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Rubin Farr Grand Master

Rubin Farr

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https://bleep.com/release/265826-coil-the-new-backwards?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Coil+-+The+New+Backwards+(Infinite+Fog)+|+Coil+-+Musick+To+Play+In+The+Dark²+(Dais+Records)+|+David+Keenan+-+England+s+Hidden+Reverse+(Turnaround)+|+Pre-Order+Now&utm_campaign=Coil+-+The+New+Backwards+(Infinite+Fog)&vgo_ee=aD%2FrQTA%2FgH2CQrr1yIycAnwFoqDlMHNmyq65fGLdufk%3D

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egggohan
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It took me sooooooo long to start to digest Coil's music and appreciate it on its own terms. I've really only begun deeply listening to their music and appreciating how mindblowingly esoteric and unse

Rubin Farr
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Rubin Farr
Rubin Farr

new Coil zine: https://temporalboundary.bigcartel.com/product/man-is-the-animal-a-coil-zine-issue-1

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milkface Grand Master

milkface

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12 minutes ago, Richie Sombrero said:

 

Sleazy moved to Thailand and mentioned rentboys in his Wire interview but was clear that none were underage, as far as I recall.

Fair enough, I remember hearing abut that then seeing the music video for love's secret domain and there's no way the boys are of legal age but I could be wrong but it never sat well with me at all.

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Alcofribas Grand Master

Alcofribas

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7 minutes ago, milkface said:

Fair enough, I remember hearing abut that then seeing the music video for love's secret domain and there's no way the boys are of legal age but I could be wrong but it never sat well with me at all.

sorry, what’s illegal about the LSD video? 

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Alcofribas Grand Master

Alcofribas

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Posted
4 hours ago, milkface said:

If the dancers rubbing up on him are of legal age, then my dad's the pope.

i'm gonna push back on this here, but i'm not at all trying to be a dick. this just happens to be a topic that i think is important beyond the scope of your posts and still in need of deeper explorations beyond contemporary conventional wisdom. 

first off, even if the boys in the video were under 18 -and there is no evidence contradicting the bands claim otherwise - there's nothing illegal taking place in the video. jhonn is in a glitter shirt dancing around with some boys in their undies. there are some crotch shots, rubbing is taking place. this is not a crime. nor should it be. 

i think a number of things are worth considering:

1. the band and their associates did in fact face legal persecution for their homosexuality so i kinda find it...not cool...that a new take on this is to accuse them of some other, obviously gay-themed transgression. i understand that's likely not your intention but taken with a fuller context it's depressing to consider that guys who were so unabashedly queer when to be so was illegal, guys were arrested for gay activism, who grappled with the brutality of homophobia, etc., are now getting flack here for a cheeky music video bc young-looking boys are in it.

2. gay relationships between older men and younger boys were not seen as forbidden in the way they are today. (in)famously, foucault was known to have openly rejected the existing age of consent laws and thought they should be made drastically lower, arguing that young people are fully able to consent to sex acts. for a more "nuanced" illustration, consider sarah schulman's novel "the child" in which she depicts a young person crushed and rejected by a cruel family and by society, and by law tragically cut off from the only relationships of pleasure and understanding known to him - sexual relationships with two older men. many examples of this dynamic exist in gay literature and history and imo it's impossible to condemn these types of relationships outright. after all, how can one be outraged by the transgression of age of consent laws when it was illegal for adults to consent with other adults? not to mention the differing laws throughout different cultures and regions of the world. but to the point - i think such relationships were extremely normal and *gasp* healthy alternatives to the violence of straight culture that rejected them. there is also the pop-culture (and straight) example of the teenage girl who had sex with david bowie and remembers it as a "beautiful" experience but is told by "the discourse" that it was "wrong." so there is a distinction to be made between "illegal" and "wrong," and this distinction is significant. 

3. the aesthetics of coil in particular was about the fringes and extremes (citing foucualt again we can call these "limit experiences"). these themes were intrinsic to their experience as gay men at the time. to simply be gay in the 80s was an extreme condition for a lot people. artistically coil drew from these themes time and again. another infamous (and at least semi-queer) inspiration for them came from aleister crowley, whose work consistently confronted limit experiences and promulgated a much broader view of sexuality in particular that clashed extremely with the victorian mores of his time. in a notorious court case the production of crowley's collection of pornographic poems "white stains" was seen to have destroyed his chances of winning, bc no jury would side with a man who could write "profligate" poems. so pushing the edges of sexual identity is a big part of coil's artistic vision and i think the video aligns with this vision very well. and i'd like to note that if this was a straight scene this video would have never raised a single eyebrow when it was released; "young-looking" girls were a staple of the music video industry.

i think the video is meant to raise eyebrows but i don't think there's something wrong taking place there. the story is they went to a go-go club and filmed the video with the boys who worked as dancers there. if true, this would have been another job for them and they probably had a good time dancing around with the man in the glitter shirt imo.

4. more broadly, i tend to see a distinctly conservative theme prevalent among certain kinds of woke sex morality, queer or otherwise. again, this is one of the main points of foucault's first book on sexuality - that we are cultural beholden to sex morality as a kind of hangover from the victorian era. i hear about consent a lot, but almost always related to sex and hardly ever having to do with any other kind of activity. for a young person to do drugs or drink with an older person is seen to be a completely normal behavior that most people would never even question - you're under age, some older dudes have booze so you party with them. no one is talking about consent here. wanna sneak out in your mom's car when you only have a permit and go smoke weed in the parking lot? no problem, these laws are fine to break! but it's illegal to dance in a sexually provocative way with a man if you're...under the age of 18? hmm. but more significantly, we don't have nearly enough discussion on consent when it has to do with jobs or the government, which to me are hands down the space where the most horrible exploitations and abuses of power occur to most normal people. we accept that you give up many of your rights to your boss, the police, the tax-collector, etc. again, no discussion of consent. consent only seems to arise from sex. i find this...bad. 

this conflation of the right and left on sex mores came together quite distinctly in the cancellation of that scumbag milo yiannopolous who finally got his backing taken away when the right and left both agreed he'd crossed a line when he spoke approvingly of relationships between teenaged boys and adult men. both the right and left tried to construe this as pedophilia, with the right hypocritically condemning it and the left trying to sanitize gay history by pretending these types of relationships are inherently pedophiliac and therefore gays don't do them bc gays are good now. both approaches are "not a good look."

/rant

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cwmbrancity Grand Master

cwmbrancity

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Posted

Playing with taboo themes of transgression was a big chunk of the entire industrial schtick & borderline reason for being, from TG to CV hacking control, all the way through to more recent electronic releases eg

https://www.discogs.com/release/320409-Thighpaulsandra-With-Siôn-Orgon-And-Martin-Schellard-Rape-Scene
 

Speculation doesn’t help but.....

21 hours ago, Alcofribas said:

i'm gonna push back on this here, but i'm not at all trying to be a dick. this just happens to be a topic that i think is important beyond the scope of your posts and still in need of deeper explorations beyond contemporary conventional wisdom. 

first off, even if the boys in the video were under 18 -and there is no evidence contradicting the bands claim otherwise - there's nothing illegal taking place in the video. jhonn is in a glitter shirt dancing around with some boys in their undies. there are some crotch shots, rubbing is taking place. this is not a crime. nor should it be. 

i think a number of things are worth considering:

1. the band and their associates did in fact face legal persecution for their homosexuality so i kinda find it...not cool...that a new take on this is to accuse them of some other, obviously gay-themed transgression. i understand that's likely not your intention but taken with a fuller context it's depressing to consider that guys who were so unabashedly queer when to be so was illegal, guys were arrested for gay activism, who grappled with the brutality of homophobia, etc., are now getting flack here for a cheeky music video bc young-looking boys are in it.

2. gay relationships between older men and younger boys were not seen as forbidden in the way they are today. (in)famously, foucault was known to have openly rejected the existing age of consent laws and thought they should be made drastically lower, arguing that young people are fully able to consent to sex acts. for a more "nuanced" illustration, consider sarah schulman's novel "the child" in which she depicts a young person crushed and rejected by a cruel family and by society, and by law tragically cut off from the only relationships of pleasure and understanding known to him - sexual relationships with two older men. many examples of this dynamic exist in gay literature and history and imo it's impossible to condemn these types of relationships outright. after all, how can one be outraged by the transgression of age of consent laws when it was illegal for adults to consent with other adults? not to mention the differing laws throughout different cultures and regions of the world. but to the point - i think such relationships were extremely normal and *gasp* healthy alternatives to the violence of straight culture that rejected them. there is also the pop-culture (and straight) example of the teenage girl who had sex with david bowie and remembers it as a "beautiful" experience but is told by "the discourse" that it was "wrong." so there is a distinction to be made between "illegal" and "wrong," and this distinction is significant. 

3. the aesthetics of coil in particular was about the fringes and extremes (citing foucualt again we can call these "limit experiences"). these themes were intrinsic to their experience as gay men at the time. to simply be gay in the 80s was an extreme condition for a lot people. artistically coil drew from these themes time and again. another infamous (and at least semi-queer) inspiration for them came from aleister crowley, whose work consistently confronted limit experiences and promulgated a much broader view of sexuality in particular that clashed extremely with the victorian mores of his time. in a notorious court case the production of crowley's collection of pornographic poems "white stains" was seen to have destroyed his chances of winning, bc no jury would side with a man who could write "profligate" poems. so pushing the edges of sexual identity is a big part of coil's artistic vision and i think the video aligns with this vision very well. and i'd like to note that if this was a straight scene this video would have never raised a single eyebrow when it was released; "young-looking" girls were a staple of the music video industry.

i think the video is meant to raise eyebrows but i don't think there's something wrong taking place there. the story is they went to a go-go club and filmed the video with the boys who worked as dancers there. if true, this would have been another job for them and they probably had a good time dancing around with the man in the glitter shirt imo.

4. more broadly, i tend to see a distinctly conservative theme prevalent among certain kinds of woke sex morality, queer or otherwise. again, this is one of the main points of foucault's first book on sexuality - that we are cultural beholden to sex morality as a kind of hangover from the victorian era. i hear about consent a lot, but almost always related to sex and hardly ever having to do with any other kind of activity. for a young person to do drugs or drink with an older person is seen to be a completely normal behavior that most people would never even question - you're under age, some older dudes have booze so you party with them. no one is talking about consent here. wanna sneak out in your mom's car when you only have a permit and go smoke weed in the parking lot? no problem, these laws are fine to break! but it's illegal to dance in a sexually provocative way with a man if you're...under the age of 18? hmm. but more significantly, we don't have nearly enough discussion on consent when it has to do with jobs or the government, which to me are hands down the space where the most horrible exploitations and abuses of power occur to most normal people. we accept that you give up many of your rights to your boss, the police, the tax-collector, etc. again, no discussion of consent. consent only seems to arise from sex. i find this...bad. 

this conflation of the right and left on sex mores came together quite distinctly in the cancellation of that scumbag milo yiannopolous who finally got his backing taken away when the right and left both agreed he'd crossed a line when he spoke approvingly of relationships between teenaged boys and adult men. both the right and left tried to construe this as pedophilia, with the right hypocritically condemning it and the left trying to sanitize gay history by pretending these types of relationships are inherently pedophiliac and therefore gays don't do them bc gays are good now. both approaches are "not a good look."

/rant

It goes deeper - in this example degrees of underage flesh being displayed were provocatively overt. Massive Coil, TSP, Burroughs & Genet freak & within this cohort a few have had an open predilection for boys of adolescent age. Boys, not even lads. Thailand, Tangier, take your pick. Places of exploitation & sex tourism. Sleazy said he liked the rougher, older criminal psychopath type too, for a balanced perspective (pardon pun). TSP has written about adolescent sexual development as a theme that should be open for discussion/debate & artistic exploration. There’s room for these processes even if they’re exceptionally delicate areas of existence & experience. Problem is they’re often prone to abuses of power & coercive control.

Consent is a slightly different conversation & I say that as a parent. How is this a position of ignorance? Speculation is almost irrelevant when folks are dead & unable to represent themselves but the vid posted is a few degrees over the line imho. Without prefectural procedure, you couldn’t release a vid like this today. You may well encounter & view legal frameworks as historically biased, weighted heavily against specific sections of society, with societal edges healthy realms to explore artistically too. Cool. I don’t see any homophobic bias here either.

Teasing out the nuances when certain oeuvres purposefully override nuance as part of their aesthetic drive can be complex, eg TOPY hoarding samples of teenage bodily fluids followed by illegal seizures of archives & threats of prosecution (GPO). In the meantime, anyone can cum on Thighpaulsandra:

https://www.thighpaulsandra.co.uk/store/p13/"Cum_on_Thighpaulsandra"_towel.html

& Rosa Mundi, a Balance collaboration with Rose McDowall for balance:

 

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Alcofribas Grand Master

Alcofribas

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, cwmbrancity said:

Playing with taboo themes of transgression was a big chunk of the entire industrial schtick & borderline reason for being, from TG to CV hacking control, all the way through to more recent electronic releases eg

https://www.discogs.com/release/320409-Thighpaulsandra-With-Siôn-Orgon-And-Martin-Schellard-Rape-Scene
 

Speculation doesn’t help but.....

It goes deeper - in this example degrees of underage flesh being displayed were provocatively overt. Massive Coil, TSP, Burroughs & Genet freak & within this cohort a few have had an open predilection for boys of adolescent age. Boys, not even lads. Thailand, Tangier, take your pick. Places of exploitation & sex tourism. Sleazy said he liked the rougher, older criminal psychopath type too, for a balanced perspective (pardon pun). TSP has written about adolescent sexual development as a theme that should be open for discussion/debate & artistic exploration. There’s room for these processes even if they’re exceptionally delicate areas of existence & experience. Problem is they’re often prone to abuses of power & coercive control.

Consent is a slightly different conversation & I say that as a parent. How is this a position of ignorance? Speculation is almost irrelevant when folks are dead & unable to represent themselves but the vid posted is a few degrees over the line imho. Without prefectural procedure, you couldn’t release a vid like this today. You may well encounter & view legal frameworks as historically biased, weighted heavily against specific sections of society, with societal edges healthy realms to explore artistically too. Cool. I don’t see any homophobic bias here either.

Teasing out the nuances when certain oeuvres purposefully override nuance as part of their aesthetic drive can be complex, eg TOPY hoarding samples of teenage bodily fluids followed by illegal seizures of archives & threats of prosecution (GPO). In the meantime, anyone can cum on Thighpaulsandra:

https://www.thighpaulsandra.co.uk/store/p13/"Cum_on_Thighpaulsandra"_towel.html

& Rosa Mundi, a Balance collaboration with Rose McDowall for balance:

 

yeah so I was obviously ranting and touching a number of different things. Mostly I wanted to push back on the claim that the were pedos doing illegal shit, meaning they shoulda been locked up. I’ve no doubt they did shit like that but from my view I don’t think the video qualifies. And in general I tend to push back on this sexual absolutes. 
 

I think Coil et al absolutely crossed many lines, which is a big part of their work. For me that drew me in as a young person, I found it fascinating. But I found a lot more there, a lot of spiritual and personal depth and a lot that was relevant to the gay experience. So perhaps I’m a bit defensive about it idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

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