america adrift

I’m unplugging from the Matrix for week starting from now. Everyone else here at aa is presumably still around, although it is Autumn Break. As for me, I need to burn one down.

Ben Harper performing at Boonaroo about 4 years ago. Or was it five?

Lately, I have been preoccupied with a new research project that I am trying to work up into a paper for the next Nordic Association of American Studies conference in May 2009.

These days I spend about 10 hours a week commuting, which means that I get to listen to a lot of CDs. One of my recent faves has been The Street Was Always There, a collection of songs by American protest and folk singers from the 60s, all performed by Eric Andersen, who himself was a member of the Greenwich Village scene at the time. The disc contains songs by virtually all the great singer-songwriters of that era - with the notable exception of Bob Dylan. Most of the contributors I was at least vaguely familiar with, but some required intensive Google’ing on my part to get their back-story.

The first thing one notices about the circle of singer/songwriters in question is that almost none of them got out of Greenwich Village alive (and the few that did, did not get away unscathed) - with the notable exception of Dylan, of course: Phil Ochs hanged himself, Paul Clayton took an electric toaster with him in the bathtub, Richard Fariña crashed his motorcycle at 90 mph, David Blue had a fatal heart attack at 42, and Peter LaFarge died of a stroke, possibly induced by a drug overdose, in October 1965. He was 34.

Many of these untimely ends can be traced back to disappointments with the singers’ careers (most realized that Dylan would be the only folkie making a successful transition into superstardom) and disillusionment with the loss of the potential of the counterculture to change the world. Among the luckier ones who didn’t die young, but ‘merely’ went into internal exile were Fred Neil (d. 2001) and Paul Siebel, who both quit the music scene almost entirely as the sixties revolutionary spirit waned into the commercial twilight of the early 70s.

But I was particularly interested in why things went so badly with Peter LaFarge, esp. after I discovered that he had been involved, at the time of his death, with Inger Nilesen, a Danish woman who had come to the US to work as a stewardess in long-distance buses - a job which she had soon quit in order to work as a hostess in a Miami Playboy club, only to follow her love of folk music to Greenwich Village’s bohemian heartland, where she soon hooked up with Peter LaFarge.

In the case of LaFarge some particularly interesting identity issues must have combined to exacerbate his discontent, and yet he seemed to have everything going for him in 1965. His song “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” had been a major country and cross-over hit for Johnny Cash the year before. LaFarge was a bit older and more experienced than most of his peers, and had already been recording folk and sea shanty albums in the late 50s, so he knew the music business quite well. He had recently met Inger Nielsen, whom he publicly expressed deep affection for, she had given birth to their daughter, and had even managed to astound everyone, including LaFarge, by recording and publishing an album of her own on Folkways Records, featuring Danish folk songs. Why, then, did things suddenly go so badly with Peter LaFarge?

To trace this enigma further one has to look at the precarious identity construction at the heart of the story everyone knew to be Peter LaFarge’s: An Indian of Hopi descent, he had been adopted at age nine by his stepfather, Oliver LaFarge - Pulitzer price winning author of the novel Laughing Boy, himself a descendant of the nearly extinct Narragansatt tribe. After educating himself, Peter decided to try his luck as a rodeo rider, which he was nearly great at until suffering an accident that almost cost him a leg - after which he discovered a talent (which was mentored by folk legend Cisco Houston) for singing and song-writing, specializing in bringing the plight of Native Americans to the attention of a wider public  - after which he served in the US Army in the Korean War, before moving to the Village to take part in the growing folk scene there, hanging out with Rambling Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, whom he took extra pains at keeping out of trouble - ultimately becoming as known for his talent as a painter as for his singing, and, to crown it all, signing a major label record deal with MGM.

Most of this rags-to-riches story, however, hinges on a string of fallacies and inventions (as uncovered by Yuval Taylor in the article linked to above) which LaFarge either actively created and spread, or at best did nothing to dispel. My paper aims to chart these ‘fake’ identity constructions and to read LaFarge’s life as a cultural text illustrating the twin hazards of aiming for cultural authenticity and cosmopolitan sophistication (esp. when one tries to do it together with a Danish-born ‘Playboy bunny turned folk singer’ as Inger Nielsen is often referred to…)

This project is still very much work in progress, and I have not yet had time to track down the recent documentary film on LaFarge which should give some enlightening background on his life. Nor have I yet been able to find out much about the later life of Inger Nielsen, other than discovering that she had at least one other child after LaFarge’s death. I need also to trace whether her record was ever reviewed in Denmark and whether she came back here to perform or to live… Help and info on such matters will of course be greatly appreciated.

“CARPE DIEM IN BLACK AND WHITE: Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers” (by Camelia Elias)

One of the perennial discussions of the concept of the fragment and fragmentary forms revolves around the status of the fragment and the fragmentary in relation to a presupposed whole. Is the fragment a remnant of something broken? Something that has been detached from a unitary form, or a whole? Is the fragmentary that which fragments? Does it have agency? If we disregard these philosophical questions, we can have a look at regular domestic drama especially as represented in the media. We often say: their marriage broke, and it was his fault. He left the nucleus of his unit, usually composed of a wife and a set of two kids, each with a different gender, for a figment, or a fragment of his imagination, usually a blond bombshell. So the heart is broken (of the victimized wife) and the mind is confused (of the treacherous husband) – there is often a fragment of remorse in the act of leaving where the one who fragments the relationship is concerned. We find fragments of this sort everywhere, and films have been known to embed in their visual representations such aspects of realist narrative not only thematically but also formally. In fact, particularly in film, the fragment sells. In this context, one of the reasons for the fragment’s success is its negative energy. The more there is a hacking of relationships, and the more painful and dramatic the separation, the more our emotions heighten and we go with the flow. There is something cathartic about the fragment, and it goes really well for the viewer or the spectator if he or she gets to see the perpetrator of fragmentation punished.

In this paper, I’m interested in how fragmentary representations of bad, malicious, and evil relations relate to moral tales, and what happens to the aesthetics of the fragment when morality is embedded into it. The bastard had it coming, we say at the end of the drama. Then we go home and enjoy the illusion of our own wholeness. But all this happens at the level of content. Where form is concerned the story of the fragment is told differently by the producers of fragmentary tales. For the viewers, such fragmentary tales occasionally achieve a cult status. Fragmentation and the fragment are good. The fragment is aesthetic. It keeps detail in play with other forms.

Fragmentation is thus positively valorized. The more of it there is the more we can enjoy the benefits of realizing that there is more to life and love than moral tales. One need only look at various works of film theory dealing not so much with conventional Hollywood tales, but with what has been considered a breakthrough in film techniques. When Russian film theorists began to experiment with editing through montage and discontinuity in the 20s, everyone agreed that that was a good thing. For instance, there is no book on film theory that doubts the significance of fragmentation for moviemaking ever since fragmentation was taken into consideration at that time. Taking their cue from the language and practice of industrialism on its rise in the 20s and 30s such filmmakers as Eisenstein and Kuleshov borrowed the “assembly line” poetics in their methods. The aim was however to create unity of form out of seeming chaos and disorienting pictures. Poststructuralists today identify these concerns with fragmentation that modernist filmmakers had with the modernists’ anxiety induced by the fear of war and the fear of what was to replace old paradigms of thinking. In his Film Theory: An Introduction, Robert Stam makes this thought clear. Thus he says:

The montage theorists were also, in a sense, structuralists avant la lettre in that they saw the filmic shot as being without intrinsic meaning prior to its placement within a montage structure. The shot gained meaning, in other words, only relationally, as part of a larger system. In film, as in language, to paraphrase Saussure, “there were only differences”. For the practically minded Kuleshov, founder of the world’s first film school, the art of cinema consisted in strategically managing the spectator’s cognitive and visual processes through the analytic segmentation of the partial views. What distinguishes the cinema from the other arts, for Kuleshov, is montage’s capacity to organize disjointed fragments into meaningful, rhythmical sequence […] It was film technique, rather than “reality,” then, that generated spectatorial emotion. (Stam, 2000: 38-39)

Insofar as filmmakers today still employ and rely on ideas of fragmentation formulated in the 20s, I want to look at how variations of moral tales that aim for unity of effect are cast as ambiguous in the hands of film directors that prefer a minimalistic ‘modular’ and fragmenting structure for their films to epic forms. My example is contemporary filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and his film Broken Flowers (2005).

As the tile indicates there is breakage in the narrative of an aging Don Juan who upon receiving an anonymous letter from an unidentified woman that informs him of his having a son he never knew he had embarks on a quest journey that takes him across the country. This latter day American Don Juan, here named Don Johnston, played by Bill Murray, sets out to find out who of the women he nailed in his youth might be the mother of his son. He remembers five of them, one dead. So he goes visiting.

The narrative draws heavily on the myth of Don Juan, who after having scored a host of women has to pay for his sins. But while the narrative also draws on all sorts of other representations of Don Juanism, from intertextual references to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and thus relies on a plot development that follows a traditional linear trajectory that has sin and fall in focus, in Jarmusch’s rendition the story ends with an open and undecided scene. I want to argue, however, that while Jarmusch makes recourse to all the elements of aesthetic fragmentation, he embeds a moral tale within the film which clashes with the poetics of the fragment as such. The fragment, particularly as we find it defined in poststructuralist studies, has a performative quality to it rather than just being a remnant. In its performative poetics the fragment escapes definition insofar as, more often than not, it is impossible to determine where it begins and where it ends. The poetics of the fragment is thus best understood in terms of its function, which is to say that we see the fragment as an act: an act of writing, an act of literature, and act of filmmaking (Elias 2004).

By the same token the fragmentary, insofar as it deals with that which remains outside wholeness, can be said to designate a neutral state. One of the best poststructuralist theorists on the fragment, Maurice Blanchot, has formulated the relation between the fragment and the fragmentary thus:

The fragmentary expresses itself best, perhaps, in a language that does not recognize it. Fragmentary: meaning neither the fragment, part of a whole, nor the fragmentary in itself. The aphorism, the proverb, maxim, citation, thoughts, themes—verbal cells in being further removed than the infinitely continuous discourse whose content is “its own continuity”, continuity that is assured of itself only in giving itself as circular and, by this turn, submitting itself to the preliminary of a return whose law is outside, which outside is outside the law. (Blanchot, 1992: 43)

Being outside of the law points to a logic of neutrality. This thinking of the fragment without the fragment[1], as it were, is something that filmmakers such as Jarmusch have been exploring.

Broken Flowers poses an interesting challenge in its dealing with continuing the line of narratives that invite an ethical assessment of relationships – even when there is no resolution in any of the five tales that are embedded in the larger framework of the structure of the film. This challenge formulates itself in the implicit question: to what extent can we think of morality without morality in the very act of thinking?

Among the many positive reviews of Jarmusch’s film, there are few that manage to identify the problem with morality as it is mediated by symbolic representations that have been overtly circulated in the media, particularly the myth of Don Juan. Here is what Robert Fulford has to say in his “The Jagged Edges” written for The National Post (August 30, 2005) on the beginning of the movie:

Murray’s character is watching The Private Life of Don Juan, a 1934 melodrama by Alexander Korda. We don’t learn much about that film from Broken Flowers, but Jarmusch knows his admirers will look it up as soon as they get home. So we have now learned that Korda’s story ends with the collapse of Don Juan’s erotic career, his public disgrace and his retirement from the ranks of sexual overachievers. We also know the movie failed, partly because the situation of the star, Douglas Fairbanks, resembled Don Juan’s. Fairbanks had become famous playing young daredevils, but in 1934 he was 51, overweight, somewhat bald and only five years away from his fatal heart attack. Disappointment, humiliation, the deterioration that accompanies ageing: Those were Korda’s themes, and on this occasion they are Jarmusch’s too. Murray, given the evocative name of Don Johnston, becomes the latest embodiment of the Don Juan myth, which has served Mozart, Moliere, Balzac, Goldoni, Byron and George Bernard Shaw (and that’s the short list). The shape it takes here makes an odd comment on current movies. Jarmusch may be the king of the independents, but on this outing he can be as heavy-handed as an old MGM warhorse.

This rather demanding intertextuality – demanding in the sense that finding out all the finer details for the possible interpretation of Jarmusch’s film requires some time on the internet – is to Fulford a waste of time. As far as Fulford is concerned, there are just too many unnecessary intertextual fragments in the film for what in his opinion are two unambiguously clear, and also rather lame, messages:

1. You just never know how people will turn out […]

2. An erotic life pursued thoughtlessly could well make you feel kind of sad.

There is, however, an odd contrast at work throughout the movie. As the narrative unfolds through sparse dialogue, we are meant to think of Don’s women as old flames, though seen from his perspective it is quite clear that he entertains no thoughts about these women at all. I particularly like the suggestion that the male protagonist thinks nothing of his past women. This interesting male perspective is however depicted against the background of a painful to watch women’s world. When Don goes to visit the 4 women, we find that they completely embody types: a hot but brainless blond widow, a hippy gone conventional and sterile, a lawyer gone weird, lesbian, and animal shrink, and a tormented and mad as hell biker. While Don is depicted as devoid of emotion, the women are full of it. Fraught with spent passions – in a male’s gaze women are always that – they all seem to have suffered negative consequences after their break from Don; in fact, they are all damaged in some way. In contrast, Don is merely apathetic, and lives a passionless, but not an unreflective life – in a male’s gaze men are always capable of cool reasoning.

And this is the point where one is tempted to say that Jarmusch’s moral tale doesn’t work. On a general level, the movie works because the roles are played exquisitely by very fine actors, but the implicit moral notion that if men don’t treat their women nicely they should be punished is not only out-dated but also problematic insofar as it seems to be out of step with the fragment, both at the level of form and content. Although we clearly get the message in a totalizing form, as Fulford points out, none of the 5 stories – of basically what happened to 5 women in the course of two decades – ends in any conclusive way. The only constant is that change is the constant. The women have changed, and so has Don. Content-wise the moral of the story is that one must get on with the story of one’s life, such as it is, and for better or worse. Thus in terms of content, there is an unmotivated blending of apathy, futility, and cynicism at the expense of form. More precisely, the movie recasts women in their age-old roles as victims – even when they are not. The movie also presupposes that what women want from men is the age-old form of total commitment – even when they don’t. The movie assumes that we are entertained by identifying with the universal human predicament (more male than female) of getting old and impotent – when we are not. As the viewer’s emotional capacity is more engaged rather than his or her cognitive capability, one tends to dislike the fact that Don, towards the end of the movie, is made to suggest that any man would or should or ought to get soft in his knees when he has the chance to mirror himself in a younger self. As he has lunch with someone he thinks is his son, he thus offers him a possibility to consider a human value in the form of a philosophical insight: carpe diem. However, against the background of what we have just witnessed, such deadpan advice – the past is gone, the future is unknown, seize the day – doesn’t work. As the young man runs into the future, and the women are left to stick to and deal with the past, Don alone is condemned to enact his dictum by seeing his own present presént itself to him as a kind of a ‘between-acts’ time. He ends up seeing every 19 year old that passes him by as a potential son. The irony is that the Carpe Diem philosophy is generally understood as a totalizing idea leading the person who follows it to a harmonious and continuous life. But the Carpe Diem philosophy is, actually, the perfect philosophy for a Don Juan insofar as it leads no further than the next conquest. It is also a perfect fragment as it fragments the present off from all other times.   

If we stay with the level of the content here, for a while longer, as that is the level which engages most the aim to create a unified narrative even as it unfolds itself against the background of unfinished business (or stories), we may grant Jarmusch a point when he suggests that whether one has children or not, they are not going to make a difference for the way in which one lives and dies. The more disturbing question, however, where the unproblematic propagation of the Don Juan myth is concerned is this: why does he have to suggest that when women grow old they turn weird and vengeful – punishing men by disclosing that their sons are not theirs or that they had some whom they didn’t tell them about, or that they aborted them because they could – men in their old age become intriguingly philosophical, and thus resourceful for the entire human race? The contextual Carpe diem here does not include women. On the other hand, and in spite of what the intention of the director might have been, such a portrayal of women works better on the formal level, especially when one considers the performative aspect of the fragment. Insofar as the underlying message is that Don ditched his women for their ‘fragmenting’ capability – women fragment whereas men unify, and this is seen particularly in the initial shots when we see Don stoically resigning himself in the face of his current girlfriend’s desire for separation – the representation of women as stereotypes becomes necessary. If the fragment fragments, and if women embody the fragment, then women by definition must be reduced to parts. Which is exactly what happens. These parts, however, go on to enforce a male dominated philosophy.

As Don gets philosophical in his attempt to ultimately grasp what the meaning of life is, he shifts allegiance and positions: the promiscuous Don Juan has turned into none other than the wise Solomon. The lack of enthusiasm which characterizes Don’s encounters with his earlier girlfriends enforces the atmosphere rendered in the Ecclesiastes: this too shall pass. There is here an interesting tension between the intended continuity in the biblical message of wisdom, ‘whatever you do, you’re still going to die’ and the fragmenting female power which has the potential to undo the world created for them by Jarmusch. As Jarmusch forces women’s potentiality through, Don’s world revolves around a middle space in which he is neither a father, nor not a father. Neither having a son, nor being sonless. What fragments the movie at this point is Jarmusch’s tampering with the law of the excluded middle. This interpretation is prompted by the fact that it is never made quite clear in the film whether Don’s girlfriend, Sherry, to tease him, sends Don the pink letter that he receives, so that he may snap out of his apathy and start assuming some responsibility in their relationship. Nor is it clear whether Don’s friend Winston, corresponding to the Leporello figure in Mozart’s opera, is not in cahoots with Sherry. If Jarmusch follows Mozart’s plot, then, this possibility is more likely than it is unlikely – in Mozart the subplot that involves some cunning twists and thinking is vital to the unfolding of the moral tale. Thus on a formal level, what Jarmusch achieves by instituting a state of fragmentation and ambiguity is a situation when Don is made to think of women without women in it, in his thinking that is. If Jarmusch plays his irony card here, one must grant him the brilliancy of his genius: if there is anything that disturbs the moralists, then, it must be the situation when one can be both/and, moral and immoral at the same time; simultaneously concerned and non-concerned, sentimental and pragmatic. In his recent study of Jim Jarmusch’s films, Juan Suaréz makes a similar point:

Jarmusch’s fondness of composite forms has been read against his fascination with Japanese cinema – especially with Kenji Mizoguchi, whose films occasionally takes the form of collections of stories. But a case may also be made for its similarity to some aesthetic procedures in Jarmusch’s immediate environment, where fragmentation and modularity are symptomatic of what contemporary philosophers were defining as the erosion of the great meta-recits of modernity and the concomitant need to refocus attention on the micrological and molecular, on punctual strategies and events. Also minimal are the blank affect and distended temporality of the film. Most scenes are devoted to inaction: to characters sitting around, listening to music or half-engaged in saggy, desultory exchange. These scenes are filled with “dead-time” – moments that do not propel the action forward, nor add information about characters (Suárez, 2007: 31)

The point here is that while the characters may emerge as rather flat, the “highly regulated game” (Suarez) of find and seek – son seeks father, father seeks potential mother – is mediated by fragmentary signs, such as the color pink which constitutes a leitmotif, leading men into temptation. While men fall, they don’t find anything.

The anticipation of a totalizing narrative out of a fragmentary form works in this film counter-intuitively: does Don get punished for his sins? Not really. Are women the victims? Not really. As Don is condemned to see signs in overabundance everywhere – which he is bound to misread because they are so many – the women are shown to be the better formalists – they are not into interpreting Don’s actions and their consequences. They create situations. Thus the fragmentary game in Broken Flowers invites the viewer to consider morality from a feminist perspective, where precisely the law of the excluded middle is explored more fully. In such a perspective, and within such a framework, one might infer that if the movie has a moral then it must be this one: that not all women that get ditched by Don Juans suffer from life-long mental affliction. Some blonde bimbos do become rocket scientists. Some brunettes do stick to Oscar Wilde’s dictum where some men’s intelligence is concerned: “Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable” (Wilde, 2004: 24).

References:

Blanchot, Maurice (1992) The Step Not Beyond. Trans. Lycette Nelson. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Elias, Camelia (2004) The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre. Bern: Peter Lang.

Derrida, Jacques (2000) Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Stanford U Press

Fulford, Robert (2005) Review of Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. “The Jagged Edges of Broken Flowers: Deadpan can only go so far before it’s dead boring”. The National Post. August 30, 2005.

Jarmusch, Jim (2005) Broken Flowers. DVD release: August 2006. Universal: Universal Studios

Stam, Robert (2000) Film Theory: An introduction. Cornwall: Blackwell Publishing.

Suárez, Juan A. (2007) Jim Jarmusch (Contemporary Film Directors). University of Illinois Press.

Wilde, Oscar (2004) The Decay of Lying. Kessinger Publishing.

I promised Stuart this post much too long ago, and I’m sorry that it only emerges now. Over at Historiann, they had a discussion about a certain installation at Burning Man, called Barbie Death Camp, which is an interesting and strange installation of Barbie dolls all meandering toward an oven. You can find the pictures here.

The installation presents an interesting challenge for interpretation and analysis. The most noticeable fact, is the clear imagery drawn from the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps. This is immediately sensitive terrain and challenges the boundaries of artistic representation. The problem is, that the installation does not show pain, fear and misery. Since all Barbie dolls smile, there is a certain joy to the installation, a kind of eager desire for the oven, which flies in the face of the conventional representations of Holocaust. Some of the images remind me more of photos from music festivals with the crowd dancing and cheering their favorite bands.

We can see slogans such as “Arbeit Macht Plastique Frei”, which rephrases “Arbeit Macht Frei” but with a seemingly ironic distance. It can be argued that this pushes the installation into a consumerist critique, killing off Barbies as symbols of capitalism and the economic circuit. We could perhaps draw parallels between the capitalist system and the Nazi death camps.

This of course ignores the gendered view, that all the Barbies are women as well as naked. Slogans such as “Die Bitch” certainly also indicate a certain misogynist slant. There are images of torture and rape, making this a violent spectacle with the added cognitive dissonance that the Barbies remain happy and smiling.

Dr. Pyro comments on Historiann’s post, that he as one of the creators simply wanted to engage female attendants at Burning Man, and that practically all (American) women have a relationship to the Barbie dolls, hence would hopefully respond in some way. I see no particular reason to doubt his words, but I disagree that there is no symbolism in the installation. Arguing that no symbolism was intended, seems naive. Certainly people would recognize the situation and that holds symbolic meaning. It may be meant as an ironic statement, but that still depends on a recognition of the situation.

What strikes me the most about the installation, is the crucifixions of Barbie. It pushes the entire installation in a different direction, which reminds me more of sacrifice than slaughter. As such, I regard the installation more as a transgressive act which articulates a relationship to our icons and idols. Here, I’m obviously inspired by Bent’s point that icons have religious connotations, and it is precisely the crucifixions which make me point out that connection.

Georges Bataille points out, that what we regard as beautiful must be spoiled in the act of appreciation. “Humanity is transgressed, profaned and besmirched. The greater the beauty, the more it is befouled” (Eroticism). The point is significant, because it shows that an act of transgression, vandalism and debasing can act as a form of appreciation. Certainly, the context of the Holocaust must be considered one of the greatest acts of debasement conceivable, as must the crucifixion with its religious connotations.

With this in mind, we can see tye installation not necessarily as a negation of Barbie’s cultural significance or a criticism of it, but as much a reinforcement of its place and importance. This somewhat destabilizes, I think, the division Bent has of collaborative and oppositional iconwork, though I’m sure Bent will be quick to point out, that the work is as much done by those seeing the installation, thus choosing to read it in one way or the other: as confirming their attitudes toward Barbie, positive or negative.

This line of thinking leads me to consider the fact that this installation is in some ways an open text: it has many different connotations and denotations which will allow the audience to understand the text in very different ways. It serves, I think, as a form of blank parody, where the parts that are parodied are not subjected to any clear satire or revision. This is enhanced by the fact that the text, as an installation, does not have a clear climax and no real closure.

We are presented with a spectacle which touches on so many cultural and historical sore points, that we are forced to respond, but if there is a clear motivation behind the piece, I think it is to act more as a form of mirror. We see what we want to see - anti-consumerism, gender criticism, and many other things. The act of transgression, which is surely there, opens up for this need to interpret, this need to ascribe meaning and sense to the piece. It is too much to ignore, somehow, even if one’s reaction becomes one of ‘bonghead humor’.

The installation works, I think, to the extent that it provokes discussion and in that sense it does have the reflective thrust, or at least intent, of parody. We are supposed to laugh at the installation, as Dr. Pyro argues, but we must laugh at ourselves, and our own understanding of the installation.

In a Cold War context, “jazz was a natural” in the arsenal of cultural diplomacy. So concludes Fred Kaplan a piece in the New York Times on the Jazz Ambassadors Program of the mid 50s. Possibly because jazz during the years when the program was launched, was not only a purely homegrown art form, but also a regular mass culture export.

So, it is interesting that when Kaplan asks what would be today’s “secret sonic weapon” the answer seems to still be jazz.

Present day’s version of the Jazz Ambassadors Program is called Rhythm Road and although it does offer what is referred to as “urban” music (not sure whether this is supposed to be an inclusive term, or just a euphemism), the main focus of the program is still jazz. It is however not with the stars of yesterday or even today, the groups are all fairly unknown. Not that this would make much difference in terms of impact, as the great names of jazz today hardly receives the world press attention of big rock, pop or even “urban” names.

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Whatever metaphor we may use, this is “crunch time” for many of us writing, editing, and grading papers, preparing for exams, getting out those last minute proposals, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

In the weeds, the jungle, buried in paperwork, up against the clock, 4th and goal. Well, you get the idea.

I always liked Devo’s cover of Allen Toussaint’s “Working In The Coal Mine” from their 1981 album New Traditionalists and thought this as good a metaphor as any. Perhaps some of you may vaguely remember this track from the soundtrack of the animated movie, Heavy Metal.

This is dedicated to all the summer slaves of academe.

“When my work day is over I’m too tired for having fun………“

NPR.org, June 2, 2008 - One of the fathers of rock ‘n’ roll died Monday at the age of 79. Bo Diddley was born Ellas Bates in Mississippi and grew up in Chicago, where he played guitar on street corners before being discovered by Chess Records. He leaves behind a sound that helped build a musical movement.

What made Bo’s music so unique? I don’t know exactly but if I had to assign to it just one adjective it would be, crunchy. Yeah, what a wonderful crunchy sound.

A few months ago I posted an article, Postmodern Presidential Branding, which highlighted Obama’s “O” logo in particular, as a example of open ended visual narrative, easily recreated and reproduced. Here’s exhibit 3,569. I was never a Dead Head (though I dated one) but I’ve been a Grateful Dead fan for as long as I’ve been choosing what I listen to. The Dead Head community has always actively recreated and reproduced the Grateful Dead image which makes this image all the more interesting as it merges two open-ended narrative icons. The employment of Obama’s campaign slogan,”fired up and ready to go” was also not lost on this gentle commentator. This flew under my radar at the time but here are some photos of the band from the “Dead Heads for Obama” GOTV event.

Here’s Bob Weir endorsing Obama which links to both Mickey Hart’s and Phil Lesh’s endorsement. Why didn’t this get as much press coverage as John Edwards’ recent endorsement? Anyhow, there’s also video from the concert which you can scroll through but I thought the quality was so poor I’ve posted the song bellow instead.

In my little neck of the woods here in Denmark, after three glorious weeks of sunshine we received a little box of rain this morning. Dead Heads were doing “viral marketing” long before Time Magazine named “YOU”, person of the year, but this “user generated” video is pretty sweet. Happy Monday.

My paper for the EAAS conference in Oslo last week dealt with icons and icon work, continuing a line of research I began about 5 years ago when I participated in a conference in Austria with the theme of US Icons. The convener of both the AAAS event in 2003 and of the Oslo workshop was Klaus Rieser of Graz, Austria whose tireless work is beginning to make an emergent interdisciplinary field out of Icon Studies.

It is the elderly Manson who fuels the imagination of icon workers that use him in a politicized discourse, as witnessed first by a right wing manipulation of Manson’s image, photo-shopped into a photo of former Democrat candidate for President, John Kerry, who was the victim of a vicious slander campaign due to his past as an anti-Vietnam War activist. Here a grinning Manson in a suit modelled on Kerry’s (as is Manson’s hair style) shows the Senator a piece of paper or a photograph (perhaps a snapshot of the original Manson victims), and they appear to share a moment of confidence, although Kerry’s closed eyes might indicate that the image Manson shows him is a bit too much to take in. Note the Swastika on Manson’s forehead (he had used a knife to scrawl an ‘X’ on his forehead during his trial, and this ‘X’ later turned into a Swastika in popular legend), as well as the Kerry campaign button on his lapel.

In a parallel image, this time used to satirize Kerry’s defeater, George W. Bush, Manson’s photograph (the raw image is the same, and here the hair and attire are not airbrushed or photo-shopped) is used for a different type of collaborative icon work, this time more oppositional in nature. It is accompanied by an amusing text calling for the approval by the Senate of Manson as ambassador to the Klingon Empire (referencing the Star Trek universe). In this narrative Manson works for the Republicans as (crudely) indicated by the replacement of the Swastika on his forehead, which is substituted with a GOP Elephant, the symbol of the Republican Party. Bush and Condoleeza Rice are both ‘quoted’ as supporting Manson’s speedy appointment, saying for instance that “questions about Manson’s management style shouldn’t be part of the confirmation process”.

Next week will be a busy academic whirlwind tour of two Nordic capitals for me: Helsinki and Oslo. The two main American Studies events of the year are crammed together as Consecutive conferences: The Renvall Institute’s Helsinki do, The Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference, has reached instalment no. 12 in its fine run (it will be my third time around as a participant). The theme is always broad and this year is no exception: “North America - Relations and relationships”. My contribution is about the cultural importance of one specific, iconic brand of car: The Cadillac…

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