For reasons I have not yet had unraveled for me by a qualified therapist, I have always been drawn towards extremity in art and culture, reasoning that an intellectual shock can restore clarity to the mind

Title comes from a voicemail left by Hunter S. Thompson for Johnny Knoxville in which he said:

What I need is a 40,000-candlepower illumination grenade. Big, bright bastards, that's what I need. See if you can get them for me. I might be coming to Baton Rouge ... and if I do I will call you, because I will be looking to have some fun, which as you know usually means violence.

Oh my God, I forgot that I saw exactly just this scene from Blue velvet recreated by Lynch for it had traumatized him so until Snow mentioned it in passing.

Dullness tends to be associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people form some other, deeper type of pain that is always there if only in an ambient, low-level way – DFW

TIL cofounder of Vice is the founder of the Proud boys

qua British lads hit each other with a chair:

Later in the video, when the first boy is on the ground after the second round of pain, the other keeps the promise made by the earlier kiss by cradling him, Pieta-like, the two men touching skin to skin. The willing victim seems to ahve experienced a transformative agony, his breathlessness and wide eyes closer to an erotic expression than a hurt one.

The prose are rather good; the subject is inventive; the research and pop cultural/memetic anecdotes are compelling – some of the in between the lines artsy-fartsy things about externally-inflected pain being instrumental to the feminine psyche/experience and its constituent trans-affirming surgery strike me as dissonant even if you share all of the author's priors:

The most interesting way to use self-injury as a way to explore one's gender is to act in opposition to what might otherwise be expected of you – to be a beautiful sorority girl who plays the stuntman, or a stuntman who displays himself like a beautiful sorority girl, or a trans woman who not only shares her transition with her audience, but makes it obvious that her ordeal was not pitiable or ugly, but heroic.

c.f. Buster Keaton with Harmony Korine of Gummo:

Sex and love are only other types of suffering

Of Bataille's la petite mort:

Bataille's theory about the proximity of death and orgasm, both offering flashbulb glimpses of an unfamiliar world, is correct: no two experiences make us feel more like passengers in our physical bodies, moving us inexorably towards an endpoint that feels uncontrollable and overwhelming (or, as Bataille would say, "violent").

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