You know who hasn’t gotten enough blame for the GOP’s loss? Steve Stivers. Seriously, he shoveled 20 million into the black hole of VA10 and CO6 when like half of the seats lost where 1-2 point races. They didn’t even put any money at all into CA. What the fuck?

It’s going to single digits in their old, weird Minnesota tonight. If anyone has some excess global warming to spare, please send it up the Mississippi.

OT-

The New York Times goes in hard on the right wing fever dream of cultural marxism.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/opinion/cultural-marxism-anti-semitism.html

But then on the very same day offers up some videos about Fake News called Operation Infektion. The videos have a strange conversational, breezy tone that seems completely out of place in The New York Times. The word Bullshit is used liberally as if it is a term of art.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-disinformation-fake-news-elections.html

The first video explains that former KGB agents who defected to the United States revealed that the Soviet Union engaged in disinformation campaigns to subvert the United States. The entire exercise is rather flat and fails to contemplate that many other governments, corporations and institutions may also be engaging in disinformation campaigns, including, of course, the United States and The New York Times itself.

One of the KGB agents featured in the first documentary is Yuri Bezmenov who not only defected to the United States, but he also aligned himself with the John Birch Society and certain other fringe right wing elements. Yuri Bezmenov is quite popular on Youtube promoting somewhat convincingly the very same theory that Cultural Marxism is undermining the West that The New York Times is simultaneously condemning as historically farcical and hateful.

Weird, weird stuff.

My favorite movie is “Dirty Harry”.
Great Politically Incorrect movie.
I wish I was born in 1950s and not in 1986.
What a time to be alive.

National Geographic’s decline into nonstop SJW propaganda is just sad!

The 1960s space program, for instance, employed this self-image of Americans as pioneers. Nowadays, of course, you aren’t supposed to think like that. National Geographic, for instance, just scolded:

When discussing space exploration, people often invoke…the march westward in the 1800s…. But…these narratives are born from racist, sexist ideologies that historically led to the subjugation and erasure of women and indigenous cultures, creating barriers that are still pervasive today.

To ensure that humanity’s future off-world is less harmful and open to all, many of the people involved are revising the problematic ways in which space exploration is framed. Numerous conversations are taking place about the importance of using inclusive language, with scholars focusing on decolonizing humanity’s next journeys into space, as well as science in general.

Yeesh. That National Geographic piece was positively sick-making:

What are some of the problematic narratives the term “colonization” brings up?
One narrative that comes up a lot draws on the history of Europeans coming to the Americas. I’ve seen people talk about the arrival of the first European settlers as this romantic, heroic story of people making it in a harsh environment. But of course, there were already people here, in the Americas, when those historical events happened.

Yep. That’s why I never learned about people like Powhatan and Squanto in grade school….The official narrative was that nobody lived in the New World before Columbus…

Furthermore, a lot of the Europeans’ ability to live throughout the Americas came at the cost of genocide for indigenous people. I think it’s not intuitive, particularly when we talk to white Americans, for example, to think of the history of Columbus’s journey as a story of genocide. But it’s important to realize that’s what it is.

Wait, this interview happened in 2018, right? Not 1959?

In addition to “colonization” and its associated terms, what are some words you consider to be problematic when we talk about space exploration?
I think the other one is “settlement.” That comes up a lot and obviously has a lot of connotations for folks about conflict in the Middle East. I think that’s one that people often turn to when they mean “inhabitation” or “humans living off-world.”

Instead, I prefer using a couple of extra words, like “humans living on Mars,” or something that is maybe longer but more specific to what I mean.

The WOKE war on concision continues….

What about terms like “manned” or “frontier?”
Yes, I do find “frontier” to be problematic. The implication is not exactly the same for somewhere like space as it is for here, but it similarly draws on the same kinds of narratives that are all based around European settlement. And often, if the word “frontier” comes up, it’s not wrong—until someone spells out the narrative of those brave explorers who went West in the early Americas.

Gosh, so you actually mean that the Outer Space frontier isn’t exactly like the 19th century Western frontier?

““Manned?” I don’t understand why anyone is still using “manned.” How old is the NASA style guide that says not to use “manned?” It’s been around literally for years [since 2006, to be precise].”

Maybe because it’s more euphonious than words like “crewed” and “peopled?”

When you look at the Outer Space Treaty, it’s this really aspirational document that contains a lot of really good things about the ways that we can and cannot explore space. However, if you read indigenous scholarship, or you listen to indigenous people, you’ll know that treaties get broken all the time.

In contrast, if you read European scholarship, or if you listen to European people, you’ll get the impression that treaties are never broken….

Planet Earth. Is there a narrative we can use that isn’t just trotting out Christopher Columbus and pretending like that’s a rosy picture?

That is really a question for a historian. I’m not a historian,

Who would have guessed?

but I’ll tell you that there probably isn’t a perfectly starched, unblemished narrative that you can draw from.

Nuts. And here I thought that using the narrative of the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific made me WOKE as all get out…

The Coen brothers are exempt from Diversity and Inclusion strictures because, well, you know.

Great point, it’s the issue of our time when they need it and a laughable delusion when they don’t. The universal childishness is also not helping them, it’s one of many deeply irritating things about NPR.

O. Henry’s Full House is a wonderful anthology of his short stories, such as The Ransom of Red Chief. Corny but I watch to see if it’s on every Christmas when it’s most likely to be aired.

No longer get National Geographic, is the author writing from Kenya? Where their family has lived for the last 2.3 million years?
We haven’t sent out the first colonization team yet, and already the Moon People and Martians are engaged in Jew-bashing.

Maybe the Coens used Sam Elliot to point out The Big Lewbowski was going to be about badasses?

Of course, being “represented” in a movie by the mordant Coens isn’t self-esteem-building. The white characters in Buster Scruggs tend to be homicidal, grasping, or, at best, long-winded.

The characters in their movies tend to be one-dimensional, grotesque caricatures of white gentiles. But the high IQ, highly verbal Coens write them long winded dialogues and give them large vocabularies and make them very articulate. It’s quite incongruous. This coupled with the visually highly realistic, historical settings of their movies produces the readily apparent fantastical or magic realism quality of their movies.

Bonanza.. What a great TV show this was. What a great theme to introduce it each week. Can you believe it ran 14 years according to wiki. This is what runs through Trump’s mind when he says, “Make America Great Again”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=25&v=IsypUGOyhz4
..

‘Dirty Harry’ is a great character, but not a great movie. Highly watchable, yes, but not great, along with ‘Death Wish’ and other movies of the ilk. I believe they were, however, the last batch of movies to be socially relevant to mainstream America. (The crime wave of the 70s and 80s was grotesque.)

As far as the Coens go, most everything they’ve done has at least been interesting, but the last few outings were mediocre at best, and ‘No Country for Old Men’ would have been nothing without the “call it, friendo,” character. (Shigurgh? or whatever, I view doing an online search as cheating).

My favorite Coen bros. film remains “Burn after Reading.” I almost cried from too much laughter – almost every character is a direct hit. It has no equal in portraying D.C. except perhaps the tv show “Veep.”

It’s quite incongruous.

Like John Goodman’s character in Raising Arizona holding his cigarette like a New Yorker movie critic.

Bugger off tiny clown.

I’m a big Coen Bros. fan, mainly because Raising Arizona is one of my favorite movies of all time, along with Goodfellas.

But yeah, it’s also pretty much the only Coen Bros. film that I liked right off the bat. Others took at least 2-3 viewings before I got them, but it’s happened often enough that I know it’s worth giving their work a few tries before judging. Intolerable Cruelty is a perfect example – everyone I know, including myself, thought it was dull and disappointing. By the third time you see it, it’s one of the funniest movies out out in years and you wish Hollywood would do more screwball comedies. Same goes for The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Big Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing, etc.

Maybe the need to re-watch their movies is just a sign of how deeply they go into these by-gone cinematic idioms, that they don’t resonate at first with a contemporary audience, even those of us who are well disposed to them.

ISteve movie reviews are a gateway to the poz.
Just opt out. You’ll cope.

The first female governor (National Geo’s odd name for the chief) is a moonbat who is slightly to the left of Leon Trotsky.
On the positive side, a collapse in sales will help prevent what they call the National Geographic Effect: the earth spinning off its axis due to the imbalance from the cumulative weight of people’s collections of back issues.

The Coens may be tapping into the huge audience for bushcraft and outdoors/survival video channels. I mean, once you’ve got the campfire going in challenging conditions and gotten comfortable and fed, what’s more natural than sharing a bunch of stories or a song?

Check out the number of views for Lonnie of “Far North Bushcraft and Survival” in this:

Noteworthy, perhaps, is that when they combine their bushcraft stuff with camp cooking the viewing stats soar…

He is loved in Uh-hi-uh. Went to fight in the desert instead of staying home arguing micro-legislation with the other congress-critters.
Even Democrats vote for the guy.

I’ve been told the four seasons in Minnesota are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Road Construction.

I’ll put in my usual plug for old Jarmusch anthology films like Night on Earth or Mystery Train.

“Native Americans are increasingly out of fashion”

Westworld and Godless. My impression was that they’re coming back into fashion, but then again my tastes verge towards the sort of shows they’d likely feature in.

P.S Either the Nigerian government is going all CCP on me or the deplatformers are testing your hosts’ defences.

Native Americans are increasingly out of fashion, however, perhaps due to fears that they are, underneath it all, Red State voters. So the cultural establishment is likely not to give the Coens too much grief over their unironic portrayal of old stereotypes of Plains Indians that were held by those who actually knew them.

Pan and zoom on Marlon Brando shedding a single tear by the side of the road.

Sometimes I’m uncertain whether I’ve actually witnessed certain changes in political fashion over my life or whether topics that were emphasized in my school years are just receding ever further into the rear-view mirror, and Native Americans are a big one. As an adult, even if you live in a Woketopia, you’re barely reminded that they even exist. Are public schools still big on them?

On the other hand…

OT: Ocasio-Cortez had a GoFundMe set up to pay for her Washington apartment, but it was reported and kicked off the GoFundMe website. She also staged a protest in front of Nancy Pelosi’s office. She can now kiss goodbye to her committee assignments.

She is beginning to set a record for being the most socially gauche person ever to be sent to the House of Representatives. You just can’t take the peasant out of some people. She has a weird unsophisticated, third world streak in her personality that I last saw in Nasim Aghdam, the woman who shot up Youtube.

In northern Wisconsin there are only two: Winter and the season of bad snowmobiling.

But I read Steve so I know (((we))) control the universities, the news media, and the banks. Those have hardly escaped the “diversity and inclusion strictures”. Where, then, does that leave your theory about the (((Coen))) brothers?

I wish I was born in 1950s and not in 1986.

Like much else in life there are pluses and minuses to being born in the 50s rather than the 80s.

Pluses:

You got to come of age in a less politically correct, matriarchal age

Kids were not helicopter managed every moment of their existence and got to be kids

Much better music and movies

College was cheap

Women were not as crazy or fat

Low vibrancy

Minuses:

Vietnam war draft

You got to see the country turn from first world into a wouldbe third world Socialist paradise

As women got crazier, understanding them was a moving target with little guidance to be found

Only official channels of news. Hard to find a print version of iSteve or Unz.com in those days

National geographic is now helmed by a Jewish female and Jewish females have to SJW

regarding the popularity of rhetoric and fancy speech-making in the 1800s, yes, orators were like rock stars in the late 1800s…it was a form of entertainment to attend political rallies where great orators spoke…

one theory about hitler is that he was born with deformed genitals, thus making him an outsider…thus, when he was a boy he pursued lonely boy activities…not the lonely boy activities of today or of recent decades (writing computer programming, learning to play guitar, piano etc), but instead he wandered alone in the austrian countryside pretending to be a great orator…because orators and oratorical skills were held in esteem in the late 1800s…

and years later, after being discharged from army at the end of WW1, hitler (as a war hero (actually he was a brown noser who got a cush job)) was hired by the army to spy on leftist political organizations…he made some impromptu speeches at a meeting of a small leftist political party, and his oratorical skills were recognized by his army superiors…the army was at that time looking to subvert the burgeoning working class leftist parties springing up in germany at the end of WW1…so the army leadership had hitler take over leadership of the party and move it to the political right, thus furthering their goal of subverting grassroots leftism…and the rest is history…

Pernell Roberts went off the rails and quit the show half way through.

ISteve movie reviews are a gateway to the poz.

I see them as almost the opposite of that. While my natural inclination these days is to avoid all movies and TV, sometimes, like Chancey (the) Gardener, I like to watch. The problem becomes what is out there that isn’t pozzed. iSteve is a valuable guide. The only other options I know of are Hollywood in Toto and the occasional Nolte piece in Breitbart.

I think there is a largely untapped market for movie and TV criticism that can help viewers find non pozzed entertainment. While viewing such work does put money into the anti white machine, it also supports non SJW subversive types like the Coens, Gibson, Vaughn and Eastwood. So, I can see the argument going either way.

I might go real handle if it came with a BANAL button.

Going instantly “OT” is rude and selfish. It’s like arriving at a party and then breaking out into song or heading straight for the piano.

The acting was amazing. Harrelson deserves a supporting actor Oscar. Brolin was really good. Tommy Lee Jones as well.

Native Americans are increasingly out of fashion, however, perhaps due to fears that they are, underneath it all, Red State voters.

Do they also vote in national elections? Yuck, yuck, yuck…

National Geographic as a TV content producer went off the diversity deep end in recent years with Morgan Freeman narrating everything that Neil DeGrasse Tyson didn’t host. Of course those Freeman, Tyson productions got horrible ratings so it was not surprising to see Nat Geo snag the Canadian reality TV show ‘Highway to Hell’ from the Weather Channel that features toxically masculine heavy lift tow truck drivers recovering wrecked big rigs on snow covered highways. This fits in quite nicely with their other popular reality shows Life Below Zero, Wicked Tuna and Alaska State Troopers.

The other reality show channel, Discovery, has the same problem. Women and minorities just don’t do the kind of interesting, challenging and dangerous work that viewers enjoy seeing white men engaged in.

‘

One of Buster Scruggs’ themes is that life in the Wild West tended to be lacking in entertainment, so people killed time by developing rhetorical skills beyond those seen today.

This mirrors a pet theory of mine about people who went to boarding school back in the day–which I did not, just to be clear.

Anyway, I got to thinking along the same lines in college after getting to know a lot of people who had had graduated from Andover, Groton, St. Paul’s etc. in the early ’80s: they just seemed a lot more dedicated to being verbally entertaining than most other people I’d known up until then. I figured it was because they and their peers had to fill the time with something…in addition to the drugs and alcohol, that is.

That National Geographic piece was positively sick-making

Yes. The usual posturing: “I’m shocked, shocked! that there has been human conflict in the world.”

There’s also a kind of psychological projection here: National Geographic types very much make their living from a modern, urban landscape that requires the paving over of nature and previous rural ways of life; they don’t really want us to notice that they are cogs in an industrial machine, so better to point and shout at Columbus et al showing up with better machines to subjugate the natives. HE is the real bad guy, we’re just here to apply a boot to the face of those who are sympathetic to HIM.

The characters in their movies tend to be one-dimensional, grotesque caricatures of white gentiles.

Or, extremely cutting, accurate characterizations of Asian-Americans. Blink and you’ll miss them in INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS and FARGO.

It’s like arriving at a party and then breaking out into song or heading straight for the piano.

What, you don’t like the Great American Songbook??!

I’m a really big Coen brothers fan but spent most of NCfOM thinking, “Why the hell did he go back with that jug of water?”

Miller’s Crossing is one of my all time favorites. Sorry we lost John Polito in 2016.

The Smithsonian magazine is much the same these days. I bought a cheap one year subscription and quit reading it after the first month because of the universal PC, woke attitudes expressed. I didn’t renew and the mag is offering a cheapo senior rate but I’m not interested. Not even interested enough to write them a letter telling them why.

For better or worse, an orator at the level of, say, Huey Long or JFK would today have to dial it back to be politically viable. Bill Clinton seems to have sensed this, and he was succeeded by a verbal clod. Barack Obama was smooth and resonant, but platitudinous and a disaster without a script. Donald Trump’s tin ear doesn’t seem to have hurt his appeal to most Americans.

People who can’t speak or write well tend not to think well, either, and are more easily manipulated. So don’t expect anything but further decline to the extent culture is entrusted to the Establishment.

Boycott Hollywood.

Are public schools still big on them?

Seems to be a niche thing. They’re allowed a couple of two minute hate sessions now and then; changing team mascot names was big for awhile, but maybe that was partly in service to getting them off the table.

When satirizing and condescending white rednecks, what better way to do it than to pack as many of them into a western as you can?

Also, I haven’t seen a John Wayne movie played on TV in years. Hmmmm…

Buster has one non white:

James Franco.

And

probably not be male.

I’m a tell these two hymies name Coen
The reason they movies be blowin’:
They suffer from wackness
Due to lackness of blackness.
Brought to you by “The More You be Knowin’”.

… hitler…

I’ve learned more about the guy in the last few years than in all years previous. Weird.

as a war hero (actually he was a brown noser who got a cush job)

He undertook some dangerous jobs as a courier in WWI. That’s a kind of heroism, but that he survived seemed to imbue him with a confidence and brashness that did not serve well later on.

Pernell Roberts went off the rails and quit the show half way through.

Wikipedia lists the reasons he quit his part, a part other actors would kill for. For the money if nothing else. The money had to be very good for being in a successful TV show that ran for 8 more years.

Steve is normally an excellent movie reviewer, but this time reading the review I got a good sense of the racial makeup of the cast, but no idea what the movie was about, until I got to the end and found out that it seems the movie doesn’t have a plot. This is probably why very few comments in the thread so far even reference the movie.

““Manned?” I don’t understand why anyone is still using “manned.” How old is the NASA style guide that says not to use “manned?” It’s been around literally for years [since 2006, to be precise].”

Anybody whose writing is informed by a NASA style guide will be a very poor writer.

I no longer read NatGeo and I canceled Netflix. The amount of media I read or view gets smaller and smaller. I’m basically left with UNZ and a couple of other websites. I still watch every new Coen bros, Wes Anderson ( Isle of Dogs was my least favorite so far perhaps because it was his most PC) film, I also watch every new Woody Allen movie. Tom Waits has always been a favorite of mine so I hope he’s good in his role in this. Here is his take on the Palestinian situation.

Because he was tortured by the dying man saying “agua,agua” and because curiosity killed the cat.

I think I watched Miller’s Crossing 3 or 4 times before I twigged that Eddie Dane and Mink were a homo couple. Somebody says “Mink is Eddie Dane’s boy,” but, to me, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re queer, especially since Eddie Dane seemed far from faggy.

GOPe wanted to throw the house election so the Dems could block or impeach Trump.

the next stage is they need to steal the senate (ongoing) and/or get some GOPe senators to vote to impeach (they already have one, Romney)

Trump needs to find out and use what they’re blackmailing Romney over.

Steve Stivers is a treasonous rat who wants to massively increase legal immigration.

Stivers is a GOP politician whore who is a member of the GOP CHEAP LABOR FACTION.

Steve Stivers must be removed from the Republican Party.

Steve Stivers deliberately sabotaged the immigration reductionist patriot GOP US House candidates in the recent mid-term elections.

From Tweet by Christina Wilkie:

The NRCC chair leading the fight to hold GOP majorities wants more legal immigration.

A Trump-backed plan would cut it in half.

Trump wants to make immigration a central issue this fall.

Stivers does not.

.@JohnJHarwood on the plight of Steve Stivers: The NRCC chair leading the fight to hold GOP majorities wants more legal immigration. A Trump-backed plan would cut it in half. Trump wants to make immigration a central issue this fall. Stivers does not. https://t.co/5lsVpHJrCv

— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) August 20, 2018

Yuri Bezmenov is quite popular on Youtube promoting somewhat convincingly the very same theory that Cultural Marxism is undermining the West that The New York Times is simultaneously condemning as historically farcical and hateful.

sounds like they’re trying to deflect the blame for cultural Marxism from 1930s Frankfurt school immigrants to the evil rooshkies.

About this part, with your use of the terms “frontiersmen”, “settlers”, and “pioneers”:

… America was then visualized as a Nation of Frontiersmen and Settlers.

The 1960s space program, for instance, employed this self-image of Americans as pioneers. Nowadays …

Hey, for the life of me, I can’t remember right now if I wrote a post on this already, but I will if I haven’t: You used the word “cowboy” only once in your review, but as far as the other terms of self-image, I agree with you that these words have been memory-holed, and in the case of “cowboys”, denigrated.

You probably remember, Steve, when cowboys were men who could be looked up to, as honest, hard-working, and maybe a little bit wild when necessary (or not necessary). Since the time of Ronald Reagan, when the Euros constantly tried to insult him as “that cowboy”, I’d always thought, “hey, what’s wrong with that. That’s a good thing. Any cowboy beats Jimmy Carter!”, etc. Somehow, the Europeans thought of that term as an insult, while Americans didn’t at that time….

… not until the media pushed and pushed, as usual. I had a job in which the term “cowboy” was used as a noun and a verb to belittle a method of getting things done. (It is now supposed to mean action without any thinking, or thinking outside the box at the times when you’re NOT supposed to, of course.) “Don’t cowboy it – use the procedures, dammit!”

#SAD

“The 1960s space program, for instance, employed this self-image of Americans as pioneers. ”

“These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

“The first of these factors is the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before. Most of the surface of the earth has now been explored and men now turn to the exploration of outer space as their next objective.”

1958 “Introduction to Space” White House pamphlet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_no_man_has_gone_before

There was Twilight Zone episode “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim” starring Cliff Robertson as a pioneer through time with a rifle that talks about how HIS people created modernity i.e. 2oth century America. Back during the time when people were proud of the nation. When Von Braun’s dream of USA on the moon was inspiring.

‘Dirty Harry’ is a great character, but not a great movie. Highly watchable, yes, but not great, along with ‘Death Wish’ and other movies of the ilk.

I was a squish liberal when it came out and still I liked tremendously, plus seeing the bad guy get it at the end. One of the scummiest bad guys on celluloid, ever.

“No Country For Old Men” stunk. Depressing, dumb and pointless. “Dirty Harry”…not depressing and pointless. Tightly directed, not a minute wasted. Amusing how credible tough guy Josh Brolin is a lib in real life who pulled the lever for Hillary. Is that squish or what?

You know I don’t give a damn about the movie business in general, Steve, but you mentioned that McDermott lady that the Coen brothers are going out with, or married to, whatever. Now, granted I just know her from Fargo when she was wearing some kind of thick parka for N. Dakota weather, and I hate to be a George Costanza about this, but they could have done a lot better than that!

Or are they separate in their romantic lives? Haha, just goofing here. I will say, that this is one movie I am looking forward to seeing. I saw First Man (thanks to Steve, Mr. Mohawk, and Mr. Derbyshire for the reviews), and this may be the 3rd movie I go see in this decade. I assume it will come to the theaters, right?

It also can sometimes get a little stale around a racebait shop.

Some of the prolific commenters here are obsessed. When I recently complained about an out-of-the-gate “OT” comment, someone retorted that this is “an HBD blog.”

Mr. Sailer is blessed with a keen mind and broad curiosity, but unfortunately typecast. He needs to whim more of the low quality comments if the threads here aren’t to take the same path as those at Taki’s and ZeroHedge.

To ensure that humanity’s future off-world is less harmful and open to all, many of the people involved are revising the problematic ways in which space exploration is framed. Numerous conversations are taking place about the importance of using inclusive language, with scholars focusing on decolonizing humanity’s next journeys into space, as well as science in general.

[Steve’s excerpt from GNAT-GEO]

OK, people, do you understand now why my website is entitled Peak Stupidity? Any questions? No, I have a comment then:

You can have all the conversations you want, SJWs, but that’s not gonna build you a spacecraft that can make it off the fucking ground!

Lake Trout is a great swimming lake in the summer.

the cleverness is the thing with their movies imo – a lot of the time i don’t really get their movies the first time but the cleverness (relative to the lack of it in most movies) tends to make me watch them 2-3 times out of lack of choice and by then i really like them – usually cos the more subtle aspects of one or more of the characters jumps out at me more after repeated viewing.

for instance i didn’t like no country for old men at all on first viewing (i dislike watching psychos) but on repeated viewing the sheriff jumped out as the main character and now i think it’s great.

Hopper’s Chop Suey sells for $92 million, record for an American realist.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/hopper-s-chop-suey-sets-artist-auction-record-at-91-9-million

Here’s the prior record holder, The Gross Clinic

Did you enjoy juxtaposing “chop suey” and dissection?

Make the American Songbook Great Again

Instead of America being a Nation of Immigrants, as we’ve been indoctrinated in recent decades, America was then visualized as a Nation of Frontiersmen and Settlers.

From Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? – The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon & Schuster, 2004):

In its origins America was not a nation of immigrants, it was a society, or societies, of settlers who came to the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its origins as an Anglo-Protestant settler society have, more than anything else, profoundly and lastingly shaped American culture, institutions, historical development, and identity.

Settlers and immigrants differ fundamentally. Settlers leave an existing society, usually in a group, in order to create a new community, a city on a hill, in a new and often distant territory. They are imbued with a sense of collective purpose. Implicitly or explicitly they subscribe to a compact or charter that defines the basis of the community they create and their collective relation to their mother country. Immigrants, in contrast, do not create a new society. They move from one society to a different society. Migration is usually a personal process, involving individuals and families, who individually define their relation to their old and new countries. The 17th and 18th century settlers came to America because it was a tabula rasa. Apart from Indian tribes, which could be killed off or pushed westward, no society was there; and they came in order to create societies that embodied and would reinforce the culture and values they brought with them from their origin country.

Immigrants came later because they wanted to become part of the society the settlers had created. Unlike settlers, they experienced “culture shock” as they and their offspring attempted to absorb a culture often much at odds with that which they brought with them. Before immigrants could come to American, settlers had to found America.

Because he had an attack of conscience about the poor bastard dying a tortured death in the desert. I thought it was very clear.

I dunno. “The world’s gonna blow up any day now” ethos wasn’t really worth it.

I’ve seen most of the Coen movies–“The Big Lebowski” is a hoot–but I wonder how many people understand where they are coming from i.e. does the average moviegoer actually “get it”? I suspect not too many, which is why the Coens are an acquired taste.

The version I know was from Alaska; Winter and hard sledding.
Actually all exaggerations. I now live in SoCal but once lived in Michigan and Canada. Viewed empirically, even in winter the majority of days the sun is out, and there is no significant amount of snow on the ground. I shake my head over the way people in the North and East are always whining about how cruel the weather is. You ever hear me complaining about the weather? Do you hear me banging on about how crowded it is here, and how astronomical the cost of living is? No sir, no sir you don’t!

What do you expect with that title. Everyone knows that nationalism is the root of all evil. Should they rename it Patriotic Geographic or maybe Global Earth Science?

As women got crazier, understanding them was a moving target with little guidance to be found

Are you applying Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle here?

Coen Brothers rule. I’ve seen at least half their movies and need to find time to see the rest.
That said, I found Frances’ rant to be puzzling. Was it some kind of deadpan joke or satire?
Or was she channeling the open-borders Zionists who exempt their own homeland from the globalist diktat?

Killing time

The second entendre there is full of interest. The temporal chauvinism of the cultural powers that be demands the death by retconning of the past aided and abetted by this sort of magical realism.

Their disregard for the future is expressed by their birth rates and those they wish on the rest of us. It’s all about the eternal now.

Going instantly “OT” is rude and selfish. It’s like arriving at a party and then breaking out into song or heading straight for the piano.

Whereas shouting out opinion from a crowd in which one can’t be identified individually is the height of good manners. Which is essentially what posting as “Anonymous” is.

Adding to the negatives;

Air quality in urban areas was horrendous. I remember one sunny morning commuting by bus to USC in downtown LA. I was sitting on the bench waiting for the next bus connection and in 10 minutes looking up Vermont Avenue I saw the visibility drop from about 5 blocks to less than 2 as photochemical smog turned the air into a spicy brown soup.

Old cars looked really neat with the styling not polished off by safety regs and wind tunnels, but objectively they were pieces of crap by modern standards: slow, death traps, thirst and filthy. Young people never experienced the fine bouquet of unburned gasoline when sitting in traffic. The muscle cars weren’t even that fast. I have car magazines from that era and comparing road test results, my six cylinder German car weighs as much as a 440 Charger, but will edge it in the quarter mile, then disappear over the horizon on top speed, out handle it, and out brake it while using 40% as much fuel, coddling me in luxury and emitting 2% the pollutants.

And Yeah, Black people really were treated badly.

For ninety mil, you’d at least expect to see some food in their bowls.

Young people never experienced the fine bouquet of unburned gasoline when sitting in traffic

In some cities, the bus fumes had a nice, sweet aroma. Miami’s, for sure, and I think Detroit’s, too.

We were more sensitive to the olfactory ambience because no one in our family smoked, in the car or anywhere else.

To certain extent those who control the institutions (Jewish and otherwise) have decided when those strictures apply (to us) and when they don’t (to them).

It’s unclear whether they’re losing control of/rethinking that arrangement.

In Florida, we also had only two seasons: hurricane season and tourist season.

No, they weren’t, not in Cal anyway.

Steve, are you going to do an election analysis based upon demographics like you usually do? From some of the preliminary results, it appears the openly, anti-white party actually picked up about 4 percentage points more of the white vote over the previous election cycle.

Frances McDormand sure seems to have gotten a lot of professional mileage out of her marriage to Joel Cohen given that she is basically a much less attractive second coming of 50s actress Patricia Crowley.

“But mostly the moviegoing public preceded the fiction-reading public in turning against short stories. In recent years, the trend has been to drag out stories over longer and longer lengths.”

Henry James and I prefer “the dear, the blessed nouvelle”, the novella or long short story. Same with movies, give me 90 tight minutes and let me get back out again.

Occasio-Cortez (Occasional Cortex) is just a really low IQ dummy. From her photos, it appears she may even be a pinhead. I have a hard time believing she is some do-it-yourself political candidate. Somebody is funding this joke, probably just to knock off Joe Crowley, who would probably have become the next Dem Speaker.

“it’s the issue of our time when they need it and a laughable delusion when they don’t. ”

Who/whom

“You’re such a super lady!”

My experience with Coen brothers’ films like “The Big Lebowski” or “Burn After Reading” is that I concentrate on the plot on first viewing, so the humor gets by me largely unnoticed. It’d only after having been familiarized with the storyline that I can fully appreciate the absurdity of the characters and dialog.

OT – any comment on this story – that US 501c3 tax-exempt organization Advocates Abroad (Federal Tax Identification Number 81-4496018) is coaching economic migrants in how to con immigration authorities that they’re oppressed and need asylum? We all knew they did that, but now the evidence is there.

Anyone know where their funds come from? Pretty sure they’re not from t-shirt sales and there’s no website details – do they have to file accounts?

https://www.rt.com/news/443812-migrants-acting-ngo-exposed/

“On its website, Advocates Abroad claims to have helped as many as 15,000 migrants cross the Greek border, and 2,500 more outside of Greece. The organization is massive, taking volunteers from major universities, and was even featured in a documentary film by the International Bar Association.

In the footage, Ariel Ricker describes how the organization provides training sessions for migrants seeking entry into Europe, in which they are taught how to act during interviews with border agents:

I tell them this is acting, all of this is acting… for them to get through, they must act their part in the theater.

She also calls EASO (European Asylum Support Office) personnel tasked with screening the migrants “f***ing stupid,” and describes a formula that the organization has created to exploit them in screening interviews.

One method she teaches migrants is to exploit the presumed Christian sympathies of the predominantly Eastern Orthodox Greece by pretending to have been persecuted for being Christian. She even describes telling them how to pray during interviews, ironically because doing so reflects “honesty.””

I also see that “migrants” are shinning over Trump’s non-wall near San Diego.

Nonsense. I’ve had a piano as long as I can remember. I bought it used and in terrible shape. I refinished it myself and it was beautiful. I still have it.

But I can’t play the piano. Nor could my wife. So when we had a party the guy who came and could play was instantly welcome. If he were reluctant he would dragged over and sat in front of the keys.

I imagine that everyone in your neck of the woods has acted in a movie or two.

Brad Pitt can play comedy!

That means he’s one of the few real movie stars who is also a real actor. Have you ever seen Al Pacino try to do comedy – painful. Off the top of my head, the only other current Hollywood leading man who has any drama-comedy range is Kevin Klein.

Yes to that. We need more original analysis from you.

I wish I was born in 1950s and not in 1986.
What a time to be alive.

It’s a good idea you have, but the truth is more complicated. There was a bad side to being born in the 1950’s, the most negative being that you had a front row seat in watching the decline of an amazing society. Sort of like being alive in Italy in the fourth and fifth centuries, only far more sudden and dramatic.

The greatness of post-war America era could only be transitional because (along with many other factors) there seems to be an inverse relationship between cultural health and popular affluence in the industrial age. As affluence increases and technology advances among the general population, the perceived need for a cohesive culture (and the inherent personal limitations that go with it) declines. Most Americans of the 1950’s and early 60’s hadn’t had enough time to become decadent in any meaningful way. When a critical mass finally did, the opportunistic left was waiting for them, taking them (and the rest of us) in the direction and to the place that we are today.

The destructive landmark court decisions that destroyed cities and led hundreds of millions of citizens to distrust the wisdom of their government often came from justices who were appointed by conservative administrations. Even the wisest among us weren’t immune from the allure of social engineering that’s contrary to culture. They weren’t necessarily influenced (at least overtly) by the left, but certainly numbed to reality by affluence.

Too much food, and you become obese. Too much sugar and you become a diabetic. Too much red wine and you become a wino. Too much affluence and you become…. Some people can handle it. Most people can’t.

You know who hasn’t gotten enough blame for the GOP’s loss?

The problem with white cons is they punch down but not up. Coulter and the like will talk about demographics and numbers. The Mexicans and Immigrant-invaders. They will punch down on the brown hordes and Muslims. But even they, despite being edgier than Con Inc., will not punch up to the Jewish Power that has most politicians and pundits in their pockets. This is like fighting the puppet but not the puppet-master. It’s like fighting the invasive horde while ignoring the fifth columnist elite behind your back who opened the gates.

In contrast, Jewish Power punches down on whites relentlessly and calls them ‘white supremacists’, ‘nazis’, and ‘far right’ all the time. In return, white conservatives say ‘we love Jews’ and ‘we love Israel’.

In boxing, you won’t win just by punching the opponent’s body. You have to go for the head. When Coulter and the like just go on and on about Mexicans and brown hordes, they are just aiming for the body. They are not hitting the head, Jewish Power. In contrast, Jewish power have already KO’ed the white mind.

Now, I know it requires a huge paradigm shift in politics and media to discuss the JQ but it has to be done.

Also, with Texas poised to go Demmy in few yrs, the only real option is to End the GOP, have everyone join the Dems, and ally with whomever and whatever against Jewish Power. Samson Option Revenge is the only way.

After 2 yrs of Trump, we know how worthless the new nationalism is. Now, maybe Trump really did try. But he is surrounded by Deep State and media that are too powerful. And Jewish Power and their lackeys control the courts whose decrees nullify white interests.

California tried to stem the mass brown tide, but the courts nixed it.

What white people should do is be ‘cultural Marxist’ against Jewish Power. BDS all the way. Deconstruct Jewish Power and Privilege with critical theory. Two can play that game.

‘Cultural Marxism’ need not be ONLY anti-white. Whites can use it in their own way to deconstruct and discredit their enemies.

Does anyone pay attention to Nat Geo anymore? It seems most mags were less PC when they were more mainstream. But with the bulk of news audience moving to internet and etc, it seems most mags have no value except as PC rags.

Those White voters are women. Chucky Schemer is not stupid. He knows anti White stuff goes over with White women like crazy. Because it’s aimed at their mortal enemy. Beta White males.

Indian reservations are some of the bluest places on earth. Red man doesn’t mean their politics.

Isn’t ‘inclusive’ an imperialist idea? After all, the story of the American Frontier was about whites forcing Indians to ‘include’ white settlers. And Iraq Invasion was about the US forcing Iraq to ‘include’ American Military. And Palestinians were forced to ‘include’ Jewish settlers. Guess what the result was?

The reason why MARTIAN CHRONICLES took inspiration from American Frontier and the Indians(wiped out by diseases) was because exploration and colonization are inherently imperialist… even when the intentions are noble. Now, there is no life in the Solar System, so I suppose we can do as we please. But if life did exist on other planets, even our best intentions would lead to eradication of many lifeforms on those planets due to any number of reason: Human colonization, disease, markets and profits, and etc. And if there is intelligent life on other planets, I can see Christians trying to convert them to Christ and Homomaniacs passing out the fruit flag. Or maybe the aliens have their own universal religion and will try to convert humanity to one of their christ-like tales.

Native Americans are increasingly out of fashion, however, perhaps due to fears that they are, underneath it all, Red State voters.

They come back into fashion every year around Columbus Day.

BONANZA wasn’t much good. Also, its color looked awful.

Best TV western was RIFLEMAN.

Anyway, it’s been said the TV Western did much to destroy the movie Western. It made the West look small on the telly. Also, the sense of adventure was lost because it was on week after week after week. Prior to TV westerns, watching a Western on the big screen felt like joining an adventure. But with cowboys on TV, you could just be a lazy couchpotato. It was no fun.

Though I hate Sopranos, I think the gangster tale can work in TV series format. Stories of corruption can just go on and on and on. But Western demands the eventual clash between good and bad, and that means a sense of finality. With TV westerns, this is impossible as the same guys go after new varmints week after week. Heroism becomes mundane.

‘Dirty Harry’ is a great character, but not a great movie.

It is a great movie of its kind. Don Siegel was one hell of a director. He did other interesting works with Eastwood too: COOGAN’S BLUFF, THE BEGUILED, and ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ.

Of them, DH is the best with a new kind of style. It is comparable to GET CARTER. DEATH WISH was bunched with DH because of theme of crime and justice, but it is bad movie-making.
DH and Friedkin’s THE FRENCH CONNECTION introduced new styles.

The characters in their movies tend to be one-dimensional, grotesque caricatures of white gentiles. But the high IQ, highly verbal Coens write them long winded dialogues and give them large vocabularies and make them very articulate. It’s quite incongruous.

And this differs from William Shakespeare in that…

Really, they should branch out and do the old, weird England:

The Tiny English Village (Population: 41) That’s Twinned With Paris

The New York Heating Oil Club

I might go real handle if it came with a BANAL button.

Is the proliferous Anonymous family which posts here the result of banal sex?

I thought we gave the Banal Zone back to Banama. John McBain should’ve gone along.

When I lived in Buffalo for a few years, the seasons were Winter and July, also known as Winter and Bee Stings.

They don’t complain about it upstate because they’re prepared. The plows are out the very same day. In NYC, there was a blizzard where they lashed plows to garbage trucks to make up for the limited equipment. In Knoxville, Tennessee, where a friend of mine lives, the entire town closed down.

Yep. That’s why I never learned about people like Powhatan and Squanto in grade school…

If you squant, you can just see them in the distance.

We’ll have Powhatan, the Bronx and Staten Island too…

I think it’s great that she was elected it will be amusing to watch her antics . I just hope the media gives her plenty of rope .

George Clooney is quite good at comedy as well when he does it .

In Chicago because of WW2 bus diesel fuel was supplemented with waste fat and grease from the Chicago Stockyards meat packers. The result was the most mouth watering exhaust fumes EVER! I spent much time at bus stops breathing in the heavenly vapors. The resulting brain damage explains why I spend so much time enjoying iSteve.

“Is curture crash.”

He was doing a good deed. Why do any of us do good deeds, especially when it might cost us personally?

Given the movie’s source material, the whole thing has to be viewed as a parable or fable, where every character and every action stands in for some larger metaphysical or moral reality.

If you want that kind of storytelling amped up to 11, check out The Counselor. I liked it but it was horribly, horribly miscast. Steve’s point about finding characters who can do stylized dialogue applies doubly to this one.

You can often see the grey brown cloud of pollution from an urban area over the horizon as you approach land from out at sea . When I first went to the Med in the Navy in the early 70’s you could see Mt. Vesuvius against the blue sky from anchorage at Naples . Ten years later I could barely make out the silhouette from the same anchorage .

I lived in Houston for 7 years. The one time it snowed I came across a dump truck that had two black guys standing in the bed shoveling sand out onto the road. I wish I’d had a camera.

Shakespeare wrote stage plays and lacked the visual technology of modern filmmaking. Shakespeare also had gentile heroes in his plays. There are no gentile heroes in Coen Brothers’ movies. There are white gentile American protaganists, who are portrayed as comic or tragic grotesques. They are similar to Sacha Baron Cohen in that respect. Baron Cohen of course is much more crude and less subtle and sophisticated about it, and his characters are a more diverse set of gentiles, while the Coens generally stick to white Americans and Americana. Baron Cohen and the Coens are quite brilliant, enough so that most of their audiences don’t realize that they’re being mocked and satirized.

George Clooney is quite funny in “Burn After Reading” and “Hail, Caesar.” That surprised me.

Lorne Greene was a Jew from the immigrant ghetto of Montreal (think Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). His was the 1st cousin of my aunt thru marriage (once he went Hollywood he had would have nothing to do with her). His real name was Chaim Green and his father was a shoemaker from the shtetl. Truth is stranger than fiction.

In NYC, there was a blizzard where they lashed plows to garbage trucks to make up for the limited equipment.

In NYC, as in many places, they put plows on the garbage trucks because the city already has the trucks and the personnel to drive them and it makes perfect sense to use them that way for every snow storm.

The characters in their movies tend to be one-dimensional, grotesque caricatures of white gentiles.

Their Jewish characters also tend to be rather off-putting…….Cf the Jewish commie screenwriters in Hail, Caesar!, the repellent Jewish studio boss in Barton Fink, the duplicitous Jewish criminal in Miller’s Crossing, the obnoxious suburban Jews in A Serious Man, ….

Lorne Greene wanted to surrender New Orleans to the British Empire.

Chuck Heston said: NO SURRENDER!

I didn’t like “Burn After Reading” the first time I saw it, but now I reference it all the time.

Every scene with JK Simmons and David Rasche is pure comedy gold:

You just can’t take the peasant out of some people.

She’s an architect’s daughter from the Westchester exurbs. Her bad manners are thoroughly contemporary.

I have unwittingly trained myself into noticing all the places where I suspect the filmmaker is spitting in my face so it is very tough for me to enjoy Coen Bros movies anymore. I started doing this a few years ago when we were going through a bunch of 80’s “family” movies, and I realized how filthy they were. It was during the Goonies. I thought it would be great to edit out all the parts of the movie where the kids are not swearing. I am really hoping the new Grinch movie isn’t full of trash.

Eakins was a master, and The Gross Clinic has my vote for his greatest painting.

In terms of Hopper, I’m not that fond of Chop Suey. There several paintings that I would place above it:

the obnoxious suburban Jews in A Serious Man, ….

The protagonist’s wife and daughter were portrayed as obnoxious. The wife’s paramour is a repellent cloying fraud (and rather out of place in time) who gets killed off in the course of the film. The protagonist’s brother isn’t obnoxious; he’s hopeless. The rabbis aren’t obnoxious; they’re frustrating and evasive. (A rabbi who reviewed the film offered that these scenes were contrived; ordinary rabbis have ready non-evasive responses to the questions the protagonist was posing). There aren’t any gentiles in the film bar the protagonist’s neighbors (who are portrayed as cold and menacing) and a father-son pair of Koreans (who are portrayed as utterly amoral).

Never really cared for Bonanza. For TV Westerns, I favor Have Gun-Will Travel:

The Virginian/Men From Shiloh was also pretty good:

Maverick was very entertaining:

” … the Coen brothers, who seem intent on continuing to do as they please.”

And I am very appreciative that they have the funding to do so. The benefit to writing a Western these days is that you can really have fun with the dialog. The HBO series Deadwood is the prime example here, but also S.Craig Zahler’s grim Bone Tomahawk (2015) is worth checking out.

those who control the institutions (Jewish and otherwise) have decided when those strictures apply (to us) and when they don’t (to them).

Exactly. It’s likely a willful misunderstanding to claim that the Privileged Class is necessarily prey to the same structures they apply to the rest of us.

For they enjoy the ability to decide when, where, and how much; not to mention who/whom.

Maybe the Coens used Sam Elliot to point out The Big Lewbowski was going to be about badasses?

BIG LEBOWSKI is clearly not a Western(or even a neo-Western), but there is a Western buried in there somewhere. A something that wants to be a Western. California used to be the Wild West not that long ago. It was the land of explorers, gold rushers, and cowboys. And even though Jews now push the Immigration-Narrative against Settler-Narrative, the distinctions used to be murkier in the late 19th century and even 20th century. I think a lot of Jewish moguls who produced Westerns actually identified with the cowboys. After all, Jewish merchants joined the whites in the Westward expansion. And Hollywood was the creation of pioneer-immigrants. And when Emma Lazarus wrote her famous poem, there were still Indian territories in the US and ongoing tribal wars. HEAVEN’S GATE is interesting in that the ethnic immigrants, though at odds with Anglo-pioneers, are also moving westward and settling the territories that had belonged to Indians not long ago. Indeed, many immigrants went to America with dreams of freedom and land. And some got land to settle and work on… like in Jan Troell’s THE EMIGRANTS and THE NEW LAND. It’s hard to define the characters as ‘settlers’ or ‘immigrants’. They are both. When many immigrants were arriving in the late 19th and early 20th century, there was still much to build and settle. (One of the problems of the Immigration Narrative is that it presupposes that ‘poor, huddled, wretched’ losers from the Old World came to the New World and made something of themselves. Therefore, we are to believe that ANY bunch of losers from any part of the world can come to the US and gain the same kind of success. But in fact, most immigrants in the 19th and early 20th century came from the MOST DEVELOPED part of the world. Europe was economically on par with the US and ahead in many ways. Even though Eastern/Southern Europe was behind, they were still many times more advanced than the non-West. Also, 20th century showed that Europeans in Europe achieved just as much as European-American in America. Swedes in Sweden and Swedish-Americans are equally well off. So, are Germans in Germany and German-Americans in the US. And if not for communism, much of Eastern Europe would have achieved Western standards of living. It’s true that many immigrants did arrive poor, but there were lots of similarly poor people in America. The ONLY real difference between remaining in Europe and coming to America was that the latter offered the promise of land. In EMIGRANTS, the guy leaves Sweden because the land is scarce and rocky. And in the US, he doesn’t find riches but work upon work. It’s toil from morning to night. But he comes to own a fair amount of good land, something not possible in the Old World. Anyway, most of immigration in the US up to early 20th century was not about total losers coming from backward nations and becoming greater winners in the US. These people came from what was then the most advanced part of the world, not least because the US was an extension of Europe. Furthermore, most of these people didn’t go from being poor to being rich. Most remained ‘poor’ in America in that their work was mostly drudgery in farms and factories. The only real difference was the vastness of the land and hope of owning some. So, the ‘proposition’ had nothing to do with it. It was the land.) Also, the West was both a dream of morality(more Plymouth Rocks) and fantasy of freedom. Western movies have both moralists who want to build churches and schools and towns safe for womenfolk and children AND lechers who love to gamble and chase after whores. So, the Western was a double fantasy: moral and nihilistic(and Leone picked up on the nihilism and distilled it into a style). There were plenty of Anglo lechers, but the overall Anglo theme was moralistic, not least due to Protestant ethos. There were plenty of Jewish moralists(often radical and anti-capitalist), but Jewish theme in the West was essentially nihilist: Hollywood and Las Vegas. Granted, Hollywood did try to be a ‘positive’ moral force, but this was largely in reaction to Protestant and Catholic pressures; Hollywood prior to Hays Code was a lot racier. Hollywood was about profits and entertainment, not art and expression(more the case in Europe). Though most Hollywood movies were ‘trash’, there were some good ones as well. Also, storytelling can range from lecherous to moral, so Hollywood could balance the ‘bad’ with the ‘good’. In contrast, Las Vegas was obviously much harder to moralize… but it was the ‘genius’ of Jews to have done just that. What seemed jokey in LOST IN AMERICA has borne fruit. Las Vegas became a family values place, a ‘Christmas place to be’. And Sheldon Adelson is the main Santy Claus to most GOP whores with their socks hanging by the chimney. It’s telling that in TWIN PEAKS 2, the main character is redeemed through some guy who hits it big at a casino.

The protagonist’s brother isn’t obnoxious; he’s hopeless.

That’s what makes him so obnoxious…..he’s the feckless, sleeping-on-his-brother’s-sofa guy….

The rabbis aren’t obnoxious; they’re frustrating and evasive

I’ll go along with that:

It’s pretty interesting to watch TV shows from the early-mid ’60s. There’s a didactic yet optimistic streak in stuff like Have Gun Will Travel and Star Trek that contrasts with the “socially conscious” stuff from the ’70s (Norman Lear’s output, for instance).

I still enjoy it, while not taking the Boomer-era social subtext too seriously. One of the great joys of the internet era is finding vids of old TV shows on YouTube. I’ve grown quite fond of Rod Cameron’s TV work from the late ’50s. State Trooper & COronado 9 are lots of fun, without making a pretense of being socially uplifting.

Amusing how credible tough guy Josh Brolin is a lib in real life who pulled the lever for Hillary. Is that squish or what?

C’mon, Man! Brolin’s a tough guy. He beat up Diane Lane while they were married!

Same with movies, give me 90 tight minutes and let me get back out again.

Agreed. Most movies today have 30 – 45 minutes of plot and are then padded out to 2+ hours with flashbacks, personal expositions, and CGI.

In NYC, as in many places, they put plows on the garbage trucks…

Same thing here, because they have more garbage trucks than any other kind.

She is the 21st century version of Michael Flanagan:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/schmich/ct-michael-flanagan-schmich-met-1109-20141109-column.html

Rasche is also good in VEEP .

Yeah, I know why he did it. I just didn’t really think a street-smart combat vet who’s just plucked a million dollars from a drug deal gone bad would go back out into the country to check on a guy who’s been shot in the gut. I’m kind of literal-minded though. Like somebody said, it’s Cormac McCarthy so it’s all metaphorical.

Jeez Steve, approving 3,000+ word movie reviews from Anon[425]?

With ‘Bonanza’ you always knew that the Cartwrights were the cowboys with the white hats on. Some of their antagonists were certainly evil black hatted curmudgeons though. In a sense they were the squeaky clean ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ brand for the Western motif, with a little Chinese cook filling in for Harriet (an early marker for PC stuff that was to follow). I’m surprised you didn’t mention ‘Gunsmoke’, that certainly captured the hearts and minds of millions of viewers?

F-A-G or Facebook-Amazon-Google buy up everything.

https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-curse-of-bigness/

but also S.Craig Zahler’s grim Bone Tomahawk (2015) is worth checking out.

Bone Tomahawk is one hell of a good Horror Western. Hard to believe that it got made in our SJW-ruled era:

Zuckerberg and Sandberg – anti-Soros activists:

h/t @yashar on this graf from my colleagues’ incredible Facebook story https://t.co/CSA2SmXGZG pic.twitter.com/aAhL3S2ejL

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 14, 2018

I’m surprised you didn’t mention ‘Gunsmoke’, that certainly captured the hearts and minds of millions of viewers?

I like the early, gritty episodes….but the show just stayed on the air too long.

There’s OT and then there’s Destination Void. A news story without its own thread, especially if largely-relevant or iStevey, is not really OT. Standing up to demand confrontation with straw man Nazis who are keeping their precious bodily fluids in a Mason jar lest less-than-white chicas obtain their Aryan acorns is truer to the pejorative meaning of off-topic, besides being self-explanatorily disruptive, and overlapping with years of reports and patterns of leftist activists disrupting online discussions.
But people will still reply, just like Corvinus never wants for partners.

Brad Pitt was pitch perfect in “Burn Without Reading”. I am not much into movies acting so his role kinda stood out to me. He plays a happy-go-lucky jock who ends up in the middle of something he does not understand (actually none of the other movie characters do either). The facial and physical expression he puts on while in the closet during his last scene in the movie stuck with me. Billy Budd.

It served him quite well for a time, and if he’d stopped at Danzig and the Sudetenland, maybe even with the Austrian plebiscite, he’d probably have retired as Chancellor in 1958 and Life Magazine would do a spread on his tastefully furnished chalet. But he didn’t because he was a megalomaniac, and if he wasn’t a megalomaniac he probably could never have become Chancellor.

I don’t think any researcher has ever found anything suggesting Hitler didn’t actually earn his Iron Cross.

There are no gentile heroes in Coen Brothers’ movies.

There are also no Jewish heroes in their work. The Coens have a rather dark view of humanity, Jews included…..

Dark? Mehhh, maybe. Certainly cynical (like Billy Wilder).

Isn’t ‘inclusive’ an imperialist idea?

Get WOKE, bigot. It’s only doubleplusungood when the European population is going up. When the European population is going down, it’s doubleplusgood:

“The High Chaparral” was the best Western TV series.

In the movies, the Italians showed how to do it…

The two top headlines at Breitbart illustrate a long-observed iStevey idea, that all the “genderqueer two-spirit dragonkin” talk is a way to hide more boring white collar crime, or at least the gruesome contempt with which our nominal brightest and best regard their customer base. New York Governor Cuomo defends exempting Amazon’s new corporate office in his state from taxes and regulation because, after all, Jeff Bezos “shares our values.”
(As a stereotypically-over-reliant thinker and non-New Yorker I would have bet that New York Value Number One is getting paid, but hey, it’s not like Cuomo just inherited his position. Wait, that sounds uncharitable. What I meant to say was that I am sure somebody was paid at some point.)

Yeah, I know why he did it. I just didn’t really think a street-smart combat vet who’s just plucked a million dollars from a drug deal gone bad would go back out into the country to check on a guy who’s been shot in the gut. I’m kind of literal-minded though. Like somebody said, it’s Cormac McCarthy so it’s all metaphorical.

As you said, it’s Cormac McCarthy’s world, a place where a simple act of compassion means death….

Alfa, our library has a free magazine desk, you like it, you take it. Every now and then a collection of old, I mean real old, Nat Geo’s come in. I grab them all. Places I will never visit, primitive people being, well, primitive and ads for goods and services at unbelievable prices. No PC.

The Coens have a rather dark view of humanity, Jews included…..

No, they’re messing with you. The plot of A Serious Man is a series of cheats. (It’s also studded with anachronisms). It would be tolerable if the film were actually amusing. It isn’t.

Wow, I worked with dozens of NAs and except for some radicals in the 60s I never heard any say they wanted to return to the buckskin days. Indoor plumbing and central heat, what’s not to like.

Yeah, I know why he did it. I just didn’t really think a street-smart combat vet who’s just plucked a million dollars from a drug deal gone bad would go back out into the country to check on a guy who’s been shot in the gut. I’m kind of literal-minded though. Like somebody said, it’s Cormac McCarthy so it’s all metaphorical.

As a (mostly-)Gael recently living and working among Ulster-Scots (= Scotch-Irish, = the most archetypal American Americans), this is just how they are; despite the Welsh first name, Llewelyn was that temperament, I read the whole movie as exposition of Ulster-Scots dealing with Chigurh. They are mild versions of Germans, if they have a belief, they will likely implement it, and “don’t leave a man die from thirst” is the sort of thing they would do. I certainly don’t endorse everything Unz puts up, but this bit from a sociologist of a hundred years ago is useful:

The outstanding trait of the Scotch-Irish was will. No other element was so masterful and contentious. In a petition directed against their immigration, the Quakers characterized them as a “pernicious and pugnacious people” who “absolutely want to control the province themselves.” The stubbornness of their character is probably responsible for the unexampled losses in the battles of our Civil War. They fought the Indian, fought the British with great unanimity in two wars, and were in the front rank in the conquest of the West. More than any other stock has this tough, gritty breed, so lacking in poetry and sensibility, molded our national character. If to-day a losing college crew rows so hard that they have to be lifted from their shell at the end of the boat-race, it is because the never-say-die Scotch-Irish fighters and pioneers have been the picturesque and glowing figures in the imagination of American youth.

It’s a great movie, and has awakened an interest in visiting the US southwest for me. I’m in Belfast a bit, and I’m certainly less likely to come across KAT graffiti in rural Texas than there!

The Coens have a rather dark view of humanity, Jews included…..

No, they’re messing with you.

No, they have a dark view of humanity.It runs through all of their original work. It’s rather telling that their most humanistic film was True Grit, an adaptation of another man’s novel…..

CLIFF’S NOTES™
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Anyway, it’s been said the TV Western did much to destroy the movie Western. It made the West look small on the telly. Also, the sense of adventure was lost because it was on week after week after week. Prior to TV westerns, watching a Western on the big screen felt like joining an adventure. But with cowboys on TV, you could just be a lazy couchpotato. It was no fun.

Though I hate Sopranos, I think the gangster tale can work in TV series format. Stories of corruption can just go on and on and on. But Western demands the eventual clash between good and bad, and that means a sense of finality. With TV westerns, this is impossible as the same guys go after new varmints week after week. Heroism becomes mundane.

Dunno. I think that you can make an argument that the TV Westerns played a role in the overexposure of the Western genre in the ’50s and early ’60s (How many Western TV shows were on the air during that period?Dozens?)….but I’m not sure that the medium itself was detrimental…..Sure, the vistas were smaller…but that was compensated by the greater intimacy that TV affords….And the ongoing nature of a TV Western can reinforce the Romantic aspects of the genre….a timeless space where mythic characters never die….

As for gangster TV shows…evil and corruption get boring….

Gradually I began to hate us.
There’s obscene language and some quibbles (what would Bakunin think of a “Marxist” anarchist?) in this screencapped post, but it’s worth a read.
https://postimg.cc/k2j7FSpj
tldr, my god, they’re right, losing some weight would probably be an objective medical benefit …

“O Brother Where Art Thou”

What’d you think of Brawl in Cell Block 99?

I don’t know how Zahler made it through the studio gates, but hey, someone found a way to get Death Wish remade, too. The film industry has its covert conservatives.

Boom, I was born in ’46 so our childhood was super cool. Ride our bikes to where ever, build tree houses and camps, stay out until the street lights came on. BB guns, pocket knives, paper routes and shoe shine stands, always making pocket change.

Boom, and that is how she introduced herself….”I am the first female and Jewish editor of Nat Geo.”

Jim, good movies need good actresses, not models. Frances McDormand and Helen Mirren are two examples.

Coen Brothers movies are largely boring and self-indulgent, with the exception of Fargo and O Brother Where Art Thou.

I read NCFOM and another Cormac McCarthy novel, and neither of them, like the movie, made much sense.

Mike, Akron, NY butts up against the Tonawanda Indian Reservation and the school district is about 10% NA, Their lacrosse team refused to play Lancaster, NY , because Lancaster’s mascot was the “Redskins.” The school district celebrates “Indigenous Peoples Day”, while we celebrate Columbus Day.

The death-knell of the old, weird America….

Dodge City, Kansas….the town where Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp once walked….

As of the 2010 United States Census, there were 27,340 people, 8,777 households, and 6,241 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,893.6 people per square mile (731.1/km²). There were 9,378 housing units at an average density of 649.5 per square mile (250.8/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 72.5% White, 2.5% African American, 1.1% American Indian, 1.6% Asian, 0.2% Pacific Islander, 19.3% from other races, and 2.9% from two or more races. Hispanics and Latinos of any race were 57.5% of the population.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_City,_Kansas#2010_census

Rosamond, Wished I had met you when you lived in Buffalo.

I reject the word “gentile”. It means “outsider” or “heathen”.

I shake my head over the way people in the North and East are always whining about how cruel the weather is. You ever hear me complaining about the weather?

I never heard that in snowy upstate New York. The weather is a feature, not a bug. It kept the riff-raff out.

Boston and NYC are quite windy in the winter, and it’s probably transplants doing the complaining.

Off Topic Steve but I’m watching on Amazon Prime, with a STARZ free 7 day look see.
Reason being is that station is featuring the documentary “America To Me” about “The Gap” in education outcome at Oak Park River Forest high school, Illinois.

You might want to check it out even if you are not a Bezos fan.

In Chicago because of WW2 bus diesel fuel was supplemented with waste fat and grease from the Chicago Stockyards meat packers.

Hog Butcher for the World!

City of the Big Shoulders– that only buses can drive on.

https://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2015/10/27/chicago-buses-can-drive-illegally-and-thats-a-good-thing-game-theory-tuesdays/

It really sucked for those of you in the frost belt when the commies switched from “global warming” to “climate change”. God knows which way the temps are going to go now . Better to remain flexible when it comes to siting.

I have been to your blog a few times and it’s pretty good. …culturally politically. With some wit and humor.

I’ve always liked intelligent, weird, dark humor, so I’ve become a fan of the Coen Brothers. Besides being White, they tend to be male oriented, most females just don’t get them and can’t understand your repeated watching of the The Big Lebowski.

Anyway, if your a fan of weird, intelligent and very dark humor, I highly recommend The Patriot on Amazon Prime. A depressed, folk singing clandestine intelligence officer is a cog in the machine trying to foment revolution in Iran. The operation takes place in the the gray winter time of Belgium and France and it goes horribly and humorously wrong. In my opinion some of the best dark humor since Dr. Strangelove.

I’ve been told the four seasons in Minnesota are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Road Construction.

Minnesota has relatively pleasant summers and is popular as a vacation destination from much of the upper Midwest.

In contrast, Iowa has only two seasons: snow and tornado.

I have been to your blog a few times and it’s pretty good. …culturally politically. With some wit and humor.

Mere Surmise sir.

Minnesota has relatively pleasant summers and is popular as a vacation destination from much of the upper Midwest.

Speaking of climate, it’s pretty amusing that the characters in INSIDE LLEYWN DAVIS just pass through rural folks country between NY and Chicago. They are folkies but only feel at home in big cities like NY and Chicago. Everything in between is a haze of snow and fog. I suppose even a cat has better chance of finding food in city dumpsters than looking for mice in the frozen fields of the Midwest

ILD has the same effect as DUNKIRK. At first viewing, not overpowering or entertaining like some movies. But its consistency and meticulous creation of another time and place stays and grows with you.

Well, the message of Jews to Mexicans is “We’ll take from gringos and give to you.”

Maybe the message of gringos to Mexicans should be “We’ll take from Jews and give to you.”

I read NCFOM and another Cormac McCarthy novel, and neither of them, like the movie, made much sense.

Usually, the movie is less than the novel, but I must say the movie of NCFOM works better than the novel. Same with IN COLD BLOOD. The novel was much celebrated, but the movie is far more powerful. And COOL HAND LUKE is 100x better than the novel.

NCFOM is a more successful movie than THE COUNSELOR but the latter is more thoughtful and ultimately far more devastating.

Or, extremely cutting, accurate characterizations of Asian-Americans.

Or caricatures of Asians – esp. males – as Jews would like them to be.

You know a lot of single unemployed Asian-American guys who live with mom and dad and hit on overaged pregnant women in the upper Midwest? That was a character in “Fargo.” On the other hand, Jews are often characters of conscience or hapless victims in their films.

So, to simplify, Jews = heroes/noble victims, non-Jewish whites = villains, Asians = losers.

OT CREEPY PORN LAWYER BEAT HIS WIFE

The Trump Curse is real because Trump Delusion Syndrome predicts for huge pre-existing problems.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/michael-avenatti-arrested-for-domestic-violence/

https://nypost.com/2018/11/14/stormy-daniels-lawyer-michael-avenatti-arrested-for-domestic-violence/

What’d you think of Brawl in Cell Block 99?

Haven’t seen it yet, but it sounds interesting.

Because before Columbus, no man ever ventured outside his cave, never explored alien ground, never confronted another soul, never came in contact, much less conflict with another. The indigenous peoples of North and South America were all peace loving, and never harmed another soul.

Maybe the writer should study history, not narratives. That would be a good start.

So, to simplify, Jews = heroes/noble victims,

More like grossly distort. E.g., the Jewish studio boss in Barton Fink is neither a hero nor a victim….Bernie Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing would be viewed as an anti-Semitic caricature (immoral Jewish schemer who exploits Christian pity, etc) if he appeared in a film made by non-Jews….Even the eponymous Barton Fink hardly counts as a “noble victim”….

Chicago is noted for it’s two seasons: winter and summer. But I can never remember, is it seven months of winter and five months of summer, or five months of winter and seven months of summer…

Anon[425] has always been a prolific and interesting commenter, I’m always interested in what he (sometimes she) has to say.

Remember, impeachment requires a majority vote. Removal requires two-thirds. Not going to happen.

Her nickname is Occasionally-Crazy in my book. She’s totally, like, you know, an airhead.

She’s going to be very entertaining to watch. She’s been the media’s new “It girl” for five months, so it’ll be curious whether the media keeps up the exposure. Most people, substantial or not, cannot stand the eternal media spot light, and either flame-out, or media quickly loses interest in the novelty.

There’s something to be said for not having a boob tube in your room that’s on all the time–whether high school, boarding school, college, or now as an adult.

Instead, everywhere you go, people have their heads buried in a screen–hand-held device or big screen. And their communication skills (speaking, spelling, writing), and life/reality awareness skills are crap.

They simply don’t know how to occupy themselves, entertain themselves, without a TV screen…

Have the men from the East finally awakened the white dragon (which is sometimes gold but normally on a red field)?

A vigilante mob is patrolling the streets of Birmingham in response to a shocking wave of violent crime. Nearly 400 people have joined the community watchdog group ‘We Stand Determined’, which formed three weeks ago on Facebook* after losing trust in their local police.

https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/14/nearly-400-join-vigilante-mob-after-losing-trust-in-local-police-8138033/

*D’oh!

Unfortunately, there is no sound on the posted youtube video.

However, I noticed there is a radio drama version on youtube:

We (OK, well, I) appreciate the compliment, Clyde.

I was six and had buck-teeth.

You know a lot of single unemployed Asian-American guys who live with mom and dad and hit on overaged pregnant women in the upper Midwest? That was a character in “Fargo.”

I tend to think that was just a character where they decided to cast an Asian guy just to be different. They could have inserted a Hispanic or black guy, but that would racist. And a white guy would be too much like any number of stock white guy characters. The Asian character stuck out more, because he was the diametric opposite of the Miyagi character in Karate Kid.

You will live to see 4chan stand for decency and CNN promote … that which they promote.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/talkers/inside-the-misunderstood-culture-of-furries

https://postimg.cc/CBgt3hS2

One of Buster Scruggs’ themes is that life in the Wild West tended to be lacking in entertainment, so people killed time by developing rhetorical skills beyond those seen today. Thus, numerous characters launch into elaborate Dickensian monologues. For example, a loquacious fur trapper only gets to talk when he comes to town every few years, but boy, does he have a lot to say when he arrives.

Hot damn, this film’s impending availability flew right past my radar. I will be watching this just as soon as I get home from work, on Friday.*

*in retrospect…I have Fridays off from work.

Mike Yanagita, the Asian fellow in Fargo, is the most poignant character in the history of cinema.

What’d you think of Brawl in Cell Block 99?

I watched it this past weekend on the strength of a recommendation here. I liked it. No PC crap and Vince Vaughn was great.

God knows which way the temps are going to go now .

NASA guy says low sunspots means more cold. https://www.iceagenow.info/lack-of-sunspots-to-bring-record-cold-warns-nasa-scientist/

I think we are headed for a Maunder Minimum.

Young Helen Mironova was thought of more as a great strumpet than actress.

https://goo.gl/images/nMcNPL

Raising Arizona is universally beloved and never criticized.

Not sure what you’re getting at with that reference.

Coen Brothers movies are largely boring and self-indulgent, with the exception of Fargo and O Brother Where Art Thou.

That’s an unfair assessment. The remarkable thing about the Coens is they kept growing and maturing. Good career pacing. And their longevity is rather surprising.

Many of the big name auteurs of the 60s and 70s burned out quickly or died from excess. Or lost their inspiration. I don’t think Robert Altman made anything of much worth after NASHVILLE. Coppola made some good works after APOCALYPSE NOW, but what happened to the Great Italian Hope afterwards? DePalma was very uneven. He made some killer movies like CARLITO’S WAY, but I think his last worthy film was FEMME FATALE. And he made too many clunkers. Sam Peckinpah tragically burned out with cocaine and alcohol… though I still think most of his late movies are of interest.
There’s a movie by Nicholas Roeg called EUREKA where Gene Hackman actually plays an ‘Aryan’ adventurer who comes upon a ton of gold. His life is about dramatic rise and fall. In contrast, the Jewish nemesis the movie played by Joe Pesci is in it for the long haul. It is as if the white man has a Romanticist fatalism. Conquer the world, watch it burn, and be immolated with it… like a Viking funeral or the end of Wagner opera. The ‘Faustian’ soul thing that Richie Spencer can’t stop babbling about. Reach for greatness at all costs, find glory, and then fall into the abyss. It’s like what Tyrell says to Roy Batty in BLADE RUNNER. A flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. This may be true ultimately of Western Christianity too, even though it is anti-pagan, grew out of Judaism, and had a long run. It burned so brightly and spread like a forest fire, but it seems like the Western Christian conflagration has burned out. It has become like Gotterdammerung. In contrast, Orthodox Judaism seems to be alive as a culture. EUREKA isn’t a good movie but pretty interesting as a exploration of ethnic personalities.

The 70s were especially a risky time for creative types. Too much freedom and drugs. If an artist didn’t have self-discipline and sense of the larger picture, he could easily burn out. Peckinpah did. Scorsese nearly met his doom from cocaine and etc too, but he somehow managed to recover and pace himself and think strategically. Lucas did have a long successful career but more as industrialist than artist. Altman continued to work, but something was missing after NASHVILLE.

Possibly the two directors with the most amazing longevity and consistency were Spielberg and Woody Allen. Where Spielberg still gets his energy, I’ve no idea. As for Allen, he paced himself with a workable schedule. Even so, Spielberg and Allen have remained more or less themselves. We know what a Spielberg or Allen movie will be like.

Coens are a strange case. If someone had told me they’d last this long in the 80s or early 90s, I wouldn’t have believed it. BLOOD SIMPLE was good, but movies like RAISING ARIZONA and MILLER CROSSING seemed too derivative. One was a 90 min Road Runner cartoon, and the other felt like a pastiche of Old Hollywood cliches touched up with violence. Their style seemed Film-School-ish. There was an article that in Film School the Coens usually sat in the back of the screening room and giggled a lot at movies. So, they struck a lot of people like a couple of smart-asses, and the movie world would soon get tired of their goofiness. Jim Jarmusch was also goofy but his sensibility seemed more genuine(if half-crazy). As for Jonathan Demme, he lost it after SOMETHING WILD, one of the truly great 80s movies.

But then, the world hailed FARGO as Coens mature film. They finally grew up! It’s an entertaining movie, but I’m still not won over that it’s a great movie. It’s not the masterpiece some people made it out to be. Also, I found the small-town caricatures rather smarmy and annoying.

The first Coens movie that totally won me over was O BROTHER. It has all the goofiness of stuff like RAISING ARIZONA but also a generous spirit, a genuine feeling for a people and culture. It wasn’t just smarmy film-school antics; there was a real sense of interest, even appreciation, of Americana. The musical numbers could have been done just for laughs but they were amazing, some of the best in a film culture that had pretty much given up on the musical. And then, MAN WHO WASN’T THERE was pretty good Twilight-Zone-ish Noir.

O BROTHER made me check out some Coen movies I’d skipped and re-view those I hadn’t much liked. BARTON FINK turned out to be a strange movie, one of their best. And upon second viewing, MILLER’S CROSSING had the same weaknesses but there were real strengths that I had overlooked. The relationship between Albert Finney and Garbriel Byrne is heartfelt and immune to film-school gimcrackery. As for BIG LEBOWSKI, I thought I’d seen it and not liked it. But when I saw it again(or maybe for the first time) because it was much discussed in this blog, it was like seeing it for the first time. And it was like an instant classic. I don’t know if the theater version had the introduction with the film archivist or if it was later added to video, but it perfectly sets the tone for the movie’s blend of irreverence and reverence. It’s set in washed out, cynical, materialistic, and cynical LA, but it seems like Americana(of bowling alleys, cowboy spirit, patriotic gungho-talk, etc) has somehow survived all that in one form or another. As in GHOST WORLD and David Lynch’s movies, the past is all around even if no one remembers.

Also noteworthy was that maybe BL was the first time the Coens successfully realized a filmic equivalent to the surreal tall-tale drift of Dylan’s songs.

And then came NO COUNTRY, another solid work but one I didn’t much care for. Most striking was the Coens made for the first time a movie devoid of Coen-isms and successfully too. When Allen tried to do Bergmanesque films, it never worked, but Coens made a movie that could have been made by any top professional. It was cool and dry, deftly executed like THE TERMINATOR or a work by Clint Eastwood(a non-Jewish director with remarkable longevity). So, Coens demonstrated the full range of what they could do. Who knew that the film-school smart-ass dorks would mature to make such a work? (FARGO, fine as it is, has Coenisms all over just like any John Hughes movies is very Hughesy.)

On first viewing, SERIOUS MAN just seemed okay. Seeing it again recently, it is one of their most remarkable and amazing movies. I must have missed all this because everyone said it was a telling of the Job story and that’s all I focused on. In certain ways, it’s their richest work. Some say it is ‘anti-Jewish’, but that’s nonsense. It has some nasty Jewish characters, but even the nastiest, the fat bald guy, is rather endearing, like when he comes to the guy’s house with a bottle of wine and gives him a pre-emptive hug. Also, it’s a loving portrait of a community, not unlike RADIO DAYS by Allen and AVALON by Levinson. But it’s much more than those two movies that are mostly awash in sentimentality.

Now, TRUE GRIT. This was a big hit, and maybe it is a good movie. I just recall hating it because (1) that girl was annoying to the max (2) Jeff Bridges’ performance felt strained and (3) how dare they remake the Duke classic, which, though no masterpiece, was his last hurrah. Still, why was it such a big hit? DJANGO was obviously a hit for its nihilism and PC moralism. But then, maybe people still hanker something sentimental and nostalgic.

LLEWYN DAVIS works like a ghost. Didn’t much care when viewing it, but it has a haunting quality. Much of it owes to the look of the film, its mood. And it was an artful roundabout way of paying tribute to Dylan. Dylan is one of those giants. Too big a subject for any movie. It’d be like directly looking at the sun. So, LLEWYN DAVIS works like an eclipse. It allows us to see the world in which Dylan moved and made his name. And Davis is a character who had genuine talent but not quite the real stuff to be what Dylan became. As portrait of a cultural scene, it has the right balance of loving tribute and gentle mockery(as folkies were animated by conceits that were soon outdated). Davis isn’t the bitter creature that Salieri is to Mozart, but he represents so many folkies who tried to be somebody but just didn’t have the chops or the chance. Or even if they ‘made it’, they were so overshadowed by Dylan that their successes didn’t seem like much. If not for Dylan, maybe we would consider Dave von Ronk, Phil Ochs, and many others genuine successes. But compared to Dylan, they look small(just like Elvis made so many rockabilly stars seem puny). Donovon had some hits but seems like Tiny Tim compared to Dylan. (Tim Burton could have been a worthy rival of the Coens, esp with MARS ATTACK, but he now seems like Tiny Tim compared to the Coens. He never developed beyond cartoon mentality.)

I recall seeing BURN AFTER READING and having a good time but don’t remember a single thing. A film in that vein that works much better and is more memorable is THE INFORMANT! Soderbergh is another bewildering director. He made some of the worst crap and is far less consistent than the Coens. But just when you want to write him off as a hopeless case, he comes up with something half-interesting like CHE, unsettling like BUBBLE, and brilliant like THE INFORMANT! His latest UNSANE has a strong first act but then gets pretty stupid. A Kafkaesque story should not look for answers.

Anyway, after INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, I was thinking Coens have done enough and proven their worth as auteurs, and their best work must be behind them. And HAIL CAESAR didn’t seem very interesting as advertised. But it is an amazing blend of comedy, musical, satire, and political philosophy. It’s like Mel Brooks’ HISTORY OF THE WORLD done straight, and it works.

And speaking of the retro, rural, or nostalgic whiteness of Coen’s movies, maybe the secret is in BLOOD SIMPLE. Their first movie has a prominent Negro, and he’s a bigass mofo. He seems to bed all the white women, and whenever he is around, white guys look like a bunch of pee-wee cucky-wucks. He towers over them and bellows like Paul Robeson + NFL linebacker. He moves around the movie with the attitude, “Hey white man, I’m here to scare you half-to-death.” (And he’s not even a villain but a rather nice guy.) In contrast, the old black woman in THE LADYKILLERS and the Magic Negro in HUDSUCKER are less threatening.

Just like Dylan blotted out all the other folkies, the big Negro makes white males look small and insignificant. BLOOD SIMPLE is a noir story about a middle aged guy who suspects his young wife is sleeping with another man. It’s a young white guy, a stud. But the white stud is a dud when the Big Negro comes clambering around. Maybe some things come into focus only in the absence of the overpowering thing. It’s like the Real Mogul in HAIL CAESAR, Mr Schenk, is never seen. He is too big.

There has never been a more comically effective anti-Semitic caricature than that of “Barton Fink,” one of the Coens’ more impenetrably arty films. Also their other apparently anti-Semitic film, “A Serious Man.” So Jews are fair game. Asians get a frequent sendup, too. So far the only ethnicity I haven’t seen caricatured or mocked in a Coen Bros. film is… well, you know. The Big Black Third Rail.

In contrast, Iowa has only two seasons: snow and tornado.

Almost. Usually there are at least two nice days, one in late May or early June, and one in September.

I think the Dakotas win (lose) the contest for worst climate in the USA.

S.Craig Zahler’s grim Bone Tomahawk (2015) is worth checking out.

Butcher porn. Didn’t notice anything all that great about the dialog.

Didn’t he do the Death Wish remake, too? That was totally forgettable.

What you know that aint so about hitler could fill a book.

I wonder if some Democratic operative walked into OcasionalCortex’s bar, started bullshitting with her while drinking his margarita, then figured he would run her for Congress.

YHWH is the hero.

To this point there are now reports of huge organized vigilantism in Birmingham, bigger than the soldiers of Odin in Finland.

Pan and zoom on Marlon Brando shedding a single tear by the side of the road.

Some Italian guy as Indian actually. True, Brando made a big fuss about Indians, but he was really all about himself. I think even if Indian shtick was all about ‘look at me’. A great actor but a failed human being. His son ended up behind bars and his daughter committed suicide. Bad parenting. But he’s such an idol, larger than life.

Brando faded in the 60s along with most Hollywood stars who made it in the 40s and 50s, but his aura lived on in the way that it didn’t for other stars. He was regarded as the Elvis of Hollywood, the rebel.

But when we look at the arc of Brando’s life, what he said and what he did were two different things. He was always about me, me, and me, and it was really that aspect that was most appealing to the boomer generation. Brando was the first real Hollywood figure as ‘youth hero’. He was also the youngest of the Classic Hollywood stars.
Boomers like Clinton and others were so much about saving the world but really about me, me, me. One of the downsides of Trump’s Americanism is he made it a bit like national narcissism instead of a modest and balanced nationalism. A-Me-Rica. To the world, that is off-putting. There is a difference between the US saying ‘no more globo-hegemony’ and ‘we are the best’.

We see the Boomer myopia in INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. The guys’ supposed to be a folkie who cares about the People, what’s right and wrong. But he bums off everyone. He gets women pregnant and just doles out money for them to get abortions and kill the babies. He didn’t even know his child is alive somewhere in the world. He gave money to a previous woman to have an abortion but she had the kid. So, Davis has a son somewhere, but he never bothered to find out. He sings folk songs but insults everyone as his intellectual and cultural inferiors. He makes a real folk singer from a rural area cry on stage. And when he sees his dad in the nursing home, his idea of connecting with the old man is to sing a folk song as if that can be meaningful medium to a sick man. But on some level, Davis must know of his betrayals. There is the haunting scene of the cat hit by the car limping into the woods. Lost cats, aborted babies, all just to forget so that he can keep singing folk songs to make it. The use of cat as motif in ILD is one of the finest.

Have you seen Dogtooth? Its humor is pretty dark.

jJ, Watch Guy Ritchie’s British gangster movie “Snatch.” Pitt is outstanding as a gypsy bare knuckle fighter.

Rosamond, not knowing when you were six means I may have been only a little older than you. And what’s not to like about buck teeth.

And whitey did it to himself.

The thing is, it was ACTING acting. Not nearly as bad as an early 60s melodrama, but, as Peter Griffin would say, “It insisted upon itself.”

I grew up in a part of Canada with a climate and geography similar to northern Minnesota. The local joke was that we had two seasons: Too Hot and Too Cold.

YHWH is the hero.

And the villain…..

Didn’t he do the Death Wish remake, too? That was totally forgettable.

That was Eli Roth.

virtually nobody found Lebowski funny during its theatrical run.

My wife and I certainly did; we thought it was one of the funniest movies we had ever seen. Still think so. A couple of years ago, a local high end movie theater ran “Lebowski” on its semi-regular classic movie night, so we went; neither of use had seen it since that first viewing, and we thought it was still hilarious. For me, a huge fan of Raymond Chandler, it was even better both times knowing that it was the Coens’ take on “The Big Sleep.”

Oddly enough, my less favorite of their movies are the ones that got major awards – “Fargo” and “No Country” in particular (“Ladykillers” and “Intolerable Cruelty” were very blah in my book, but weren’t particularly well-received critically either). But “Blood Simple” (which we saw on its theatrical release! And that final scene still gives me chills!), “Miller’s Crossing” (near perfection from beginning to end, and a faithful homage to Hammett), the arty but sly “Barton Fink”, “Burn After Reading” (did NOT see “that scene” coming), “Inside Llewyn Davis” (Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac both terrific), “O Country”… some seriously good films there.

Not saying ‘Dirty Harry’ is a bad movie. I think it’s pretty high up there, but mostly because it was the right movie at the right time. ‘Get Carter’, however is art in the best movie sense of the word.

As various people have noted, Blacks are the one group that seem to get consistently favorable treatment in their films….Could be the inner-SJW coming out…..Or it could be their one concession to the PC overlords….Hard to tell….

the right wing fever dream of cultural marxism

Whatever.

Cultural Stalinism is cold, hard fact.

In general, Jews aren’t that numerous in Coen Brothers movies and aren’t particularly sympathetically portrayed, with the exception of the beaten-down professor presumably based on their dad in “A Serious Man.”

Filial piety, I suppose…..Although it is interesting to note that he fails his moral test at the end, altering the student’s grade from an “F” to a “C-“…

The Coens seem to take a sympathetic interest in different types of Protestants, a subject I barely know anything about. It comes up, for example, in “Buster Scruggs” in the nicest scene in the movie when a cowboy proposes to a young lady and they mention their denominations.

Catholicism gets a nod in Hail, Caesar!.

Bingo!

Just like Dylan blotted out all the other folkies, the big Negro makes white males look small and insignificant. BLOOD SIMPLE is a noir story about a middle aged guy who suspects his young wife is sleeping with another man. It’s a young white guy, a stud. But the white stud is a dud when the Big Negro comes clambering around. Maybe some things come into focus only in the absence of the overpowering thing. It’s like the Real Mogul in HAIL CAESAR, Mr Schenk, is never seen. He is too big

Interesting what people focus on in films. I barely remember the Black guy in Blood Simple….He’s got that scene in the bar and that’s about it….The guy that always remember is M Emmet Walsh’s sleazy private detective….

He’s got that scene in the bar and that’s about it…

No, he later shows up all angry and shi* and chews out the white guy who looks helpless like a Raggedy Andy doll.

He acts like, ‘little white man, why you piss me off and shi*. Mebbe I should pop your head like a zit.’

Western Michigan has nice summers due to the prevailing winds blowing across 100 mile wide Lake Michigan providing cool summers.

My family and I are quite fond of Charlevoix.

“No Country” is good but the villain is too silly and over-the-top, too visually divergent from his supposed menace, for it to be great.

Plus I just find crap like the handcuffs around the legs thing insulting. 0 chance some pudgy Mexican could do that.

It burned so brightly and spread like a forest fire, but it seems like the Western Christian conflagration has burned out. It has become like Gotterdammerung. In contrast, Orthodox Judaism seems to be alive as a culture.

As G.K. Chesterton observed, one of the essential characteristics of Christianity is that it always remains young enough to be killed (and thus reborn). Orthodox Judaism would fall into the opposite category, that of those mummified Asiatic accretions that have become too old to die.

Doing Ragbrai in Iowa summers and staying in unconditioned attics at nights in small towns was pure good time.

Jewish studio boss in Barton Fink is neither a hero nor a victim

I wrote “Jews are often characters of conscience or hapless victims.” Note “hapless.” A number of Jewish characters in their films fit such a moniker. And obviously not all Jewish characters can be described as heroes or noble victims. That’d be too obvious.

So you don’t disagree with the characterizations of gentile villains and Asian losers in their films?

In any case, whatever their particular biases notwithstanding (we all have ours), I appreciate their artistic merits. As I wrote earlier, Burn after Reading is too good. Anyone who’s worked in D.C. as a gov/mil/pol can recognize almost all the characters (and their spouses) such as the suit-wearing LEO who is always looking to squeeze in a run (or a workout) all the while sleeping around, the frigid, overeducated, childless wife who writes children’s books, the sad, lonely older woman on the fringes who sleeps around with the first decent guy who shows interest, the mid-level intelligence analyst who thinks his career is worthy of a memoir, the dolt on the outside who thinks any bread crumb that drops is some top-secret file, and so on. It’s pure comedy gold.

The only other archetype I wish they included in the film is the young, ambitious, and slutty female intern who is over-eager to do anything to get near power (there are legions of them at every senate and house member office) who, at the same time, holds their her colleagues in utter contempt.

There’s an Asian student — “I know about the cat!” — in “A Serious Man” set in the late 1960s at, presumably, the U. of Minnesota. Their dad was a professor of economics there, so probably they had some contact with Asians growing up.

Yes, because everyone knows that Asian students hand out cash-stuffed envelops to their professors in America. And that their fathers are clever* enough to, alternately, threaten to sure the said professors for defamation or accuse them of bribery.

*Because suing people with clever verbal traps is such an Asian thing.

And the villain…..

Because YHWH is so… goy. Always oppressing the Chosen.

In general, Jews aren’t that numerous in Coen Brothers movies and aren’t particularly sympathetically portrayed

But some of them are hapless victims of circumstances or accidents… or of a tragic, fallen world. Though they may fail moral tests, they have some semblance of self-aware humanity, whereas others are often cardboard cutouts.

And that includes the TV series, Fargo.

Greene interviewed for the folks back home in Canada. Some interesting shots of Los Angeles in 1963 including the freeways and Hollywood. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/868574787687

And as Canada’s best known radio broadcaster https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1838087814

It’s a great comment. Substantive and passionate.

Just glad that Quentin Tarantino is a fan of this website.

I’d say give Miller’s Crossing another viewing. Focus on Gabriel Byrne’s hat and conflict between a man’s heart and his brain. The nature of morality in an immoral system. There are interesting ethnic and homosexual undercurrents to the film.