Let's just get the Halloween season ball rolling by thanking Holo honey Raora for hosting a watchalong for a classic horror movie, The Thing! (The canonical 1982 version.) Irys also did a watchalong for it last year...
So does that mean that Raora is a daddy's girl like Irys? It's rare for girls to have cool tastes, usually only guys do. Ame also watched a lot of classic "guy's movies," but she's a bit on the tomboy side, whereas Irys and Raora are very girly.
So where do they get their preference for cool-guy culture? From wanting to bond with their dad! Their dad is a guy, and has guy tastes, so if they want to bond with him, they'll have to develop a taste for guy movies, guy music, and so on. Raora has fondly mentioned her dad quite a bit, more so than her mom or her sister, so I think she might be a daddy's girl -- very rare, and very appreciated! ^_^
On the Holo JP side, I'm pretty sure that the Koronator is a daddy's girl -- she's mentioned the two of them bonding over classic video games while she was growing up. Marine must be a daddy's girl -- she has fondly mentioned him quite a bit on stream (he thinks Choco is pretty, he has some rules for marrying Marine, etc.). And it sounds like Lui is closer to her dad than to her mom (who is more like Lui's brother), so I think she's a daddy's girl too. And they all have cool tastes! And they're not tomboys, so they found an interest in cool things so that they'd have something to bond with their dad over. ^_^
And those are only the ones I know about -- perhaps there are others, but I just haven't seen clips or heard them talk about their families on stream before. It seems like there are a lot more daddy's girls in Glorious Nippon than in other countries. And Japanese girls *do* have cooler tastes than girls from other countries.
Probably because their men are cooler -- descendants of samurai, ninjas, pirates, and warrior-monks (yes, Japanese Buddhist monks could marry and have children). In China and Korea, the dominant classes were scholar-bureaucrats and literally castrated eunuchs, along with the military. Girls are more likely to want to bond with their dad when he has an exciting personality, which comes from leading an exciting lifestyle (not the life of a scholar-bureaucrat).
Even among the non-warriors, Japanese men were more likely to be hunters and fishermen than the Chinese and Koreans were, because Japan is so mountainous that arable land is relatively less common, so intensive agriculture is not as common as it is in China and Korea. And fishing is just another form of hunting -- more adventurous, setting off into the unknown, having to fight against hostile natural forces.
If the fish are migratory like salmon, then fishing is more like pastoralism, and the fishermen are tending to a herd of underwater livestock, much like the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes -- which makes them a lot cooler, resembling pastoralists (risk-taking, badass, culture of honor) instead of intensive agriculturalists (boring, predictable, hardscrabble).
Mongolian girls also have cool tastes, like practicing horse-mounted archery for fun! Your daughters would be cool, too, if they looked up to their fathers as the descendants of Genghis Khan! Hehe.
I'll be posting more post-length comments in the comments section shortly, just wanted to get the ball rolling...
October 9, 2024
Halloween mega-post / thread: horror movies, music, video games, sublime aesthetics, vtuber recommendations, ancient Indo-European origins of trick-or-treating, etc.
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Watched Messiah of Evil (1974, filmed in '71), which languished in obscurity until brought back during the 2010s through digital restoration -- and likely enhancement over the original.
ReplyDeleteIt was shot in Techniscope, which only uses half the area of filmstock vs. the standard method, so it required a 2x blow-up to be projected like standard-size frames -- which literally magnifies its defects, like graininess. I'm pretty sure all of these newly restored for Blu-ray B-movies from the '70s or whenever have benefited from this digital enhancement -- if they didn't look so great due to budget limitations when originally filmed, why keep them that way?
You don't want to make them look unrecognizable, but cleaning up graininess, putting saturation into faded colors (this movie's color was done by Technicolor, but not with the rich, saturated dye-transfer process), etc., is what the filmmakers would have originally wanted -- they just didn't have enough money, as they were B-movies.
Anyway, this is a masterpiece of a B-movie, and is a reminder of how much craft was put into these in the good ol' days vs. the cursed slop that has been served up in this all-but-dried-up niche within the film industry.
Shot on film, not video.
Bare minimum of an original score, but still effective at setting an eerie creepy atmosphere, with an uncanny timbre due to its foreward-looking use of synths.
Heavy use of chiaroscuro lighting, both sculpturally and compositionally, a distinction I explored in this post about Venetian Renaissance colorito being the origin of this compositional chiaroscuro:
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/12/venetian-ethnogenesis-and-its-role-as.html
Rich and varied color palette (more saturated in the digital enhancement).
Striking and iconic locations -- maybe only seeming iconic after the fact, but the locations in this movie perfectly capture one of America's most iconic environments -- "Midcentury Modern small-town Southern California".
Ditto for the set design and set dressing, wonderfully capturing the Modern-meets-Boho look of many interiors of the '70s (vs. a more strictly Modern look to the '60s).
Costumes and hair / make-up are well done, too, from the blue-collar denim uniform and greasy slicked-back hair of the gas station attendant, to the Boho chic look of one of the traveling companion girls (red turtleneck, flowy patchwork skirt, long lustrous hair brushed straight into a fuss-free mane).
Eye candy actresses (including one of the original Price is Right models), who possess a healthy and natural libido. Here, their corporeal presence is more sensual, with no nudity or softcore scenes, but still adds an erotic charge to the dreamy yet dangerous atmosphere.
Acting that is sincere and competent and naturalistic, not lazy / phoned-in or self-aware / campy (which includes deadpan delivery of ridiculous dialog and actions). The protag's voiceover narration has some moments of melodramatic delivery, but it's meant to be reading her diary entry aloud, and people do get more melodramatic in their private diary entries than in their everyday speech face-to-face with others.
None of these elements are cost-prohibitive, and none of them use no-longer-existent technology. The only reason that the B-movies have become so crappy since the 21st century is that the cohesion, cooperative spirit, creative drive, and inspiration to create something larger and longer-lasting than your own self, has thoroughly evaporated in the stagnating and now collapsing American Empire.
As an aside, Messiah of Evil contains perhaps the earliest use of a supermarket as a utopia-or-dystopia location. See the galleries within these two reviews, though watch the movie to see its wonderfully Modern / Googie / butterfly-arched roof in the establishing shot:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cinemadelirium.com/2011/04/messiah-of-evil-1973.html
https://www.johntrafton.com/messiah-of-evil
This movie was filmed in 1971, and went through release Hell until 1974. To my knowledge, the only other similar use of "brightly lit, clean, well-stocked supermarket as symbol for Midcentury material abundance and security" is from The Long Goodbye, where the protag goes shopping for cat food late at night -- as in The Messiah of Evil, the fact that these places were open at night was another sign of peak prosperity, having such a cornucopia available at your convenience. That movie was filmed in '72, released in '73.
The other major example, probably the most famous, is from The Stepford Wives, filmed in '74 and released in '75.
This is part of the broader trend of peak-American Empire aesthetics, where dystopia was bright, lush, and harmonious -- their assumption that such trends from the Midcentury would continue indefinitely, rather than darken, dessicate, and fracture. See this post of mine on the topic (with a still of The Stepford Wives' supermarket scene):
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2017/10/is-dystopia-bright-lush-harmonious-or.html
In addition to the supermarket, Messiah of Evil has a very brightly lit (at night) gas station, clean & pristine, 24-7 convenience, abundance and security. Not to mention the Midcentury Modern movie theatre (naturally open at night), shown and discussed in this review from a blog about movie theatres in movies:
https://theatresinmovies.blogspot.com/2017/01/messiah-of-evil.html
Two of the main characters are mobbed, killed, and eaten in these locations, portraying the enemies as outsider infiltrators of what is supposed to be a clean bright sanctuary. In the movie theatre, the bright lights come in before she is chased down and killed, so it up-ends the trope of the movie theatre's danger coming from its dark setting, where people are disguised by darkness.
These are therefore more like the rape scenes from A Clockwork Orange (another classic where dystopia is bright), which unfold in brightly lit locations -- a bright home interior at night, and a stage in a theatre that is otherwise dark but has a bright spotlight trained on the stage itself.
Not only does the contrast between the bright light and horrific violence make us feel like a sanctuary is being violated, but also like we wish it were taking place in the dark. For, although that makes it easier for the assailant to attack a victim, it also makes it easier for the spectators to be spared of the gruesome details. And it therefore adds to the pain and terror of the victim, to feel so exposed while under attack, without the dignity of having their attack kept private and unseen by a panopticon.
True Midcentury norms, though, there is minimal gore in Messiah of Evil. It's not torture porn either literally or figuratively, e.g. when a victim is humiliated or degraded. The harsh lit accompanying their death is more about heightening their -- and our -- sense of terror, than about humiliation, degradation, debasement, and torture.
To my knowledge, the first example of the turning of the tide against "supermarket as bright abundant utopia, perhaps overly utopian" is the gritty cop classic Cobra (1986):
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRGnchtk6hc
While a crazed criminal is holding a bunch of people hostage inside a supermarket, the bright overhead lights have all gone out, and there's only a bit of sunlight coming in through the windows. Most of the light comes from the smaller independently lit places like neon signs over the lunch counter, an illuminated giant Pepsi can display, etc. So it's more like a film noir exterior, only now on the inside of a building -- in neoliberal Hell, the Midcentury wholesome cornucopia of secure convenience, is dead.
Final note about Messiah of Evil. It's like a stylish European Gothic haunted-location movie, but set in, and adapted to, Midcentury America. It's not trying to Euro-LARP -- e.g., by setting it in a Colonial or Victorian mansion in New England or Dixie. That's too literal, too LARP-y.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which -- why didn't we make a horror movie that's set in a Brutalist fortress? They're the closest thing we have to American castles. What might have been...
How to create a Gothic atmosphere in a land that is new, where all the buildings are relatively new as well -- where there are no ruins or creaking dilapidated relics of the place's glory days centuries ago?
The movie is not so focused on the plot, but on atmosphere -- creepy, eerie, unsettling / uncanny, familiar yet strange, apparently safe but actually menacing. The environment is not hostile per se, as in a tropical jungle or remote snow-buried mountain. It's the kind of environment that ought to be safe and welcoming, so if it is dangerous and menacing, it implies some kind of infiltration, contamination, corruption, and so on.
This is in fact a case of infiltration by evil outsiders -- not a superficially clean and safe place, which is actually run by sick-and-twisted insiders who disguise their sinister nature from outsiders.
There's something lacking in those tryhard chuuni portrayals of "clean but internally evil" places. They fundamentally rely on the audience perceiving the place as a wholly foreign and unfamiliar place -- so we arrive there giving them the benefit of the doubt, after all it's so clean and safe and charming, at least at first blush. If it is actually run by wicked villains and dangerous, then we've been hoodwinked -- something that could only happen if we were naive outsiders who were not in on the place's inner workings.
That can work if it's a tropical jungle that seems thriving with life, an earthly paradise, but turns out to be inhabited by savage cannibals.
Or a calm peaceful body of water -- which, deeper down and unseen from the calm surface, is inhabited by killer sharks.
Or a geographically isolated and culturally alien place, which is calm and peaceful enough at the outset -- like the tiny island community in The Wicker Man. The policeman arrives from mainland Britain, how is he supposed to be familiar with a remote little island? If there's no immediate evidence of savagery, give them the benefit of the doubt.
But movies and TV shows about mid-to-late 20th century America, for a contemporary audience of Americans, these environments are not strange unfamiliar places where we're naive and just giving them the benefit of the doubt. We know those places -- probably live there ourselves, not a dingy disgusting slum in America.
ReplyDeleteSo if there's a big reveal that it's actually run by a wicked in-group -- not infiltrated by villainous outsiders -- we have to reject its plausibility, and the premise of it being a threatening location is totally deflated.
Such places are only run by sinister insiders in the seething imaginations of social misfits from those very environments, who are taking out their social rejection on their rejectors by portraying them as evil, destructive, etc., despite all appearances of them being good, constructive, and so on. It's just high school reject BS.
That's not to say there can't be a few bad apples from the in-group, like homegrown serial killer Michael Myers in Halloween. But they can't be a cabal that leads the community -- we already know that's not who leads us, and we know that there can be bad apples locally and internally. A few bad apple misfits are not the ones who build, maintain, and supply the bright clean abundant utopia that those Midcentury environments looked like.
Whoever built them, cannot have been a cabal of evil insiders -- evil insiders give their communities the grayed-out, textureless boxes with cheap crap or empty shelves, fragmented, and routinely set upon by mobs or colonized by indifferent and alien-speaking foreigners.
And so, as the American Empire neared its collapsing stage in the 21st century, as the Euros neared theirs during the 19th century, our horror movies are much heavier on locations that are decaying, ruins, or relics of a bygone heyday, truer to the original Euro Gothic spirit. Like the Rust Belt-era Detroit suburbs in It Follows from 2015, and countless others that are heavy on "vintage traces left within the current hellhole" aesthetics.
How does The Stepford Wives pull off the "sinister cabal of insiders leading a bright clean utopia" trope, which would otherwise be unbelievable?
ReplyDeleteFirst, the movie is clearly satirical and black-humor in tone, not meant to be taken too literally as a plausible threat, unlike a vampire or zombie movie where the monsters are meant to be taken literally.
And yet it does have a serious thriller tone as well, unlike the campy remake from 2004. So, it is meant to be taken more literally than figuratively, if not as seriously as a standard thriller or horror movie.
More importantly, then, the environment *is* on the remote and foreign side, to mainstream audiences. It's upper-class New England -- not an all-American middle-class suburb or small town. Maybe the elites do live decadent scandalous private lifestyles, within the comforted seclusion of their insulated communities. These are the future Epstein Island crowd, wealthy New England professionals.
What kind of weird stuff does the Skull & Bones crowd get up to, within their insular Yale community? Perhaps the same kind of stuff that they get up to when they settle into family life nearby.
Being so elite, so New England-y (prehistoric America, before America truly became American), and so adjacent to secret societies, perhaps the sinister plot of The Stepford Wives sounded plausible -- because it didn't generalize to all of America, which would've been rejected as implausible by audiences who knew first-hand that it wasn't like that. If it's confined to an upper-class elite secret society in prehistoric America, well, maybe it could happen.
Another extensive gallery of stills from Messiah of Evil, just images, no words or review, to convince the visually-oriented that it's worth watching:
ReplyDeletehttps://film-grab.com/2015/06/28/messiah-of-evil/
Watching a bunch of classic Italian Gothic horror movies makes me appreciate why Italy was chosen for Gothic and related genres coming from the British Empire. It's because there's so much architecture still standing from the Dark Ages, and comparatively little from the Humanistic / Renaissance / Baroque / Neoclassical eras.
ReplyDelete"Gothic" is a misnomer, it's really Norman / Romanesque, but whatever.
And even more importantly, they showcase castles instead of cathedrals -- nothing against cathedrals, but why are they the only buildings that have made it into the architectural record? Even my beloved treasure trove, Romanesque Art in Italy by Decker, is mostly about religious buildings.
Well, if you like American Brutalist fortresses, or their Dark Age predecessors, you're in for a real feast for the eyes with the Italian horror movies of the 1960s and early '70s! Most of the interiors are sets constructed in studios, but some interiors are real locations, and all exteriors and establishing shots of the environment are real as well.
La Maschera del Demonio by Bava (AKA Black Sunday) is shot at Castle Massimo in Arsoli.
Il Demonio by Rondi (AKA The Demon) is shot around various Dark Age villages in the Basilicata region.
Danza Macabra by Margheriti (AKA Castle of Blood) is shot at the castle in Bolsena.
Operazione Paura by Bava (AKA Kill, Baby, Kill) is shot around the Dark Age village of Calcata.
And so on and so forth...
Sadly, none filmed at the Castle of Melfi in Basilicata, with its dramatic tall bridge entrance, but I'm sure there's one with a bridge somewhere in these classic '60s Italian Gothic movies!
Also none shot at Naples' prominent and iconic Castel Nuovo -- the "new" castle, as in the late 1200s, as compared to even earlier in the Dark Ages.
Southern Italy, even up to Rome and Lazio, was totally passed over by the ackshual Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical periods. There are still some Classical buildings from Roman times, but most of it is from the good ol' Dark Ages. ^_^
That's cuz they didn't spawn a new empire of their own, which is what gave birth to all those styles from Gothic onward. In the North, they had growing city-states, and the regional great power of the Venetian Republic, to deliver newer styles, though none as entirely-new and all-encompassing and replacing-the-past as if an empire had given birth to them.
But in the South, there wasn't even that partial trend away from the Dark Ages. Including the region around Rome, which was part of the Papal States, no longer an empire.
No piles and piles of wealth either, after the collapse of the Roman Empire -- except for the birth of commercial, mercantile, and financial sectors in the North in the late Middle Ages / early Renaissance.
In the South, they had to keep what they'd inherited from the Dark Ages, a decent amount of which *was* funded by wealthy people -- but wealthy foreigners, like the Normans, Angevins, etc. from wealthy countries like France. Although they were not French-French -- they were the ones from Western France getting sidelined by the French-French from Paris and the Northeast. The exact same people who married into British nobility.
Perfect setting for Gothic horror movies!
Related, Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew is filmed in various Dark Age villages in the South (Basilicata and Apulia), even though he scouted locations in Palestine itself, but thought they were too "commercialized".
ReplyDeleteIDK what that means, but possibly he was struck by how civilized and Classical the Levant's architecture is. That would have been appropriate for the times of Jesus himself.
But the birth of Christianity as a proper imperial religion stems from the Dark Ages, namely with the growth of the Byzantine Empire (that's who sponsored, hosted, and codefied all those Ecumenical Councils that standardized what Christianity is). That was from the very beginning of the Dark Ages, but still decidedly post-Classical, the beginning of the mystical, magical, and monastic Dark Ages.
So in choosing to film the movie in Dark Age villages (Mediterranean ones, still, not Dark Age Britain or France), Pasolini was channeling the origin of Christianity as a proper religion, with its mystical and monastic foundations, from the era of the Church Fathers -- rather than the civilized and Classical time-and-place of Jesus and the Apostles themselves, when "Christianity" was only an inchoate group of Jesus-followers from within the Second Temple Judaic ethnos and a handful of Gentile converts.
So really, it's not a 20th-C portrayal of the 1st-C events surrounding Jesus, but a 20th-C imagining of a 5th or 6th-C Byzantine-sponsored movie about the events of Jesus as the Byzantines understood them. I.e., if the Byzantines had film-making technology, what would their movie about "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" look like?
Pasolini was an atheist and Communist, but even he had the right intuition about channeling the Dark Age / Church Fathers / Byzantine zeitgeist that produced the religion of Christianity, rather than the Roman Classical zeitgeist of Jesus' own lifetime. It's a movie about Christianity the religion, not Christ the person.
Neat!
PS, possibly Pasolini was also struck by how post-Dark Age the Levant began to look once the Ottoman Empire took it over. Ottoman architecture is akin to Gothic, Baroque, and even Rococo, from their Euro contemporaries. Rooted to some extent in Byzantine shapes and volumes, but introducing lots more complexity and scales of volumes, more thin volumes (Ottoman minarets, Gothic spires), more light-airy-open spaces, tons of surface ornamentation, etc.
ReplyDeleteThat's not what you want to see when you're filming a movie about Jesus -- or the birth of the Christian religion in Byzantine times. It'd be like filming a movie about Arthurian romance, and there's Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical buildings crowding the frame. Boo! Too fancy, too civilized -- give us the noble savage aesthetic of the Dark Ages, where Christianity and Arthurian romance came from!
Ashkenazi wedding ritual spotted in traditional Basilicata Italian wedding ritual, as shown in Il Demonio (1963). The movie, although in the horror / possession / exorcism genre, is heavy on accurate ethnological details from rural Basilicata in Southern Italy. Especially relating to customs and rituals and superstitions.
ReplyDeleteThere's a wedding scene, and before the bride and groom enter the church, right at the entrance, the groom asks his attendant "Do I have anything tied?" and the attendant unties the groom's shoelaces. The bride asks the same thing, and her attendant says no, nothing tied. Only after ensuring that there is no item of clothing in a tied position, do they enter -- and do a little hop on their way through the door.
I immediately recognized this as a notable element for some, but not all, Ashkenazi weddings -- perhaps more on the Hasidic side. See here, on untying knots before proceeding down the aisle:
https://outorah.org/p/27241/
Hasidic Jews and rural Southern Italians have spent hardly any time together, and Hasidic Jews are very endogamous anyway, so there's minimal chance of this ritual spreading from Italians to Jews, or vice versa.
Rather, it must stem from a common ancestor -- and given how far back that is, it must be Indo-European, or some ancient but not prehistoric practice among some swath of the Indo-Europeans.
This is yet more evidence, from wedding rituals, that the Ashkenazi Jews come from an Indo-European background, not a Saharo-Arabian background, let alone a Semitic or Canaanite or Judaean background. They're converts from the Dark Ages, as outlined in the earlier posts.
Now I'll have to track down which other of the many customs, rituals, and superstitions shown in Il Demonio are also found in Ashkenazi Jews. Sticking just to weddings, there's an elaborate scene where the adults prepare the matrimonial bed before the newlyweds consummate their marriage. They toss a bunch of raisins onto the sheet and spread them into the shape of a cross, so that their dryness will soak up all the evil vibes in the room.
The cross shape is obviously a Christian-era adaptation. But throwing a bunch of bad-vibe-absorbing things onto the bed in order to protect the newlyweds must have analogs in other Indo-Euro cultures, whether Ashkenazi or otherwise. But that item will have to wait in line with all the others...
Anna Khachiyan looks nothing like Ayn Rand, as a reminder after listening to the recent Red Scare. Earlier she said she looked like her, but she didn't mention it this time -- that's right!
ReplyDeleteLast time I pointed out their non-resemblance, I pointed to an Ashkenazi who she does take after somewhat -- Britpop frontbabe Justine Frischmann, from Elastica, if you compare similar ages.
This ties back into that split within the early Ashkenazi community, where half of them were more Armenian / Iranian and the other half were more Slavic. They eventually merged, genetically and culturally, to form a unimodal genetic group today, instead of bimodal in the 14th C.
Supposedly, there's still something of a split between them, with the Western ones who bear Germanic surnames being more advanced or civilized or well-behaved or something, and the Eastern ones who bear Slavic surnames being less of those things.
I've noticed a phenotypic sign of this -- the really Armenian and Iranian-looking Ashkenazis have Germanic surnames. Justine Frischmann, Susanna Hoffs, Karl Marx, Aaron Schwartz, Felix Biederman, and I forget what it is on Anna's maternal side but it's definitely Germanic, not Slavic.
The ones with Slavic names tend to look more European, maybe specifically Slavic, but not very Middle Eastern. Noam Chomsky, Michael Rappaport (a family that settled into the Slavic East), Mel Brooks (born Kaminsky), etc.
So, although these two sub-groups did eventually merge, it looks like the Armo/Iranian one was based further west in Germany, and the Slavic one was based further east in Slavic-speaking areas. Why did the Armo/Iranian one migrate even further westward than the Slavic one? IDK, but worth noting.
DeleteWhat about actress Fran Drescher?
Young Bernie Sanders and Elliott Gould (born Goldstein) also have that Armo/Iranian look, more than a generic Euro look.
ReplyDeleteAlso, CORRECTION: the Angevin dynasty in Southern Italy was *not* the same group of Angevins who got displaced by the expanding Capetian dynasty from Paris. They were in fact a cadet branch of the Capetians -- the Capetians who took over Anjou immediately after conquering it, gave rise to the "Capetian House of Anjou," who ruled over Southern Italy in the late Dark Ages.
So they had access to a whole lot of wealth, through their connections to the Parisian capital of the richest European nation of the 13th C.
But the Normans who ruled in Southern Italy were the original Normans, not a cadet branch of the Capetians who took over Normandy after conquering it. They were a separate line from William the Conqueror in Britain, but same ethnic and political background.
Speaking of Jews and Iranians, did you know that ironically for a time the Sassinid Persians set up a kind of Jewish puppet state in Jerusalem of the 610s during the "Last War of Antiquity":
ReplyDeletehttps://unamsanctamcatholicam.com/2022/11/07/jews-and-the-sassanid-capture-of-jerusalem/
Fran Drescher is fairly Caucasus-looking, although on her mother's side there's also some Romanian (who converted to Judaism), so she has an Eastern Mediterranean / Balkan look as well, which is similar to Anatolian-Caucasian-Iranian. And her surname is Germanic.
ReplyDeleteSeth Rogen is another fairly standard Euro-looking Ashkenazi, like Michael Rapaport, and his surname is Slavic (variant of Rogin, a Slavic place name from Belarus), and his mother's maiden name sounds way more Slavic than Germanic (Belogus).
Marvin Minsky has a Slavic surname (another place name from Belarus), although his mother's maiden name is Germanic (Reiser). He looks more Euro than Middle Eastern:
https://achievement.org/achiever/marvin-minsky-ph-d/
Russian oligarch Alexander Smolensky looks Prussian, not Middle Eastern, and has a Slavic place name for a surname:
https://www.jeremynichollarchive.com/image/I0000hAxTey_dxCw
Back to the Germanic-surnamed Jews, Anna always jokes about looking like Nathan Fielder (Germanic surname), or Marc Jacobs (ditto -- Hebrew origin for Jacob, but Germanic possessive suffix, not Jakobov or whatever).
Speaking of Hebrew-origin surnames, they seem to be Armo/Iranian. If there's a Germanic or Slavic suffix, that may clarify things, but bare Hebrew surnames seem Armo/Iranian.
Sam Seder looks Armo/Iranian. Abby Shapiro as well.
The star of Il Demonio and La Frusta e il Corpo (AKA The Whip and the Body), Daliah Lavi, was not Italian at all -- she's Ashkenazi, one of their early births within Israel. She looks Armo/Iranian, not Slavic. Her mother's maiden name is Germanic (Klammer), and her father's is a Hebrew root with a Germanic suffix (Lewinbuk / Levenbuch).
The same Hebrew root with a Slavic suffix -- Monica Lewinsky -- looks more Slavic than Middle Eastern, although there's always a bit of Armo/Iranian in any Ashkenazi.
Finally, exotic hottie Gal Gadot comes from two Germanic-surnamed parents. Mother's maiden name is Weiss, and father's surname is a recently Hebraized form of Greenstein. She has the Armo/Iranian look for sure, not Euro.
Natalie Portman looks like Ana Kasparian, and sure enough she has Germanic-surnamed parents (mother's maiden name is Stevens, father's is Hershlag -- Portman is a stage name).
Oh, and Anna K's mother's maiden name is Reynberg (though Anna's mother is Slavic on her maternal side, IIRC). Forgot to look that up before. Anna has Armo/Iranian roots through more pathways than just her Armo father! ^_^
Netanyahu's grandfather, Nathan Mileikowsky, looks standard Euro, not Middle Eastern, and has a Slavic surname and was born-and-raised in a Slavic area (present-day Belarus):
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Mileikowsky
Netanyahu's mother, however, has a maiden name Segal, variant of Siegel, which is Germanic. So Netanyahu has a bit of an Armo/Iranian look, though I think he mostly looks Euro like his Slavic-surnamed father and grandfather.
There was a total babe in my high school named Siegel, tan / vaguely exotic / Armo-ish, not the standard Euro look.
That's it, I'm convinced. Germanic surname = exotic Armo/Iranian, Slavic surname = standard Euro.
Are blond and redhead Jews mostly Slavic-surnamed? There aren't very many blond or redhead Ashkenazis, but the few who are seem to be Slavic-surnamed, or not Germanic-surnamed at any rate. Blond / red hair is way more common among Euros, especially Slavs, than Armos or Iranians. Light eye color is somewhat common among Iranians, so it's not as determinative -- also it's hard to tell from pictures, so I ignore that in favor of hair color.
ReplyDeleteMichael Rapaport, Alexander Smolensky, Dave Portnoy... not just facial features looking standard Euro, but hair color as well. Portnoy especially looks like a bog-standard Russian.
Bette Midler's roots are dark, not natural blonde or ginger. However, she doesn't look Armo/Iranian, despite both parents being Germanic-surnamed, so she's an example of the minority of Germanic-named Jews who look like a standard Euro rather than Mid-Eastern.
Barbra Streisand is not a natural blonde either. Unlike Midler, she does look Armo/Iranian, especially when young in the '60s -- straight out of "This was Tehran before the Islamic Revolution". Both parents Germanic-surnamed.
Amy Schumer is blonde, but she's half-WASP and clearly takes after that side. Her father looks pretty Armo/Iranian, as does her relative Chuck Schumer (both of whose parents are Germanic-surnamed Jews), when young.
https://shoespost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/42CB388100000578-4741738-image-m-38_1501319344783.jpg
https://www.schumer.senate.gov/imo/media/image/schumer_earlydays.jpg
Chuck Schumer's high school quiz bowl pic reminds me of Rod Serling, another Germanic-surnamed Jew who looks heavily Armo/Iranian.
https://www.schumer.senate.gov/imo/media/image/schumer_madison_hs.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rod-Serling-HS-yearbook.jpg
I knew someone in high school who was Ashkenazi, pale skin, orange-y dark blond hair, blue eyes, and his sister and parents looked the same way. Unfortunately they have a recent Israeli Hebraized surname, so I don't know if they were originally Germanic or Slavic surnamed -- but I'll bet dollars to donuts it was Slavic. None of them looked Armo/Iranian in their facial features either, more like standard Euro.
There's a good test -- survey a bunch of Ashkenazis, and ask them if they've ever been told, "Funny, you don't look Jewish". I'm sure the ones whose grandparents were Slavic-surnamed are more likely to say yes than those with Germanic-surnamed grandparents.
Woody Allen looks fairly standard Euro, and has reddish light brown hair. Not very Armo/Iranian. His grandparents are evenly split between Germanic and Slavic surnamed -- Konigsberg, Hoff, Copplin, and Cherry (I assume an Anglicization of Cherno or related Slavic word meaning "dark").
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Cherno, Mike Cernovich looks pretty standard Slavic (and like Dave Portnoy has dark blond hair), and has a Slavic surname. As fate has it, his wife is Persian, so their kids would look like the average Ashkenazi, an even mix of Slavic and Iranian.
Dov Charney has the same Slavic root in his surname, but his mother is Syrian Jewish -- which explains why he looks so Mid-Eastern.
Israel being on the opposite side of Iran and Russia goes to show that deep genetic similarities have little bearing on geopolitical and cultural conflicts. Races and ethnic groups are *not* extended genetic families, they're historically contingent socially constructed groups that rise and fall, that lose members or form new coalitions and integrate outsiders, especially if they're an expanding empire.
ReplyDeleteThe Ashkenazis control Israel, and their ancestors are evenly split between Iran and Russia (and their vicinity).
Greeks and Turks mostly overlap genetically, and they've been in conflict for awhile, too.
Afghans vs. Persians, ditto. Afghan conflict with Iran led to the rise of the Afghan Durrani Empire.
Not to mention civil wars among genetic twins. But even the wars between states cut against close genetic bonds -- if they speak different languages, worship different gods, wear different clothing, etc., they don't perceive their genetic affinity at all. They might as well come from different galaxies. Cultural forms, not genes or physical phenotypes, are what they use to determine who is Us and who is Them.
Japanese vs. Koreans is like the Turks vs. Greeks of East Asia. Very similar genetically, both spending a lot of time in the Korean Peninsula, related languages (agglutinative, vowel harmony -- at least ancestrally, somewhat today as well), borrowings from Chinese culture (Buddhism, Chinese writing), beef-eating East Asians rather than chicken-eating East Asians, living right next door to each other, and yet...
ReplyDeleteDoesn't matter if the Koreans are Northern communists or Southern woketards, they're both in conflict with the Japanese. But as the rump states of a collapsed quasi-empire, they can't cooperate with each other even in the face of a shared and hostile enemy who invaded, occupied, and annexed them in recent history.
Koreans are lucky that the age of nomads in Eurasia is over for now, otherwise a fragmented place like Korea would get easily overrun and annexed by Mongols or related people from the Steppe. That was effectively the role played by the expanding Japanese great power -- they're not on the Eurasian timeline, since they are not on the Eurasian landmass.
From the days of Japanese pirates (Wokou), up through annexation by the Meiji state, Glorious Nippon was an expanding nomadic confederation, in an era when such threats had long subsided on the Eurasian mainland. And they made quick work of the internally fragmenting Joseon Dynasty, as well as the collapsing Qing Empire in China.
Imagine lecturing either side of the Korean vs. Japanese conflict "no more brother wars" based on their shared genes and physical phenotypes. Sorry, dork, that's not how geopolitics works!
How daddy's girls help to preserve culture. Most cultural conservationists, curators of museums, and historians are male -- it's a task aimed at a society-wide scale, and that's far beyond the domestic scale that females are more comfy within. Males are more comfortable interacting with strangers within the same society, or being ambassadors between societies.
ReplyDeleteHowever, some women play a crucial role in cultural preservation -- by passing it onto their kids, by becoming a teacher or librarian who passes it onto many kids in their charge, or by becoming a performer who passes it onto a broad audience of spectators.
Such women are more likely to be daddy's girls, and imprinted on some key male-typical traits, in order to bond with their dad -- like a taste for cool culture, especially cool *older* culture that requires preservation, not just trendy new stuff.
Daddy's girls are more likely to pass this onto their kids, vs. a mama's girl not being into it in the first place, let alone feeling excited to pass it onto her kids, the schoolchildren under her watch, an audience of spectators, etc.
One reason why there are so many daddy's girls in Glorious Nippon compared to present-day America, is that their divorce rate is a lot lower, so their dads are actually present in the home. That's the first step toward becoming a daddy's girl who picks up on male-typical culture. She could become a mama's girl, but having dad present in the home a necessary step toward becoming a daddy's girl.
Back during our New Deal peak, everyone grew up with both parents present at home. My mom's visiting now, and every time she visits, there's some cool older piece of culture that she passes along -- this time, the TV show Ironside from the '60s and '70s, about a gruff police consultant and former head of detectives. Definitely a guy-oriented show. She hates chick flicks. And she's a daddy's girl -- which was made possible by her parents sticking together "till death do us part".
I've picked up all sorts of cool guy-oriented influences via my daddy's girl mom, over my life. I wouldn't have picked them up so easily if she were a mama's girl. And they would've been harder to pick up via my dad, since they divorced when I was young and I didn't see him much after elementary school.
Well, today we still have a high rate of kids growing up without dad, but it's compounded by the single moms not being daddy's girls like they used to be. My divorced mom was a daddy's girl, cuz her parents' generation didn't get divorced. But today's divorced moms are likely to have grown up in a broken home themselves, and therefore far less likely to have bonded with their dad over guy-oriented culture.
Every generation that this social disintegration continues, dads fail to pass on guy culture cuz they're not present in the home, and moms fail to as well cuz they weren't daddy's girls (due to growing up in a broken home themselves) and never picked up guy culture while growing up.
As for routes of transmission outside the home, fewer daddy's girls means there's far fewer women who are teachers or librarians who cherish guy culture and pass it on to their charges, and few female performers who are excited to enact or perform guy culture for a broad audience.
That leaves just a handful of guys as the transmitters, and even this demographic is shrinking over time cuz they're less likely to have had a dad in the home or a daddy's girl for a mom.
They can discover it on their own, or from peers, but that's far less reliable than transmission from an older curator of some kind. When there are older curators, the younger initiates can still rely on their peers to compare notes about what's cool, but they also have that crucial inter-generational route of transmission as well.
Speaking of Japanese daddy's girls preserving culture, I think Luna from Holo JP must be a daddy's girl. Or at least, a girl who likes her dad and mom equally.
ReplyDeleteShe's like the Koronator and the Pirate Goddess, in preserving the classics of Japanese culture -- she always has a few nostalgic songs in her karaoke setlist, she frequently plays retro video games, and even plays music on a Yamaha Electone (which is shown IRL, despite her being a vtuber). That's an electric organ, which has a nostalgic feeling since they were more popular in the Midcentury, before the rise of synthesizers and later computer-based "instruments".
All Japanese classrooms used to have an organ of some kind, perhaps a small electric one. I wonder if Luna was the one who played it in her classrooms growing up, and that's how she learned it?
In any case, there are several clips of her talking about her parents, and she is in fact close to her dad, sharing the fact that he watches the 3rd generation of Holo JP a lot, in addition to watching his own daughter's streams.
I'll consider that proof of her being a daddy's girl. ^_^
Was Moom raised Mormon? The remark about not being allowed to drink soda while growing up sounded very Mormon to me. Yeah, it's just one detail, but it's uncommon outside of Mormons these days.
ReplyDeleteOther Mormon traits:
Decent-sized extended family, who she hung out with a lot growing up. Family sizes are a lot smaller these days, and Zoomers like her are more likely to be only children compared to earlier gens. Mormons are much more fertile than non-Mormons.
Over-protective mother... although her father doesn't seem very Mormon to me, watching violent-themed TV shows with her nearby and not even registering it. Maybe only her mom is Mormon, and Moom was raised partly Mormon, but not fully due to Father Owl not being one or not practicing? IDK.
The family is Midwestern nice, which Mormons are on steroids.
Took her to dance lessons as a child. Mormons are big on dance and physical activities.
Western accent (most Mormons hailing from out West).
Given how much attention she gets from the other Holo honies, she's pretty, and Mormon girls are stereotyped as prettier than non-Mormon girls.
Sings well, like Mormons in general.
The most white-girl of Holo EN, and Mormons are normie white American on steroids.
The main thing being a large family that's very Midwestern nice and weren't allowed to drink soda growing up. That combo is very Mormon.
The only thing that's not is I seem to recall her mentioning a stepfather or someone her mother was dating in the past, and divorce is less common among Mormons. Perhaps they're part of that small minority of Mormons. But that is one strike against my hunch.
Another strike against my hunch is that Mormons tend to be overly trusting -- perhaps to the point of being naive and gullible. Utah is the capital of fraud, cuz they're easy targets for fraudsters.
ReplyDeleteWhereas Moom is the polar opposite -- suspicious, paranoid, into conspiracy theories.
Could be part of the small minority of Mormons like this, or maybe she's just not Mormon after all.
Large families these days tend to allow drinking soda, and parents who prohibit drinking soda tend to have small families / only children. The specific combo of large family, no soda, and Midwestern nice just has to be Mormon, at least partly.
On a totally unrelated note, if Canadians want to blend in as Americans more seamlessly, the American expression is to stand in "line" -- not "queue", which is a British word, one that Canadians have preserved as part of their Euro-LARP and refusal to fully merge with America.
ReplyDeleteI heard someone say that about a month ago, but didn't want to say anything at the time, in case it could've been easily traced back to the source I was responding to, and unmasked a supposed American as in fact a, dun dun dun, Canadian!
Sneaky leafs... ^_^
It's worth noting that the raison d'etre for Canada's existence as a separate nation was as The Remnant to which Loyalists fled after the American Revolution; it was the Taiwan of British North America:
Deletehttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheRemnant
Back to daddy's girls' preference for guy culture, while my mom's visiting so far we've watched Assault on Precinct 13 (the original) and Thief (1981). Daddy's girls love detective stories (what she watches the most on TV), although these were close enough -- cop / crime / heist.
ReplyDeleteThief belongs to that twilight of the '70s / New Deal moment, with stunning cinematography (lighting, color, and like Taxi Driver, Expressionist atmosphere in gritty locations -- not dull, drab verite gritty), a focus on some kind of underworld, and a somewhat compromised hero who tries to rescue some of its characters from the underworld. Neo-noir tone and look.
The other two major ones being Hardcore (1979) and Cruising (1980), which I saw and reviewed late last year or early this year. Thief came out right after them. Each was filmed the year before it was released.
And they hit all three major American cities -- L.A. in Hardcore, New York in Cruising, and Chicago in Thief. All by directors who were or became well-known (Schrader, Friedkin, and Mann), but were not pitched at the summer blockbuster market.
Only slight difference is Thief doesn't have a sexual underworld of any kind -- just heist. Otherwise it fits into this trilogy perfectly.
But this is the only one that's a true example of "the early '80s were still part of the '70s" since it was filmed in '80, not '78 or '79 like the other two, which make them wholly or partly '70s movies.
Not much else to add about Thief, having already written about the other two. But it does make for a perfect end to a trilogy.
Still thinking about Season Hubley as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in Hardcore... her role alone makes it rewatchable.
ReplyDeleteMy reviews of Hardcore and Cruising:
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/11/thoughts-on-hardcore-1979-by-schrader.html
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/10/seven-1995-as-origin-of-puritanical.html?showComment=1698264196831#c6785572610267383562
The comments on Cruising are in the context of other reviews on the theme of violence and disgust, getting back to sublime aesthetics -- which are about violence, not disgust.
Disgust as a replacement for violence is a Puritanical thing, rearing its literally ugly head in torture porn (where the violence is incidental to the disgust), which was the topic of the main post in which the Cruising review appears in the comments.
Nothing disgusting in Thief, BTW, since there's no serial killer / maniac, and no sexuallly deviant underworld. Maybe one aspect in which it's not so much like the '70s.
Who in JP Holohive is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?
ReplyDeleteThe MPDG of Holo JP is the Legendary Idol Gamer Maid, Minato Aqua!
ReplyDeleteYes, we still think about her, she is not gone. I was looking through her YouTube archive to see what vods I can watch.
She played Ocarina of Time early on, although many of her retro streams have been privated or deleted due to copyright claims. I really want to watch her play Super Ghouls N' Ghosts for Halloween! ^_^
Maybe someone has an archive of it out there somewhere.
We will never forget you, Akutan...
Ceci from Holo EN is playing Majora's Mask, BTW! Another classic, which I always liked more than Ocarina of Time. The time mechanic is a bit annoying, but overall it's so much better. More varied environments, all the different masks, the darker tone (it's from the vulnerable phase of the 15-year excitement cycle, 2000, akin to the 1985-'89 vulnerable phase, when all those dark children's movies came out).
ReplyDeleteBeing Germanic has nothing to do with Midwestern niceness. There are plenty of Germanic people back East, and they're not Midwestern nice. And there are plenty of non-Germanic people out West, who are still very Midwestern nice. It's historically contingent geography, not genes or long-term cultural inheritance.
ReplyDeleteNamely, the cult of politeness arises on the meta-ethnic frontier, forcing people to behave friendly toward each other, since they need to band together to fend off / take over their nemesis.
Away from the frontier, no such need for politeness -- they're frank, brusque, no BS, crotchety, antagonistic if anything.
I reviewed this at length last year, probably in the comments to the post on waterfalls and American sense of place.
Italians have a rhyming phrase for this as well -- "Piemontesi, falsi e cortesi". Piedmontese, fake but courteous.
The modern Italian state was founded by an expanding cohesive group from Turin, in the far NW, along the meta-ethnic frontier with the expanding French Empire. They united Italy, and they have a cult of politeness that lets them cooperate on a large scale.
In the South, they're far from that frontier with the French Empire, they were not the leaders of unification, and they are famous for being straight-talking, no BS kind of people.
This is not genetically encoded, since Italian-Americans are almost all from Southern Italy -- and yet only the Italian-Americans back East are straight-talk / no-BS types, whereas Italian-Americans from the Midwest, Mountains, and West Coast are more polite and laid-back, not high-strung and brusque like their genetic twins back East.
The American meta-ethnic frontier is out West, against the Indians and later the Mexicans.
Beginning of comments about politeness and the meta-ethnic frontier, going into more detail than I just did:
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/07/waterfalls-as-uniquely-american-feature.html?showComment=1691315157731#c3085541285373437073
Relevant to Lebanon's continued bitchslapping of Israel out of its territory -- this time, Israel can't even secure a foothold for their attempted invasion. Some earlier comments on the Northern vs. Southern divide in Lebanon, based on proximity to the meta-ethnic frontier with their nemesis, Israel:
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2024/01/wide-ranging-thread-on-shoot-em-up.html?showComment=1707260583121#c1636230075666244536
Southern Lebanese already have more of a cult of politeness and stoicism, and that will become more hardened into their character over time. They're on the meta-ethnic frontier. So they have to cooperate for shared defense / annexing Israel, and that means they need to be very polite around each other.
Northern Lebanese are famous for being straight-talk, no-BS, high-strung, curse like a sailor, constantly feuding with their next-door neighbors. Like the TV comedic character Sayed from Zgharta.
They're not the ones uniting Lebanon -- they lost the Civil War. Only this time, Israel is beginning to massacre Christians and blow up churches, in addition to massacring Muslims and blowing up mosques, rather than trying to play the Christians against the Muslims like in the '80s.
By targeting all of Lebanon, Israel is forcing all sects of Lebanese to band together, meaning accepting Hezbollah / Southern Shia leadership, for their shared collective survival.
Would-be traitors in the Christian North cannot partner with Israel this time around -- cuz Israel is indiscriminately bombing them, too. Israel is bombing them as part of their final "suicide by cop" / school shooter program. They know they're going out, and they want to take as many out with them, whether they were former allies or foes.
Maronites in the diaspora may not be aware of this, since they haven't lived there in generations. But Maronites who never left their homeland are becoming quickly aware of Israel's suicidal swan-song operations going forward -- not realpolitik trying to play the factions within Lebanon off against each other.
Now, it's either follow the lead of Hezbollah, or go extinct through Israel's school shooter suicidal rage.
BTW, WaPo (the Langley Post) just announced Dems will steal the election again. Pennsylvania's board of elections already said a month or so ago that they will steal their state's election, but WaPo is now adding Wisconsin to those telegraphing their steal.
ReplyDeleteUtter mouth-breathing morons on the right / Trumpian independents have never accepted the cold hard truth -- that Dems are just going to steal it again. They keep writing their impotent letters to Santa Claus, and posting cringe-y fanfic about what's gonna happen "When we win".
Cool story, dork -- how'd that work out in 2020? Republicans, including Trump threw you under the bus. Show no loyalty to those who have already betrayed you in the recent past, like the GOP regarding stolen presidential elections.
That's not to say they have no reason to vote -- the more real votes Trump gets, the farther the stealers have to go in order to complete the steal, making their steal all the more glaringly obvious to everyone, and thereby delegitimizing their usurper administration even more when it takes office. Just as with the Biden admin -- nobody obeyed any federal order that they weren't already on board with, and faced zero consequences. Masks, vax, border patrol, etc.
But that is the only honest way to talk about the upcoming election, if you're pro-Trump. None of this laughable nonsense about "When we win" -- the national state is already disintegrating, and you're talking about what you're going to do when you occupy a national-level office? You won't be doing anything, let alone forcing anything on your enemies -- any more than the Biden admin forced Trump voters into doing things they did not want.
But all of these pathetic lame LARP-ers on social media are greedy status-strivers infected and corrupted by overweening ambition -- so they have to imagine the ultimate prize, control over a national and even global imperial office! That's high status. Competing over a state's governor mansion, well, that's relatively small potatoes.
Only the latter has real authority and legitimacy left at this point. But greedy hucksters cannot accept reality, so they'll keep posting cringe-y fanfic about "When we win" national / imperial office.
Write better fanfic! At least be entertaining -- entertainment requires suspension of disbelief, plausibility. A powerful national government in the collapsing American Empire fails the plausibility test, the audience cannot suspend disbelief, so they just dismiss your poorly written fanfic.
Write something about the California rump state vs. the Mid-Atlantic rump state, or Texas vs. California, or Florida vs. Massachusetts... something believable at this point!
Would you say the German meta-ethnic frontier would be in the South around the Alps? It's on the meta-ethnic frontier with the historical Italic region. I have read that South Germans tend to be friendlier and more outgoing than North Germans. Feli from Germany (from Bavaria) seems to be a good example of this:
ReplyDeletehttps://m.youtube.com/@FelifromGermany/videos
I believe you said the Wessex-Cornwall boundary is a meta-ethnic frontier for England. It was there was the last holdout against the Vikings would form the foundations of a united England.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Halloween aesthetics, have you tried the new 'UFO 50' game on Steam, where various designers made a bunch of small tribute games to early NES-era classics? The 80s palettes, environments, and design sensibilities from America and Japan in the 80s are all there depending on the game, from Edenic landscapes to pastel color palettes, and a great many classic Monster-Party-type horror/noir sensibilities in their takes on the Macventure-type games.
ReplyDeleteThe German meta-ethnic frontier was in Prussia -- Prussians expanded and united Germany. Their meta-ethnic nemesis was the Poles and their Lithuanian allies in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who had encircled them.
ReplyDeleteThey allied early on with another group of eastern Germans -- the Hohenzollern house from Brandenburg, which is why Berlin is the capital of Germany, and the cultural hotbed of German culture -- not Bavaria or Westphalia.
Austria's meta-ethnic frontier was in the east, against the encroaching Ottoman Empire. That's why Austrian ethnogenesis is centered in Vienna (still its capital), and other eastern cities like Prague and Budapest -- not Bavaria, like Salzburg where the no-filter, theatrical kinds of Austrians live, like Kiwawa.
Bavaria is like Southern Italy or back East in America -- warm people, in the sense of no cult of politeness or stiff upper lip (that's Southern English only, not the Norf), boisterous, rambunctious, no-filter, go crazy, theatrical, dancing, straight-talking, colorful language-speaking, comic / comedic improv, etc.
Speaking of the theatrical Norf, the vtuber Fallenshadow is from Liverpool, and she is definitely on the no-filter / tell it like it is / theatrical / performative side, not a mellow stiff upper lip type (while perhaps seething underneath) like they are in the South, along the meta-ethnic frontier (originally against the Vikings, then later against the French).
ReplyDeleteTrue to the general pattern, far from the meta-ethnic frontier, the Norf of England is fractured at all scales -- the Norf hates the South, but within the Norf, the NW and the NE hate each other, and within the NW, the Mancunians and the Scousers hate each other, and this neighborhood within Manchester hates that neighborhood within Manchester.
Similar to America, where the East hates the West, but within the East, the NE and SE hate each other, and within the NE, Bostonians and New Yorkers hate each other, and even within NYC, Manhattan hates Brooklyn, etc.
In the South of England, along the meta-ethnic frontier, the SW and SE do not hate each other, despite their regional differences. And within the SE, London and Oxford and Essex and Kent do not hate each other, nor do all the various neighborhoods within London. They had to unify in order to fend off the Vikings, and later the French, and there are still traces of that earlier split in cohesion between the South and the Norf -- albeit with plummeting levels of cohesion in the South, as the British Empire collapsed in the early 20th C.
Are Germanic-surnamed Jews more likely to be hippies, Romantics, and related types? It struck me that Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, is Germanic-surnamed Jewish. Although looking into her family roots, there's a Wool surname on her mother's side -- seems to be Estonian, maybe Jewish though not necessarily. So she may be a mix of Germanic and Slavic-surnamed.
ReplyDeleteThe Siegel babe I mentioned from my high school, I just looked her up to see what she's up to, and without doxxing her, I'll just say she found a career in nature conservation. A professional tree-hugger! ^_^ One of the few types of good Democrats, especially in her case as the area was under threat of development (and these days that only leads to crappy gray box apartments for yuppie transplants and/or foreign slaves).
I just googled "jewish hippies," and the leader of the Jewish version of "Jesus freaks" (AKA Christian hippies from the '60s), was "the singing rabbi" Shlomo Carlebach, who not only has a Germanic surname, he was born in Berlin. And he does look Armo/Iranian, not standard Euro.
Karl Marx is Germanic surnamed and born / raised in Germany -- and his early work was more in the Romantic movement of its time, like critiques of the alienation of labor under mechanization and industrialization. He also looks Armo/Iranian, not Euro.
Susanna Hoffs from the Bangles is very '60s hippie / psychedelic / Paisley Underground, and partnered with Matthew Sweet to release several cover albums of '60s, '70s, and '80s classics (mainly in the hippie-aligned genres).
Whereas the Slavic-surnamed Jews seem to be the more marketeering, sacrilegious, everything is up for sale type, a la Mel Brooks' line as Yogurt in Spaceballs about "Moichendising! Moichendising! Moichendising!" Peddlers, hawkers of wares, whatever you want can be bought for a price, clear out a sacred forest in order to put up tenement slums for rent-seeking. Anti-Romantic, and Market Liberal instead.
I don't think this traces to their earlier Armo/Iranian roots -- more like it reflects the fact that Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis were more integrated into their adoptive societies, so when their host country underwent Romanticism, they did so as well.
When their hosts underwent Romantic nationalism, so did these assimilated Jews, just for their own real or imagined ethnos -- like Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism, who has a Germanic surname and whose family was German-speaking (while living in Budapest). He looks Armo/Iranian, not Euro. His family's original surname was Loebl, which has a Hebrew root but a Germanic suffix (diminuitive "-l").
And when American society gave birth to hippies, back to nature, and religious hippie-ism, the Germanic-surnamed Jews in America took that up as well. Whereas the Slavic-surnamed ones -- or non-Germanic-named ones, at any rate -- were more content to insulate themselves in a literal or remnant Ellis Island cultural enclave, unmoved by cultural currents in the American mainstream like hippies, Jesus freaks, tree-huggers, and NIMBYs.
I ignore the kibbutz phenomenon in Israel cuz it's not clear how much it was a hippie / Romantic / back to nature thing, and how much was simply providing material subsistence through cultivated agriculture for the good of the nation. Probably various strains within it. And I can't find too many key names to judge from.
(And yes I know Estonian is not Slavic, nor even Indo-Euro, but there are Slavic speakers there, and a strange surnamed like Wool or Vool could come from a Slavic root like Wolinski in Polish.)
ReplyDeleteMuch like Germanic-surnamed Jewish hippie Bernie Sanders, Ethan Allen founder Theodore Baumritter is Germanic-surnamed, and fled the urban Ellis Island enclave shithole of Noo Yawk, for a pastoral back-to-nature setting in rural Vermont. More colonial and trad than hippie, but still with a nostalgic and romantic view toward the past.
ReplyDeleteHe originally dabbled in Midcentury Modern, which was still assimilated into the American mainstream of its time, then went with American colonial revival in Vermont, also assimilated but in a more back-to-nature way.
Other Jewish hippie refugees in Vermont are Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield from Ben & Jerry's ice cream. One has a German surname, the other a bare Hebrew one. Neither wiki article says who their parents are / where they were from, so I leave that to someone else to track down.
Cohen looks a bit more Armo/Iranian than Greenfield does, BTW:
https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-ben-cohen-jerry-greenfield-founders-of-ben-and-jerrys-2020-6
The two biggest Romantic composers of Ashkenazi background were Germanic, not Slavic, Jews -- Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler. Looking through other Jewish composers from Europe, they almost all seem to be Germanic rather than Slavic, despite a high level of musical output from Slavs at the same time -- again pointing to the lack of assimilation into their host societies among Slavic-surnamed Jews vs. Germanic-surnamed Jews.
ReplyDeleteAlso worth noting that Noam Chomsky is an exception, in the Romantic / anti-Market Liberal vein, treasuring German and Austrian imperial culture, but with two Slavic-surnamed parents (Chomsky and Simonofsky).
Leading shill for YIMBY, open borders, market liberalism, and hating on Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, Matt Yglesias, may have one grandparent with an Iberian Christian surname, but the other is Jewish with a Slavic, not Germanic, surname (Bassine), and his Jewish mother has a Slavic surname too (Joskow). Looks like a standard Euro, not totally Slavic due to the Iberian side, but not Armo/Iranian like the Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm convinced about mistrusting Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis, who never left their enclave, did not assimilate into the American mainstream, and therefore feel nothing wrong about melting down its sacrosanct material and cultural inheritance, and selling it off to the highest bidder in the name of higher profit margins.
Obviously the situation is different for people in the Levant, where leading Zionist invaders bore Germanic surnames. But here in America, it's pretty safe to say -- Slavic-surnamed Jews bad, Germanic-surnamed Jews good.
Related, most of the Jewish Russian oligarchs have Slavic surnames, and they're the ones who stole everything in the collapsing Russian Empire during the 1990s and sold it off to the highest bidder. Skimming the wiki article on Russian oligarchs, I only caught two big ones with Germanic surnames -- Rotenberg and Fridman. Probably some others in there, but there are many times more with Slavic surnames, like Abramovich, Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Abramov, Prigozhin, etc.
ReplyDeleteNot the Marxist kind of Russian imperial Jew like Trotsky, who was in fact born with a Germanic surname (Bronstein), and not the tree-hugging conservationist Romantic hippie kinds of Jews, who overwhelmingly bear Germanic surnames, and would not have melted down the Russian economy and sold it for scrap, in the nation's most vulnerable years.
Ukrainian arch-sell-out Zelensky is also a Slavic not Germanic surnamed Jew. He never assimilated, and is eager to sell out his people to the American Empire -- and get annexed by Russia anyway. Pathetic.