THOUGHTS
The need to hear the news several times a day is already a sign of fear; the imagination grows and paralyzed itself in a rising vortex. – Ernst Jünger
BASED SAFETY
Since returning from my trip abroad to Greece, a trip that I could write at length about but travel journals are for libtards and Charles Dickens (maybe someday,) I’ve been trying to get back to work on my longer terms projects. Collecting clips from the Internet has felt rather low priority, and I’ve been dreading doing it. But given the general low attention spans of the modern content consumer, the market demands more low-IQ aggregate articles. So, we are back!
Filmmaker Michael Bilandic interviews his former boss and mentor Abel Ferrara for Metrograph, and this would be an ideal place to make this announcement: tomorrow night at Newtonn, 99 Canal St., I will be introducing a screening of Michael’s 2014 film Hellaware at 8 PM. Be there!
DC Miller joins the Not the BBC channel (or show or whatever I don’t fucking know) to discuss the supremacy of ideology and the pitfalls of claiming oneself a “dissident artist.” Michael Shellenberger, who I will never fully trust (he came up as a Soros guy sorry I can’t shake that off,) courageously argues to congress that there is no climate emergency that warrants the erosion of our energy security and prosperity. Though it should surprise no one, it appears that a large portion of left wing activism in the United States is funded by dark money. Also: grass is green and men love tight pussy.
Filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko joins Red Scare. Eugene was supposed to come on System of Systems once, but I don’t know – I dropped the ball. I get it though. Anna and Dasha are a lot more famous than me. My pals J. David and Kelby from the Agitator podcast join The Perfume Nationalist to discuss two low-brow ‘90s rock records — Korn’s self-titled debut and Faith No More’s Angel Dust — that are inarguably masterpieces that transcend the limitations of their mediums. Angel Dust makes me cry. One of my best friends Alex Bienstock appears on the Easy Listening podcast to discuss the most oft-overlooked aspect of his practice: fucked up music making, BOII!|
Doris Wishman, the charming sexploitation filmmaker who died in 2002, is evidently having a posthumous moment, or something. In any case, you can read about her fascinating career in Artforum. Writer A.M. Holmes discusses the decline of the literary industry with Bret Ellis, and as annoying as it is to hear this industry veteran make sure she makes snipes at Kellyanne Conway to signal her do-gooder libtard values before she makes even the slightest criticism of the obnoxious intersectionalism that has plagued creativity in the 2010s and beyond, I can’t hold it against her. After all, Holmes wrote one of the most depraved and sickening novels to ever be published by a mainstream house: The End of Alice, memorably narrated by an unrepentant pedophile. Miami noise icon Rat Bastard, of To Live and Shave in LA and the Laundry Room Squelchers pseudo-fame, showed up on Noisextra to document some of the history of his sunny and surreal city’s little known avant-garde, which is particularly helpful research for a thing that I’m writing so thank you very much for that. The free jazz pioneer Pharoah Sanders is finally dead at what feels like 1200 years old or some shit, in any case: he was great. With him, a piece of greatness dies. REST IN PEACE.
I’m off to a slow start but System of Systems is back online, starting with this episode featuring the artist Zach Brown. He tells us about all the pussy he got at RISD.
CRINGE PROPAGANDA
My annoyance with the dirtbag left/dirtbag right unspoken handshake alliance has reached an apex with its newest talking point: weed prescriptions, according to these nerds who have obviously never used drugs in their fucking lives, are as dangerous as opiate prescriptions. Been seeing a lot of articles making this claim recently. Here, Leighton Woodhouse makes the case citing an alleged rise in cases of psychosis that are linked to excess marijuana use. Now, I have been a daily user of both cannabis AND opiates like heroin. Which substance do you think had the most damaging impact on my life? Did you sincerely need to even think hard about this answer? Of course not. Marijuana is, while not without its down sides, very mild. Opiates ruin your life, and fast. Coming off a weed habit might result in a few sleepless nights. Coming off a junk habit will result in weeks of the most viscerally gut-wrenching sickness that can’t be imagined by those who have never experienced it, followed by months or years of depression and boredom. IT’S NOT THE FUCKING SAME!
Aside from the obvious choices in the top 10 — no one can argue the greatness of The Sopranos or Breaking Bad regardless of how libtarded the discourse gets (knock on wood) — can someone please have the Rolling Stone editors explain exactly how a series that barely anyone watched and certainly no one remembers like I May Destroy You is a more important cultural artifact than fucking Twin Peaks. Can they please demonstrate why Issa Rae’s nearly unwatchable and utterly unfunny dramedy series Insecure is more of an artistic milestone than the era defining work of Lena Dunham on Girls? Or the massively popular and ‘90s archetypal The X-Files? I even have to assume that the lowered status of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (slotted way back in the sixties of the top 100) has less to do with decreased lovability than it does the cancellation of the show’s brilliant writer and now outed coomer Joss Whedon. But also, who the fuck cares? “Best-of” listicles are generated to erode your own critical faculties, dissolving subjectivity into an algorithmic cauldron of preordained formulaic critical orthodoxies.
I used to defend Kanye West, or “Yé” or whatever the fuck he wants to be called, at all costs. I always viewed him as, for better or worse, the last mega famous artist willing to take on the role of the provocateur and one consistently dedicated to pushing the envelope and to formal and conceptual experimentation – a total rarity if not outright extinction in contemporary pop. This is largely due to the fact that I was enamored with his holy trilogy of albums: 808z and Heartbreaks, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Yeezus. To me, these are by far the most fascinating and exciting records made by a top 40 artist this millennium. But I have to admit: with now a decade gone by since Kanye has put out anything resembling a good album, countless exhibitions of moronic behavior in public, and incessant whining and bitching about his apparel brands not being properly funded or whatever, I can’t defend him anymore. He’s really fucking annoying, actually.
Is there anything in the art world more grating than the way in which Arthur Jafa is treated as an infallible God-level genius? Not even Picasso enjoys the kind of accolades that are thrown at this guy (especially not now, when Picasso can’t be written about without someone screeching woman art critic labeling him a misogynist.) The difference of course is that Picasso defined what painting would become in modernism, Arthur Jafa makes video collages made to make white art critics feel guilty about being white. OK, maybe I’m being harsh. Maybe there is SOMETHING, at least, to the way that this guy works with images. But either way, it doesn’t deserve the total collapse of criticality exhibited here by David Velasco in this interview with Jafa. One more thing annoying me in art criticism these days: the uniformity of glowing praise around painter Jordan Casteel. Here, John Yau writes that Casteel is “as a realist documentarian of Black lives,” and yes: she is. That’s why her paintings are so fucking boring. And that’s before Yau goes on to celebrate Casteel for her humanitarian depictions of black people and immigrants, who he says are “demonized” by American media. God, I’m beyond exhausted by this. Fox News isn’t the entire media. The “media"“, on the other hand, falls on their face routinely trying to depict all black people and all black immigrants as infallible moral beings in a way that’s just as grotesque as the demonization of them elsewhere. Shut up, for chrissakes! Write about something other than what the art world press releases tell you to write about!
New York Magazine plummets down to a new low, hiring an Asian writer to takedown the politics of #StopAsianHate, and questions whether or not the term “hate crime” applies to these attacks. Wow. Now, I don’t believe we should have a designation for “hate crime,” as the reasoning behind a crime doesn’t make the crime more actionable, and it’s up to a judge to assess whether there is motive or not in a violent attack. But, one has to wonder if they would have published such an article if these attacks against Asians weren’t being almost entirely committed by black people. But, of course not. If whites were doing the Asian attacks they would inevitably be absorbed into the security state’s currently most favored ideological justification of “white terror.” Shant Mesrobian tweets: “It's funny how, as opposed to other minority groups, professional class Asians in elite media are tasked with *minimizing* and explaining away the significance of hate crimes and attacks against their minority group. Why is that?” It’s obvious why: BLM has become a very important ideological justification of ruling power. The Asian attacks complicate that justification.
E-Flux, which gets worse and less respectable with every issue, publishes a smear piece of Dugin family by Andrey Loshak who argues that Aleksandr Dugin and his recently politically assassinated daughter Darya are satanically evil because, among other reasons, they’re suspiciously so fans of the neofolk music genre. Is there anything more repulsive than the crypto-alliance between the deep state and critical theory departments? Ben Burgis endorses Bernie for 2024 (LMAO!) At least this go about we can count on ol’ Bern only raising about a quarter of what he did in 2020 before he sends those funds back over to the Democrats.
Evidently, I live in libtard mecca. It’s not so bad, all things considered.
ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Still from Doris Wishman’s A Night to Dismember
2. Pharoah Sanders
3. Still from Arthur Jafa’s Apex