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How fucking kvlt are you? My guess is that while you may dabble in a little weekend corpse paint, you have yet to venture into church burning. So you long for something to consummately up the devotion, fully engaging your creative black energies, but perhaps something more legal. Welcome to Black Metal Theory, the mutual blackening of metal and theory, duh, which is all the trooest rage in the chthonic realms of Continental Philosophy. Two symposiums already, Hideous Gnosis and Melancology, and I am assuming more on the way. Hideous Gnosis is available in paperback in case you missed it. But what the fuck is all this? From Melancology:

Black metal irrupts from a place already divested of nature, a site of extinction…

As such black metal could be described as a negative form of environmental writing; the least Apollonian of genres, it is terrestrial – indeed subterranean and infernal – inhabiting a dead forest that is at once both mythic and real unfolding along an atheological horizon that marks the limit of absolute evil where there are no goods or resources to distribute and therefore no means of power and domination, a mastery of nothing.

A new word is required that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction.

…

This environment of absolute evil is exactly the same as the absolute good of black metal itself: the expenditure of a sonic drive that propels a blackened self-consciousness, a melancological consciousness without object that is the necessary prior condition to any speculation on or intervention in the environment.

The Black Metal Theory Symposium thus invites speculation and interventions on the blackening of the earth, landscapes of extinction, starless aeon, sempiternal nightmares, black horizons, malign essences, Qliphothic forces from beyond … in a general re-conceptualization of black ecology.

Whoa, dude. You had me at ‘melancology’.

If you can’t wait for another symposium, there is also ‘Helvete · A Journal of Black Metal Theory‘ and their forthcoming inaugural Incipit: Open Issue due in 2012, hopefully before the apocalypse.

Initially I had high, if not unrealistic, hopes for Charlie Sheen’s enigmatic ‘Violent Torpedo of Truth’ appearance. If Sheen was the Übermensch from Mars, as previously postulated, then his alien lexicon certainly must have a metaphysics to match. I hoped for more tirades, phantasmagorical tangents and deeper forays into Warlockian cosmology. Forget petty deliberations about the future of the novel: Sheen’s narrative was poised to inherit the future of postmodernism itself. Alas, it is with regret that I must report that the dude has got no game, as evidenced last Thursday in Atlanta. The Warlock’s curious cosmology now probably rests forever incomplete, perhaps one of the greatest underdeveloped philosophical texts of the 21st century.

The evening of the show, outside the Fabulous Fox Theatre in downtown Atlanta, the schadenfreude hung as thick as a humid summer evening in Georgia. A mix of rednecks, fratboys, sycophants, celebritists, disaster tourists, hipsters and detached meta-ironists adorned the streets, curious to experience perhaps the oddest and newest form of popular entertainment: the unhinged celebrity meltdown, live in your hometown! Videographers, bloggers and mainstream TV crews worked the crowds panning for the archetypal caricature of Charlie’s Kids. They had no shortage of wonderful subjects.

One interviewer to a dopey lidded Georgia boy:
“He bombed in Detroit, do you think he will bomb here?”
“Huhu, I hope so.”
Remarks the stoner, in the true spirit of the deprecation of the times.

The show itself was predictably unfocused, persistently heckled and Sheen did very little of the infamous bizarro ranting that initially popularized his meltdown. He mouthed a few catchphrases when he wasn’t smoking, his delivery completely frazzled and bewildered. Vacant and ghostly white, he ambled forward. If it weren’t for Jeff Ross (“how do you roast a meltdown?”), whose roasting intervention literally kept people from walking out, the show would have been an epic disaster. Finally, Sheen’s brief monolog at the end smelled pathetically like a desperate plea to get his TV job back, claiming in reference to his former bosses, that “it’s up them to give the people what they want.” Gone was the fire, gone was the game. Face it Charlie, the drugs don’t work.

CBS need look no further than 1976 satire ‘Network’ in dealing with the Howard Beale Charlie Sheen situation. The world wants solipsistic rant master Charlie Sheen and full televised access to his 24×7 Dionysian revelry. Screw the lame sitcom. Give Charlie Sheen his own fucking show, with all the money and drugs he needs, and let him go nuts with it. It will pay for itself 100x over. This is the new reality TV, why are we afraid to embrace it?

What we love about Sheen’s nihilistic disregard for anything that stands in opposition to His Quest for Winning, is his dogged commitment to the crazy train, full steam ahead, all contrition out the window. There will be no genuflection before the great alter of therapy culture that so desires to process his celebrity meat into acquiescence.

In a way, Sheen recalls a derelict version of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the artist-tyrant, hyper-evolved man above men who has rejected the values of the miserable class and their appeasing mediocrity, to create the world anew.

So alien are ye in your souls to what is great, that to you the Superman would be frightful in his goodness!

And ye wise and knowing ones, ye would flee from the solar-glow of the wisdom in which the Superman joyfully batheth his nakedness!

Ye highest men who have come within my ken! this is my doubt of you, and my secret laughter: I suspect ye would call my Superman—a devil!

— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’

Unfortunately one wouldn’t expect the Übermensch to be doing such crappy sitcoms. But then again…God is dead, Sheen is #winning.

While it is amusing to see some psych-research pains taken to quantify nebulous existential entities such as ‘meaningfulness’ and their underlying sociology, I take issue with this egregious conflation of indifference and apathy:

The existentially indifferent appear to live a life of complacency, with few highs and little or no introspection. As Schnell puts it, “Without commitment to sources of meaning, life remains superficial. But superficiality is not necessarily a state of suffering.” They aren’t classified as having “psychological stress,” but they “can hardly be viewed as living a life of health and well-being,” according to Schnell. An existentialist would say they are asleep.

“Existential philosophers and psychologists, from Heidegger to Frankl … have discussed distinctions between an authentic, complex life and a shallow, ‘everydayness’ mode of existence,” Schnell comments. The existentially indifferent characterize this “everyday” mode of existence, and as if to defy existentialism, are perfectly fine with it. To replace meaningful pursuits, they have a wide array of superficial weaponry. “Surrogates for meaningful commitment abound: They range from material possessions to pleasure seeking, from busy-ness to sexuality.”

Problem: there are at least two kinds of existential indifference. What these researchers seem to be taking for indifference is the kind nefariously in bed with apathy. But not caring about meaning is not at all the same thing as being indifferent to meaning once it has been considered: indifference that is in fact a response to consideration. Apathy implies a blatant lack of concern before meaningfulness is even properly considered, or at least a lack of concern despite what ‘meaningfulness’ might even be. However, if life’s meaningfulness is considered, and deemed an epistemological dead end, then this warrants further speciation of those considered existentially indifferent. This variant of the existential indifferents consider the question of meaningfulness, unlike their cohorts the apathetics, but treat the problem itself with epistemological skepticism (can we really even know what meaningfulness is? does Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle apply? ) and may choose to shelve it with other categories of unanswerables like religion.

There is a learned secular pragmatism to this type of indifference: if the problem is at least possibly unsolvable, why waste time engaging it? A parallel of this situation can be observed in the sundry and fruitless religious debates we are all forced to occasionally tolerate. If I can’t prove my religious views are objectifiably true (I cannot), and you can’t prove your religious views are objectifiably true (you cannot), then why are we discussing it? Time waster.

Meaningfulness is an elusive quality like happiness or spirituality and perhaps not necessarily best dealt with head on. The true existential indifferents are just going about their lives, hoping perhaps that meaningfulness will catch up with them at a later date. This is not nihilism or apathy. The idea here is that it is not easily quantifiable (if at all), and as such, should not be obsessed over. And note that this is not categorical indifference, but simply indifference to the epistemologically impossible task of accurately defining meaningfulness. When those hedonistic indifferents play video games and have sex as opposed to sitting around tallying up all the meaning their lives lack (presumably in Quicken’s Meaning Calculator), it is because they have better things to do than spinning wheels over impossible philosophical terrain, things that may one day result in meaningfulness actually being achieved. Quit trying so hard, people.

Long, somewhat overdone, philosophical analysis of the cult of Rambo. I remember reading the book First Blood as a young boy scout, before seeing the movie, and really liking it. Had no idea back then that this book was originally published in 1972. Rambo was the coolest male survivalist role model for young boys with corporate dads. He’s a good loner that minds his own business…but if you fuck with him, whoa boy. Come to think of it, Stallone really does have a knack for playing the downtrodden loner. And I can’t wait to see the new Rambo movie, honestly.

Which of those two Rambos prevailed? When the Cold War ended, Sylvester Stallone’s movies lost their hold on the culture and decayed into ’80s kitsch. But that distrust of the government didn’t disappear; if anything, it intensified and crossed what used to be sharp ideological lines. (In the early ’90s, it wasn’t that unusual to hear left-wing radicals pondering the possibility of a POW coverup—or right-wing radicals touting the powers of hemp.) Since 2001, the balance has tipped back and forth. When the wounds of 9/11 were fresh, the outrage of the heartland populists turned outwards again; since then, the failures of the Iraqi occupation have driven many of them back to an anti-government stance.

Another good BBC documentary. Sartre…philosopher, playa. That picture of him with Robert Plant hair as a child kills me.