Kathy Shaidle's Blog, page 8

Camille Paglia on Movies, #MeToo and Modern Sexuality: “Endless, Bitter Rancor Lies Ahead”

writes:

A Catholic backlash to Norma Shearer’s free love frolics and Mae West’s wicked double entendres finally forced strict compliance with the infamous studio production code in 1934.

But ironically, those censorious rules launched Hollywood’s supreme era, when sex had to be conveyed by suggestion and innuendo, swept by thrilling surges of romantic music.

The witty, stylish, emancipated women of 1930s and ’40s movies liked and admired men and did not denigrate them. Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Lena Horne, Rosalind Russell and Ingrid Bergman had it all together onscreen in ways that make today’s sermonizing women stars seem taut and strident. In the 1950s and ’60s, austere European art films attained a stunning sexual sophistication via magnetic stars like Jeanne Moreau, Delphine Seyrig and Catherine Deneuve. (…)

But movies are receding. Many young people, locked to their miniaturized cellphones, no longer value patient scrutiny of a colossal projected image. Furthermore, as texting has become the default discourse for an entire generation, the ability to read real-life facial expressions and body language is alarmingly atrophying.

TCM Saturday night: ‘The Iron Curtain’ (1948), about Igor Gouzenko, was even filmed on location in Canada

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

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Rick McGinnis: “The last really great polemic on the state of modern art was probably ‘Why Beauty Matters’…”

Rick McGinnis writes:

…an hour-long BBC program hosted by philosopher Roger Scruton almost a decade ago. He begins with a warning:

“I think we are losing beauty, and there is a danger that with it, we will lose the meaning of life.”

At any point between 1750 and 1930, Scruton asserts, an educated person would have told you that beauty was the point of art, a value as important as truth or goodness. That changed when originality – at all costs – superseded those values, depriving us of the relief from chaos and suffering that beauty in art provided.

Art became, in essence, whatever we said it was, and the ability to shock one of the few remaining yardsticks by which we measured its success. Artists stopped trying to communicate something universal and turned inward, creating work that looks to outsiders – the viewing public, really – like an “elaborately unfunny joke.”

“Discussions of the kind I have been having are dangerous,” says Scruton. “In our democratic culture people think it is threatening to judge another person’s taste.”

He made this statement almost a decade ago. As I write this, serious people, media personalities and politicians – not the same people, it goes without saying – talk about a “right” not to be offended, and art that aspires to the old standards of beauty, truth and goodness is considered retrograde, even kitsch.

Except “originality” has at this point all but vanished as well.

All “art” that I see (hear) now is a “commentary” about some earlier art, “meta” style.

‘I was certain that if only I could lose 30 pounds, I’d have a boyfriend’

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

          Related StoriesCamille Paglia on Movies, #MeToo and Modern Sexuality: “Endless, Bitter Rancor Lies Ahead”“At my [black majority] high school, our head of security was a suave, middle-aged black gentleman who was packing…”The Intellectual Dark Web: Guide to “the freethinkers leading the charge”  

“At my [black majority] high school, our head of security was a suave, middle-aged black gentleman who was packing…”

writes:

…and he made sure we knew it. I saw him draw his weapon only once. My fellow theater geeks and I were rehearsing a production of A Soldier’s Play (plays with black majority casts did well at my school), and one of the white actors, a blond-haired, redneck hillbilly type with the last name of Rocheford (which I always found humorous, as I tend to associate a surname like that with someone of class and breeding), thought it would be hilarious to take the toy gun he was using in the play and “draw” on our security guy (there’s them hillbilly smarts for ya!). Rocheford crept up behind the dude, pulled out the gun, and yelled, “Reach for it.” And within a split second Rocheford found himself staring down the barrel of the kind of gun that makes black men mull just how lucky they feel. But Rocheford, being white, merely pissed himself. And, far from being “scarred” by having witnessed a gun drawn on campus, the rest of us found the episode quite funny.

So how can I possibly relate to the howling harridans of white suburbia who bemoan turning schools into “armed compounds”? For six years that was my life, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Just the opposite; the “gates ’n’ guns” policy made perfect sense to me, my friends, and our parents.

Cole equates hardening targets like schools to what some of us call “diversity barriers”: Those hideous bollards now commonplace in Europe, and, increasingly, in North America. He approves of both, albeit very reluctantly, and his argument is nuanced.

Mark Steyn has already dealt with those bollards more eloquently than I could, but here is my (one-coffee) email to David:

It’s basically airport “security theatre”, but in the streets.

I have to disagree with you on this one, but I realize I’m being hypocritical and have a skewed perspective — I’m frankly way more concerned about Islamic stuff than school shootings, maybe just because that’s what I’ve immersed myself in since 9/11.

Canada has actually had MORE school shootings than Muslim attacks, but the Muslim thing is about more than just the attacks (note the upswing in Muslims demanding the legalization of FGM — they’re not even trying to hide it anymore). They are wearing us down via violence so that the alternatives (“Oh, just let them do their crazy customs—what could it hurt us?”) seem attractive.

Whereas school shootings begin and end with the incident itself, aren’t indicative of a broad social movement to undermine Western society.

Schools shootings are the Symbionese Liberation Army. Whereas Muslim attacks are more… “world historical,” like early 20th century anarchism.

I should have added, for example, that while the Charlie Hebdo massacre was “more important” than any school shooting (in the larger scheme of things, not to any of the victims’ friends and family obviously) because it was more than an attack on a specific, personal target, but an attack on what that target represented.

And that what irks me is the mendacity. (Sorry, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was on yesterday…)

Increasing school security to prevent mass shootings is about… increasing school security to prevent mass shootings.

Street barriers and airport theatre are, in contrast, sleight of hand:

Never mind all the Muslims, here’s the bollards!!

Oh, and, er…

“I Don’t Think Black People Really Understand How Tired Everyone Else Is Of Hearing How Hard It Is To Be Black”

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

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The Intellectual Dark Web: Guide to “the freethinkers leading the charge”

Douglas Murray writes:

On the internet, the situation is completely different. Internet-based programmes like the LA-located Dave Rubin’s show demonstrate an entirely different model. There people are invited into the studio for discussions that can run to a couple of hours. People have an opportunity to put their case as well as they can and their way is not littered with booby traps and barely disguised agendas. Whether it is a conservative trans activist like Blaire White, a left-wing atheist neuroscientist like Sam Harris or a black conservative woman like Candace Owens, the guests have the chance to explain where they’re coming from and the audience is allowed to make its own mind up.

And while sparks certainly can fly, these discussions are rarely set up in the dated red-corner/blue-corner style of a BBC or Channel 4 debate. It is not decided that if you have someone of one view you must have someone of a contrary view, that if you have somebody who is right on a subject you need to balance them with someone who is wrong, or that if you have a world authority on a subject you must complement them with someone who can just throw fireworks around. Crucially, the entire political axis on which traditional media still operates is shown on the intellectual dark web to be moribund.

This was actually just an excuse to post this hilarious “inside baseball” cartoon, which I can’t stop watching:

What If Lions Are Better Than People? – My NEW Taki’s column

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

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Jim Goad: “The Problem With White Guys These Days”

Jim Goad writes:

“What’s it going to take for white men to start talking about race?” Madison asks.

Is he serious? I can’t stop talking about it. I could talk about it for 24 hours straight enabled only by Gatorade and a will to prevail.

David Cole: The Death of the False Flag

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

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“JFK” (1991) and the soft bigotry of NOLA expectations?

Utterly random:

Did a lot of viewers buy the (utterly discredited, even by “buffdom”) “Garrison” theory promoted by Oliver Stone’s JFK because they heard a lot of characters saying stuff like, “The dog don’t hunt” in New Orleans accents (albeit of varying authenticity), and figured:

“Hey, these southerners know more about guns and ‘Texas live oaks’ and political corruption than we do. Maybe they’re onto something”?

Re: above — The Zapruder film does no such thing.

Behold how basing a world-historical argument on a single, elementary error (I’m looking at you, Karl Marx…) led in this case to 50 years of unnecessary multi-generational psychic damage, and the waste of who knows how many millions of man hours and tax dollars… (cough global warming cough)

If one discards the notion that Zapruder recorded the shooting sequence in full, it has the virtue of solving several puzzles that have consistently defied explanation.

RELATED:

An important fact to realize is that the film he shot that day consists of two parts. The first segment, 132 frames (seven seconds long), shows police motorcyclists riding by.

Zapruder stopped recording the advance escort because he did not want to run out of film. He restarted his camera only after he clearly saw Kennedy acknowledging the crowd from a gleaming blue stretch limousine.

Thus, the 19 seconds of Zapruder film everyone is familiar with begin at frame 133—well after the Lincoln Continental had already negotiated the sharp turn onto Elm Street, putting it about 71 feet into the plaza…

Well before investigative agencies had their say, the notion that Zapruder had captured the assassination in full was put forward by a very self-interested party: Time Inc., which had snapped up all rights to the film. (…)

That Zapruder had caught the entire sequence from beginning to horrific end was the position Life staked out and has never budged from, judging from the essays in a lavishly illustrated, $50 book it published on the 50th anniversary of the assassination.

No one realized that the commission, despite its crucial revision of the FBI’s analysis, had also been Zaprudered. Squeezing the shooting sequence so that it fit inside the film made Oswald’s feat of marksmanship appear to be much more difficult than it actually was.

The commission’s scenario, the one that reduced the shooting down to not just six but as little as 4.8 seconds, was all but impossible for expert marksmen to replicate.

Good: ‘Machete’ filmmakers say Texas denied them tax credits

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

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Christopher DeGroot: America Needs a Civil War

Christopher DeGroot writes:

Never in even his most misanthropic reflections on the degenerate character of the modern world did Nietzsche imagine a man as contemptible as Johanson, whose self-abasing type is now so common. You’d think that the fellow would have mercy on himself, or at least on us, and commit suicide. But that is unlikely to happen, because, however unhealthy, there is some vitality in a perspective that beholds enemies virtually everywhere. A person who has a boring and unsatisfying job, as Johanson may, gets a kind of forward drive from his “mantle.” He allies himself to fellow vulgarians, who feel much solidarity as together they stew in tepid baths of resentment. “Scratch my back, nonbinary.” “Why, thank you, blue-haired queer! It is very pleasant, our resistance.”

There are now a great many Americans like Johanson, people whose perceptions are perverted by the paucity of value that marks our time. (…)

But the increasing prevalence of views like Johanson’s suggests that there is more going on here than sheer moral failure. In the absence of good ways of living, our animal energy does not just vanish, it goes in another direction; in some cases, one as extreme as that taken by Nikolas Cruz.

 

Rose Parks has a lot to answer for

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

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“In Praise of Negative Book Reviews”

Hey, thanks for coming out!

I wrote book reviews for years but that was a long time ago.

In the first place, they have a bad return on investment:

The time spent reading the book and then writing the review is in reverse proportion to how much they pay.

But also, I didn’t write positive reviews if they weren’t deserved.

As longtime 5FF readers know, one of the only books I keep on my desk is The Boy Looked at Johnny. I was steeped in the nasty British (pop) culture review style in my formative years, but it’s a rather “foreign” style in North America, even here in the Commonwealth. As far as I’m concerned, one of the finest sentences in the English language remains Auburon Waugh’s notorious description of one wine’s bouquet as evoking “a bunch of dead chrysanthemums on the grave of a still-born West Indian baby.”

As well, the incestuous nature of CanLit means you are pretty much guaranteed to be insulting the editor’s girlfriend, or the bigshot writer who recommended so-and-so for a grant — or who is considered “a national treasure” and therefore untouchable.

Anyhow:

It is a pitiable present, this one that celebrates the enfeebling of literary criticism, but we were warned of it. Elizabeth Hardwick, that Cassandra of criticism, predicted it five decades ago, when she penned “The Decline of Book Reviewing” for Harper’s magazine. It is indeed some small mercy to her that she did not live to see its actual and dismal death. Hardwick would have winced at it and wept at the reincarnation of the form as an extended marketing operation coaxed out by fawning, persistent publicists. In Hardwick’s world reviewers and critics were feared as “persons of dangerous acerbity” who were “cruel to youth” and (often out of jealousy) blind to the freshness and importance of new work. Hardwick thought this an unfair estimation, but she would have found what exists now more repugnant. The reviewers at work now are rather the opposite, copywriters whose task it is to arrange the book in a bouquet of Wikipedia-blooming literary references.

 

Mark Steyn is back, ‘celebrating’ the 10th anniversary of ‘America Alone’

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

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Joe Bob Briggs: “Making My Peace With Billy Graham”

knows his evangelical preachers, having written for The Door (run by the Trinity Foundation, see below, which has its own problems), and hosted a regular comedy feature about them, “God Stuff,” on the old Daily Show…

Count the number of times Billy Graham said “Jesus Christ” in any sermon, always talking more about Christ the messiah than Jesus the man. The fact that he was even allowed on network television, given the sensitivity of executives to religious partisanship, is some evidence of how powerful his pulpit presence was. There were plenty of people who didn’t like him—Harry Truman thought he was a bit of a self-promoter—but the nameless ones whose lives were changed at those rallies and crusades saw beyond the curly hair and the chiseled features and the smooth velvet tone of his voice and the “counselor to presidents” image, and just heard Billy trying to help them out. In a world where the pregame prayer at the football game had become a sort of pagan paean to Zeus, Billy Graham kept saying Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, only Jesus Christ.

 

Me for years: Neil deGrasse Tyson is Affirmative Action in action

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

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“In the early 1980s when I was a schoolboy, my father worked for Oxfam”

“Oxfam’s troubles began when it became politically correct”:

The focus was on development. Like my dad, most were sandal-clad volunteers who worked for the charity for free. They helped farmers cultivate better crops or breed improved livestock to stop soil erosion, vaccinate cattle, plant trees and dig boreholes.

Around the turn of the century, during Tony Blair’s government, everything suddenly changed. (…) Aid groups got so much money they could hardly keep up with the ‘burn rate’, which is what they call the need to spend funds before the end of a financial year so that donors do not cut the flow of future cash. (…)

Some of this ‘social justice’ work involves what Oxfam calls ‘holding governments and businesses accountable’ in third world countries. Talk to people in Africa and many will say this involves harassing private investors and bypassing local elected rulers. Oxfam says this is about building a fair and just world without poverty, but this huge shift in its focus seems to be aimed at exonerating the poor from responsibility, inciting their resentment against private capital and blaming the West, stoking guilt and making Africa into a utopian playground for socialists from Sussex University. (…)

It was with sadness that I read in the charity’s report for last year that it is carrying out a great deal of work in Kenya’s Turkana region, where, it notes, 95 per cent of people live in absolute poverty. This is exactly where my father helped start a number of projects for Oxfam in the early 1980s. In those days, I recall that people lived simple lives, but few lived in the dire poverty of the sort we see now.

All negative outcomes are only ‘unimaginable’ to the unimaginative

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

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