Though I can’t pinpoint the boredom that explains it—admittedly I haven’t been getting out much—I’ve recently been staying up late watching iconic nighttime soap operas and reading the Marquis de Sade. For months now, sleep-deprived and on edge, I’ve watched two or three episodes of Knots Landing, Dallas, or Melrose Place a night before slamming my laptop shut and opening either The 120 Days of Sodom, Justine, or Juliette. I never finish any of them, having already read them in the past, but find myself artistically enriched by reading their passages as literary fragments. And then it occurred to me: Soap operas are perfectly compatible with Sade’s literary philosophy. At their peak, they were undoubtedly the most Sadean popular art form of the 20th century. My strange recent cultural consumption habits then make perfect sense given this epiphany.

Sure, other art forms and subcultures invoke Sade more directly: surrealism, Viennese Actionism, industrial music and power electronics, the New French Extremity, among others. But referencing Sade’s preferred subjects does not make a work Sadean. Soap operas, by contrast, would normally be considered too lowbrow to belong to Sade’s tradition. That is precisely what makes them such compelling candidates for the title of the Marquis’ most popular heirs.

In Sade’s literature, characters are locked away in massive castles where the laws of 18th-century France no longer apply. They are completely subjected to the libertines’ twisted imaginations and desires, which is to say, to Sade’s own. Soap operas similarly unfold in hyper-stylized visual universes detached from reality and realism. The only logic they obey is that of their writers’ limitless imaginations. Because critics dismiss the soap opera as redundant and stupid, it faces no pressure to adhere to the realistic depictions of human life demanded of prestige drama. Days of Our Lives had no problem enlivening its marital strife, affairs, and ego feuds with the demonic possession of its charming psychiatrist, Marlena Evans, in 1995. General Hospital had no reservations about giving the villainous Mikkos Cassadine a weather machine with which to hold the entire world hostage. Taking full advantage of its fictional New England setting, Passions explained the town of Harmony’s susceptibility to evil through its supernatural history: The town had once been home to a witch whose closet served as a gateway between Earth and hell. Soap operas may be the only narrative art form capable of indulging every imaginative whim, drifting from melodramatic marital breakdown to vampire serial killers stalking nubile high school girls within a single cinematic transition.

Sade’s novels almost never reach genuine conclusions, let alone moral ones. They are repetitive and monotonous, moving from one act of perversity or sadism to the next as though they could continue for eternity. Soap operas function in exactly the same way. A soap opera is conceived so that it never has to end. It can stretch across decades, introducing new characters for new generations, while its only constants remain the original setting and the endless procession of cruelty, betrayal, eroticism, and violence. In his 1959 study of Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont, Maurice Blanchot argued that the cyclical, interminable nature of Sade’s books derives from the paradox confronting his libertines. The libertine seeks an absolute, infinite crime capable of destroying Nature itself. But trapped within a finite world, he is condemned to repeat the same acts endlessly in a futile attempt to reach infinity.

Soap operas completely reject the traditional Western narrative arc of sin, repentance, and permanent moral resolution. In many ways, they reject Western morality altogether. Their villainous, or perhaps libertine, characters are more often than not the fan favorites. This, of course, echoes Sade, whose libertines’ villainy is undercut by his humor and the perverse logic of his stories. They are not conventional villains but entertaining clowns and, sometimes, demented heroes. Sade’s work is not a “warning” about the ethical consequences of untethered libertinism. It largely presents itself as a celebration of the sadistic impulses it depicts. His libertines are free from outside influence and completely committed to making their most heinous fantasies real. Sade does not suggest that they are good or heroic, but that we are hypocrites for instinctively condemning them. We are, in his telling, little more than repressed libertines who resent their freedom to indulge what we cannot admit we desire. Soap operas play upon this same instinct in women, presenting their most treacherous, villainous, and sadistic characters as their least hypocritical, most charming, and most charismatic.

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I’ve made a habit of defending Nicolas Winding Refn as a great stylist and arthouse director who primarily makes movies for bros. At his best, he makes beautiful films about male brutality, male lust, male greed, and male hate. His work is drenched in so much aestheticized machismo that it often comes as a surprise that Refn is married with two beautiful daughters and not a closet fag. That isn’t an insult, either. Peter Greenaway is another ostensibly heterosexual filmmaker whose finicky attention to his uniquely disorienting palette, something like Jacobean theater intercut with the postmodern sensibilities of Derek Jarman or Raúl Ruiz, has left enormous question marks floating around his sexual orientation. And I regard Greenaway as an undisputed genius.

Alas, the Pusher trilogy, Bronson, and Valhalla Rising are all spectacularly strange and kinetic explorations of the impulses that compel and often control men. We were thrilled when Refn earned enough recognition in Denmark and across the rest of Europe to be handed the keys to Hollywood’s gold chest.

Nevertheless, Refn’s career since the success of Drive has been uneven, to say the least. Only God Forgives is horrible, and no, I’m not interested in any contrarian takes touting it. The Neon Demon was kind of cool, but that’s it. Then he made Too Old to Die Young, a 13-hour, hyperviolent cartel odyssey that looks like the most brutal and pornographic Guy Bourdin photographs ever taken. One standalone episode, in which Miles Teller’s vigilante cop tracks down and savagely kills two sicko pornographer brothers, could have been released by itself as one of the best films of 2019. The series also featured a truly demonic villain who looked like a Mexican twink blasting test and Anavar. I loved it and wrote about how much I loved it in one of my first-ever viral essays. While it surely followed the path laid down by David Lynch’s masterpiece Twin Peaks: The Return, Refn’s work on TOTDY should also be celebrated as one of the defining projects to reveal the artistic possibilities inherent in streaming TV shows.

Alas, he followed it with Copenhagen Cowboy, a Denmark-set miniseries about an immensely powerful, seemingly alien girl who murders sex traffickers to avenge their victims, only to run afoul of a pair of vampires, one of whom is played by Refn’s stunningly beautiful daughter, Lola Corfixen. Described that way, the show sounds amazing. Unfortunately, it’s fucking terrible. There is maybe one exciting episode before it fades into terminal dullness and ends with another of Refn’s nonendings. I have nothing against narrative art refusing to resolve itself, but when Refn does this kind of thing, it feels less like a surreal stylistic choice than like he simply got bored writing the script.

But now, having watched Her Private Hell, I might be done with the guy. Within a minute, I realized that this was one of the most phoned-in films ever made by a high-profile film artist. Refn should be embarrassed that his return to movies after a decade traversing the streaming industry is marked by a feeble attempt to wed Kenneth Anger’s style to long-form narrative cinema, something no one asked for. Maybe there is ambition in so explicitly invoking Anger’s aesthetic, but you can’t admire it because the ambition carries Refn only as far as the idea. It never compels him to complete an actual work of art. Maybe the sheer scale of TOTDY, followed by its unfair algorithmic burial at the hands of nervous Amazon executives, exhausted him. Whatever happened, this movie feels like a fragment of a fragment of a fragment of an idea, and not in a good way.

In my opinion, Refn needs a screenwriter. It should come as no surprise that his most popular and acclaimed film, Drive, is the only one he made from someone else’s script. He doesn’t need to make any more ponderous attempts at cinematic esoterica. He needs a fucking hit, and he needs one soon.

There’s something so freeing about turning on your favorite artists.

Artist, filmmaker and founder of the Amsterdam art collective The Unsafe House (and, yes, former member of KIRAC) Tarik Sadouma joins the crew on the occasion of the release of the Unsafe House’s new film Scorched Earth. The film, which chronicles the inner conflicts of the Unsafe House in a manner that blends fact and fiction while documenting Tarik’s attempts to take over the U.S. pavilion of the Venice Biennale with Curtis Yarvin (and other exploits,) is the most clear enunciation of The Unsafe House’s aesthetic and values. The conversation veers from the film, to the lie that “wokeness is dead,” to the importance of reading Yarvin and Michele Houellebecq as art, and not just as political critique.

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Evan and EV return to the show to discuss Meinschaft’s Empire of Liberty, arguably their landmark recording to date. Released in the year of the United States’ 250th anniversary, the album depicts contemporary Americana as a fragmented and distorted landscape, eerie and beautiful. A rural grotesque befitting of Flannery O’Connor made manifest as electronic sound.

In order for the arresting vitality of music to be restored and experienced once again in the fullness of its mystical glory and unmatched raw emotional power as MUSIC, it must advance or expand BEYOND “music” per se and enter into a kind of totalizing techno-cinematic gesamtkunstwerk; thus fulfilling hypermodernity’s greater and greater need for spectacle. The “pagan cult of the eye” (Paglia) demands blood, but in order to effectively resonate and challenge consciousness, it truly can not be bloodless.

—Evan Lipson

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OST:

Meinschaft “Biting the Hand” https://music.apple.com/us/album/biting-the-hand/6771633191?i=6771633203
Scott Walker “Bolivia 95” https://music.apple.com/us/album/bolivia-95/1877073621?i=1877073724
Laibach “Satanic Versus” https://music.apple.com/us/album/satanic-versus/828068604?i=828068627
The Doors “Moonlight Drive” https://music.apple.com/us/album/moonlight-drive/1622362830?i=1622362928
Elliot Smith “Pretty (Ugly Before)

LINKS:
Buy Empire of Liberty at Discriminate Audio’s Bandcamp

Read Discipline Mag‘s review of the album https://disciplinemag.com/reviews/meinschaft-empire-of-liberty-album-review/

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Three weeks ago, one of Jim Goad’s ex-girlfriends informed me that the great right-wing writer had taken his own life at the end of June. Out of respect for his widow, I kept the news to myself. I can’t judge her desire for privacy, because God only knows the hell she is living through, but I disagreed wildly with the decision to prolong the concealment of his death from the public, as though Jim Goad were a piece of hazardous data that could be quietly scrubbed from the system. Goad was enormously influential in shaping the subculture that launched me, though he rarely received the credit he deserved for it. And if those of us he inspired aren’t permitted to know he is gone, we can’t properly mourn him, honor his work, or calculate the size of the crater he left behind. Over the weekend, I was finally given permission to write about his death.

I discovered Goad’s writing in high school. Coming from a family of liberal Jews, I found many of his themes and political inclinations shocking, to put it mildly. Around the same time, I discovered the literary demimonde surrounding Adam Parfrey and his Feral House imprint, along with much of the Gen X subcultural art and music that would utterly shape me as a thinker and artist: power-electronics groups like Whitehouse, cultural saboteurs like Boyd Rice, and terrifying writers like Peter Sotos all entered my adolescent database. My parents were thrilled that I read so much. Had they known what I was actually reading, there is little doubt they would have staged some kind of intervention. But of all these figures, Goad excited and challenged me most. Why? Because he alone removed the protective layer of irony separating his actual beliefs from his art. There was no disclaimer tucked inside the packaging. Goad meant it.

Much of Gen X art flirted with the symbols and aesthetics of the extreme right, but always from the safe vantage point of ironic distance. It was easy to admire that generation’s commitment to freedom of expression. Now, however, one suspects that such commitment was possible only because the prosperity of the 1990s provided a buffer between politics and art, one that has long since been vaporized. This is precisely why, as I’ve written before, so many Gen X edgelords rushed to clarify that their right-wing flirtations had been nothing more than aesthetic gestures once the cultural values of the 1990s melted away and were replaced by those of the 2010s.

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The late Steve Albini devolved from one of underground American art’s wittiest provocateurs into an absolutely pathetic worm of a libtard, spending much of his final years on the app formerly known as Twitter melting down over the supposed rise of the far right while publicly flagellating himself for his post-ironic racism, or whatever the infraction happened to be that week. Likewise, following Parfrey’s death, his sister rebranded Feral House as a completely irrelevant publisher of radlib political theory. The Feral House of today bears roughly the same relationship to Parfrey’s Feral House that And Just Like That… bears to Sex and the City: Gen X liberals attempting to comprehend millennial politics while apologizing for the more libertine forms of freedom they celebrated in the 1990s. Goad, for all his faults, never submitted the necessary paperwork.

Goad never lost his edge precisely because he never wrote from a place of pure irony. His worldview was unmistakably right-wing, and he never apologized for it. That was why his writing shocked me so deeply. It was his truth, presented without protective packaging, and it compelled and changed me even as I resisted it through the liberal assumptions of my youth.

When I began rising as a literary figure in my own right, Goad and I had a couple of brief conversations over direct messages. In one, he antagonized me over my recent criticisms of his generation. He told me that ascribing cultural traits to an entire generation was “low IQ,” which I found completely ridiculous. How could millions of people who came of age under similar cultural, political, material, and technological conditions not share at least some observable characteristics?

I have often detected this tendency among Gen X figures. While boomers, millennials, and zoomers have been inundated with diagnoses of their respective generational maladies, and have even participated enthusiastically in diagnosing themselves, Gen Xers tend to deny that they possess any recognizable attributes whatsoever. Perhaps this is because they emerged during the decade when Western freedom reached its apex. Expressing one’s beliefs without fear of social or professional annihilation seemed so natural to them that they eventually lost the ability to examine themselves as a cohort.

But I ultimately concluded that Goad was, in fact, mourning the failures of his generation. He was disgusted by his contemporaries’ abandonment of their rebellious antagonism toward the prevailing social order. I know this because he wrote about it often. Here is what he had to say about Albini’s devolution into abject libtardism in a 2021 essay for Counter-Currents:

What’s semantically annoying about the term “edgelord” is that it implies insincerity. It also implies that the alleged edgelord cares about the feelings of the people who read or hear his opinions so much that he merely wants to offend them rather than express a heartfelt point. It suggests that they actually agree with the people they’re antagonizing and are simply misbehaving to be an “asshole,” which is a term Albini overuses to the point of self-parody. In this sense, it’s similar to the semantically-charged term “denier” — it’s a form of gaslighting that alleges you actually agree with the person about the Holocaust or climate change or vaccines but are denying it just to be a dick.

But I will always admire Goad precisely because he never wrote merely to provoke or shock, as Albini so often did. He wrote the truth of the world as he saw it. As far back as 1997, in his iconic book The Redneck Manifesto, Goad was already describing American liberalism as a system of profound cultural repression and hypocrisy. He argued that the liberal establishment used identity politics and cultural elitism to obscure its economic exploitation of ordinary working class white Americans. For Goad, the “redneck” was the designated scapegoat of an elite that denounced poor white people’s values as backward and toxic while ostentatiously professing its devotion to minorities, all to camouflage its extraction of wealth from the dirty hillbillies it despised. It is difficult to overstate how influential this critique would become. Nor is it surprising that Goad reemerged as an important political figure in 2016, amid the rise of the alt-right.

In 2017, Goad again proved prophetic with The New Church Ladies, which tracked liberalism’s evolution from a Western commitment to secular governance and freedom of expression into nothing less than a religion without God or faith. Goad distanced himself, however, from every ideology of control. He articulated a fundamentally American conservatism that celebrated the country as a society founded upon freedom of expression and rugged individualism.

Contrary to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization of him, Goad was anything but a Nazi. He repeatedly dismissed the ultra-right’s compulsion to blame the Jews for everything as “low IQ” (undoubtedly, the insult was one of his favorites and he seemed to apply it to everyone he found objectionable.) More important, his conservatism was rooted in conserving the American dream. European fascism, he believed, was simply Marxism with racial consciousness substituted for class consciousness. His own consciousness was American and therefore contained pluralities, contradictions, and multitudes.

Before I had even begun to define my politics as right-wing, Goad showed me that an artistic worldview could be compatible with right-wing thought. Until then, I still believed that art was inherently leftist. Goad helped me understand American right-wing thought as a philosophy of freedom, including the freedom to create art without the censorious interference of some communist Big Brother. That was a freedom worth conserving.

It wasn’t only Goad’s politics that inspired me, however, but his approach to art and writing. For Goad, gonzo journalism was less a rigid journalistic form than an expressionistic art form in its own right. Hunter S. Thompson could certainly be understood as an artist, as could Ken Kesey, but Goad was unusually conscious of nonfiction writing as a form of creative production, one that permitted the writer to bend the rules of form and, of course, truth itself. The world always assumes new colors and shapes when filtered through an individual consciousness, and through Goad’s eyes, America acquired an unmistakably surreal and uncanny glow. In his writing, the country was beautiful and a fucking mess at the same time.

Goad’s iconic zine ANSWER Me! will always remain, for me, his monument and masterpiece, a hypnagogic synthesis of observational reportage and his singular expressionistic, hard-boiled literary style. He created a voice that simultaneously evoked Henry Miller’s surreal, diaristic musings; Robert Stone’s literary pulp; and the gonzo journalism and criticism of Lester Bangs, with perhaps a dose of Tom Wolfe thrown into the chemical bath.

In “The Orange County Vietnamese Gangs,” from the first issue of ANSWER Me!, Goad combined real-world crime reporting with the velocity and aggression of a pulp novel. By presenting urban horror through an uncompromising, unsanctified lens, he transcribed the stories of the inner city into compelling, transgressive narratives. In his writing, the Vietnamese gangs were terrifying, almost noble, and ultimately a bit ridiculous.

Another high point was his interview with the late pimp and memoirist Iceberg Slim, conducted shortly before Slim’s death. Slim’s 1967 memoir, Pimp, is shocking not only for its horrific depictions of misogynistic violence, but because it is a fucking literary masterpiece, one that, in a less ideological culture, would be celebrated as a contribution to the Black American literary canon every bit as important as Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo or Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Alongside Bangs’ iconic interviews with Lou Reed and David Sylvester’s conversations with Francis Bacon, I consider Goad’s interview with Slim one of the greatest art interviews ever published. But while Bangs sought to drag Reed’s rock-star mythos through the mud, and Sylvester sought to humanize Bacon’s genius, Goad did the opposite. Without denying that Slim was both a degenerate and a criminal, he reframed him as an artistic genius. Goad elevated a controversial figure of pulp literature into a high-art subject, challenging the boundaries of whom the mainstream considered worthy of serious literary journalism.

“[Slim] conjures up characters so real you can almost smell their intestines,” writes Goad. “As a writer he can be as eloquent as James Baldwin (but rougher,) and as lyrical as LeRoi Jones (but with more heart.)”

But the most disturbing article in any issue of ANSWER Me! also appeared in the third: “Killing Me Softly, Roughly, and Just About Every Other Fucking Way Imaginable: 100 Spectacular Suicides.” The article is exactly what it sounds like: 100 accounts of real-world suicides, recounted in painstaking detail and accompanied by horrifying images and farewell notes from the self-murdered. In one, a woman spurned by a former lover deliberately ingests metal objects until her internal organs hemorrhage. In another, a broke, aging porn star blows her brains out after agreeing to suck cock on camera one last time. Some of the suicides are famous, including that of the brilliant photographer Diane Arbus. Goad wrote that Arbus left a suicide note for her photography teacher, Lisette Model, in which she admitted that her goal in photographing society’s outcasts had been “photographing evil.” “She succeeded,” Goad wrote. “But evil swallowed her up as part of the deal.”

It should be said, however, that Goad’s taking of his own life, effectively making himself the 101st entry in “100 Spectacular Suicides,” represents no form of hypocrisy. He would never have been persuaded by Christian-conservative notions of suicide as a sin. On the contrary, he argued that the truly self-aware, the spiritually attuned, and even the brilliant were often those most susceptible to suicide. The worthless, he believed, were precisely the ones least likely to kill themselves:

That’s why we have room in our otherwise impregnable hearts for the individuals on this list…if there were more people like them, this world wouldn’t be half as bad. Ironically, it’s the nonsuicidal who make life unbearable.”

Still then, Goad’s death comes as a bit of a shock and is difficult to analytically reconcile. He had already survived so much: severe depression, seizures, several near-death experiences, and a fucking brain tumor. What possibly could have led him to make this decision now, after all that? Writing about his “brain invader” of a meningioma, non-cancerous brain tumor for The Observer in 2016, Goad wrote:

So I walk around like a suicide bomber strapped to the gills with explosives, always silently wondering if today will be the day. I am essentially in a lifelong fistfight with my own brain, never sure if or when it’s going to betray me. But that’s everyone’s struggle, as everyone’s body will eventually betray them—if they don’t get killed first.

A friend of the late writer told me that Goad had once weaponized her own experience with suicide against her. It was an obviously callous and cruel thing to do. Goad had a mean streak, and it would be a disservice to his memory to pretend otherwise. But she also told me that, near the end, he called her and admitted that he had been feeling suicidal himself. In recent years, Goad became petty and resentful in a manner that mystified many. He regularly contributed to online flame wars and relentlessly attacked other writers in what some reasoned was an attempt to cash in on the rise of Trump and the emergence of a countercultural right-wing media. I can only speculate, but I do believe he had some bitterness towards his omission from this particular canon and, like many his age, was having trouble adjusting to a digital reality.

So far, the only other obituary I have seen, written by Greg Johnson for Counter-Currents, omits Goad’s suicide and attributes his death instead to “long-term health problems.” I don’t know why a crucial part of the story was excluded, but it’s possible that Johnson doesn’t even know. Perhaps Goad’s widow simply did not want it made public. But I believe that concealing the truth would do the artist a disservice. The truth is that Goad took his own life. His health problems no doubt contributed to his suffering, but so, presumably, did an immense and finally unbearable psychic pain. According to my source, there’s no grand conspiracy to conceal his death, but she admitted that by vanquishing the suicide from the narrative, they’re certainly making it look like there is one.

That suicide remained such an open area of inquiry throughout Goad’s life forces us to confront the possibility that he was suffering all along. His writing, then, reads as a declaration of strength: a code of ethics by which to live and a survival strategy for inhabiting a world he knew to be cold and hateful. Suicide may always have remained the final option, but he fought damn hard to give himself reasons to keep breathing. I only hope he knew how much that code meant to the rest of us. I would even dare say that his writing helped other alienated and dejected young men find their own reasons to survive and endure.

Maybe Goad simply grew tired of wondering which day would be the last and decided to assign himself a definitive expiration date. Maybe in his suicide, he becomes like the enchantress Helen Vaughan from Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, revealing his true nature less as a flesh and blood man and more as an idea or, as Machen calls it, an “abyss of all being.” But I refuse to pity him because he would have hated me for it and condemned my sanctimonious appeals for empathy. Instead, I choose to honor the idiosyncrasy of his work and its enormous, largely unacknowledged influence on a subculture that would not escape the shackles of mainstream media until the internet revealed its anarchic potential across the forums and message boards of the 2000s. I honor Goad for being himself, for refusing conformity, for never surrendering, and for never fucking apologizing.

Adam and Matt discuss the massive runaway successes of the low budget horror films Obsession and Backrooms, try and identify what people have responded two in them, and discuss whether they’re actually any good or not.

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SOUNDTRACK Dead Can Dance “A Passage in Time” Cro-Mags “Show You No Mercy” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/show-you-no-mercy/1533125261?i=1533125279⁠ Porter Ricks “Port of Call” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/port-of-call/496491073?i=496491084⁠ Otis Redding “Pain in my Heart” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/pain-in-my-heart/995810749?i=995810862⁠

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Between 2019 and 2024, I experienced what can only be described as a creative fever dream. Looking back, the volume of work I produced feels almost impossible, as though I had stumbled into some transcendental current and, for a few miraculous years, forgot what it meant to struggle. It began when I came out as a right-winger in 2019 and, seemingly overnight, lost nearly every writing contract and artistic connection I had. I wrote an essay about the experience, self-published it on my website, and, to my surprise, it went viral.

Everything seemed to cascade from there. In the aftermath, I started the System of Systems podcast in late 2019 and, not long afterward—2020, or was it 2021?—I opened this blog. I wrote hundreds of essays, stories, and poems. I wrote three books, and got two of them published (the third still lies dormant in the Cloud.) I started a performance art rock n’ roll band, Botched Chadification, with one of my best friends, and what began as an absurd joke somehow became a full-length album and, even more ridiculously, actual concert bookings. Several of my favorite artists became close friends—the surest sign, I think, that you’ve stumbled onto something genuinely interesting—and I found myself cultivating a real audience of disaffected, disappointed readers, mostly men, though plenty of women came along too.

When I look back on that period now, I find myself asking: What propelled that manic work rate? It wasn't drugs. Give or take a couple of ketamine binges, I'd already left most of that behind, and my days of serious partying were years in the rearview. There were practical reasons, I suppose. The pandemic freed me from my day job and convinced me to take the internet seriously—not merely as a distribution platform, but as a medium in its own right. So I consumed art with almost monastic discipline. I watched films, read books, listened to music, wandered through paintings, and everything I absorbed I did so with a singular intention: to alchemize it into ideas, into sentences, into essays, stories, books, songs, new projects. Nothing was allowed to remain merely consumption. Everything had to become fuel.

But if I'm being honest, I think the real creative impetus was desperation. I had crossed into my mid-thirties, and it felt like now or never, my last real chance to establish a voice in public before resigning myself to obscurity. Then the work started finding readers, and the feedback became its own addiction. My blood would boil with anticipation as I watched people react with equal measures of enthusiasm and fury to what, to me, often felt like throwaway lines dashed off in an afternoon. The detractors became as intoxicating as the supporters. In fact, the more evenly divided they were, the more convinced I became that I was onto something. Nothing truly worthwhile is greeted with universal praise. (Sinners has a 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, after all. Lol.)

Since 2025, my output of raw creative work has slowed considerably, which only makes sense given how radically my life has changed. I got married in 2023. At the end of 2024, my favorite teacher from my NYU days, the writer David Samuels, reached out and changed my life by offering me a salaried position at Tablet magazine, a job I take with absolute seriousness and one that necessarily takes precedence over whatever transgressive conceptual art project might otherwise seize my imagination. Then, in 2025, I became a father to a beautiful and increasingly spunky little boy, Rustin.

By the time I’ve finished work and gotten him to sleep, I’d usually rather watch some shitty television or fuck my wife than crack open another difficult book. And when I do read, I find myself reaching for Karl Ove Knausgaard or Stephen King, writers I know I’ll simply enjoy instead of mining for quotations to dutifully transcribe into the Apple Notes app, where they’ll wait to be repurposed into some future essay. The relationship has changed. I don’t experience every novel, film, or painting as raw material anymore. Relaxation and pleasure, sure, but it feels considerably lower stakes.

Needless to say, life is different. Making art is, in many ways, a selfish act, requiring a kind of obsessive self-possession that borders on solipsism. At least for now, my responsibilities require a measure of selflessness. For perhaps the first time in my 37 years, I have people I love more than I love my own ideas.

Sometime in the middle of 2025, I became convinced that I was washed up. And I don’t mean washed up as in “going through a funk.” I mean Anderson Silva seven fights into his career-ending losing streak washed up. The muse had packed her bags, and I was already rehearsing the story I would someday tell about that brief, improbable period when everything had come so effortlessly.

The absurdity, of course, was that I hadn’t stopped writing. Spend five minutes on my author page at Tablet and the notion that my career had somehow ended is obviously ridiculous. But writing for a publication has never carried quite the same feeling of limitless freedom as writing simply to discover where a sentence might lead. Journalism is creative discipline. Art is drifting into a dream.

I think that’s why, after dabbling in photography, music, performance, and a dozen other creative pursuits, I always return to writing. It’s the endlessness of it. A blank page is an abyss, and somehow the act of projecting consciousness into that void causes narrative and form to materialize where there was previously nothing. Four hundred years of technological upheaval later, the essential act remains unchanged. In that sense, writing is no different for me than it was for Shakespeare. It is simultaneously ancient and contemporary, primitive and inexhaustibly modern. That’s the sublime quality of it.

But just because my first creative renaissance may be behind me doesn’t mean there won’t be others. Maybe they’ll arrive when Rustin is an angry teenager and no longer needs me hovering over him. Maybe they’ll come in my fifties, when my body starts protesting its own existence, or in my sixties, when my libido finally gives up. Maybe they won’t arrive until I’m an old man staring down death itself. Who knows. For most of my life, I believed the tragedy was that life is short. I’m no longer convinced that’s true. Life is astonishingly, almost unbearably long. Long enough to become several different people. Long enough to exhaust one imagination and discover another waiting quietly beneath it. The trick, I suspect, is learning not to mourn the ebb quite so much that you miss the tide returning.

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Artist Faina Brodsky illuminates on the difficulty (or not) of being beautiful in the art world and her and Adam wade into performance enhancing drugs and looksmaxxing.

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UV Pop “Sleep Don’t Talk” https://music.apple.com/us/album/sleep-dont-talk/1676648297?i=1676648709
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The Scottish writer New Juche moved to Southeast Asia from Edinburgh during the mid-2000s, in search of perversity and abandon. And if his books are any indication, he found what he was looking for. Abjection, cruelty, and sexual degradation — masturbation, prostitution, porn, and all the viscous fluids that flow from them — his writing explores the connections between an author and his environment to the point of dissolution. He seeks, he finds, he merges and decays, he exploits, he narrates his abasement and invites his readers to join him.

Juche manipulates the formal possibilities inherent in the literary medium to his own ends. Few, if any, contemporary writers are breaking the conventions of the novel to this extremist extent. It’s not only that his content is transgressive, or that he’s a white heterosexual man who brazenly documents his fetishistic adventures with Third World whores in the most visceral language imaginable and against the modes of political correctness that have plagued and tarnished literature for decades now. That’s all in there, but there’s also more. Juche uses the form of the novel to express something deeper than any single literary genre can contain. Too unreal to be non-fiction, too journalistic to be fiction, too disgusting to be philosophy and too philosophical to be autofiction, Juche captures an aesthetic experience that cannot be expressed in painting, sculpture, music, or even film: a subjective projection that begins, and perhaps also ends, with a blank page.

Prostitution

I’ve only paid for sex three times in my life, all in one week. It was years before I would be recruited into culture industries counter-intelligence and a decade before my own path as an artist truly revealed itself. My goals were much simpler then: fuck up, make mistakes, have experiences. I was 20 and in Amsterdam with two close friends from high school. Not yet a drug addict, my drive for psychological limit experience came from the same mental disposition as did my wanderlust. After seven days wasted on beer, cannabis, MDMA, psilocybin, mescaline, and cocaine, I recall being lured into Amsterdam’s hallucinatory rhythms, its intoxicating freedom coursing through my veins. The Red Light District beckoned.

During my initial visit to a high-end brothel, I was amazed to discover that for the price of 100 euros, an assortment of flawlessly beautiful European women of every ethnicity, body type, and fetish was available. I pointed at the lineup almost randomly and one of them — a tall, thin and leggy blonde of presumably Scandinavian descent — took my hand and led me into a private booth. Once inside, she asked me to remove my clothes, applied a condom to my cock, sucked it with the condom on, and let me fuck her in the missionary position (having her on top would have cost extra). It was pleasurable but quick. I remember leaving the booth and worrying that my friends (who were in other booths) and I might get split up, but curiously we all exited our private booths at the exact same time. These women were indeed professionals.

I encountered my second prostitute in a solitary booth in Dewallen a few days later. Outside stood a single, seemingly Samoan, pimp; his fearsome image suggested a more dangerous and exciting experience than what had transpired one night earlier. High on a large dose of ecstasy, alcohol and weed, mentally deadened, all lust and id, I gave the pimp 60 euros and entered the booth.

The lady was of ambiguous ethnicity — likely Asian and also something else — in her late ‘20s and gorgeous with brown hair, deep smooth skin, massive tits, and a minuscule waist. She got right down to business — I recall being struck by the business-like neutrality of the meeting — putting a condom over my prick and sucking it with Fordist efficiency and artisan skill. It all happened so quickly and nonchalantly that I remember struggling to acclimate to the charged environment. But for all the chaotic desire that enveloped me, the combination of the drugs and my anxiety prevented me from achieving erection. As my anxiety increased my cock diminished further. It bent inside of her as I, awkwardly emasculated and humiliated, profusely apologized.

Nonetheless, in my mortification, she was tender. She said that MDMA is not actually good for sex, that it “traps sex inside of you.” Comforted by her words, I longed to correct the experience. The next night, in a more sober condition, I returned to her again, intent on satisfying her both to prove my masculinity to myself and to thank her for her kindness. She was erotic, loving, and comforting. She looked in my eyes, put her hand on my face, placed my hands on her tits and pinched my finger tips around her nipples, and rode me while purring in my ears, assuring me how beautiful I felt inside of her.

Recalling that moment, I understand the attachment to prostitutes that Juche details in novels of his like Mountainhead and Stupid Baby. That room in Dewallen, with its dimly lit neon glow and smell of cheap perfume, cleaning products, and semen, was her domain, forlorn, and haunted by phantoms of anguish and trauma. In that uncanny space, I felt alive, if dismayed and uncomfortable that I could only taste a fraction of the state of being that the prostitute is inherently subsumed within. I would never be more than a tourist here, nor do I think I could adjust to making such a state of existence one of permanence.

Prostitution is a state of being — or rather, an unadulterated form of a particular state of being — that Juche both covets and mourns in his inability to fully attain. It will never be his, but through prostitutes and the “cruelty”, both metaphysical and dispositional, which he inflicts upon them, he feels closer to it. The prostitute, for Juche, is a spiritual figure that anchors his literary universe as the embodiment of an abject truth. Genet, probably his biggest influence, found beauty in the “saintliness” that he saw in a homosexual criminal underworld. Juche finds this same saintliness in the bodies, beings, and lifestyles of the whores of the third world. “Prostitutes are the easiest and most accessible source of abjection,” he writes.

Juche’s hunger for these sexual limit experiences is both disturbing and honest. He’s indifferent, or so he insists, to being an “artist.” What matters to him is his quest for places, people and states that evoke corporeal sensations of dreadful unease. “I’ve always loved and reveled in prostitution,” he told an interviewer. “This is my whole subject. Sex is linked inextricably with place, as prostitution is with poverty. I love poverty.” Prostitution is Juche’s master metaphor for a specific kind of cosmic abjection — its purest state — and the specter that haunts all of his writing – even when it doesn’t manifest directly as his content. To clarify, Juche does not make prostitution the only narrative material within his work. No, the writer’s subjects are indeed vast: architecture, loneliness, home sickness, art history, music, memory, and countless other images and ideas course through his texts. But due to the strength of Mountainhead and the way that novel centers prostitutions as a means with which Juche mimetically confronts a litany of philosophical and aesthetic observations and concepts, prostitution functions as Juche’s kind of literary ground zero.

It’s not just a theme in his work, but becomes a metaphoric image so evocative that it bleeds into and shapes much of Juche’s writing. Juche’s conception of prostitution isn’t just a theme, but an aesthetic and a guiding principle that I can’t seem to ever push from my mind while reading his writing. Juche lost his virginity to a prostitute, he claims, and that loss of innocence and taste of abjection launched him on his path towards the occulted, the hidden, the scorned, and the rotten and decayed.

Mountainhead and “Evil”

Mountainhead, which was published by Nine-Banded Books in 2017, is Juche’s memoirs or travelogues about the events leading up to and during the period he spent living in the rural north of Thailand. Throughout the text, Juche strives to go deeper and deeper into a hidden dimension of filth. It is “the breathtaking glory of decay” that arouses and completes him. His descriptions of his surroundings evoke putridity in the discarded nature and becomes as much a point of erotic fixation as the sexual acts he commits in the area.

He searches for prostitutes that are often old and, given common sexual norms, unappealing and, maybe even to some, disgusting. Sex with prostitutes or solitary acts of masturbation embed Juche both in the physical and hidden landscape. At one point in the text, he describes jerking off on a mountain and scooping his cum up and swallowing it with the dirt it had mixed with. “Sex, like religion, and drinking and smoking, is tied profoundly to ideas about place,” he writes. The putrid landscapes that he traverses are described in the same vulgar language that the sexual experiences he luridly describes are, emphasizing the feeling of being lost in a strange land. The writer imbues death with lust and sexual id rendering a most peculiarly literary Thanatos. The prostitution, the masturbation, the brazen and unapologetic sexual id of it all activates Juche’s near surreal embedment into these territories. This is all frightfully difficult to describe critically, but quite simply I’ve never experienced place in the rich, sexualized and transcendent manner that Juche renders his settings.

Juche makes no (literary, at least) effort to sympathize with his prostitutes’ poverty. Contrary to current political orthodoxy, his gaze is naked fetishistic lust, combined with a bizarre envy, of sorts. Only that which is revolting to most seems to trigger his own lust. For him to think about his prostitutes’ humanity and sympathize with the condition of their lives would be counterproductive, and even sacrilegious given the distorted hero’s journey he’s embarked on. This isn’t a sociological text, it is a mind-bending self examination of all the contradictory feelings, thoughts and impulses that shape the writer’s subjectivity. While so many writers pick and choose the aspects of the self that they wish to share, Juche is nothing short of courageous in his commitment to letting us see how he sees, psychic scars and all, which invokes both sympathy AND disgust. In both Juche and, due to the fact that basically all humans have singular fetishes and disconcerting, atypical desires — ourselves.

What Juche seeks is a singular freedom (a freedom in death, or a freedom in the Lacanian “little death”, perhaps?), achieved by means of a “cruelty” that he inflicts upon his surroundings to make the lands he explores feel like his. No, I don’t mean the author literally goes around Southeast Asia and physically hurts the women that he cavorts with. I’m referring instead to a symbolic “cruelty” in the text. There’s no attempts by Juche to morally or intellectually justify what happens in these pages. Mountainhead evokes the pure expulsion of energy of Munch’s The Scream or Darkthrone’s Transylvanian Hunger. But while those Nordic artists trade in the exorcism of anguish, rage and hate, Juche’s Mountainhead is instead an explosive purgation of lust, captured and rendered as a contained literary space. Few writers can conjure a reader’s physical response, but reading Juche often leaves me shivering in goosebumps. It’s thrilling.

In his 1930 article “The Ethnographer’s Eye”, Surrealist ethnographer Michel Leiris, discussing the famous Dakar-Djibouti mission in which he participated, concludes that seeing is the essential mode for relating to an environment. In Mountainhead, Juche amends Leiris’s findings: the essential mode is fucking. The sense of location in Juche’s writing is no less visceral and clear than in Leiris’s.

There is a hallucinatory ethnography to Juche’s work – sexual abandon and violence are methods of immersion. Beyond that, he has no interest in entertaining boring academic masturbatory critiques on colonialism or imperialism per se. He is interested in masturbating, period. Juche’s writing often sounds like he’s giving his dormant, non-lingual id the microphone just so we can see what it might say. He is unapologetic and unflinching in the exploits that he conveys to his readers “I just want the proof that my visionary participation in human geography justifies the memories I labour under today,” he writes in Mountainhead. “I want the proof that I was capable of cruelties I no longer celebrate so simplistically and recklessly.”

What Juche wants is difficult to convey with language, but manifests as an inescapable atmosphere. There is something in his writing that is heightened, a mystic element that lulls you into a muted and angst-ridden hypnosis. It is best to read his books late at night in that insomniac, confused, and horny state in which it feels like you keep forgetting what you read, like the words are washing over you in a way that transcends the act of reading itself. Also a photographer, Juche uses images similarly to how William Burroughs did – the photographs bind him to his environment. But in Mountainhead, we only see the sparsest of utterly ambiguous photographs of the Thai landscapes that he often describes in detail, as if the literalism of the image would dilute the surrealist implications of his writing. His work functions as memoir, art criticism, and travelogues, but a fictional quality lurks in this unseen essence as a central element in all of his writings.

The heightened atmosphere of Juche’s work is defined through disquieting flourishes of surreal and supernatural occurrences that blend seamlessly into the reportage aspect of his work. At one point in Mountainhead, Juche comes across a supernatural entity in the woods: “The witch seemed to glisten horribly in the sunlight, giving it a commanding and ghostly clarity.” No effort is made to explain this event nor distinguish it from the more plausible occurrences. It is Juche’s subjectivity that washes over us, guides us, and demands our fealty. Is this real? If you start asking these questions, then you’ve already failed to give yourself over to the text completely enough to fully experience the extent of Juche’s abject dream space.

In a chapter in which he saves a young girl from drowning, he goes on to fantasize about the different scenarios that might play out in her later life. In one timeline he saves her and the family is thankful to and remains close to him. In another he attempts to save the girl but fails. She dies, he is blamed, and he ends up a pariah in prison for murder and pederasty. In the last scenario, the girl finally grows up and becomes a prostitute and reconnects with him as her client.

Juche’s reflections on the event are triggered by the shower heads he uses to wash the girl’s vomit off; the writer claims to see the “fascist beauty of Rome” in these objects. It should be stated that it is the last scenario, in which the young girl, “Blossoms like a rosebud on the temperate mountain, into a street walker, an abject whore,” that imbues Juche with the inspiration to recount the tale of Noi, his favorite prostitute whom his feelings for amount to a kind of love. For in Juche’s writing, prostitution is a state of nobility. It is a deified degradation, and as such the prostitute lives with a proximity to the decay of the earth that personally eludes him. This proximity of the prostitute is Juche’s passion and his envy.

Violence, Childhood and The Devils

After Mountainhead, prostitution rarely comes up so directly in Juche’s books, but the spiritual state of the prostitute that Juche desires — abjection at its purest — lingers conceptually in his writing as an aesthetic that perpetually shapes my perceptions of his work. In The Devils, a novel from 2019, Juche follows Truman Capote, Gary Indiana, and Mikita Brottman in using a grisly crime that took place in Juche’s hometown of Midlothian in Scotland to create a mandala of psychological, sociological and biographical implications. It is not merely the crime that defines this true crime novel, but instead the crime activates Juche’s incongruous memories of his place of upbringing. The book becomes indispensable in Juche’s bibliography as it offers encrypted insight into the places and events that shaped his creative and aesthetic sensibilities — the “cruelty” that perpetually looms over his texts — that he imbues into his art.

The first chapter of The Devils, written in the style of strict reportage without editorial slant or literary flourish (it almost reads like a case file), documents the case of a teenage boy, Luke Mitchell, arrested for murdering his teenage girlfriend, Jodi Jones. The crime’s details are heinous and nauseating. But as the text mutates into more somnolent, self-reflective prose, Juche begins to cast doubt on Luke’s guilt. For example, we learn that Luke never confessed to the crime, passed a polygraph stating that he was not the killer, and maintains his innocence to this day.

From here, Juche delves deeper into his hometown community’s pettiness and thirst for violence and from this we can start to piece together the psyche of the artist and see how those cultural tendencies shaped Juche’s personage. The Devils is a true crime story, and also a ghost story (of sorts) – but one which documents how the ghosts that haunt a land can seep into a person’s psyche and possess their being. These specters — these fragmented memories — are carried with us throughout our lives, distorting the ways in which we experience and perceive the world. Contorting our personas and mangling our psychologies in ways that we can’t even understand (after all, who can really give language to or understand the ways that we think and behave?). The Devils forces us, the faithful readers and admirers of New Juche, to contemplate how this small town young Scottish man would evolve into the jouissance-driven literary explorer of the third world, of prostitution, and of “cruelty”.

What was it about Midlothian that would eventually seep into Juche’s obsessions? What in Juche’s Medieval-dating home city would influence him to extrapolate so much mimetic psychological, sexual, aesthetic, and fetishistic insight from the architecture he inhabits, the nature he traverses, and the prostitutes that he fucks? As stated above, place takes on transcendental meaning in Juche’s writing. As he merges with these places, they in turn seep into him. Midlothian, as chronicled in The Devils, isn’t just the place where Juche grew up then, but a pivotal aspect of his psyche. Midlothian, like Southeast Asia, is a guiding parasite that he takes with him throughout all his experiences.

In The Devils, the entire Midlothian community succumbs to possession in the wake of Jodi’s violent death; spectral demonic entities take control of its inhabitants. The rumors that swirl around the convicted killer — that he and his brother were both fucking Jodi, that the murder was out of Luke’s jealousy over his brother’s superior sexual prowess, that Luke was involved in an incestuous sexual relationship with his mother, allegation of Luke’s bizarre masturbation habits — speak to the Midlothian community’s erotic fascinations (as well as its narrow minded biases) in a way that clarifies Juche’s own dispositions towards prostitution and sexual violence. Midlothian — its landscape, its history, and Juche’s own memories of it — is revealed as the psychosexual landscape of Juche’s self.

“The icehouse, fertilized by death, became a secret chapel of teenage sex,” writes Juche about a location of personal meaning near to where Jodi’s body was found. “An open challenge was established to fuck a girl in or near the passageway, as close to the pit as possible.”

Juche’s connection to these spaces is spectrophiliac. He describes his memories of jerking off in the local church, and fucking in dank alleyways. He recalls a humiliating event that he himself endured near the proverbial crime scene, in particular escaping from a violent skinhead only to be coerced into testifying against him in an open court and then living in terror at reprisal from his family (not to mention guilt over betraying his working class values of loyalty and honor). In painstaking detail, Juche documents a savage beating inflicted upon him at eight years old:

He punched me in the stomach and I fell to the ground winded and struggling for breath, not equipped to cope with the virgin eruptions of fear and outrage mingling with the pain. The innate sense of peace and security in my heart destroyed forever.”\

Juche says that the event caused him to puke on his front door. Was it this eroticized nausea that he has come to perpetually seek in his life as an adult and as a writer? Pain, sickness, and orgasm: in Juche’s writing, corporeal unease opens a portal to transcendence. Kristeva says that abjection is the space where meaning collapses – in Juche’s novels, meaning collapses continuously and all around. One association bleeds into the next, a thought becomes a desire becomes an act, and Juche’s mind perpetually reverberates. Something painful (a savage beating) becomes something uncannily relieving if not pleasurable (vomiting). This collapsing of walls between desire and pain, sex and death, is that which is constantly explored in Juche’s writing (and therefore, implicitly, his life). This place, Midlothian, is what allowed the writer New Juche to emerge fully formed. The Devils then is an encrypted origin story, and one which broadens the ways that I understand and read Juche’s other works.

Juche’s books all use a different specific terrain — the putrescent landscapes of North Thailand in Mountainhead, a crime that transpired in his homeland in The Devils, and hell, in Bosun, Juche dissects the architecture of the city of Rangoon and unlocks the repressed memories of his institutionalized life — to conjure a specific state of being, an abasing bliss perhaps, that always remains just out of reach to him. The closest he seems to get to achieving this state is in a scene in Mountainhead when he jacks off during a rainstorm on the mountain, writhing in mud. But perhaps this kind of limited experience is unachievable in modernity? Perhaps no amount of debasement or sexual abandon can melt these layers of social conditioning? Juche’s inability to find complete fulfillment in the experiences that he describes to us is what gives his work tension and makes his quest fascinating. His writing is an eternal state of becoming.

Schopenhauer wrote that the aesthetic experience of the sublime was the only experience that offered reprieve from the suffering of enslavement to the will. Juche instead indulges in enslavement to his drives to experience a taste of his own peculiar sublime.

Outside Discourse, The Worm, and Conclusions

Juche’s unvarnished commitment to his own sensibility and his embrace of the sordid paradoxically lends his work the quality of a sanctuary from the mandates of the contemporary culture industry, allowing him to explore political themes now essentially forbidden from official mainstream discourse. In The Worm, released earlier this year by Infinity Land Press, Juche takes advantage of this freedom to confront one of the most controversial images of all: the hypnotic face of Adolph Hitler.

Employing a mixture of architectural insight, art criticism, rumination on the schizo-analysis of photography, and personal anecdote, Juche also uses his photographic practice in the text more prominently and potently than in his previous novels, The Worm’s center is occupied by a photography project in which Juche displayed grids of Hitler portraits along the walls of an abandoned housing complex called The Flowers that is near his home in Southeast Asia, which he then re-photographed from a variety of perspectives. “These are not images, but sketches or accounts of me looking at images,” says Juche. “Half a world away from Europe, I look back, in every sense of the word, at the continent’s face.” If Hitler is simultaneously the face of Europe, yet also the most hated, feared and repressed face in Europe, then Europe itself represses its true face. Its true nature. And perhaps this repression itself is the face of Europe: greyed flesh and muted, ill-defined features that barely conceal its deep guilt. Having traveled across strange and alienating lands, engaging in a wealth of experiences both sordid and beautiful, Juche feels that he’s cultivated enough distance from Europe to finally look back upon it with clear-headed insight, sharp critique, and even a touch of well-deserved homesickness.

Many quotes cited throughout the book intimate this great repression of Europe. German filmmaker Hans Jurgen Syberberg who directed Hitler: A Film From Germany Canadian, architectural historian Stratigakos, Genet, Hitler himself, and others are amongst those oft-quoted, while countless other quotes remain unattributed. The central question is the extent to which art was fundamental to shaping Hitler’s vision of the Third Reich. But what kind of art? Juche uses Nazi-era German architect Albert Speer’s Schwerbelastungskörper — a hefty concrete cylindrical arc erected in Berlin in 1941 and 1942 to reflect the aesthetic spirit of Nazi Germany as envisioned by Hitler — as an image of art that is in direct contrast to Juche’s own conception of art. While Schwerbelastungskörper is rigid, dominating, and fixed in its concept and ideology, The Worm itself is presented as a “gesamtkunstwerk” of ever flowing, shifting, and evolving ideas and forms. Juche is not a banal “edgelord” delighting in the evocation of Nazism as a one-dimensional provocation to his audience. Instead, the challenging nature of The Worm’s themes encrypts Juche’s most painstaking and fully formed aesthetic theory.

Juche approaches this subject through a web of observations on aesthetics and memories of his own personal experiences past. He talks about the singer Antony (now known as Anohni) whose genius he says was “in turning his own honest pain into a cabaret performance.” The line of thought leads to a memory of a security guard that Juche became enamored with and photographed. The clothed portrait session becomes a nude one, when the security guard, unprompted, removes his clothes for Juche. With this transaction Juche realizes painfully that the human face is a mask that he can’t remove with his limited photographic techniques.

“A stoic perfection of an image,” he says. “A mask.” The Worm is the failed attempt to remove this mask: Hitler’s, Europe’s… Is this also what Juche desires from his prostitutes? Purity, or naked truth: the most occluded thing of all.

The Worm closes with a mind-bending “conversation” and debate between Hitler and Juche himself in which Hitler waxes lyrical on the vital role that art and aesthetics inhabit within his political theory. He laments the destruction of the Berghof, his residence and the last aesthetic testament to Nazism, which now stands in ruins. He praises Mussolini as a political genius but derides his dilettantish comprehension of the arts. He lauds the compositional brilliance of Wagner in whose music he hears “the rhythms of the primeval world.” He rejects the Enlightenment and stresses the need to build nationalism on ideals related to blood, iron, intuition, chauvinism, anti-Semitism and the rejection of modernism and outlines an aesthetic theory, of sorts. “Fascism prefers action to conversation, and aesthetics to reason,” says Hitler, as inhabited by Juche. “It celebrates a cult of beauty and harmony, courage, an ecstatic sense of community and a hateful and vicious repudiation of the intellect, of scholars and sober experts. It will not abide any form of disharmony.”

Eventually. Juche pushes back. Hitler’s ideals, he says, are narrow: “Does this hatred of anything new not suffocate culture in reality?”

Hitler doubles down. He insists on the creation of an aesthetic that externalizes a nation’s will. “It will use its primary totem of the leader, whose face, personality, values and achievements will form an archetype and eternal base note in the oppressively sedative and extravagantly drone of national harmony.”

But then, jarringly, Hitler recounts a concert he witnessed performed by skinhead punks, “many openly racist.” All of the bands are oppressively similar, until the stage is taken by a troupe of Moroccan classical musicians who, dressed in traditional robes and fez, evoke the image of the Master Musicians of Joujouka. “What is this madness?” Hitler asks. The leader, who resembles an Arab Frank Zappa, takes up a bassoon and leads the group in what Hitler describes as an expression of “the full range of his inner ghost” and “a savage and haunting dream of the driest landscapes.” The transcendent ebullience produced by the music moves Hitler to tears, forcing him to reconsider his hardline stances. He surrenders entirely to the disharmony of a group of Moroccan musicians upstaging the skinheads. “I looked upon the prophet’s face and saw tears of joy there,” says Hitler. “I wept myself when I saw this, I wanted to kiss him passionately in celebration of his humanity and in compensation for his fear.”

Is this “sympathy for the devil” or is Juche emphasizing an almost universalist belief in the power of art to expel hate, perversion, repression, and fear? From this passage we can conclude that Juche’s philosophy — even at its most disquieting and terrifying — is never absent a touch of the artist’s humanity. From this perspective, Juche’s search for abjection is also a call for readers to once again experience the world beyond dehumanizing systems; beyond language even. By showing us what is hidden, dismissed, and even hated — in himself and in the worlds he is submerged in — he shows that the heart of literature is a space which exists unchained to the social codes and politics of the world around it. Hitler’s aesthetic system is wrong because it is rigid.

As Juche makes clear in The Worm, Nazism can’t function without a brittle stage of rigidity best embodied in Nazi structures like Speer’s Schwerbelastungskörper. It collapses entirely beneath the weight of ideas foreign to it. Juche, however, remains open. He indulges the limitless expansiveness of his own mind and allows for each thought to take form and bleed into a desire. He embraces a beauty in the foreign, the strange, and the sickening and abject. He sees it in prostitution. He feels it in the “cruelty” that he feels compelled by, or rather, in his refusal to ask us to either empathize or lament with his actions. He only asks that we reject rigidity and embrace the contradictory nature of the world — its sublime and its grotesqueries — to fully experience life beyond politics, ideology, and systems.

This article was originally published in 2022 in Apocalypse Confidential

We recorded this two weeks ago, when it looked like Spencer Pratt would still have a statistical shot at taking second place and advancing in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

New records by Ye, Drake, JPEG Mafia and Bladee discussed

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Sorry for the hiatus, Adam was busy writing this for Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/god-of-euphoria-sam-levinson

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Miss Kittin and the Hacker “Stock Exchange” https://music.apple.com/us/album/stock-exchange/308664562?i=308664609
Husker Du “Everything Falls Apart” https://music.apple.com/us/album/everything-falls-apart/1249140194?i=1249140590
Bulbous Creation “Fever Machine Man” https://music.apple.com/us/album/fever-machine-man/924210928?i=924210938
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Inxs “Never Tear Us Apart” https://music.apple.com/us/album/never-tear-us-apart-2017-remaster/1614037635?i=1614037849

LINKS:
Adam on the return of Euphoria https://safetypropaganda.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-sam-levinson-and-shlock

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Montreal-based conceptual artist Dante Guthrie joins the show to discuss the distinctions between the Canuck and U.S. art worlds, bodybuilding, photography, music and more.

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Yesterday, I took to X to defend Sam Levinson and Euphoria:

I received an incalculable amount of hate responses from right-wing groypers and left-wing libtards, but one that I thought was on the smarter end of the backlash was:

First, Nic Pizzolatto failed to make anything worthwhile after the undeniable masterpiece of True Detective Season 1. Considering I named my firstborn son Rustin after Rustin Cohle, I’ll always admire the man for making something as perfect as those eight hours of television.

More to the point, I believe there comes a moment when schlock becomes great art, and you know it when you see it. Take Paul Verhoeven, my favorite filmmaker of all time, who has explored this blurred boundary throughout his career. He makes trashy schlock with the sophistication of highbrow art films, as in RoboCop or Starship Troopers. And he makes arthouse films with the sensibilities of trashy schlock. Black Book, for instance, is a World War II drama drenched in the aesthetics of Nazisploitation cinema. And Elle is a subversive arthouse thriller laden with homage to the rape-revenge subgenre and I Spit on Your Grave.

Other filmmakers who operate in this vein include John Waters, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jess Franco, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, and Gaspar Noé, among others. All are “trash” filmmakers who are nonetheless self-aware in their construction of artifice and deeply studied in the history of art and aesthetics. Cinema, as a medium, is great precisely because it disintegrates the boundary between high and low. The Godfather was once considered lowbrow crime material, yet its cinematic adaptation is now indisputably one of the great works of art.

So yes, Euphoria is absolutely schlocky trash, and yet at times it has achieved something far closer to art. Even when the show is at its most brutal and hyperrealistic, the scenarios its characters find themselves in feel utterly real and human.

In my view, Sam Levinson will become the kind of filmmaker who is as despised as he is defended by certain critics, myself included, who appreciate what he is trying to do with his work in television. In a few decades, with the benefit of hindsight, Levinson may well be revered as one of the few film artists of the 2020s who adequately captured the world as it was, and as it felt, then/now.

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Adam speaks to the self-described “former artist” and current tech worker Daniel Keller to discuss the performative Luddism of the art world, Judaism, the war on Iran, the imminent conflict with China, and a positive conception of artificial technology...

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OST:
November Novelet “Magic”
Bill Fay “I Hear you Calling”
Punish Yourself “Let’s Build a Station in Space”
Crucifier “Stronger than Passing Time”
Sol Invictus “Lax Tallionis”

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Follow Daniel on X: @dnlklr

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And when society has to make that choice between gay world and sharia, Tucker will choose Sharia every damn time (because he’s a retard on middle eastern payroll)

I just learned that my baby son exhibits 8/8 signs of a “high maintenance baby” which was honestly validating because I have felt like I’ve been going insane.

On the Academy Awards:

It feels amazing to not care about movies. The Oscars were an excellent reminder of why I will never feel ashamed of not paying for the “theatrical experience” ever again.

Someone really should have told Robert Rodriguez that if he cast a mostly black cast for From Dusk Till Dawn he would have cleaned up with the Oscar mods.

Frusciante is my favorite musical artist who ever lived and his debut album Niandra La Des and Usually Just a T-Shirt is my favorite album of all time (you’d be shocked how Influential that album is on the low, even some European black metal guys I used to message with admired it, anyways) so it’s always painful to watch these interviews when he’s slivers away from death, but just want to clarify that Frusciante has amended his vows on Cobain and now admits he was indeed a genius

The Ayatollah getting got is a great day for the world and for history. Make a note of every single libtard and every single know nothing rightard claiming it’s anything but that. That’s who your real enemy is.

Guy is obviously a wreck, but I think people really admire Shia Labeouf’s willingness to live authentically and to fuck up so publicly. Most movie stars live behind so many layers of publicists and agents and managers that they are little more than walking talking mannequins. Shia, while fractionally as talented, is like Brando. He doesn’t give a fuck. He has some version of his own principles, and he also speaks intelligently about his damage and philosophically about the nature of fame. He’s maybe less hilarious but Charlie Sheen captivated the public in similar ways. It’s rare to be so upfront about what a fucking mess you are and people really do admire radical honesty.

There’s more low IQ conspiratard slop on the timeline than I’ve ever seen, just trying to collect notes for work tomorrow feels like walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

I genuinely believe Elon bought this site with the best intentions and that free speech is the foundation of this whole damn society, but free speech in the era of the algorithm forces the most retarded speech to gain cultural dominance. Say something inflammatory based on nothing, watch it go viral within minutes.

At least when antisemitism was fringe, you might get some more thoughtful antisemites, like Celine or Pound or HG Wells. Kerouac.

With the normalization of antisemitism in the era of AI, algorithmic dominance and social media the ideology has been mainstreamed, at least among retards who attain political education from watching streams, and the leaders of the movement are a mid-tier MMA wash-up riddled in CTE and a retarded Muslim for clout who even the Tate brothers refuse to vouch for based on how stupid he is.

Hard to know whether it’s all just a ridiculous sideshow that’ll fade as the guys who watch this slop grow up, get jobs and fall in love or if this is actually something that is going to be a huge problem for a longtime in the future.

You have to admit that open Hitler admiration from a washed up UfC fighter getting 44K likes is pretty fucking insane and basically unprecedented in the now two decade history of social media.

The sentiment is what it is, vile and evil and ridiculous of course, but the fact that there are at least 44K people who read that there and thought “fuck yeah he gets it” before hearting this trash is nothing short of a cultural crisis

I didn’t even know Lewandoski was involved in the new administration. Guy is a pro at staying out of headlines, fucking the hottest women admin officials (Hicks and then Noem) until it blows up in everyone’s faces except for his who comes out almost completely unscathed by the scandal. You have to respect that, he knows how to make a life in DC interesting.

Just finished Knausgaard’s latest masterpiece, The School of Night, and while I loved every page I genuinely wish I’d stopped reading before the final 50 pages. If you have recently become a parent, I don’t recommend reading until the end

Team Khabib and all Islamic fighters only compete when they know they’ll win. They don’t share our values of sportsmanship, competition and integrity and ENTERTAINMENT AND SPECTACLE. their only goal is racking up easy wins against westerners so their low IQ fans can brag that they beat the west online. It’s a totally different mindset and a lot of people don’t get this distinction.

Just saw a Wiccan girl in Williamsburg wearing four Covid masks and it amused me to think of someone believing so intensely in two mostly invisible forces, the spirit realm and the pandemic (years after it ended)

I actually always found it to be funny and cool that Rage’s vacuous faux Chicano anarcho Marxist politics didn’t really translate to their Woodstock 99 audience who just thought it was good hard banging rape rock.

De La Rocha would rap, “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” as an act of defiance against the man but in the ears of a Rage fan it sounded more like a defiant chant against a sorority girl’s demand to stop trying to feel up her skirt

When democrats say they want to “bring people together” they mean they will bring them all together by forcing them to be libtards. It’s what the Soviets called “ideological work,” control information, education, the democrats do maybe less brutal physical repression but I’d rather be beaten and forced to do something than be slowly humiliated forced to swallow bullshit garbage ideas that I don’t believe.

Thomas Massie is a narcissist, a glory hound, and also on a basic level incredibly stupid. He is who liberals think RFK, Jr is, a dreadfully boomer brained attempt at seeing conspiracy everywhere

I’ve already posted “Tim Dillon is a fat homosexual slob” before so I can’t use that again.

I hope the real ones understand that this is another fault line in the culture and specifically within the right wing.

Just like everyone who refused to oppose #metoo, just like those who failed to defend the innocence of Derek Chauvin during the fiery summer of 2020, just like those who believed Covid was a real plague until the bitter end, just like those who hedged on the innocence of Kyle Rittenhouse, just like those who sympathized with Hamas after Oct. 7, etc, those who refuse to call the Epstein Files the most over-heated and ridiculous conspiracy theory of the last 10 years even after hard evidence has come out can be discarded and condemned as enemies and wreckers within our block.

Call me a libtard but it’s utterly pedestrian and dreadfully normie to care about the Super Bowl Halftime show. Adult men shouldn’t be concerned about which mediocre mass market top 40 superstar is chosen to play at a game. Yes they’re rubbing your nose in an ideology designed to make you irrelevant, so don’t look.

Love’s ‘Forever Changes’ is what I consider to be the perfect work of high art masquerading as a pop album. Every time I listen to it (several times a year) it reveals new layers, new hidden meanings, new images buried somewhere in its kaleidoscopic, psychedelic and melodic acid rock sound. It’s also the album that best alludes to the darkness just around the corner of the bright sunny hippie culture, with Manson, Altamont and the Vietnam War ready to reveal free love and heavy drug culture’s true nature.

Been trying for 30 minutes to get an android to admit that Michelle Obama is objectively fugly

While I of course blame the agitators for the ICE shootings in Minneapolis, creating hostile and tense working conditions that only guarantee tragedies will rear their heads, the administration shouldn't be so reflexive in defense of every shooting that happens. The Pretti shooting was obviously a procedural error made by CBP agents and now everyone looks stupid.

Deranged far left agitators have always been a thing in American society. What is new is both the volume of them and the fact that they enjoy the protection of the entire media and liberal political establishment. That CNN anchors are more favorable to people instigating attacks on law enforcement than actual law enforcement is totally unique to this era. The concept of “bourgeois media” completely flipped on its head.

If you’re wondering “are these leftists insane enough to deliberately commit suicide by cop just to get martyred via viral clip they’ll further animate their equally psychotic and demented comrades to more violence and more martyrdom?” Stop wondering. You’re one hundred percent correct.

“It was a clean shooting”

“No way dude, the wheels were turned away or whatever, he’s a murderer!”

“He was struck, and bleeding internally!”

“Wow what a pussy, shoots a woman over a little internal bleeding!”

“Well, just strictly legally speaking, he’ll be found innocent if he’s even charged at all.”

“What does that matter!?!? Laws were written by fashoid RAYCISS NAHSI FUCKS!!!!!”

And on and on

Anthony Keidis has had at least two girlfriends that were Epstein aged, and no one seems to care enough for the Chi Peps not to sell out stadiums across the country every time they tour. Almost makes you wonder if perhaps..... the media might have a role in shaping reality?

Aside from the red pill ideological evolution I’ve gone through over the last decade, I’m very consistent. For instance, I think the vast majority of tawdry sex accusations are political machinations that should be discarded as bullshit. I disbelieved loony E Jean Carroll’s claims of having been raped by Trump every bit as much as I disbelieved Tara Reade’s claims of Joe Biden having forcibly finger banged her. That’s a principle applied equally.

Leftists, however, scream their heads off about Renee Good but you just absolutely know that if she did manage to keep driving and ran the ICEman over, the left would fully be saying “he shouldn’t have been harassing immigrants and violating international law” or some nonsense. They have no grounds in any argument, they aren’t serious people. They are agitators, nuisances, and wreckers.

Anyone being cavalier about the fact that that martyrmade is a disgusting piece of shit barely crypto commie subversive should be sent to Gitmo right behind him

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A catch up episode, covering the Iran war, antisemite influencers, and Adam being iced out by old friends

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SOUNDTRACK

Rhythm and Sound “See mi Yah” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/see-mi-yah/52996963?i=52995478⁠ Toiling Midgets “4-track Mind” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/aarons-song/1513830226?i=1513830228⁠ 6 Comm “Like Stukas Angels Fall” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/pipes-of-gold/311867520?i=311867695⁠ X Marks the Pedwalk “Human Desolation” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/desolation/946071535?i=946071548⁠ Forteresse “La moisson de la liberte” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/la-moisson-de-la-libert%C3%A9/1796587075?i=1796587076⁠ Tricky “Makes me Wanna Die” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/makes-me-wanna-die/1443717694?i=1443717885⁠

LINKS:

Adam on Elena Velez and incongruities in gendered cancellation ⁠https://safetypropaganda.substack.com/p/cancellation-and-female-narcissism⁠

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“The penis has now become a political liability. Pundits are vocal in their conviction that the penis is itself an overly fascist act.” – Adam Parfrey [1]

In a spirited essay entitled “Cut it Off: A Case for Self Castration”, included in his iconic anthology book Apocalypse Culture, the artist, journalist and Feral House editor Adam Parfrey argued in favor of what he posited as the only rational male response to Andrea Dworkin’s argument that the radical feminist made in her book Intercourse:

“The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation,” writes Dworkin. “ Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of woman [2].”

If merely having sex with a woman amounts to both rape and slavery, thought Parfrey, then men would do themselves a favor in severing their penises from their own bodies – for is it not better to live as a unik than be condemned as a rapist? Parfrey’s essay benefits from one’s inability to discern with what sincerity he approaches his proscriptions, and indeed there hasn’t yet been a phenomenon in which masses of men have taken to self-castration. Some feminist writers have credited the #MeToo movement with the implementation of a somewhat diluted and liberal (replace radicalism and militarism with empathy and “awareness”) version of Dworkin’s theories into praxis [3]. Since the movement, the goalposts in terms of what constitutes sexual assault and predatory behavior have been pushed back further and further ever so incrementally. It’s not just outright rape that is predatory anymore (as in Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein’s cases), but also flirtatious gestures previously seen as harmless (Andrew Cuomo). And while men have not cut their own penises off yet, we have started altering our behavior. We think twice before complimenting a woman on her perfume, we second guess our every interaction with the opposite sex for fear of being taken in a threatening way. It’s a stressful way to live.

Predictably, #MeToo hit the art world rather quickly after its origins in 2017. Given it’s an industry dominated by bourgeois and petty bourgeois women often in steep competition with an ownership class still predominantly occupied by men, this was bound to happen. The phenomenon first struck institutional figureheads — Philadelphia Art Museum manager Joshua Helmer was accused of making women uncomfortable, Tate donor Anthony d’Offay was cut off due to various allegations of sexual harrassment, etc. [4] — before being directed at artists themselves. The late and much revered wheelchair-bound painter Chuck Close was accused by none other than actress and recent Kanye West ex-girlfriend Julia Fox of telling the young star that her “pussy looks delicious” while she posed for the artist [5]. Even more absurdly, an anonymous instagram account called “Surviving the Art World” made vague accusations against the artist Jon Rafman that didn’t even seem to amount to accusations – one user described having consensual sex with Rafman four times but was put off by some of his aggressive behaviors during the encounter. So now, predatory behavior isn’t just presenting women with unwanted sexual attention, but all your behavior during consensual sexual encounters can be used against you.

As asinine as the accusations against Rafman sounded at face, three museums including the Hirshhorn Museum canceled exhibitions featuring the post-Internet artist. While no one wants to acknowledge this reality, it’s increasingly perilous to be a heterosexual male artist in 2022.

While male artists may have not responded to this state of affairs by parting with their penises, it appears that they have taken to castrating themselves aesthetically. The art world has never been gun shy about profitting off of artists dealing with sexually explicit content. This is still the case — the images by queer male photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya or the perverse paintings of woman artist Oh de Laval can attest to this — except when it comes to depictions of male heterosexual desire, which appears more and more to be purposefully overlooked if not outright suppressed by artists and institutions alike.

This is dismaying considering the role that male libido has had in driving creative productions of all kinds, but visual arts chiefly among them. Gustav Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde” (1866), which depicts a woman’s vagina and torso in close-up, is a masterpiece of early modernism. And of course, while the painting is a grand formal achievement, we cannot decouple its form from its content. “L’Origine du monde” is the image of its artist’s desire to be inside of his subject, the model Joanna Hiffernan. And let’s not forget Picasso’s epic libido and his sexual obsessions with the likes of artist Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Françoise Gilot and the artist’s countless other concubines that inspired so much of his greatest masterworks. The history of art, for better or for worse, is also a history of male desire. While I see no fault in the incorporation of desires alternative to that of the male heterosexual in contemporary art, it is an insult to art itself to suppress male libido in the exhibition of artistic productions.

Don’t believe me? Let’s refer to MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” exhibition. While there are quite a few non-male or non-heterosexual artists dealing in sexually explicit imagery exhibited — Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the late Argentinian painter Luis Frangella, and the Egypt-born painter Nicolas Moufarrage among them — there is hardly one straight male artist deriving inspiration from his sexual thirst for women. This trend is only more pronounced in the upcoming Whitney Biennial.

So, what happened? Where are all the libidinally charged men in contemporary art? We have to assume that one of or both of these two factors are driving the aesthetic castration of male artists. First, we can assume that male artists are more self-conscious about their sexualities in the wake of #MeToo and as a result have grown squeamish about putting their sexualities on display in their work. Second, it’s likely that the art world itself is trying to make restitution for what are seen as historical inequities in the way that art history has been presented, favorites often heterosexual and always male artists over artists of various other identities. Most likely, both these tendencies are happening at the same time, but the result is the same: male sexual desire is largely not given any attention in contemporary art, if it’s not outright being actively suppressed.

Some artists have managed to evade aesthetic castration. John Currin, for instance, is likely so wealthy and so famous that Gagosian Gallery would never its back on him. Currin’s 2021 exhibition, Memorial John Currin, featured a number of hyper-realistic depictions of what appeared to be female forms statued in hyper-pornographic posings. It was one of the best shows of the year. Brad Phillips almost makes brazenly erotic paintings of women and seems to get away with it by making his wife, the artist Cristine Brache, his only subject. The trouble is that Phillips’ work is occasionally less than stellar — he often seems like one of those renaissance men who does everything but does it all mediocrely — and by making his wife his model he’s still actively suppressing desire within his dreamscape.

Brothers and fellow artists, I implore you: reclaim your manhoods. Do not allow yourselves to be aesthetically castrated. The more you continue to do so is the more that you’re validating the idea that male heterosexual desire is wrong or should be suppressed. The Kabbalah, the esoteric method and school of thought in Judaism, claims that sexual desire is the absolute highest order of spiritual expression. By this logic then, to aesthetically castrate ourselves is to cut ourselves off of our very life force. And without that life force, we cannot make great art. We owe it to ourselves and to culture to confront the world with the powerful force that is the male libido. This is the Case Against Aesthetic Castration.

This piece was originally published by Compact Magazine in 2022

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Over the weekend, Ivy Wolk took to Instagram Live to lament what she described as an unfair double standard. Female artists, she argued, are afforded less freedom to be transgressive and are canceled far more readily than their male counterparts. The video has since disappeared, but the complaint hasn’t. I tracked down a quote from Wolk in an interview with Hailey Ryan on the latter’s Substack that lands on the same familiar—and moronic—point:

To me, the celebrities that are the most interesting, the people whose stories I really study, and the bodies of work that I really value are from women, in particular, who were deemed by everybody in their heyday as damaged, as broken goods, as too irreparable and too crazy to deal with, who wee have cast aside and murdered and exiled so many of them.

She doesn’t use the term “cancellation” here, but she clearly believes that “problematic” women are treated more harshly than men. The example she cites is the late Amy Winehouse, invoking what she calls “the Amy Winehouses of the world.” Now, it’s obviously true that Winehouse was treated brutally by the tabloids. But let’s slow down for half a second and ask the forbidden question: why was she treated brutally by the tabloids? Because Winehouse was a profoundly fucked-up junkie who made a public sport of wrecking her own life. Was she ever “canceled” for her lunatic public behavior? Hardly. She made millions right up until the moment she overdosed. No, Ivy—Amy wasn’t murdered. She overdosed on drugs she had no intention of ever stopping.

And since I find Wolk to be a near-perfect example of controlled opposition and institutionally approved transgression—an edgelord for woke trans people who require constant reassurance that the artist allegedly “pushing boundaries” is still politically on their side—I noticed the clip when fashion designer Elena Velez reposted it.

Elena is a friend, so trashing her brings me no pleasure. Still, this whole debacle set me off. Are these bitches fucking serious? I remember thinking.

It’s easy to see why the designer was sympathetic to Wolk’s statements given the recent context. Earlier this month, Velez shocked audiences by having the looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular, who seems to have risen to mega-fame out of thin air over the past three months, walk the runway at her Fall–Winter 2026 show. I had already heard about Clav’s appearance, but it was still jarring to see him stride down the runway with the confidence of a professional model, trailed by his streaming cameraman.

I also knew exactly what would happen next. The presence of Clavicular—who uses the word “nigga” more than I do and who was recently spotted at a red-pill influencer club night alongside Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and the insufferable Muslim-for-clout antisemitic moron Sneako—was guaranteed to enrage a very specific crowd.

As my wife and I walked out of the show and toward the train, I overheard a conversation between what I assumed were low-level fashion editors, draped in thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes while pulling in $32,000 a year from Hypebeast, Highsnobiety, or whatever outlet happened to be exploiting them.

“Who was that pretty guy with the cameraman following him?” one asked, a Black girl with green-dyed hair and a shiny PVC coat.

“Oh, that was Clavicular,” said the other, a fat homosexual with an aggressively feminine vocal affect. “He’s like a red-pill influencer who only cares about looking good and he hates women and minorities.”

“Elena is disgusting,” said the Black editor. “Imagine putting someone like that in front of trans people. Imagine how they feel.”

I was pleased. Clearly, Elena’s stunt casting had landed. It had rattled people, which meant it worked. I even defended the choice as a successful act of transgressive performance art in an X post after the show:

No doubt, something had been stirred.

Writing for Forbes, Tiana Randall wrote:

This latest turn lands differently because it arrives amid controversy that increasingly eclipses the clothes. By centering [Clavicular], Velez now carries the baggage of his controversy in real life, not online. It’s the baggage of alleged clips surfacing of him using racial slurs, taking steroids and other drugs, posing next to someone performing Nazi salutes, and striking someone with his car while streaming.

Uh-oh. Sounds like Elena’s been a bad girl, and the scolds are circling.

In the comments of a Merde Magazine Instagram post, one user of the app commented:

Why are you giving this horrible woman a larger platform?? She’s supporting sexists & racists, transphobes & homophobes. This has nothing to do with provocation and everything to do with being a despicable human being.

If someone claims an artist’s provocation crossed the boundary of acceptable provocation and slipped into something resembling human evil, it’s fair to say that the provocation worked like a fucking charm.

By positioning herself inside the highly mainstream, aggressively politicized New York fashion ecosystem, dominated by editors with “black girl magic” and sinister homosexuals, while simultaneously leveraging her camaraderie with the right-wing, highly online, and nominally countercultural Dimes Square scene, or whatever faint residue of it still exists, Elena manages to do something genuinely interesting.

“Preaching to the converted” is easy, and it will only get you so far. When Alex Bienstock and I did the Botched Chadification conceptual rock n’ roll project, we played several shows. By far the most interesting was the leftist bar we played in Bushwick. The audience absolutely despised us, and eventually our sound got cut. It was glorious. That was the night we finally achieved the project’s real goal, which was to confront an audience of leftist conformists with right-wing online memes and concepts they were constitutionally incapable of processing. That was the only night the band stopped being a regular, if not especially good, rock n’ roll band and became a genuinely radical piece of conceptual art.

Elena clearly knows what she’s doing. You don’t invite Vogue editors and trans influencers to share a room with right-wing commentators, whether Anna or Dasha or Future Moldovan Citizen or me, and fucking George Santos, unless you’re actively trying to shock people. Elena meant to shock them. And she did.

But the designer refuses to accept the extremely predictable consequences of her own artistic transgressions.

And this brings us back to Ivy Wolk, her deeply retarded opinions, and the fact that those opinions were clearly shared by Elena, as evidenced by her reposting of them.

But the assertion that women are canceled more than men is obviously untrue. The only way someone could convince themselves otherwise is by internalizing the same persecution complex that fueled a cultural moment devoted to the ritual destruction of men and their careers, often on the basis of inflated or outright bogus claims of sexual misconduct. Do these people not remember the years when virtually any alleged sexual transgression by a man, large or small, resulted in the total annihilation of his professional and personal life? Harvey Weinstein remains in prison despite a trial that bulldozed basic procedural norms and featured prosecutors who failed, repeatedly, to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. But sure, you’re the one being unfairly “canceled” because some sanctified libtard style editors were forced to look at a pretty boy influencer whose use of the term “nigger” is documented all over the internet. I digress.

Cancellation is really about who your audience is. If your audience is broad and semi-mainstream, you will be punished for hammering it with subcultural and online forms of transgression. That friction is precisely what makes this kind of provocation interesting in the first place. But you do not then get to turn around and complain when people react exactly the way you knew they would all along.

And let’s be honest. If Elena had pulled any of the stunts she’s gotten away with, Clav, the Gone with the Wind Ball, hell, even her very public friendship with the Red Scare girls, as a white man, or even a gay white man, she would have been completely shadow-banned out of the industry by now. If she weren’t a Puerto Rican woman, a fact that appears in almost every profile written about her, she likely wouldn’t have a platform at all.

It’s not like we have to speculate here. The proof is right in front of us.

After John Galliano’s drunken, racist, and antisemitic rant in 2011, he was fired from Dior, pushed out of his own label, publicly convicted of antisemitism in France, and effectively exiled from the upper tiers of the fashion industry. It took years before he was even partially rehabilitated, and that only happened when Maison Margiela brought him in to replace its iconic founder Martin Margiela.

And this was John Galliano. One of the most critically celebrated and commercially successful designers of all time. His work at Dior helped propel LVMH to record profits north of €21 billion before he was fired. Dropping him for getting drunk and saying vile things was the fashion-industry equivalent of the Chicago Bulls firing Michael Jordan over gambling. That’s how central Galliano was to Dior and to fashion itself. And yet his cancellation was immediate. It devastated him financially, erased him institutionally, and required years of public penance and professional groveling just to claw back a shadow of what he once was.

A more recent example is Russian streetwear designer Gosha Rubchinskiy. In 2018, a 16-year-old aspiring male model shared screenshots of private Instagram DMs, WhatsApp messages, and a FaceTime exchange with Rubchinskiy in various social media groups. The messages appeared to show Rubchinskiy initiating contact under the pretext of a street casting. They also included requests for photos of the boy shirtless or in underwear, with Rubchinskiy suggesting the photos be taken in a bathroom so the parents would not notice. that last detail could be read a number of ways. Nonetheless, the allegations, vague as they were, were aggressively amplified by the online fashion hall monitors at Diet Prada, who treated insinuation as conviction and ensured the scandal metastasized instantly.

Rubchinskiy immediately issued statements denying any misconduct, arguing that the conversations had been altered and taken out of context and that they were part of a legitimate casting process for his brand. His team claimed that the teenager initiated contact by asking to model and that Rubchinskiy blocked him once the interaction became suspicious, framing the episode as a planned provocation. Now, even if we are being completely uncharitable and assume that Gosha did harbor mischievous sexual intentions toward the teenager, I would ask you to do something very simple. Go to your favorite AI and ask, “What is the age of consent in Russia?” The answer it will give you is sixteen years old.

This means that even in the worst-case interpretation, Rubchinskiy’s behavior fell within the legal norms of his own country. To his credit, Adrian Joffe, the president of Comme des Garçons, which distributed Rubchinskiy’s line, defended him publicly. Joffe criticized the mob mentality of social media and the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach, while noting that multiple models who had worked with Rubchinskiy vouched for him. None of it mattered. Rubchinskiy became a liability for the Comme des Garçons brand, and later that year he shut his label down entirely.

Rubchinskiy then vanished from public view for years, until 2024, when Kanye West, the patron saint of canceled men, pulled the Russian designer out of exile to help develop a new Yeezy collection timed to the release of West’s and Ty Dolla $ign’s Vultures album. By 2025, Rubchinskiy had relaunched under a new name. The operation is far smaller than the Comme des Garçons–backed version of his brand ever was, but the clothes are excellent. Still, he will never quite regain the institutional access or cultural sanction he once enjoyed.

And that’s not even wading into the photographers whose careers were obliterated in the hysteria of #MeToo: Mario Testino, Bruce Weber, Terry Richardson.

Historically, fashion was an industry that thrived by operating under its own sexual codes. It was defined by boundary-pushing, libertine behavior, and a bon vivant ethos that everyone pretended not to see because the work was good and the money was flowing. Then wokeness hit, and someone had to be sacrificed for a century of permissive, exploratory industry practice. And let me be very clear. It wasn’t women.

If Elena is serious about maintaining a transgressive ethos by staging similarly provocative spectacles in the future, and I truly hope she is, she has to accept that pushback from the peasants is not a bug. It’s the feature. I accepted the consequences of my own public statements and actions. I spent five years in no man’s land, building an audience piece by piece, scraping by on patronage and freelancing before finally landing on my feet. I didn’t complain when people got mad at me, because their anger was the validation. That rage was the point.

And in the end, it doesn’t matter anyway. If anything, the fury of the losers only keeps Elena in the spotlight, allowing her to dominate the conversation in ways most designers never could. Don’t fear them. Embrace them. You’re not going to be truly canceled.

The boys reconnect. Adam reflects on early fatherhood, Mattio documents his trip to Mexico City to see Ye, and both chronicle the absolute abysmal moral panic unleashed by the Epstein Files.

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SOUNDTRACK:

Clipse “Keys Open Doors” Midgards Soner “November 30” Asylum Party “Play Alone” Wolfsmond “Dusterworld” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/d%C3%BCsterwald/1321259736?i=1321259959⁠ NOFX “S&M Airlines” ⁠https://music.apple.com/us/album/s-m-airlines/1485033293?i=1485033300⁠

LINKS:

Adam on the life and career of Kanye West as a long, slowly unfolding performance art platform: ⁠https://safetypropaganda.substack.com/p/kanyes-apology-and-fame-as-ultimate⁠

Adam on “Epstein Apophenia”:

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Many commercial art galleries are closed in participation of today’s national shutdown to protest the “brutal, fascist, authoritarian” actions of ICE doing what it and every other federal immigration enforcement appratus of every nation on earth has always done: booting illegal immigrants the fuck out of the country that they have no right to be in. Some of the galleries participating in the hilarious charade are (from The Art Newspaper):

OH MY GAWD!!! Well, the art galleries are shut down. Lord knows Americans can’t survive a day without looking at squiggles of paint on canvas and conceptual art videos about black women’s hair or whatever. Looks like we’ll just have to let the illegals stay here. A profoundly effective protest strategy no doubt (LMAO).

Hell, fuck just one day. Why don’t galleries just stay closed in perpetuity ? That would be such a wonderful display of sympathy and camaraderie with the downtrodden ?? We all know that without contemporary art galleries, the world will simply cease to exist!!! There would for sure never be mass deportations if all of you never worked again!!!! Plus you’d actually go poor, meaning you wouldn’t just be sympathizing with illegal migrants, you’d be poor like them too!! You could channel their LIVED EXPERIENCES!!! Maybe some of you can join Tren de Aragua and MS13 and get deported alongside the rest of those fucking violent animals to El Salvador prisons!!!!

Screw the day of closure, make it an eternity of closure. Contemporary art died for illegal immigrants (and no one cared)!!!!

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