So it’s canonical that the CIA was shaping art trends for national advantage in the Cold War. And, of course, in both the peace and war periods of the FDR era, the government had entwined with the domestic cultural apparatus, to mutual delight.

Which makes me wonder about all the Hawaiiana - tiki style, the Elvis movies - in American culture around the time of Hawaii’s accession to statehood.

Basically, to use the Europa Universalis metaphor, was that America spending culture points to make core on Hawaii?

highway62:

Stood up all like tombstones.

Dixon CA 2014

well in the course of saying bye I just said the exact wrong thing and had to spend 20 minutes biking uphill while I kicked my own ass, that was fun.

70sscifiart:

Legendary sci-fi artist John Harris gave an interview for his upcoming art collection, The Art of John Harris: Beyond the Horizon:

Q: What are the three biggest changes that you’ve seen in the genre of science fiction art over the course of your career?

A: It seems to me that there have been quite distinct phases in the evolution of the sci-fi art during my lifetime. When I was a kid, the genre was dominated by the work of comic strip artists like Frank Bellamy, and those who painted the covers for Astounding periodicals.

Artists like Jim Burns and Sid Mead took that futuristic look to a whole new level in the mid seventies. I came in around that time, having been fed on Chesley Bonestall, who captured the spirit of exploration and a sense of wonder, that had a huge effect on me. And Chris Foss, an engineer by training, gave a realist twist to the technology. By this time, of course, NASA had flooded the world with the imagery of actual space travel.

Another game changer was H.R. Giger, who gave the genre an altogether darker tone, with his work on Alien, a direction that has rather dominated the genre for quite some time, aided and abetted by the digital revolution which has made it easier to produce very convincing realities, however bizarre (the explosion of knowledge of genetics has vastly added to our sense of possible futures).

My personal feelings on all of this is that, as artists, we merely reflect the dominant zeitgeist, possibly brought about by real scientific development.

Read the full interview | Buy the book

At that point in mid 20- 30s where half of my contemporaries - and not precisely the half I would have expected - have come to define themselves by the very most cliche rituals of family formation and middle management career progression.

I’m not part of that half, and intentionally guided my life to avoid so being, and so find myself part of the other half, whose public performativity consists in reveling in our self-loathing (quite possibly projected outwards onto The Enemy).

Honestly it seems like the even given an uncharitable reading of the virtues of the first path it might just generate a pleasant effect by the mechanism of crowding out the second for time, attention, centrality in self-narrative. Like, I took “childraising is a life-affirming, radically happiness-enhancing experience” and “childraising consumes you with a regular succession of stressful, time-demanding, but not particularly complex tasks” as necessarily in conflict but I’m starting to rethink that.

If the danger of following a bourgeois suburban life-path was that you might, at age 50, look back and realize that the past few decades lacked for transcendent purpose, meaning, satisfaction, or majesty, well, the alternative might not be living a life full of those things, but rather to live through those decades in full contemporary awareness of that lack.

Which would explain some things.

It became warm and it was like “oh no, it is now fly and ant season in this old wooden house with no window screens”

But I took comfort: this is Portland, where nature steps in at the last minute to balance everything

It is now spider season in this old wooden house with no window screens

monetizeyourcat:

of course i had a crush on leeloo as a kid man. she beat up a bunch of guys and had no respect for bruce willis

I’ve probably posted this at least three times on whatever blogjournal platforms over the years but the trivia I always like to pull out with relation to Leeloo:

There are two different films in which Milla Jovovich was cast as a genetically perfected superwarrior first introduced to the audience naked in a glass tube, and she in turn married the directors of each.

Resident Evil is actually my personal top-rated video game movie. Because I’m a plot guy. As a video game adaptation, and of a CAPCOM series, it came in with the lowest expectations you could imagine, took what should by all rights have been a box-checking exercise in stringing eye-candy sequences together and delivered so well it retroactively made the games make sense.

Another thing about Fifth Element, it was the best of the post-Star Wars neopulp pieces, which I’d say include what?

Flash Gordon, The Shadow, The Phantom, and Green Hornet as the literal serial reboots

Buckaroo Banzai? (Spaceballs?)

the Burton/Elfman Batman? (Raimi’s Darkman?)

Romancing the Stone? That drew at least half its power from the general “long ‘80s” movie zeitgeist of reconciling female autonomy with patriarchal inevitability (c.f. Ghostbusters, Frozen Assets, etc.)

actually Bruce Willis did a lot of that - adding that was one of the big innovations of the Die Hard lineage that turned out to be the reliable action format of its age

yeah I guess Pulp Fiction really was the important movie of the '90s

(I mean Indiana Jones yeah - too obvious, or not enough post-, I can’t tell)

skelenabones:

i find the use of the term “witchcraft” when people are discussing actual popular historical magical practices from the early modern or medieval periods of Europe to be vexing and confusing, because the way people use it tends to carry along an ahistorical set of assumptions that has more to do with early neopagan misunderstandings of history than anything else. namely, when people seek ‘witchcraft’ in these time periods they are usually seeking non-christian folk magical practices and beliefs. a big reason this is the case is because early neopagans like Gardner bought into poor scholarship that suggested that during the period of the witch trials there existed sects of surviving pagan practitioners who did magic, and that often these practitioners were the target of the trials. most people seeking historical witchcraft know this was never true, these witch cults did not exist, but the way they use the term witchcraft means they’re ironically basically looking for the mythical practices Gardner and others believed in. why this is especially vexing is that it causes people interested in ‘witchcraft’ to skip entirely over the large corpus of christian magical practices that are decently well documented and were practiced by people in almost every level of society from the bottom to the top. pro-tip you know who was the most prevalent professional magical practitioner in most medieval western European towns, almost certainly even surpassing wise women and other similar folk? the village priest

You know how police car sirens often have multiple sounds and the operators can kind of switch between them or flip one on and off real quick for a blippy effect? I wonder if experienced cops can tell who’s driving a squad car by the sound of their siren, like birdkeepers can distinguish between birds by the subtleties of their call.

Syriza’s declared that its nationwide victory in the European parliament polls was a historic milestone for Greece and Europe, as it represents the first time a leftwing , as opposed to a socialist, party has finished first.

I get things like the difference in what “liberal” means across the Atlantic, but reading about European politics still throws me occasionally.

justnevilledup:

4gifs:

I must go…my people need me

#I had NO IDEA how relevant that caption would be

A fascinating thing about Vladimir Putin is how he’s managed to get both the American/European center-right and -left aligned against him at the same time he’s got the extremes of both wings rooting for him, for different reasons:

winning the marginalized right and alienating the center-left with his repressive Christian traditionalist posturing; winning the marginal left and alienating the center-right (and to a degree winning the off-right) by opposing the NATO imperium (plus some off-left bonus from reviving the 20th century “anti-fascist” imaginary).

He’s got both the channels and the rhetoric to speak out of both sides of his mouth to different crowds - able to justify any given geopolitical move in both registers at the same times - and I’d be shocked if this wasn’t the plan all along; one of the strengths of the KGB he came up through was its ability to fracture coalitions and inspire internal conflict in the western bloc

Wouldn’t say I in any way trust his commitment to any cause beyond “Russia strong”, but I certainly respect his relentless competence at power politics. (Admittedly, the Chuck Norris masculinity charms me a little too.)

glaciersofice:

clelta:

im having an out of body experience 

moderncosmonaut thatleolion

There was this summer camp near where I grew up aligned with Habonim Dror, the “Labor Zionist Youth Movement”. Had a friend who’d gone for years with his sister, and when one of our friends came out as gay his first boyfriend was working there as a counselor (well I think at that time he was still saying “bisexual”, which we took as “either gay or looking for attention”, which apologies to the actual male bisexuals but when a 17 year old boy so declared in the late ‘90s, chances were good) so we visited sometimes.

First time we drove over one summer while camp was in session the boyfriend was still working so we got up in a treehouse and smoked pot, eventually some adult came by, greeted us in Hebrew, greeted us again in English when it was clear we had no idea what he said, and walked off. It was that kind of place. I don’t know how Zionist it was still (they were vaguely upset about the plight of the Palestinians) or how Labor (that summer they tried to do some role-playing for the kids about the bad capitalism only to find the kids rooting for the capitalist figure as a sort of Santa Claus of consumerism, it was I think ‘99 and history was still over), though I think kids who stayed in the programs long enough ended up spending some time on one of the remaining kibbutzim.

Honestly that was probably of a kind with the Birthright thing - “hey, suburbanowhere bougies-in-training, come visit Israel: a beautiful land full of fun young military hardbodies who share your pop culture and want to sex you up”. Israel is good at that shit.

Anyway one night we were hanging in the counselors’ rec cabin, smoking cigarettes when some girl - this might have been the one who could recount from memory all 98 people she’d ever kissed - said that she had found one of her kids - actually, one of her [hebrew word for a kid between 6th and 7th grade]s - sniffling in the grass that day. And when she’d tried to comfort her, the girl sobbed that all the other kids were exploring their bisexuality and she felt like a left-out failure, and so the counselor reassured her that no, it was totally okay and valid to be straight.

We all got to shake our heads and have a chuckle at that one.

The proposition that “whiteness” dates to the 17th century seems reasonable, but it’s not that before then ethnic distinctions weren’t made, but rather that they were made in religious rather than biological terms. Between the turn-of-the-millennia Christianization of Northern and Eastern Europe and the overseas missionary work of the European Age of Exploration, Christendom had, with the noble (but quite peripheral) exception of Ethiopia, basically the same borders that would later be rendered as whiteness

The parallels hold pretty well even for distinctions within Christendom/whiteness - Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox maps imperfectly but sufficiently to Nordic/Mediterranean/Alpine.

The Spanish Inquisition against mariscos and marranos is passed down to us as a confessional conflict, Catholics against (suspected) crypto-heathens, but a modern Northern Italian/Iberian effort to subjugate and drive off people of Moorish and Jewish heritage would be read as racial conflict.

Lot of attention lately to the Dark Enlightenment that is mostly about Moldbug. The brown menace, she rides again.

As I’ve said before, his one innovation, “neocameralism”, is just a rewording of the Divine Right of Kings in corporate shareholder idiom, a legitimating myth for an order that hasn’t established itself yet. It is significant that that’s exactly the idiom native to the SF tech/VC complex - if shit kicks off in America, dollars to donuts it starts in the Bay Area, which I’ll maybe go into in another post, but suffice it to say I expect the particular details of his program to be pretty much irrelevant to anything.

I will say what intrigues me more, and what could really be a prime mover in that sector, is the construction of a modern, international, English-speaking Australian-American-Polish-British-Scandanavian-Serbian-etc. white volk around a core of internet-native right-masculo-populism on the chans’ “waifus, warhammer, and white nationalism” model

things like Polandball’s (and SatW’s) western-centric resurrection of the concept of national personification, heavy metal culture and the associated Vikingism, feelsguy’s translinguistic sense of selfhood, /pol/’s kebab removal… well, just /pol/’s /pol/ness, really

Now this sounds ridiculous. I know this sounds ridiculous. This is me pointing to cultural trends particularly prominent in the dork niche circles I notice and ascribing to them world-shifting importance. I know it is.

Sure, heavy metal is not the actual historic musical tradition of any people. Sure, Norse neopaganism is not the actual historic religious tradition of any people. Sure, Tolkien-by-way-of-D&D aesthetics are not the actual historic mythology of any people.

Unless, of course, you count “2008” as being a part of history, or those then alive as counting as a people. Or, say, 1978. Or, you know, the 19th century, and the conscious, successful Wagnerian construction of Germanic identity from which these are all lineally descended.

To Golda Meir is attributed the line that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, by which was meant that the identity didn’t predate the establishment of the state of Israel. True, true. Neither was there such a thing as an Israeli. But then the state of Israel was established.


Plus okay, the celebration of western, particularly north european feudal great man realpolitik that is Paradox games is a niche thing, not quite mainstream popular culture

but how about the celebration of western, particularly north european feudal great man realpolitik that is the Canadian/Irish/American “Vikings” series?

how about the celebration of western, particularly north european feudal great man realpolitik that is Game of Thrones?

*de Benoist voice* metapolitics