Archive for 2023

August 5, 2023

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Meet Anita Pallenberg, the Teutonic goddess who ‘created’ the Rolling Stones.

The twenty-three-year-old Pallenberg first met the Stones backstage in Berlin in 1965. Winder invites us to picture the “Teutonic goddess” leaning against the spotty lads’ dressing room door, “her smile cocky, revealing flashes of fanglike teeth.” She dug into her pocket for a vial of amyl nitrate, then asked: “Vant to smoke a joint?” The Stones had never taken drugs before. Nor had they met a woman as intimidatingly experienced as Pallenberg. Winder notes they were used to “Carnaby Street’s trendy dolly birds with their knee socks and baby-doll dresses.” But Pallenberg had grown up “skipping school with the street kids and artists in Rome, grave-digging, beach drinking, boyfriends with Vespas, Caffè Rosati with Federico Fellini and living in Warhol’s Manhattan as a Factory girl.”

Faithfull has always credited Pallenberg with creating the Stones. She brought them swashbuckling, gender-bending flair and the cosmopolitan confidence to flout the rules. She zipped them into skirts, slipped them drugs and took them to galleries. Winder calls her a “pythoness” — a satanic majesty who humiliated, seduced, empowered, educated, bonded and divided the band as the whim took her. She goaded them into the swagger they carried into their music and they remixed tracks on her instructions.

But they all struggled with her freewheeling power. Brian Jones eventually responded by blacking her eyes and ripping up the film scripts she was offered. Keith Richards initially loved her from afar, while the competitive Jagger was irked that she out-cooled his own girlfriend, the Buckinghamshire farm-raised model Chrissie Shrimpton (whom he controlled with strict curfews and gifts of children’s toys). Jagger withdrew his offer of marriage to Shrimpton and upgraded to the more intellectual Faithfull.

There’s no doubt that Pallenberg was the Stones’ muse in the late ’60s and early 1970s, when they did some of their best work. But she didn’t “create” the group. The band existed before her, and after she and Keith broke up.

Related: Anita Review: Anita Pallenberg Gets Her Own Documentary, and It’s One of the Darkest Portraits of the Rock World.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 5th, 2023

UNSURPRISING: AP is very worried someone might clean up the Justice Department. “Many conservative analysts have recoiled in disgust at the way the Department of Justice has become increasingly politicized and weaponized, acting as a tool of leftist Democrats in recent years. There has been no clearer example of this than the way they have attempted to cook up multiple avenues to put Joe Biden’s primary political opponent, former President Donald Trump, in jail before he can have the opportunity to take back the White House. But now that Trump has actually spoken out about this, the Associated Press and other media outlets are feigning outrage over the idea that a thorough housecleaning of the DoJ is in order. Were that to happen, the AP claims, it would represent ‘a new assault on the U.S. system.’ (Whatever that’s supposed to mean.)”

Posted at 8:52 am by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 5th, 2023

August 4, 2023

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED:

Or at least made irretrievably stupid.

Posted at 10:32 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 4th, 2023
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