Here at the end of everything cinema is having a boon (thanks to Bong Joon Ho)

The bodies of other people are heinous things to me. They fill me with equal parts fascination and disgust, to know that portions of creation such as myself march around fulfilling electrical impulses, contextualising these after the moment with mythic motivations and/or excuses supported by psychology and history. It's a wild trip. The distance between sex and fear has recently started closing for me which is alarming. It's not your average fear of intimacy but a cosmic horror of these bodies and this culture and this species and the fact of anything existing at all over the relative calm of non-existence which I can hold in my mind as a tonic; obviously I have no actual experience at being parcel to The Void but as a reprieve from consciousness I envisage it like an unending spa of gentle lighting and fluffy towels and soothing Muzak. Maybe I'm just tired or still coming down from the weekend. 

I watched Parasite last night and it's pretty much everything people are saying it is, as flooring as it was to see a foreign language film win Best Picture and one with such strong anti-capitalist sentiments at that. A token gesture at dissidence by The Academy? Because as we've learned from the non-committal woke-ness of Netflix and the cynicism of Disney nothing sells like capitalism flagellating itself for the cool kids. It too played with expressions of class through dirt, grime, physical presences, smell, 'crossing the line'. As someone who has always had an excessive sweating issue due to my body temperature sitting somewhere between a convection oven and the molten core of the sun, when poorer characters expressed shame in their bodies for bearing the tell-tale signs of poverty, for bearing residual traces of class-origins, I shifted uncomfortably and sympathised completely. No matter how cleaned up I get, no matter how fixated on class mobility I become in my professional strivings (whatever those are), I am also so painfully aware of myself in this body which willingly betrays me, which pisses the working-class accessory of sweat when I least expect or desire it. 

As far as crossing the line goes I feel like my obsessions with public sex and sex in massive violent not always super enjoyable quantities comes down to a death wish inside this shame, a will to transcending bodily shame (for being a stopper to class mobility) by immersing in the body completely, by exhausting it's power over me. So is there a light at the end of this tunnel in exhaustive methodical over-abundant fucking? Am I trying to fuck myself into a better, richer, whiter version of myself?  A version of myself which isn't burdened by a toxic central nucleus that some vague intuition has me convinced I can fuck away like a reverse-STI? Is it really possible to fuck away my body-held class-shame?

I guess we'll see.

I have lately become more aware of the incentives within myself that call me to hurt myself, in sanctioned consumerist ways. The kinds of ways which friends and family are oblivious to because they're also participants in this regimen of slow death. We will sometimes even call it 'healthy'. What's worse is some of these practices are tethered to identity, so on top of being internal to metrics of marketable harm they've been assimilated as demarcations of self-hood and so frequently experienced as empowering. What a fucking joke. 

I mean smoking, drinking, fastfood; all that seemingly benign stuff which actually orbits a threshold of indifference towards myself as a body, as a unit of metabolic configurations scoping it's environment and selectively ingesting pieces of it. Am I just having a Gwyneth Paltrow moment? Is this sudden concern over purity of the body, stemming from an abrupt and violent bodily disgust, a latent expression of a deeper misanthropy? Which is exactly where I'm placing Paltrow's absurd curation of what enters (and exits) her body, a practically fascist policing of her physical borders. 

Bong Joon Ho (director of Parasite) has always fixated on themes of class and imperialistic capitalism. He has generally done this in his films through a dark humour, but nothing's approached the kind of thesis-moment of Parasite in which the comedy is filtered heavily through affective domestic horror. So heavy that the comedy is experienced as despair, the same despair of it's characters trapped in structural nightmares which even more hellishly resemble the oppressive capitalistic forces organising our world today. Since his debut film The Host in the early noughties he has concerned himself with the effects of imperial culture mostly through it's ravages on the family, and how while bringing people together in nuclear units it then goes about testing these bonds and inducing stress and trauma by tearing them apart, maybe from an anxiety that it could always be doing things more efficiently or lucratively and so never allowing it's (mostly passive) participants to relax. 

In The Host the imperial nightmare was embodied by a monster created by an American pharmaceutical company dumping chemicals into a river. In Snowpiercer (oddly Ho's earliest English speaking film and pitted as his mainstream cross-over, a moment he arguably wouldn't actually have until his Korean-language film Parasite), bioengineering against climate change has induced a new ice age and the only survivors are passengers on an ark-like train presided over by a paternal engineer-god Wilford, with each section of the train representing a class in humanity's hierarchical organisation. Finally there's Okja which extends these environmental themes into justice for animals, interrogating the ethics of meat diets and markets while also lambasting the politics around both activism AND capitalism. 

For director Ho Parasite feels like a natural arrival point, the least fantastic of his films in terms of setting, but in it's realism the most brutal and challenging for acting as a mirror and refusing to take sides with it's affluent oppressors or destitute victims; rather, proceedings are concerned with displaying a Greek-tragedy style narrative structure in which everyone is sustaining damage in one form or other and are all variously complicit. 

It's some harrowing funny-not-funny nightmare shit and a litmus of how close to the end of itself this system is, really. The hate and rage it generates, perhaps even more so than the ecologically desolating practices it's premised on, are unsustainable and are hurtling us towards bloody implosion. Ho seems to think we will probably tear ourselves apart before the environmental reckoning even occurs. 

I tend to agree. 

I dont wanna die alone but i also might (deleted this yesterday and reposting today because it made me feel vulnerable which is both exciting and painful)

Relationships are a thing and I don't necessarily know how much value they will have in a world disintegrating from perennial abuse. John Berger said relationships erected a locus of exemption from the pain and suffering of the world so that in the vein of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres (being a vessel or construct of containment like a house or tribe) a pleasurable experience with a lover establishes an immunity from the bullshit. Of which there is so much you'd conceivably drown if you didn't every now and then delude yourself with certain sanctioned activities into feeling separate and safe from it.  Which makes monogamy, even when making people more prone to sexual boredoms, still the crowning jewel in this pursuit of exclusionary securities. 

I recently went to a wedding and it was beautiful and I got teary but the distinction was the money behind it and the parental and filial support which not every queer person gets when stepping out with a willingness to inhabit more normative relationship visibility. Again the money. Weddings are expensive and yes there's an essence of gifting to your family and friends but also there's an ostentation which performs consumer proficiency as a rite of passage towards maturity and adulthood, of which marriage is arguably the prima facie. To stress, the wedding was beautiful and I couldn't help picturing my own day and the kinds of things my friends would be saying while I sat at the bridal table (I am the bride in this scenario) vibrating with gratitude. I wanted to call my sister. I wanted to call my best friend. If anything the performances and speeches reiterated the importance of community over the centrality of normative relationship statuses, and considering the brides and their respective vocations it was no surprise their wedding would be so themed. 

But again the money. 

I would love to throw a big enough party and give my friends and family tangible reason to appreciate one another amidst rivers of food and drink at a beach-side venue with subsidised accomodation. And normative culture scrutinises lives which fail to deliver such rites as juvenile or anti-social. But it costs so fucking much that right here in this particular moment of my life I'm doubting if I'll ever have deep enough pockets to pay for that kind of tribute to my community. 

But then consider everything life could be like without the expectation of finding a 'partner'. Are we really geared for such interlocking compatibility with a single Other? Is there really something in Nature's script that moves us so, or is it all conditioning and commercial incentives to join hands with a significant-other and combine your financial clout to become even better consumers? Certainly two guys getting married would be a structurally favourable move when stats give men economic privileges over women; basically gay marriage is capitalism's wet dream, even if it's taken society and law a little longer to catch up. 

At the wedding I saw a boy I went to high school with who I was never great friends with but who I had a civil enough vibe with. He was also our head boy and in that vein diplomacy was the brand. When he was younger we definitely had run ins, me being an out gay guy and he being the fourteen year old playing with assertive masculine presentation and adopting homophobic angst, not from actual loathing of gays but from the decrepitude of normative-gender falsely convincing him he had to. When we were older and seniors and slightly more critical and we had enough mutual friends that it was no longer appropriate or self-serving for him to be homophobic he eased into friendliness towards me. But I never forgot. 

And there he was at my adult-friend's wedding. It was in the queue for the bathroom we came across one another. I smiled, we hugged, and after a less than pleasant pause I said I'd pee outside and left him there, a practical pretence but also a loud enough signal that I was done with this, with him. The door then closed. 

Would it have been better, less cruel to make small talk and then potentially hate fuck him later? Was that the fantasy I kept to myself while icily turning from him and barring the possibility? 

The person I later told about this jarring encounter suggested that I in fact wanted to hate fuck him, and as he was saying this my brain shivered with flat out rejection of this notion because I knew it was not as simple as that. I wanted closure, triumph, connection. I wanted to shut the door and become best of friend's simultaneously, push a reset button and explore an intimacy (non-sexual, filial) that could've been if it hadn't been for silly arbitrary divisions of sex and gender that we didn't even understand at the time but which we pretended to understand because when you're fourteen signs of weakness make you vulnerable to attack from other pack animals. It was a missed connection, but a missed friend connection. 

I wonder how many others I've missed in my slouching life-trajectory. How many people's lives have I brushed and ignored? How many of those brushes could've been nurtured into worthy bonds? It's a sobering thought and makes me want to live more slowly and more gently. 

Until I get bored anyway.

And what the fuck is it about relationships that makes everyone froth or fear and measure themselves accordingly? What is the value, aside from the psychological cosiness of facing the void of existence with a support person? Being single for too long is pathologised, but then also someone who jumps from relationship to relationship is pathologised, meaning the measure of wellness which everyone holds up to each other with casual cruelty is their ability too sustain a single union. That is so fucking cooked, not every life can support a relationship nor should it have to. Relationships are premised on leisure time essentially because it's labour no one's paying you for. You need more time than late-stage capitalism could ever allow to commit to the project of intimacy, true intimacy with deep connection and not simply the performance of joint bank accounts and selfies from your annual vacation (and the ultimate soul-crushing body-ruining performance of child-rearing). Also there are no assured returns making it the worst kind of investment.

I think I would rather be rich.

Also you always get fat in a new relationship so on top of it being a suck of time and money you sacrifice the body and esteem for yourself you curated so carefully as a single person, not to mention interpersonal relationships beyond the primary partner are undermined by a hegemonic prioritising of the boy/girlfriend-spouse. That this unit has societal endorsement makes me wonder where our obsession with claustrophobic entombment comes from; an echo of womb experiences? A wish to die and so fortify ourselves against life's various highs and lows inside living coffins? Does the normative relationship model perhaps abbreviate the dialectal obsessions of society in which truth is formed and spread via contrastive binarising of everything?

Like, EVERYTHING.

Through the eyes of society the existence of anything is confirmed in pairs. 

I don't know but if environmental collapse and societal degeneracy really are looming closer than they've ever done, I am seriously rethinking how much energy I'm reserving for a relationship which is only possible in a world that will soon cease to exist. 

FEELING LIKE A USED CONDOM BUT STILL VERY MUCH ALIVE; a short disjointed treatise on the reasons and symptoms of joy

This essay appears in a recent issue of NEVERLAND zine and I also read an excerpt from it for Our Gala opening Auckland Pride for 2020

Is joy even possible in a world as tempered with malice as this one? I feel like my capacity for joy has become mangled, a distorted lens which has been forced to adapt to a foreign diet of worry and violence. In this way the strangest things give me joy; crisis, the prospect of violence, of collective disaster, the death of a beloved celebrity without whom the average citizen (reared on a diet of celluloid) can't fathom the rotation of the earth. I remember as a kid joy came more easily. But did it really, or am I misremembering on purpose to more expertly perform the role of jaded adult? Disappointment, lack of expectation; these are affects which shelter us from the hurt of expecting the best for ourselves, for others, for this world. Disaffection is what sustains the veneer of functionality, an evacuation of every larger, more troublesome emotion. Even if it's a positive one, like joy.

There's generally no room for joy in the course of a day. 

Take the work environment, especially if you're interfacing with the general public who, as a rule, are made up of the dizzyingly normal, the unconscionably complaisant, the workaday damned who dream of retirement only because it's like being unemployed but without the stigma. If Max Weber's admittedly flawed arguments about capitalism, coercive productivity and Protestantism are to be believed, this knee-jerk future-orientation in which hay is made while the sun is out and gratification is endlessly forfeited until an 'after', is entirely compatible with the habitual projection of the Christian soul into the afterlife by which all reality is a 'worldly' trial-run for better days (a better eternity). Obviously this does two things; it denigrates the physical world by upholding a spiritual Beyond as superior (subsequently establishing a premise of resent for the coarser body), and it also practically institutes cognitive dissonance, asking people to constantly split their attention between their direct experience and a symbolically maintained dream of Tomorrow at all times. Nothing can be enjoyed for it's own sake, everything gains or loses value run by the ledger of Heaven and Hell. 

I can only speak to Christianity (we were Baptists) but let's assume that most organised religions with a monotheistic premise operate along similar lines, dangling otherworldly bliss as a carrot for people to lunge towards by aligning their behaviours with a preset code of ethical and moral behaviour. It seems to me ironic that the very concept of God, which in more psychoanalytic terms might be equated with the joyous dissolution of form and a direct oceanic experience of life as a numinous totality, gets historically domesticated; forgetting it's ecstatic roots for the most part and doing it's best to undermine the originally joyous religious experience of touching the divine, with bureaucracy and drudgery (and let's not forget those Catholic specials guilt and shame). 

Sex has forever been a pill for me, as I'm sure it's been for anyone. New toys have something of a feverish allure and when you're slouching towards thirty still maintaining the HBO-fuelled delusion that adolescence extends into the late twenties (like myself), then the allure is probably yet to fade. I remember vividly the ways in which my early brushes with religion braided with my burgeoning pre-adolescent sexuality. Throughout my childhood I had those vertiginous feelings of attraction (mostly to parental figures and older family friends) which could only be detailed as such when looking back, but which at the time felt like some magical mystery narcotic dropping into the dormant pit of my long-sober body. The awful sobriety of childhood was for me comprised of a poverty-violence combo (which I'm only just feeling like I have some functionality and perspective over), and as anyone who grew up poor and gay and (semi) battered can tell you, the experience is both alienating and (subsequently) incredibly lonely. 

Lonely because you see these less turbulent lives happening around you. Agonisingly close, as close as the distance between yourself and the desk of the kid next to you in class who has branded snacks for lunch and not the economy version which doesn't even have a characteristic logo or anthropomorphised spokes-animal, which makes you feel like crying every time you think about it because it just seems to encapsulate the whole sorry mess your life is at this point, which you're powerless to effect or even articulate as a child; and so you squirrel away at recess and huff your little off-brand snack even though you'd rather throw it in the bin as a raised fist to the dark fates which have cursed you so, but you can't because you're also overeating to compensate for the stress of it and because of which you can add body dysmorphia to the growing list of developmental issues that will crop up when puberty finally hits.

Which it does. Like a mushroom cloud over Nagasaki. 

And then there's church. That's where I met my first sexual partner at age eleven. Jesus Christ. 

Basically Christ did two things for me as a kid; firstly, he was ripped as fuck and strung up on a cross in an overt bdsm scenario, which I'd discovered I liked at age six after seeing an episode of Sinbad The Sailor (a bad live-action version from the nineties). In that particular episode Sinbad had been captured and imprisoned by a long running nemesis who happened to be female and got played by some daytime never-was like a hammy femme fatale who didn't know if she wanted to fight or fuck. I got the gist and for the next few years privately percolated my crotch-twinge at this and it's implications, until passively learning that my premature discovery of finding both men and scenes of bondage hot was for all intents and purposes taboo. 

Enter Christ, who not only ticked my long-ruminating box of rippling suffering sub, but also came pre-stamped with societal and parental approval. They encouraged, nay exhorted me to 'have a relationship' with Him. Sexual confusion and childhood loneliness twined powerfully, wrapping round my dick and heart like an effigy-crown of thorns. In Christ I had found the perfect spiritual-psycho-sexual outlet and proceeded to nurture this trade-marked fantasy figure like the whirlwind love with Duncan James from boy-band Blue I secretly wanted to be having. 

Say what you will; fantasy or not I can only remember this short time of discovery in my life as one of unadulterated, blistering and unearthly joy. It was also the beginning of a chronic masturbation phase that only petered out in my early twenties (and which as a habit flares up sometimes depending on certain stressors). But masturbation is an incredibly reductive and frankly inaccurate descriptor for the kinds of intense erotic preoccupation with Jesus Christ I was going through, my lonely childhood suddenly being filled with holy/rosy light; I could literally feel the rippling biceps of this agent of divine forgiveness wrapping around me at the drop of a hat, because the church was telling me I need only think of Him and the Holy Spirit descended like a trade-marked veil of ambience. So think of Him I did, often, cultivating the 'relationship' the adults around me kept telling me was the cornerstone of our religion. 

The ironies were not lost on me even as a horny tween, that certain elders in their anxiety around my effeminate behaviours would gently remind me that homosexuality was a sin, perhaps convinced they were diverting me from the devil's program even while they were telling me to nose-dive passionately into a divine romance with Jesus. Relationships with other men were off the table I realised, maybe not because faggotry was inherently bad but because Jesus gets jealous, because when it comes to the gays he wants to be the only pole in the room, the divine pole by which all other poles are measured and deemed lacklustre, micro, or sub-par. 

We took family trips often which in my mind counteracted the various darknesses any childhood consists of, and which were especially precious in pushing back the claustrophobia of a father with a gaping wound and a short temper. On these trips the great New Zealand pastoral became emblematic of god's grace and beauty, and driving through pristine kiwi landscape beside my otherwise bored sister and behind my inanely chatty mother (who talked incessantly to camouflage her battery) and my brooding father at the wheel, I would project myself out the window into passing trees and grasses and braid natural beauty to my boyfriend Christ and by the time we'd reach our destination my dick would've been hard for roughly three hours and I'd run to the bathroom and basically only brush the head before exploding in a maelstrom of shuddering Nature-y Jesus-y joy. 

Mea culpa. 

Is there much of a difference between pleasure and joy? If they weren't so similar then people wouldn't so frequently mistake their vices for absolutions. Makes me wonder if perhaps pleasure exists in the foundation of joy like fruits and vegetables in the ass-layer of the nutrition pyramid; not synonymous but related. And yet the working world for most people is comprised of the opposite ethos, one of delayed gratification and forfeiting immediate pleasures for the yonder lands of retirement and security (and the non-secular equivalent Heaven). Is pleasure and it's cousin joy entirely virtual then, veritable states of mind? Should I be manipulating my oxygen intake via mindfulness workshops and namaste-ing my way towards a cognitive framework rinsed of the cultural particularities of existing in this country, in this economy, in this time, wading out to a purer being free of ideology and bias? 

Partying is kindof a thing. I find it ironic that for so many 'radical' subcultures the steady consumption of drugs and alcohol remains internal to group dynamics, as if the dire reality one is combatting (or even passively resisting) necessitates a diet of numbing agents. I understand because my thought processes have me gravitating towards numbing agents too, nothing overly insidious but there's definitely not much I won't do under the banner of Recreation. There's a scene in Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac in which Charlotte Gainsbourg's titular sex-addict describes the only two kinds of people, and that's the kind of person who when shortening their fingernails clips the left hand first, offset by the kind of person who firstly clips the right. Obviously clipping the left hand first signals a person that gives primacy to pleasurable pursuits while the right-hand clippers are in the camp of god-bothering future-oriented goal-setters, delaying the easier route as they're convinced it always pays to do the work first, as if purchasing pleasurable experiences through their toil. Christianity itself as a martyr-cult kindof bolsters this logic that good things are paid for through labour and/or suffering, seeing as their icon-towards-salvation is a tortured human body strung up in homoerotic repose, awaiting his death after which it's alleged he dipped down to Hell and retrieved the keys to immortality. Or something. 

In the film Stellan Skarsgard is attentively listening to Gainsbourg's analogy and feels he's in the right as a right-hand clipper, because certainly good things come to those with the work ethic to meet the harder task first. Gainsbourg looks at him bemused and explains that clipping the left hand first is not some lazy hedonistic manoeuvre but also the only clear rational decision, as once you've clipped the easier hand there's only the right hand left, beyond decision and subsequently the 'easy' remainder. By leaning into pleasurable pursuits the path emerges with simple clarity, desire as a motor propelling it's subjects through a variety of tasks and phases with the surety of a divine roadmap. It would seem pleasure and it's natural precursor desire, in Von Trier's opinion, contain an almost evolutionary providence in as much as they remove the agonistic necessity of choice itself. They resume 'flow', re-inscribing the human animal inside nature's script, giving us back from acculturated abstraction into God's channel. 

Within the confines of a film about sex addiction (if only as allegory for 'agape' love which in Grecian classics is akin to divine-whorish love of everyone and everything), Gainsbourg's coda is that joy as an affect of alignment with god's will can be attained via unbridled pursuits of pleasure. You can literally fuck your way into heaven. 

Happiness gets talked about a lot but I'm convinced it's nothing more than a consumer affect, an ambience of sedation via the implanted desires that make for quiet lives, the kinds of lives seasoned with a house and kids and cars and regular vacations to tropical climates and foreseeable retirement plans. Happiness is probably the litmus of a single way of life, one which doesn't come naturally to a lot of people because it's concocted and imposed by a billionaire class which profits from our compliance. Obviously domestic existences aren't foreign concepts relayed to the public on billboards; there's history to be considered and all the acculturated incidentals, the happenstances and byproducts that in history's unending stream can ossify into legitimate phenomena. In the sweep of history an accident or a joke can become a program. I mean look at Trump's hateful brand of populism. Who could've predicted that the next 'leader of the free world' would be an ex-reality-television star? Today's theatre of the absurd can easily become tomorrow's feat du jour. 

Things like Fordism and heteronormativity have a lot to do with the ways in which the middle classes have historically organised themselves. And yet this far into the new millennium with the very concept 'middle-class' being an archaism of economically more stable times, there remains a sense of terror when we are faced with anything other than the prescribed, IG-ready lifestyles. Maybe success paradigms (apparently thresholds to greater personal fulfilment now since the labour force can fluidly act through freelance channels and autonomously dictate it's own hours and rates), have if anything become more oppressive when failure (and it's subsequent losses) is pinned to the worker, and not the rigged system; meanwhile governments jerk off bigger and badder corporations and pretend like draining the public sector is a good thing. 

Fuck happiness. It's for cattle and I might've been born cattle into a society which has diminishing value for human life, but I certainly won't be rolling over and offering my half-alive carcass as nutrients for the overlords with a limp medicated smile. Happiness is the drift that makes us play nice while the house is on fire.  And clearly it's neurochemical effects are on the wane because everybody is fucking depressed, vibrating with apocalyptic anxieties and (barely) existing somewhere in the dissonance between business as usual and total annihilation. After pointing out the ideological nastiness of Christianity putting suffering on a pedestal in the visage of Christ, there's also a part of me which finds the prospect of marching gleefully to my own death, embracing all the needling drudgeries of the gig economy and the consumer-addictions proffered as pitiful consolations (with which we're meant to exercise 'mature' levels of restraint), as reason to be joyous. To wit, happiness is a middle-lane affect making us manageable units in a grid of quiet despair. Happiness is a very social feeling while joy stands opposed to the flimsy metrics of workaday conduct, in it's feeling and doing being decidedly anti-social. It's too big for the office. Happiness gilds the slow decline into oblivion with the delusion of longevity, positing survival for it's own sake as an overarching value.

Fuck. That.

I know I'm going to die, I don't need the blinder. I don't need the myth of longevity or security, because if the twentieth century has taught us anything it's that no one anywhere at any time is 'safe'. Safety's about as real as an easy fix for climate change. 

So pardon me while I embrace anxiety as a lifestyle and let it ravage my body, alternating between pitch-black and crystalline blips of otherworldly clarity in which I'm reminded that nothing matters and everything sucks and death will relativise all of my life experiences into neither good nor bad but something else entirely. I guess you could call it negative transcendence or something but here in my body it still registers as joy.