Lethem is correct to point out she is indeed strikingly “mannish” for a nevertheless attractive woman (originally cast in TV’s Cagney and Lacey, she was dropped because she made Tyne Daly look too feminine!), which may have something to do with Nada’s oddly unmotivated rage against how ugly the female ghouls appear to him; he has firm though offbeat ideas about beauty.
And though dark haired she has eyes that “are such a pale shade of blue they’re nearly a special effect” by themselves. He alludes to her roles in The Scarlet Letter (19th century American lit again!) and The Osterman Weekend, but I find it more interesting to compare her role just the year before in the otherwise atrocious Masters of the Universe, where her hard face and unearthly eyes work well for the straightforwardly and extra-dimensionally evil character called Evil-lyn (it’s that kind of movie), playing against another muscular blonde hero, Dolph Lundgren as He-Man.
Mannish though she is, Holly will, of course, turn out to be the femme fatale to infiltrate the group and betray everyone, even killing Frank. Lethem nicely points out that this unexpected turn makes it seem like genre conventions are attacking our poor heroes; like Full Metal Jacket or The Shining, halfway through the film, the sci-fi metaphysics stop, and suddenly it’s an action flick, then a film noir.
Throughout the book, Lethem comments on the oddly pedestrian, that is, walk-around, flâneur-like LA in the film, so unlike the freeway-LA we think we know, and comes up with various explanations, including budget restraints. To me, the answer is simple; Carpenter sets the whole film in some kind of post-Reagan hyper-recession; jobs have disappeared, workers are migratory (Frank from Detroit, Nada from Denver), riding the rails, working under the counter, etc. Who can afford to drive, except the “Well Dressed Man” at the newsstand, who’s a ghoul, or Holly, who’s a mole for the ghouls? The supposed “real face” of Reagan’s Morning in America.
8. Making the film as early as 1988 gives it the look of Leftist hysteria, but in fact the process was underway, it just took 30 years and two busted bubbles to make everyone realize that while we were putting everything on the card, the real jobs were shipped out, and the real money was siphoned off, not so much by yuppies (who are as mortgage-strapped as the rest of us, just with bigger houses) but the really big guys, the bankers. Frank and Nada’s car-less wanderings, and the packed streets, give the film a contemporary, not a dated, look.
9. Another theme dear to the New Right: the ghouls are outright colonizers and parasites, not even illegal aliens (like District Nine) you might work up some Ellis Island sympathy for, like the sociopathic Sicilians we now welcome as “Italian American patriots,” and they’re coruscating ugly, and even worse, they want to wear our best clothes (like “Well Dressed Man”) and make it with our smooth, pink bodies.
There’s no chance for the “traditional science-fiction platitude, with its overtones of Franz Boas cultural relativism.” When a ghoul cop tries the Good Cop routine and suggests “You look just as ugly to us” Nada responds with Randian certitude and contempt: “Impossible.” It reminds me of the scene where Toohey tries to confront Roark, but Roark just walks away. Lethem refers to Carpenter’s ’50s film outlook again, and he’s right. Not for nothing does Carpenter idolize John Ford and admire the Ford-influenced The Thing enough to remake it. The comparable exchange in the ’50s Thing: “What do you do with a carrot? You cook it.”
10. Lethem contrasts this with another late ’80s sci-fi film, Blade Runner, where the replicants are more sympathetic than the humans, and the controversies over whether Deckard himself is a replicant. I would again match him with Lovecraft. Lovecraft certainly loathed furriners, especially immigrants. The Old Ones certainly seem to covet warm human flesh, and several characters are half-breeds of such couplings, who, in accordance with Lovecraft’s strict morality (or bigotry) must be evil and come to bad ends, like Wilbur in “The Dunwich Horror” that Carpenter’s pseudonym alludes to. His brother, “who looked more like the father,” is a monster killed by the scientists at the end; the narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth gradually realizes he is one of the fish-people himself and presumably will shoot himself at the end; the eponymous Arthur Jermyn discovers he is the offspring of an ape mother, and burns himself alive (although this might be one of the Darwinian Lovecraft’s little jokes). Poor Akeley, beset by Plutonian immigrant miners in “The Whisperer in Darkness” is fooled into joining the Plutonian race, having his brain boxed up with the promise of being shipped off to see the sights of the galaxy, perhaps the ones Roy recalls at the end of Blade Runner. Most notably, Professor Peaslee in The Shadow Out of Time has his mind “kidnapped” and transferred into the “rugose cone” body of a Cyclopean prehistoric race—brain rape!—when he finally works up the courage to look in a mirror at his new body, he shrieks and faints, as does “The Outsider” when a mirror reveals that he is a rotting corpse. Nada, Lethem points out, never turns the glasses on himself in a mirror.
But there is another vein in Lovecraft, part of his “cosmic awe.” Peaslee learns to appreciate and admire the super-intelligent cones, rugose or not; the narrator in At the Mountains of Madness sympathizes with the specimens of the ancient race dug out of the ice only to be attacked by dogs. As the Templars came to admire the Moslem warriors they fought, anyone who peers deeply into a religion or culture of his own may be able to recognize the value of an alien’s, but at such a deep, shared level that talk of conversion or “relativism” is inane. But still, not with these guys. They’re space yuppies, practicing planetary gentrification, and ugly as cheese dip from 1957. Nada kills the cop and steals his weapons.
11. As a boomer myself, I find it mind-boggling that Lethem attributes the line “ten thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire” to “Yellow Submarine”; in fact, since “A Day in the Life” is usually held up as some kind of “classic work of timeless genius,” to misattribute an image, and to such a dopey song, seems unforgivable in general; or is he deliberately thumbing his nose at the middle-brows?
12. But, just a page or two later, he redeems himself with this: “it’s hard to imagine that at the ghouls’ first job fair the position of Fatuous Cocktail-swilling Jackass didn’t have willing applicants lined up around the block.” I can’t wait to use that line myself, maybe even on myself.
13. Holy cow, now Lethem’s calling the same character “the cockroach of the human spirit.” He’s using my meme!
14. Lethem’s giving us some freeze-dried lecture on how “post-Freudian, post-Virginia Woolf” readers demand characters that are flawed, even treacherous; he thinks this is an index of how seriously a work is intended, or even, he adds ominously, “how seriously it is likely to be received”—by the literary gatekeepers, like him, of course. If you don’t know where this is going, he tells us “If Shakespeare had written The Lord of the Rings, its title would be Gollum.” (And I guess if Shakespeare had written Hamlet, its title would have been Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)
And there, in admittedly a neat little phrase, is a perfect example of the Judaic Plan for Culture Distortion; how even already existing classic literature can be “taught” in ways that inculcate the cockroach mentality. And after all, is not the plea that “we” prefer such “complex” and twisted characters simple egotism? Does the Jew not recognize himself in such figures (just as Freud’s so-called science was an impudent projection of the Judaic domestic scene onto all mankind)? Surely Gollum is the Jew of the Ring films; did people not complain of the role’s “anti-Semitism”? It is the Jew who finds such characters “intriguing,” not the Aryan public, which is why normal stories keep getting written and filmed, since they are demanded by the public (adjusted for inflation, the all-time box office hit: Gone with the Wind), and the Judaic gatekeepers keep having to push them back underwater and “demand” “more serious” ones.
Lethem keeps trying to insinuate, in that Judaic way, that we really like the bum-turned-traitorous big-shot, Drifter, that we’d really like to be him, in fact, far more than
that dumb, boring blond hero. It surfaces again when he discusses the poor Pregnant Woman with Coffee Pot who gets in Nada’s way during the shoot-out, specifically connecting her with Frances Dormand’s character in Fargo, the Coen Brothers’ festival of Judaic paranoia, dividing the goyim into two groups, murderous blond beasts and simple-minded law enforcers (who, implicitly, will protect the Jews from the first group). You want to play that game, Jonathan? OK, Nada embodies both; while we know he’s a simple guy just trying to save us, to the office workers he’s just a murderous workplace psycho. Oh, and your precious Coen Bros. stole Lebowski from . . . Drifter!
Maybe it was a mistake to try and read this all in one sitting. I’m starting to feel a little woozy, more than a little cranky. If you took my suggestion at the beginning to do this, go back, you fools! Only a few pages of the book, less than two minutes of the film, are left, and Lethem is really working my nerves. First, he quotes G. K. Chesterton—when’s the last time you saw that, outside the New Oxford Review or maybe that Catholic cable channel? But then, he follows it up some “film curator” guy who says that “we who live in the urban centers” both fear and loathe the denizens of the heartland, whom “we” perceive as “Bible-thumping, gun-toting” nut jobs “like the Unabomber.” Uh, the Unabomber? Harvard, brilliant mathematician, Manifesto published in the New York Times, oh yeah, that cracker dumbass. Alright buddy, Mr. “Milan Film Festival” jag-off, you’ve asked for it. I’ve run out of bubble gun . . . I mean, gum.
15. But wait, as I move down the hallway for my stolen police rifle, I pass a mirror . . . look in . . . My God! The blue skin, the robotic eyes! You others, drop the book, before it’s too late . . . save yourselves! As for me . . . I have fallen into the cheese dip . . .
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
September 5, 2011
I’LL HAVE A WHITE ROCK, PLEASE:
IMPLICIT WHITENESS, ARYAN FUTURISM,
& THE GODLIKE GENIUS OF SCOTT WALKER
“Was listening to this during a rocket attack at DaNang Vietnam in ’71 . . . what a rush . . . after smoking 3 bowls of Thai Stick. Still get a rush to this day at age 64 . . . there was teeth, hair, and eyeballs all around my barracks, but we survived.”
—YouTube comment on “Jim Dandy to the Rescue”
by Black Oak Arkansas
Over the last year or two, the value or usefulness of popular music, and rock in particular, to the struggle to renew White Consciousness has been subject to debate. These discussions have made important points, but too often they suffer from a lack of historical, and perhaps metaphysical, data. In this essay I will examine some of the most interesting of these recent online discussions, and suggest how they might profit from a little re-orientation in the light of such White musical pioneers Varg Vikernes and Scott Walker, as well as the writings of Julius Evola and Alain Daniélou on music from the Traditionalist point of view.
THE WOMAN QUESTION IN WHITE ROCK
In “How About Some Good Old Love Songs From Alleged ‘Right Wing’ Groups?”293 Andrea O. Letania—proprietress of the “Neo-Fascist” pop culture blog Once Upon a Time in America,294 whose title alone makes me want to call her a comrade—calls attention to an important issue—“Given that the main point of popular music is to appeal to the opposite sex, how can right-wing rock appeal to most ladies out there?”—and raises some interesting questions, but too many questionable assumptions prevent her from making any real headway toward a solution.
First, she seems to think that the “right wing” milieu is characterized by a love of Metal. This may be broadly true, especially among groups that either themselves or by their music cause the mainstream media to have convulsions, and hence get lots of press, but arguably the most characteristic, and interesting, current is composed of the small but deeply loyal tributaries making up what’s been called alt-folk, or apocalyptic folk, etc.,295 which are hardly male-only when it comes to performers, audience, or even distributors (hello, Jane Elizabeth!). For more on this “scene traditionalism,” see the articles on Mark Sedgwick’s blog296 as well as Josh Buckley’s comments on the same blog:
One would expect that a music-based subculture would consist of music groups with an identifiably similar sound. This is certainly the criterion for defining music genres like bluegrass, rhythm & blues, or country/western. Yet the vast majority of (alt.folk groups) play wildly divergent styles of music.297
But let’s look at Metal itself. Letania finds it either impossibly “hard” or else given to “kitschy mythic airs.” As for the latter, I thought girls liked stories of castles and unicorns. And anyway, it’s hardly any more “monotonous” than rap (and considerably less vulgar and misogynistic, quite a trick for music that supposedly appeals to adolescent boys) or the olde-tyme moon-June-spoon songs our great-grandmothers sang around the parlor piano (while the men, I guess, danced to John Philip Sousa marches).
However, Letania is exactly correct that “a rock band is supposed to do both, which is why even the toughest rock bands have songs ranging from hard to soft.” But this hardly sets aside Metal. Indeed, Metal was arguably created, as a genre, by Led Zeppelin, and Zep is arguably still the greatest Metal band, not so much for any specific musical or lyrical accomplishment, as for its ability, as Michael Hoffman298 emphasized, to rock both hard and soft equally well. In this quote, he states Letania’s whole thesis quite well:
Classic Rock inherently has more potential for acid allusions, because it includes the entire range from Heavy to Soothing, whereas Pop is limited to Soothing, and Metal is limited to Heavy. This is why Led Zeppelin ranks at the top of Rock history: a broad command of the full range of modes. That’s why Pop and Metal have a harder time becoming Classic. Pop has the advantage of being acceptable in public.299
Hoffman even seems to grant Letania’s dichotomy, but this is because he, like most general culture critics, can’t be bothered to consider “popular” bands that are popular precisely for their willingness to include the infamous “power ballads” to keep the chicks happy.
In fact, when it comes to the ladies, Metal, despite its media image, has historically had more than a little appeal. Though “hair metal” is universally disparaged today, its continued existence reminds us that heavy music, as well as such “gay” attributes as long hair and spandex attire, can be chick magnets, as they were in the dreaded ’80s.
Or, since Letania speaks highly of Southern Rock, consider Black Oak Arkansas. White skin, long blonde hair, and white spandex jeans, but it’s not Ann Coulter! The chicks love Jim Dandy! And forget about “don’t ask don’t tell.” Jim Dandy’s qualifications are on display for all to fall down before in lust or despair.
What happened? Rather than disparaging Metal as such, we would be better off looking for the cause exactly where “alleged ‘right wing’ groups” would suggest: the Judaic-Negro conspiracy that, in defiance of market demand, took White rock off MTV and force fed rap and its no-hair, no-ass “aesthetic.”
While the boys stayed loyal and metal flourished under the radar (who sold more records, the Stones in 40 years or Metallica in 20? Metallica, of course), the girls seem to have swallowed the whole Britney-and-rap cocktail. One might speculate that the girls’ preferences reflect a greater conformism, or susceptibility to media brainwashing, but I suppose that would be sexism.
From her description of what’s wrong with metal, I can imagine Varg Vikernes would pretty well sum up her image of the Worst Alleged Right Wing music. Yet, Varg may have the answer she seeks. While Letania wants soft but “rockin’” music with romantic lyrics, Varg has questioned the appropriateness of “guitar based” music entirely, when it come to White people. The music he’s been releasing from his prison cell—how romantic is that?—sounds like nothing other than what might just be called Aryan New Age, and what could be more female-friendly than that?
THE RHYTHM QUESTION AND THE NEW WHITE AGE
Letania wants softer music, Varg to get rid of guitars altogether.
But what if we got rid of shredding guitars and pounding drums—how would we rock? This leads to another question: does White music have, or need, rhythm? And what does it matter?
Discussions of “implicit Whiteness” in popular music—such as this from Kevin MacDonald300—tend to gravitate toward Heavy Metal and country rather than “New Age” music, for obvious reasons; while all three are reviled, only “New Age” is associated with hippies, yuppies, boomers, and other Left-of-center types.
Yet consider this discussion of “New Directions for ‘New Age’”:
But even though Woods sees new-age music as a universal force for change, the fact is that the audience is limited by age (mostly baby boomers), race (mostly White), and class (mostly middle and up). Consider, for example, this definition of new-age music offered by composer-producer Steve Halpern in Patti Jean Birosik’s book The New Age Music Guide: “Perhaps the most striking aspect of new-age music is its use of rhythm—or, more accurately, its lack of it.” This characteristic alienates vast numbers of listeners for whom rhythm is the thing—not just African-Americans and Latinos but people of all origins.301
I ran across this while trying to save my lazy White ass by finding whether someone had already typed up for me that quote from Halpern’s fine Introduction to said book (an ancient tome from 1989, which, like other culturally scorned material, is easily found for a buck or two).
Although intending exactly the opposite, the writer correctly ascertains the obsession with rhythm characteristic of the primitive Negro mentality. And of course, by “people of all origins” he means “formerly White people who have been brainwashed by MSM and modern society in general into a grotesque overvaluation of one, small, dispensable aspect of music, the better to reject their entire culture in favor of an alien simulacrum.” As the White college student famously said, “We don’t have any culture.”
The Homo and the Negro Page 17