"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.

Real Fascism is Boring, Part 2

Post-Irony and the Rise of the Security State

Once again it's that day when we are all supposed to wipe that jaded grin off our faces and feel the grasp of our innermost sincerity in the face of a memory of that day when everything went wrong. A coveted treasure-trove for propagandists of all shades, the terrorist attack of a few years ago has been framed as an assault on such various lofty apparitions as the nation, the liberal-democratic form of government, the workers' movement and suchlike. With no shortage of pompous, self-important contestants to the post-22/7 cake, the general agreement seems to be that of a general agreement as such, its dire emphasis rivalled only by its vagueness, its content secondary to its very existence.

I do not doubt the sincerity of the public demonstrations of (os-)love that have followed. But herein lies their true danger. When politicized, love becomes false and perverted. As we have known since Robespierre, nothing lends legitimacy to totalitarian means as easily as a rhetoric of love, dissolving the distance between subjects, between private and public, zoe and bios. Without a minimum of public alienation, no space for rational political discourse is possible, and we are left with Lippestad's doctrine of totalberedskap or Total Preparedness – a principle not only impossible to achieve, but which also has no place in a democratic society.

initiation;

We do not really want what we think that we want. There is always something extra, something for which the desired object is a symbol, its undead more-than-itself quality. The worst thing that can happen to a desire is that it becomes Real, that its inner emptiness is uncovered. The Real is its nightmare-state.

Terrain-Vague: a Troll Geography

Between the regulated intensity of the cityscape and the postcard-wholesome countryside there grows a steadily thickening belt of non-location – easily definable in terms of GPS coordinates or dots on a map, yet difficult to grasp in the subjective geography. 

Vørds, part 01

Or: Notes toward a Norwegian-English Dictionary

F60.6

Daytime is eyes everywhere, burning tyrant above casting needles of open sight. You know they can't see through you, you're not transparent, but still you cannot but think of breaking CCTV cameras and mobile phones, crushing eyeballs. You fear that these thoughts too are visible, so eventually you sleep through these hours, preferring to come out of your hole after dark. Dodge, walk away, be gone.

One Man's Garbage

Do you find there are too few museums in your area?
Hardwood oak floors a knee-hurting bitch to walk slowly upon from exhibit to exhibit?
Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art a forbiddingly expensive airplane ticket away?
Actually went to London for a weekend and wanted to go and see the Sutton Hoo collection in the British Museum, but your significant other would rather go shopping and coerced you to join (philistine that s/he is), and you can't go back to London for another look?

Hogwash. You don't even have to walk away from your seat in order to access wonderful art, archaeological findings and historical collections - the Google Cultural Institute has started to make wonderfully detailed high-definition photos of many world-class collections, many of them zoomable for details and all of them accessible for free.

The photographic representations, bordering on artworks in their own right, capture beautifully the hue of the items in question, the complex patterns of strokes in the paintings, the spots and dents in the once-buried items, thus to an extent illustrating a glimpse of what makes these items worth dedicating whole buildings to. "Oh," you might say, "but will never be the same as seeing that Sutton Hoo helmet in real life!"

And then you go for that second trip, and as soon as you get close enough you'll find the Real object, that which cannot be replicated by a picture, is just an unwieldy hardhat. Such is the case with a lot of things; too far away and they are "just a photograph" of something we imagine to be important and special, too close and the magic(k) fades to reveal the dull piece of old scrap metal some graduate student dug up and handed over to his professor for her to take credit for. They seem like two different objects, and in one sense, they are.

Troll Science 101: the Coin Experiment

Summer is here, the sun is shining and yet here you are sitting in front of a computer and reading my depressing blog. Shame on you. Here's a fun little experiment you should do instead.

On Tutorial Art

Tutorial art may be understood (very roughly) as what develops during the process of learning to use a new technique, a new tool, a new method of creative work. Often marked by clumsy experimentation and imperfection, the negative aura (in the Walter Benjamin sense of the word, not the new-age-quackery sense) of seemingly ill-advised use of filters and effects creates curious results that deserve some further exploration. The Ultimate Tutorial Art blog provides some interesting examples of how this effect may be applied.

A few honourable mentions, all from Ultimate Tutorial Art:

by Franz Omar Fanon

ibid.

by almosteveryonegotnipples

By all means go ahead and contest my definition of tutorial art in the comment field below.

Pre-Emptive Notes on the Title

In the normal course of events, if someone asked, I would rather make up some excuse as for my choice of the blog's name. Eventually the matter would come up anyway.

Mercantilism with a Tie

The doctrine of New Public Management was eagerly adopted by the moderate-left Workers' Party in the early 1990's, supposedly as part of an attempt to make the public sector more cost-effective, more accountable to the public and to a greater extent able to provide high-quality services to a society in rapid change.

The prescribed solution was to run all public affairs the way a corporation would, making all the same exact mistakes while restructuring sector after sector according to corporate principles. Privatizing sectors with no actual market competition (which would even for demographic reasons alone often be nearly-impossible anyway) creates a de facto corporate cartel within the state, delivering lower-grade services more slowly, at greater financial and structural costs, accountable to the public as customers or not at all.

To counter this problem, NPM requires all sectors to document their activity in increasing detail, meaning more paper pushers than ever before are in the state's employ as “administrative employees”, undoubtedly creating many jobs, but strangling the organizational structure in its unwilingness to listen to its professional employees except through their unions (admittedly from a technocratic perspective an ingeniously integrated part of Norwegian infrastructure). Hospitals are no longer managed by doctors, for instance, but by economists. With such internal counter-incentives to performance it is a wonder anything gets done at all anymore. Also see the Gjørv Report.

The underlying cause, Corporatism, is of course much older, having replaced feudal government as early as the 16th century and since then proven flexible enough to dodge the gradual reforms of the ruling class as well as the sporadic revolutionary ire of us commoners. It has proven profitable enough to fuel a welfare state, vague enough for its implications not to be grasped in its fullness by the citizenry, expansive enough to seize power on every level. New Public Management is just the current version, arguably with less violence, but by the same logic and with the same long-term results.

Another BP Moment Waiting to Happen

You may know BP from the Mexico Gulf spill and several other engineering misadventures, a short selection of their American accidents alone being available here. Norwegian petrol otherwise being heavily regulated, regarded as public property and usually dealt with in a relatively responsible manner, the Government's apparent consent to BP's new, bright idea of remote-controlling their leaky, shoddily constructed offshore platforms is a tell-tale sign of the creeping desperation, incompetence and sheer wantonness developing in even the most well-managed oil kingdom.


http://www.frifagbevegelse.no/arbeidslivet/article6714039.ece
http://www.dn.no/energi/article1935038.ece

Here's for hoping these clowns are kept out of the Lofoten area. If we are to shit where we eat, may we at least retain the privilege for our own oil corporation.

Real Fascism is Boring

Socialist Norway's only major private institution for independent press grants etc., the wealthy liberal Fritt Ord (“Free Word”) Institution, has recently decided to award a stipend of NOK 75000 to Peder Nøstvold Jensen aka. Fjordman, whose counter-jihadist ramblings combine all the smugly resentful self-appointed victimhood of leftists like his parents (except with himself in the role of the Palestinean) with the misogynistic elements of the “Men's Rights Movement” and what appears to be a paralyzing fear of angry men with beards.

In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek describes how, in Fascism, the surplus-enjoyment derived from the ideological praxis is repressed and becomes its obscene underside. In this respect Fjordman's ideology goes one step further – reactionary thought sans jouissance, Fascism without the fun bits. How depressing! How perverse! As for the underlying psychological mechanisms motivating Fjordman's meticulously quixotic reconquista, we may only speculate, but between the attention of U.S. think tanks like Middle East Forum and an apparently never-ending horde of resentful basement dwellers, I'd say he has a future ahead of him regardless of petty grants for books and such.

Much more interesting is the matter of where the good old reactionaries went. The Goebbels types went into Marketing and Advertising, the advisory committees and consultant firms. The Heydrich types started making drones and are wealthier than ever. The Himmler types seem to have gone back to Agrochemistry and its nephew, the GMO industry. But what of the sick, joyous visionaries? The Rosenbergs? The Evolas? The Codreanus? We are taught to fear these demagogues for their destructive rhetoric and their dangerously stupid ideas – meanwhile the quiet paper-pushers, enterprising middle-managers and engineers of corporate feudalism have found a new rhetorical basis excusing and legitimizing new and more profitable ways to perform the same basic routine without the Dionysiac excesses of Despotism, but with the same ruthlessness.

From my own basement-dwelling far-right internet troll days, which began around September 2006 and ended in 2008, I remember Fjordman's tear-dripping dirges over a Europa which has burned and, as the song goes, will burn again. Why wouldn't it? And why must the really existing Fascism be so boring and uninspired?

Introductory Remarks

My name is Gunnar and this is my new blog. I have blogged before, but always given up after two or three posts. The reason is not so much that I feel choked among all the other blogs, or despair for attention, or am too lazy to keep writing – all of which being decent enough excuses to quit, of course. Rather, I have felt that the introductory work has taken too much time and only served to reduce the scope of the blog without contributing any impulses as for what to write about, a negative light giving away the topic without really leading anywhere from there on.

The obvious starting point is therefore to go the other way about it: to use the very symbol of the resulting writer's block as name, logo and trademark for the blog itself.