Ellen Willis
Ellen Willis
Ellen Jane Williswas an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth14 December 1941
CountryUnited States of America
illustration rope levels
On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.
turn-me turns
What turns me on is erotica; what turns you on is pornographic.
contained easily encouraged expansive pushing
By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.
artists awful corrupt courage dominated education face imperative modernist optimism religious romantics scorn secular supreme taught thinkers truth
My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries.
politics separate
For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms.
diversion playing
I can't keep myself from playing roles. The emotionless decadent, looking for diversion from boredom, is a favorite.
artificial discourse foreign nowhere politics separation
The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.
casts imagine trauma
To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.
art commercial cultural far form grasp itself seem taken
What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.