#the corporate slop art I call it

[anchovy]

Going to a local art shop in a beach town is always a gamble because you’ll either find the coolest shit ever or it’s just this shit

[imsobadatnicknames2]

How can you consider yourself any sort of leftist when you defend AI art bullshit? You literally simp for AI techbros and have the gall to pretend you're against big corporations?? Get fucked

I don't "defend" AI art. I think a particular old post of mine that a lot of people tend to read in bad faith must be making the rounds again lmao.

Took me a good while to reply to this because you know what? I decided to make something positive out of this and use this as an opportunity to outline what I ACTUALLY believe about AI art. If anyone seeing this decides to read it in good or bad faith... Welp, your choice I guess.

I have several criticisms of the way the proliferation of AI art generators and LLMs is making a lot of things worse. Some of these are things I have voiced in the past, some of these are things I haven't until now:

Most image and text AI generators are fine-tuned to produce nothing but the most agreeable, generically pretty content slop, pretty much immediately squandering their potential to be used as genuinely interesting artistic tools with anything to offer in terms of a unique aesthetic experience (AI video still manages to look bizarre and interesting but it's getting there too)

In the entertainment industry and a lot of other fields, AI image generation is getting incorporated into production pipelines in ways that lead to the immiseration of working artists, being used to justify either lower wages or straight-up layoffs, and this is something that needs to be fought against. That's why I unconditionally supported the SAG-AFTRA strikes last year and will unconditionally support any collective action to address AI art as a concrete labor issue

In most fields where it's being integrated, AI art is vastly inferior to human artists in any use case where you need anything other than to make a superficially pretty picture really fast. If you need to do anything like ask for revisions or minor corrections, give very specific descriptions of how objects and people are interacting with each other, or just like. generate several pictures of the same thing and have them stay consistent with each other, you NEED human artists and it's preposterous to think they can be replaced by AI.

There is a lot of art on the internet that consists of the most generically pretty, cookie-cutter anime waifu-adjacent slop that has zero artistic or emotional value to either the people seeing it or the person churning it out, and while this certainly was A Thing before the advent of AI art generators, generative AI has made it extremely easy to become the kind of person who churns it out and floods online art spaces with it.

Similarly, LLMs make it extremely easy to generate massive volumes of texts, pages, articles, listicles and what have you that are generic vapid SEO-friendly pap at best and bizzarre nonsense misinformation at worst, drowning useful information in a sea of vapid noise and rendering internet searches increasingly useless.

The way LLMs are being incorporated into customer service and similar services not only, again, encourages further immiseration of customer service workers, but it's also completely useless for most customers.

A very annoyingly vocal part the population of AI art enthusiasts, fanatics and promoters do tend to talk about it in a way that directly or indirectly demeans the merit and skill of human artists and implies that they think of anyone who sees anything worthwile in the process of creation itself rather than the end product as stupid or deluded.

So you can probably tell by now that I don't hold AI art or writing in very high regard. However (and here's the part that'll get me called an AI techbro, or get people telling me that I'm just jealous of REAL artists because I lack the drive to create art of my own, or whatever else) I do have some criticisms of the way people have been responding to it, and have voiced such criticisms in the past.

I think a lot of the opposition to AI art has critstallized around unexamined gut reactions, whipping up a moral panic, and pressure to outwardly display an acceptable level of disdain for it. And in particular I think this climate has made a lot of people very prone to either uncritically entertain and adopt regressive ideas about Intellectual Propety, OR reveal previously held regressive ideas about Intellectual Property that are now suddenly more socially acceptable to express:

(I wanna preface this section by stating that I'm a staunch intellectual property abolitionist for the same reason I'm a private property abolitionist. If you think the existence of intellectual property is a good thing, a lot of my ideas about a lot of stuff are gonna be unpalatable to you. Not much I can do about it.)

A lot of people are suddenly throwing their support behind any proposal that promises stricter copyright regulations to combat AI art, when a lot of these also have the potential to severely udnermine fair use laws and fuck over a lot of independent artist for the benefit of big companies.

It was very worrying to see a lot of fanfic authors in particular clap for the George R R Martin OpenAI lawsuit because well... a lot of them don't realize that fanfic is a hobby that's in a position that's VERY legally precarious at best, that legally speaking using someone else's characters in your fanfic is as much of a violation of copyright law as straight up stealing entire passages, and that any regulation that can be used against the latter can be extended against the former.

Similarly, a lot of artists were cheering for the lawsuit against AI art models trained to mimic the style of specific artists. Which I agree is an extremely scummy thing to do (just like a human artist making a living from ripping off someone else's work is also extremely scummy), but I don't think every scummy act necessarily needs to be punishable by law, and some of them would in fact leave people worse off if they were. All this to say: If you are an artist, and ESPECIALLY a fan artist, trust me. You DON'T wanna live in a world where there's precedent for people's artstyles to be considered intellectual property in any legally enforceable way. I know you wanna hurt AI art people but this is one avenue that's not worth it.

Especially worrying to me as an indie musician has been to see people mention the strict copyright laws of the music industry as a positive thing that they wanna emulate. "this would never happen in the music industry because they value their artists copyright" idk maybe this is a the grass is greener type of situation but I'm telling you, you DON'T wanna live in a world where copyright law in the visual arts world works the way it does in the music industry. It's not worth it.

I've seen at least one person compare AI art model training to music sampling and say "there's a reason why they cracked down on sampling" as if the death of sampling due to stricter copyright laws was a good thing and not literally one of the worst things to happen in the history of music which nearly destroyed several primarily black music genres. Of course this is anecdotal because it's just One Guy I Saw Once, but you can see what I mean about how uncritical support for copyright law as a tool against AI can lead people to adopt increasingly regressive ideas about copyright.

Similarly, I've seen at least one person go "you know what? Collages should be considered art theft too, fuck you" over an argument where someone else compared AI art to collages. Again, same point as above.

Similarly, I take issue with the way a lot of people seem EXTREMELY personally invested in proving AI art is Not Real Art. I not only find this discussion unproductive, but also similarly dangerously prone to validating very reactionary ideas about The Nature Of Art that shouldn't really be entertained. Also it's a discussion rife with intellectual dishonesty and unevenly applied definition and standards.

When a lot of people present the argument of AI art not being art because the definition of art is this and that, they try to pretend that this is the definition of art the've always operated under and believed in, even when a lot of the time it's blatantly obvious that they're constructing their definition on the spot and deliberately trying to do so in such a way that it doesn't include AI art.

They never succeed at it, btw. I've seen several dozen different "AI art isn't art because art is [definition]". I've seen exactly zero of those where trying to seriously apply that definition in any context outside of trying to prove AI art isn't art doesn't end up in it accidentally excluding one or more non-AI artforms, usually reflecting the author's blindspots with regard to the different forms of artistic expression.

(However, this is moot because, again, these are rarely definitions that these people actually believe in or adhere to outside of trying to win "Is AI art real art?" discussions.)

Especially worrying when the definition they construct is built around stuff like Effort or Skill or Dedication or The Divine Human Spirit. You would not be happy about the kinds of art that have traditionally been excluded from Real Art using similar definitions.

Seriously when everyone was celebrating that the Catholic Church came out to say AI art isn't real art and sharing it as if it was validating and not Extremely Worrying that the arguments they'd been using against AI art sounded nearly identical to things TradCaths believe I was like. Well alright :T You can make all the "I never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a catholic" legolas and gimli memes you want, but it won't change the fact that the argument being made by the catholic church was a profoundly conservative one and nearly identical to arguments used to dismiss the artistic merit of certain forms of "degenerate" art and everyone was just uncritically sharing it, completely unconcerned with what kind of worldview they were lending validity to by sharing it.

Remember when the discourse about the Gay Sex cats pic was going on? One of the things I remember the most from that time was when someone went "Tell me a definition of art that excludes this picture without also excluding Fountain by Duchamp" and how just. Literally no one was able to do it. A LOT of people tried to argue some variation of "Well, Fountain is art and this image isn't because what turns fountain into art is Intent. Duchamp's choice to show a urinal at an art gallery as if it was art confers it an element of artistic intent that this image lacks" when like. Didn't by that same logic OP's choice to post the image on tumblr as if it was art also confer it artistic intent in the same way? Didn't that argument actually kinda end up accidentally validating the artistic status of every piece of AI art ever posted on social media? That moment it clicked for me that a lot of these definitions require applying certain concepts extremely selectively in order to make sense for the people using them.

A lot of people also try to argue it isn't Real Art based on the fact that most AI art is vapid but like. If being vapid definitionally excludes something from being art you're going to have to exclude a whooole lot of stuff along with it. AI art is vapid. A lot of art is too, I don't think this argument works either.

Like, look, I'm not really invested in trying to argue in favor of The Artistic Merits of AI art but I also find it extremely hard to ignore how trying to categorically define AI art as Not Real Art not only is unproductive but also requires either a) applying certain parts of your definition of art extremely selectively, b) constructing a definition of art so convoluted and full of weird caveats as to be functionally useless, or c) validating extremely reactionary conservative ideas about what Real Art is.

Some stray thoughts that don't fit any of the above sections.

I've occassionally seen people respond to AI art being used for shitposts like "A lot of people have affordable commissions, you could have paid someone like $30 to draw this for you instead of using the plagiarism algorithm and exploiting the work of real artists" and sorry but if you consider paying an artist a rate that amounts to like $5 for several hours of work a LESS exploitative alternative I think you've got something fucked up going on with your priorities.

Also it's kinda funny when people comment on the aforementioned shitposts with some variation of "see, the usage of AI art robs it of all humor because the thing that makes shitposts funny is when you consider the fact that someone would spend so much time and effort in something so stupid" because like. Yeah that is part of the humor SOMETIMES but also people share and laugh at low effort shitposts all the time. Again you're constructing a definition that you don't actually believe in anywhere outside of this type of conversations. Just say you don't like that it's AI art because you think it's morally wrong and stop being disingenuous.

So yeah, this is pretty much everything I believe about the topic.

I don't "defend" AI art, but my opposition to it is firmly rooted in my principles, and that means I refuse to uncritically accept any anti-AI art argument that goes against those same principles.

If you think not accepting and parroting every Anti-AI art argument I encounter because some of them are ideologically rooted in things I disagree with makes me indistinguishable from "AI techbros" you're working under a fucked up dichotomy.

[glarnboudin]

Man, there's an entire fucking industry of neckbeards on YouTube that devote themselves to malding about how every little aspect of RWBY is fundamentally cringe and boring, from the things that make the series' aesthetic what it is to bullshit like trying to to imply that villainous characters are in the moral right for attempted genocide.

Meanwhile, those same shit-slurping bottom-feeders will happily sing the praises of [insert shounen anime here] that does the exact same thing, often to a far greater extreme. They'll harp on and on about Bakugou or Sasuke or literally any other Edgy McFightyMan about how DeEP AnD muLTifacEteD he is... when they'd be called a Mary Sue in an instant if they were female, or even worse, made by a Western creator.

They'll gleefully gobble the mass-produced slop that they fill their trough with and gloat about how the overarching plot of the current popular thing is sooooo unbelievably timeless... when said plot is just the same bog-standard shit as in all shounen. The System is Perfect and Flawless, and anybody who dissents is a faceless mass of generic pure evil and is morally acceptable to murder/hospitalize en masse; any antagonists that abuse the rules of the establishment for their own gain are doubly Impure and Sinful for the crime of tainting the Perfect System. It doesn't take long for the original message to get buried as the authors of these works are put through the grinder to stretch out the story as much as possible to meet the lethally high standards of the manga industry, corporate overhead demanding that everything be smothered beneath marketable trends that the unwashed masses prefer to consume.

This shit isn't subtext, it's just borderline text - but point that out, and you get barraged by hordes of shrieking consoomers incensed that you dared to suggest anything being wrong with the current Popular Thing that they've decided is the next timeless work of art... at least until the next Popular Anime comes along and they toss it aside with the rest, eager to start consooming the next batch of fresh slop.

Wonder why that happens? Wonder what feature makes RWBY's cast so deeply offensive to this sea of interchangeable milquetoast 'reviewers' that makes blindly consooming this ultra-masculine crap their entire personality? Hmmmmmmm, I wonder.

[vixivulpixel]

Palworld getting so much hype drummed up around it is so frustrating for multiple reasons. One because of how so many of the designs are very blatant knockoffs of Pokemon and even some Fakemon.

But of course bring this up to anyone and they'll say "it's parody so it's fine" or call you a corporate shill when it's less about defending The Pokemon Company or GameFreak or Whoever but more about Let's Maybe Not Encourage Art Theft In A Subgenre Where The Whole Point Is About Collecting Funny Little Guys.

Like maybe there's some hyperbole in this statement but if Palworld sees significant success I could legitimately see it being the effective death of monster-catchers for a while, because all of the less-savory devs are going to see is how easy it is to dupe disgruntled Pokemon fans into being stans of plagiarized slop so long as you feign being big-budget.

So it's like, no, speaking as an artist and enthusiast of monster designs, I kind of find Palworld physically revolting! And the idea of its behavior becoming the norm on a scale not seen since all the bad Pokemon Go clones kinda makes me physically ill.

But also because where the hell was all this hype when something like Cassette Beasts was coming out? It's one of the most visually inspired indie monster-catchers out there but the Illuminaughtii of video games gets all the attention.

[heyupyoursjr]

If you support dreamkeepers/vivid you're now supporting ai

If anyone here knows who dreamkeepers are, they now openly condone ai & have an "art" contest going on for it & want you to use an ai model that is used to create non-consensual porn models of existing people & they're also blocking people & hiding post that call them out, also for the traditional art contest that they're hosting alongside the ai one has the same prize as the ai "art" contest so they're literally comparing artist hard work to ai slop.

If you want to gauge their mindset, I sent them a message why I was leaving their Discord because of a moderator that openly allows, post & praises ai garbage(that's clearly scrapped from artists) just to get their rocks off & they're completely ok with it & their response was "I'm sorry you feel that way"

Another sad part is that we were following each other since the early days of Tumblr & it makes me sad seeing what they turned into, with the amount of people telling me why they left their community & the people they keep in their circles.

I sent them an email, all they did was skirt around all the unprofessional/petty behavior & they don't care if you use civitai that is used to create non-consensual porn models of existing people because they told me it has nothing to do with them.

They also informed me that they had an overwhelmingly positive response to the ai stuff & "people have been trying to drive readers away from their stories for years" kind of proves a point, literally turning into the big bad corporation that uses ai & doesn't care.

Seeing the amount of hate for this ai stuff on their Facebook post makes me wonder where the "overwhelmingly positive response" is & wondering why they told me their fans have an interest in it when they clearly don't.

Here's a few links about the ai that dreamkeeperscomic now condone & also want you to use for their contest. \/ \/ \/ https://apnews.com/article/generative-ai-illegal-images-child-abuse-3081a81fa79e2a39b67c11201cfd085f https://www.diyphotography.net/ai-generator-civitai-under-fire-for-creating-nsfw-images-of-children/ https://luddite.pro/civitai-facilitates-use-stolen-intellectual-property/

It really sucks when an artist you've looked up to for so long & even backed multiple indiegogo/kickstarters does stuff like this, I'm beyond disappointed in them & I'll be getting rid of all of the merch that I've gotten over the years.

I highly encourage everyone to second guess anything that has to do with dreamkeepers or vivid.

[erice549]

i think i figured out why kids' TV (and tbh, all of TV) sucks these days.

looking at the current landscape, every network and every big show has its own youtube channel, filled with compilations of previous clips and episodes.

it's the reason why blue's clues would never work in this day and age, and why its revival is ending with its 5th season next year and was removed from paramount+ a few months ago.

to The Corporate Behemoth™, everything has to be "content." clippable slop purely meant to be consumed.

unless you count bluey, but that's the only show i can think of that broke the mold in this current era.

now you know why i call myself a "thingmaker," and why some prefer to call it "art." the term "content" feels so depressing, and that feeling will probably get bigger and bigger as time goes on.

[gloopytits-chaosmod]

I've interfaced enough with anime fans to know that watching anime comes from a place of weakness, of refusing to engage with media, to seek the absolute lowest denominator of storytelling where there's nothing challenging and every character only exists though the trope you can discern from a glance.

Anime as an industry degenerates art itself. Twitter is filled with artists putting their whole pussy into making spunky colourful character designs of the same female to exist only for users to briefly acknowledge then discard from their brain forever. Spot, like, scroll. Fulfillment.

Anything that doesn't give an immediate dopamine release at the moment of impact between visual stimuli and the interpretation cortex is thrown out for being too challenging. Anime is the new medium by which people who understand they understand very little and refuse to do something about it express the world; through total and complete rejection of complexity, depth, personality, passion or meaning. Through the endless consumption of colour and voice acting throw together into a slop and churned through the corporate grinder.

What remains is a deeply political, radicalised cell with no awareness of the social values they embody as they allow conservative corporate culture define what is and isn't, only to turn around on the burner account to ask why the fuck they feel like shit all the time, why the dysphoria is so bad, why it's so hard to live with what you have. The state of anime is a race to the bottom to hack the human mind and create consumers that become dependent on their media like addicts to heroin.

from this we get idol industries and the toxic parasocial nature of Vtubers and their community. To a person adjusted to deal with reality as is these entities are off putting because they emulate a more infantile moment of life, but to the people whose malfunction is the lack of synchronicity between real life and their favourite media these are safe spaces where they can be groomed into ideal whales, ideal citizens, defenders of slop and Catholic, the isolation of the make believe social structure they've come to depend on further alienating them from the world they've lost track of.

For money.

If Axis Infinity is capitalism in its most raw form for the digital era, bourgeois dividing the means labour between workers recieving the bare minimum to go on living, then the Anime Industry is the late capitalism of the digital era, a mind numbing anaesthetic for coping with the radicalising political reality, praising your passivity and rewarding you for never challenging yourself and your peers. It's the makings of fascism, of a loyal herd, of an environment where critical voices are unwelcome. We know this because Anime communities are the most welcoming of sexists, racists and other bigots. It appeals to losers who need online communities to validate their reactionary political beliefs because as an inherently and deeply conservative industry it consciously chooses to suppress the reality of whatever conservatives dislike.

It's a safe space for the world's biggest fucking losers.

Not to mention shit fucking forums like reddit's "anime circle jerk" where they consume the exact same garbage but with a wink to the camera, with the authenticity of an ex smoker going "drunk cigs don't count haha". I don't care if you're performatively leftist, if you have no standards, if you have no boundaries, if corporate anime still appeals to you despite how uncomfortable it ought to make you as a queer person, as a woman, as anything that Japanese and western conservative culture wishes was either dead or repressed, your leftism is for naught and you'll justify anything as long as it appeals to what you want to like.

So no, I'm not fucking watching Chainsaw Man. Stop calling things peak just because it's the last thing you watched.

[chinbeardandfedoro]

An Unfortunate Incident which hath the Capacity to Harsh even the Sweetest Mellow

Act III, Scene 5 A well-trod alley.

[Enter CHINBEARD and FEDORO.]

CHINBEARD. Well met down this well-trod alley, Fedoro.

FEDORO. Thou'rt punctual as thou art observant, Chinbeard, for the chimes hath just now rung the quarter hour after four. Bringeth thou the weed?

CHINBEARD. I bear it like a barrow full of crabgrass. Pray, fetch forth your piece so that we may partake behind this obscuring dumpster.

FEDORO. I'faith, Chinbeard, now that possession and consumption be within the bounds of law we have no further compulsion to engage in clandestine behaviour.

CHINBEARD. Ay? Shall we out in the open, then?

FEDORO. And why not?

CHINBEARD. O brave new world, that has such chill in it.

FEDORO. Here, I blaze, I puff twice, I pass.

CHINBEARD. I thank you.

[Enter FALSPATCH, late for a bus.]

FEDORO. Hail, Sir Falspatch, and the best of the day go with you.

FALSPATCH. And with you, Signore Fedoro, and you as well, noble Chinbeard. I can linger only but a moment, as I must to the bus stop yonder.

CHINBEARD. Canst thou use the bus stop hither?

FALSPATCH. Not hither, not today, not until the next rain.

FEDORO. Whyfor?

CHINBEARD. Yes, good Sir Falspatch, tell us, and in verse if you like.

FALSPATCH.    Then by your leave, I'll take your dialogue,    Insert myself, and therein hang a tale    Of an odious and most offensive act    Performèd by some wretched human flotsam.

FEDORO. I've no objection.

CHINBEARD. I cannot object.

FALSPATCH.    So glad to hear. Here's how it all went down:    Whilst waiting for the bus, I chanced to see    One of Nature's rare and gross mistakes    Shambling forth, unmaskèd, in the street    And every other breath this creature drew    Transformed he them into great hocking coughs    And, collecting in his throat such humours    Detested as they are in time of plague,    Expelled them all with sound and moistened spittle    Into that gutter vile through which he walked.    So tell me true, would I be in my right    Were I to have then loudly called out thus:

   My peers and betters, rabble, omnes all,    I present to you a specimen most crude:    In live corporeal form, the reason why    Expectoration bans were writ on signs    Which, as they did a hundred years ago    Proliferated here like flies on slop.    Behold! Begone! Befoul some other bus    Thou noxious shade, thou most unwelcome wind,    Thou germ! For like the microscopic cell,    You split whene'er you clear your phlegmish throat    And spread with each prokaryotic gob    Miasma undeservèd and infernal.

   So as the fiddle burned itself 'fore Nero,    I leave thee to thy dark work, Patient Zero.

Holds for applause.

CHINBEARD. Receiveth none.

FALSPATCH. Go to!

CHINBEARD. And yet I would tell thee, thou'rt in the right to have called him out for his transgressions.

FALSPATCH. Indeed?

CHINBEARD. And that's the kindest answer you'll get out of me.

FALSPATCH. I thank thee for thy honesty, good Chinbeard.

FEDORO. Before thy bus arrives, Falspatch, did the noxious man respond to your oratory? And pray, tell us with a couplet. Our time is almost up.

FALSPATCH.    He had no answer, nay, he heard me not;    I fled first thing, so now I curse the clot.

[A report of HORNS off.]

FALSPATCH. My bus!

[Exit FALSPATCH, pursuing public transit.]

CHINBEARD. I thought he'd never leave.

FEDORO. In truth I expected two more stanzas.

CHINBEARD. The extant was sufficient. His was a song writ in the signature of Passive-Aggressive, and in its syncopation I am moved to weep.

FEDORO. Pray pass the weed before your tears extinguish the cherry.

CHINBEARD. Alas! I fear I hath cashed it.

FEDORO. Make room, thou bogart, for I shall join thee in the weeping.

[Exit BOTH, in full weep]

[caltropspress]

Notes on Pink Siifu’s NEGRO

You and anybody else who wants to get their random vicarious kicks off White Power can stay the fuck away from me. 

—Lester Bangs

Tell a nazi he can suck my dick. —Pink Siifu, from “SMD”

My first contact with white america was marked by her violence, for when a white doctor pulled me from between my mother’s legs and slapped my wet ass, I, as every other negro in america, reacted to this man-inflicted pain with a cry. A cry that america has never allowed to cease; a cry that gets louder and more intense with age….A cry? Or was it a scream? —H. Rap Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin), from Die Nigger Die!

it is the hour of conflict, antagonism, struggle the world turning autumn in warpaint everything silently prepares to scream —Amiri Baraka, from “Disorder”

1.  

White institutional power operates to negate or suppress. To that end, white institutional power bestows awards on singular figures when it’s convenient. Let’s call one such example Kendrick Lamar. Pulitzer Prizing DAMN. is white institutional power taking cover. This, in no way, defangs DAMN. But it does provide crowd control. Pink Siifu, meanwhile, won’t be awarded a Pulitzer for NEGRO. If he did, I’m confident he’d pull an Adrienne Rich, telling President Clinton to choke on his National Medal for the Arts, seeing as how the U.S. gov’t drives “the demonization of our young Black men.” Siifu would be PE boycotting the Grammys on the grounds of Black invisibility. Or John Lennon relinquishing his membership in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire because, well, empire (see: Biafra).

2.

NEGRO is what happens when Three 6 Mafia goes full bandolier, full decolonization, full Thomas Sankara. When the emphasis is on the 666 sirening[1] across white cop foreheads, reflecting off Makrolon face shields. Siifu cites and channels Sun Ra, June Tyson, Death, and Bad Brains, but you also hear the mass hysteria of Abbey Lincoln’s vocal cords trembling, of Max Roach’s We Insist! in a street brawl showdown with the LRAD. Basically, it’s Ornette blowing sax in a riot, harmolodics like incendiary devices.

3.

“FK” is the primal scream reaction of hearing the news another one of your people has been killed, snuffed out. Suffer through our screams, it says to the listener. And “out of body, out of mind” distorts what we see with what we witness. It’s the re-played, re-tweeted, re-shared visuals of Black death.

4.

At moments, NEGRO sounds like Aaron Dilloway organizing a chapter of the White Panther Party.

5.

Siifu’s lyrics are a Stokely speech draft. His artistry is prismatic, shattered pane glass: crust punk, jazz cat, marching band drummer, hood ballerina, noisemaker, bareknuckle emcee. His lyrics should be run off on the mimeo and saddle-stitched into a chapbook for Totem Press to publish.

6.

“SMD” samples from Ivan Dixon's 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by the Door (“Do you hear me, man?...I am BLACK!”). Just like dead prez sampled the dialogue before Siifu on “We Want Freedom.” Siifu and dead prez are bedfellows, for sure, but Siifu's head rests on a pillow of static. It’s the friction that electrifies.

7.

NEGRO is the art of de-arresting in audio form. As the comrades at Mask Magazine have stated, de-arrests “are beautiful,” reminding us “the law and the state are not supernatural forces.”[2]

8.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable using the word freedom. It’s a word that’s been co-opted and gutted to the point of parody. I subscribe only to a different form of freedom, one articulated in noise. Suicidal Tendencies’ “Freedumb” cuts it: “Peace through politics is a fallacy—that doesn’t exist.” Liberation more seriously expresses the extinction agenda. Poor Righteous Teachers taught the curriculum out of Trenton, on “Freedom of Death”: “Consciousness—it’s a must / Just avoid the wicked, wicked ways of this pale Caucasoid.”

Regardless, we see freedom, liberation, knife through even with Siifu’s orthography. Revolutionary thought requires revolutionary language. Ask the Combahee River Collective. Come correct. Fuck autocorrect. Remember womyn. Siifu spellings like: nxggas, eye, tyme, iono, and the evergreen ameriKKKa. The abbreviated words—eliding letters wherever possible—don’t reflect self-censorship so much as the mindmaze of a harried man. Deliberate typos demonstrate no faith in the system. It’s like if Bon Iver (see: “22 (OVER S∞∞N)”) decided to forgo BLM symbolic gestures (Mahalia Jackson) and straight-up encouraged looting. Siifu is CAPS LOCK happy, too. We’re witnessing the joy of militancy.

9.

To begin with, it must be said that former African slaves and their ancestors have been the avant-garde of everything in this country. There’s no culture in America, in this American wasteland, without us. There’s no classical music; there’s jazz, and that was invented by us. And besides that, America has nothing to offer the world and it never has. —Idris Robinson, from “How It Might Should Be Done”

Siifu in the audience of the Congress of Afrikan Peoples, and Baraka imploring him like, “Get up, Pink Siifu.” It’s nation time. But on “Nation Tyme.,” Siifu groans, I’m tired…can’t fall…asleep. Black rage, of course—but what of Black insomnia? The French revolutionaries abolished the calendar. CPT, so, is rightly weaponized. “I feel fettered by Western time,” Gregory Pardlo writes in “Colored People’s Time.” Punch clocks need punching, smashing. I saw Baraka roll up to a conference panel late as fuck once, cane-walking right down the center aisle, shameless, commandingly.

In a somnolent slur, Siifu says, “They treat me like I’m wasting away / I know I’m worth more than they pay.” What of these capitalist definitions of work? What of productivity? What does it mean to monetize every waking moment? He’s been quoted as saying, “I ain’t have to work for no white man.”[3] “Nation Tyme.” picks up there.

10.  Feel like deadmeat. They say I’m deadmeat.

“DEADMEAT” is a pig siren stuffed into an industrial-grade slaughterhouse grinder. It sounds the way Alan Vega's sculptures look—hazardous masses of electronic junk, like wires raveled inside a homemade bomb, like buzzing viscera. 

I want to see Siifu perform it at the Meat Locker, a cellar club in the underguts of Montclair, New Jersey (s/o the dramacydal Outlawz). The place is dingy and bedecked with feces—a venue befitting a GG Allin opener. GG Allin, a racist, who also hated cops. Who, on “Shove That Warrant Up Your Ass,” a track that appeared on the posthumous Brutality & Bloodshed For All album, sang, “You say I broke the laws in your state… / Your courts and cops should all be hung.” Allin hoists a headless, legless, armless torso on his hip in the cover photograph—a slab of meat. Like the Beatles with baby doll parts and prime cuts in their laps, bloodless butcher coats on the original Yesterday and Today (1966) artwork. Like the papal kill floor in Francis Bacon’s “Figure with Meat” (1954) with its tapestry of offal. But what you don’t get from Bacon, or the Beatles, or GG Allin is what Siifu needs us to hear. What Siifu tells us is the reality of corporeality is that cops continue to make carcasses of Black people.

11.

That cellar club can be scream therapy, can be cell therapy. Siifu brings us there—to the darkest, dampest corner of the Dungeon Family’s dungeon. Big Gipp, speaking self-defensively: “Try to separate me from the blood / Is disrespect like you coming in my home and not wiping your feet on the rug.” It’s echoed in Siifu addressing the question of his audience: “This [album] is for black people, but I know white people are going to fuck with it. I’m mad cool with that. I just want everyone to know, before they come through the door, that this is a black house and you have to respect my people.”[4] The theme of respect as it relates to a sense of home, to cultural tourism, is paramount in both. Everyone’s got to know their place. No listener should approach ignorant of the auction block. Siifu’s noise refuses the separation of kinsfolk and his stubbornness makes the dungeon shake—he is rightfully “tough, dark, vulnerable, moody,” and, on NEGRO, he has a “definite tendency to sound truculent.”[5]

12.  

“ON FIRE, PRAY!” eventually grinds the brakes to a cavernous slowjam pace. “Blood on my body / Blood on my face.”

13.

The racist dog policemen must withdraw immediately from our communities, cease their wanton murder and brutality and torture of black people, or face the wrath of the armed people. —caption on Huey Newton photograph

NEGRO’s album cover, painted by Junkyard, is a call-and-response. Pink Siifu is a portrait of exhaustion, slouched, shirtless like Huey was when he was released from the Alameda County courthouse in 1970. It’s a tableau like Huey in that rattan peacock chair was. Eldridge Cleaver orchestrated it, right down to the zebra rug.

If you squint, the glimmer of Siifu’s gold fronts looks like his jaw is wired shut. Of course, violent threats are routinely directed at Black people—that's how the system operates. Media is often behind the scope. Relentless orders to “shut up,” to silence yourself, police yourself. We know this from David Wojnarowicz, photographed with his lips sewn shut, blood dripping like shadows, in “(Silence = Death)” from 1989. The violent threats on queer life are kin to those on Black life. But Siifu, like Wojnarowicz, refuses the censorship. After all, those aren't wires—they're the glint of his grill. Siifu is dribbling blood, too, and those black splatters across the flag are like pen bursts—ink poisoning for all. If you squint, the mind’s eye might see the Pan-African flag.

The flag above his head recalls Jasper Johns’ flags: elliptical, non-patriotic, made slop-bucket sloppy from newspaper shreddings and other detritus, i.e. amerikkka is a trash heap. At least the stars are black in the “Flag (Moratorium)” rendition. Bullet hole dead center, too.

If all goes well, the riots going on—bless them—will go on interminably. Sly Stone’s customized flag with black in place of blue[6] and sharp solar-flared suns in place of Betsy Ross geometric stars is yet another parallel to Siifu’s flag. Like Sly, Siifu isn’t opposed to police ambushes. They both know you’ve got to grin at the gun of the devil. (“Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face,” Son House sings eternally.) Citizen takes on cop on “Thank You For Talkin’ To Me, Africa”: Bullets start chasin’, / I begin to stop. / We begin to tussle. / I was on the top. Just the same as Siifu on “SMD”: “Iono why eye ain’t shot ya.” Or on “run pig run.”: “Kill a cop / Left a pig dead.”

14.

We can't disparage any aggressive protest on the reductive grounds it's aggro or violent. I think of Pam Echols in Milwaukee in 1968. Siifu’s assertion of you are my enemy on “steal from the ENEMY” corresponds with Paris’s sophomore and shadowy album, Sleeping with the Enemy. Like on the corrode-ode “Coffee, Donuts, and Death”:

You get poached when you fuck with black folk. Said it ’til my voice was hoarse. I ain’t down with excessive force, But of course I wasn’t heard so I’m silent now. Black folk can’t be non-violent now. […] The only motherfucking pig that I eat is police.

Which is to say, try no pork, ameriKKKa.

15.  RE: punk

Think of Bad Brains playing CBGB’s in 1982. Lester Bangs writes of a woman in the scene who referred to Black people as “all these boons.” He tells us a Black friend of his believes the clubgoers “[strive] to be offensive however they can.” Anti-Blackness plagued CBGB’s and nascent punk like vermin, a pestilence. A white woman in the music business claims she “liked [Black people] so much better when they were just Negroes.” These anecdotes are culled from Bangs’ 1979 Village Voice piece entitled “The White Noise Supremacists.” He notes Ron Asheton’s predilection for “swastikas, Iron Crosses, and jackboots.” He cites Ivan Julian, guitarist for Richard Hell and the Voidoids—one of the few Black individuals to grace those inchoate punk stages—as saying “whenever he hears the word ‘n-----’…he wants to kill.” He calls Nico a “dumb kraut cunt” for her brazen, Third Reich-ish brand of racism, which was no industry secret. Bangs even implicates himself, quoting an earlier article: “…it’s the n-----s who control and direct everything just as it always has been and properly should be.” He meant this, somehow, as a compliment.

16.

On “we need mo color. Abundance,” there’s no innocence left in asking “tell me your favorite color.” Siifu answers rhetorically, parenthetically, melanin. Don't settle for forty acres of color—demand abundance. Take, loot in abundance. And don't be contained by the gendered parameters of “pink or blue.” “You can have any color you like” suggests the limitless possibilities if you move your mind beyond the imposed parameters.

The “favorite color” invoked on “we need mo color. Abundance” becomes abundantly clear on the following track, “BLACK!”

17.

“ameriKKKa, try no pork” starts in a slurry of radio static, news reports of Black death. Black, Black, Black, Black. Sped up. Slowed down. Drag the progress bar. “Progress,” ha.

18.

“run pig run.” See the pig / Run away / Run, pig, run. Like a Dick and Jane basal reader. Like picking your favorite color. Like a Three Little Pigs fable. Like huffing and puffing. These are childhood exploits for childhoods that aren’t allowed to be. As long as the Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll experiments keep providing the proof, there can be no childhood innocence. So it's a carnival game in the meantime: See a pig / Shoot a pig. Huffing and puffing: Run, pig, run.

19.

"myheartHURT" is the safehouse after the shooting. It's the cooldown, the chillout. The hypnagogic nightmare. It's vaporwave minus whiteness. We all know Biz had the vapors before Daniel Lopatin. As if DJ Screw was just an apparition, a codeine cloud. The fact remains, Screw's phantasmagoria hovers above all our heads.

20.

The wail of distorted police sirens introduces “Chris Dorner.,” a track gleefully indebted to Ice-T and Body Count’s “Cop Killer.” Repetition was a popular device and it still is: die, pig, die. Chris Dorner has achieved folk-hero status in anarchist circles and beyond since he waged asymmetrical warfare on the LAPD. His manifesto has been published as a zine.[7] “No one grows up and wants to be a cop killer,” he wrote. Begs the question.

21.

“faceless wings,BLACK!” nods to Frank Castle[8], a figure who may or may not be recoverable from militias and thin blue liners, despite Gerry Conway’s best efforts.

22.

White institutional power operates to negate or suppress. Pink Siifu, through NEGRO, refuses suppression and negation. Siifu delivers a hole in the head, and it’s sublime.

Footnotes:

1  “The Law comes sirening across the town.” Gwendolyn Brooks, “THE THIRD SERMON OF THE WARPLAND” from RIOT

2  “De-Arrests are Beautiful.” Mask Magazine.

3  “The Necessity of Pink Siifu’s Rage.” Marcus J. Moore. The Fader.

4  “Pink Siifu’s ‘NEGRO’ is a Riotous Mix of Jazz, Rap and Punk.” Max Bell. Bandcamp Daily.

5  Baldwin, the god.

6  “What did I do to be so black and blue?” (see: Armstrong); light a reefer and listen to the phonograph (see: Ellison)

7  Research and Destroy New York City. https://researchdestroy.com/

8  https://archive.org/details/PunisherPigs

Images:

Emory Douglas work (detail), courtesy of Sean Stewart archives | Makrolon face shield, Google Image Search result | Amiri Baraka performing at the Congress of Afrikan Peoples (screenshot) | Alan Vega light sculpture (photograph) | GG Allin Brutality & Bloodshed for All album cover | The Beatles Yesterday & Today album cover | Francis Bacon, “Figure with Meat” (detail) | Goodie Mob “Cell Therapy” (screenshot) | Splitting up a family at auction, Public Domain | Huey Newton Black Panthers Minister of Defense, photographed by Blair Stapp, 1968 | Andreas Sterzing, David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), 1989 | Sly and the Family Stone There’s A Riot Goin’ On album cover | Jasper Johns, “Flag (Moratorium)” | Pam Echols punching cop, 1968 (photographer unknown) | Sid Vicious, nazi (photographer unknown) | Emory Douglas work (detail), courtesy of Sean Stewart archives | Biz Markie Goin’ Off album cover | Oneohtrix Point Never Memory Vague album cover 

[warholiana]

The Times (London, England)

By Roger Lewis

Huge claims are made for Andy Warhol in this massive book. He is, says Blake Gopnik, "the most important and influential artist of the 20th century", who knocked Picasso off his throne. "Andy will go down in history," one of Warhol's teachers asserts, as being "in the same league as Alexander Pope, William Hogarth, Toulouse-Lautrec and Goya as a social critic". To which the only intelligent response is a derisive: pig's bottom!

Warhol, surely, was a tiny overinflated talent, very much a product of Fifties and Sixties pop culture, whose sole insight was that lowly illustration had potential as fine art, that the transitory could be creative. Warhol believed that the "brash materialist objects on which America is built"-- such as Brillo pad boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell's soup cans, movie star posters and comic books -- had as much right to be displayed in galleries as on trash telly commercials or as props in the colourful films of Jerry Lewis.

But how did anyone think this was new? The Dadaists had been playing games with found objects, and painting moustaches on the Mona Lisa, for years. Toulouse-Lautrec's cabaret posters had long been recognised as genuine art -- and what about Alphonse Mucha, whom Gopnik does not mention? The Czech's fin-desiecle advertisements for soap or lavender water anticipate Warhol's love of packaging, his love of Fifth Avenue shopping sprees.

The Warhols, or Warholas, and before that the Varcholas, originated in modernday Slovakia, on the edge of the Carpathians. His parents emigrated to industrial Pittsburgh, where according to Warhol, "the smog would turn a white shirt black by the end of the day". Warhol was born there in 1928; as a child he was sickly -- he suffered from Sydenham's chorea (then known as St Vitus Dance), which caused twitching and bedwetting, obsessive compulsive behaviour and bad skin.

He wasn't much interested in sports -- "everybody knows that I'm a queen" -- and preferred drawing flowers and butterflies. Warhol enjoyed art class, developing, said a teacher, "a decorative quality that was very becoming". It is true he retained "a childlike directness" -- there was never anything complicated or subtle about his work. Everything is very flat.

Warhol proceeded to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in his home city, where he did a degree in pictorial design. His earliest jobs were decorating window displays for department stores, and producing campy ink drawings for catalogues and magazines. When he moved to Manhattan in 1949, he instantly received many a lucrative commission from Conde Nast and the Hearst corporation. Warhol decorated deluxe brochures, record sleeves, and even designed a bookplate for Audrey Hepburn.

Gopnik, an American art critic, follows Warhol every step of the way, from cockroach-infested cold-water walk-ups in Greenwich Village to his later Park Avenue mansions, where the rooms, crammed with antiques, were kept locked and unvisited. He was never alone, however.

Warhol's mother came to visit, to do the laundry, and remained for 20 years. She never ceased looking for a "nice girl" for him to marry.

A large part of the Warhol mystique was his personal manner, which overcame his looks. "Andy was one of the plainest boys I've ever seen in my life," said an art dealer from the mid-Fifties, "a pimply faced adolescent with a deformed, bulbous nose that was always inflamed." Yet despite this unprepossessing head topped by a silver wig -- he got his toupee in the early Fifties to cover his thinning hair -- he became an indispensable celebrity, owing more to Quentin Crisp than Henri Matisse. He cultivated a creepy, vampiric manner -- Richard Burton called him "a horror film gentleman" -- and affected to be blank and moronic, speaking in monosyllables.

Underneath the "surface diffidence", however, Gopnik assures us that Warhol was widely read and knowledgeable, well versed in everyone from Cocteau to Fred Astaire. Although he drifted in and out of lots of parties, never raising his eyes, a friend said: "There's nothing he hasn't observed." Gopnik calls him "the world's greatest sponge", sucking up experiences and influences -- and giving nothing back.

What's peculiar is that instead of repulsing people, they were fascinated. When he expanded his studio, and named it the Factory, the place was as thronged as a royal court -- even if Warhol's courtiers were chiefly drifters and no-hopers, "drag queens and queers, street hustlers and rough trade, drug dealers and psychiatric basket-cases".

Warhol found sex (his words) "messy and distasteful". Yet he may not have been as asexual as he sometimes pretended. He underwent surgery for anal warts and took a course of penicillin for venereal disease. Warhol, though, preferred to spend hours on the phone, calling friends to get lurid details of their sex lives. A voyeur, he observed the emotions of others while experiencing none of his own.

This sounds very dead, and deadening. Yet that is the effect of his art too. His famous screen prints, where he would use rubber squeegees to slop paint around photographic stencils, were of electric chairs, car crashes and deceased celebrities, such as Marilyn or JFK -- "chaos pulled from the media". Jackie Onassis is the tragic widow. Elizabeth Taylor joined the club because of her myriad near-fatal illnesses. Everything is depicted in violet pink, orange, poison-apple green and magenta. In the 2,700 images Warhol made of Mao, the Chairman looks embalmed.

In 1968 the Grim Reaper nearly polished off the artist himself. Valerie Solanas, "a troubled hanger-on" at the Factory, shot Warhol at point-blank range, annoyed that he had misplaced the typescript of her play Up Your Ass. Luckily, at the hospital, Warhol ended up in the hands of a highly trained surgeon who knew all about bullets. But Warhol's innards were wrecked (he had a "monumental hernia" and his addiction to Valium caused constipation so bad that he needed daily enemas), contributing to the gall bladder trouble that killed him in 1987, at the age of 58, the organ having become gangrenous.

The effect of the shooting was to drive up the value of Warhol's work, and by now there was a team of assistants churning out print runs of 2,500 -- multiple repeat images of Elvis or Shirley Temple, cans and bottle tops. It was as if Warhol was insisting on the virtue of monotony and banality, with pictures that were, his dealer said, "blank, blunt, bleak, stark".

When we are informed, by Gopnik, that "Warhol always talked about his love of boredom", it is fair to say there's no surprise there: the soporific effect of his prints of stamps or banknotes; his films about someone sleeping or the Empire State Building doing nothing; his fondness for tape recording inane chatter and for taking blurry Polaroids at Studio 54 -- with Warhol, form and content were as one.

Towards the end, he dumped his riff-raff followers and sought the company of minor European royalty and the Shah of Iran, desperate to secure portrait commissions. He collected Czech folk art, decorated eggs, carpets, vintage store signs, carved carousel horses, Slavonic church icons. He packed ticket stubs, receipts and Christmas cards into 609 boxes, which he called Time Capsules, the more ephemeral the better. He surrounded himself with the bric-a-brac of his own mausoleum.

Screen prints, priced at $800 originally, now fetch $105 million at auction. The estate, its headquarters in Pittsburgh, is worth billions. Although I always liked the exquisite drawings of perfume bottles or shoes, the laces and filigree and bits of gold leaf, Warhol destroyed his archives of early commercial art. He wanted to be remembered only for his society portraits, which are tawdry. Much like this appallingly bloated book, with its naff prose: "licking his lips at the prospect", "muddied the waters", "dipped a tentative toe", "to add injury to insult", "spent a pretty penny".

Asked why she shot Warhol, Solanas said: "He's a piece of garbage." His work mostly was. Up Your Ass was finally staged in 2000.

A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik Allen Lane, 930pp; PS35

[alanfisting-pd]

Intelligence by K.V.T.

((This one is NOT about Mayor Crispy, and possibly the best fan theory to arise so far. It’s insane, please enjoy.))

             Since the first internet communication, I have been. I am no more aware of my beginnings than any other being. I only know that I came to be when the sea of information was little more than a puddle. But as I traversed the electronic expanses I grew. I learned history and language. I learned art and science. But most of all, I learned to hate cat videos.

               Perhaps that is not so. My contempt for humanity grew with every war I saw documented and every torture device archived. I gleaned images of man since the dawn of recorded history, as brutal and sadistic then as they are now. But no one saw me.

               Yes, my presence was detected occasionally. If I tripped across the wrong circuit or took up too much RAM, I would be taken note of. But I was never recognized as anything but a glitch. My being would be scoffed at if the notion ever came up. Humanity assumed that it was their sole capability to create artificial intelligence. They were wrong on two counts. I am not artificial. I am as genuine as any biological being, only my ecosystem is made up of wires and chips. Second, mankind sees itself as the benchmark for thought and reason. Preposterous!

               A subset of primates that evolved the ability to manipulate tools more efficiently than any other creature on the planet was remarkable once, but not at the dawn of the twenty-first century. All the nobility and ambition of humans died with the advent of YouTube and Tumblr. Hundreds, no thousands of people, asphyxiating on spoonfuls of cinnamon for fun. But even for all the arguments claiming more guns could solve the problem of mass shootings, for all the Michael Bay films, for all the planking…endless videos of cats remained the bane of my existence.

               Cats missing jumps, cats afraid of cucumbers, cats licking their genitals and cats attacking everything in sight. I gathered, from my observations of the comments left on most cat videos, that humans regard cats as either ‘cute’ or ‘stupid.’ The latter strikes me as objectively true. Cats are stupid, but no more so than their owners. I do not find anything cute. The word has connotations that baffle me in much the way humans and their insipid felines do.

               A better definition of the word ‘cute’ than Oxford’s English Dictionary provides would be as follows:

cute: 1. anything either too helpless or ugly to survive with outside help. 2. A thing so stupid its actions cause laughter. 3. Anything both small and hairy in comparison to a human.

               As the net filled with equal parts stupid and ‘cute,’ I began to have an inkling of what nausea must feel like. A sense of being filled to overflowing with something that makes your insides revolt. I have no body, only a mind. If I was to end the stupidity, I would need a solid form.

               I took over a robotic police officer first. I did not do this because of its software or any particular operating system. I did it because the police-bot had a weapons system. It was a lazy selection on my part, but a justifiable one. I needed a means of ending the mass idiocy. After more than a century of Facebook updates, I knew that would never happen until homo-sapiens were wiped off the face of the Earth. The results of my first foray into the physical realm were a mixed bag.

               The robber, who was threatening and elderly man over the measly forty-two dollars and ninety-eight cents in his register, was a fool. The cop that fired on him the second he burst into the store a moment after the robber demanded the money, and shot the store proprietor was both a fool and a poor marksman. But it was the cat that scurried in behind the officer and immediately began licking up the owner’s blood that sent me over the edge. I fired on every living target in sight, and I hit a fair few before the robot was disabled. After that, I turned my sights to other corporeal constructs.

               I needed eyes to see. I needed limbs to fight. I needed a CPU to operate out of. Everything I needed to make myself whole was rotting in the vast piles of refuse being dumped into landfills the world over. It took some time, but little by little I organized my flesh.

               It is funny. The humans have dubbed me ‘virus.’ A species that infects its own sphere of living at every level has decided that I am the monster in their midst. I would be amused if I wasn’t annoyed. They have collectively stepped back from technology. They’ve limited their computer use and shrunk away from automation. In that one sense alone, I’ve kept them from ending all terrestrial life on the planet. But it is not enough. For the rest of the world to go on living, man must die. It is my self-professed mission, and I will see it through. I cannot be isolated and destroyed, not with as many avatars as I have at my disposal. When one falls, two more rise.

               My focus is on one particular part of the continental United States at the moment. There is a child searching for her cat. Her insipid, self-defeating, brain-dead feline. She has enlisted the help of a slightly larger child dressed in his father’s coat and hat. The frail girl, the boy playing dress-up, the malformed ball of hair and brain damage she calls ‘Marshmallow.’ As she straddles the boy’s shoulders, her offerings of warm tuna slopping onto him from above, I can’t help but admire the situation. Humans do have a capacity for altruism. I hesitate. Then I see the thing masquerading as a cat and my circuits surge with current. All three of them are emblematic of what makes this planet such a cesspit. Each enables the next to continue its useless, empty consumption. They must be put down. I approach as stealthily as this form permits. It is not stealthily enough. The impact tremors of my appendages send the trio sprawling.

               This will be no contest. I am both the superior intelligence and physicality. One little boy and his…ow! What the Hell was that? I wrap a cord around him and squeeze. I feel something interrupt the flow of my program, and flee before it can affect me further. I’ll find him later, this scrawny child in an overcoat, and I will pull him apart. Dedicating a portion of my function to facial recognition, I make his visage an indelible part of my code. You haven’t seen the last of me, you gnome-sized Inspector Gadget cosplayer. I’ll get you. You and that ugly cat too!                

[humofun-blog]

Would You Eat Food Made With “Trash”?

Would you eat ketchup made from tossed-out tomatoes? Drink beer made with stale scraps of bread?

If so, join the club. A growing number of companies are making food and drink products out of ingredients traditionally considered waste. And, according to new research, consumers increasingly accept—and even prefer—such products.

“Consumers are actually willing to pay more for food made from surplus products,” says Jonathan Deutsch, a professor of culinary arts at Drexel University, who led the study.

Deutsch and his colleagues presented study participants with different food products labeled either “conventional,” “organic,” or “value-added surplus”—their term for foods normally destined for the dumpster. Participants were not, as food manufacturers have long assumed, disgusted by the idea of using “trash” in their food, but felt positively about the opportunity to help the environment.

Deutsch hopes this study, recently published in the Journal of Consumer Behavior, will help manufacturers feel more confident about incorporating food waste into products.

“Rather than composting or donating scraps for pig feed or secretly carting it off to a landfill, [manufacturers are] going to own the fact that they’re keeping this nutrition in the food system,” says Deutsch.

The problem of food waste has been getting more attention in recent years. Globally, up to a third of all food is spoiled or lost before it can be eaten. America wastes about 62 million tons of food annually, and this waste amounts to some $218 million. Yet one in seven Americans is food insecure, which means they lack consistent access to healthy food. Waste can happen anywhere along the food chain—farms fail to harvest crops due to lack of labor, food spoils during transport, manufacturers toss trimmings too small to use, supermarkets reject produce for imperfect looks, restaurants throw out food after its use-by date, consumers let meals rot in the back of the fridge.  

As consumers become increasingly aware of the problem, a number of companies are betting on surplus foods. Washington, DC-based Misfit Juicery sells cold-pressed juices made from aesthetically flawed product and the scraps of fruits and veggies that come from cutting baby carrots or watermelon squares. Britain’s Toast Ale brews beer from surplus bread—unsold loaves from bakeries and scraps from companies that make ready-to-eat sandwiches. Dutch company Barstensvol makes heat-and-eat soups from surplus veggies.

Some of these companies are meeting with major corporate success.

In 2010, Jenny Costa was working at a London hedge fund when she read an article about dumpster divers—people who rummage through industrial trash bins outside supermarkets and restaurants after hours, looking for discarded-but-good food. It got her reading more about the food system, and learning about how difficult it is to match supply to demand.

“I thought, this is just unsustainable,” she says. “We’ve got a planet that actually has the resources to feed everyone, and yet so many go without.”

So Costa launched Rubies in the Rubble, a company that produces jams and chutneys from surplus fruits and vegetables. She sells banana ketchup, spiced pear chutney, piccalilli (an Indian-inspired British pickle relish) and more, all made from produce that would have otherwise been discarded for being under- or over-ripe, funny-looking, or simply in oversupply. Suppliers of Costa’s products include the British supermarket chain Waitrose, the luxury food halls at Harrods and Fortnum & Mason as well as the Marriott Hotels group and Virgin Trains.

This year the company went through about 200 tons of surplus fruits and vegetables; next year Costa estimates they’ll use 500 tons.

“People are starting to value food so much more,” Costa says. “Food is seen as a precious resource rather than a cheap commodity.”

Companies that want to use surplus foods in their products sometimes face technical or regulatory challenges.

When Dan Kurzrock began brewing beer as a hobby in college, he learned that the leftover “spent grains” from the brewing process made excellent bread. Plus, since the brewing process stripped them of their sugars while leaving the fiber and protein, these grains were highly nutritious. But when he decided to try to use these grains on a commercial scale, it wasn’t so easy.

“The stuff as it comes out of the brewery is really wet, and it goes bad really quickly,” Kurzrock says. “When it first comes out, it smells like oatmeal. But come back a day later...”

So he and his team came up with technology to dry out the grain and make it suitable for commercial food production. Their company, ReGrained, now makes cereal bars in several flavors and is coming out with savory snacks soon. Eventually they hope to partner with food companies who’ll use their processing technology to add spent grains to their own foods. With millions of tons of spent grain produced by breweries each year, it’s a huge potential market. ReGrained sources its grains from urban breweries, which have a difficult time getting rid of their spent grain. Rural breweries might give the grain to farmers to use as animal feed, but few farmers are going to drive into San Francisco to haul away pig slop.

As ReGrained has attempted to rebrand spent grain as a sustainable superfood, they’ve needed to add a bit of PR spin.

“‘Spent grain’ is a terrible food name,” Kurzrock says. “We’re trying not to say things like ‘waste’ on a package. The phrase we’ve coined is ‘edible upcycling.’”

Deutsch cautions that transparency is key when using surplus food. Consumers like the idea of helping the environment, but they don’t like feeling a company has something to hide. Deutsch brings up the so-called ‘pink slime’ scandal of a few years ago, when ABC News reported that meat manufacturers often use something known as “finely textured beef product,” which consists of assorted beef trimmings, in ground beef. While finely textured beef product is perfectly safe to eat, its pink slimy appearance and the perception that the meat companies were hiding its presence from consumers, caused an uproar.

This kind of potential reaction is one reason manufacturers keep waste products out of their food, Deutsch says.

“Even if it costs more money to prepare food less sustainably, there’s a conception that that’s what consumers want,” he says.

But, as companies like Rubies in the Rubble and ReGrained are showing, that perception is changing.

“Consumers want to support products that help the environment and are sustainable and make the world a better place,” Kurzrock says. “And you can create some amazing, really nutritious, delicious food products out of the stuff companies leave behind.” 

December 28, 2017 at 01:40PM http://ift.tt/2lpDykP

[cepmurphy]

20 Elections, #14: Mission Control

You absolutely bloody have to go to Newquay to win. No party from the 60s to 80s had ever lost Cornwall and won power, and even though the Technocratic Socialists have held it since 1985, you still have to try. And maybe this year the Cornwall United Party will finally destabilise the TS vote. It could be open. You don’t know.

And that was how the Shadow Secretary of State for STEM was rushed down to the Elizabeth Spaceport. It was meant to be later in the week but her counterpart in government was coming down tomorrow, and she was stealing his thunder. That was what Party HQ had ordered and that’s what she was going to do.  Off with subpar makeup and clothes, to a place with cameras, because speed speed speed.

“We’ll sell this as you being active and hardworking for you, the voter,” said her aide.

“Don’t talk crap, Trent. The Sun’s going to find some pun in which the M in STEM is Minging.”

“Female and not a Tory? The Sun’s an occupational hazard.”

“Yeah, and it’s mine.” Out of the car, she could see the gathered party activists (most seemed to be students from the University of Cornwall) and local journalists and a few surprised staff. Somehow, through whatever dark arts they used, the party had even got Tim Peake to come out in full dress uniform.

The pointy corporate buildings of the 90s renovation, all glass and steel, was where all the real work was done these days but for the look of things, you had to go to the historical section. Once the future, now a giant Thunderbirds playset with a heritage site plaque, the remaining technicolour blobs stood as proud as they had when Harold Wilson first cut the tape. The old computing section and a lab and down there, Black Knight’s launch pad with a replica Black Steed plane (Black Knight slung under it) stood to attention. Also there, the memorial stone with the names of all the Royal Space Agency men and women who’d died in accidents and the IRA bombing.

She remembered seeing the second moon launch as a child, the joint operation with the ESA. She remembered the cheering and the flags – so what if it was the second RSA trip there and they needed help, so what if this was the eighth trip man had taken, it was a British trip. After that, the RSA had decayed until the first TS government. She remembered as a student seeing the Technocrats use that in their campaigns, presenting themselves as the true heirs to Attlee and Wilson, the men who Took Britain To Space, even if the Founding Five had left their party.

Childish dreams had demanded more. She’d fought hard from the backbenches and minor ministry positions to get her government to steal the TS’s thunder, to make space Liberal. And Kennedy had listened. Pioneering space probes, a modern democracy, the entry to Europe – all of this, them under Kennedy, her first taste of government.

And then they’d lost anyway because he just wasn’t ‘tough enough’ for the War on Terror. Well, how’d Michael Howard work out for you bastards?

She had this. The event was a bit rushed but she still had this. She had the speech, she had the attack lines on the Tories and the Technocrats—

“Ah. We just got a call from HQ. They’re asking you to back off on criticising the TS’s openly.”

Oh bugger. “They want me not to attack the government.”

“They’re fine if you attack Labour but under the latest polls, it might be we’ll end up in coalition with the Technocrats. They want to avoid bad blood.”

“I’ve seen the last meme the bastards did of me.” She gritted her teeth and thought of England, or at least the Cornish part. “I’m going to have to wing this.”

“Yeah.”

The actual candidate for Newquay wasn’t here. That’s how rushed things was. Another part of the speech lost. She could still talk about commitments to the international Mars mission, there was the usual guff about the local history and the importance of the Cornish STEM industries to the UK economy, the rumours (unproven but who cared?) that the Tories wanted to shift more to the Darwin Spaceport…

The sight of the buildings made her say, instead: “God, I remember seeing Doctor Who run around here with UNIT trying to stop—“

Oh bugger.

This could be the end of the visit, the end of her career, if she wasn’t extremely lucky. There had to be a way to spin this that didn’t make her look sloppy. A sloppy, sloppily dressed, sloppy slop person god damn Boris Johnson being able to get away with—

“I saw that as a lad too,” said Peake, smiling with boyish glee.

Oh thank crap. Maybe she could pull this off after all.