Let's All Put A Curse On Donald J. Trump - liner notes

Good news everyone! My festive new single is out, just in time for the holidays. My new composition is the perfect thing to put your family in the mood for four years of an orange maniac being the most powerful man in the free world. Put it on at your office Xmas party and enjoy the suffocating mood of oppressive doom which will settle over the gathering. It's available now for pay what you want at the link below. The single is over 45 minutes and it's as a recording of a curse I've placed on Donald J Trump.

Malesperi - Let's All Put A Curse On Donald J Trump

This year with the topical theme I've chosen for my Xmas single I wanted to explain in a little depth the thinking behind the record and the process of creating it.

Like many people I was appalled by America’s decision to elect a man with obvious and crippling mental health problems to the highest office in their land. It was an act of self-destruction that requires a response no matter where you might be in the world. Unfortunately, like the majority of the citizens of this globe I am absolutely powerless to materially influence the ramifications of this disastrous decision. I knew that I wanted to create a piece of music that reflected my ambiguous feelings of antipathy and powerlessness in the face of a global catastrophe. I’ve produced Christmas singles in the past and Trump seemed like the perfect antidote to the mood of enforced jollity that pervades over the winter period.

There is something uniquely hideous about Donald J Trump, he exerts a kind of grisly fascination, a curious reverse charisma that makes it hard to look away from the ongoing car wreck of his public persona. This dark attraction was very much part of the problem during the election cycle; his limitless reservoirs of spite and bile, his constant willingness to demand attention in ever more strident terms, his strange relationship with objective reality, all conspired to create a kind of circus of the obscene. I wanted to create a piece of music that also reflected my own compulsion to keep staring at the nightmare. The outcome was a piece of music that lasted more than 45 minutes and has more than 4000 words of lyrics, the perfect metaphor for how Trump has been able to generate content around himself in ever more expansive fashion. Has there ever been a modern human being who has generated so many opinion pieces, so many talking heads, so many fucking hot takes?

I settled on the idea of a curse fairly early. It seemed to me to be the ideal mixture of vituperation and futility. A curse is an occult declaration of war, a sincere wish for the total obliteration of an enemy, a chance to cathartically wallow in absolute negativity. It is also objectively pointless, an empty psychodrama with no real chance of effecting actual change on a macrocosmic level. I love a good curse but I’m all too aware that the laws of physics don’t look too kindly on people trying to influence events out there in the real world by altering their own inner reality. There was also something appealing about the idea that Trump, and a certain subset of his more reality impaired and paranoid cohorts, might be genuinely annoyed by the idea of someone harnessing occult forces against him, in the unlikely event of their actually finding out about it. In the end there's well over a thousand words of the track that consists of me wishing ever more baroque harm and misfortune on that most baffling of modern political phenomena. It won't actually achieve anything but it's still more effective than the average 38 degrees petition.

The music for ‘Let’s All Put A Curse On Donald J Trump’ is palindromic, something that came about almost by accident. I had recorded the music on my tablet and uploaded it to my computer. I then deleted the original recording because I’m always short of space on my tablet. Due to some unforeseen fuck up I’d somehow only uploaded half of the original track which meant that I was a good twenty five minutes short of material. I considered re-recording the entire thing but then it occurred to me that I could simply play the first half again backwards and see how it sounded. I was delighted by the result and I defy anyone to work out when the soundtrack flips from moving forwards to backwards just by listening. It creates a nice sense of structure amid chaos which is something that always appeals to me, I like the idea of the structure being there but hidden from casual attention.

The ritual alluded to in the lyrics was completed on 12/12/16 at the sight on a neolithic hill fort, one of the very few examples of the local geography being permanently changed by our ancient ancestors. It’s located in a country park and rounded by trees which create a natural barrier to sight and sound above and beyond the raised earthen walls of the fort itself. It’s often a quiet place, the steep slope ramparts and the ditch moat do a good job of funneling dog walkers away from the interior of the fort. The psycho-geography of the place continues to function just as it did all those thousands of years since. It is something sequestered, something private, something serene, the very antithesis of everything Trump stands for and therefore the ideal place to call down meaningless imprecations upon his head.

View of the raised mound of the fort from the bottom of the ditch

The ritual itself went well. The weather was dreary and drizzling which imparted a fine layer of moisture onto everything. I was not disturbed, in fact I didn’t see another human being the entire time I was in the park, the rain and the gloom seemed to have serendipitously kept people away. I wanted to have the freedom to invoke without having to explain to passing strangers that I was engaging in a piece of performance art with an intended audience of zero in order to validate the contents of a conceptual noise composition.

The sigil adulterated with blood in preparation for the ritual

The sigil destroyed after the climax of the ritual

So there you have it. A Christmas gift from me to you. One man’s attempt to make sense of the senseless, to dramatise the churning riot of negative emotions into something that has meaning and which can provide a brief, fleeting sense of illusory agency. Just remember that every time you play the track you are in a sense repeating the ritual and calling down fresh curses on the man who is soon to lead the free world. I’m not saying it’ll be down to us if he drops dead of a heart attack before taking office but I’m also very clearly not saying that either. I’ve also made the instrumental version of the piece available as a bonus track. I find it a pleasant composition to put on as background music for meditation. Ho Ho Ho. Merry Christmas.

A Serial Killer Speaks

Below you will find a video of the last interview that the serial killer Ted Bundy ever gave on January 23rd 1989, just a few short hours before his execution. In it he speaks about his positive upbringing and how his murderous impulses cannot have stemmed from his environment. He traces the origins of his desires to kill back to his experiences as a user of pornography. Bundy states, very calmly, that he wants to speak "as honestly he can" about how "this kind of literature fueled my violent desires". He talks about how his taste in violent pornography escalated until the pornography alone could not slake his appetite for sexual violence. It's a fascinating interview and I strongly suggest you watch it before reading further.

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What makes it fascinating is that almost nothing that Bundy says is true. This is not the final confession of a repentant man, it the final attempt of a psychopath to achieve one more stay of execution. Bundy, a man who had previously refused all requests for interview finally granted access to James Dobson, a conservative psychologist and right wing Christian with pronounced anti-pornography views. Rather than opening up to Dobson Bundy is simply telling him what he wants to hear, that his conservative world view is right, that pornography, along with alcohol and violence in the media, is a menace to society that can corrupt people from otherwise good backgrounds into becoming monsters. At one point Dobson says "there is a percentage of people affected by hardcore pornography in a very violent way and you're obviously one of them". At this moment, twelve and a half minutes into a half hour interview, Bundy has already manipulated Dobson into seeing him as a victim. That's the chilling power of a psychopath in action. As someone with a background in discursive psychology it's fascinating to look at how Bundy deploys language to accomplish his goal. He states that there are many people who are not affected by pornography but then describes its effects on his own psyche in such a way as to make it central to his development as a killer. By doing so he minimizes and calls into question his original statement that many people are not affected by pornography. He has created the illusion of giving a balanced appraisal but in practice he is inviting his audience to focus only on the negative power of pornography.

Bundy talks early on the interview about his upbringing, which he describes as very ordinary and crucially very Christian. This is again, something deployed to create a particular effect upon Dobson, knowing that he is a right wing Christian who will likely respond positively to Bundy's claim to come from a similar background. In fact Bundy is simply lying about his upbringing. He was born to a single mother and raised by his grandparents to avoid the stigma of being born out of wedlock. For a time he believed that his mother was his older sister. This is a far cry from the average American childhood that Bundy describes to Dobson. There were allegations that Bundy's grandfather was a violent drunk and a vicious racist who enjoyed tormenting animals. A few hours before his death Bundy is able to calmly lie about his upbringing in order to create a sense of intimacy, a sense of connection with a man who he feels may be able to help him.

This is not a confession, this is a power play. By 23rd of January 1989 Bundy had run out of options. He resisted confessing to his crimes for many years but as execution started to loom he began sharing the true nature of his crimes with the authorities. This was likely an attempt to raise doubts of his mental competence, the details of the necrophiliac acts he had undertaken with the corpses of his victims were shocking enough to raise all sorts of questions about his sanity. This had bought time but by this point his time had run out. On his last day on Earth Bundy may have hoped that an intervention from someone like Dobson might have been enough to buy him another stay of execution.

When I watched the video of the interview I already knew enough about Bundy to suspect that he was not being honest with Dobson but what struck me was how plausible the interaction was despite this foreknowledge. The presence of the cameras, the polite, intimate terms of the interview all have a role to play in making this conversation appear genuine. Indeed the very fact of the interview being filmed at all makes it feel more genuine because the mere act of choosing to record something inflates its importance. There's a lesson there about politicians becoming newsworthy through our collective media hallucinations and the way the camera lends legitimacy to a good liar.

For me the illusion does start to break down as the interview progresses, the manipulation becomes more obvious. Bundy doesn't care about that, the cameras are not important to him. He may be trying to convince the viewers at home to some extent but that's a secondary concern. It's all about Dobson and what getting him on side might do for him. When Dobson asks him if he deserves to die Bundy dodges the question and carefully brings the conversation back round to the various social ills that he claims are responsible. Dobson allows him to do this, probably because the whole interview has been set up to flatter his ego.

"Basically I was a normal person, I led a normal life." If there's one truly enormous lie Bundy tells then this is it. Serial killers are nothing if not obsessives and if there's one truism about being obsessive is that it infects every part of your life. When I'm working on a new project I become distracted from almost every other part of my life, the story, the music, the art, whatever it is takes over my thought processes. That's to say nothing of the many times per day I get distracted by thinking about sex. For Bundy murder was both his project and his sex.

In the end it availed Bundy nothing to do the interview. Dobson did not intervene, there was no great public outcry and Bundy was executed by electric chair the following morning. What we are left with is a strange document that reminds us that truth is often determined by context. What would people think five hundred years from now if they were to watch that interview divorced from the context of history and the facts of the case? Will psychology have advanced to the point where they can detect the self-serving psychopath from thirty minutes of conversation or will they take Bundy's words and Dobson's acquiesence at face value?

Castration in the modern world

I've been reading about castration recently. There's something impressively transgressive about the idea of removing the male sex organs, especially in an age where masculinity is thoroughly bound up with virility. The urge to remove sex organs of the body seems to exist in a weird space that partakes of both body dysmorphia and sexual fantasy at different times and different places.

I remember coming across a man who styles himself 'Gelding' in the late nineties (possibly through Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture although I wouldn't swear to it). At the time he had been voluntarily castrated and was very much the poster boy for the process due to his willingness to expose himself publicly. There's an interview with him from 2000 here where he talks candidly about the process. I was intrigued to discover that he has since had a penectomy leaving him with only a hole through which to piss and cum. It seems that for Gelding the identity of eunuch, or nullo, is intensely bound up with his his identity as a submissive gay man. There's a more recent interview where he talks about having his penis removed here. Gelding claims that the majority of eunuchs and nullos are gay but, as a gay man himself, he may not be getting a complete picture of the wider world. I've found a few people who claim to have engaged in castration play as part of a heterosexual, extreme submissive lifestyle but its not clear how much of that is reportage and how much is fantasy. There's a curiously bloodless video of a castration here and a decidedly more bloody series of photographs of a castration operation here. A eunuch called Talula who runs The Eunuch Archive posted an account of a man whose underground castration went badly wrong, leading to a deeply embarrassing visit to the emergency room. For those interested in nullo sexuality there's an Xtube user called Sidewiner who has posted videos of himself masturbating to orgasm, a curiously hypnotic sight. With HRT many modern eunuchs and nullos can enjoy a full and active sex life. There are also people who engage in castration play that stops short of actual removal of the testicles but may involve incisions being made in the scrotum allowing the testicles to briefly hang out. I did try and find a video of this practice that I remembered having seen but unfortunately I couldn't track it down.

There are also people who elect to become castrated for other reasons. I was fascinated to read about the existence of a castration focused sect within Russia called the Skoptsy. They practiced castration as a form of asceticism and apparently thrived throughout Russia between the 18th and 20th century, apparently having as many as 100,000 members at their height. There's a book about the group called Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom which I have ordered but haven't read yet so I can't comment on whether it's any good. It's amazing to think that such a large number of people could be attracted to such a radical solution to the issue of sexual continence, especially considering the health issues that can result from a complete lack of male hormones. I can't help but think that there would be a benefit to the Catholic church in requiring their priests to undergo a similar process (or chemical castration). There would certainly be a benefit to vulnerable children.

A high profile case of someone who identifies as asexual undergoing complete genital nullification was the case of Mao Sugiyama who had his sex organs completely removed and then served them up at a banquet to which curious guests paid a fee to taste minute portions of his sex organs. Apparently they didn't taste very nice. Gelding claims to have eaten penis and testicles on occasion and predictably claims that they tasted 'like chicken'. As as a side note on the consumption of genitals there is also the case of Armin Meiwes who killed and ate a willing victim. They attempted to share his cooked penis and testicles before the victim expired. Mao Sugiyama remains known largely for this piece of gastronomical provocation although I did turn up a photo attributed to Lu Yang x Mao Sugiyama of Mao cosplaying as Uterusman from 2013 which is a collaboration with Chinese artist Lu Yang.

Finally there's the world of penis modification that stop short of full removal but still render the penis no longer suitable for penetration. There's also simple removal of the glans which is often seen as a sex positive modification for those that undergo the procedure. It's intriguing to think what kind of options might become available for genital reconstruction in the future as the technology improves. Could it be possible to radically alter the function and appearance of the penis so that it resembles something else, such as a popular dildo or vibrator such as the rabbit? Could it possible to reconfigure the testicles as internal organs, allowing people who want to become eunuchs the appearance of castration without the potential health risks? As always the future is the most interesting place to visit.