2,390 words
I cannot speak for the rest of the world, but for those of us who grew up in the United States, especially in its more rural environs, autumn is a particularly nostalgic season. In part, this is owing to associations formed during childhood: the forest ramblings, the fallen leaves crunching underfoot, the morning fog over the trees, the smell of woodsmoke in the air; the pumpkin patches and hayrides, county fairs and bonfires — all of these thoughts and remembrances come back to us in this season, tinted in shades of red and gold. (more…)
3,469 words
He came from a world where soft music lilted through dining rooms and ballrooms and salons . . . it was played to make life sweeter and more festive, to make women’s eyes flash and men’s vanity throw sparks . . . [his] music on the other hand didn’t offer forgetfulness; it aroused people to the feelings of passion and guilt and demanded that [they] be truer to themselves . . . such music is upsetting . . . [1] (more…)
1,132 words
Believe it or not, there was once a time in the now-enviable 2000s in which Midwestern indie bands were considered the epitome of cool. If you wore plaid shirts (sometimes, with a t-shirt over said shirt), could play passable guitar, and had a just-so-slightly off-kilter voice with which you could sing about outsiderdom and ennui, (more…)
202 words / 2:03:09
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On the Counter-Currents Radio fundraiser livestream for July 26th, 2020, Greg Johnson is joined by special guest Morgoth to discuss culture, nostalgia, individualism, music, television, and the End of History. (more…)
4,673 words
To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
I grew up in the final years of the Cold War. If you aren’t old enough to remember the Cold War, let me tell you that it was a trip.
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1,719 words
Crystal Castles is a Canadian band, initially consisting of singer Alice Glass and producer Ethan Kath. The two met each other because of their mutual connections in the large and prolific Toronto music scene, and collaborated on one track, the chaotic “Alice Practice,” as a mere experiment. The two never intended to form a full-time group (more…)
215 words / 70:38
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Greg Johnson talks to composer Xurious about his intellectual, political, and artistic journey and the censorship of his music by YouTube. (more…)
Remember what they stole from us.
2,031 words / 11:08
Audio Version: To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
Also: Rich’s podcast on 7-11 Nationalism here. (more…)
74 words / 1:06:17
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(more…)
Remember what they stole from us.
2,000 words
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” — L. P. Hartley
There’s an old time capsule video from 1987 titled “2:30am at a 7-11 near Disney World” that has made its way around the Internet over the years and has been viewed millions of times. (more…)
2,155 words
I took an interest in architecture a few years back, after reading Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head. The book described the effects of the arrangement of space on how we perceived and acted in the world. The effects of arranged space could be negative—the distraction of eye-catching advertisements and flashing lights—or positive—the machine-like feeling of cooking in a well-stocked and well-organized kitchen. (more…)
2,110 words
Editor’s Note:
This speech was delivered at the Francis Parker Yockey Memorial Dinner in the San Francisco Bay Area on August 19, 2017. — Greg Johnson
“There can be no national epic about things which the people cannot picture themselves as reproducible in a near future . . .” — Georges Sorel[1] (more…)
From the San Francisco Opera production of The Makropulos Case, 2016.
2,721 words
Leoš Janáček
The Makropulos Case
English National Opera, conducted by Sir Charles MacKerras, Chandos, 2007
(Warning: This review contains spoilers for the plot of this opera.)
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) was a Czech composer known for his combination of folk music with a strikingly original modernism. There is no other composer who sounds remotely like him. He is as instantly recognizable as Vivaldi, Wagner, or Philip Glass. (more…)
Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, detail
969 words
Since our last update, on September 2nd, we have received 24 donations totaling $2,215.88, in amounts ranging from $7 to $650. Eight of these donations were merely the first of ongoing monthly pledges, which are especially helpful. Our total is now $16,374.88. We are thus $103,956.12 from our goal of $120,331 ($23,625.12 from last year’s goal of $40,000), with basically six weeks to go before the fundraiser ends on Halloween. I want to thank all our donors, new and old. You make Counter-Currents possible. (more…)
1,852 words
Where were you when Adlai Stevenson died? It was the summer of ’65, and I was sitting in a dark movie theater in Plattsburgh, New York with some cousins, and we were watching a very long, complicated, black-and-white war movie called In Harm’s Way.
In Harm’s Way was way over my head. It was an Otto Preminger production, thus by 1965 standards it was racier than the average fare, chuggy-jam full of intricate subplots about rape, adultery, class-envy, and other grown-up business that left me cold. (more…)
1,810 words
Readers of this website are aware of the fact that I am an aficionado of the ’60s superspy series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But I awaited Guy Ritchie’s “reimagining” of U.N.C.L.E. with some trepidation. A big screen adaptation of the series has been in the works for around 40 years. And an execrable TV movie was actually made in 1983. The theatrical film project has changed hands many times, and innumerable scripts have been written. After Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino announced that The Man From U.N.C.L.E. would be his next project (I reacted to this news with mixed feelings). (more…)
1,430 words
Alien to American heritage.
It’s a phrase I heard on a radio program a few days ago, and it got my attention. I thought about it a lot, because it pretty much sums up how many of us feel at the moment.
It doesn’t matter where I am, or what I’m doing, it’s always there. That sinking feeling. (more…)
2,176 words
Mark Fisher
Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014
Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx was an attempt to resurrect Marxism. Published in 1993, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe, Specters of Marx was an attempt to disrupt the apparent flow of historical progression (more…)
William Blake, “Hamlet and his Father’s Ghost”
5,903 words
We never manage to bury the dead completely. Their words still echo down to us from beyond life’s event horizon in direct contravention of physical law. Our stance towards death is a determining factor in how the dead return to us; in what form and with what significance they haunt the living. Although they are always there, the ways in which they interact with us vary and shift through time. And, at the present time, there is a strange blend of residual religious funerary rites and atheistic materialism. It feels very much as though we go through the motions of dispatching the dead to the next world without believing a word of it. (more…)
Willy Meller, Schicksalsstunde (Hour of Destiny)
9,576 words
Translated by R. G. Fowler
“Time, Space and Number
Fell from the black firmament,
Into the still and sombre sea.
Shroud of silence and shade,
The night erases absolutely
Time, Space and Number.”
—Leconte de Lisle (“Villanelle” [pastoral poem], Poèmes Tragiques)
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