis that is instantly recognizable. Balenciaga. McQueen. Margiela. Rei Kawakubo. Rick Owens. Those kinds of designers, right? But no. The magazine instead decides that we need to know about Asian designers who “unravel” Asian identity; whatever the fuck that means. We have some other fashion-related items on the menu. Vogue writer Blythe Marks, who I have to assume is not a real human, writes this article that can be summed up as: fur is soooo bad, but also faux fur is soooo bad, we need to not wear fur but also faux fur is something we should be ashamed of and not wear because environment, but to save environment we need to not wear clothes anymore but we work for a fashion magazine so we are the problem but at least we know fur and faux fur are bad. OH MY GOD SHUT UP! And this week in things I don’t need, NY holds a “vintage fashion show.” I don’t know why this pisses me off, but it does. Vintage is about effortless cool, fashion is about effort. It doesn’t make sense. Leave vintage alone!

My favorite book that I read in 2022 was not the new novels published by some of my favorite writers: Otessa Mosfegh, Bret Easton Ellis, Bruce Wagner, and Cormac McCarthy among them. No, in fact the best thing I’ve read recently is Quentin Tarantino’s essay collection Cinema Speculation. The book seems to work equally as one of film criticism as it does a kind of memoir told through QT’s passion for cinema. It is, in many ways, a kind of accessible and imminently readable film theory, and reminds me now of the essay by Jeppesen I mentioned earlier. It is a work of art criticism as a LITERARY pursuit, and not merely a half-baked tone of pseudo theory. I loved it. All 500 pages. And yet, that doesn’t stop this guy from doing anything he can to take issue with QT’s writing, because there is nothing that a critic fears more than an ARTIST who can still write criticism better than they can. If all critics are failed artists, what happens when successful artists become critics? The failed artists quiver, that’s what.

Speaking of art critics, what fucking babies these people are! The American members of the International Association of Art Critics have a hissy fit that they’re demands made on the organization for diversity initiatives following the Summer of Floyd are being ignored by the more conservative leaning French wing of the group. Must be tough to realize that people outside America don’t fall for the same psyops and ideological browbeating campaigns that academics fall for here! Apparently, an artist named “SKY HOKINKA” is “SO TIRED” of having to explain Native American culture to non-natives, which is just as well given I don’t want to hear this lady’s shrill rhetorical pleas for recognition of the plight of the natives ever in my fucking life! Pitchfork reveals the 25 musicians of the future, and the future looks bleak indeed.

A paid soldier from the infamous MOZART mercenary group, gets drunk, and accidentally reveals how he really feels about Ukraine: “It’s a corrupt and sick society,” he says, before going on to lament the seeming inability of Ukrainian forces to not commit war crimes and heinous atrocities that seem to prioritize a delirious spectacle of violence. I didn’t believe that the dollar was actually in trouble until reading Krugman say that it wasn’t (as ever, Krugman is useful in that the opposite of whatever he writes is the truth.) Finally, the unnerving Swede Malcolm Kyeune points to the controversy surrounding our beloved Pericles Abbasi, joie de vivre posting extraordinaire and actual real life election law layer, and thinks this is all way more serious than it actually is, using Perry’s example to explain how the art of the post is distorting reality or something, in this poorly edited, triggered sounding article.