“La puta” of course is “the whore,” in line with the obsessive sexual symbolism of the film, but also a reference to Swift’s airborne utopia of scientific cranks; as we’ll see next, taking out Laputa will make way for Strangelove’s very different, solidly based ge-mineshaft utopia.
[←311]
See Andy Nowicki’s meditations on the demeaning subtext of the macho “Game” theorists; for example, “Trouble in Twilight,” http://alternativeright.com/altright-archive/main/blogs/untimely-observations/trouble-in-twilight
[←312]
“Evil Hand: Dr. Strangelove has one, which seems to act on Strangelove’s violent and Nazi subconscious. The portrayal was so influential that the real life condition “alien hand syndrome” is also known as “Dr. Strangelove Syndrome,” http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/
pmwiki.php/Main/EvilHand%20/%20http:/tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilHand
[←313]
Cf. the iconic boys’ book, Kipling’s Stalky and Co.
[←314]
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/DrStrangelove?
from=Film.DoctorStrangelove
[←315]
Strangelove’s lapse into German links him to the equally deceptive failure at the end of Hesse’s Demian: “In the very last sentence of the novel Sinclair addresses Demian, his recently departed friend and mentor, as ‘mein Führer’.” Mark Harmon, review of Gunnar Decker’s Hesse: Der Wanderer und sein Schatten in the TLS, September 14, 2012, available here: http://www.gss.ucsb.edu/projects/ hesse/documents/Harman-
Decker-2012-2.pdf
[←316]
“Physicist Isidor Rabi noticed Oppenheimer’s disconcerting triumphalism: “I’ll never forget his walk; I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car . . . his walk was like High Noon . . . this kind of strut. He had done it” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer).
[←317]
Itself an obviously phallic notion: satirizing the “missile gap”—a lie about the aged Eisenhower that helped put virile Kennedy in the White House; Turgidson demands that “Mr. President, we must prevent a mineshaft gap!”
[←318]
Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State (New York: Verso, 1988).
[←319]
An outdated webpage at http://www.oocities.org/redgiantsite/
moon.html which also includes an excerpt from Carter’s book.
[←320]
Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983).
[←321]
In a replay of the whole “Incredibly Strange Creatures” kerfuffle that we referenced before, “Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove were both produced by Columbia Pictures. . . . Director Stanley Kubrick, adapting Peter George’s novel Red Alert, insisted the studio release his movie first (in January 1964). “Fail-Safe” so closely resembled Red Alert that George filed a plagiarism lawsuit. The case was settled out of court.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-Safe_%281964_film%29#Lawsuit).
[←322]
Albeit an underground triumph, which does fit in with many “Nazi survival” mythologies.
[←323]
Although she wouldn’t like that bit about “animals raised and slaughtered.”
[←324]
Trevor Lynch shows the right approach. Reviewing Jan Counen’s Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, he points out that “Stravinsky and Chanel . . . were both highly talented individuals in their own rights, but they also interest me because they combined avant-garde aesthetics with archaic, conservative, even reactionary tastes and convictions.” See Son of Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).
[←325]
As Baron Evola says: “‘Tradition,’ in the complete sense, is a feature of the periods which Vico would call ‘heroic ages’—where a sole formative force, with metaphysical roots, manifested itself in customs as well as in religion, in law, in myth, in artistic creations, in short in every particular domain of existence. Where can the survival of tradition in this sense be found today? And, specifically, as European tradition, great, unanimous, and not peasant or folkloric, tradition? It is only in the sense of the levelling “totalitarianism” that tendencies towards political-cultural absolute unity have appeared. In concrete terms, the ‘European tradition’ as culture has nowadays as content only the private and more or less diverging interpretations of intellectuals and scholars in fashion . . .”—Julius Evola, “Spiritual And Structural Presuppositions of The European Union” in Greg Johnson, ed. North American New Right, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012).
[←326]
It’s like Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Gatien’s Hamlet. If, as I will suggest, Gatien found himself in the role of Wotan, Michael Alig would be his Loki.
[←327]
Halston turns out to have had a . . . friend . . . who seems to have been the real-life inspiration for Baron’s Borat—it’s easy to imagine him in Borat’s yellow slingshot bikini—not that Sudler-Smith ever makes the point.
[←328]
Limelight is, after all, about a dance club entrepreneur, while Ultrasuede veers off, like its subject, into an infatuation with the Judaic-run Studio 54. Bizarrely, the latter film makes considerable use of Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music, White Boy” but keeps cutting out the words “White boy” in the chorus (perhaps using a version, similarly cut, that was used for airplay in Boston—banned in Boston?)—an interesting choice, given the Aryan themes we will find in Halston’s life and work.
[←329]
Not for nothing did the Federal Court system link together Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia into one district.
[←330]
And love Andre’s smooth reaction: “Can somebody get me another cappuccino, puh-leeze?”
[←331]
One wishes he would wind up interviewing Hannibal Lecter, so that the good Doctor could tell him that “Good nutrition’s given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you . . . ? And that accent you’ve tried so desperately to shed: pure West Virginia."
[←332]
Though he does not “way over-southern it” as MST3k finds the actors in Squirm.
[←333]
For more on Billy see James Holbeyfield, “Billy and Alexa Ray Joel,” http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/billy-and-alexa-ray-joel/
[←334]
To anticipate our proposal of the correct way to view Halston, Smith’s fixation on Studio 54 as the “key” to Halston reminds one of Pasolini’s Salo, where the last days of Mussolini’s Social Republic are recast as a reenactment of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Of course, there is otherwise no similarity between the two auteurs.
[←335]
“Disco’s Not Dead; the Return of Halston,” review of Ultrasuede, Interview Magazine, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/
ultrasuede-in-search-of-halston%20/%20_
[←336]
For information on Spengler and the Futurists I am indebted to Kerry Bolton’s “Faustianism and Futurism: Analogous Primary Elements in Two Doctrines on European Destiny” in Aristokratia (Manticore Press, 2013), pp. 82–114.
[←337]
Spengler, Decline of the West, vol. 1, p. 183.
[←338]
Sam Adams January 19, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/
ultrasuede-in-search-of-halston,67879/
[←339]
“Halston we hardly knew ye,” http://www.thedaily.com/page/
2012/01/20/012012-arts-movies-review-halston-1-3
[←340]
When the ultimate ownership of Halston’s empire was decided, the new owners sent security guards—centurians—to effect the return of every item of clothing Halston had ever given a model or celebrity.
[←341]
Bolton, pp. 84–86.
[←342]
Bolton, p. 89.
[←343]
/> “Appear” because, as Bolton makes clear, neither Spengler nor the Futurists seems to have even heard of each other, much less been influenced. The same, of course, with them and Halston.
[←344]
Marinetti, “War: The Ultimate Hygiene,” quoted in Bolton, p. 90.
[←345]
Gwendolyn von Taunton, “Aristocratic Radicalism: The Political Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche,” in Aristokratia, pp. 11–49; quotes on pp. 28, 40, and 48.
[←346]
See his “Pessimism?” from 1921.
[←347]
As Greg Johnson writes: “If the moral life is rooted in a plurality of different cultures and ways of life, this also implies the existence of real conflicts of interest. These conflicts can always become existentially serious: peoples can fight over them; men can kill and die over them; in short, there can be war. And the potential for war is the origin of the political in Schmitt’s sense,” in “Leo Strauss, the Conservative Revolution, and National Socialism,” North American New Right, vol. 2, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2016).
[←348]
According to Wikipedia: “Historically, the pillbox was also military headgear, often including a chin strap, and can still be seen on ceremonial occasions in some countries, especially former members of the Commonwealth. For example, the Royal Military College of Canada dress uniform includes a pillbox hat. A pillbox cap, also referred to as a kilmarnock, is a modern manufacture of the traditional headdress worn by members of virtually all Gurkha Regiments. During the late Roman Empire, the pillbox, then known as the pilleus or ‘Pannonian cap’ was worn by Roman soldiers,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillbox_hat
[←349]
Halston’s use of so-called “African-American” models had nothing to do with modern multi-culti notions or affirmative action. “I wanted the best girl I could get, the best girls in America.” That included Midwestern blondes as well, even from Detroit. Partly based on his pro-Americanism, which we’ll discuss soon, it is mostly due to his Aristocratic Radicalism, itself fully in line with American ideas of “natural aristocracy,” promoted by Jefferson and Emerson (one of Nietzsche’s favorite authors, by the way). See von Taunton, pp. 21ff. The model interviewed for the film, Pat Cleveland, like Andre Talley, clearly belongs to what W. E. B. Dubois would call “the talented tenth.”
Spengler incurred the wrath of NS Germany when, in The Hour of Decision, he mocked biological notions of race and emphasized the far more important notion of “having race”: a mestizo like Hugo Chávez is a man of race, unlike a nominally White globalist; the former can be our ally, the latter is the enemy. Evola also contrasted “zoological” notions of race with his own ideas of physical, psychological, and spiritual race, for which he too was declared persona non grata in NS Germany.
Interestingly too, the contemporary work von Taunton relies most on for her discussion of Nietzsche’s Aristocratic Radicalism is “The Challenge of Aristocratic Radicalism” by N. A. Tobias, a black scholar at the University of Michigan. Also, Halston’s personal disinterest, contrary to the stereotype of “fashion designers,” is what enabled him to field a group of Halstonettes that was, despite the uniformity of dress, quite “diverse” for its time; it is the heterosexual, homophobic Judaic “porn” producers that have eventually created the truly uniform, plastic “bimbo” as a “model” for women.
[←350]
Sharontina, “The Runway Battle of Versailles ’73: A Story That Needed to be Told,” The Runway Times, September 13, 2012 (http:// therunwaytimes.com/the-runway-battle-of-versailles-73-a-story-that-needed-to-be-told/). The author says the story of the event “is finally being told” which seems like a fitting response to Sudley-Smith’s earlier yet trivializing film.
[←351]
“Nietzsche’s primary task is to create a transition point which shifts the emphasis from the old regime towards a new and eminently more useful cultural stratification.”—Von Taunton, p. 15.
[←352]
“We are not given patterns to imitate”—Spengler, “Pessimism.”
[←353]
It appears to be the same grey as the furniture in the famous townhouse; when asked about it by a talk-show audience member, he says it “brings people out.” We’ll revisit that guest in a moment.
[←354]
The Halstonettes’ landing by yacht at the celebration of Halston’s contract to design Braniff’s uniforms and planes, with its conjunction of black uniforms, sea, and air recalls the quasi-Futurist and Italian air ace D’Annunzio’s pirate republic of Fiume, whose black naval uniforms—designed by D’Annunzio himself—were the clear inspiration for the famous SS uniforms, right down to the Death’s Head. See Hakim Bey’s “March on Fiume” (http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/03/march-on-fiume/). Fiume is one of the historical instantiations of Bey’s concept of “Temporary Autonomous Zones,” and is obviously related to the Nietzschean Geisterkrieg, just as is Peter Gatien’s club scene to be discussed in the next section.
[←355]
As Greg Johnson writes: “The core of a culture is a set of ideals or norms. To participate in a culture is to feel that one is part of the culture and the culture is part of oneself. It is an experience of identity. It is also an experience of commitment to the culture’s ideals, the feeling that they are obligatory, that they demand that one change one’s life. This obligation is experienced as a kind of vitalizing tension between the ideal and the reality of one’s life, leading one to master one’s passions and mobilize one’s energies toward living up to the ideal. The moral life, in short, requires cultivation within a normative culture,” “Leo Strauss, the Conservative Revolution, and National Socialism.”
[←356]
Bolton, p. 86, my emphasis.
[←357]
Did the Prince of the Air bring Halston to the heights of Olympic Towers in order to display the world before him, as in Matthew 4: 8–10?
[←358]
Amy Odell, “From the Disco to JC Penney: The Enduring Tragedy of Halston,” New York, http://nymag.com/thecut/2011/12/halston-from-the-disco-to-jcpenney.html
[←359]
As James Holbeyfield puts it: “These people, adapted to the white brain instead of to a piece of this beautiful earth, truly know the price of every continent and the value of none.” See his review of Werner Herzog’s Antarctic odyssey Encounters at the End of the World, http://www.
counter-currents.com/2013/03/werner-herzogs-encounters-at-the-end-of-the-world/
[←360]
Parker has been pushed for decades by the Judaic media as some kind of sex symbol—despite looking more equine than aquiline—or role model for modern “liberated” women—apparently, be like promiscuous gay men—as if they were Dolly Levi promoting an unpromising spinster. She makes an interesting contrast with Anjelica Huston, an actual Halston model we see in archival footage and interviews. Her equally . . . unusual features suggest a beauty that dwells on other planes than ours; superhuman rather than subhuman, elfin rather than bestial. Like Meg Foster, it would be possible to imagine a production of LOTR where she plays Galadriel, while Parker suggests nothing more otherworldly than a wicked witch or stepmother. Only Ed Wood, appropriately enough, would cast her as the Angel of Peace.
[←361]
And should any White group try to “loot” them, all must be tracked down and “restored” to them, even after almost a hundred years.
[←362]
A. Nolen on Ultrasuede, http://anolen.com/tag/ultrasuede-in-search-of-halston/
[←363]
The Left has never understood how different at least some German bankers were in the ’30s, and even today talks about “bankers supporting Hitler” and comparing it to today’s so-called “corporate fascism.” As Bolton remarks, German bankers were “conscious of a national and cultural mission” unlike today’s globalists. See Bolton, p. 101.
[←364]
On a related note, one thing Spengler warned
against was “noisy self-advertisement.” It is in this light that we should view Halston’s legendary hard-partying lifestyle, which Sudler-Smith seems to think reveals his essence. On the contrary, it was a fairly deliberate marketing strategy, creating an indelible connection in the public mind between fame, celebrity, and Halston’s clothes, which he would be very happy to sell you down at Penny’s. It also serves as a release from the immense tension felt most acutely by the creator type: “The gap between the ideal and the real is bridged by a longing of the soul for perfection. This longing is a tension, like the tension of the bowstring or the lyre, that makes human greatness possible” (Greg Johnson, “Postmodernism, Hedonism and Death,” http://www.counter-currents.com/
Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture Page 26
