System of Systems

Two of our favorite of gal pals, the beautiful Jana Surkova (of the Hate Fiction podcast) and the lovely Zach Langley Chi Chi (of the I'm so Popular podcast) join System of Systems to discuss the flattening of sexuality in cinema and, by extension, the collapse of eroticism in our society. The crew discusses Tumblr aesthetics (Adam comes out of the closet as a once Tumblr user), and their favorite sex scenes in cinema. Films discussed include: Blue is the Warmest Color, Showgirls, Crash, Crimes of Passion, and our namesake Network, and much more.

LINKS:

Jana's new podcast Hate Fiction: https://www.patreon.com/posts/50892957
Jana's twitter: @paranoidlikes
Zach's twitter: @asukahomo
Zach's I'm so Popular podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/im-so-popular/id1523827234
Review of David Thomson's 'Sleeping with Strangers'

The boys are joined by Zac Davis, a musician, thinker and writer who is perhaps best known for the mid-'00s noise rock/psychedelic no wave band Lamsbread, but has also done solo guitar noise and various strains of electronic music. Zac has also been writing some killer stuff and publishing it on Substack, which is linked to below. Fun fact: Zac and Adam both grew up on Cape Cod.

Topics of conversation move from underground music (Mark Morgan, Stefan Jaworzyn, Ft. Thunder and otherwise) before we get into discussions on the groovy heroin using Columbia Professor Carl Hart, and the neoliberal optimizing of hard drug use. Finally, the conversation ends on a criticism of the ever apparent theoretical incoherence of Adam Curtis, who Adam and Ben have soured on since the Red Scare interview.

LINKS:

Zac Davis Substack: https://zacdavis.substack.com/
Zac Davis discogs: https://www.discogs.com/artist/777386-Zac-Davis
Trilogy Tapes with Zac Davis: https://soundcloud.com/the-trilogy-tapes/ttt-nts-080218-with-zac-davis
Ulli Lommel interview: https://halloweenlove.com/interview-with-filmmaker-and-actor-ulli-lommel/
Opioid crisis stats: https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/opioid-crisis-statistics/index.html#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20an%20estimated%2010.1,and%20745%2C000%20people%20used%20heroin.
Mark Morgan/Sightings Interview: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/sightings
Stefan Jaworzyn interview: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/stefan-jaworzyn
Reza N Interview: https://www.neroeditions.com/docs/reza-negarestani-engineering-the-world-crafting-the-mind/
Carl Hart at GQ: https://www.gq.com/story/imagining-a-world-where-all-drugs-are-legal-carl-hart
Carl Hart CNN interview: https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/02/27/ivy-league-professor-uses-heroin-advocates-legalization.cnn

Ulli Lommell's The Tenderness of Wolves at Mubi: https://mubi.com/films/tenderness-of-the-wolves

Our anon homie Gaye Step Dad comes on the show finally! We talk about the tendency that Step Dad calls "anarchoid neoliberalism," the deliberate incoherence of prison abolitionists, Zero Books publisher Doug Lain's terrible take down video of the Marxist anti-left critique (Aimee, Benedict Cryptofash and otherwise), the new issue of E-flux which is published by transgender "Marxist-feminist" academic McKenzie Wark and the erosion of intellectual thought in America, and we end on an interesting discussion about the ideological contradictions and inconsistencies amongst the people that have been labeled "post-left." In short, the post-left is comprised of both ortho marxists/left coms (like Adam and Step Dad) and paleconservative social democrats (like Ben). Can these disparities be reconciled to remain a political force? Can we all remain the best of friends? Ya goddamn right we can!

Stepdad on twitter: https://twitter.com/GayeStepdad

Image: still from Luchino Visconti's 'The Damned'

LINKS:

Doug Lain "takes down" the anti-left: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPX21fRqhKY

McKenzie Wark 'The Cis Gaze and its Other': https://www.e-flux.com/journal/117/387134/the-cis-gaze-and-its-others-for-shola/

Debord on Bakunin and anarchism: https://radicalarchives.org/2010/06/13/guy-debord-on-anarchism/

Lewis Parker is a writer, editor, and the publisher of Morbid Books. Based in the UK, Morbid Books was founded upon the principles of the Surrealist Internationale and applies those principles to the schizoid landscape of our contemporary digital capitalism. They've published writing by poet Jeremy Reed, transgressive writer Supervert, philosopher Nina Power, and Lewis himself. They also publish a regular literary journal, A Void (named after the Georges Perec novel).
Its most recent publication is a work of excellent hallucinatory pulp, My Week Without Gerard, written by a pseudonymous writer Ivan Boris, which Adam reviewed.

LINKS:

Morbid Books: https://morbidbooks.net/

Surrealist Temple Band: https://soundcloud.com/user-985388830

Tommy Hazard in A Void: https://morbidbooks.net/feed/2020-11-01-the-other-zone/

Supervert interview: https://morbidbooks.net/feed/2019-04-14-supervert/

Fiction by Lewis: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/01/07/a-hero-of-our-time-fiction-lewis-parker/

Adam's review of 'My Week Without Boris': https://safetypropaganda.substack.com/p/i-am-lester-langway

Artist Petra Cortright joins Adam to discuss discontent with the contemporary art world and her journey from a "girl boss" to a "based and red-pilled girl boss." She emphasizes her romantic notion of an art divorced of politics and social issues, and chronicles her early work with web-cam based self-portraiture and her recent landscape paintings made from Photoshop technology. She also dishes on some of the experiences she had that blackpilled her on the insanity of the political ideology that pervades contemporary art.

LINKS:

Petra Cortright: https://www.petracortright.com/

Petra Cortright at Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrX_XbIix_E4EyNGhTjvn5Q

Petra Cortright on the Contain podcast: https://www.patreon.com/posts/patrician-highs-48806201?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copy_to_clipboard&utm_campaign=postshare

Petra Cortright at Danziger: https://www.danzigergallery.com/exhibitions/petra-cortright

Petra interview, The Creative Independent: https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/visual-artist-petra-cortright-on-having-the-confidence-to-create-anything-you-want/

Petra interview at Mousse Magazine: http://moussemagazine.it/joy-of-missing-out-petra-cortright-chiara-moioli-galeria-duarte-sequeira-braga-2019/

The boys are joined by Zac Davis, a musician, thinker and writer who is perhaps best known for the mid-'00s noise rock/psychedelic no wave band Lamsbread, but has also done solo guitar noise and various strains of electronic music. Zac has also been writing some killer stuff and publishing it on Substack, which is linked to below. Fun fact: Zac and Adam both grew up on Cape Cod.

Topics of conversation move from underground music (Mark Morgan, Stefan Jaworzyn, Ft. Thunder and otherwise) before we get into discussions on the groovy heroin using Columbia Professor Carl Hart, and the neoliberal optimizing of hard drug use. Finally, the conversation ends on a criticism of the ever apparent theoretical incoherence of Adam Curtis, who Adam and Ben have soured on since the Red Scare interview.

FULL EPISODE AT: https://www.patreon.com/posts/groovy-dope-w-49091250?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copy_to_clipboard&utm_campaign=postshare

LINKS:

Zac Davis Substack: zacdavis.substack.com/
Zac Davis discogs: www.discogs.com/artist/777386-Zac-Davis
Trilogy Tapes with Zac Davis: The-trilogy-tapes – Ttt-nts-080218-with-zac-davis
Ulli Lommel interview: halloweenlove.com/interview-with-f…tor-ulli-lommel/
Opioid crisis stats: www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-e…ple%20used%20heroin.
Mark Morgan/Sightings Interview: www.tinymixtapes.com/features/sightings
Stefan Jaworzyn interview: www.tinymixtapes.com/features/stefan-jaworzyn
Reza N Interview
Carl Hart at GQ: www.gq.com/story/imagining-a-w…are-legal-carl-hart
Carl Hart CNN interview: www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/02/2…es-legalization.cnn

To get us out of the depressing discourse loop of contemporary politics, we brought on the Scottish writer, academic, and editor of the exciting experimental lit publisher Hyperidean Press, Udith Dematagoda. We discuss Udith's recent novel, 'Horizontal Rain,' literary nihilism, and the rich history of reactionary ideology throughout early modernism: Céline, Wyndham Lewis, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Mishima, and more. There is also some discussions on painting, surrealism, failure, and pessimism. Udith has just published an excellent piece on Adam's Safety Propaganda project, which is linked below. Udith is currently finishing a book on the confluence of technology, fascism and masculinity.
  Links: Udith Dematagoda: https://udithdematagoda.com/about-2/ Udith Dematagoda 'Horizontal Rain': https://hyperideanpress.com/books Udith Dematagoda 'On Infantilism': https://safetypropaganda.substack.com/p/on-infantilism-by-udith-dematagoda Wyndham Lewis 'Tarr': http://www.gutenberg.org/files/58340/58340-h/58340-h.htm

Egg God joins the show to talk about the state of contemporary poetry and the culture around it, AOC's emotional warfare and offensive pattern of lying, and his recent Twink Revolution essay 'What Gregg Araki Was Trying to Say,' which leads to a discussion on commercial art at the end of history, and the liquidation of modernism and the avant-garde.

There is only one.

Fernando Pessoa 'Autopsychography'

The poet is a man who feigns
And feigns so thoroughly, at last
He manages to feign as pain
The pain he really feels,
And those who read what once he wrote
Feel clearly, in the pain they read,
Neither of the pains he felt,
Only a pain they cannot sense.
And thus, around its jolting track
There runs, to keep our reason busy,
The circling clockwork train of ours
That men agree to call a heart.

LINKS:

Egg God 'What Gregg Araki Was Trying to Say': https://twinkrev.com/2021/02/what-gregg-araki-was-trying-to-say/

Adam on Hype Williams and Commercial Art writ large: https://www.adamlehrer.com/blog/2020/5/15/2gba9lbl38vbk8obosi0y44gpq5bq6

Adam on Amanda Gorman: https://safetypropaganda.substack.com/p/amanda-gorman-and-the-rise-of-the

JG Ballard on Helmut Newton: https://www.jgballard.ca/media/1997_march_artforum_magazine.html

Charlie Fox on Harmony Korine: https://www.frieze.com/article/charlie-fox-harmony-korines-gummo

Michael Tracey on AOC: https://nypost.com/2021/02/04/how-aoc-links-the-personal-with-the-political-stifling-dissent/

Marxist writer and member of the Platypus Affiliated Society Efraim Carlebach joins the show to discuss two essays of his. In one essay, 'Returning to Marxism in the Age of Trump,' Efraim explored the left's defeatist tendencies through the Trump presidency, and 'Forgetting Mark Fisher' is a critique of Mark Fisher's claim to Marxism as well as Fisher's capitulation to the very capitalist realism tendency that he made his career defining. We also discuss the work of Platypus writ large, and its commitment to clearheaded Marxist analysis in an era very short of it.

LINKS

Efraim 'Returning to Marxism in the Age of Trump': https://platypus1917.org/2020/11/01/returning-to-marxism-in-the-age-of-trump-in-2020/

Efraim 'Forgetting Mark Fisher': https://platypus1917.org/2019/04/01/forgetting-mark-fisher/

Efraim 'Last Illusions': https://platypus1917.org/2017/06/05/last-illusions-labour-party-left/

Chris Cutrone 'Why Not Trump Again?': https://platypus1917.org/2020/02/01/why-not-trump-again/

Chris Cutrone 'Why Not Trump': https://chriscutrone.platypus1917.org/?p=2493

Chris Cutrone 'The Left is Dead! Long Live the Left!': https://platypus1917.org/project/the-left-is-dead-long-live-the-left/

Platypus podcast: https://soundcloud.com/platypus-affiliated-society

Mark Fisher 'All of this is Temporary' lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deZgzw0YHQI

The boys finally get a sit down with the left's least favorite Marxist and arguably the greatest poster in the history of political twitter, What's Left co-host Aimee Terese. The conversation revolves around the strict discourse policing on the left and its reactionary character, Aimee's experience trying to help the Sanders campaign only to watch in astonishment as they refused to do anything right, left com theory (Bordiga and others), and why Aimee Terese is the Mark Lombardi of liquid modernity.

Links:

What's Left on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/whatsleft/posts

Amadeo Bordiga 'Party and Class': https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1921/party-class.htm

Gilles Dauvé 'Communisation': https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-dauve-communisation

Otto Ruhle 'The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism': https://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1939/ruhle01.htm

Mark Lombardi's work and his death: https://www.newsweek.com/2015/10/16/contemporary-artist-mark-lombardi-death-379532.html