"Brenn i oss" is finally released!

As promised, I hereby update the blog to bring the good news of the release of our new record, "Brenn i oss".

Graphics: Peter Horneland

First off, I thank by fellow band-members Steffen B. F. Hasleberg (guitars), Ulrik Borg (bass) and Lars B. Galaaen (drums) for their great musical contributions, and also for putting up with my stupid insane bullshit. 

But I would also like to thank the eminent Daniel Vrangsinn, who did a great job at mixing and mastering the tracks. 

Our gratitude goes also to the amazing Peter Horneland for having done all the band's graphic design so far. 

I thank Jens Sevik of Kirkebrann for having us record the tracks at his studio.

I thank our manager Nicklas Skjelbreid for his relentless organizing and problem-solving.

I thank my parents, Bjørn and Astri, for their support during this entire process.

I thank our fans for their patience.

Here are the tracks on YouTube:

Our first gig will be held in our hometown, headlining together with Deception (NO) for Skien Metalfest 2019 on 12 April. The poster looks like this:

On the Circling of the Wagons

I have been meaning to write this post for quite some time, but have put it off until the point where the constant itch cannot be ignored. I try to avoid getting personal on the blog, but here goes: the most personal thing I have written on BSE so far.

The Ghibelline eagle is my own addition.

When I started coming out as a nonbinary person, I was afraid, but not of something concrete like bigotry from self-appointed protectors of "traditional values" or ridicule from macho pinheads. Far-right thugs being a quite marginal phenomenon where I live, they were even lower on my list of concerns. The fact that my country's government does not yet officially recognize that we exist also didn't faze me at all. I suppose what scared me the most, looking back, was the prospect of never-ending conversations with well-meaning liberal types who most of all wish to "understand", and for me to guide them to a supposedly higher state of wokeness. I was socially awkward to start with, and then all of a sudden I was supposed to talk to people about bathrooms and pronouns and whatnot after having been very well used to keeping these things to myself.

I cannot state in clear enough terms that overall, people have been supportive or at least accepting. The only explicit hostility I have encountered so far during this ongoing process has come from cis-women. It always goes down the same road: I am not femme, I dislike wearing makeup and I usually prefer male clothes for their sturdiness and many good pockets. This leads some folks (who are literally always women) to insist not only that I am a male, but also that I am simply appropriating the nonbinary label since I "don't present as queer enough." Curiously, this hostility is not specific to TERFs or even straight people.

A lot of it has to do with strategic essentialism - women are feminine, femmes are oppressed by patriarchal mechanisms, queers experience the same oppressive structures in their daily lives, ergo queers must be femme to "really count", especially if they were assigned male at birth. The wagons thus circled, us weirdos are in effect tossed under the bus. Misgendering hurts so much more when it comes deliberately from supposed allies than when it comes from the usual snowflakes who desperately need for there to be only two genders just so as to keep their fragile cosmos from falling apart.

A related phenomenon is the expectation, common among activists, that we all gather in the same narrow segment of the so-called intersectional left. I find this difficult since as an Anarchist with more "old-school" Marxist leanings (and active membership in a Social Democratic party), I do not believe in the strategy of stacking victim roles on top of each other and rewarding whoever holds the biggest pile. Sure, systems of oppression often overlap and strengthen each other, and I agree that leftists should recognize this, but so-called intersectionalism depends on the same essentialist thinking it claims to attack (albeit for strategic purposes) and ultimately comes off as the same bourgeois, divide-and-conquer identity politics which has hampered the left for decades. Say any of this aloud in the wrong place and prepare to get called out as a shill for racist imperialism - especially if you are a queer person.

On good days I say "Screw it, let them think I'm a man" and brush it off like a stranger's cigarette ashes. On worse days it's like stepping on a dog turd - you manage to scrape it off your heel, yet the stench lingers for a while. I cannot help but wonder what all the fuss is about. I don't even want to use their damned bathrooms.

12 Rules for Chaos

00001: Crawl together into a huddle and admit to yourself that you are a spineless Normie Maggot, powerless in the face of late modernity, and that your life has become unbearable. This first step is crucial.

00002: Accept that the forces of Chaos can change your ways, and that you deserve their assistance. Think big. Think scaly wings and fiery breath if you want to. Or maybe something more subtle?

00003: Make a conscious decision to dedicate your life to the forces of Chaos. Find a location that is meaningful to you and accessible at night, where you will not be disturbed. Design the ceremony beforehand. Inflame yourself with prayer.

00004: Make a personal inventory of your past decisions to pursue your Normie Maggot existence and how it lead to your current sorry state. Our dreams form our habits over time - note yours on a piece of paper, and decide which habits to keep and which ones to shed along the road.

00005: Admit to the forces of Chaos how you have wronged yourself by trying to become something you expected "everyone" to expect you to be, when this "everyone" as a category doesn't even exist. There is no Big Other. You are ultimately alone in a cold dark universe that only cares if you taste good. There are other people, however, and they are as scared and confused as you are.

00006: Be ready and prepared for your eventual transformation into a Chaos Magician. Stop shaving if you want to. Be difficult if you have to. This is not as easy as it sounds. Eventually people around you are going to notice, and then what? Will you laugh, will you run and hide, will you just stand there?

00007: Pursue what is meaningful by repeatedly pestering the forces of Chaos for your transformation. Return to your location regularly, refine the liturgical details of your prayer. It will typically become tedious even before it starts to seem stupid, but persist in kindling the black flame.

00008: Make a list of people you have hurt or shunned or bullied or oratracized or gossiped about because your inner parent was creeped out by them; include people you have consciously lied to in order for them to like you better. This may take quite some time. Be honest. It's ok to cry as long as you don't start pitying yourself, which will only make you bitter and small.

00009: Make amends to the people on the list to the best of your reasonable ability unless doing so will put either of you or anyone else at personal risk.

00010: Review and correct your personal inventory, admitting errors and outright fabrications. If you have nothing to add, change or subtract the first few times, chances are you have not done points 00004-00009 precisely enough. Be thorough.

00011: Strive for improved conscious contact with the forces of Chaos through prayer, meditation, skateboarding or bizarre rituals you either designed yourself or found online somewhere. Take your time with this step. Don't be afraid to re-take previous steps at this point.

00012: Having turned into a Chaos Magician, seek to carry this message to other Normie Maggots and apply these principles in all your affairs.

Maskinskog

I'm playing black metal music again. The band I played in during my high school years is reunited and has been developing and rehearsing stuff since April 2017. In January 2019 we are going to the studio. I'm so excited I can hardly stand still!

Maskinskog consists of the following members:
Lars Blikstad Galaaen - drums
Ulrik Borg - bass guitar
Steffen Bengtson Fujita Hasleberg - lead guitar
Gunnar Høgstmyr (myself) - vocals

We even have a logo, designed by the great Peter Horneland, whom I have written about in an earlier blogpost.

As much as I like reading about the Viking Age (or perhaps exactly for that reason), I am thoroughly sick and tired of norsecore. If I hear another metal song about bloody vikings and fjords and mountains and longships and valkyries, I fear I am going to destroy something. Even the pretend-Satanism of the early scene is preferable to the mangled folk tones and long-disproven 19th century Romantic myths of heroic blonde berserker fighters in horned helmets. So we are not bringing axes on stage, we are not wearing chainmail, we are not waving flags.

There should be a place in black metal music for the things we are not proud of, for doubt and ambivalence - for aggression, yes, of course, but also isolation, confusion and dodgy liminal states. More importantly, there should be a place for experimentation, for making mistakes and learning from them. Otherwise we are stuck repeating the 1990's forever and nobody wants that.

Expect updates as soon as we have the songs recorded.

Man with Moustache makes Interesting Things - a Troll Dialectic

Thesis.: The artwork of Peter Horneland (1985-) explores spatiality and sacrality, complex systems, profanation and time.

Antithesis!: The "Altarspace 1-3" (2013) suitcases had parents pull their children out of the room.

Synthesis?: Why is the uncanny double nature of sacrality, the seeming glitch between its aspects of glorification (prayers, speeches and votes) and its aspects of banishing (exorcism, exclusion) so unsettling to us that we as adults consider works like Altarspace and the installation "Agne Idam Na

Mama" (2013) to be for mature audiences only? After all there is no up-front nudity here, no explicit political incitations, not even strong language for fuck's sake, just spaces where something feels

slightly geometrically off at first but you have to take a closer look and that nameless part of your mind greets you like an old pal.

Parenthesis(): (Nobody but Mr. Horneland knows what all the symbols and little scribbles mean or it remains a closely-guarded secret.)

Paralysis;: He lives and works under several pseudonyms in Oslo, Norway, where he studies at the Oslo Academy of Fine Arts.

Secularism and Prole Drift

In marketing there's an expression called Prole Drift. It's what happens when products considered identity markers by the urban middle class and above are devaluated and become toxic as they are embraced by the lower orders. Burberry is one example: originally marketed toward professionals, it became a staple of British chav culture and is now considered low-brow. Automobile aficionados can attest to how the same thing happened with the BMW 3 series, or more infamously, the whole Porsche brand after the Boxter was released. High-quality coffee products likewise lost their aura of exclusivity as soon as the rabble could afford and appreciate them. It's even happening to cocaine.

Arguably a similar process is going on in the marketplace of ideas. When secular liberalism was first marketed, the militant hardline version as well as the softer Can't-We-All-Get-Along package, it was for the educated populace from respectable homes, who could appreciate and afford art, who had the time and energy to go to the opera and discuss topics of interest in the pretty salons. We all know what happened: the Western European working class eventually stopped clutching their crosses and demanded that the clergy and their power-structures step out of their lives. As laïcité, women's lib, family planning and other such marvels of modernity became everyman's property, enter Houellebecq and his ilk telling us how half-empty our cup of freedom is and what self-serving swine we've all become.

Recently, the Guardian commentator Giles Fraser has provided us with a prime example of this curious dynamic in action. As the wrong kind of white people have finally embraced the notion that religious ideas have no place in determining public discourse, to maintain the precious distinction there is no choice but for the middle class to latch onto another group, no matter how reactionary, while pointing all the time vaguely toward colonialism, but like the unfortunate Richard Seymour of Jacobin (instructing us to read Edward Said and then come back to the discussion), never properly explaining what upper-class plundering of poor countries has to do with drawing Muhammad, funny or otherwise.

During South African apartheid, one of the main arguments against full integration was that it would ruin the beautiful and mysterious indigenous African cultures, the integrity of whose communities better protected by fences and death squads. Today the well-meaning profesionals most likely cannot give a future to the “disaffected banlieues”, but it can give them a cardinal's hat with which to prance around. We don't know what the Muslim population thinks of being turned into a Muslim community (though Kenan Malik has written extensively about the political process involved) or being reduced to a hipster affectation, but right now it does answer a desperate need on part of the middle class to distinguish itself from the vulgar swine that keep running away with their ideas.

Krenkelsesfellesskap

There is nothing like public outrage to bring a neurotic population together. It provides, for a short moment during its outburst, not only an easy access-point to the moral high ground, as the casual observer might be lead to believe. It also creates a sense of community, of belonging, however ephemeral. Moreover, the warm feeling we get when we are offended together has attracted an offense industry staffed by smug journalists who specialise in providing the population with stories of people using the wrong word or otherwise stepping over a moral boundary, easily shareable through social media. In size and intensity, the resulting hurricanes of self-satisfied rage at the person “called out” usually dwarfs the initial offense as everyone's bad conscience is projected upon the culprit.