"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.

"EVERYDAY" INNOCENCE

Buddy Holly: a nerdy knight of faith.

by Andy Nowicki

A corrupt age views innocence as an essential absence; that is to say, as a state of being “not guilty.” Since all ages are corrupt, to varying degrees, we never quite apprehend innocence for what it truly is: a positive presence.

Philosophy, after all, teaches that man’s telos is the Good; if this is so, then the condition of innocence can’t simply be dismissively consigned to the silly naivety of childhood, while “knowledge” and “wisdom” get to be associated with an individual’s embracing of the corruption that invariably attends maturity, thus demonstrating his complicity with that which spoils his innocence.

WE HATE BIG BROTHER

                                                        

                                                by Andy Nowicki

At the end of George Orwell’s 1984, hero and would-be revolutionary Winston Smith is tortured brutally by ghoulish government goons at the Ministry of Love. Following this ordeal, his will is utterly broken; he betrays his closest allies as well as himself; moreover, he learns to “love” Big Brother, the awful totalitarian entity who has made his life unbearably miserable. Winston himself gets absolutely nothing out of this bargain except a certain warped peace of mind and a perverse sense that he has in some way “done the right thing”:

COKE AIN'T IT

                           

                                                              

by Andy Nowicki

I’ll admit that I had an immediate, visceral, and startlingly profane reaction to the now notorious Coca-Cola advertisement broadcast during the Super Bowl, as my poor, patient wife can attest.

The commercial, as surely you must know by now, features “America the Beautiful” being sung in various languages while a dippy montage unfolds featuring breakdancing blacks, hijab-adorned Middle Eastern women, yarmulked men, loveably grizzled septagenarian Latino cowboys and adorable urban effeminates (with a few sparse hints of white, seeming-heterosexual suburbanites begrudgingly thrown in as if in afterthought).