The Pulpit: 1st Edition
Welcome to The Pulpit, a monthly newsletter from Derange. In this edition we’re talking purgatory, Fakemink, and throwing some recs your way.
Location: Atlanta, GA.
Temperature: 84° and humid.
Morale: Not too shabby.
Millan
Alright–we’re one month in. This newsletter is hitting the inboxes of just over 250 people, and I’d like to thank all of you for hopping aboard this early. (Triple thanks to those who have purchased subscriptions.) Things are progressing nicely here at Derange. We have a meager budget for writers (pitch us!), and in addition to our long-form features, we’ll be sending out this newsletter, The Pulpit, every month. It’s free, and will loosely follow the structure you see today: mini-essays, recommendations, and some space for our writers and paying subscribers to take the stand.
In case you’re new, here’s what we published this month:
- ’s head-rattling odyssey through Power Slap and its adjacent manosphere, featuring some touching portraits of the league’s fiercest slappers. (Paywall removed for a limited time.)
Gluttons for Punishment
Shaking Makini “Big Mak” Manu’s hand, which runs 10.5 inches from thumb to pinky, makes me feel small in the way that a starry night sky does. To the touch, Manu’s right paw resembles a baseball glove filled with sand. I briefly calculate how much money it would take me to let Manu slap me in the face, abandoning the effort once my hypothetical sum surpasses my student loan debt. At Power Slap 14 in New Orleans, Duane “The Iron Giant” Crespo will do it for $5,000.
- ’s sharp analysis of Shane Gillis and a review of his show in Albany, NY, which sparked some controversy on r/ShaneGillis.
MAGA's Funniest Foot Soldier
The “Uncle Danny” bit wasn’t the first time I heard of Shane Gillis—that honor goes to when, in 2019, he was hired and subsequently fired from SNL before the season even began. But it was what made me a fan. If you don’t belong to my demographic (18-29, male, the sort of person who deleted TikTok just to get hooked on YouTube Shorts), let me try and summarize: “I said ‘retarded’ there a couple times,” Gillis opens, addressing the audience of his 2023 Netflix special
“The Russian Painter,” by yours truly, which looked at a 1 of 1 artist who was swept up by global rumblings in a Forrest Gump-esque sequence of events (albeit without as much humor).
The Russian Painter
On a strip of 6x6 cloth nailed to a wall, dozens of abstracted bodies congregate on a grey floor. Some lie on cots, others sit together at a table, and someone in the bottom-right corner screams with hands held high. The deranged painting, made with acrylic and charcoal, is called “Common Cell Room.” It depicts living conditions in the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest ICE detention facility in the northeast. Its creator, a Targaryen-looking 28 year-old, makes sure to point out a fallacy in the building’s name: “It is not a processing center. It is a prison.”
- on That One Time he got locked up for using white-out marker (OK, “doing graffiti”) in NYC. He dives into the puzzling way the NYPD persecutes graffiti writers, and takes us through his surreal 24 hours in Queens Central Booking.
Don't Get Bagged in Queens
Last summer, I took a nine hour Megabus bus from Montreal to New York City, where my friend Allee had offered me a couch to sleep on. I was subletting a cheap room in Montreal, where I was enjoying a lazy, unemployed summer. In New York, I did much of the same, spending days aimlessly wandering and nights drinking beer in nearby Maria Hernandez Park. On Saturday, I went to a block party hosted by
Will
Fakemink, Live in NYC
As Fakemink, the London rapper recently christened by Frank Ocean, was wrapping up his show at the Bowery Ballroom, a seven-foot selfie stick materialized. Wielded by a quad of gangly-looking youths sporting dark denim and RL Big Pony Polos, the act was less aggressive than the blinking red light of a GoPro in the middle of recording would suggest.
For one, the group was standing on the edge of the venue’s second floor, stretching their upper torsos and string bean arms over the railing. It’s as if they were trying to catch errant aura shrapnel cast from the 20-year-old rapper’s person. In this way the selfie stick was far removed from anyone’s sight line, a godly neutral observer like the Skycam used in NFL broadcasts.
The line between performative concert-attendee and exuberant teenager in the age of crowd-sourced-surveillance is thin. Sure, you don’t do yourself any favors when you fake-play chess at a rap show, but I found myself glancing up at the group, waiting for a misstep before forcing myself to course correct: “I’m unc, and these kids are having fun.”
(Here’s Fakemink’s No Bells interview for other uncs out there.)
Maybe it was because they looked like they stepped out of the “Chief Keef really had white boys dressing like this 😂 he the 🐐,” meme. Or maybe it was the nature of the show:
Underground darling receives string of A-list co-signs and rides the ensuing hype train into an NYC performance with murmurs of white AAVE-speaking influencers in attendance and a couple prominent faces of the 2010s streetwear clout-vortex (Luka Sabbat and Asspizza) on stage, all watching the young artist in the same way John Calipari eyes prospects at summer EYBL tournaments.
Here’s a few things that stood out:
There were at least 17 articles of clothing bearing the Union Jack, vaguely gesturing to the half-Indian and half-Algerian’s Essex roots but more broadly to the percolating UK rap moment™ that has been taking place for a while now.
The stage blended elements of Neon Geneis Evangelion (thin monoliths beaming different-colored light adjourning the edges) and Eyes Wide Shut (scarlet-red carpet at center).
Fakemink took his shirt on and off four times despite no visible moisture anywhere on his body.
The lethargic nature of his stage presence didn't detract from the performance. Fakemink had real command of the crowd.
Sammy
Threshold by Rob Doyle and Eternal Damnation
Last week, I got really into Threshold by Rob Doyle, a meandering book that was recommended to me by someone who told me it was about “being depressed and doing a lot of drugs.” When I started reading it on my train rides, the narrator was blandly rambling about mushrooms, and I was listening to a lot of Julianna Hatfield, for some reason.
These two things felt diametrically opposed: distant, plotless narrative in my hands; sharp, bleeding-heart music in my ears. “Performative reading” discourse was all over my Twitter timeline, which made me extremely conscious of how I looked on the subway, headphones on, holding this big book of acid testimonials, thinking about the people around me, and in doing so, low-key performing. Little did I know, then, that I had committed my final sin. The Julianna Hatfield music turned sour, like a doppler-effected ice cream truck, and I was thrust before a panel of my peers, all dressed in blinding white, glaring at me through META glasses. My actions were dishonorable, they said, pouting. They demanded that I perform for them; I could not find my book, as I had left it on Earth. Too bad. They jeered, spat at my feet, unleashed upon me a series of hurtful, bitingly-witty subtweets. I sobbed and was promptly cast into Hell. It looks a lot like Queens Central Booking.
Ock
United in Flames w/ jamesjamesjames
Malibu, the dreamy French ambient artist, has been going crazy on her NTS residency shows, but this week’s installation in collaboration with jamesjamesjames, the producer with the Avicii back tattoo (real? who’s to say…it feels real to me, which is all that matters) is my new favorite.
Ty Dolla $ign against “Stereo Love,” a crazy trance send-up of the poppy Ethel Cain song from the Obama list…my favorite music is the stuff that shouldn’t work, that your brain forecloses itself against the possibility of, and yet still goes. Malibu is sometimes swept under the rug as a nostalgia merchant, but what she’s doing reminds me of my favorite parts of the still-outstanding Jane Remover NTS show (RIP) or the best of vaporwave (“best of” doing a lot of heavy lifting), wherein poppy detritus is reconstituted into a joyous bit of affirmation. Don’t think of it as ironic or sincere, but as total.
Not Reacting to Graphs You See on the Internet
You don’t know what they mean, and more often than not they’re none of your business. Resist the temptation to predict everything…
Negative Literary Criticism
Everyone was abuzz about the big New Yorker piece about the purported death of negativity in music criticism, which I actually thought was fine…as comprehensive as a two-pager at the end of a bi-weekly could reasonably be, considered, perceptive. The writing world doesn’t have stans or, like, VIP sections to do ketamine in at music festivals, but the scene isn’t much brighter.
Increasingly, the venn diagram of who criticism is for, by, and about is coming to resemble a full circle. Why pan a book if you might run into its author at a bar? When nobody really reads anymore, is it worth putting additional negativity into an endangered space? Isn’t that what we have Andrea Long Chu’s quarterly skewer jobs for? Anyway, The Baffler just ran two pieces of acerbic and ruthless criticism from two of my favorite writers working, Daniel Kolitz and Adrian Nathan West. Each piece is a compelling, unintentional answer to the question Kolitz poses at his conclusion: this shit is why we bother.
Srikar
Corridos Ketamina
This is a duo with a background in the LA rave scene that now make their own southwestern strain of cloud rock. They trade Dean Blunt’s London fog that obscures and reveals black, white, British, and American heritage for their native desert dust. They time-stretch acoustic guitars until digital cracks appear and throw on trap, trip-hop, or intoxicating drum breaks. Sirens and smoke for the clown crashout gueyes give rise to a dark smog. Like many of their forefathers in regional Mexican music, they are most deeply devoted to the love in their life, with whom they share el sexo sin proteccion and botitas de miu miu.
Seeing Oasis
I didn’t expect for my eyes to well up at the sight of 50-year-old Manchester-born brothers holding hands in the air as the beat from “Fuckin in the Bushes” plays. The brotherly love that eluded them for so long mixed with the brotherly love that got me there in the first place did something to me. My friends pooled together to get me a ticket for Saturday’s show in Pasadena.
The blues shuffle of “Cigarettes and Alcohol” is the soundtrack to the crowds’ European Poznan. Sir Paul himself records “Little by Little” from the box seats. Crying fathers hug their crying daughters.
The Gallagher brothers have finally gotten to the ripe age where they can set aside their egos to accept that they need each other (and money, post-divorce). Noel’s ability to weave melodies and progressions that sew themselves into your mind mixed with Liam’s sneer and presence causes the nearly nonsensical lyrics about the desire to escape time and one’s circumstances to take on a genuinely transcendental feeling.
Millan
snuggle
A band out of the growing scene in Copenhagen that just released their second album, Goodbyehouse. It's enchanting, high-brow indie composed by Andrea Thuesen and Vilhelm Strange. Andrea’s vocals put you in quicksand, but the fat bass lines, spastic drum machines, and sprite strings provide just enough spunk to keep you from sinking. Here’s my favorite from the record:
Atlanta Will Be Just Fine
A cleanse from the city’s feuding rap titans.
Derange Subscribers:
Will [Boston]: Bud Light glass bottles. The most crisp taste + optimal consumption vehicle in the entire light beer market. Grab 2 at a time and hold them in the same hand while gesturing over a college football game. A simple pleasure.
Jon [Los Angeles]: David Halberstam - The Best and the Brightest. The classics are sometimes classics for a reason. Dense, long, but almost never dull. Insane detail. A reminder that history repeat itself and powerful men are really silly gooses not so deep down.
Nick [Los Angeles]: Richard Linklater's SubUrbia. This is the older, darker, and more jaded cousin of Dazed & Confused, about what happens after graduation and all the last day of school shenanigans. Though not as iconic as its predecessor, its depiction of lost and aimless youth in the citadels of the American Dream serves as a searing indictment of the great emptiness that all those decades of post-war empire wrought.
Chris [Chicago]: Give "Mapmaker" by Oh Geeez, Not Again a listen! This indie/folk-y/pop-rock album from last year is catchy, polished, sincere, and a great soundtrack for an outdoor adventure on a crisp autumn day.
Alex [NYC]: How The West Stole Democracy From The Arabs by Elizabeth Thompson. The rare nonfiction page-turner that tells the nearly erased history of Greater Syria's fight for a multifaith democracy (including Lebanon and Palestine, which were still part of Syria before European partition) after World War 1, and the 100s of French and British betrayals that destroyed it. You can draw a century-long straight line from the events in the book to better understand the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, the broader Middle East Crisis™️ and the hollow mirage known as 'international law.'
it's derange 👍🏽