The West, a stagnant swamp choked by the fetid corpses of dead idols. Art? A necrotic circus, clowns with painted-on grins hawking pre-packaged rebellion. We sniff the air, gagging on the stench of insincerity. Beauty? A lobotomized Barbie doll, plastic smile stretched taut, eyes vacant. We crave the grotesque, a jolt to the numbed senses. But here’s the rub, man: true ugliness, it takes a twisted genius. You can crank out vapid beauty by the truckload, but sincere grotesquerie? That’s a rare flower blooming in a junkyard.
Maybe it’s a virus, this obsession with the fake. A psychic contagion spread by subliminal tendrils worming their way out of television screens. Or maybe it’s the cities themselves, concrete jungles where genuine feeling gets devoured by the steel and glass. We’re all meat puppets twitching on invisible strings, programmed for pre-approved emotional responses.
Dead idols sprawl on the media tarmac, flies buzzing around their vacant sockets. The West, a junkie on a ten-year bender, craves a stronger fix. Sincerity? Naw, man, that pure white snow evaporated decades ago. We shoot up simulacra, hollow shells of rebellion and transgression.
Antibodies? Bullshit. We mainline insincerity like a virus with a million catchy hooks. Grotesque? We manufacture it on conveyor belts, churn out mountains of plastic angst and pre-fab nightmares. The bad? That’s easy. It’s mass-produced dreck, derivative dog vomit. But sincere ugliness? Now that’s a rare breed. It takes guts, a willingness to tear open your own insides and expose the writhing mess beneath.
Beauty? Beauty’s a shill, a con game for the masses. It sells serenity, fake transcendence. But ugliness, unfiltered, raw ugliness – that’s the real trip. It’s a punch in the gut, a mirror reflecting the monstrous metropolis we’ve built. It ain’t easy to stomach, but at least it’s real. At least it ain’t another empty calorie from the menu of lies.
The antibodies swarm, a buzzing cloud of critical conditioning. Beauty? Commodified, airbrushed, a sterile dream pumped out by the image factories. We sniff it out, this pre-fab perfection, a rancid stench beneath the gloss. But grotesque? Ah, grotesque! That’s a trickier beast. A bad trip, a word salad spewed from a malfunctioning meat machine – can it be manufactured? Can it be franchised? Perhaps not. True grotesquerie requires a rawness, a plunge into the psychic sewer system, a place most fear to tread.
The bad beauty, it’s a paint-by-numbers nightmare, all garish colors and predictable shadows. Grotesque, though… grotesque is a free jazz improvisation in a slaughterhouse, a Burroughs cut-up fueled by roach motel nightmares. It’s the uncontrollable id writhing beneath the veneer of control, a message scrawled in blood on the bathroom stall of reality. We crave the shock, but can we stomach the unfiltered truth? Or are we too busy tweeting about the curated chaos to face the genuine article?
So, we wallow in the grotesque supermarket, high on the fumes of manufactured despair. We crave the bad because at least it acknowledges the bad trip we’re all on. Maybe, just maybe, through this manufactured nightmare, we can stumble onto a truth more terrifying than any pre-packaged horror show.