Triumph In Blog

The waiters sit and stare, the patrons make wisecracks behind my back

I promised that there would be music once a month at one point, but the clock is sort of ticking now, isn’t it? I would probably have put out what I’ve been chipping away at last week, but after spending one week sick and another in Chicago, I have been sidetracked. In truth, I have had the majority of it done and just sitting around–some low-impact electronic stuff–with the only remaining piece being this one song I’ve been trying to mix and master for a while but it just still sounds weird to me.

Either way, that will happen when it happens. What’s more important is actually that trip I took to Chicago. I had been planning it for a pretty short time, the reason being that I needed to go quickly in order to visit artist Cam Collins’s exhibition for COPPER ODYSSEY 2: MUSEUM OF MIRACLES before it went out. I have referenced Cam before, and I even have some Redman tribute music on the backburner to eventually put out via soundcloud, so if you still don’t know this shit then you’re seriously falling behind. I have referred to COPPER ODYSSEY as a “muse” in the past, and now more than ever I think that’s true; this trip was pretty eye-opening for me in exactly the way I expected.

Being trapped in the suburbs is something else that I have brought up in the past a lot, and the whining won’t stop any time soon. Going to a big city with lots of people and things to do, where life feels real and artwork feels important…it was inspirational unlike anything else. The intent of my trip was basically to hang out and see some weird video games in an environment I like better than the puny, suffocating tenements of Indy, but I ended up facing the undeniable reality that every change I have considered making in my life recently is completely justified and necessary.

For me personally, I need to be in that environment, and be away from here, from my dependence and my monotony and, really, my shame. But some of the things going on up there are pretty special divorced from even my own narcissism; the COPPER ODYSSEY exhibition was put on at a place called the Center for MAD Culture, which is owned and operated by artist and professor Matt Bodett (Rogers Park represent, that’s where my parents used to live!) The purpose of this gallery is to, as the name implies, elucidate through the use of artwork the potential for “madness,” a catch-all for anything psychiatrically deemed irregular or undesirable, to be a reasonable perspective on life without necessarily needing to be treated, wished away, or suffocated. Via national endowments for artists with disabilities (even though our mcdonaldsreich volksgemeinschaft government is trying to get rid of them,) people with “mad” perspectives are able to put things through this space and actually be paid for it, a system which Matt currently sustains out of pocket. In a word, this gallery is dedicated to “outsider art.” That was two words but you know what I mean.

As for Cam, the level of madness is sort of transient, and private as far as I know. Matt is a diagnosed schizophrenic, which as many of you hopefully understand is a deeply misunderstood and stigmatized pattern of thinking with an incredibly diverse range of potential presentations. For a small minority it may be a serious, debilitating affliction, which is how it is almost always presented to the public–a sideshow attraction of numerology-obsessed neurotics in padded rooms. I spoke one-on-one with Matt for some time when I went to the COPPER ODYSSEY exhibit, and unsurprisingly it was pretty far from being in the mouth of madness. I think he’s a great guy with some really interesting work and a lot of very well put-together writing, both in academia and in poetry, and his vast knowledge of outsider art, its presence in American culture, its legacy as a cudgel for strategically keeping people down socially and politically, it’s all given me a lot to think about.

I loved the Center for MAD Culture, and I will gladly plug it to anyone who is ever in the loop, or wants to go, or just gives a shit about art in general. I even got a bunch of stickers and business cards from Matt, so let me know if you want one! But the reason this all speaks to me so deeply isn’t just a straightforward connection. I didn’t know that the center was dedicated to outsider art the way it is, not until I actually went and talked to Matt myself. I thought it was just a regular art gallery, no Deleuze included, but alas! I found a place where I immediately felt like I could be myself and just act the way I always do, and people would get it. I wasn’t ready for how much this was all going to speak to me.

I think it’s obvious if you know me or if you’ve seen any of this stuff I put out that I’m not exactly “neurotypical.” I don’t exactly have anything exotic or fun, at least not to me. Just regular autism and OCD and anxiety disorders and what have you. And I’m gay also. Still, the idea of the outside, and of outsider art, has always been absolutely crucial to my perception of the world. Growing up knowing full well that I just didn’t seem to think like other people, or find a whole lot of common interests with other people; that all had a profound impact on me. I know that it’s why I connect so much to things that are considered outsider art–things that don’t make sense, things that don’t follow established patterns, things that normal people don’t really like. A whole art gallery dedicated to showcasing and studying such work was a revelation for me, as I have spent a lot of time beating myself down for perceived imperfections and believing that my own work so far is valueless.

No, other people do think sort of like me, or at least feel sort of alienated like I do. They have read (or at least skimmed let’s be realistic here) all the gay old german books that I have, they’ve watched all the demented movies on the internet and listened to all the freaky 80s music and cried looking at all the colorful paintings that I have. I’m me, we’re all us, but no man is an island, right? I believe a place like the Center for MAD Culture could be an oasis for freaks like me (we’re not really all freaks I just use self-deprecation as a defense mechanism, stay with me,) in a desert of increasingly atomized and hostile culture all across the first-world, and a bulwark against the uneducated, poser aestheticism of counterculture.

However, I didn’t write this just to plug the art gallery. I wrote this because all of these thoughts seem kinda incoherent from the outside, not really very cohesive. I’m obviously a little cognitively dissonant to go to bat for anti-psychiatry and anti-oedipus and the like while also being notoriously self-conscious about my own ways of thinking, not to mention a militant marxist. In my armchair, from which all of my genius sociological analysis is conducted and dispensed, I have developed a sort of working hypothesis for reckoning why certain patterns of thought seem to exist in certain spheres. I believe that there are three separate spheres of subculture within every given culture, and the proximity to any single one that someone is raised in can explain their level of perceived adjustment as an adult, or at least empirically (I’m applying that term pretty charitably to myself here,) account for their perception of their society as favorable or not.

I don’t think it’s like a venn diagram with levels of intersection, and I’m not sure I think it’s a psychoanalytic thing either. The way I think of it is most similar to Wallerstein’s basic World-Systems model, with levels sort of imbalanced by how many people are adherent to one over the others, and which borrow from one another significantly. I’m not a sociologist and I’m not writing this as a sourced, academic document; this is just my hypothesis I came up based on my background as a materialist that sort of reconciles, within that framework, why some people feel alienated to the same degree from very different directions, on various sides of the political or economic spectrum.

The basic idea is this: There is culture, there is counterculture, and there is the outside. Culture and counterculture are directly opposing forces, socially and often politically, while the outside contains whatever doesn’t fit neatly into either of those two categories. I will attempt to outline how I perceive all three spheres below, relative to the World-Systems model I referenced a bit ago.

• Culture–This is equivalent to Wallerstein’s “Core,” or “Imperial Core.” Culture is sort of the idealized component of a society where the most popular and approachable things and ideas reach the most people. Like the geopolitical Core, it’s very comfortable and often very ignorant, feeding off of ideas from the other two spheres by co-opting them from the labor of people in those spheres, and essentially running them into the ground. Although usually vapid and detestable, there’s no denying that this is where “normal” people want to consider themselves, and have an easy life. Unlike the Core in Wallerstein’s model, this does not constitute a minority of people who explicitly profit from exploitation, rather a majority of people who profit (socially) from whatever comes their way to reinforce their existing worldview. In America, Culture consists of televised sports, shitty beer, keynesian economics, and national socialism, among other things; anything widespread enough that your shittiest relatives who don’t use the internet would be intimately familiar with it for their whole lives.
• Counterculture–Equivalent to Wallerstein’s “Semi-Periphery,” in that it exists in contrast and often opposition to culture while still profiting off of the Outside. In Wallerstein’s model, the Semi-Periphery is made up of nations that don’t necessarily have superpower status (cultural hegemony, imperial interests, global military or economic control, etc.) but still extract profit from labor and materials in the periphery, even though they may have those things extracted from themselves by the Core. In turn, Counterculture is a bijection of this idea into a relationship in my own model. Counterculture, a smaller sphere in population than Culture, is polarized against Culture when Culture extracts ideas from Counterculture as they become popular. At the same time. Counterculture extracts many of its ideas from the Outside, in order to generate ideology or ethos that Culture would be blissfully unaware of. This is because the outside is comparatively infinitesimal to Culture. In America, Counterculture consists of things like furries, juggalos (whoop whoop,) dark enlightenment types, and libertarians, things like that. Things you may not encounter much outside of a decent-size city, and are usually annoying contrarian shit for sex criminals. In the recent past, many of our great artists and political figures were considered Counterculture, before being commodified and recycled into culture. Japes aside, Counterculture also includes things like minority ethnic cultures, fringe political groups, and social advocacy groups.
• The Outside–comparable to the “Periphery” in Wallerstein’s model, the Outside represents the very small minority of people too incomprehensible for the other two spheres. Although the other two spheres inevitably build their societies around ideas that would have once originated here, the process of their extraction is long and complicated, and the Outside itself is often ignored, misunderstood, and abused, much like the Periphery. The typical process involves Counterculture adherents, radicalized against Culture in some way, looking to people on the Outside to pick and choose components of their beliefs or presentation that can be rehabilitated into something perceptibly chic or detached–in some way divorced from the mental peculiarity necessary to be a part of the outside. Once these ideas have been popularized enough within Counterculture to be visible, Culture will co-opt them for themselves, and the whole chain of custody will go unnoticed by the people within. There is no one way to describe the Outside cohesively, and many people in it are directly opposed to one another, or too dissociated from material reality that they don’t care to feel like part of a social bloc. Some groups of people regularly alienated and rejected by the other spheres of culture are also simply less marketable components of existing, populous groups, outcast for being too indigestible. On the outside, you will encounter the significantly neurodivergent, the physically and/or mentally disabled, and the politically ostracized. Autistics, Schizophrenics, the mentally retarded, political extremists, scapegoat minority groups, transgenders who refuse to be marketed as tenderqueers–this is skid row, and it’s where everything interesting exists, really.

Those are the three spheres as I conceive them. Culture is the plurality where everyone’s normal and happy, Counterculture is the vocal minority of dissidents who want to change or even destroy Culture, and the Outside is where people who, willingly or otherwise, aren’t germane to the worldview of the other two spheres and simply pile up at the bottom. The Center for MAD Culture, like myself, recognizes that the third group is where everything truly special and different lies, and where things potentially bereft of the need to be consistent or cohesive or presentable may be observed. There’s an upward exchange of the perspectives from the Outside that ends up perverting them as more people get a hold of them, like a massive game of telephone. I feel sometimes that explaining things more makes them make less sense, but that’s because I’m an autistic freak who people often find fascinating as a subject to observe rather than as a human being–sometimes I, myself, am “people” in this scenario.

This is one such reason why I consider myself on the Outside, and hopefully with my little explanation above you can see why. I don’t necessarily believe that these are distinct categories within which individual components of our societies are immutable. You could say that, like, designer streetwear is both Culture and Counterculture depending on where you buy it from and why you’re wearing it. You may belong to multiple spheres, and really I think we all do, but it’s your specific proximity to each of them from in-between–your place within the exchange of ideas–that determines how alienated you may feel. This isn’t a great system for observing the world, and as a gestalt idea it kinda fails to answer a lot of sociological questions, but like I said: the reason I came up with it is because it helps me consider why, outside specific political circumstances, some people feel alienated from one another. Maybe you can’t really explain why you think something popular is dumb and gay, maybe you can’t explain what it is you don’t understand about the conception of neurodivergence in the American zeitgeist, maybe you’re not sure why it seems so stupid to see kids wearing metallica shirts in 2025. I think of it as the long, torturous mobility of ideas from the inscrutable, indescribable periphery up to the dumbstruck, thoughtless imperial core, all via tiktok trends, advertisements, and shitty art collectives you start when you’re 20 that dissolve within the year.

It’s cathartic for me to write all of this out, mostly because it makes me laugh to see how silly all my preconceptions are out on paper. Computer paper that is digital, I mean. It’s good not to take myself too seriously, and most of my worldview, analytical models notwithstanding, is based around how I was raised by misanthropic Gen X nerds who wanted to get away from the bible. So, most of what I think is important about understanding large social dynamics revolves around how funny people think it is to reference outdated pop culture in conversation. My trip to Chicago opened my mind back up a bit though, as some time in the deskjob mines had made me feel pretty alone, and pretty spiteful (I still am in a lot of ways both of those things.) I believe that the Outside is a diverse and surprisingly well-saturated realm of physical space where all the great artworks and ideas spawn from, and my only real purpose in life as I have ordained for myself is to investigate all parts of the Outside, using my inherent ability to understand it, and uncover radical, unique perspectives before they can be diluted.

I am on the Outside, and I feel pretty alone and misunderstood a lot of the time, but a lot of other people do too. Only thing for it? Study history, study each other, apply a framework, understand that every group of people has their place, recognize that there is a mobility to our thought patterns and we exchange them with each other at all times. Think of yourself as a system within a system, because you are one, and take phenomena in as they come to you and share them, and understand that there is a material reality in which we are all contained. I’m not enough of a nazi to have read a lot of Heidegger but he’s pretty cool sometimes