Jonah Goldberg: NEA Chair Kowtows to His Caesar

By demonstrating with brazenly self-abasing ignorance that he is wholly Obama’s man, Landesman is making it clear that the NEA is completely committed to Obamaism.

NEA Chair Rocco Landesman

Jonah Goldberg in today’s National Review:

“Last week, Landesman gave the keynote address to the 2009 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference. In fairness, Landesman did not reaffirm the White House and NEA’s obvious initial intent to turn the allegedly independent government agency into an adjunct of Obama’s “Organizing for America” operation. He was more subtle than that.

“Instead, Landesman embraced a timeless tactic of power politics. He debased himself with incandescently vulgar obsequiousness to his supreme leader. “There is a new president and a new NEA,” he proclaimed. “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.” (more…)

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Tags: Caesar, Jonah Goldberg, National review, nea, Obama
Posted Oct 30th 2009 at 9:53 am in Art, Politics | 25559848 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bighollywood/2009/10/30/jonah-goldberg-nea-chair-kowtows-to-his-caesar/Jonah+Goldberg%3A+NEA+Chair+Kowtows+to+His+Caesar2009-10-30+16%3A53%3A23Big+Hollywood

A Conservative Journey Through Literary America – Part 5: A Conversation With John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire, columnist, essayist, critic, raconteur, has an opinion.  On everything, it seems.  Thankfully, he is not shy about sharing them, and was kind enough to speak with me by phone one afternoon.

In addition to wearing the above listed hats, Derbyshire has also written a strange and wonderful little novel called Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, a book described in the New York Times as, “a bouncy, Capraesque tale of midlife crisis, romantic confusion and spiritual regeneration.”  (The Times review was so favorable that it puts the conceit that conservative authors can’t get a fair shake from the liberal media in a good bit of jeopardy).

I asked Derbyshire about Coolidge, the writing of which he recounts with both fondness and exasperation, with decided emphasis on the former.  He claims that writing fiction puts one in a state of “aesthetic bliss” (to paraphrase Nabachov), the prime virtue of which is an expansion of perspective that “…separates you from the everyday world.”  He tells me that writing a good novel gives one a pleasure many times that of reading a good novel, which, if true, must be a high state of bliss indeed. (more…)

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Tags: ann coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Calvin Coolidge, David Mamet. John Derbyshire, Dean Koontz
Posted May 30th 2009 at 7:04 am in Entertainment, Featured Story, Politics | 1439822 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mpatterson/2009/05/30/a-conservative-journey-through-literary-america-part-5-a-conversation-with-john-derbyshire/A+Conservative+Journey+Through+Literary+America+-+Part+5%3A++A+Conversation+With+John+Derbyshire2009-05-30+14%3A04%3A55Matt+Patterson

The Lives of Other Inconvenient Truths

It comes as no surprise that the liberal blogosphere did a collective spit-take over the National Review’s recent list of the top 25 conservative films of the past 25 years (full disclosure: the Buckleyites invited me to comment on one selection).

One lefty blogger wrote, “In the end, right-wingers cannot excape [sic] from the fundamental fact that great art challenges assumptions and received wisdom and calls on us to look at the world with new eyes — and therefore is inherently progressive.”

If true, then the left’s claim on the arts is about to weaken. Because the “assumptions” and “received wisdom” of the Establishment these days are predominantly progressive. After all, who is the Establishment now? No matter your ideology, surely you must agree that there’s nothing more tired and cliche than a “rebellious” artist infusing his work with the same old leftist bromides. (more…)

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Tags: Daily Kos, Liberal Fascism, National review, National Review 25 Best Conservative Movies of the last
Posted Feb 20th 2009 at 5:30 pm in Entertainment, Media Criticism | 56326126 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/aleigh/2009/02/20/the-lives-of-other-inconvenient-truths/The+Lives+of+Other+Inconvenient+Truths2009-02-21+01%3A30%3A39Andrew+Leigh