Based Safety vs Cringe Propaganda #20

This Week in Based and Cringe

BASED SAFETY

Sorry I missed the column last week – I swear I was not just fucking off. Nevertheless, we missed quite a lot of based, and even more cringe (as per usual). This is going to bea lengthy column. Let’s fucking GOOOOO!!!!!!!

Curtis Yarvin gets Fisted by Foucault in this discussion with Niccolo Soldo. Soldo declares the true Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: “Fake, Gay, Cringe, and Retarded,” which Moldbug believes is true (of course): “If someone had told Hitler he was cringe, the Holocaust would never have happened,” says Yarvin. While on Moldbuggian news, Yarvin is also on a recent episode of my friends at the Good ol’ Boyz podcast discussing Christopher Rufo’s good intentions in his CRT crusade despite the ultimate toothlessness of his strategy. Moldbug also tells some great jokes throughout the episode.

Dennis Cooper compiles his favorite fiction, poetry, music and films of the first half of 2021 and includes new work by New Juche, Ivan Boris, Audrey Szasz, and more. Thankfully, we can rely on Dennis to sift through the bullshit for us and locate the real literary RAW! He is nothing short of a hero of our times. A lost screenplay to some surrealist horror film written by The Fall’s fallen god and iconic frontman and lyricist Mark E. Smith and British writer Graham Duff is being published in a book by Strange Attractor along with a conversation between the authors. Here, The Wire excerpts that conversation and finds the Hip Priest and Duff discussing filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (he who made both the mesmeric British boarding school set surrealist epic If and the skull-numbingly boring Academy Award winner Chariots of Fire) and Krautrock band Can.

Nick Land’s Xenosystems is now compiled as a PDF available here, emphasizing the evolution in Land’s thought that transpired once the philosopher came across the aforementioned Moldbug’s writings for the first time. It kicks off with a bang. “Once it is accepted that the right can never agree about anything, the opportunity arises to luxuriate in the delights of diversity,” writes Land in “Flavors of Reaction.” “Libertarianism already rivaled Trotskyism as a source of almost incomprehensibly compact dissensus, but the New Reaction looks set to take internecine micro-factionalism into previously unimagined territories. We might as well enjoy it.”

Friend of SP Alex Gutentag has emerged as a voice of great wisdom and courage in these dark times with her fierce anti-lockdown stance, and this Tablet piece is the best thing she’s written yet. In “The War On Reality,” Gutentag chronicles the immense social cost we’ve suffered despite there being almost no factual basis justifying the lockdowns themselves. DC Miller begs us to wake the fuck up and acknowledge the tyranny that we’re already living under! British writer Manick Govinda comes out forcefully against censorship and propaganda in the arts, and vilifies those who have conspired to destroy the careers of some of our greatest artistic minds. The cryptofashionable casting director himself Walter Pearce is on Contain discussing the flame wars he’s waged upon the fashion world. Criterion, a company now known equally for both its historical role as an archivist of classic film art and more recently its weird capitulation to NGO ideologies, has an incredible retrospective on “art house animation.” In a bit of visual art intrigue, I’m fascinated by the multimedia approach of art duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė. Their photographs especially warped my fucking head a bit.

Finally, great friend of ours Gio Pennachietti is on SOS talking about painting and some of its greatest postmodern practitioners: Martin Kippenberger, Anselm Kiefer, Michael Krebber, and Justin Mortimer.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA
Despite this fella John Roberts’ criticisms of my essay “On ‘The Intensive Care Unit Ballad’ and the Post-Covid Conflict,” it seems that that essay’s assessment of the psychological disposition of Covid liberals is one hundred percent correct: many of them PREFER life under lockdown after all. No offense to Greenwald, but I really don’t understand the point of trying to debate someone like the plantation riddler. To debate someone requires both parties to want to discuss their ideas with some level of mutual respect and pure intentionality. Nathan J. is a party hitman and this whole video published by the fed honeypot Brie Greyjoy (notably, still absent the recently canceled vapeholic Virgil Texas) is meant to make Glenn look misguided and resentful. Speaking of the fed honeypot, here she is hosting another one of those thinly veiled CRT “discussions,” in which the weirdo intersectional professor Irami Osei-Frimpong claims that poor whites “enjoy whiteness” and Freddie Deboer, still valorized as one of those “class first leftists,” says that he’d rather still be white than black and a millionaire (the “class first leftist” thing seems to be more of a phantom every day).
Also, Greenwald had Ben Bourgeois on to talk about Bourgeois’ book of unbridled, grandiose intellectual acuity Canceling Comedians While The World Burns and gets a taste of the full extent of Bourgeois’ reductive, light weight, soc dem “critique.” Even cornier though is this “debate” between Doug Lain and the guy who hosts the show that Aimee used to be on, where the guy who hosts the show Aimee used to be on claims to be a “thought leader,” declares that he “prays to Marx,” and refers to Marxism as an “ideology.” Real fuckin doozy there! Also, Doug looks unwell. Perhaps the stress of running a crypto-propaganda network is doing him in. Pray (“to Marx”) for him!

When you think of the greatest art works of the 2010s, what do you think of? Twin Peaks: The Return, probably? Nymphomaniac, perhaps? Maybe Yeezus? But you’re also apparently forgetting none other than the uptown funk boy Bruno Mars himself! At least, that’s what Lorrie Moore believes, who deems Mars worthy of the high-end literary analysis here. A new book compiling work by usual suspects (in this regard) like Kim Kelly, Drew Daniel, and Hunter-Hunt Hendrix, Black Metal Rainbow, rewrites recent music history to posit black metal — a genre created by hateful and reactionary petty bourgeois white boys — has been very woke, gay, and nonbinary or whatever the whole time! This is absurd of course, but especially absurd that one could actually make a much more compelling and TRUE case for a homoeroticism in black metal. There is, for sure, a repressed homosexuality to the genre that explains its theatrics and almost emo-leaning anguish. But it is not rainbow flag shit, OK?

Dumb ass, pro-war, anti-fascist Paul Mason continues his dumb-ass, pro-war, anti-fascist crusade. The most BLM art work ever lives in the new play What It Sends Up To Go Down which forces its viewers to walk through countless screens emblazoned with the images of black people who have died, making the liberal self-flagellation grievance spectacle materially manifest (which is interesting, perhaps, in a way that the production didn’t intend) and acting like the ideas espoused on the literal nightly news cycle are radical or novel. Predictably, Hyperallergic finds it to be “staggering.” Natasha Lennard, who last year attempted to get her colleague fired for publishing A SOURCE’s opinion she didn’t like, is now very very concerned about free speech (I’ll defer to the great 90-Day Fiancé contestant Asuelu on this one).

And why the fuck is David Chase doing this to himself and to us? Why is the artist who created the most monumentally beautiful, hilarious and important long-form series of all time in The Sopranos allowing his sublime masterpiece to be reduced to a tawdry, low-energy summer action film rife with terrible casting choices and a visual style totally out of phase with that which the show cloaked itself in? I will watch The Many Saints of Newark, but I really don’t want to. Its problems start with the stunt casting of Gandolfini’s son as a Young Tony; despite a slight facial resemblance, the kid totally lacks his father’s magnetic charisma, forceful and large screen presence, subtle humor and timing, and actual fucking acting talent. It only gets worse from there. You’re telling me that goombah Johnny Soprano was actually as handsome as Jon Bernthal the whole time? You’re telling me that Junior Soprano was a man twice the size (Corey Stoll) of that which we saw portrayed by Dominic Chianese in the original series. This is a nightmare. Not even the solid casting of statuesque but cold and asexual Vera Farmiga as Livia can right the many wrongs that The Sopranos prequel is forcing upon us.

The greatest art work of the 21st century is now officially little more than a meme, ladies and gentleman. I could curl up into the fetal and ball my eyes out over this. But baby, THERE’S NO TIME TO CRY!

Illustration by Adam Lehrer