America's Jazz Diplomacy Revisited

When America finds itself on the defensive on the PR front, it puts its talented -- and preferably Black -- tenth forward. During the Cold War, it sent its best jazz musicians -- Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other geniuses -- on international tours, whose photographs are now on display in the exhibition titled "Jam Session: America's Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World" at the Meridian International Center.

"Louis Armstrong in Cairo in 1961," Louis Armstrong House Museum

Reviewing the exhibition, Fred Kaplan reports that "Curtis Sandberg, the curator at Meridian International, said that during the three years it took to prepare the show his staff would frequently gaze at the photos and say, 'Why aren't we doing something like this now?'"¹

But cultural power rises and falls with economic power, and American culture no longer enjoys the same edge -- the ability to combine innovation and mass appeal, drawing upon cultures of Blacks and immigrants, and market its products worldwide -- it did at the height of the Cold War.

Today jazz in America is for connoisseurs, not for masses. The largest film industry in the world is Bollywood, whose films, salacious and yet demure ("[f]ilmmakers in India are banned from glorifying drinking, drug abuse and smoking, or including scenes 'degrading or denigrating women in any manner'"), are "popular in regions where Hollywood has had only limited success, like the Middle East."² Jackson Pollock's Abstract Expressionism could be plausibly promoted as "free enterprise painting" (in the worlds of then MOMA President Nelson Rockefeller) superior to Soviet socialist realism, but Jeff Koons and his ilk can only serve as a test of what the market bears. As for literature, even English professors would get stumped if they were asked to come up with the ten most influential American writers alive today in whom the rest of the world ought to take interest.

The only field of culture in which America truly eclipses all others may be the art of self fashioning. That's what Barack Obama is good at,³ and that's what he sells. So far, it's sold very well in America. Will the rest of the world buy it, though?

1 Fred Kaplan, "When Ambassadors Had Rhythm," New York Times, 29 June 2008. The historical facts in Kaplan's article are based on Penny M. Von Eschen's excellent research: Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Cornell UP, 1997); and Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2004). See, also, Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New Press, 2001).

2 Thomas Fuller, "It's Bollywood!/'They Can't Compete with Us in Emotions': Indian Movies Speak to a Global Audience," International Herald Tribune, 20 October 2000.

3 Matt Taibbi on the art of being Obama:

Here's the thing about Obama, the reason they call him a "natural" and a "rare talent." When Hillary Clinton spouts a cliché, it's four words long, she's reading it off a teleprompter, and it hits the ear like the fat part of a wooden oar. Even when Hillary announced she was running for president, she sounded like she was ordering coffee. Obama on the other hand can close his eyes and the clichés just pour out of his mouth in huge polysyllabic paragraphs, like Rachmaninoff improvisations. In this sense he's exactly like Bill Clinton, who had the same gift. He is exactly what is meant by the term bullshit artist. ("Obama Is the Best BS Artist Since Bill Clinton," AlterNet, 14 February 2008)

The Fires Within: Sri Lanka at War

Watch Ron Haviv's "The Fires Within: Sri Lanka at War," a documentary that is as compassionate as it is objective.

Cf. Nermeen Shaikh, "Photographing Conflict to 'Give a Voice': Ron Haviv Discusses Recent Sri Lanka Project," Asia Society, 12 June 2008.

Postcards from Iran

Here's a slide show of everyday life in Iran, made by Make Films Not War.

Aren't Iranians lovely? Let's not let Washington kill them or hurt them in any way.

When Sex Is Not Subversive. . . .

One of the enduring myths of modernity is that the social order depends upon repression of sex and therefore sex is a subversive act. Both states that censor sex and dissidents who defy them share this myth. The myth has inspired countless artists into sexual dissidence.

Oshima Nagisa's In the Realm of the Senses (1976), set in 1936, is perhaps the best of the genre that depicts sex as a symbolic statement against the repressive state. The pivotal scene of the film has its protagonist Kichi walk in the opposite direction to a military parade, and the end of the film has him willingly submit to his lover Sada's wish to strangle him as she has sex with him. After his death, Sada castrates Kichi, completing the reversal of the power relation in which he was initially her master. The state obliged the artist, and In the Realm of the Senses, upon its release, was censored in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other countries where either the film was banned altogether or controversial scenes were cut or altered.

Araki Nobuyoshi, a photographer best known for bondage photos, takes a different tack than Oshima. In his photos, female bodies meticulously conjugated according to the exacting grammar of fetishism are part of everyday life, often surrounded by commonplace objects, a zabuton on tatami, a tea cup and saucer, things like them, shot in the same tender spirit with which he captures shitamachi [old downtown Tokyo], very unlike those of Hans Bellmer or Robert Mapplethorpe. Were Araki a woman, his work would be more fascinating than it is. Even limited by his social identity, though, his work may prove more enduring than those of artists who have played the expected role of antagonist in the aforementioned sexual myth of modernity. On the occasion of the release of the uncut version of In the Realm of the Senses, Freda Freiberg wrote:

In the mid '70s, when this film was produced, it created a storm of controversy, and encountered censorship problems in several countries, not just Japan. Its explicit treatment of sexual intercourse and its bloody castration scene outraged and disturbed viewers brought up on Hays Code morality. It was an international sensation, provoking packed houses and lively debate at the 1976 Melbourne Film Festival.

Now, 25 years later, its re-release in the original uncut version has passed almost unnoticed by viewers in Melbourne, despite the plaudits of film critics. It has become a classic, but not a cult classic apparently. That is the unkindest cut of all. The public's lack of interest serves to remind us of all those clichés about yesterday's sensation and the ephemerality of fame. ("The Unkindest Cut of All?" Senses of Cinema 12, February-March 2001)

Freiberg laments the passing of the time of sexual dissidence, but that is perhaps a welcome sign that sex has become unremarkable -- just a part of everyday life, as Araki has always insisted.

Bahman Jalali

Here's a beautiful installation video of the work of Bahman Jalali, from his exhibition at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona (28 September 2007 - 9 December 2007).

Read Catherine David, "Entrevista a Bahman Jalali," and Hamid Dabashi, "L'ànima d'una màquina sense ànima: Reflexions sobre la fotografia de Bahman Jalali."

I Am Iran -- Do Not Bomb Me

The best anti-war slogan for Iranian-Americans is "I Am Iran -- Do Not Bomb Me." Here are two photographs with signs that say just that (plus one that shows a really lovely young woman) seen at the 27 October 2007 demonstration in San Francisco.

Photo by Jahanshah Javid ("'I Am Iran, Do Not Bomb Me': Photo Essay: San Francisco Anti-war Rally," Iranian.com, 28 October 2007)

Comments left on Javid's photo essay at Iranian.com show, however, that Iranian-Americans are far from united around this slogan.

One commentator observed: "Imagine if it was a gugush concert. More would show up. That's sad." True, but this is just a beginning. More Iranian-Americans will rediscover their love for Iran.

Robert Frank's America

Robert Frank, whose exhibition Storylines is now being held at Tate Modern, shot the photograph below in Chicago in 1956, in the course of documenting the Democratic National Convention:

"Political Rally, Chicago" (1956), gelatin silver print, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

That's an iconic image of Cold War America, captured at the moment when, having purged most of the real and imaginary Reds from political life, "even McCarthyism was losing its force," as "the Senator, curtailed by the Senate's condemnation motion of December 1954, was to die" in 1957 (Marjorie Perloff, "Poetry 1956: A Step Away From Them"). Joseph McCarthy's political death, however, hardly destroyed the paranoid culture of anticommunism, and, in 1955, the Swiss-born Frank, while documenting America on a Guggenheim fellowship, was arrested and questioned by the police in Little Rock, Arkansas, who were convinced that he was a spy on account of his camera, foreign accent, and papers in foreign languages. What the police didn't realize was Frank was a spy of an altogether different sort, stealing and exposing an open secret -- essential lonesomeness -- of the American way of life.

Below the display of patriotic bunting stands a tuba player, his face completely obscured by the horn. Or rather it is as if the horn grew out of his body, having supplanted a human face. Instead of speaking in his own voice, the man is condemned to play a red, white, and blue tune on demand. The tuba player is up against a bleak wall. The woman on his left and the man on his right, both faceless and fragmented, stand apart from him, looking away in opposite directions. "In Frank's images, people, whether alone, in twos and threes, or in crowds, always seeming curiously detached from one another" (Perloff, "Poetry 1956: A Step Away From Them"), embody alienation and isolation beneath the facade of prosperity in Eisenhower's America. If you look too deeply, blackness at the center of the tuba's mouth might swallow you up.

The same black emptiness exists at the heart of America today, made emptier than in the Eisenhower era by the yawning current-account deficit and the declining dollar, and it is waiting to be photographed by a Robert Frank of the twenty-first century.