The price of Spectator Magazine $6.95.
The price of a Metro ticket home, $2.75.
Reading about Rudolph Nureyev trying to snog Taki
in the back seat of a taxi, PRICELESS.

Oh good.  Now I feel less embarassed about my puppy trying to shag my leg.  The surgeon will fix that problem next week, but then for the next ten days he’ll need special care and I’ll need to avoid so much as seeing Hillary Clinton’s name.

PS, now I remember a scene from “The Last Emperor.” The eunuchs in the Forbidden City were being streeted, and they were carrying their organs in little boxes, because they couldn’t be deprived of the right to be “buried as a Whole Man.”

So I guess when Nurse Ratched takes over in 2009, someone can make a fortune manufacturing 150 million of those little boxes for the males of America.

But wait!  Some of us won’t go willingly into that good night of Nurse Ratched.  Here’s a better idea.  How about manufacturing a few million little “organ boxes” - cheap fungible ones - and whenever Hillary and Nancy Pelosi sign some new enabling, or rather disabling, acts in the name of the Femintern, we can organise a mass-protest, millions of men mailing those empty eunuch-boxes to Hillary and Nancy with a note, “NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN!”

PPS, please, no feeble jokes about my surname here.  :-) It seems to have been a corruption of a Viking name, “Bald” meaning “Bold.” ("Baldwin" is related.) In any case I’m not giving up my surname or my more precious family jewels, not even after Nurse Ratched takes over.  But then she’ll have no jurisdiction over me in Australia, where our new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will win the coming election regardless of his enjoyment of a few drinks at a strippers’ club - something that would get him lynched by Hillary’s Femintern.

It’s interesting to learn that Rudy left the Soviet Union
for “artistic” reasons...in a way, the old Soviet system
really gave a lot of opportunities to gifted athletes like
Rudy, taken from the hinterlands where he had no chance
of ever gaining fame or recognition, and giving him an
opportunity that some poor white kid here in the US don’t have.

an amazing book is vasily nijinsky’s autobiography.  amazing because he apparently did not have a very good education and really had no business attempting to write a biography but he did.  It’s 200-500 pages, depending on whether you have the version his wife edited the gay and anti government stuff out of or the real version.  it is random short declaritive sentences like “working men go to rough bars.  i don’t go there.  I never will. they drink cheap wine”.  the fact that he was gradually losing his grip on reality doesn’t help.

JP, once again you and I agree on more than our occasional quibbles might imply.
We both know Marxism is rubbish - but we ALSO both know that so is its American kindred spirit of libertarianism and idolatry of the “market.”

In the Soviet Union of circa 1955-1989 (until Yeltsin and the American “free-market” interlopers ruined the fine job Gorbachev was doing of SLOWLY reforming the country and its economy) - during those 30-35 years after Stalin died and real Communism died with him, truly talented Soviet children of poor families had more ample opportunities to
make the best use of their talents than gifted American children of poor families.

Overall the Soviet system was worse, but when it came to promoting real talent among the poor, the Soviets did a better job of it.  And yes that even applies to the fine arts, or perhaps ESPECIALLY to the arts!  Compare Soviet cinema of the 1960s-70s to American cinema of the same era; Soviet cinema was immensely more intelligent AND in many ways less propagandistic than Hollywood movies!

(Just one example, for now:  in bloody 1969, under BREZHNEV, one of the greatest Soviet movies was, “Andrei Rublyev”, about a 14th century CHRISTIAN icon painter!  The so-called “Communist” government of the USSR approved of it.
Meanwhile, in America, we were producing, what?  “Midnight Cowboy”, a movie about a homosexual prostitute.  Hmmmm....)

Keep it up, JP!  Good on ya!

And a link about that beautiful movie (USSR, 1969) about Russia’s greatest Christian icon painter, is here:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060107/

John---one more agreement: Andrei Rublev is a fantastic
movie. Too bad Criterion released it at such a steep
price.

I think it was Elia Kazan who said that the only origina;
movie genre of any merit created in the US was the
Western (and, with a devotion to John Ford, Howard
Hawks, John Sturges, and Anthony Mann, I am inclined
to agree)...give me THE SEARCHERS, THE MAN WHO SHOT
LIBERTY VALANCE, or THE MAN FROM LARAMIE any day, not
to mention the classy B movies of a William Boyd, the
Paramount Zane Greys, etc.

I also agree about the artistic emphasis of the old Soviet
Union. One of my favorite operatic films is the 1954
Moskfilm BORIS GODUNOV, with Pirogov as Boris, and
Kozlovsky as the Simpleton---superb. Maxim
Mikhailov, the sonorous monk Pimen, was Stalin’s
favorite basso, and he’s one of mine, too...which
goes to prove that even dictators can have good taste.

PS, Adolf begged Arturo Toscanini to return to Salzburg
after the Anschluss (he didn’t), and worshipped the
artistic ground on which Wilhelm Furtwangler walked--
again, a sign of good musical perception and taste (too
bad his political instincts weren’t as good). Germany,
like the USSR, favored and encouraged musical and
artistic advancement (with some very noticeable limits,
of course), and showered (some)artists with honors and
Reichsmarks.

yah the nazis and the communists made way better music and movies than the western world.  you guys are a couple of maniacs.

“yah the nazis and the communists made way better music and movies than the western world.  you guys are a couple of maniacs.

Posted by lester on Oct 26, 2007.”

Remember that line from The Third Man about the Renaissance and the beauty and cruelty it produced vs. Switzerland, brotherly love and the cuckoo clock?  The U.S. seems to be in a class of its own:  a nasty country with a lousy culture.

it doesn’t have a lousy culture.  look around the world, the top ten movies and albums are usually american made.  “citizen kane”, elvis presley, jackson pollock, muhammed ali.  If you can’t appreciate american culture i don’t know what to tell you.  cuckoo clocks are annoying

Taki,

Have you ever encountered a name so small that you could not manage to drop it?

“it doesn’t have a lousy culture.  look around the world, the top ten movies and albums are usually american made.  “citizen kane”, elvis presley, jackson pollock, muhammed ali.  If you can’t appreciate american culture i don’t know what to tell you.

Posted by lester on Oct 27, 2007.”

lester is confusing culture with fashion, well apart from “Citizen Kane”, a work of genius but unfortunately not ‘commercial’ therefore no calling card for Orson Welles.

Why jackson pollock? why elvis? why jeans? why coca-cola? why do hemlines rise and fall? what of it? Creators of great art are geniuses. The common herd is far too stupid to listen, buy, watch, appreciate any product of genius; the’re just a money making opportunity to be sold the latest new thing - who cares where they spend it? - but don’t call it culture without the ‘trash’, and don’t confuse nostalgia with merit.

I’d consider light entertainment part of what is known as culture.  most hollywood movies are just that: entertainment.  people work hard all day.  they don’t want to learn about episodes in the great leaders life like the “cinema” of totalitarian countries.  common people enjoy drinking and dancing and having a good time as they have since the begining of time.  besides, there are dozens of movies as serious and great as the russian picture you mentioned made in the US and people are free to make and view those.  If you don’t care for elvis presley or jackson pollock that’s your perogative but to say they aren’t culture is ridiculous.  there is no line where citizen kane starts and “24” or evil knieval’s motorcycle jumps ends.  they are all cool shit!

@ lester, “there is no line where citizen kane starts and “24” or evil knieval’s motorcycle jumps ends.  they are all cool shit!”

Actually I thought even “Citizen Kane” was puerile rubbish, let alone those other pieces of crap you mentioned as “cool shit.”

Come to think of it, the last TRULY “cool shit” indigenous American product I ever enjoyed, was (in 1996) some organic cannabis grown by a friend of mine; he offered a bit to me medicinally when I was hungover at his house, the morning after his great New Years Eve party, and yeah, it really WAS “cool shit!” (Heh,
he grew it in an upstate forest, on land adjacent to his holiday cabin’s land - he grew it surreptitiously on land owned by a mean-spirited Fundamentalist minister who used to hector him about “being in danger of hellfire”, just so that IF those cannabis plants were ever discovered by the police, my friend’s obnoxious neighbour would be sent to prison.  Well, yeah, I have some “unusual” friends… :-)

Now THAT was some REALLY “cool shit”, in REAL old fashioned American style!  (Libertarians among us, listen up!  I agree with you guys when it comes to things like legalising marijuana - which, honestly, I’ve used only around ten times in my 44 years - last time was 1996 - and yes I DID inhale!)

(Gloss:  I know Taki won’t look down on me for this, because he of all people knows, “things don’t always go better with coke.")

But anyway.  Lester, those stupid American TV shows etc you called “cool shit” were not cool.  They were just shit.  America’s GOOD “shit” is not to be found in Hollywood or on TV, but in very obscure, unpublicised nooks and crannies among mostly un-famous people.

And @ Boyd Cathey:  SIR!  Your above comment has persuaded me, with no reservations, that you and I ought to have a few drinks together.  We might quibble about details of history and theology, but anyone who loves Soviet cinema like you evidently do, is destined to drink with me sometime.  Problem is, I’m on the other side of the world (Australia), but “the spirits” will guide us.  Oh, and Boyd, I promise not to smuggle any “good shit” across the American border - because plenty of it still grows in America, and always will, and I don’t just mean good grass… :-)

I’d hardly call pot smoking an “obscure” practice.  it’s practicly the national past time.  You must be ancient to think it is part of any dsort of counterculture.

lester, you...just...don’t...get it.

I don’t give a flying f--- about marijuana.
But I DID tell a story about a colourful, rebellious, intractable and unclubbable (uncatecorisable, if that’s a word) kind of American who is, well, going extinct now, and you ain’t his kind, or mine.  But then that’s one of the reasons why I emigrated to Australia, where all kinds of weirdness are taken for granted (like the Platypus) and no one tries too hard to put any of our life-forms into abstract categories...........

you probably think shakespeare is stupid.  how about the bible?  i mean what a hackneyed ciche ridden story that is.  and frank sinatra, I mean, why waste your life making beautiful music that makes people happy, when you could be studying the platypus.  STAY IN AUSTRALIA

I’m not sure if I’m addressing Taki’s article, or the spirited reaction to it. A few thoughts. There is no question the soviet juggernaut produced olympic champions and brilliant chess champions, despite a very stifling regime. But lets give a little credit to American culture. I’ve heard people disparage it. Take jazz and baseball both uniquely American. The Japanese are fanatical about both. The french wear jeans and honor jerry lewis (go figure.) The art scene shifted from paris to new york in 20th C. I could go on. For a young country, not bad.

The best explanation I know for the survival of literature and the arts in the former Soviet Union was given by Andrei Navrozov in his book “the Gingerbread Race.” He points out that Russia under the czars was the last society in Europe that had a purely aristocratic high culture - by 1917, the rest of the civilized world had subordinated culture to commerce. After the Bolshevik revolution, the new rulers of Russia did not really know what to do with the arts. To their modest credit, they preserved them even though they had nothing to do with creating them.

It’s also to be noted that the old-fashioned sort of socialist - both in the Soviet Union and outside it - did not hate Western civilization. Furthermore, such people still subscribed to the notion that their great desideratum of social and economic equality had in part to be achieved by elevating the proletariat, rather than solely by cutting down the gentry and bourgeoisie. This goal of uplifting the working class was to be accomplished by making high culture available to them. At least that was the theory, though the practice was another matter.

Then along came the Frankfurt school, Frantz Fanon, and people like Susan Sontag, who proclaimed her enmity to the “Matthew Arnold idea of culture” and averred that the white race was a cancer on the world. The determination of the modern left to destroy the institutions of Western civilization, to deprecate its high culture as the product of “DWEMs” (dead white European males) is the product of these folk. Again, to their modest credit, the old Bolshevik commissars never proposed such nonsense.

I’ll point out to those who have disparaged American culture in this thread that there was once a widespread “middlebrow” culture in this country that respected literature and the arts and sought to make them available to a broad public through such institutions as public libraries, Chautauqua lectures, and in larger cities, art museums and symphony orchestras. There were, obviously, many people who had no interest in any of these things, who were content with “lowbrow” entertainments, and the “highbrows” often sneered at the efforts of the less educated and less wealthy to improve themselves - but these institutions persisted in American society until the ‘sixties, when the academic/intellectual world that had hitherto been the stewards of high culture turned against it.

We know the rest of the story, because we’ve lived through it. The American culture that so many here and abroad disparage is the result of exalting the most vulgar aspects of lowbrow pop culture and appealing to the basest instincts of human nature. What is amazing is the strange alliance that has created this circumstance - on one hand, the anti-Western ideologues of the far left, on the other, entrepreneurs in the entertainment and fashion industries who have seen it as their opportunity to make their fortunes.

Jacques Barzun once said that getting old is like learning a new profession. Writers do not suffer as much as athletes do, but they certainly lose their edge.

Tolkien didn’t.  Was he exceptional?

I’m not a ballet fan, although I admire like hell the pain these poor guys and gals have to go though to reach the top. Pop stars have it easy. All they have to do is write some very bad lyrics or make some horrible noise and presto, they get laid a lot and make millions upon millions. Their success makes inherited wealth moral by comparison.

Right.