118 words / 57:22
Greg Johnson welcomed Alexander Adams (WordPress, Substack), author of the recently-published book from Imperium Press Blood, Soil, Paint, to the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio, where they discussed Romanticism and modern art. It is now available for download and online listening. (more…)
Portrait of Schelling by Karl Joseph Stieler
Portrait of Schelling by Karl Joseph Stieler
5,320 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
In the first part of this essay I introduced readers to Schelling, who is one of the first philosophers to react against what Heideggereans have called “the metaphysics of presence”: the hidden will in Western metaphysics that gives primacy to human subjectivity, adjusting our understanding of the Being of beings to the human desire that beings should be completely transparent to us, hiding nothing, and readily available for our manipulation. In response to this, Schelling argues that it is nature, not human subjectivity, that should be the starting point of philosophy. (more…)
Jean Raoux, Pygmalion Adoring His Statue, 1717
Jean Raoux, Pygmalion Adoring His Statue, 1717
6,135 words
Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) are both concerned with love and the ideal. If you love cinema, you will love these films, which I would rank among the greatest ever made. They can teach us a lot about love, idealism, art, and different sorts of desire. Be advised that there are a great many spoilers ahead.
Vertigo is the story of John “Scottie” Ferguson (played by James Stewart), a San Francisco policeman who retires from the force after a deadly rooftop chase leaves him with severe acrophobia (fear of heights). (more…)
4,106 words
Gore Vidal once said to Dwight McDonald, “You realize we have nothing more to say; only to add.”
I feel the same way in this review of Todd Field’s Tár, the recent film so artfully described in Trevor Lynch’s review (“The Talented Miss Tarr”), but the film made an immediate impression on me in terms of how it dealt with life and power when applied to art. I recall Lynch’s discomfort with Tár’s opening monologues which could, by virtue of their length and the fact of there being two in sequence, could easily kill a film. (more…)
Horus the Avenger
6,288 words
Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)
The following is a transcript of Charles Krafft‘s interview with Tim Murdock, aka Horus the Avenger, on EndGame Exotica at White Rabbit Radio. The interview was originally broadcast on January 30, 2015. We would like to thank Hyacinth Bouquet for the transcript. (more…)
3,643 words
Much could be said about Laibach (and has been, here at Counter-Currents). The name is the German form of Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital city. The language choice references their Austro-Hungarian past, and depending on who you ask, maybe some other era, too. Their sound is one of a kind, as unique as that of Laure LePrunenec. Laibach is best described as an industrial band with heavy martial and totalitarian influences. One notable characteristic of their unique presentation is walking a tightrope between fascist aesthetics and socialist realism. (more…)
2,757 words
A chronic problem with the arts and politics is that explicitly political art is often not the best art, regardless of the message. Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has noted that novels which are written with the intention of delivering a pro-white message are generally not very good. We see a similar problem in contemporary films, where the obsession with delivering a “woke” message recently created a movie so terrible that it was cancelled after filming was complete. (more…)
1,411 words
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently staging an exhibition entitled “The African Origin of Civilization.” Inspired by Cheikh Anta Diop’s eponymous book, one of Afrocentrism’s central texts, it juxtaposes African artifacts dating mostly from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries with ancient Egyptian artifacts. (more…)
Salvador Dalí, Perpignan Train Station
Salvador Dalí, Perpignan Train Station
5,557 words
Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)
With Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity, Dalí returned to his paranoiac-critical concerns (i.e., autoeroticism), but now transformed. The paranoiac origin is Dalí’s obsession with Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, which in turn he believed to “consist” in rhinoceroses’ horns. (more…)
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory
5,672 words
Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)
This excursus has prematurely broached The Gala Situation, so let’s go back to where we started, with Dalí beginning to apply his method: “For the next few years Dalí’s paranoiac process remained preoccupied with fetishist obsessions, including masturbation and his fear of heterosexual sex.”[1] (more…)
