Negation Aspiration vol. 40

Group of Pennsylvania men, dressed as furries, arrested for sexually abusing 9-year-old boy

Negation Aspiration vol. 39

A huge mouth and no anus – this could be our earliest known ancestor

 An artist’s reconstruction of Saccorhytus coronarius, based on the original fossil finds. The actual creature was probably no more than a millimetre in size. Illustration: S Conway Morris / Jian Han

Negation Aspiration vol. 38

Human-Pig Hybrid 

Created in the Lab

—Here Are the Facts

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 97

Trump Aides Keep Leaking Embarrassing Stories About How He Can’t Handle Embarrassment

By Eric Levitz

That same day, some Trump aides provided the New York Times with a portrait of the president as a moody adolescent.

Mr. Trump grew increasingly angry on Inauguration Day after reading a series of Twitter messages pointing out that the size of his inaugural crowd did not rival that of Mr. Obama’s in 2009. But he spent his Friday night in a whirlwind of celebration and affirmation. When he awoke on Saturday morning, after his first night in the Executive Mansion, the glow was gone, several people close to him said, and the new president was filled anew with a sense of injury.

And then, on Monday night, Trump’s staffers whispered an even more vivid account of his rough weekend to the Washington Post.

President Trump had just returned to the White House on Saturday from his final inauguration event, a tranquil interfaith prayer service, when the flashes of anger began to build.

Trump turned on the television to see a jarring juxtaposition — massive demonstrations around the globe protesting his day-old presidency and footage of the sparser crowd at his inauguration, with large patches of white empty space on the Mall. As his press secretary, Sean Spicer, was still unpacking boxes in his spacious new West Wing office, Trump grew increasingly and visibly enraged…Over the objections of his aides and advisers — who urged him to focus on policy and the broader goals of his presidency — the new president issued a decree: He wanted a fiery public response, and he wanted it to come from his press secretary.

Five days in office..

* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the DOJ’s Violence Against Women programs.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Minority Business Development Agency.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Economic Development Administration.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the International Trade Administration.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Legal Services Corporation.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Environmental and Natural Resources Division of the DOJ.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Office of Electricity Deliverability and Energy Reliability.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
* On January 19th, 2017, DT said that he would cut funding for the Office of Fossil Energy.
* On January 20th, 2017, DT ordered all regulatory powers of all federal agencies frozen.
* On January 20th, 2017, DT ordered the National Parks Service to stop using social media after RTing factual, side by side photos of the crowds for the 2009 and 2017 inaugurations.
* On January 20th, 2017, roughly 230 protestors were arrested in DC and face unprecedented felony riot charges. Among them were legal observers, journalists, and medics.
* On January 20th, 2017, a member of the International Workers of the World was shot in the stomach at an anti-fascist protest in Seattle. He remains in critical condition.
* On January 21st, 2017, DT brought a group of 40 cheerleaders to a meeting with the CIA to cheer for him during a speech that consisted almost entirely of framing himself as the victim of dishonest press.
* On January 21st, 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held a press conference largely to attack the press for accurately reporting the size of attendance at the inaugural festivities, saying that the inauguration had the largest audience of any in history, “period.”
* On January 22nd, 2017, White House advisor Kellyann Conway defended Spicer’s lies as “alternative facts” on national television news.
* On January 22nd, 2017, DT appeared to blow a kiss to director James Comey during a meeting with the FBI, and then opened his arms in a gesture of strange, paternal affection, before hugging him with a pat on the back.
* On January 23rd, 2017, DT reinstated the global gag order, which defunds international organizations that even mention abortion as a medical option.
* On January 23rd, 2017, Spicer said that the US will not tolerate China’s expansion onto islands in the South China Sea, essentially threatening war with China.
* On January 23rd, 2017, DT repeated the lie that 3-5 million people voted “illegally” thus costing him the popular vote.
* On January 23rd, 2017, it was announced that the man who shot the anti-fascist protester in Seattle was released without charges, despite turning himself in.
* On January 24th, 2017, Spicer reiterated the lie that 3-5 million people voted “illegally” thus costing DT the popular vote.
* On January 24th, 2017, DT tweeted a picture from his personal Twitter account of a photo he says depicts the crowd at his inauguration and will hang in the White House press room. The photo is of the 2009 inauguration of 44th President Barack Obama, and is curiously dated January 21st, 2017, the day AFTER the inauguration and the day of the Women’s March, the largest inauguration related protest in history.
* On January 24th, 2017, the EPA was ordered to stop communicating with the public through social media or the press and to freeze all grants and contracts.
* On January 24th, 2017, the USDA was ordered to stop communicating with the public through social media or the press and to stop publishing any papers or research. All communication with the press would also have to be authorized and vetted by the White House.
* On January 24th, 2017, HR7, a bill that would prohibit federal funding not only to abortion service providers, but to any insurance coverage, including Medicaid, that provides abortion coverage, went to the floor of the House for a vote.
* On January 24th, 2017, DT ordered the resumption of construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline, while the North Dakota state congress considers a bill that would legalize hitting and killing protestors with cars if they are on roadways.
* On January 24th, 2017, it was discovered that police officers had used confiscated cell phones to search the emails and messages of the 230 demonstrators now facing felony riot charges for protesting on January 20th, including lawyers and journalists whose email accounts contain privileged information of clients and sources.
From News and Guts
*credit for compilation: Karen Cornett-Dwayne Thanks to Stephen Pitti for sharing.

Negation Aspiration vol. 37

Revisiting Creepypasta, the Social Horror Craze That Launched Slenderman

NERRRRRRRD! vol. 57

One of the things that I wanted to say with Jerusalem was that the imagination is still massively important. Use it or lose it. We should be able to create art and writing that is sufficient to these times. We should not have our culture frozen upon the spot in the way that it appears to be. It seems to me that we frisked hurriedly through the 1950s with all of the car tail fins like Buck Rogers rocket ships. We skipped through the space-age sixties with the moon landings and all of our science fiction. We were hastening through these decades in a hurry to get to our promised Jetsons’ future. Sometime around the mid-nineties, we suddenly realized that we were there. That this was the future and it was looking a lot more complicated and a lot different than the future we’d been imagining. And we froze. We didn’t know what to do. We decided that we would culturally march on the spot for the next twenty or thirty years. We would simply recycle the musical tastes of the previous few decades. Our films would largely be franchises based on characters that were created last century. We wanted that familiar twentieth-century stuff that we understood.

“The interior of the human head is infinite”: A Conversation with Alan Moore

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 96

Hillary Clinton was the ultimate Establishment candidate facing the ultimate outsider, and also a quintessential old-media personality facing a veritable Voldemort of social media. Given that, she came pretty damn close to pulling it off. But Clinton was also a candidate from reality facing a shimmering celebrity avatar, a clownish prankster who took physical form in our universe but who could say anything and do anything because he was self-evidently not real. That disadvantage proved impossible to overcome. 

 Furthermore, Trump’s supporters may be delusional and misguided, but they aren’t half as dumb as they often look to “coastal elites.” Many of them understood, consciously or otherwise, that his incoherent promises could not be taken literally and that his outrageous personality did not reflect the realm of reality. They were sick of reality, and you can’t entirely blame them. For lots of people in “middle America” (the term is patronizing, but let’s move on) reality has been so debased, or so much replaced, as to seem valueless. 

 If reality means lives of pointless service-sector drudgery, downward mobility or stagnation, fast-food dinners, opioid addiction and traffic jams, then escape into fantasy seems forgivable. Donald Trump is a creature of the nurturing electronic cocoon that disrupts or replaces reality, an overlord of consumerism. (He is not in any meaningful sense a “capitalist.” Capitalists produce things, in the real world.) To paraphrase Michael Moore, Trump represented a historic opportunity to extend a giant middle finger to reality itself, and to the forces that have rendered it so dismal. 

 When I suggested a few weeks ago that Trump’s worldview resembled the narcissistic simulated universe of “The Matrix,” I had no idea how far the analogy would go. His election represents the moment when roughly half our voting population — slightly less than that, to be fair — spoke out clearly: Give us the blue pill! That’s the one where you wake up in your beds and believe whatever you want to believe, leaving reality behind. If onetime movie star Ronald Reagan was the first postmodern president (the word still meant something back then), Trump will be the first post-reality president.

Fake news, a fake president and a fake country: Welcome to America, land of no context

Donald Trump's supporters have locked themselves in a "Matrix"-style simulated America — but they're not alone

Negation Aspiration vol. 36

Apocalypse Whatever

The making of a racist, sexist religion of nihilism on 4Chan

In their apparent indifference to content and their commitment to aestheticized irony, shitposters resemble the disengaged ironists the 19th-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard discussed in texts like The Concept of Irony and Either/Or. According to Kierkegaard, the ironist “poetically composes himself and his environment with the greatest possible poetic license” and lives “in this totally hypothetical and subjunctive way.” Every act is an act of self-creation: Stories that are told are not descriptive of “true” facts out there but rather ways in which the ironist can prove his power, his philosophical strength, his verbal dexterity. He says things just to be the sort of person who says them. The ironist maintains his power by taking no position, starting every argument anew. “There is something seductive about every beginning, because the subject is again free, and it is this pleasure the ironist longs for,” Kierkegaard writes in The Concept of Irony. “In such moments, actuality loses its validity for him; he is free, above it.” For that freedom, the ironist is willing to say anything, make any argument, undeterred by any fear of being called to account. That is, the ironist is the proto-troll.

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 95

Report: Russia Has Trump 'Golden Showers' Blackmail

NERRRRRRRRRD! vol. 56

DC Comics’ Watchmen Revival Could Go Very, Very Wrong

“DC Universe meets the Watchmen!”

i'm not going to suggest that someone Charlie Hebdos the DC offices... but that might be the only way they'll learn.

 'kay... that's your nerd-salt for the year.

We Are The Sprocket Holes vol. 234

micro-reviews:

BLACK PAST

shot-on-video enfant terrible Olaf Ittenbach's first gooey blast of backyard splatter borrows heavily from Raimi's first Evil Dead film in plot and ideas, but Ittenbach establishes his vision within those parameters, crafting set-pieces that look as if your worst nightmare of an indoor kid made a life-size paper-mache diorama detailing the goreist passages of Sade's 150 Passions.

CARNAGE PARK

Mickey Keating's stand-your-ground parable avoids the pitfalls of most similarly costumed "grindhouse" throwbacks due in large part to convincing performances from all the players involved, an organic sense of who the characters are, and a narrative that escalates into strobe-lit nightmare.

THE DEVIL LIVES HERE

occasionally formulaic (sometimes frustratingly so) and periodically dragging, this Brazilian export still has enough visual imagination and energetic aggression to encourage its recommendation.

DOG EAT DOG

Paul Schrader's latest veers dangerously close to being one of those dreadful post-Tarantino celluloid husks that pocked the indie-scene throughout the 90s, but mercifully all those involved are able to stay the course, crafting a film that hearkens back to the themes that made Schrader the Poet Laureate of White Male Impotence.

THE GREASY STRANGLER 

every frame... every piece of dialogue... is a work of mind scrambled post-ironic art.

TRASH FIRE

Richard Bates Jr.'s (Excision) delightfully mean-spirited gothic horror comedy dips hard into perverse surrealism and dinner-table-giggling blasphemy, topped off with some of the most likable unlikables this side of John Waters.

Negation Aspiration vol. 36

"He would sit on a throne at the front of this vast room filled with trainees. There would be a girl stroking his hair, another massaging his back and another stroking him under orange towels that would be placed on his lap. It was disgusting but it was a daily occurrence. He is a cold, calculating predator. I witnessed him routinely abusing that power, often with the most vulnerable students. These were young women who looked up to him as a spiritual guru. They loved him. And he took advantage of that in the most heinous way imaginable.”

Hot Yoga Founder Bikram Choudhury Loses Lawsuit, Has to Give up His Entire Empire

by  Shahana Yasmin 02 January, 2017

Negation Aspiration vol. 35

The story behind the sudden cancellation of Adult Swim’s Trump-loving comedy show

2007 / 2017: Ten Years of Retributional Sodomy

i was fresh out of college, 2 and 1/2 years immersed in The Communion (still counting), cruising for trim, and looking for writing gigs when i conceived this blog. as best i can remember, the title came from a post on the old Relapse Records message board (hence the parodic tribute in the banner), and this blog was meant to be a place where i could curate raw materials and aesthetic inspirations for my creative outputs. not merely a blog for self-attention starved diary entries (although there is plenty of that), but a place where i'd share art, music, bizarre news stories, films, pornography, works of others shuffled into a barrage of information both catastrophic and fruitful.

looking back at older entries, i see a lot of idiot rage stemming from deep insecurity and frustrated uncertainty about what would become of my aspirations. i had not yet learned that the publishing industry had been perhaps irrevocably toxified by a misguided animus directed toward those from working class backgrounds, who fail to be in possession the enabling trust funds that insure they only remain fashionably impoverished while they grind through unpaid internships and barista underemployment while still expecting everyone to marvel at their "struggle" to live in one of the most expensive cities in the country, as if their inherited privilege had nothing to do with their occupation of the metropolis and their ability to network among other cosmopolitan subversives.

that being said, i can't help but wince at the ballistic overentitlement and craftless vitriol that make up much of this blog's DNA in the early years. stupid, petty, vicious stuff... no wonder they don't come calling. the fact that much of the social networks are invariably fueled by even more acerbic strains of spite and possessiveness is what caused me to move this blog into more of a spot for off-beat news items and poetically terse film reviews, with an occasional dip into the perma-fixation on women, in all their infuriating splendor and tantalizing rancor.

perhaps they'll be further shifts in content and expression. perhaps not. but since i'm going nowhere... i'm not going anywhere.

here's Lydia Lunch getting spanked while Richard Kern watches: