This past Friday I attended the filming of Peter Vack\u2019s new movie, www.RachelOrmont.com, and I found myself in a literal theater of cruelty self-destruction psychosis. What I thought was going to be a \u201Cfilmed party\u201D where I would be interviewed for 60 seconds and then float around observing people turned out to be an hours-long public humiliation ritual in which I was put on trial as revenge for a negative Substack review of a movie made by Peter and his sister, Betsey Brown. The shaming centered around collective ridicule of the way I write about a \u201Cfascist tendency\u201D in New York\u2019s downtown wannabe art scene, but what it ultimately did was expose this tendency in all its naked, pathetic sadism. Allowing myself to be humiliated without breaking was intensely empowering and harrowing of the self, giving me a new understanding of my own art\u2014as both a mirror and a bomb for \u201Cthis strange downtown world of mystic cranks, proto-fascists, and abortive avant-gardes.\u201D
New Blog For New Writers: Self-Destruction
This past April I was invited by the Ion Pack, the hosts of the Ion Podcast, to watch Betsey Brown\u2019s deep fringe underground movie Actors at the Roxy Cinema, under the impression that I would write a review of the movie. I hadn\u2019t had any previous association with Betsey Brown, Peter Vack, or the Ion Pack, but the Ion Pack guys had read my review of Matt Gasda\u2019s play Dimes Square, which they then skewered on their podcast. The Dimes Square play review was the first in an ongoing arc of cultural-criticism blogging that explores today\u2019s downtown scene. And although I didn\u2019t mention the Ion Pack specifically in that initial piece, I made fun of a bunch of targets that resembled them. It was after I tweeted a link to their podcast delighted at what they were saying about my writing\u2014\u201Cthe absolute worst kind of guy\u201D\u2026 \u201Che doesn\u2019t even mention us... it just got me angry, got me thinking\u201D \u2026 \u201Cit\u2019s like a Godard thing\u201D \u2026 \u201Cthe most insane thing I've ever read, low key\u201D\u2014that I guess they figured I had some self-awareness and a sense of humor about it all. So then they reached out and invited me to review this movie that they were promoting\u2014Betsey Brown\u2019s Actors\u2014assuring me that this is the \u201Creal downtown scene.\u201D Eager to capitalize on what I had already written and probe deeper into this world ripe for critical engagement, I agreed to review the movie, which was basically Tootsie\u2014if Tootsie was about how the most mentally ill and shameful thing for a cis person to do is to think it\u2019s better to be a trans person. (This was the source of minstrel humor, too, the simultaneous devaluation of black people and the mockery of the potential for white people to \u201Cact\u201D black, to become black even.)
I showed up a half hour before my call time and saw a long line snaking around the front of the Daryl Roth Theatre. These were the people responding to the Instagram call for extras. I passed by a \u201CBlack Lives Matter\u201D mural in my walk to the front of the line, where I met Curtis. He brought me inside, where I signed a talent consent form that gave the filmmakers the rights to use my likeness in their film, just as I had used their likeness in my writing. He then brought me downstairs to the theater\u2019s basement, where he showed me Dasha Nekrasova in her makeup room in the midst of a transformation into an anime girl. Then he told me what exactly they were supposed to be filming: the crowd of extras was to populate the house of the Daryl Roth Theatre and become an improvised IRL YouTube comments section/4chan message board. The special guests they had invited, which included myself, were to be dispersed through the crowd and contribute to the discussion as \u201CElite Trolls.\u201D Curtis said he didn\u2019t know how exactly I was supposed to fit in to the discussion\u2014that was all in Peter\u2019s head apparently\u2014but whatever I had to say about fascism in art was going to be part of some collage of internet chatter manifested in real life. I met Nick Rochefort of Million Dollar Extreme, who told us about how his collaborators Sam Hyde and Charles Carroll were having another feud at the moment, but that they would inevitably reconcile as always. Nick was supposed to be one of the \u201CElite Trolls,\u201D as were the artist Alex Bienstock, Wobble Palace filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko, actress Ivy Wolk, neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, Cum Town podcaster Nick Mullen, writer and Wet Brain podcaster Honor Levy, and Ion Pack podcasters Curtis and KJ themselves. Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz had been invited and was included as an Elite Troll in the call sheet for the day, but she had a scheduling conflict and would not be there. Curtis told me that this would be the last time the Ion Pack would don the black masks that signified their former anonymity, and how it was ironic that once the movie comes out it will have been two years since they last wore them. Soon after, the production team brought the Elite Trolls up to the theater house, where they were seated, dispersed through the crowd of regular troll background extras, who were either committed fans of the \u201CPeter Vack Cinematic Universe\u201D that found out about this through Instagram, or completely random people who were looking for work as film extras on the website Backstage. When I was waiting to be seated, Peter approached me and asked if I was ready, if I had prepared some response to the prompt. I said I was and asked if he\u2019d rather I respond in a sincere way, which would try to be more clear and reasoned, or a trolling way, which would be easier to present in \u201Cdumbed-down\u201D language but answer the prompt more obliquely. He said he\u2019d prefer I be more sincere, that I just be myself. He also said that they\u2019d be starting off with me. Weird, but whatever.
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People abuse drugs for many reasons, most related to personal stresses. Many people who suffer mental illness, including writers and artists, turn to drugs to self-medicate, but some artists take them intentionally to boost their creativity and the performance of their art. Madness and creativity are linked, and some artists are willing to endure the self-destruction of devastating mood disorders and psychosis of mental illness to fuel creative works of art by deliberately inducing these mental states with drugs to unbalance an otherwise healthy brain.
Often, this turmoil can be difficult for others to see or even for the perfectionist to acknowledge, as those who suffer often work diligently to maintain a cohesive image of accomplishment and well-being. As a result, perfectionists who are struggling with psychological distress may be less likely to receive the help they need, causing ever-deeper levels of emotional pain that can sometimes end in acts of self-destruction; research has linked perfectionism to nonsuicidal self-injury, and a 2007 study on suicides in Alaska found that 56% of those who took their own lives were described as perfectionists by family and friends.
Spargo has published stories in the Antioch Review, FICTION, Glimmer Train, SOMA, and the Kenyon Review, among other places. His essays and reviews on literature, culture, and rock music have been featured in Raritan, Commonweal, the Yale Review, and the Chicago Tribune, and he writes a blog called The HI/LO, on the interplay between high and low culture, for the Huffington Post.
I don't agree with you about Shirley, I think she comes across as loving too, she deeply cares for everyone, and she is a clean freak.I am tired of Midge's self-destruction every chance she gets. It is uncomfortable to watch.
Some schools use blogs as teaching tools with the benefit of improving English skills, writing and creativity. Facebook and other similar sites allow students to gather outside of school and exchange ideas about assignments or collaborate on group projects (Borja, 2005).
To better explain what I mean, when Lubos Motl reads in interesting paper concerning his own subject, thinks about it and comes up with some interesting thoughts and questions he rather posts an article on his blog as he did for example here to obtain a better response than he would get when posting a corresponding question here. And think about it, who should answer, if people like Qmechanic have a question about something they do not understand concerning their own research subject? There are simply not enough physicists of this calliber here who could appreciate or even answer such questions. 2ff7e9595c
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