The Grindhouse is the Opera of the Oppressed

 “My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I'm pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.”

-George A. Romero

"I became a prostitute and walked the streets in low-cut tops and high-heeled shoes owing no one an explanation, and I kept and spent every penny I earned. I hitchhiked, I was raped, I hitchhiked again. I wrote a first novel and published it under my own, clearly female first name, not imagining for a second that when it came out, I’d be continually lectured to about all the boundaries that should never be crossed...I wanted to live like a man, so I lived like a man."

-Virginie Despentes

Art is the most dangerous weapon in any radical's arsenal. I say this a lot, and I try to live by it with my journalism-defying gonzo prose, but no weapon is more radical than cinema. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a camera is a fully automatic assault weapon firing off a million words a second and revolutionaries have long wielded cinema at the powerful with a vengeance. 

From Luis Bunuel to Pier Paolo Pasolini. From the steps of Odessa to the Battle of Algiers, cinema's power to obstruct and redefine the zeitgeist in undeniable. It's impact so deadly that counterrevolutionary forces have invested billions perverting its power with the celluloid empire of Hollywood. But radicals persist and the Weinstein Class continues to chase their audience rather than lead them. Sadly however, many radicals do as well.

The biggest problem with radical cinema is the biggest problem with radical anything and that is a severe lack of populism. I love the latest five-hour Dogma diatribe as much as the next pretentious asshole, and I mean every word of that sentence with all my heart, but there is no denying that the avante garde pretty consistently fires its ammunition a mile above your average post-working-class door dasher's head. 

With that being said, the recipe for reaching the uninitiated masses isn't to water down the message. It's to deliver it in language too immersively visceral for anyone to ignore. Antonin Artaud once achieved this with his Theater of Cruelty, but George Romero achieved the same results much more recently with good old-fashioned blood and guts.

The American grindhouse has long been a playground for fomenting radical notions among thrill seeking proles with a few bucks to spare and a taste for something right to the point. The high-brow critics call this exploitation cinema and wag their bony fingers at such fare for indulging in spectacle and bad taste and they aren't totally wrong. 

The problem is that modern late-capitalist civilization has reduced us all to a slumbering horde of flesh-eating zombies and the spectacle of "bad taste" or transgressing our prescribed bourgeoise sensibilities is the only thing that will ever wake us. I know because it has before and not that long ago. The neon bathed grindhouses of pre-Giuliani Time Square achieved this goal with a rash of garish subcultural revolutions while Godard sold out and every new wave became assimilated into Spielbergian Hollywood dreck.

In no arena is this truer than with the genre of horror cinema which was transformed forever in 1968 with the no-budget, black-and-white, zombie shocker, Night of the Living Dead. Repulsed and possessed by raw footage of urban race riots and the Vietnam War, George Romero decided to use B-movie tropes like braindead monsters and apocalyptic crises to point out how grotesque humanity had become.

Trapped in an isolated farmhouse surrounded by the walking dead, a small cross section of everyday Americans quickly become the most dangerous monsters on screen, torn apart by petty differences like skin color and age. The movie ends with the lone surviving hero, a Black man played by Duane Jones, being gunned down by the National Guard sent to save the people already dead because they refused that Black man's help.

This movie shocked and appalled the studios and the critics but it ignited a revolution of low-budget gore fests with something dangerous to say. Shocking movies like Wes Craven's Last House on the Left and Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre practically invented the much-maligned slasher film in an attempt to comprehend the rising tide of violence among Mayberry Americans who cheered on My Lai and Kent State but couldn't seem to grasp the fact that they had invited such demons into their white-picket Lalaland with their imperial sins.

The new American Frankenstein monsters weren't green ghouls held together with stitches and bolts. The new American Frankensteins weren't monsters at all. They were handsome young White men like Ted Bundy who killed their daughters for sport and wholesome reverends like Jim Jones slinging the Gospel with a side of spiked Kool-Aid.

Directors like Wes Craven and John Carpenter responded at the grindhouse and what walked out into the light of day and became a part of the American cultural tapestry wasn't just Michael Myers, it was Laurie Strode and the cult of the final girl. 

Much like with Romero's Living Dead, the most radical thing accomplished by the first red wave of American slasher films was to simply shift the roles cinema had assigned us. The heroes of seemingly macho murder films like Halloween and the Texas Chain Saw Massacre weren't cops or cowboys, but teenage girls who survived the sadism of perverted masculinity and lived to tell the tale.

Many of these stories were rife with sexist tropes but what isn't in American culture? The important thing wasn't just that their films convinced white male audiences to identify with women being preyed on by other white men, it was a sense of catharsis given to millions of women and girls who lived in terror beneath a culture that had long rendered them voiceless and invisible prey, walking through poorly lit parking garages with their keys clutched tightly between their fingers.

It is not a coincidence that the horror movie genre has a significantly larger female audience than the often equally violent action film genre. It is also not a coincidence that the most radical among these films continue to be condemned by mainstream society as the most unforgivably offensive films committed to celluloid.

I speak of the so-called rape/revenge genre long reviled by pedophile coddling critics who unironically seem to have a much easier time identifying with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski than a girl with a gun and a man on her back. These stories go back to Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring but exploded out of the 1970s with the early films of Wes Craven like Last House on the Left and the Hills Have Eyes. 

These early revenge sagas largely delt with family retribution and the fine line between conventional society and unhinged savagery, but the template would eventually evolve into a story arc where a female victim of sexual violence becomes the protagonist of the narrative by surviving the unsurvivable and confronting their abusers directly without the aid or even the permission of a matriarchal legal system.

As a transgender victim childhood sexual abuse, I found my pain validated in these supposedly exploitative stories of explicit sexual violence and I also found myself in the ferocious eyes of many different kinds of survivors, from the daughter of a rape victim who gave birth to her child in prison after slaying one of her attackers in Lady Snowblood to a mute molestation survivor sold into sexual slavery in Thriller: A Cruel Picture.

These movies and others like them were banned by supposedly progressive social democracies across Europe and protested by second wave feminist gadflies but their impact as well as the impact of slasher films and splatter flicks more generally has slowly come full circle and flooded the arthouse as well as the matinee with buckets of blood.

This high artistic reproach to shock cinema began in the late nineties and early 2000s with an equally reviled wave of boldly transgressive cinema in Europe labeled the New French Extremity by its appalled detractors. These films, modern classics like Irreversible, Trouble Every Day and Romance, became notorious for pushing the envelope on the acceptable amount of sex, violence, and sexual violence allowed in ostensibly arthouse films, but many of them were defined by intimate explorations of femininity and sexuality using the storybook of the American grindhouse, and many of its directors were women.

Thus, you had sex worker turned feminist academic Virginie Despentes' and porn star Coralie Trinh Thi's 2000 shocker Baise-Moi (French for 'Fuck Me'), based on Despentes' novel of the same name, in which not only are the protagonists brutally abused sex workers, but they carry out their revenge using the sexual violence of their attackers against largely random men before ending up drowning in a bottomless abyss of nihilism as the camera lingers with an unflinchingly sadistic female gaze.

It was a shocking and downright repulsive spectacle, but it was necessary to kick down the door for women and other marginalized genders by daring to weaponize horror cinema. 

Directors like Julia Ducournau who has boldly explored the outer limits of the female body with Cronenbergian masterpieces like 2016's Raw and 2021's Titane, and Coraline Fargeat, whose explicitly feminist rape/revenge masterwork, Revenge (2017), set the stage for her 2023 Academy Award nominated indictment on showbiz sexism, The Substance, which also gleefully toyed with its own monster movie campiness like a grindhouse drag show. All a part of a much larger revolution uniting the arthouse with the grindhouse while giving Marvel a run for its money.

I can't help but to believe that George Romero and Virgine Despentes are owed a debt of gratitude for creating a market for horror movies as far-out and downright avante garde as Begonia, Mandy, Antichrist, Skinamarink, and Backrooms, not to mention opening up the playing field for distinctly Queer directors like Jane Schoenbrun and Rose Glass, telling our stories, drenched in our blood, on the grindhouse walls. But we can go so much further. We can break the rest of the rules too.

For at the end of the day, this blog post itself is a rape/revenge story. One in which the raped doesn't just include Catholic transgirls but Palestinian women and Zaydi children. One in which revenge means bringing the gore of the American Empire home and using it to convert passive observers into fully engaged participants forced to choose between the predators who rule them and the final girls who can castrate the powerful and leave them bleeding in a ditch with a little help from a sympathetic audience no longer afforded the privilege of standing by until the credits roll.

Let the seas run red with the blood of the unavenged. Let the undead revolt and inherit the earth. It's time to tell the stories they don't want you to here and this time you can't just tell yourself 'It's only a movie' because this time it's right outside your door.

Be afraid, dearest motherfuckers, be very afraid.

Blood, Guts, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced This Post

*  Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush

*  You Have Killed Me by Morrissey

*  I Like Fucking by Bikini Kill

*  I Blame Myself by Sky Ferreira

*  Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

*  Rape Me by Nirvana

*  Oblivion by Grimes

*  Me and a Gun by Tori Amos

*  Jennifer's Body by Hole

*  Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl by Yeule

The Queer Optimism of Post-Apocalyptic Survivalism

 Not to complain, but I have kind of a lot of shit on my mind lately and sometimes the shit is almost more than I can bare. This isn't a flex, but I am a genderfuck hick struggling to organize a rural Queer revolution in the same microscopic Pennsyltucky town where I was raped and bullied into developing five dissociative personalities just to carry the weight. 

As if that weren't enough, I now run a youth group which is quite literally in the shadow of the church where I was molested, counseling other Queer kids who have been tormented by their own parents for failing to live up to some other fucking church's expectations, all while the people I love more than life itself in my own found family struggle to eke out an existence defined by poverty and discrimination.

I do it all because I love it and I love this place and I love those people, but between the heartache and the flashbacks and the house fires and the switching and the trips to battered women's shelters with kids who call me mom and the executive office assisted transgender genocide running roughshod through the already vile compulsory school system, I am pathologically exhausted and dangling by a thread at the end of my rope.

It is in downright soul crushing times like these that the little things become lifesaving. I speak as a learned student of several years of intensive trauma therapy when I say that self-care is a martial art when you are this fucked up. I have my chocolate and my candles and my dreary lesbian rock music but, as bizarre as it might sound, when all feels fucked, I prep, and I'm not talking about HIV. When I say I prep, I mean I prep like a millenarian militia fiend with tits during the run-up to Y2K. 

I joyfully and peacefully prepare myself for a coming apocalypse. I peruse the breeder-laden aisles of Rural King and Tractor Supply for hatchets, machetes, and hunting knives. I do up my bedroom like a Hot Topic curated remake of Straw Dogs. I window-shop army surplus sites for concertina wire, sandbags, and MREs. I study the different kinds of earth homes most capable of repelling a prolonged armed assault in the hills of Appalachia. And amidst all this doom and gloom and camouflage, I find peace or at least something vaguely resembling it.

Some of this I am well aware is very much traumagenic. When the people you are supposed to trust most both literally and figuratively fuck you at such an impressionable age, you spend the rest of your life finding a place in every room to sit where you can put your back to the wall and keep your eye on the exits. 

However, some of this is actually shockingly pedestrian when you think about it. Doomsday prepping has become something of a booming cottage industry in the west, and it shows this time of year with the very mainstream fixation with all things zombie apocalypse. Suburban housewives get decked out in matching tactical gear, binge watch The Walking Dead and gleefully indulge in daylight phantasies of nesting with assault weapons in a world rendered stateless by flesh eating ghouls.

On a similar but far more troubling note, our elites are very much in on the hobby as well. The wealthiest men on earth are snatching up rural acreage in places like New Zealand and Hawaii's Big Island where they are digging out colossal subterranean castles stocked with enough provisions to last a decade and enough firepower to take on the militaries of most mid-size nations, that is when they're not busy shooting huge chunks of their ill-gotten fortunes into outer space, inspired by hopped up, ketamine induced fever dreams of space colonization amidst celestial bodies they have yet to rape blind and dumb with their corporate behemoths.

As out of touch as such corporate creatures may be with the life of your average American plebian, they do have access to the kind of intel most doomers can only dream of and if they're running scared it shouldn't be construed as anything less than recognition at the highest levels that the odds are stacked heavily against even the most privileged earthlings in recorded history.

Of course, you shouldn't require a billionaire with Q-clearance to tell you which way the wind blows and the evidence that humanity's days of plenty are numbered are littered all around us. The tea leaves are the size of Renaissance tableaus. As Pax-Americana's global influence wanes, the most powerful nations on earth are embracing increasingly robust military-police states, turning every last sector of law enforcement into tactically armored paramilitaries with orders from on high to shoot anything that moves and shoot to kill. 

Partisan politics are largely defined by publicized targets but whether the prescribed threat to western civilization is antifa or militias or neo-Nazis or undocumented migrants, the solution is always the same; more power in fewer hands and bigger guns in those hands. 

So, why not the rest of us? Why not the peasants trapped between the treads of a thousand tanks? Especially marginalized groups like mine who are already fighting for our lives every single day. Black, brown, and/or Queer folk have more reason to prep than the rest of the country combined, so let's get started while we still can.

Some will likely argue that this mentality is deeply unhealthy regardless of the competition, and some will (and have) suggested that I do something a little more positive with whatever time I have left on this terraformed cannonball we call a planet. However, I would argue that when you consider the actual science behind our increasingly precarious situation, you would be dense not to come to the conclusion that investing in any model of future society, even one of the Mad-Maxian variety, is nothing short of optimistic.

While massive data centers sprout like mushrooms and artificial intelligence rapidly approaches a very sociopathic form of sentience, while the Pentagon streamlines the Executive Office's access to so-called tactical nuclear warheads, and NATO corners Russia in Kaliningrad, carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase at a clip even faster than most of the world's top climate scientists predicted while the planet just gets hotter and hotter.

Westphalia's supposed solution to this predicament is to bet the farm on colossal infrastructure projects like the "Green New Deal", but such massive programs not only empower many of the same globalist institutions that brought us to this point, they rely on a convoluted plot to replace one colossal superstructure totally reliant on fossil fuels with another colossal superstructure completely reliant on the equally corporate monopolized, big green energy industry without diminishing western civilization's high-tech global footprint an inch.

Even if this great green leap forward doesn't end in another huge fucking Ponzi scheme of corporate welfare and no-bid contracts, the level of infrastructure required to replace fossil fuels would require a construction project that would burn through enough fossil fuels to melt the ice caps and kill the rainforest in the process.

The sad and sorry fact is that aside from some kind of massive psychedelic tryptamine fueled spiritual awakening, the best hope we have of any human beings surviving this tropical shit storm is collapse. The corporate class pushing their automated police state too fast, too soon, and literally melting the grid as the ocean gobbles up their precious metropolises like gilded pills.

So, I prep, and you should too, especially if you're a member of a marginalized tribe like mine because Kali knows, we have already been set up to be the first ones to die for straight white cis bros' sins. But this needn't be all doom and gloom. The fact that most of the rugged individualist preppers on the right never seem to grasp is that the strongest defense against apocalyptic turmoil is small, intimate, self-sufficient communities.

Thus, when the world is getting me down, I focus on doing everything I can to protect the people I love and that goes way beyond stockpiles and boobytraps. That is about forging homesteads and mutual aid societies and non-profit community centers and a Queer tribal consciousness among the battered and beautiful people who make me feel safe even when the sky is falling.

If I can build something local that gets my people just a little bit closer to being truly independent from the global, then all that fear and loathing I wrestle with daily feels just a little bit lighter.

So, when the world breaks my heart, I prep. But I'm not just prepping for doomsday, I'm prepping for the day after because there is no fate but the one we make.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  The House of the Rising Sun by the Animals

*  Tokyo by Julien Baker

*  Human Behavior by Bjork

*  Chinese Satellite by Phoebe Bridgers

* The Bends by Radiohead

*  Safari by the Breeders

* (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction by Devo

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Supernaut by 1000 Homo DJs

How the Shahed Drone Became the New AK-47

 Every once in a while, human beings invent a machine that changes everything and more often than anyone would like to admit, that change seems to be for the worse. For every vibrator there seems to be at least 16 smart bombs and even the vibrators are made in the same factories that produce the bombs, often with child labor and toxic run-off. 

Some of these machines are worse than bad. Some of them are downright monstrous. Technological Frankenstein monsters that seem to advance mercilessly while their proud human parents devolve in their wake. The steam engine that powered Manifest Destiny.  The atom bomb that erased entire cities. That government tracking device that keeps going off in your pocket.

In the 21rst century, the modern world has become a Frankenstein empire with a thousand terrible new machines produced per minute as resources dwindle and the emotional wellbeing of entire generations crashes with the bombs. We call this progress, but what it really amounts to is slavery in exchange for convenience. The problem isn't even really the devices themselves, but rather the fact that human beings seem to take less and less moral inventory with every new device produced. Nobody stops to ask the simple question of 'Is this good for me? Do I need this? Does anyone really need this?' before pressing 'except' on their computer screen.

The end result is a brave new world where life is cheap and oppression is downright affordable. Prisons pop up like mushrooms. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. And there are more drones in the sky than monarch butterflies. But hey, now I can buy chicken nuggets with my phone!

The only bright side to this strangely convenient dystopia is that with the mass production of quite literally everything, resistance becomes as cheap as oppression. A 13-year-old autistic kid in Bishkek can shut down the factory giving her asthma with one of those phones it produces. A widowed mother of six in the African Sahel can evade sanctions with crypto currency and buy insulin on the dark web. In the best-case scenarios, entire populations find the opportunity to play the monster on the cheap and get even with the Frankenstein Empire, at least for a minute.

And so, once upon a time, there was a starving Siberian hick named Mikhail Kalashnikov who grew up tinkering with rusty tractors and ancient hunting rifles. After serving in the Red Army during the Second World War as a tank commander and getting wounded in the Battle of Bryansk, Mikhail used his largely self-taught engineering skills to design a combat rifle based on the Sturmgewehr 44 brought over by the Nazis who turned the Soviet Union into a colossal graveyard of scorched villages and ruined cities. 

This machine would become what is now known as the AK-47. It was reliable even under the harshest conditions, so easy to operate that even a novice dirt farmer could wield it with deadly efficiency, but above all else, it was cheap and easy to produce. So much so that soon every communist country under contract with Stalin was producing their own version and soon so were many of the people that they oppressed.

The AK-47 has a fearsome reputation in the west and for good reason but across the Third World it has become a symbol of resistance. If the Winchester is the gun that won the west, then the Kalashnikov is the gun that liberated Africa and Southeast Asia. It was this Soviet Frankenstein machine that allowed many peasants to even the playing field with their conquistadors and this included Pashtun farmers and Chechnyan militiamen going toe to toe with the remnants of Mikhail's Red Army. 

Now, long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in countries like the Congo and Somalia, you can buy Kalashnikov's monster from a back-alley counterfeiter for as low as six dollars or the price of a chicken or a sack of grain, meanwhile Hezbollah fights genocide beneath a flag marked by the silhouette of the rifle they fight it with.

Of course, there are still plenty of evil people who wield this machine as well. Hell, the IDF still carries the IMI Galil, an assault rifle largely based on the Kalashnikov model. But there is no denying that the AK-47 changed the way that wars are fought and helped give rise to the specter of the Third World guerrilla as a force to be reckoned with. Today we are seeing a similar revolution in technological mutation transpiring across the Middle East with Iran's Shahed drone.

Much like the AK-47, this was a device produced by a nation under siege using the guts of their enemies' devices as a model. Iran's drone program goes back to the American financed Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s that brought another revolutionary government in its infancy to the brink of extinction, but most of the biggest breakthroughs in Iran's drone program came after 2011 when an IRGC cyber warfare unit managed to hack a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 being operated in Iranian airspace by the CIA, using GPS signals and communication jamming technology to force the multi-million dollar machine to land largely intact. 

Even then, smug western analysts doubted the Islamic Republic could duplicate such advanced first world technology, but Iran pretty easily reverse engineered their enemies' toy and made it the basis for a machine that now threatens American dominance across the Middle East and beyond. 

Most Shahed drones are what is known as loitering munitions, which are essentially remote-control Kamikaze planes. They are cheap and relatively simple to produce in mass by necessity. They were developed under heavy sanctions from largely commercially available parts smuggled in piecemeal from Poland, Japan, Turkey, India, Vietnam and dozens of other countries, then put together in small factories built underground, just beneath the reach of IDF bombs. 

It is precisely the poverty of the Shahed's production however that has allowed it to haunt the skies over the American Empire in the Persian Gulf. 

Your average American air-to-air missile or ground-based interceptor used to defend American bases in the region generally runs somewhere between $400,000 and $1.2 million dollars to produce. Your average Shahed drone costs about $20,000 bucks. The result of this equation is a massive munitions gap. After hurling heaps of cheap American knockoffs at our bases and the quisling emirates that cloister them for just a few months, Washington has run dangerously low on the weapons we use to hold the world hostage while Iran just keeps producing more and more drones from the ruins.

This is how a nation with virtually no navy or air force left standing sent American forces packing, abandoning many of their bases across the Gulf with their tails between their legs. A recent Pentagon Inspector General Report puts the total cost of Trump's war for Israel in Iran at about $38 billion dollars and warns of near unprecedented strategic munitions shortfalls and resupply bottlenecks.

And just like the Kalashnikov, the Shahed is spreading. Yemen's Houthi rebels are currently holding their own against the heavily armed and US backed Saudis in a conflict that Donald Trump appears to be afraid to enter openly. It is widely reported with little evidence that the Houthis entire drone fleet is essentially a gift for the IRGC, but all actually available evidence cries bullshit on this claim. 

It is undeniable that the Houthis are certainly using the Shahed blueprint and they appear to have been supplied with some Iranian guidance systems but everything else appears to be the kind of cheap commercial swag from the Chinese market available to any low-rent Austin hobby shop, split up and smuggled across multiple shipping containers to evade imperial embargos. 

The Houthis have also smuggled in earthmoving machinery and ventilation equipment necessary for underground manufacturing and why not? This is how Iran built a drone industry from the ruins of their own American proxy war. Why buy fish when fishing rods are twice as cheap? The Houthis have expanded their industry to largely indigenous designs and other Shia militias appear to be following in their footsteps, but the Axis of Resistance would be wise not to get cocky. After all, those who kill by the drone die by the drone.

While Iran licenses Russia to build their own Shaheds to kill civilians in Ukraine, Ukraine has torn a page from Iran's playbook and has used the wreckage to make their own knockoffs, now being used to kill civilians in Russia, and the US is too; reverse engineering the reverse engineered and improved Shahed and declaring the resulting Frankenclone the LUCAS drone, and round and round we go.

This is the law of Frankenstein. The fruit of progress. Every new monster creates a template for the next new monster and once the monster is out of the grave, there is no putting it back in, especially when you can download the blueprint to build your own on 4chan. Thomas Sankara and Muammar Gadafi would tell you if they could, they were both buried with half a mag of Soviet ammo weighing down their caskets.

It is likely inevitable now that lonely teenage lunatics in Akron, Ohio will build a Shahed of their own in their stepdad's basement. I can only urge them to consider the data center two towns over as a target instead of the children's hospital down the street and pray to Kali that the grid goes down before it can take us all down with it.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced this Post

*  Supernaut by Black Sabbath

*  Gimme Gimme Gimme by Black Flag

*  Paranoid Android by Radiohead

*  Raw Power by the Stooges

*  Cars by Gary Numan

*  Animal Nitrate by Suede

*  Iron Man by Black Sabbath

*  Beauty and the Beast by David Bowie

*  Frankenstein by New York Dolls

*  Search & Destroy by the Stooges