Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #42

This week in Based and Cringe

THOUGHTS

We become righteous not by subbing one faith for another, but by opening ourselves up to receive salvation from the full extent of our abilities. The poorest bargain one can make is to swap one’s thinking individuality for what is called respectability and authority. – Dr. Randall Phillip

I’ve been enjoying the deliciously malignant writing of author, the creator of the Fuck zine, noise musician, video artist, and avant-garde hate monger who often makes Jim Goad sound like a choir boy (an indeed, contributed to the fourth issue of Goad’s Answer Me! zine) Dr. Randall Phillip. If you Google Phillip, you might think that I’ve gone overboard with the kind of artists that I gleefully and nonchalantly support, given his extreme racism and open advocacy of violent crime. But Phillip’s entire artistic persona is a challenge. A dare. It is a true test of our commitment to freedom of expression, going so far into the realm of literary evil that one wonders if they might be sick just reading it. And this is why I can appreciate it. Phillip made it impossible for him to be absorbed into any existing political movement because his public statements and his art were too disgusting and provocative for any kind of polite liberal society to absorb. And by taking his literary persona to the bottom layers of hell, he solidifies his status as a singular avant-garde jester to be relegated to the absolute outer limits of the literary fringes.

The algorithm has never been totally favorable to me. And in the rare moments that it was, where I saw the ISO numbers and felt the dopamine rush of generating stir and popularity, I was driving myself towards depression in a state of agitation driven shitposting. Some of my most popular texts are those that I now am most embarrassed by. Instead of being an artist, I was leaning towards punditry. I now refuse punditry at all costs. Clearly, I’ve been made totally unpalatable to any and all factions within the left a long time ago. But I’m also glad that I never through my whole weight in with the right, as it’s become clear to me that large swathes of it are the same censorious and petty ideologues that exist in droves on the left. I simply refuse to contribute to groomer hysteria. I refuse to convert to Catholicism. I refuse to see Libs of Tik Tok as anything other than a corrosive phenomenon of rage porn. I want to exist totally independent of political goals because once said goals are espoused, you can only say what contributes towards it. And that’s just not how I think. I want to say everything that’s on my mind at all times, allowing you to bare witness to my insanity, hypocrisy, and various ideological contradictions.

Finding your people is so much more spiritually enriching than finding an audience of a lot of people. Why would I want to feed a political rage machine that I fundamentally loathe when I could be forging genuine connections with the real outsider artists among us? I’ve become friends with and connected with people that I’ve looked up to for decades – far more meaningful than 100 likes on a Substack post, that I can assure you. I don’t need 100 likes, no – I just need one person who genuinely gets it. I believe someone like Randall Phillip, as disgusting as he might seem to the average liberal American, would agree. So would Colin Wilson. So would Helios Creed. So would Giuseppe Andrews. And so on.

Narcissistic rant over. Continue with regular broadcasting.

BASED SAFETY

First, I’d like to laud the San Francisco based zine Dynamite Hemorrhage, run by Jay Hinman, and in particular its spectacular podcast project. Each episode contains a playlist loaded with the strangest and most obscure in both new and old scuzz punk, experimental pop, no wave, freak disco, and all kinds of musical delight gunky and off-putting. Every time I listen I find myself having to download bands I’ve never heard of on Soulseek, and it’s a stark reminder that the investigation of the avant-garde never ends. You simply will never know all that lurks within its abyss, and engagement with it brings you closer and closer still to uncovering mysteries and gaining insight into the unseen and dark forces of the universe.

John Waters has released his first book of fiction, Liarmouth: A Feel Bad Romance, that I look forward to reading. In its wake, the Pope of Trash talks with another troublemaking homosexual artist, the writer Brontez Purnell, for Interview Mag. Apparently, Kanye and Balenciaga’s world changing designer Demna Gvasalia team up once more to re-design the interior of the Gap’s flagship store in Manhattan and, in celebration, launch a pop-up to sell their Kanye-designed and Balenciaga-engineered one-off Gap garments. Why is this based? Well, even though the clothes are entirely mediocre and, from my perspective, uninteresting, the fervor around the release is ever more evidence of Kanye’s singular ability to psyop the global population into wearing whatever the fuck he tells them to (hell, I’ll even admit that suede Bottega Veneta chelsea boots, which are those that I wear and cherish most often, were incepted into my brain by Kanye himself.) Moritz Scheper examines the art of Matthias Groebel, whose “computer robotic assisted paintings” have always indelibly imprinted onto my imagination. The excellent purveyor of video criticism of putrid, sub-underground extreme music White Filth interviews Dani Li, the surprisingly Chinese proprietor of the excellent GOATOWAREX Records, to discuss the onslaught of strange and brutal music recently released by the label.

Nina chronicles the liberal tendency towards Schmittian friend-enemy distinctions: “Liberals are only pretending to be nice: When they search out the witches’ mark or declare that you have spoken to the wrong person, we should respond, if at all, with: ‘And?’” Writer Lafayette Lee asks that we rewatch Herzog’s Aguirre outside the ideological limitations of our liberalism: “It is a shrunken world with no patience for terror, and thus, no room for tragedy.” Emmalea Russo weaves a textual collage of plague, Joan Didion, The Doors and T.S. Elliot in another thoughtful essay. Russo’s new book, Confetti, is available now from Hyperidean Press for pre-order, the same innovative publisher that put out mine own Communions last year.

Podcasts. Barrett interviews the iconic female half of my all-time favorite rock n’ roll band Royal Trux Jennifer Herrema. Fun fact: Barrett and I first got in contact well before we had out moments in the internet sub-culture when I poorly reviewed Royal Trux’s post-reunion music for The Quietus, which he worked on. But we ended up bonding over our fandom of the band anyways when he conceded that my points weren’t too bitterly intentioned. Jack has been extremely busy so I’ll shout this one out, because it features Italian giallo and horror master Lucio Fulci. I’m so Popular dives into the legacy of Alexander Payne’s masterpiece of pitch black suburban comedy Election.

Apologies for this but I have lots to plug in the wake of my absence (my work load, with two books set to drop in the next 10 months, is brutal.) I appear on the great Art of Darkness podcast to discuss Antonin Artaud for a whopping four hours (I missed my friend Nate Boyce’s birthday party for this and, by extension, my chance to befriend a very famous movie star so hope you guys appreciate this.) System of Systems galore: Psyop Resistor joins to talk black metal, JJ Ruiz comes on the show to relay stories of Seth Putnam and Anal Cunt, and my faithful and brilliant publisher Udith Dematagoda remembers Fight Club. Finally, I review the adaptation of Balzac’s Lost Illusions and take it as an opportunity to profess my love for the man and his work.

One last thing: I was impressed by this surprising piece of candor about the left liberal censorship campaign that has come to dominate the publishing industry.