The Culture of Schizophrenia
Yatagan by Caron Paris was the fragrance of the summer. Watercress, galbanum and incense clouds. If you were to ask Jack Mason of The Perfume Nationalist he might disagree and say it was Magie Noire by Lancôme. There try a different ballet of scents with blackcurrant, jasmine and rose clouds of holocaust (always matching Jack’s unironically tasteful band t-shirt - We love you Douglas). Don’t believe me? Go to the bored perfume siren at your local Neiman Marcus and ask her. Find out how her clientele has been getting stranger, younger, and more male. The tastemakers at the department store grabbing obscure bottles and befriending counter ladies are all from perfume twitter. It’s no coincidence. The cross-wiring is real. You’re watching it in real time.
When the Roe v. Wade repeal draft decision leaked last spring pro-choice protesters clashed with LGBTQ+ atheists for life. Go back and watch the protest footage, it’s some of the funniest and most confusing historical event footage you will ever watch. Naturally nothing beats being there, but you live your life through screens now anyway. Suck it up. It won’t take long for pro-choice Aryan nation tradfems for women’s rights to follow suit. Yeah those are the most exaggerated examples, but if you have any proximity to people that care about ‘issues’ you’ll notice that just a small majority of them will seem to have lost their minds. The mind is surprisingly gifted at holding completely contradictory worldviews but you will see those limits stretched with every new software update patch from the official narrative cloud. Politics might be a waste of time, but being a spectator to mass psychological collapse is hard to avoid. Sometimes you just can’t help it. In 2018 I witnessed a man get gunned down at a gas station north of Richmond, Virginia. A few months earlier in New York City I waited for a bus down the block from where an NYPD cruiser had crashed into a one family home. The car the cops were following had collided with another vehicle in the intersection. There was human arm in the street. Rubbernecking political/mental collapse kind of feels a lot like watching those events. Richmond, Virginia though, not a great place, probably won’t go back.
During the summer of 2021 health food obsessed hippy New Age followers sheltered away from the cities to not get the vaccine. They weighed the cons of seed oils and performed group meditation rituals to ward off the coming arrival of dark archons through medicinal nano-particles in the aforementioned treatments. Go read about Austin’s Temple of the Sacred Womb. Think desert rave nu-hippies tangentially involved with NFTs discussing opening or closing the Lion’s Gate. You won’t easily pin down what any of that means, but you get the idea. The whole notion of stopping factory farming, eating healthy, growing local organic produce, raw milk, and preservation of the planet will all be on SPLC’s indicators or far right hate groups by year’s end. They probably already are. You’re experiencing manifold vibeshifts. Nothing makes sense anymore. There’s no reason to reason. No better time than now to start embracing the telos of informatics dummy data sets.
On the side topic of raves, the truly best raves in 2020 were at Devil’s Gate, Pasadena. They were illegal. The same tattletales that called called the police on Brooklyn warehouse parties summer 2020 through their ACAB phone backgrounds also tried to shutdown the LA party scene all year. But the true insurrectionists in the spirit of Devil’s Gate JPL bros will be the first ones to tell you, “It was just the flu bro” through a halcyon devil worship concrete graffiti pit, complete with EDM laser haze and rockets. The stories you will hear about the Devil’s Gate raves are now the stuff of legend. While you were socially distancing, cool omni rebel cowboys were throwing parties inside storm drains and abandoned churches. You weren’t there because you were hiding from the flu, you cuck, loser. It’s just the truth, you missed out.
Cross-wiring is the easy way to describe a phenomena where the usual categories of ideology or politics no longer apply. It recalls Oliver Bateman’s piece in Unheard, The Radical Left is now Extinct - the response to which is a resounding “duh”. Whatever fragments remain of the left are completely consumed by state and corporate power sure, but individuals parse out differently. Individuals don’t quite pan out the way mass movements do - certainly not anymore. When attention spans are as low as they are now, and narcissism is replaced with real life schizoposting, you can expect more and more novel hilarious results. Expect to see weirder and weirder events, weirder and weirder identity categories. One of the weirder cross-wired schizo moments of the year was the photos of the April 2022 DC mass shooter’s apartment.
Wait, what is that? Zoom in.
Enhance
Makes total sense. Asian mass shooter with a poster of Yakub, the mythic Nation of Islam African scientist that created the white race 6000 years ago on the island of Patmos by way of Eugenics.
My best advice is to ignore all of it if you can. Shoot a film, learn the harp, open a porn studio. Do anything but pay attention to any of this.
Unhinged will be the theme going into 2023. Christopher Lasch predicted America would be defined by pathological narcissism in the twenty-first century. He missed the part about pathological schizophrenia. He’s also careful to mention the ‘vibeshift’ continuing through 2023 when he appears in your dreams.
Which brings us to Dimes Square
What the fuck is Dimes Square? Schizophrenia I get. I’m from New York, I’m not exactly a portrait of mental health. But this scene defining phrase keeps showing up and I keep ignoring it.
Don’t worry you can continue to ignore it. Christopher Lasch revealed the answers to me last night in a cryptic dream full of symbols and predictions. Here is what Lasch told me:
Former prostitute Marie Chinchilla Auburn will be the Alan Ginsburg of Canal Street. She is married to a former Mossad agent with Hepatitis, Aviv Ratzei. The couple is well known for a series of sex parties with less than subtle artistic reference to Clive Barker by way of the The Accursed Share. Not to be topped by Sean Thor Conroe’s fifteen minutes, Marie will release a poetry book, “Rentboi” to widespread cultural confusion.
Fashionably overweight incel romantic going by various pseuds lifted from German idealists will “Kick it like Kierkegaard” while redefining the Hegelian dialectic for a new generation of fashionably muscular homosexual right-wing body builders practicing testicle sunning as a pre Yukio Mishima book club reading ritual. He will not lose any of the weight despite opining that he wishes he could “make all the mids skinny” with his mind.
Popular support for Ukraine will wane in downtown Manhattan after mass refugee resettlement of sonnenrad clad blonde Ukrainian femme fatales and femmeboy fatales in the Lower East Side. A whole generation of post-covid relationships will be upended as refugees steal boyfriend and girlfriend alike in a chthonic ritual of Slavic vrill magick. The mid problem is finally solved for good.
NPCC Festival never finds a venue is forced to rebrand as Poetry Brothel.
New York City continues to produce no music of note. Bands no one cared about that pulled their music from Spotify to protest Joe Rogan continue to make no impact.
Podcasts are not over and will continue to be funded by really cool mysterious dark money akin to classical Renaissance patronage. Certain iconoclastic thinspo NYC podcasters will deny it, but we all know.
Publishing remains decentralized. There’s better literature being produced in Salt Lake City right now than there is in NYC. Downtown Manhattanites remain oblivious and continue posting Apu meme while in Ariel Pink t-shirt.
#MeToo is over, but only because celebrity is over.
Martin Shkreli will move to the Lower East Side
Dimes Square is cool and trendy and NYC is the greatest city in the world.