Halloween Doomscroll
Where Good Vibes Have Sex and Then Get Murdered
The Artist and his Shadow
By: Erik Rittenberry
SEP 15, 2022
He is unfit for this life, this
unduly managed era devoid
of poesy and freedom, a time
of useless haste in honor of
the illusion of progress,
a life starving of life, a life
dripping with chains as dull-witted
bureaucrats and political
imbeciles run amok.
There’s something dark and peculiar in him
that forbids his full participation in
the blatant absurdity of
today’s world.
Even as a child he felt something
fierce was there in him — an unrest, an
unrealized freedom, something
shadowy but knowing,
a deep-seated primordial power
groping endlessly in the
apocalyptical night.
It’s still there, stirring in the
inmost abyss, this esoteric ghost,
this daemon, dwelling
in the shadows of the soul,
convulsing and throbbing like a
diabolical gypsy in the throes
of ecstasy.
He tries, at times, to wash it away
with morality and decency, bowing
down to the sanctified normalcy
of his fellow humans. But still,
it’s there, raging, taunting him,
hounding him, forcing him
out of the prison of SELF
and into the creative realm,
the destructive realm,
into the elemental kingdom
of existence.
It calls forth the spirit
into a higher dominion of being
and yearns for expression, this
enigmatic drive,
even at the cost of reputation
and alliance
and it tempts the body, the vehicle
of the soul, to thrive with
Dionysian defiance,
and it wants to flip over the table
of conventionalities and go to war
with all customary forms and
cultural norms.
It’s this archaic force that burns from
the most profound depths
of his being, an insatiable rapture
that coalesces the dark of the unconscious
with the universal light, arousing
the sheer realization of his
utter nothingness — the
true awakening.
He could hardly put on a mask and
endure the typical occupation, or
partake in the social games
of the ordinary, blindly acting
out his role on the stage of culture,
following the fashions of the
day, living uncritically as a
conditioned child.
Undefinable,
with no creed or title and a
fierce contempt for conceptual
reality, he’s in spiritual exile
from the place and time
he was born into. Terribly
alone among his contemporaries,
misunderstood
by an arid society, an
aimless wanderer, he is, laughed at
by the well-adjusted, their minds
chloroformed with low-grade
entertainment, their meanings
and desires built into them
from the outside.
The more emaciated they are inwardly,
the showier they become outwardly.
But he cares nothing of status
and spectacle or the unimaginative
interests of the bourgeois, so he
ventures onward
towards
an austere existence,
choosing the possibility of
poverty over pointless labor,
autonomy over dependency,
art over it all –
an unconditional renunciation
of a secure existence in
search of the sublime.
He’s in flight from the endless trivialities
that make up the modern world, choosing
instead to live perilously close to
the primal forces within.
His fate, he knows. He is doomed
to suffer alone.
When uninspired, the firm grip of melancholy
takes hold and he becomes the unhappiest
of mortals, endlessly sloshing around in
a cesspool of despair, nourishing
his apathy with whiskey and
mascara-smeared love.
But when enthused, he’s lit up,
galvanized, electrified, and his
heart is filled to the brim
with poetic rapture and the
forces at work within him
become relentless. He is
transformed into a mere
instrument of supremely
powerful forces,
consecrating and sacrificing
every fiber of his BEING to the
supreme task of
CREATION –
quenching the thirst
of a bone-dry
generation.
“O melodies above me in the infinite,
To you, to you, I rise.”Hania Rani. Ghosts.
“Ghosts is a story about life and death, light and darkness, real and unreal. It’s an attempt to touch ultimate qualities and craft my own mythologies; to face fears, take a deep dive into things that scare me but also seduce me subconsciously. Ghosts collects all of these things together, mixing the past, present and the future into a new sound of mine.”
“This will not be the last election in a democratic United States. Trump is far from the perfect candidate, his flaws more obvious than most of his predecessors. But the perfect candidate is elusive, and so one must accept much of the good and realize the imperfect is baked in. Trump is a boor at times, crude in his language and demeanor, but he is not a dictator. For all the noise about January 6, power transferred peacefully to Joe Biden days later. It was one bad afternoon, folks….”
Much of Trump’s dream-team coalition of mavericks are Paul’s fans and friends: RFK Jr. shares his longtime distrust of the CDC, FDA, and Big Pharma’s capture of our medicine; Tulsi Gabbard evokes his antiwar veteran perspective; Vivek Ramaswamy championed many similar policies in the 2024 primary. Musk talks about government spending as a tax on the people in a way we have not heard in a presidential campaign since Paul. Even J.D. Vance recently said he has “come around” to Paul’s ideas on the Federal Reserve.
Harris can almost be forgiven for acting like a typical politician eager to tap-dance furiously away from an issue she can’t in good conscience explain or justify, but Cooper blew an opportunity to exploit her little awkward transition from the foreign to the domestic. They are one and the same, and if you don’t think that sending billions of dollars of weapons to Israel after years of sending arms and cash to Ukraine doesn’t in some way affect Americans’ consternation at the cash register, then we need to talk.
“It’s no real pleasure in life,” says a man known as The Misfit who’s just killed a Christian family in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The man, a famous escaped convict, calls himself The Misfit because he can’t see what he’s done to be punished as he’s been. “Does it seem right to you, lady,” he asks the pious grandmother, “that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?” The woman calls to Jesus; the Misfit shoots her in the chest.
I like to borrow O’Connor’s term “Christ-haunted” to describe the music of Ethel Cain, the stage name of Hayden Anhedönia, who is often called a pop star, though you wouldn’t know that from her songs. Besides “American Teenager,” an “anti-patriotism fake pop song” that found its way to Barack Obama’s Best of 2022 playlist, her songs are doomed and dirge-like, preoccupied by fate. “I am punished by love,” Cain sings plainly on “Punish,” the first single from her forthcoming project, Perverts, which, at over nearly seven minutes, invokes angels and murderers, channeling the piano drone of Ruins-era Grouper and Midwife’s doleful so-described “heaven metal.”
“Words mean nothing anymore,” Cain wrote recently in a Tumblr post she’s since deleted. The post identified a crisis of sincerity, an unwillingness to earnestly engage with art without using the language of irony and memes. If certain moments on Preacher’s Daughter seemed to mesmerize the mainstream, “Punish” is Anhedönia embodying her name — an almost cruelly gorgeous word for the inability to feel pleasure, a word that seems to spite you for how good it feels to say. — By Meaghan Garvey, Pitchfork
NEW CITY CHICAGO/BRASIL
“…Material reality is bizarre in its own right. I don’t think about the apocalypse. I only see a possible exhaustion of conditions for human life on earth in the future. Anyone who has seen the death that misery brings knows that it comes at a slower pace, without the fanfare of trumpets, or an elevator. This is why it is so important to expand our radius of attention in the world.”
ProPublica and Documented obtained videos of the two speeches Vought delivered during events for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank led by Vought. The think tank’s employees or fellows include Jeffrey Clark, the former senior Justice Department lawyer who aided Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result; Ken Cuccinelli, a former acting deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Mark Paoletta, a former senior budget official in the Trump administration. Other Trump allies such as former White House adviser Steve Bannon and U.S. Reps. Chip Roy and Scott Perry either spoke at the conferences or appeared on promotional materials for the events.
“In this country, four generations on, we don’t matter, we don’t belong, that we’re still othered, and that it doesn’t matter how much blood, sweat, life you give, you’re still seen as the enemy within.” — Sayeeda Warsi
Surprised staff in Paul’s office are responding to media queries by sending out copies of original documents showing scheduled DHS/CISA participation. You can expect new denials to hit large news organizations as soon as tonight, with the result that a tale once destined to be a footnote to Election Day may now blow up into something larger and weirder.
