NERRRRRRRRD! vol. 81

How Brightburn connects to one of the best superhero comics ever

caught Brightburn this past Friday and really got a kick out of it.  a near perfect splicing of blockbuster superhero myth making, rural slasher terror, and the darker strains of the coming-of-age sub-genre like (possible reach warning) Reflecting Skin or the Boy (not the puppet one with Maggs from Walking Dead). focused, brutal, bleak, and allegorical without being heavy-handed, a caustically cautionary tale about the diseased wish fulfillment of 12 year old boys, that time in your life where the juvenile fantasies of pre-adolescence collide with burgeoning sexual desires, one causing the other to mutate wildly. now put all that in God Mode.  if that scratches ya wheres ya itch, give it a whirl.

Awwww yeah vol. 113

Moby couldn’t just be Moby, a single middle-aged man with poor dating instincts.

Moby became all "rich white” men.

Moby became the predatory "older men" sleazing after “a teenager barely out of high school” (both parties were adults past the age of consent)

Moby became all the “beta males” and “nice guys” – those who hide their carnal desires behind a friendly persona.

Finally, Moby became “the patriarchy,” or just“men.” 

I am sure that all of the above authors – predominantly women, and a few “allies” of whom Moby used to be one – think they know their own Moby, and yes, he does represent a certain recognizable model of male behaviour.

But using him to attack a whole class of people – based on race or gender – is pure prejudice.

And while these authors think they are performing some deep socio-cultural analysis, what they are actually doing is using a single anecdote to say “look at men, aren’t they bastards/creeps/idiots” leveraging it as self-vindication for their own unsuccessful brushes with men.

After all, among the dozens of think pieces, there isn’t one deeply analysing why fame and wealth gives this apparently unattractive individual the cachet for his cornucopia of conquests, or why Western culture teaches men that acting like Moby – since he is, apparently, so representative – is the way to a woman’s heart.

In fact, what the episode is most reminiscent of is school gossip – where some socially-maladjusted nerd is picked as the scapegoat, and the 'Mean Girls' point and laugh. As in many recent public eviscerations, there is much self-congratulatory virtuousness, but no empathy, and one assumes that all of the authors piling in have never acted like fools in relationships, because that would make them hypocrites.

Moby’s romantic failures are not your cue to attack ‘white men,’ ‘beta males’ & ‘the patriarchy’

We Are The Sprocket Holes vol. 340: Top 10 Dust Conductors for the first 1/2 of 2019

so far this year i've watched 144 films. i can legally change my name to "Radley Fucksalot". anyway, so i have less to worry about later this year, here's the first round;

LET THE CORPSES TAN (dir: Helene Cattet, Bruno Forzani)

the duo behind Amer and The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears fever-grounded swirling of polizia thriller grit and spaghetti western heatstroke.

SLAVE TO THE GRIND (dir. Doug Brown)

maybe ignore the worn out '77 punk retrospectives and take a look at a genre that has actually maintained relevance throughout its existence.

POSSUM (dir. Matthew Holness) 

somewhere between Cronenberg's Spider and Andrew Getty's The Evil Within lurks this curio

SKIINER (dir. Ivan Naggy) 

a wonderfully insensitive addition to the 1990s DTV serial killer syllabus. 

LOLITA: VIBRATOR TORTURE (dir. Hisayasu Sato) 

Japan's Poet Laureate of Pinku Eiga pushes the Roman Porno to its most repellent extremes.

PIERCING (dir. Nicolas Pesce) 

the director of Eyes of My Mother returns with an American spin on the aforementioned Nikatsu Roman Porno series with a little boost from Audition scribe Ryu Murakami (who wrote the source novel).

HAGAZUSSA: A HEATHEN'S CURSE  (dir. Lucas Feigelfeld) 

a painterly, primordial shriek of mythomanical mutilation.

DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE (dir. S. Craig Zahler) 

more novelistic psychosis from the pulping populist ID.

PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT  (dir. Dennis Coooper, Zac Farley) 

motivations sharpened by ennui.

SAINT BERNARD  (dir. Gabe Bartalos) 

there is no where to begin with this one.

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 182

Trump invokes 

emergency powers 

to bypass Congress, 

sell arms to Saudis, 

UAE

Republicans and Democrats urged the Trump administration this week not to take the rare step of declaring an emergency to push through arms deals that lawmakers have blocked.

Negation Aspiration vol. 160

The golden maxim of this movement is to ‘be in the present moment.’ For mindfulness devotees, social and political change is contingent on the fantasy of converting the distracted masses to follow this advice and live ‘mindfully.’ The movement’s present moment fetish is a practice that cultivates social amnesia, encouraging a collective forgetting of historical memory and at the same time effectively foreclosing the utopian imagination.

The faux mindfulness revolution provides a way of endlessly coping with the problems of capitalism by taking refuge in the fragility of the present moment; the new chronic leaves us mindfully maintaining the status quo. This is a cruel optimism that encourages settling for a resigned political passivity. Mindfulness then becomes a way of managing, naturalizing and enduring toxic systems, rather than turning personal change towards a critical questioning of the historical, cultural, and political conditions that are responsible for social suffering.

The faux 

revolution 

of mindfulness

McMindfulness is the new capitalist spirituality.

Ronald Purser

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 181

Gallagher was arrested in September on more than a dozen charges. Gallagher is accused of having shot at unarmed forces and killing a teen ISIS prisoner with a knife before posing with the body. He has been charged with premeditated murder and attempted murder, among other illegal acts, and has pleaded not guilty to all charges. If convicted at his trial, set for later this month, he faces life in prison. Trump tweeted his sympathy for Gallagher in March.

Golsteyn is charged with premeditated murder for shooting and killing an unarmed Afghan man in 2010. Golsteyn claimed he did so out of fear the man would continue making explosives, even though the man had already been released following an interrogation by soldiers.

Trump is believed to also be trying to pardon Nicholas A. Slatten and the Marine Corps snipers who were filmed urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters. Slatten is a former Blackwater security contractor who was twice found guilty for participating in the 2007 shooting that left 14 unarmed Iraqis dead, and injured more than a dozen.

“Presidents use pardons to send messages. They recognize when a process wasn’t just or when punishments were too extreme, like for some nonviolent drug cases,” Love explained. “If this president is planning to pardon a bunch of people charged with war crimes, he will use the pardon power to send a far darker message.”

Trump expected to pardon Navy SEAL and Green Beret accused of war crimes, among others

Negation Aspiration vol. 159

SOMETHING APPEARS TO HAVE RIPPED A HUGE HOLE IN THE MILKY WAY AND SCIENTISTS DON’T KNOW WHAT

NERRRRRRRD! vol. 81

Game of Thrones Sees Internet Petition Make Disproportionate News Thanks to Lazy Entertainment Writers Staring at Twitter All Day

PSST: if you think i wouldn't be down with an episode of television that played like a D&D campaign from the director of THREADS that not only featured a brutalist ballet between a surly burn victim and the baby from DEAD ALIVE all swole up but also inspired bitter fangirl tears over the 8 year deep projection of their "fierce" icon's heel turn, then all there is to say is......

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 180

“The level of depravity in terms of this administration has no bounds. It’s just insane,” Mark-Viverito said. “It’s inhumane. There is no sense of the understanding what the implications are for the greater society. There is no consideration that these families are making positive economic contributions to these cities. It is about fearmongering to the nth degree.”

Before Trump’s purge at DHS, top officials challenged plan for mass family arrests

Negation Aspiration vol. 158

Deterrence capacity is essentially a measure of how terrified people are of a violent response if they were to cross Israel. Throughout all of Israel’s statehood, deterrence capacity has been at the center of its military strategy. It is established when the Israeli forces “demonstrate real hooliganism” at the demand of the high Israeli officials. The more indiscriminate the violence and the more fear struck into the hearts of Palestinians, the less likely they are to resist Israel’s harsh treatment. The Israelis use the term “mowing the lawn” to describe these periodic outbursts of violence. It is a deliberate attempt to beat a desperate people into submission in order to accomplish political ends. In a word, it is the definition of state terrorism.

There’s No Other Way To Put It: Israel Kills Babies To Terrorize Gaza Into Submission

Negation Aspiration vol. 157

previously on Negation Aspiration 

Florida man accused of wearing werewolf mask while torturing 2-year-old girl kills himself

Awww Yeah vol. 112

previously on Awwww Yeah

Allison Mack: From TV star to accused sex trafficker

We Are The Sprocket Holes vol. 339

How one LIer became Ugandan filmmaker's passionate advocate

Thanks to the behind-the-scenes efforts of East Northport's Alan Hofmanis, one of Isaac Nabwana's movies will be shown in the United States, including a screening at MoMA.

Awwww Yeah vol.111

Beck’s ideology has found a natural home in WoLF. Founded in 2014, the organization, in its own words, fights for “the total liberation of women” and “to end male violence, regain reproductive sovereignty, and ultimately dismantle the gender-caste system.” But for all of the talk of women’s rights, and despite the current assault on abortion rights led by Republicans (to name just one example) that would seem a more natural target of their ire, the bulk of WoLF’s activism has been obsessively limited to only one issue: fighting the expansion of trans rights, in the name of preventing the spread of what the group derides as the postmodern concept of “gender identity.” In their opposition, they have aligned with conservative, largely Christian rightwing activists and elected officials, who have their separate, reactionary reasons for wanting to maintain the notion that there is a strict dividing line between man and woman and who have, similarly, reframed the debate about trans rights as one about “safety for women and girls.”

The Unholy Alliance of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists and the Right Wing

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 179

Much of the Republican Party now spends much of its time and political capital protecting America’s Top Boy, President Donald Trump. While he is, in most respects, a perfectly apt representative of his class and generation, much of our president’s conduct could be fairly described as “adolescent”: the way he sulks and rages when he doesn’t get his way; the visceral pleasure he takes in mocking the vulnerable or disadvantaged; his solipsism and conviction that no one can teach him anything he doesn’t already know. Some of this just bears grim testimony to the stunted emotional capacity of any rich celebrity (neuroscientists and psychologists have identified numerous ways in which power and status warp the brain), and the rest is presumably the result of a degenerating mind replicating the limitations of a still-developing one.

Teenage Pricks

Trumpism’s brand of boy power

We Are The Sprocket Holes vol. 338

“They’re gonna show the fucking Driller Killer at the fucking Museum of Modern Art, bro!”

Sex, Drugs, 

Redemption 

and Filmmaking: 

A Candid 

Conversation 

With Abel Ferrara

The notorious filmmaker behind
 ‘King of New York’ 

and ‘Bad Lieutenant’
opens up about his MoMA
retro, 

New York, drugs,
redemption and sobriety

Negation Aspiration vol. 156

AI Evolved These Creepy Images to Please a Monkey’s Brain

What happens when an algorithm can ask neurons what they want to see?

Negation Aspiration vol. 155

on the morning of May 9, 1994, Gacy, having exhausted all appeals, had his last meal. That night after a confab with a priest, he took the needle and 18 minutes later lay dead. His last words? “Kiss my ass.”

GRISLY JOHN WAYNE GACY, THE PAINTING, MURDERING CLOWN

By Eugene S. Robinson

almost 25 years ago i caught an episode of A Current Affair. my reason for watching this show that i usually ignored was they were to air the final interview w/ Brandon Lee, conducted just before the tragic on-set accident that took his life during the filming of The Crow. the film was about to be released, and since it was based on a comic book, and i was a voracious obsessive with regards to that medium, i wanted to know more.

it was the lead-in to that story however, that would plant the seed for another interest that would eventually bloom into all-consuming. the story? the execution of John Wayne Gacy. the interest? serial killer lore.

Gacy was like a real-life Spawn villain; a portly ghoul who hid in plain sight via the quietly demonic costuming of friendly smiles and "legitimate" business.

my interest in serial killers and true crime had percolated in earnest the previous years with the release of mass murderer trading cards and underground comics about Jeffrey Dahmer, but it was this piece on Gacy that really operated as the portal into these grimy private universes that would go on to hold my attention and envenom my imagination for years to come.

Negation Aspiration vol. 154

Chief Deputy Chip Simmons said at a press conference on Wednesday they found systematic “torture” on the tapes. Two videos showed the child sleeping as the man entered the room wearing a werewolf mask and throwing the bottle at the child.

“What really strikes you is the fact that it is dark, the child is sleeping, the door opens and this guy throws a half-empty bottle right into the bed to wake the child up,” Simmons said.

They also found a “number of instances” where Ross-Celaius shot the girl with a airsoft gun to wake and hurt her.

Simmons said one of the more disturbing videos shows the child being shocked with a dog collar as she shrieks in pain. Ross-Celaius also allegedly used a butane lighter to burn the girl — either with the flame or by heating the end and pressing it to her skin.

Florida man wore werewolf mask while torturing girlfriend’s sleeping 2-year-old, police say

NERRRRRRRD! vol. 80

Many people understand that art is for expressing and exploring the human mind and soul—and the human mind and soul contain darkness, sexual mania, racism, hostility, and any number of awful truths. To force those things out of the conversation is to unreasonably limit the whole project, they say. Art is a treasured aspect of the healthy human condition, even if what the art says is unhealthy on various dimensions. Many others consider that tradeoff worth it in the name of protecting the status and feelings of previously excluded or oppressed groups.

Crumb's attempt to open comics to a vast range of human expression was victorious: Whether they want to acknowledge it or not, those working in the field today are his descendants. Like all children and grandchildren, they can choose whether or not to understand their patriarch, whether to emulate him or tell him to fuck off. Their choices may not always be kind or wise, but such is human freedom.

Cancel Culture Comes for Counterculture Comics

Today it's creators, not cops, who want to banish R. Crumb, onetime king of the comics underground.