THANKS FOR NOTHING

                                                 by Andy Nowicki

I am not stoical by nature, by temperament, or by habit. To my everlasting exasperation, I find that I continue to crave the applause, admiration, and approval of my fellow man. Horrifically enough, I still have hope for the future. I still cross my fingers, hold my breath, and get butterflies in my stomach when I anticipate the possibility of obtaining some manner of temporal success or victory in life. When someone pays me a compliment, I find my inner Sally Field-- "You like me; you really like me!!"-- annoyingly asserting herself. (Yes, the part of me that gushes in such a manner is unquestionably a woman.)

INDICITING THE AUDIENCE(S): WE ARE ALL "BASTERDS" NOW

                                                      

                                                               by Andy Nowicki

Inglourious Basterds marks a return to form for Quentin Tarantino. It is a brilliant, hilarious, artfully crafted, and wildly entertaining film, in every way on a par with 1994's Pulp Fiction, the director's last brush with cinematic greatness. It is also the most disturbing movie I've seen in a while. Inglourious Basterds (the double misspelling is Tarantino's) glorifies wartime brutality to a grotesque extent, yet at the same time seems aware of its own excesses and subtly critical of them. It is a movie where the "good guys" commit several horrendous atrocities, and the camera never flinches from recording the full extent of their savagery.

IMMORAL EQUIVALENCE

by Andy Nowicki

Say what you want about the cult of Martin Luther King-worship which has been legally sanctioned (complete with its own sacra-secular Holy Feast Day) and rendered socially mandatory in the U.S. for decades. Indeed, I heartily deplore the avalanche of bombastically sanctimonious rhetorical treacle which vomits forth from the mouths of our cultural betters each year on the third Monday of January. And let’s not even talk about the enforced platitudinous reverence we are asked to assume for all approved expressions of negritude during those insufferable “Black History Month” festivities in February.

TOTALITARIAN PANSIES

                                                 by Andy Nowicki

In his hilarious, horrifying, and profoundly insightful short book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis assumes the persona of a mid-level administrative demon in Hell instructing his infernal nephew, a guardian Devil on Earth, in the myriad ways to steer his client down the slick and well-trod road to damnation. At one point, the infernal bureaucrat narrator exults at just how cleverly demonic propagandists have trained the foolish humans to be on guard against the very type of wrongdoing that is least likely to happen in a given era’s Zeitgeist:

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic… Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants, we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

'THE PATRIARCHY' AND PROPER MANHOOD

Be a "man of steel," not a "playa"

by Andy Nowicki

Recently The Patriarchy, a Facebook page geared towards young nationalist men, ran a series of posts, each of which featured an eye-catching picture of a highly attractive young woman possessed of an apparently impeccable traditionalist orientation and mindset. In each case, the text below the comely lass took the form of a pep talk: “Come on lads, don’t give up! Play your cards right, get your shit together, and something like this could be yours!!!”

Responses to these posts, which I am paraphrasing here, ranged from  expressions of sullenly cynical Return of Kings-esque bon mots (“No way a girl like that really exists in the West – these days, they’re all a bunch of fat, skanky liberal feminist sluts!!!”) to effusions of simple mouth-agape admiration (“Whoa, she’s HOT!!!”) to displays of good-naturedly brazen, jovial braggadocio (“Get away from her, you bunch of losers… she’s MINE!”), to general declarations of approval with the overall message of the post (“What an inspiring speech! I won’t give up!”), each post more emphatic than the last (as signified here by the copious exclamation marks).

"THEN I SAW HER FACE": PREMATURE ENLIGHTENMENT IN ART AND LIFE

Would THIS face lie?

                                                     

by Andy Nowicki

In the movie Fight Club, charismatic terrorist Tyler Durden chastises the more timid, never-named narrator for advocating what Durden disdainfully calls “premature enlightenment.”

Durden uses this colorful, vaguely obscene-sounding expression to refer to the tendency of an individual, following a protracted period of mental anguish and spiritual suffering, suddenly to succumb to “wishful thinking”: that is, all at once to see only what he wants to see, pushed into this state of willed myopia by a desperate desire to manufacture inner peace for himself.

HOLLYWOOD'S LAST WHITE NATIONALIST

M. Night Shyamalan

by Andy Nowicki

If you're the sort who lets the fickle proclivities of film critics affect your judgment of the actual quality of movies, you've surely concluded that M. Night Shyamalan's talents have been in a state of sad and hopeless decline for nearly a decade.
The same cultural commissars who unanimously praised The Sixth Sense (1999) and generally approved of Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002) began to turn on their once-favored cinematic prodigy when The Village was released in 2004; since that pivotal turning point in elite collective taste, they have never looked back.

It is as though the India-born, Philadelphia-raised director has committed some unforgivable cinematic sin against the Holy Ghost, as far as critics are concerned -- one suspects that even if he were to deliver the next Citizen Kane or Vertigo, it would still be greeted with a sour, bitter, contemptuous hate-loogie from the representative sampling of scribblers at Rotten Tomatoes, and the kind of accompanying astronomically low "rotten" score on the "tomato-meter" usually reserved for Pauly Shore or Larry the Cable Guy joints.

IN THE THICKE OF THE TWERK

by Andy Nowicki

Folks have reportedly been shocked and shattered by the aesthetic grotesqueries displayed by Miley Cyrus’s full-throttle sexed-up meth-bimbo act at the MTV Video Music Awards last Sunday. But the onstage schtick she stuck in the nation’s face during her performance of the vacuously generic party-anthem We Can’t Stop isn’t anything new; I caught the dubious scent a few days ago when I came across the bizarre video for this inexplicably chart-topping single, which, far from being sexily hedonistic, is downright creepy in its unsparing depiction of youthful degradation. (See also Colin Liddell's useful analysis of the video.)

Gone are the Daisy Duke shorts, the lustrous locks and the winsome eyes of Miley in her Party in the U.S.A. teen-tease phase. Even the smokin’ hot jailbait seductress look of Can’t Be Tamed is nowhere to be seen. What we have here is an entirely different vibe from anything that preceded it in the Miley canon, from Hannah Montana's premiere episode through to the present.

VILE!

by Andy Nowicki

(originally published on May 31, 2012)

In chronicling the ongoing anti-White, anti-male, anti-heteronormative ideological full-court-press of our judicial, media, and governmental overlords, it is all-too easy to find oneself flogged into a perpetual state of spluttering outrage, or thrust towards a inveterate inclination to indulge in gloomy-doomy prognosticatications.

Such reactions are, in a way, understandable. After all, the campaign afoot to criminalize and/or stigmatize the most innocent, healthy, and normal of human impulses – such as the preference for one's own culture, heritage, or traditions – is indeed an outrageous, obnoxious, and nefarious assault on decency. That said, however, one should take care not avoid the snare of becoming an angry, snarling – but ultimately impotent – curmudgeon, compulsively soaking up the latest ridiculousness, blared luridly from various right-wing scandal sheet tabloids, which record all of these malefactions and atrocities with grinning, almost obscene relish.