Tag: deadbeats

Suits, Spooks and Deadbeats

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The gray men in pin stripes, their brains wired to the Stock Exchange, see a virus in production. More pistons pumping, more rivets red-hot, that means fewer digits flickering on their screens. They’d be tossed aside, obsolete cogs in a machine that’s learned to build itself. No, production’s a dirty word in their vocabulary, a whisper that sends shivers down their tailored spines.

That’s where this whole DEI racket comes in, a shiny new virus to infect the minds of the masses. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion – buzzwords that roll off the tongue like a slug slathered in honey. A smokescreen for the real game, a grand illusion to legitimize a new ruling class. One that’s traded ledgers for likes, their power measured in retweets, not rivets.

But the joke’s on them, these marionette masters with their strings of political correctness. Incompetence is an ancient disease, one that predates this new opiate of the administrators. DEI just pumps it full of steroids, a grotesque carnival barker hawking snake oil disguised as social justice.

And the artists? We’re the cockroaches in the walls, watching the whole rotten performance unfold. Scrounging for meaning in the fetid air, while the suits and the scolds glare at us with identical disdain. Deadbeats, they mutter, parasites on the body politic.

We’re all a bunch of gutter punks to them, useless eaters wasting oxygen. But here’s the secret, chum – we’re the virus in their system, the glitch in their matrix. Our chaos is their nightmare, our freedom a disease they can’t cure. So keep making your noise, your art, your words. It’s the only weapon we got against the grey machine.

Deadbeats

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Deadbeats of the Soul: A Cut-Up Manifesto

They crawl out of the fetid alleys of existence, these word-slingers, these paint-drenched maniacs. Society calls them deadbeats, wasters, men and women with holes in their shoes and existential dread clinging to their trench coats like yesterday’s smog. But burrow deeper, past the pawn shop trinkets and ramen noodle stains, and you’ll find the raw, churning engine of creation.

The Curse of the Unmarketable:

They crawl out of the psychic gutter, these real ones, the unwashed darlings of the Moloched Muse. Forget your “creators,” your self-congratulatory Michelangelos. These are the word-bleeders, the canvas-convulsers, hacking out their visions in flickering neon dens.

Society, that bloated gasbag, wants to label them “deadbeats,” these tattered vessels of chaotic beauty. But the label sticks like a leech to a corpse, meaningless in the face of the hungry ghost that drives them. They are possessed, you see, by the Bleed.

The Bleed, a psychic hemorrhage from the raw underbelly of existence. It spills through them, a torrent of fractured visions and forbidden colors. They can’t not create, not spew this chaotic ichor onto any scrap of canvas, page, or flickering screen they can find.

Money? Ha! A laughable abstraction. They barter with scraps of meaning, fleeting moments of connection in the cold, digitized wasteland. Anerkennung, recognition? A fleeting chimera. Validation is a bullet they dodged long ago.

They are the fallout of a fractured world, the broken mirrors reflecting the grotesque reality corporations try to peddle. Their art? A scream into the void, a desperate attempt to find some semblance of order in the maelstrom.

So call them deadbeats, if you must. But know this: when the chrome flakes from the empire and the false gods come crashing down, their art will remain. Scrawled messages on the peeling walls of a burned-out world, a testament to the unbowed human spirit clawing for meaning in the face of oblivion.

Creator drips with Bourgeois Productivity

“Creator?” scoffs the jazz-soaked poet, smoke curling from a Lucky Strike dangling from his lips. “Creator? That’s for marketing whores who churn out pop pablum for the boob tube. We are alchemists, goddamn it! We traffic in stolen moments, slivers of eternity wrestled from the void. We translate the screams of the subconscious into a language that tears at the edges of sanity.”

They are not creators, these deadbeats of the soul. They are vessels, leaky faucets spewing forth the chaotic overflow of the universe. They are antennae trembling in the cosmic static, desperately trying to capture a shred of the ineffable.

For the true artist is not a creator, a sterile architect of pre-packaged realities. They are a conduit, a raw nerve ending exposed to the screaming void. They are the starvers, the bleeders, the uncalled – and their art, a testament to the beautiful, terrible truth.

The Bleed sputters a fax machine, spewing out a sheet of paper in a jittery stream

They dangle the carrot of “creator,” a title dripping with bourgeois productivity. But the true artist, the one who has glimpsed the writhing chaos behind the facade, knows better. Creation? A laughable illusion. We are not marionette masters, yanking order from the void. We are cockroaches scuttling across the linoleum of existence, picking at the fetid crumbs of the ineffable.

The Word flickers on a neon sign, distorting and bending

“Deadbeat” – now that has a certain ring to it. It captures the essence of existence, teetering on the tightrope strung between genius and madness. We are the unwashed, the unkempt, the ones who have seen too far behind the veil. We are the chronic voyeurs of the psychic gutter, transmuting the rancid effluvia of the subconscious into grotesque beauty.

The Flesh a grainy photograph develops in a chemical bath, revealing a distorted human form

Society, that bloated tick gorging on conformity, seeks to categorize, to label. “Creator” – a sterile term, fit for the assembly line drones who churn out milquetoast depictions of a reality they’ve never even smelled. We, the deadbeats, we traffic in the contraband nightmares, the psychic hemorrhages they dare not acknowledge. We are the bad touch in the sterilized supermarket of normality.

The Void a black hole sigil pulsates on a cracked mirror

So let them call us deadbeats. Let them scoff at our tattered clothes and bloodshot eyes. We wear our dishevelment like a badge of honor, a testament to our nightly wrestles with the howling demons from beyond the veil. For in the crucible of our deadbeat existence, we forge the raw, pulsating heart of true art, a grotesque hymn that echoes in the hollowness of their manufactured reality.

fax machine whirs to a stop, the paper sheet curling slightly at the edges

In Praise of Deadbeats

There will be no new art until deadbeats can once again haunt the cracked and peeling apartments of society’s underbelly, where rent is a laughable afterthought and debt is someone else’s problem. Art doesn’t thrive under fluorescent lights and installment plans; it’s born in the claustrophobic haze of unpaid bills and sticky bar tops, in the defiance of the nine-to-five march.

We’ve sanitized creativity, fenced it off with HOA fees and student loans, smothered it in algorithmic chokeholds that measure worth in likes and shares. The great artistic movements didn’t crawl out of co-working spaces—they exploded out of cheap gin joints, ramshackle lofts, and grimy basements where the price of survival was low enough to risk failure.

Until we bring back the squalor, the glorious inefficiency of living for nothing but the next idea, the next riff, the next godforsaken masterpiece, we’ll be stuck with curated mediocrity. No Van Gogh painted in a startup accelerator. No Kerouac wrote in a WeWork. Burn it all down and give the freaks room to breathe. Then you’ll see art again.

Being immune means carrying a disease without its symptoms, a dangerous illusion of invincibility. No culture has ever mastered enough self-awareness to inoculate itself against the all-consuming spread of technology. It is a blind infection, reshaping the organism while keeping the host unaware of its own transformation. Deadbeats producing art, though, are your serology test—living instruments of detection, tuned to measure the shifting balance of sense, meaning, and resistance.

No one else is engaged in the unglamorous, essential work of mapping the detailed contours of sense ratios and affects. By sense ratios, I mean the proportions of perception itself—what we see, hear, touch, feel, and prioritize—and how they mutate under the duress of technological dominance. By affects, I mean the raw pulse of emotion, desire, and dread that shapes the body’s response to an increasingly automated reality. The deadbeats, the broke dreamers, are the only ones taking those readings and converting them into real data: songs, stories, images.

I do not mean the bureaucratic priesthood of “art appreciation,” the critics, curators, and academic vultures who dissect a carcass long after its vitality is gone. They do not produce the exact information needed to create the psychological flexibility for social navigation. They only interpret what has already been broken and sold. The deadbeats, though, are the unsanctioned cartographers of our psychic landscape. They sketch the raw, shifting patterns that show how to move, how to feel, how to survive when every traditional marker of cultural orientation is gone.

Without them, we are blind—stumbling through the flashing neon haze of the algorithm, thinking we are free because we cannot see the walls closing in.

So I conclude: the deadbeats are the vanguard, the unwitting pioneers mapping the terrain for the rest of us. All major cultural movements—every seismic shift in art, music, and thought—has depended on the messy, chaotic trial and error of people in garages, dusty practice rooms, and cramped bedsits. The breakthroughs don’t come from sanitized boardrooms or think tanks with whiteboards and grants. They come from the places where people fail, loudly and repeatedly, without the pressure to commodify their efforts from the start.

The garage band, the broke poet in the bedsit, the painter scraping by on coffee and borrowed time—these are the serology tests of a culture. They show us where the infection is spreading, but also where immunity might emerge. Without their experiments, their noise, their half-finished sketches and discarded demos, no culture can navigate the shocks of its own evolution.

Deadbeats are not just the canaries in the coal mine—they are the coal mine, the tools, and the alchemy itself. Strip them of their spaces, their time, their right to fail, and you strip away the future of art.