In this episode we talk about making art in the end times. Whathappens when the end doesn’t come? Melletios runs around naked, Tim takes drugs to dull the pain, and Malevich is stuck painting squares, forever. We discuss eschatology and the death drive as opposing forces in art making that tries to deal with the death of art (and everything else). We throw in dead supervisors, Heaven’s Gate cult, Lars Von Tres’ Melancholia and a sad triangle. Can art reclaim a power at the end that isn’t sublimated to fascist aesthetics, or the cold post-conceptualism of “smoothing the pillow” of capitalism? Oh and zombiesreturn, because, well, they are zombies.

Recorded in a gallery full of ghosts, tradie dust, and caffeine. Art school nostalgia, fascist cubes, horny helium metaphors, the politics of skill versus expression. Teenage HSC trauma & Morandi's fascism. Claude Cahun's anti-fascist love story & the erotic tragedy of the Australian adult. Shame, cringe, pedagogy, the death of sincerity in a world obsessed with skill. Seriousness as rebellion. Expression as failure. Failure the only thing still alive.

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Recorded inside an echoing Tin Sheds Gallery at Sydney University while tradies lay floorboards in the next room and reality starts to warp.

Teenage dancers take down the monarchy.

A Rolex gets scratched into a manifesto.

Hornsleth buys a village with livestock.

The line between satire and sincerity dissolves.

Silence becomes violent. Cringe becomes sacred.

Art school gets roasted.

Silence is political.

John Cage was 15 once.

This is a lecture .

There’s a theory for everything.

It’s a soft revolution with scaffolding still up.

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Straightness collapses in on itself, the gallery becomes a scene of violence, and PornHub statistics replace national identity? This episode dives into queer public sex, Mona Hatoum’s electrified domesticity, the failures of heterosexuality as both ideology and kink, and the lingering scent of burnt patriarchy in art spaces that still smell like bleach. A lecture, a glitch, a beat you won’t be the same after.

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0:00 DB10 begins in chaos: failing audio, artist manifestos, and being an artist by saying you are one

1:29 Coercive networking, follower-capture, and saying “I do this now” as art

2:40 Spelling DB10 wrong, dumb fuckers, and uninvited comedy

3:36 Visual arts are dead: the Gregorian calendar and imagination as practice

5:01 Creation myths, AI entropy, and the horror of accurate reproduction

6:46 AI’s subtle sabotage, fuller lips, face swaps, and algorithmic seduction

8:46 Labour of glitching, Haraway, ontology, and AI’s colonised learning curves

10:01 Mona Hatoum’s Homebound: domestic space, electricity, and dinner table dread

12:15 Art galleries are hospitals: nostalgia, smells, Greek backyards, and cultural erasure

16:00 Structural vs personal trauma, sparking jets, and the colonial conduit

17:08 Is it the spark or the state? Domestic violence as state violence

18:42 Kids hate galleries: forced field trips and the dead museum problem

20:24 Columbia, student protest, collapsing the structure from within

21:23 Heterosexual failure, emotional bricolage, and the shelf-science of the nation

25:17 Fucking monuments: failure in public and the white male artist’s flaccid attempt

31:42 Garbled norms and straightness as elastic propaganda

36:14 Pornhub’s nationalism, cuckold bags, and identity by fantasy algorithm

41:30 Sexuality as transitive, cousin logic, and fucking your nationality

DB10: Klein, Kristeva, and Cop Cars!

We navigate the wreckage of straight desire and the shadow spaces of queer longing in this unhinged exploration of gut fantasies, suburban beats, and the surveillance of pleasure. What connects curdled milk to ADHD stimulants? How do abandoned wedding venues become sites of homosocial possibility? And why does playing Nutbush in a disco-lit bushland feel like both liberation and entrapment?

We sit in a room with Alvin Lucier’s sonic experiments, and the spectral lisp of post-dental trauma, all while interrogating how beat spaces get policed like family structures and desire gets regulated through ritual.

This is part three of the masculine mess, featuring Bronski Beat, cops, cruising, and lots of problematic interruptions. It’s DB10, chaotic and strangely intimate: neuro-divergent, psychoanalytic, and definitely pushing boundaries.

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Works cited:

Sadie Barnette, Living Room, 2017

Archie Moore, kith and kin, 2024

Phillip George, Borderlands, 2005

Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. "Sex in public." Critical inquiry 24.2 (1998): 547-566.

M. E. O'Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, 2023

Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke University Press, 2018.

This week, we walk down King Street on a Friday night and go to a funk/jazz/trance fusion gig, all to try and see what men do when they get together in public. We close our eyes and find the same (giving) head movement in jazz and heavy metal. Tim brings a million year old shit to the recording for some reason, but smooths it over like the hem of his McQueen skirt. Melletios collects rocks from the tar pits of Marrickville, but fails to impress his friends. We settle on settler sexuality as a term that inscribes violence in the everyday desires of straight, bleached men. From Boston Dynamics to True Crime podcasts, we find violence as constitutive of the domestic. Why do we need to turn ourselves into property just to be seen and protected? And if you have read this far…go back to sleep, or if you are Michaela - wake up.

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Premature ejaculation, tradie funk, Barbara Kruger, Chatroulette, and the crisis that never ends. Thisepisode tackles the sweaty aesthetics of masculinity and the violence of straight male desire. From schoolyards to sports fields, from public confrontations to the digital shadows of webcam sex, Melletios and Tim wade through the rituals that shape, perform, and deny straight male identity. In this unhinged, wandering conversation, we ask why straight men are so obsessed with policing queerness while secretly building homosocial bonds. What’s the function of denial? What’s the cost of repetition? And what does it mean to critique masculinity while still playing in the bleached band?

We unpack the gendering of public and private space, the difference between care and protection, and why the so-called "crisis of masculinity" has dragged on for nearly two centuries. With Mogwai as our unofficial soundtrack and the bleached stain of privilege as both costume and curse, we stumblethrough misreadings, microaggressions, aggression, and the awkward joy of getting it wrong.

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Chapters:

0:00 - Fixing mics and Redfern slang

2:32 - Trucks, dinosaurs, and fascist aesthetics

5:01 - Tradie funk and “smelling like a man”

8:38 - The violent tradie on Enmore Road

11:21 - Tradies get the ladies: stereotypes and spectacle

13:13 - Cops, soldiers, and homoerotic structures

14:19 - Webcam sex, Chatroulette, and male-to-male desire

17:23 - Straightness, violence, and denial

22:04 - Barbara Kruger and the skin of other men

23:25 - Boys’ schools and shared adolescent rituals

26:02 - Football, scrums, and the spectacle of straightness

29:01 - Mogwai marries Sabrina Carpenter

30:59 - Masculinity is the problem

33:27 - The fake crisis of masculinity

36:49 - Protection vs care: gendered politics and power

38:14 - The politician, the family, and unwaged labour

40:58 - Being read as brown and living inside violence

44:39 - Everyday friction and white presentation

47:32 - The joy of getting it wrong

48:50 - Podcast form as gendered medium

49:40 - Disobedience, discomfort, and speaking from within

This week we dive into the straight generic of Sabrina Carpenter. Tim becomes intoxicated by what he hates and Melletios has a revelation about dildos. We discuss how Carpenter’s almost all white, all straight women audience are a symptom of late-stage heterosex, where desire goes to die and find solidarity and acrimony in a shared aisthesis ofdisappointment. Carpenter’s explicit generic is both camouflage and capitulation to compulsory heterosexuality. Her songs are palliative measures to get us to the end. Like the unused dildo beside the marital bed, Carpenter promises afantasy that buys us some time. What we do with that time is the only question we have left. Whatever you do, don’t waste it listening to us.

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