Kathy Shaidle's Blog, page 12

“But Mitchell’s brilliant art was always a product of artifice as much as it was of honesty”

“Authenticity” (particularly in music) and “received wisdom” being two of my typically middlebrow, overgrown-adolescent hobbyhorses, may I present Ivan Kreilkamp…

Her song “Woodstock” is now remembered as one of the most iconic musical artifacts of the late 1960s American counterculture, but it’s worth remembering that it was written by a Canadian artist who did not perform at (or even attend) Woodstock. (…)

While I never tire of pointing out hippie fakery, one could argue that her basing “Woodstock” on what she saw on TV news reports makes the song more “authentic,” since that’s how 99.99% of the Western world (has) experienced it too.

To this day, Mitchell epitomizes the confessional singer-songwriter, whose art dramatizes her own experience. This musical mode is now often justly criticized for its over-valuation of authenticity, sincerity, and the natural. But if the naive singer-songwriter assumes that the “self” can simply be presented in song—in a process not complicated by recording, mass mediation, or the pop marketplace—Mitchell’s own self-performance always contained depths of complex artistry and artifice.

But “honesty” in art is, of course, also an aesthetic effect. If this child of Saskatchewan seemed to associate Canada with childhood, pure self-expression, and the natural—with those bird songs of her youth—she was at least as much an “Americanized” modern rock performer.

Ed Driscoll: The Secret Torment of Joni Mitchell

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesApartheid: Was it ALL bad…?Joe Bob Briggs: Shut up about “Get Out”David Cole: “When Wolf Blitzer called his father ‘unskilled,’ he was straight-up lying”  

Apartheid: Was it ALL bad…?

Katie Hopkins reports from South Africa:

Bernard’s dad untied his son, his daughter-in-law and his own wife – all bound hand and foot in the garage. Then he went to sit on the stoop outside the house.

It was the last thing he ever did.

“I told him to hold on. I told him we had new projects on the farm. I told him to hold on because we still had a lot to do.”

Ten minutes later Bernard’s father was dead.

 

Apartheid: was it all bad?

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Joe Bob Briggs: Shut up about “Get Out”

Joe Bob Briggs writes:

For the first couple months after Get Out was released, I was beating the drums for it, telling anyone who would listen that it was brilliant dark-comedy horror with a Rosemary’s Baby vibe combined with a Roger Corman-type social-commentary subtext. The film has a third-act problem, but I would tell people, “You won’t care because the rest of it is so damn brilliant.”

Pseudo-intellectuals on the internet can ruin anything. (…)

Then it was “the first horror film to feature a black protagonist.” EXCUSE ME, but, uh, Night of the Living Dead? Not to mention Blackenstein, Blacula, The Beast Must Die, the remake of House on Haunted Hill, Halle Berry in The Call, Wesley Snipes in Blade, Laurence Fishburne in Event Horizon, Grace Jones in Vamp, the little boy in Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs, Jada Pinkett in Demon Knight, Danny Glover in Predator 2, Tony Todd in everything including the Tom Savini remake of Night of the Living Dead, Naomie Harris in 28 Days Later—and I’m sure I’m leaving some out. Who invents this stuff?

I’ve never heard Judy Garland described as ‘sexy’ before, even as a ‘runner up’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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David Cole: “When Wolf Blitzer called his father ‘unskilled,’ he was straight-up lying”

A typical must-read by David Cole:

David Blitzer’s skills were not only impressive, they were recognized as such by the Nazis, who specifically classified him as a skilled worker. Think about that for a minute…and try to wrap your brain around this stunning fact: The Nazis apparently had a higher opinion of Wolf Blitzer’s father than Wolf Blitzer does. Sure, they may have considered David Blitzer a verminous Jew, someone to imprison or expel, but at least they acknowledged that the guy was skilled, a “specialist,” and they kept him alive, reluctantly, because of those skills (no question it was reluctantly, because, as I said, Polish Jews were pretty much marked for destruction unless they had “value”).

What would make Wolf Blitzer decide to shit all over the memory of his Holocaust-survivor father, for no other reason than to push for the U.S. to be flooded with unskilled immigrants? Why is that so damn important to the guy, that he’s willing to dishonor the memory of the man who raised him?

This is a low point for leftist Jews. (…)

But those answers don’t satisfy me…maybe because I’m not asking the right questions. Perhaps I should be asking, are Jews still fighting World War II? (…)

Will Jews forever carry a hatred of the West, a desire to see Western traditions and values subverted even at their own expense?

 

 

David Cole: How Your B.S. Conspiracy Theories Help the State

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Steve Sailer: “Miller perhaps recognizes how much hatred he attracts from many Jewish members of the media as a sort of ‘renegade Jew’”

…whose pro-American people principles make others who, for petty reasons, want to ethnically swap Americans with foreigners look bad by comparison.

For example, an article from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wire service this week began:

“During a combative news conference in early August, White House adviser Stephen Miller told reporters that the United States should prioritize immigrants who speak English. (…)

“But if English proficiency had been an immigration requirement a century ago, Miller’s own great-grandmother may not have been allowed into the country.”

This clichéd argument would make perfect sense in a Back to the Future universe where changes to the law in the future alter the law in the past, causing your whole family line to vanish from Hill Valley.

But that’s not the universe we inhabit. In ours, the past has passed and all you can change is the future.

The establishment’s conventional wisdom that past immigration morally mandates future immigration is kind of like saying that because your favorite NBA star’s ancestors got here due to the slave trade, Congress should re-legalize the Middle Passage.

These are not high-quality arguments.

Mark Vandermaas: Will free speechers miss Berkeley’s golden opportunity?

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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The Great White War: “Most of my hatred (…) is INTRA-racial”

Jim Goad writes:

In her book Good White People, Shannon Sullivan takes the sanctimonious middle-class goodwhites to task for projecting their own guilt complexes onto the easily despised and perennially maligned rednecks and white trash.

So far, so good. I appreciate her gesture in calling goodwhite sanctimony out for the self-serving vanity project that it is.

However, she and I reach a fork in the road when she encourages both the goodwhites and badwhites to accept their role in dismantling the “illness” of whiteness and forge ahead hand-in-hand to build a racially just and equitable society—but, as is ALWAYS the case, she offers no timelines or quantifiers for exactly how or why our society is currently unjust, nor any spreadsheets with graphs that will show exactly when “justice” has been achieved and everyone can finally quit whining once and for all. Unlike her, I think it’s OK being white. And what the goodwhites don’t realize is that I wouldn’t care either way if they hadn’t beaten me over the head since childhood with the idea that there’s nothing OK with being white.

Mad Men Creator: Nothing To Laugh At By The Time You’re In The Late ‘60s

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Joe Bob Briggs defends Susan Cabot — by dissing “The Wasp Woman”

was humming along splendidly, until:

First of all, for those of you who don’t follow these things, The Wasp Woman was a 1959 quickie for American International, dashed off by exploitation movie legend Roger Corman, that is considered horrible even by people who love Roger Corman. Focusing on this throwaway programmer—a clichéd fountain-of-youth/Dorian Gray story that has been handled much better in other forms—is to ignore the fact that, without Susan Cabot at its center, there’s no movie at all!

Please: The Wasp Woman (which I’ve written about before) is a deeply flawed but important proto-feminist B-movie, along the lines of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

Ignore the bad monster makeup. What is particularly well observed (perhaps merely by accident or indifference on the filmmaker’s part), especially since this was just a Roger Corman quickie, this that the subtle differences between the main character when she is less youthful and beautiful, and (after the serum) suddenly more attractive, are a matter of millimeters.

That men made these movies at all is notable.

That they made them in the 1950s is extraordinary.

I’d like to see Briggs’ list of those other, “better” movies. “Better” or not, there are in fact NOT very many movies AT ALL about one of the central facts of a woman’s life:

That her attractiveness is currency, but an asset that rapidly depreciates.

There’s Mr. Skeffington, and a few lines here and there, scattered throughout a handful of movies.

A handful, of the tens of thousands of movies that have been made in the last 100 years.

Joe Bob Briggs: “We need a strong female character for this…”

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Steve Sailer: “Shithole” countries, immigration and the Deep State

Steve Sailer writes:

America is to be “a colony of the world,” as Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-WI) noted a quarter of a century ago. And that’s because Washington is to be the capital of the world.

That explains much of the frenzy of the response to Trump’s comparison of Norway with Haiti. For Washington to rule the world, America can’t be allowed to rule itself.

Norman Pearlstine, Your Moral and Intellectual Superior! ™ compares McCarthy to Trump, but that’s not the punchline

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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“This sheds a different light on the well-known MLK plagiarism scandals…”

Cough.

Related:

The truth about King has been there since the beginning for those who cared to look.

 

‘Snark all you like, but ‘stop being poor’ isn’t the worst advice in the world’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Blood libel: Oprah’s “depraved indifference” makes her quite presidential, actually

David Cole pens another “read the whole thing”:

Whether you’re preserving the Union, inciting a World War, incinerating a couple hundred thousand Japs, or getting up to some mischief in a Tonkin Gulf, indifference to human life is kind of a must. Reckless indifference is helpful, but depraved indifference? Now, that’s the stuff of presidential legend. (…)

Oprah is practically defined by her depraved indifference to human life. During the course of her storied career, Oprah has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to put any number of lives at risk for the sake of her show’s ratings, and I have no doubt she’d be willing to do the same for the sake of her political agenda were she to become president. (…)

To be clear, all the other daytime talk shows jumped on the “satanic ritual abuse” bandwagon as well, but Oprah was the only one to make it about Jews, with no concern for how this idiotic falsehood might impact ordinary Jewish folks (for whatever it’s worth, statistics showed an apparent rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes in the second half of ’89). Oprah met privately with Jewish leaders to hear their grievances, but she steadfastly refused to make an on-air apology for the misinformation she presented. So to those on the far right who may be tempted to dismiss Oprah as good presidential material, keep in mind, here’s someone who resurrected the Jewish blood libel, broadcast it to 7.6 million homes, and refused to cave to the demands of Jewish groups to publicly apologize. Winfrey/Duke 2020?

“Milo Yiannopoulos’ ‘Dangerous’: A Manifesto for the Transgressive Right”

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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