Music, Socio-Sexual Studies

Mangina Melodies: “El Paso” by Marty Robbins

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I’ve never liked country music, but there’s an old forgotten genre that most people mistake for country, and I like listening to it now and then. It’s mostly old cowboy ballads, from artists like the Sons of the Pioneers, Gene Autry, Tex Ritter…and the western swing of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. If I’m writing a western, sometimes these songs help me keep the right mindset.

I call it “western music,” figuring maybe it’s what mixed in with the mama-died-on-Christmas stuff to form “country & western.” However you classify it, I liked it enough to compile a CD, which one family member liked so much, I’ve recently fulfilled a request for another.

You can listen to a song for years, and even sing along with it, without really considering the lyrics. At least I have. Such is the case with “El Paso” by Marty Robbins, a cowboy ballad with beautiful Tex-Mex guitar accompaniment. Only on my last listen did I really think about the story the song tells.

Here’s the gist of it as crooned by Robbins:

A cowboy has a raging case of one-itus for a Mexican bar girl who sounds like an eight or nine. He’s convinced she’s a special snowflake and he’s partially right: she is flaky. Obviously she’s still riding the carousel because one night he catches her all up on the juevos of a “wild young cowboy.”

Our hero confronts the pick up artist in a jealous rage, and the cowboy goes for his gun. But the narrator is quick on the draw and shoots him dead. Now, knowing he’ll be hanged for murder, he makes a run for it, and holes up in the badlands of New Mexico.

But the boy’s got it bad. By “it” I mean codependent disorder or something, ’cause he just can’t bear being separated from Felina any longer (probably haunted by visions of her on the carousel) and rides back for El Paso.

He knows he’s a wanted man, so this decision was stupid enough. But maybe he thinks they might not be looking for him to return. That notion is put to rest when he’s intercepted by a posse shouting and shooting…and yet he keeps riding for the saloon! Clearly he’s delusional or just plumb loco.

One of the posse scores a hit, but he’s just gotta make it to Rose’s Cantina, so he plunges onward into the hail of lead.

Why, you idiot?

Sure enough, somebody in the posse scores a center-mass hit. The bullet goes deep in his chest. The dumbass dies right there outside Rose’s cantina…but at least he gets a kiss goodbye on the cheek from the slut Felina as his soul floats away to the last round-up.

This song was a tremendous hit back in the day, from what I’ve been told.  Yech. The Ballad of a Blue Pill Beta is what this should be called.

By 1959 when this song debuted, the cowboy was the icon of American masculinity. Young boys used to play “cowboys & Indians.” Back then about half the programming on TV was made up of westerns. Even inner city black kids with no interest in history and no appreciation for the great outdoors dreamed of playing football for the team with a cowboy as its mascot.

Was this song instrumental in toppling the icon? Did Marty Robbins’ artsy-fartsy ballad push the he-man symbol of rugged individualism off the alpha pinnacle of devil-may-care masculinity and send him tumbling down (with the tumbleweeds) the slippery slope of feminized pop culture, to finally land, decades later, at the foot of Brokeback Mountain?

The hero of this ballad should have nexted Felina and gamed a quality senorita from a nearby hacienda to cook him frijoles and squeeze out little vaqueros while he built his spread into a cattle empire.

Now there’s a ballad worthy of the music, and lyrics worth singing.

Fantasy, Reviews

Pre-Flood Fiction

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You ever have a really  cool idea, but are too busy with other stuff to make it a reality before somebody else comes along and does it? Then you grumble under your breath when other people rave about what a cool idea it was.

It’s happened to me too many times over the years. One of the latest is this one: Brian Godawa’s fantasy series set on antedeluvian Earth.


Intending to read the whole series, I started with this one in order to follow it chronologically. Maybe that was a mistake.

Chronicles of the Nephilim was a good idea and pre-flood Earth is a great setting for a fantasy tale. Also, the author had to have done some homework in Enoch, the Bible, possibly Jasher and some other sources. All props to him for that.

I think I would have enjoyed a summary of his research more than this novel.

What grates on me are major selling points for the average feminista reader. In particular the “cute” romance elements didn’t sit well with me at all–especially the smarmy syrupy pet name exchanges . And I get a little more irritated every time I run into the obligatory amazon superninja character.

In the author’s defense, my patience had been sorely taxed before I ever heard of him, so it only takes a straw or two to break my camel’s back.

My camel’s name is Suspension of Disbelief.

The author did build a quest tale, of sorts, around the historic sketch left us via Genesis and Enoch 1, with some plot twists and such. I can’t say I liked any of the characters enough to become absorbed, or even smooth over the parts that ruffled my feathers. I set the book down for a couple months before forcing myself to finish it. Having heard raves about the Noah book, I’m almost tempted to give him another chance, but it’s certainly not a priority.

Non-Fiction/Documentary, Socio-Sexual Studies

Battle of the Sexes: One Way Women are Beating Men

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With a culture and governmental structure biased against men and favoring women, you’d think western men would do everything possible to minimize our disadvantages. Strangely, there’s at least one way even a lot of red pill men (or at least red pill candidates) are working against themselves.

There seems to be plenty of self-help info out in the manosphere, ranging from physical fitness to psychological coaching and even wardrobe advice–all aimed at fostering self-improvement.

What I’m about to share comes from statistics, which means I’ll be speaking in generalities. If you’re an exception, then that’s great.

The disadvantage has been there for quite a while, but it’s become much worse over the last 20-25 years.

To put it simply: men watch TV instead of reading.

Forget about the socio-sexual hierarchy for a moment; I’m going to introduce a whole different use for prefixes like “alpha” and “beta.” These describe two different states your brain can be in. In the beta mode, your mind is active–you generate ideas; you analyze critically; you solve problems; your imagination exercises. The theta mode takes over your brain during REM sleep or, with some people, meditation, and only your subconscious is active. During the delta phase your brain rests, and your body heals.

Then there is the alpha phase, in which your mind is most receptive to outside influence, “optimal for programming” according to scientists. In other words: at your most vulnerable to suggestion. It is literally a trance state–a necessary segue into hypnosis which hypnotherapists are trained to induce. And audio-visual stimulus can get most people there in a matter of seconds.

I used the phrase “audio-visual stimulus” to include movies, videos, and anything you can watch on television. Hours of Facebook, Twitter and other types of internet surfing can get you there, too, but not as quickly.

Reading, however, puts your brain in the beta mode. Your mind stays sharp; critical reasoning is often strengthened; imagination gets exercise.

While America is dumbed-down to greater and greater degrees across all demographics, women are still much more likely to read voluntarily, after high school, than men. This has a lot to do with the indocrination industry educational component of our feminized culture. Public schools are designed to teach girls, and boys don’t learn the same ways. The less a boy gets out of the female-biased teaching methods, the worse a student he is and the more the system tries to force him to learn like a girl. Reading seems like just another form of torture to him and by the time he graduates, he’ll avoid it if at all possible.

If you want to hide something from the average public-educated male, put it in a book.

Have you noticed how many white nights and manginas there are in the male population? Not just among the couch potatoes and geeks, but even among alpha dogs at the top of their chosen fields in business, sports or the military, etc. And political persuasion makes little difference! There seem to be just as many feminista males on the right as the left.

Joe Blow was a poor student, so public schools may not have been able to feminize him to the degree they wanted to. But he came home every day and sat in front of the idiot box, and with his guard down in the Entertain Me mode (alpha/trance) the thought cops went to work on him.

Joe Blow may have had differing levels of resistance to different types of conditioning, which is why there are plenty of white knight manginas who lean “conservative” (whatever that means) and notice catch the media in some of its deception. But it’s going to be nearly impossible to make him swallow the red pill when it comes to the female of the species. You can’t compete with three-to-five hours a day of conditioning during a trance state (plus what his mother likely taught him). That conditioning hasn’t been challenged in his entire life.

Was it hard for you to get over your one-itus or other cultural programming? Is some of it still difficult? Like uprooting a tree that’s been carefully nurtured over the course of years or decades?

Is your critical reasoning not as sharp as you wish it were? Does problem solving not come as easily as you think it should? Do you have a lack of imagination impairing you from advancing at your job?

The way you’ve been choosing to inform and entertain yourself could have a lot to do with it.

 

Historical, Military

Badasses of Dude-Lit: Number One

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We have reached Number One in my Top Five Literary Badass List. The Top FIve were chosen partly out of consideration for where the hero stands in the  socio-sexual hierarchy; partly for how much fun it is to read them.

I used to apply the term “guilty pleasure” to men’s fiction such as what I’m referring to. But guilt (in this context) is for manginas and others overly concerned about what people think.

1. The Sergeant

The Top Dude-LIt Badass is Master Sergeant Clarence Mahoney–the worst nightmare of German soldiers (and plenty of American lower enlisted as well).

Through nine novels, countless firefights, bayonet duels, and plenty of cheap, meaningless fornication, the picture we have of Mahoney is crystal-clear: he’s an alpha male to his very core, who rose up through the ranks in a very competitive (dog-eat-dog is more accurate) environment purely by merit. He wants to be in charge and usually is. The betas in his platoon (especially sidekick Corporal Cranepool) are fanatically loyal to him/want to be him.


Ladies and other civilized people tend to think of him as a barbaric brute, yet he’s got enough game to make notches out of those same ladies anyway. And pretty much any other broad who conveniently becomes available on his blood-splattered path through wartime Europe.

Amidst all the mayhem in the series, you also get some nice slices of historic facts. Author Len Levinson did his research, resulting in much more historical accuracy than you might expect from war pulp.

 

Action, Adventure, Military

Badasses of Dude-Lit: Number Two

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2. Breeder

This is the only stand-alone novel in the Top Five. And thankfully it is now also available as an E-Book.

You can read my review of Breeder on the old blog, but I’ll summarize in manosphere terms here.

Jeff Clendenning is the ultimate alpha-dog…and not by chance. He was bred to be. Not only is he a perfect physical specimen and a savant for combat, but also has bulletproof game that makes him irresistible to women.

Any women.

In fact, he was born with an absolutely unique superpower: an innate ability to visually clock a woman’s menstrual cycle. Wouldn’t we all like to have that one? We could avoid a whole lot of aggravation, for one thing. But alas, he uses this menstro-vision for a purpose not all of us would: impregnating every single woman he meets, who is capable of reproduction.

He can’t help it. It’s an instinct that was bred (or designed) into his DNA.

See, Jeff is unknowingly part of a clandestine Russian operation. He’s been raised in a “Potempkin Village” believing he’s really an American in the USA, attending college ROTC so he can go fight the Geebees (Patriot militias, basically). But after graduation he gets away from his handlers and finds himself in the actual USA…and that’s where the fun really begins.


Things are a lot different in the bona fide USA. For one example, the Breeder’s “extremely rapid seductions” are considered rape. And that’s just one way this speculative novel written in the 1970s, published in 1988, can be considered prophetic of our present and near-future cultural condition.

Breeder is an action-adventure with a military flavor and some dystopian (or prophetic) elements, but it could be fun for red pill readers simply because of what it implies about hypergamy and the aplha fux/beta bux phenomenon.

Frankly, it’s a lot of fun with or without that.

Action, Adventure, Historical

Badasses of Dude-Lit: Number Three

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3. The Renegade

Possibly inspired by 19th Century mercenary William Walker, the Renegade AKA Captain Gringo AKA Richard (Dick) Walker, raises hell in Latin America over the course of 36 novels. Writing as “Ramsay Thorne,” prolific pulp prose-peddler Lou Cameron undoubtedly had loads of fun (and passed it on to us) writing a character used to “winning in battles and bedrooms!”

I’m delighted to discover that these are being released as E-books now, under Cameron’s own name. I only bought a few of the paperbacks while they were in print (wasn’t on a historical kick at the time), but now I should be able to read the whole series.

Captain Gringo is a definite alpha dog. In a setting rife with treachery, teeming with tyrants, revolutionaries, and German agents, the only man of integrity to be found is the lecherous Frenchman Gaston, his loyal sidekick. The Renegade seduces more women in each novel than some men will in their entire life (women who shout lines like “Oh Deek, my great bull!” during the throes of passion), and Gaston feeds on his scraps without complaint.


In his tactics and instincts, Captain Gringo is seemingly flawless as written. But there’s more than enough wild cards thrown at him to keep the pages turning…and the rounds feeding through his Maxim machinegun.

Action, Adventure, TEOTWAWKI

Badasses of Dude-Lit: Number Four

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The countdown continues…

4. The Last Ranger

Here’s another hero that’s probably a beta male, but he ranks this high mostly because I enjoy the post-apocalyptic genre.

Whoever wrote under the name “Craig Sargent” was probably a peacenik from the Vietnam era, because that’s how Martin Stone comes off–despite being raised and trained by a Special Forces officer. The series was published toward the end of the Cold War and left-leaning nuclear disarmament sentiments permeate.

Yet despite the political proclivities and the beta nature of Martin Stone, he’s forced to act decisively and heroically due to the environment and the characters who inhabit it. He also gets his wick dipped on a regular basis, because there’s an average of one damsel-in-distress in every novel.

Major Clayton Stone wasn’t a Ranger, and his son was never even a soldier, so I’m not sure how the series title was justified.

I own all 10 paperbacks in the series. The plotting really goes downhill toward the end, like the author(s?) lost interest and were just typing words for a paycheck. But it’s a lot of fun prior to that. If I have to face a post-nuke future, I’d want to start from a secret mountain bunker full of automatic weapons, with a Harley and a loyal fighting dog to scout with.


I just found out these books are being released for the Kindle. And with the original covers! It looks like they started with the series finale and are working their way back to the first one for some reason. It’s great news for readers in any case.

Action, Adventure, Fantasy

Top Five Count Down: Badasses of Dude-Lit

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What is “dude-lit” you ask? It’s a term I coined even before becoming the Two-Fisted Blogger. It’s been hijacked somewhat by homoerotic hacks and delta or gamma males getting in touch with their feelings, writing (allegedly) masculine counterparts to the womyn’s fiction on the bookshelf.

That is not dude-lit. I thought of the term first, so I’m gonna continue using it to describe fiction written for red-blooded heterosexual men. I guess you could call it red pill in the post-Matrix period.

It’s not the highbrow stuff you see touted on some manosphere blogs, though.  Dude-lit isn’t for the wine-sipping, chess-playing side of your personality. It’s for the beer-slamming, ball-playing , trash-talking side.

So I thought I’d highlight some of the he-men of literature. I ranked them partly by their place in the socio-sexual hierarchy, and partly by how fun it is to read them.

Here’s the start of my short list of dude-lit heroes from over the years–the kind who are in short supply anymore in the pop culture of our feminized society:

5. Conan

Yup–a classic is in the Top Five. I know there’ve been Conan stories written since the death of his creator, but I’m including only the character as written by the delightfully un-PC Robert E. Howard. He’d never get this fantasy series published by the New York Publishing Cartel today–not without watering the barbarian down, adding some amazon superninjas and slipping an approved left-wing message into the Hyborian Age.

Conan is an alpha living in the ultimate habitat for alphas. His age and region is swarming with musclebound cutthroats, but the Cimmerian stands out above them all. He is perfectly at home in anarchy, yet you can also put him in a society with structure and he’ll rise quickly toward the top. In the movie he began adulthood as a slave, was promoted to gladiator, then gained his freedom and graduated to brigandry. In the books his self-improvement continues all the way to kingship.

Tarzan is a classic who didn’t make my Top Five for a couple reasons. While the ape-man is nobody to mess with, either with bare hands or primitive weapons, he is more of a beta male or arguably a sigma. He keeps to himself and has no ambition to leadership–even among the ape tribe that raised him. He also falls quickly into wunitus (1/”one”-itus) after meeting Jane.

Despite being raised in the jungle by apes, Tarzan is far more civilized than Conan…hence, not quite as much fun.

Browse by next time for my #4 pick.

Non-Fiction/Documentary

More on Hollywood and Originality (or Lack Thereof)

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I’ve called Hollywood out on their creative parasitism before. This is just a brief follow-up to the last one.

I’ve been working on a video project lately, and since I’m responsible for the soundtrack, I’m listening to a lot of classical music these days.

Shame on me, but I don’t pay much attention to what orchestra plays which symphony. It’s not like music composed post-Phonograph Age where you’ll get wildly different versions of the same song from different artists. If I like the symphony (or opera, or whatever), I’m confident I’ll like it no matter who the artists are.

But as I was listening yesterday, I noticed there are some subtle differences in how different orchestras play the same symphonies. Nothing major, because the notes are still the same ones written by some long dead guy with funny looking hair. But sometimes the pacing will vary, or certain instruments will be louder. I guess that’s the individual conductor doing what they can to put their own “stamp” on a fixed work of art.

While mulling this over, it dawned on me: the composers of Hollywood have mostly died off; only conductors remain.

I’m not talking about musical scores, here. I’m analyzing film as if movies were symphonies.

Once upon a time, Hollywood screenwriters/directors didn’t just artistically regurgitate; they created. In fact, their livelihood depended on it. Sure, there were remakes as early as the 1930s, but if you wanted to make a name for yourself, you couldn’t rely solely on the plundering of other men’s ideas.

The great film makers (called “auteurs” by the snobs) are often accused of making the same film over and over again.

Horsefeathers.

You’ll find the same themes running through most of their films; and many of them preferred to use the same cast and crew repeatedly…but that’s because those movies came from the same respective artist’s own arsenal of experience, world view and imagination. They didn’t come out of the DNC-approved cookie cutter.

Not for a few decades, anyway. Sure, there were socialist messages in plenty of the old movies. But they weren’t the only message allowed back then.

Directors and screenwriters of today are simply syphoning creative energy from the hard work of those who’ve gone before them; waving a stick at their assembled creative teams, tweaking a costume here and a set design there, while turning what were once original ideas into overused cliche`s.

To borrow a phrase from the publishing biz of yesteryear, they’re a bunch of hacks.

Non-Fiction/Documentary

Communist Profiteers

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I’ve been kvetching about the sad state of entertainment for some time, so of course when this post  showed up on my news feed, it caught my eye.

The lack of original thought in our arts and culture would make anyone think the western world is truly in decline. The movie industry no longer invests in such frivolous things as plot, script, and original ideas.

…Modern movies reek of cronyism, group thought, and investment in profitable ideas rather than original ones. The movies are created to garner the most income with the least amount of investment, targeting the unthinking masses to maximize profits.  Popularity trumps quality.

In this dichotomy, political leanings often play a role.

Yeah, no kidding.

Those are the two forces dominating Tinseltown, (and the publishing industry, etc.), but the priority is reversed from what is suggested by the article.

The political agenda is supreme to the entertainment gatekeepers. Of course they’d prefer to make colossal profits while brainwashing you; but they’ll lose money to herd you into the approved groupthink corral when that’s what it takes.

But calling out the mass media svengalis on their propaganda with chapter and verse is something I won’t spend the energy to do in this post. You’re either aware of it; you deny it/whine that there’s not enough of it; or you only recognize little tinges of “liberal bias” now and then. (The latter group has been partially absorbed into the hive already, becoming less and less aware of the conditioning as they are conditioned.) It’s doubtful there’s anything I could write in a blog post to reverse 20+ years of cognitive manipulation undergone by the last two groups.

It is amusing to consider the multiple personality disorder of the entertainment industry: the corporate beancounter completely devoid of original thought and the arrogant Marxist artfag who pretends to have a monopoly on original thought.

During the red state/blue state meme of 2004, one of the aforementioned arrogant Marxist artfags crowed on national TV about how all the creative genius in the nation was concentrated in the major population centers represented as the blue splotches on the political map. She had in mind, primarily, the Left Coast and the Rotten Apple.

All that creative genius and original thought in Homowood, Commiefornia must be why they can’t produce anything but remakes, adaptations of old TV shows or video games, and oppressively formulaic romantic comedies.

Even when they mine their material from the comic books, with thousands of plots to plagiarize from, they keep rebooting the same old origin tales. Take away Kryptonite and those “creative geniuses” couldn’t pool enough imagination between them to conceive a single story idea for Superman.

I enjoyed the first couple Expendables flicks as much as the next guy. But when you think about it, it’s pretty sad that such movies stand out in a given year for drawing men to theaters without the coercion of a wife or girlfriend.

The solution is simple; demote both those megalomaniac hive minds (the Marxists and beancounters) from their gatekeeper position. Allow some cognitive variety. Allow some entertainment that offends…even when it offends (insert the Victim Class of the Month here) and tips over their sacred cows.

You know–offend somebody besides your favorite scapegoats in Flyover Country/the Bible Belt. You’ve already stacked up enough offense against them to last a few lifetimes.

Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World