. . . in The Desert of Earthly Delights at Zabriskie Point.
Meanwhile, at the Playboy Mansion the partying continued . . .
. . . with the Martini Burlesque!
The term "burlesque" is used to apply to a "concept" as well as a "category" (as is the word "art"), and derives from the Italian burlesco, which, in turn, is derived from the Italian burla – a joke, ridicule or mockery.So, a burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects. However, in its contemporary condition as a "genre" of popular culture, burlesque is more than capable of taking itself too seriously.Burlesque overlaps in meaning with caricature, parody and travesty, and, in its theatrical sense, with extravaganza, as presented during the Victorian era. "Burlesque" has been used in English in this literary and theatrical sense since the late 17th century. A later use of the term, particularly in the United States, refers to performances in a variety show format. These were popular from the 1860s to the 1940s, often in cabarets and clubs, as well as theatres, and featured bawdy comedy and female striptease.
Victorian burlesque, sometimes known as "travesty" or "extravaganza", was popular in London theatres between the 1830s and the 1890s. It took the form of musical theatre parody in which a well-known opera, play or ballet was adapted into a broad comic play, usually a musical play, often risqué in style, mocking the theatrical and musical conventions and styles of the original work, and quoting or pastiching text or music from the original work. A staple of burlesque was the display of attractive women in travesty roles, dressed in tights to show off their legs, but the plays themselves were seldom more than modestly risqué. American burlesque shows were originally an offshoot of Victorian burlesque. The English genre had been successfully staged in New York from the 1840s, and it was popularised by a visiting British burlesque troupe, Lydia Thompson and the "British Blondes", beginning in 1868. New York burlesque shows soon incorporated elements and the structure of the popular minstrel shows.
Once upon a time in America - Blackface
The minstrel show, was an American form of racist entertainment developed in the early 19th century. Minstrel shows were popular before slavery was abolished, sufficiently so that Frederick Douglass, the American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer statesman and escaped slave, described blackface performers as ". . . the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens."
Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people specifically of African descent. The shows were performed by mostly white people in make-up or blackface for the purpose of playing the role of black people. Minstrel shows lampooned black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.Minstrel shows emerged as brief burlesques and comic entr'actes in the early 1830s in the Northeastern states of the United States. They were developed into full-fledged form over the next decade.
An American artform?
By 1848, blackface minstrel shows were the first uniquely American theatrical art, translating formal art, such as opera, into a popular and accessible form, albeit one that established a profoundly racist trope, intended for, and reflecting the tastes and confirming the attitudes of a general audience.
My consumers are they not my producers?The typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure. The troupe first danced onto stage then exchanged wisecracks and sang songs. The second part featured a variety of entertainments, including the pun-filled stump speech. The final act consisted of a slapstick musical plantation skit or a send-up of a popular play.Minstrel songs and sketches featured several stock characters, most popularly the slave and the dandy. These were further divided into sub-archetypes such as the mammy, her counterpart the old darky, the provocative mulatto wench, and the black soldier.
Jim Crow
These earliest minstrel characters took as their base popular white stage archetypes — frontiersmen, fishermen, hunters, and riverboatsmen whose depictions drew heavily from the tall tale — and added exaggerated blackface speech and makeup. These Jim Crows and Gumbo Chaffs fought and boasted that they could "wip [their] weight in wildcats" or "eat an alligator". As public opinion toward blacks changed, however, so did the minstrel stereotypes.
Eventually, several stock characters emerged. Chief among these were the slave, who often maintained the earlier name Jim Crow, and the dandy, known frequently as Zip Coon, from the song Zip Coon.
"First performed by George Dixon in 1834, Zip Coon made a mockery of free blacks. An arrogant, ostentatious figure, he dressed in high style and spoke in a series of malaprops and puns that undermined his attempts to appear dignified."
The white actors who portrayed these characters spoke an exaggerated form of Black Vernacular English. The blackface makeup and illustrations on programs and sheet music depicted these grotesque caricatures with huge eyeballs, very wide noses, and thick-lipped mouths that hung open or grinned foolishly; one character expressed his love for a woman with "lips so large a lover could not kiss them all at once". They had huge feet and preferred "possum" and "coon" to more civilised fare. Minstrel characters were often described in animalistic terms, with "wool" instead of hair, "bleating" like sheep, and having "darky cubs" instead of children. Other claims were that blacks had to drink ink when they got sick "to restore their color" and that they had to file their hair rather than cut it. They were inherently musical, dancing and frolicking through the night with no need for sleep.
Thomas "Daddy" Rice introduced the earliest slave archetype with his song "Jump Jim Crow" and its accompanying dance. He claimed to have learned the number by watching an old, limping black stable hand dancing and singing, "Wheel about and turn about and do jus' so/Eb'ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow." Other early minstrel performers quickly adopted Rice's character.
Minstrels claimed that their songs and dances were authentically black, although the doubtful extent of African American cultural influence remains debated. Spirituals (known as jubilees) entered the repertoire in the 1870s, marking the first undeniably black music to be used in minstrelsy.What does it signify, that as a truly American art form, it was blackface minstrelsy that was to become the first theatrical form that was distinctly American?
During the 1830s and 1840s at the height of its popularity, it was at the epicentre of the American music industry. For several decades, it provided the means through which American white people viewed black people through a prism that divided and separated strong racist aspects on one side, while on the other, it afforded white Americans an awareness, albeit distorted, of some aspects of black culture.By the turn of the 20th century, the minstrel show enjoyed but a shadow of its former popularity, having been replaced for the most part by vaudeville and burlesque.
Jim Crow Law
The phrase "Jim Crow Law" can be found as early as 1884 in a newspaper article summarizing congressional debate. The term appears in 1892 in the title of a New York Times article about Louisiana requiring segregated railroad cars. The origin of this phrase "Jim Crow" is obvious, generally attributed to the "Jump Jim Crow" song-and-dance caricature of black people by the aforesaid white actor Thomas D. Rice, performing in blackface. As a result of Rice's fame, "Jim Crow" by 1838 had become a pejorative expression meaning "Negro". When southern legislatures passed laws of racial segregation directed against black people at the end of the 19th century, these statutes became known as Jim Crow laws.
The Rule of Three
Like the minstrel shows, American burlesque shows usually consisted of three parts: first, songs and ribald comic sketches by low comedians; second, assorted olios and male acts, such as acrobats, magicians and solo singers; and third, chorus numbers and sometimes a burlesque in the English style on politics or a current play.
The finale ended up taking over the show - as Striptease!
The entertainment was usually concluded by an exotic dancer or a wrestling or boxing match. The transition from burlesque on the old lines to striptease was gradual. At first, soubrettes showed off their figures while singing and dancing; some were less active but compensated by appearing in elaborate stage costumes. The strippers gradually supplanted the singing and dancing soubrettes; by 1932 there were at least 150 strip principals in the US. Star strippers included Sally Rand, Gypsy Rose Lee, Tempest Storm, and Lili St. Cyr.
From STRIPORAMA to . . .
Blaze Starr, Ann Corio and Margie Hart, who was celebrated enough to be mentioned in song lyrics by Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter.
By the late 1930s, American burlesque shows would have up to six strippers supported by one or two comics and a master of ceremonies.
The cultural envelope of American burlesque had huge influence on American films made during the Great Depression era of the 1930's. Roman Scandals was one such movie from 1933. This American black-and-white pre-Code musical film was directed by Frank Tuttle. However, the film's significance rests on the fact it features a number of intricate production numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley. This includes the song "Keep Young and Beautiful" and where Berkeley's film treatment absorbs and reflects the racist tropes of minstrelsy. In addition to the starring actors in the picture, the elaborate dance numbers are performed by the "Goldwyn Girls
The "Goldwyn Girls" in this film included future stars such as Lucille Ball, Paulette Goddard and Barbara Pepper.
Keep young and beautiful . . .
Berkeley's popularity with an entertainment-hungry Depression audience was secured when he choreographed five musicals back-to-back for Warner Bros: 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933, Dames, and Fashions of 1934.
Busby Berkeley's "numbers" are characterised by starting out in the realm of the stage, but quickly exceeding this space by moving into a time and place that could only be cinematic, to return to shots of an applauding audience and the fall of a curtain. As choreographer, Berkeley was allowed a certain degree of independence in his direction of musical numbers, and they were often markedly distinct from the narrative sections of the films. The numbers he choreographed were mostly upbeat and focused on decoration as opposed to substance. One dramatic exception was the heart-rending and notably martial "Remember My Forgotten Man" from Gold Diggers of 1933, which dealt with the mistreatment of World War I veterans during the Great Depression. "Remember My Forgotten Man" is performed by Joan Blondell, with featured vocal solo by Etta Moten – who also dubbed Blondell's singing voice at the end of the number – and features sets influenced by German Expressionism and a gritty evocation of Depression-era poverty.
Berkeley was inspired by the May 1932 war veterans' march on Washington, D.C. and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech about the "Forgotten Man" from the same year. Roosevelt had appropriated this phrase in a speech, using it to refer to those at the bottom of the economic scale whom Roosevelt believed the state needed to help. When the number was finished, Jack L. Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck (the studio production head) were so impressed that they ordered it moved to the end of the film.This video montage begins with this musical number from Gold Diggers of 1933, and then followed by a couple of clips from the 1942 American biographical musical film Yankee Doodle Dandy about George M. Cohan, known as "The Man Who Owned Broadway" and starring James Cagney. The plot begins in the early days of World War II, Cohan comes out of retirement to star as President Roosevelt in the Rodgers and Hart musical I'd Rather Be Right, a Depression-era political satire set in New York City about Washington politics. The plot centers on Peggy Jones and her boyfriend Phil, who needs a raise in order for them to get married. The President steps in and solves their dilemma. On the first night, he is summoned to meet the president at the White House, who presents him with a Congressional Gold Medal. Cohan is overcome and chats with Roosevelt, recalling his early days on the stage. The film flashes back to his supposed birth on July 4, whilst his father is performing on the vaudeville stage. The first clip used from this film in this Re:LODE Radio montage shows Cohan working on the idea for a patriotic song designed to galvanise American young men to enlist and fight the "Hun" "Over There".
The final clip is the finale of the film where the President presents Cohan with the Congressional Gold Medal. As he leaves the White House, he descends a set of stairs while performing a tap dance (which Cagney thought up before the scene was filmed and undertook without rehearsal). Outside, he joins a military parade, where the soldiers are singing "Over There", and, at first, he isn't singing. Not knowing that Cohan is the song's composer, one of them asks if he knows the words. Cohan's response is a smile before joining in to sing too. Cagney had initially been opposed to a biopic of George M. Cohan's life, having disliked Cohan since the Actors' Equity Strike in 1919, in which he sided with the producers. In 1940, Cagney was named, along with 15 other Hollywood figures, in the grand jury testimony of John R. Leech, the self-described 'chief functionary' of the Los Angeles Communist Party who had been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The New York Times printed the allegation that Cagney was a communist on its front page. Cagney refuted the accusation and Martin Dies, Jr. made a statement to the press clearing Cagney. William Cagney, one of the film's producers, is reported to have said to his brother that "we're going to have to make the goddamndest patriotic picture that's ever been made. I think it's the Cohan story".
Forgotten men . . .
. . . over there, over there, the yanks are coming, the yanks are coming . . .
This report from the Congressional Research Service lists hundreds of instances in which the United States has used its Armed Forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes. It was compiled in part from various older lists and is intended primarily to provide a rough survey of past U.S. military ventures abroad, without reference to the magnitude of the given instance noted
Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020
July 20, 2020
Barbara Salazar Torreon Senior Research LibrarianSofia Plagakis Research LibrarianThe list . . .
. . . was compiled in part from various older lists and is intended primarily to provide a rough survey of past U.S. military ventures abroad, without reference to the magnitude of the given instance noted. The listing often contains references, especially from 1980 forward, to continuing military deployments, especially U.S. military participation in multinational operations associated with NATO or the United Nations. Most of these post-1980 instances are summaries based on presidential reports to Congress related to the War Powers Resolution. A comprehensive commentary regarding any of the instances listed is not undertaken here.
The instances differ greatly in number of forces, purpose, extent of hostilities, and legal authorization. Eleven times in its history, the United States has formally declared war against foreign nations. These 11 U.S. war declarations encompassed five separate wars: the war with Great Britain declared in 1812; the war with Mexico declared in 1846; the war with Spain declared in 1898; the First World War, during which the United States declared war with Germany and with Austria-Hungary during 1917; and World War II, during which the United States declared war against Japan, Germany, and Italy in 1941, and against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania in 1942.Some of the instances were extended military engagements that might be considered undeclared wars. These include the Undeclared Naval War with France from 1798 to 1800; the First Barbary War from 1801 to 1805; the Second Barbary War of 1815; the Korean War of 1950-1953; the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1973; the Persian Gulf War of 1991; global actions against foreign terrorists after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States; and the war with Iraq in 2003. With the exception of the Korean War, all of these conflicts received congressional authorization in some form short of a formal declaration of war. Other, more recent instances have often involved deployment of U.S. military forces as part of a multinational operation associated with NATO or the United Nations.The majority of the instances listed prior to World War II were brief Marine Corps or Navy actions to protect U.S. citizens or promote U.S. interests. A number were engagements against pirates or bandits. Covert operations, domestic disaster relief, and routine alliance stationing and training exercises are not included here, nor are the Civil and Revolutionary Wars and the continual use of U.S. military units in the exploration, settlement, and pacification of the western part of the United States."To the shores of Tripoli"
From the Halls of Montezuma to . . .
The "Marines' Hymn" is the official hymn of the United States Marine Corps, introduced by the first director of the USMC Band, Francesco Maria Scala. Its music originates from an 1867 work by Jacques Offenbach with the lyrics added by an anonymous author at an unknown time in the following years.
The line "To the shores of Tripoli" refers to the First Barbary War, and specifically the Battle of Derna in 1805. Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon and his Marines hoisted the American flag over the so-called "Old World" for the first time. This overseas military deployment was the second of hundreds more.
Black and white and the White House?
As Cohan leaves the White House two African American actors play the attendants who serve him.In the "Remember My Forgotten Man" episode, the finale of Gold Diggers of 1933 with Joan Blondell, the featured vocal solo is performed by Etta Moten.
On January 31, 1934, Etta Moten became one of the rare black stars to perform at the White House since Marie Selika Williams performed for President Rutherford B. Hayes and First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes in 1878. Etta Moten performed The Forgotten Man from her movie Gold Diggers of 1933 for President Roosevelt at his birthday celebration. The song echoed Roosevelt's campaign promise that he would remember the "forgotten man."
NOT the "Mammy"!
Up until this point, the representation of black women in movies was limited to maids or nannies (the Mammy archetype). Moten made a breakthrough with her roles in a number of movies and is generally recognized as the 1st black woman to do so. Etta Moten Barnett crossed over decades before that music-industry phrase existed. Disturbed by subtle but persistent racial discrimination, Etta persevered, believing she had to be “twice as good to get anywhere at all.”
George Gershwin discussed her singing the part of "Bess" in his new work Porgy and Bess, which he had written with her in mind. She was concerned about trying a role above her natural range of contralto. In the 1942 revival, the part of Bess was rewritten. She did accept the role of "Bess", but she would not sing the word "nigger", which Ira Gershwin subsequently wrote out of the libretto. Through her performances on Broadway and with the national touring company until 1945, she captured Bess as her signature role.Etta Moten Barnett hosted a radio show in Chicago called I Remember When before the United States government appointed her to be a representative on cultural missions to ten African nations. Dozens of recordings of I Remember When are available at the Library of Congress and at the Schomburg Library in New York City. Etta's marriage to Claude Barnett gave her the opportunity to travel to Africa. Claude, as the head of the Associated Negro Press, along with Etta and other members of the organization visited the continent frequently to gain African news information for the ANP to include in their issues.
On March 6, 1957 Moten Barnett interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Accra, Ghana, where they were both attending the celebration of Ghana's independence from Great Britain — she as the wife of Claude Barnett, a prominent member of the official U.S. delegation headed by Vice President Richard Nixon; and King, fresh from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as a man interested in the liberation of oppressed people globally, but with no official place in Ghana's Independence Day festivities.
The recording of this conversation, conducted in a Ghanaian radio studio where Moten Barnett was gathering recordings for her Chicago broadcasts, is also available at the Library of Congress and the Schomburg Library.
It was during World War I that Berkeley served as a field artillery lieutenant, drilling 1,200 soldiers in complex formations that became the basis for his highly sophisticated choreography in musicals and films.
Re:LODE Radio makes a connection between the "reel" world of the movie and the way a linear sequence of images projected on the silver screen translates to movement. The organic quality of movement, as encapsulated in the use of the term "Bioscope" for early cinema venues in England, is in Berkeley's choreographic film treatment is layered with a "mechanical" and "clock time" musical rhythm. In this video montage the sequence begins with a popular scene from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, his 1936 American comedy film in which his iconic Little Tramp character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialised world. The film represents a critical commentary on the desperate employment and financial conditions many people faced during the Great Depression — conditions exacerbated, in Chaplin's view, by the drive to pursue efficiencies in modern industrial processes, in order to maximise surplus value and profit for the capitalist owners of the means of production. This is followed by a montage of clips from Busby Berkeley's "production" "numbers". Next comes Berkeley's 1969 ad for Contac. In the late 1960s a nostalgia for this camp style brought the Berkeley musicals back to the forefront. He toured the college and lecture circuit, and even directed a 1930s-style cold medication commercial for Contac capsules entitled the "Cold Diggers of 1969", complete with a top shot of a dancing clock. The final clip in the sequence has Imogen Kelly (renowned as Australia's Queen of Burlesque and crowned World Queen of Burlesque in 2012 at the Burlesque Hall of Fame, Las Vegas), in a nostalgic reprise of a Berkeley routine with a modern burlesque version thrown in at the end.
Assembly line rhythms . . .
The burlesquerie of a deliberately escapist style in American films such as Roman Scandals provided an aesthetic envelope adapted from the racialised trope of minstrelsy. Cinema in the United States had a brief period of relative freedom from the censor up until the strict enforcement of the "Hays Code" in mid-1934. This short period, beginning with the production of "talking pictures" in 1929, is known as Pre-Code Hollywood. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor, and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934.
American social mores and . . .
This montage of clips from the Pre-Code era includes video edits by Kevin Wentinck. First a trailer followed by: The Unmentionables and the video edit: Pre-Codes: Sadism, Masochism, Misogyny & Grapefruit that reveals more than female anatomy and styles of underwear. What it lays bare is the uncomfortable truth about what were acceptable American social mores that censorship sought to hide from public view.
The emergence of the "talkies" in American cinema in 1929 coincided with the Great Depression that started in the United States after a major fall in stock prices around September 4, 1929, and became worldwide news with the Wall Street stock market crash of October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%. By comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s.
The impact of the Great Depression that began in the United States in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s was global in scale. This was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. The Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how intensely the global economy can decline. In this case the decline in the U.S. economy was the factor that pulled down most other countries at first; then, internal weaknesses or strengths in each country made conditions worse or better. Frantic attempts by individual countries to shore up their economies through protectionist policies – such as the 1930 U.S. Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act and retaliatory tariffs in other countries – exacerbated the collapse in global trade, contributing to the depression. By 1933, the economic decline pushed world trade to one third of its level compared to four years earlier.
The Great Depression hit Germany hard. The impact of the Wall Street Crash forced American banks to end the new loans that had been funding the repayments under the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan. The financial crisis escalated out of control in mid-1931, starting with the collapse of the Credit Anstalt in Vienna in May. This put heavy pressure on Germany, which was already in political turmoil with the rise in violence of Nazi and communist movements, as well as with investor nervousness at harsh government financial policies. Investors withdrew their short-term money from Germany, as confidence spiraled downward. The Reichsbank lost 150 million marks in the first week of June, 540 million in the second, and 150 million in two days, June 19–20. Collapse was at hand. U.S. President Herbert Hoover called for a moratorium on Payment of war reparations. This angered Paris, which depended on a steady flow of German payments, but it slowed the crisis down, and the moratorium was agreed to in July 1931. An international conference in London later in July produced no agreements but on August 19 a standstill agreement froze Germany's foreign liabilities for six months. Germany received emergency funding from private banks in New York as well as the Bank of International Settlements and the Bank of England. The funding only slowed the process. Industrial failures began in Germany, a major bank closed in July and a two-day holiday for all German banks was declared. Business failures became more frequent in July, and spread to Romania and Hungary.In 1932, 90% of German reparation payments were cancelled. Widespread unemployment reached 25% as every sector was hurt. The government did not increase government spending to deal with Germany's growing crisis, as they were afraid that a high-spending policy could lead to a return of the hyperinflation that had affected Germany in 1923.
Germany's Weimar Republic was hit hard by the depression, as American loans to help rebuild the German economy now stopped. The unemployment rate reached nearly 30% in 1932, bolstering support for the Nazi (NSDAP) and Communist (KPD) parties, causing the collapse of the politically centrist Social Democratic Party.
Hitler ran for the Presidency in 1932, and while he lost to the incumbent Hindenburg in the election, it marked a point during which both Nazi Party and the Communist parties rose in the years following the crash to altogether possess a Reichstag majority following the general election in July 1932.Hitler followed an autarky (national self-sufficiency) in economic policy, creating a network of client states and economic allies in central Europe and Latin America. By cutting wages and taking control of labour unions, plus public works spending, unemployment fell significantly by 1935. Large-scale military spending played a major role in the recovery.Re:LODE Radio chooses to connect the historical situation in Germany in 1935, and the aesthetics of Busby Berkeley through the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, originally published in 1935, by Walter Benjamin. This is an essay proposes and explains how the mechanical reproduction of art devalues the aura (uniqueness) of an objet d’art. But the essay does much more than consider the impact of the shift in the information environment from the typographic to a graphic, and photographic world and experience.
Photography does not simply represent the world, it substitutes itself for the world!Walter Benjamin's essay is headed by a quote from the essay "The Conquest of Ubiquity" (1928), by Paul Valéry:Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.
Symptomatic of this shift is the Dadaist art work L.H.O.O.Q. (French pronunciation: [ɛl aʃ o o ky]) a work of art by Marcel Duchamp. First conceived nearly a decade before "The Conquest of Ubiquity" (1928), in 1919, the work is one of what Duchamp referred to as readymades, in this case a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's early 16th-century painting the Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp had drawn a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title.
L.H.O.O.Q.
It's a pun! On pronouncing L.H.O.O.Q. "Elle a chaud au cul" (which translates as "She is hot in the arse")
The original title of Benjamin's essay was, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, in 1935; followed by the French edition, L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée, in 1936; and the German revised edition in 1939, from which derive the contemporary English translations of the essay.The point that Benjamin makes in this essay that provides Re:LODE Radio with a connection between the Hollywood entertainment industry and the rise of Hitler, the Nazi ideology, and Bolshevik communist ideology in the 1930's is this. That in the age of mechanical reproduction and the absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of art would be inherently based upon the praxis of politics.
Written during the Nazi regime (1933–1945) in Germany, Benjamin’s essay presents a theory of art that is “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art” in a mass-culture society. More specifically Benjamin comes up with the notion of the aestheticisation of politics, an idea first coined by Benjamin in this essay, as being a key ingredient to fascist regimes. He says; "fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics", in the sense of a spectacle in which it allows the masses to express themselves without seeing their rights recognised, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate. He ends the essay thus:
The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!”This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, (Re:LODE Radio translates as: "Let tech rip - and the world to perish") says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.In Benjamin's (original) formulation, the politicization of aesthetics was considered the opposite of the aestheticization of politics, the former possibly being indicated as an instrument of "mythologizing" totalitarian Fascist regimes. Benjamin's concept has been linked to Guy Debord's 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle.Another détournement?
Re:LODE Radio chooses to montage an excerpt from Gold Diggers of 1935, an American musical film directed and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. The musical number "Lullaby of Broadway" is a short film-within-a-film, and tells the story of a Broadway Baby who plays all night and sleeps all day. Of all the musical numbers Berkeley created in his career, he named this as his personal favourite. As everyone rushes off to work, she returns home from her night's carousing and goes to sleep. When she awakens, that night, we follow her and her beau from club to club, with elaborate large cast tap numbers. This spectacle in allows the audience, living through the Great Depression, to escape the everyday reality, and experience the ecstatic flow of choreographed image, sound, movement and rhythm, to vicariously "express themselves without seeing their rights recognised, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate".
Another film, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) was released in 1935. This Nazi propaganda film directed, produced, edited and co-written by Leni Riefenstahl chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters.
Writing in 1975, Susan Sontag considers Triumph of the Will the "most successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made, whose very conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker's having an aesthetic or visual conception independent of propaganda."
Sontag points to Riefenstahl's involvement in the planning and design of the Nuremberg ceremonies as evidence that Riefenstahl was working as a propagandist, rather than as an artist in any sense of the word. With some 30 cameras and a crew of 150, the marches, parades, speeches, and processions were orchestrated like a movie set for Riefenstahl's film. Further, this was not the first political film made by Riefenstahl for the Third Reich (there was Victory of Faith, 1933), nor was it the last (Day of Freedom, 1935, and Olympia, 1938). "Anyone who defends Riefenstahl's films as documentary", Sontag states, "if documentary is to be distinguished from propaganda, is being disingenuous. In Triumph of Will, the document (the image) is no longer simply the record of reality; 'reality' has been constructed to serve the image."
This is considerably different from the position she had taken ten years earlier in a 1965 essay entitled "On Style," where she opposes the idea that Riefenstahl's propaganda films are purely propaganda, and writes: "To call Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too, which we reject at our loss. Because they project the complex movements of intelligence and grace and sensuousness, these two films of Riefenstahl (unique among works of Nazi artists) transcend the categories of propaganda or even reportage. And we find ourselves—to be sure, rather uncomfortably—seeing 'Hitler' and not Hitler, the '1936 Olympics' and not the 1936 Olympics. Through Riefenstahl's genius as a film-maker, the 'content' has—let us even assume, against her intentions—come to play a purely formal role."
Brian Winston's essay on the film in The Movies in History (2000) is largely a critique of Sontag's 1975 analysis. Winston argues that any filmmaker could have made the film look impressive because the Nazis' mise en scène was impressive, particularly when they were offering it for camera re-stagings. In form, the film alternates repetitively between marches and speeches. Winston asks the viewers to consider if such a film should be seen as anything more than a pedestrian effort. He finds the film tedious, and believes anyone who takes the time to analyse its structure will quickly agree.
Purely for the purpose of achieving a détournement effect, Re:LODE Radio edits film footage from newsreel coverage of military and Nazi party "choreography", including clips from The Triumph of the Will. This sequence is then dubbed with a replay of the sound track from Busby Berkeley's "Lullaby of Broadway" that includes the sound effect all those stamping and tap dancing routines. And . . .
. . . it works!
Even more outrageous burlesquerie takes place in this final scene in this Re:LODE Radio montage, taken from the 2005 film reprise of Mel Brooks' The Producers, and the musical number "Springtime for Hitler". As the show opens, the audience is horrified at the first song, and people begin leaving out of disgust until the entrance of an over-the-top camp Hitler ("Heil Myself"). Playing Hitler very flamboyantly, causes the audience to misinterpret the play as satire, resulting in the show becoming a smash, instead of the intended flop
Burlesque and . . .. . . the aestheticisation of politics?Gold Diggers in Paris (1938) was the fifth and last in Warner Bros.' series of "Gold Digger" films, and was directed by Ray Enright with musical numbers created and directed by Busby Berkeley, starring Rudy Vallee, Rosemary Lane, Hugh Herbert, and Allen Jenkins.
"Gold Diggers in Paris" - The Plot
Maurice Giraud (Herbert) is sent to New York to arrange for the Academy Ballet of America to come to Paris to compete for cash prizes at an international dance festival, but a cabbie takes him by mistake to the Club Ballé, a nightclub about to go under. The desperate owners of the club, Terry Moore (Vallee) and Duke Dennis (Jenkins), know that an error has occurred, but see the invitation as a way out of their financial problems. To get some ballet into their nightclub act, they hire ballet teacher Luis Leoni (Fritz Feld) and his star (and only) pupil Kay Morrow (Rosemary Lane) to teach their girls ballet on the boat crossing the Atlantic. Terry finds Kay very attractive, but things are complicated when his ex-wife, Mona (Gloria Dickson), invites herself along, rooming with Kay.
Meanwhile, the head of the real ballet company, Padrinsky (Curt Bois), finds out what has happened and cables Giraud aboard ship, then heads to Paris with his patron, a ballet-loving gangster named Mike Coogan (Edward Brophy), who intends to rub out Terry and Duke. Giraud is upset about being hoaxed, but is mollified when a "talking dog" (a ventriloquist hired by Terry and Duke) convinces him that Padrinsky is the liar.
After they arrive in Paris, a representative of the exposition, Pierre Le Brec (Melville Cooper), wants to watch the group's rehearsals, and Duke tells his new friend Coogan, the gangster, that Le Brec is causing him trouble. Coogan goes to "take care" of the problem, but by mistake knocks out Leoni instead of Le Brec.
Padrinsky shows up and arranges for the imposters to be deported on the day of the contest, but Mona manages to change the order so that Coogan and Padrinsky are shipped out, instead, which allows the company to perform and win the grand prize.From New York . . .
. . . to Paris!When it comes to striptease Paris is a foreign country! They do things differently there!
That is according to Roland Barthes in his essay on Striptease in Mythologies.
Le Crazy Horse Saloon or Le Crazy Horse de Paris is a Parisian cabaret known for its stage shows performed by nude female dancers and for the diverse range of magic and variety 'turns' between each nude show and the next.
The Paris Crazy Horse occupies former wine cellars of an impressive Haussmanian building at 12 Avenue George-V.
Alain Bernardin opened the business in 1951 and personally operated it for decades until his death by suicide in 1994. The enterprise remained a family business, in the hands of Bernardin's three children, until 2005, when it changed hands. By this time the name "Le Crazy Horse de Paris" was used for the original venue and Crazy Horse Paris for one in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand.Along with its dancers, the Crazy Horse has also been a popular venue for many other artists, including magicians, jugglers, and mimes. Bernardin explained that he loved magic because it corresponded with his vision:
"[Magic] is a dream. There is no show that is more dreamlike than a magic show. And what we do with the girls is magic, too, because they aren't as beautiful as you see them onstage. It's the magic of lights and costumes. These are my dreams and fascinations that I put onstage."
The Crazy Horse Paris was the subject of Crazy Horse, a film by Frederick Wiseman (2011). The "clickbait" pages for Re:LODE - A Cargo of Questions includes this multimedia article:
Display - behind the scenes - "clickbait"?Under new shareholders and new management from 2005, Crazy Horse started featuring famous or prestigious artists stripping for a limited number of shows, including burlesque star Dita Von Teese.
From the Crazy Horse Paris . . .
In the 1957 book by Roland Barthes, Mythologies, a collection of his essays taken from Les Lettres nouvelles, he considers the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths.However Barthes' Mythologies is much more than a collection of essays. While the first section, Mythologies, describes a selection of modern cultural phenomena, chosen for their status as modern myths and for the added meaning that has been conferred upon them, the second section, Myth Today, offers further and general analysis of the concept.
Earlier in this article one of Barthes' essays, Ornamental Cookery, was used to consider various techniques for "covering", or "glossing over", actuality. This essay on Striptease considers how "uncovering" is potentially another form of "covering", and a highly functional way to hide reality in plain sight. There is NO sign of "revelation" here except in the apocalypse of Barthes' thinking. He writes:
Striptease - at least Parisian striptease - is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.It is only the time taken in shedding clothes which makes voyeurs of the public; but here, as in any mystifying spectacle, the decor, the props and the stereotypes intervene to contradict the initially provocative intention and eventually bury it in insignificance: evil is advertised the better to impede and exorcize it. French striptease seems to stem from what I have earlier called 'Operation Margarine', a mystifying device which consists in inoculating the public with a touch of evil, the better to plunge it afterwards into a permanently immune Moral Good: a few particles of eroticism, highlighted by the very situation on which the show is based, are in fact absorbed in a reassuring ritual which negates the flesh as surely as the vaccine or the taboo circumscribe and control the illness or the crime.Pigalle, Montmartre, Pose for me . .
. . . Moulin Rouge, Mon Cherie!
There will therefore be in striptease a whole series of coverings placed upon the body of the woman in proportion as she pretends to strip it bare. Exoticism is the first of these barriers, for it is always of a petrified kind which transports the body into the world of legend or romance: a Chinese woman equipped with an opium pipe (the indispensable symbol of 'Sininess' *), an undulating vamp with a gigantic cigarette-holder, a Venetian decor complete with gondola, a dress with panniers and a singer of serenades: all aim at establishing the woman right from the start as an object in disguise. The end of the striptease is then no longer to drag into the light a hidden depth, but to signify, through the shedding of an incongruous and artificial clothing, nakedness as a natural vesture of woman, which amounts in the end to regaining a perfectly chaste state of the flesh.The classic props of the music-hall, which are invariably rounded up here, constantly make the unveiled body more remote, and force it back into the all-pervading ease of a well-known rite: the furs, the fans, the gloves, the feathers, the fishnet stockings, in short the whole spectrum of adornment, constantly makes the living body return to the category of luxurious objects which surround man with a magical decor. Covered with feathers or gloved, the woman identifies herself here as a stereotyped element of music-hall, and to shed objects as ritualistic as these is no longer a part of a further, genuine undressing. Feathers, furs and gloves go on pervading the woman with their magical virtue even once removed, and give her something like the enveloping memory of a luxurious shell, for it is a self-evident law that the whole of striptease is given in the very nature of the initial garment: if the latter is improbable, as in the case of the Chinese woman or the woman in furs, the nakedness which follows remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful slippery object, withdrawn by its very extravagance from human use: this is the underlying significance of the G-String covered with diamonds or sequins which is the very end of striptease.
This ultimate triangle, by its pure and geometrical shape, by its hard and shiny material, bars the way to the sexual parts like a sword of purity, and definitively drives the woman back into a mineral world, the (precious) stone being here the irrefutable symbol of the absolute object, that which serves no purpose.
Exotic? Erotic?
Lili St. Cyr and "the spectrum of adornment"!
Lili St. Cyr's reputation in the burlesque and stripping world was that of a quality and high-class performer, unlike others such as Rosa La Rose, who flashed her pubic hair. Two years after she started her career as a chorus line dancer, her stripping debut was at the Music Box, in an Ivan Fehnova production. The producer had not even seen her perform—her striking looks won him over. The act was a disaster, but instead of firing her, Fehnova put together a new act. At the end of the dance, a stagehand pulled a fishing line attached to St. Cyr's G-string, which flew into the balcony as the lights went dim. This act was known as The Flying G, and such creative shows became St. Cyr's trademark.
While performing in 1947 at Ciro's nightclub in Hollywood, billed as the "Anatomic Bomb", St. Cyr was arrested by police and taken to court by a customer who considered her act lewd and lascivious. Represented by the infamous Hollywood attorney Jerry Giesler in court, St. Cyr insisted to the jury that her act was refined and elegant. As St. Cyr pointed out, what she did was slip off her dress, try on a hat, slip off her brassiere (there was another underneath), slip into a négligée. Then, undressing discreetly behind her maid, she stepped into a bubble bath, splashed around, and emerged, more or less dressed. After her appearance as a witness, as a newspaper account of the time put it, "The defense rested, as did everyone else." After just 80 minutes of deliberation by the jury, St. Cyr was acquitted.
St. Cyr retired from the stage, and began a lingerie business that she retained an interest in until her death. Similar to Frederick's of Hollywood, the "Undie World of Lili St. Cyr" designs offered costuming for strippers, and excitement for ordinary women. Her catalogs featured photos or drawings of her modeling each article, lavishly detailed descriptions, and hand-selected fabrics. Her marketing for "Scantie-Panties" advertised them as "perfect for street wear, stage or photography."#630 QUEEN OF THE CATS
Scanty panty that conceals and reveals. Shaped with Lili's hip-hugging flattery.
#625 AFRICAN QUEEN
You'll see spots before your eyes in this tantalizing bosom-baring jumpsuit that's the jungle's answer to the topless craze.
#685 SLAVE TRADE
She'll be your slave gladly . . . if you gift her with this gorgeous fringe-trimmed torso twirler. Breezy bolero is tops in glamour . . . and the hip-hugging bottom is almost too much to bare. Brilliant design creation in a snarling leopard print.
#640 RESTLESS NATIVES
Tantalizing twosome drives men mad. Barely decent bra PLUS high-on-the-hip scandal-making panty in a marvelous life-like leopard print.
The past is another country! They do things differently there!
What stands out in the sales pitch for Lili St. Cyr's "spectrum of adornment" is the evocation of "Passion" and the "Primitive", the "African Queen", the "Slave Trade" and "Restless Natives" in a mix of the erotic and the exotic, that is clearly an extension of the culture of European, or WHITE, colonial imperialism, into what for now we can classify as being part of the territory of Pornotropia.
William Safire explores the use of the word exotic in relation to dancers and striptease in this article for The New York Times Magazine (May 21, 2006). He writes under the headline:
Erotic or Exotic?The difference between the two adjectives is rooted in their Greek etymologies: exotic is from exo, "outside," though that meaning of "alien" has been extended to flavors or looks as "mysteriously different." Erotic, as Eros, god of sexual love, would tell you, can describe action at home.
The adjectival difference is the easy part: exotic is "strange, foreign," while erotic is "sexy." But when married to the noun dancer, the meanings of the phrases get tricky.
Thanks to a commercial database named the Newspaper Archive, I found a 1918 review in The Elyria Evening Telegram of Elyria, Ohio, of a silent movie starring a young woman from Spain known as "the famous Doralinda, a women of remarkable personality, who has achieved a noteworthy success as an exotic dancer in New York." That phrase did not then denote the removal of clothing. From the belly dance performed by a dancer who called herself Little Egypt at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, through the shimmying and semiviolent "apache dance" of the Jazz Age of the 1920's, to the colorful gyrations of Carmen Miranda with what seemed to be a fruit basket on her head in the early 1940's — the performers of such rhythmic writhing were often called exotic dancers.
Meanwhile, in the 1930's, the striptease blossomed, and the "burlesque wars" broke out. The uptown set embraced the word follies, celebrating beautiful girls in costumes, while the "poor man's follies" downtown, in immigrant districts and in Harlem, embraced the bumping, grinding, take-it-off entertainment presented by impresarios of the strippers. On Oct. 10, 1942, the show-biz publication Billboard headlined an article "Strip, Strip Tease or Exotic Dancing, and the Difference." The difference was explained by an arrested bar owner in Bucks County, Pa., to a local judge: in a striptease, "the performer doesn't remove the veils that are her only adornment — but she lifts and swishes them around" while an exotic dance "has more strip than a striptease, and practically no tease at all." He was fined $400.
In her 2004 book, "Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show," Rachel Shteir quoted the famed striptease artist Georgia Sothern's letter to the columnist-semanticist H. L. Mencken: "I hope that the science of semantics can find time to help the verbally underprivileged members of my profession." He accommodated her with his coinage of ecdysiast, rooted in ecdysis, "the act of molting," which Gypsy Rose Lee dismissed with "We don't wear feathers and molt them off. . .what does he know about stripping?"
"In Philadelphia the word exotic described performers who abandoned bumps and grinds for slinking across the stage in a tiny costume," Shteir wrote, which was "partly motivated by local censors' attacks on striptease and burlesque, but I like to think they also revealed the genre's variety." Although Ms. Shteir cited Billboard's contrary differentiation noted above, she recently informed me that "exotic dance sounded classier than striptease because it did not suggest the removal of clothing to music. It suggested undulating in Middle Eastern or Latin American garb."
The philologist Allan Orrick of Johns Hopkins University addressed the question that we deal with today in the October 1956 issue of American Speech. Reviewing peeler, burlesque queen and stripteaser (compressed to one word), as well as news coverage of the League of Exotic Dancers, he concluded that "the word exotic is used not as a euphemism for stripper but to distinguish exotics from dancers such as 'acrobatics' and from other kinds of striptease dancers. 'Exotics' may be referred to as 'strippers,' but all strippers are not exotics. In other words, stripper seems to be a generic term while exotic denotes a subtype . . .the two words are not synonyms, and one can hardly be a euphemism for another."
That scholarly analysis is a half-century old. Usage has changed the meaning of exotic dancer, erasing such subtypes as belly dancing and acrobatics. There never was a category widely called erotic dancer; that phrase emerged only later as an attempted correction of exotic dancer, but the original phrase subsumed the meaning of the correction and outnumbers it in current usage by more than 40 to 1. In 50 years, the meaning of exotic dancer has merged with stripper as performers using both phrases leave little or nothing to the imagination.
It is still a mistake to confuse the adjective erotic (maddeningly sexy) with exotic (mysteriously foreign). But the phrase exotic dancer — which preceded stripteaser and became for a time a euphemism for it — has for longer than a generation made the usage leap to become synonymous with stripper and the more recent nude dancer.
Therefore, this language maven deems it no mistake to adopt common usage of the phrase exotic dancer to mean "one who strips off clothing to arouse sexual desire by displaying the naked body in motion."
But wait! What about the Banana Dance?From Josephine Baker to Beyoncé . . .
In 2016 Vogue Magazine published this article on Josephine Baker's "Banana Skirt".
Morgan Jerkins writes (June 3, 2016) under the headline:
90 Years Later, the Radical Power of Josephine Baker's Banana SkirtIt was the summer of 1926 at the Folies Bergère in Paris. Hordes of white Parisians flocked to the famed theater to see La Revue Nègre, a musical show that emerged from France due to the country’s fascination with jazz culture. And there, wearing little more than strings of pearls, wrist cuffs, and a skirt made of 16 rubber bananas, Josephine Baker descended from a palm tree onstage, and began to dance. This dance — the danse sauvage — is what established her as the biggest black female star in the world. She became an overnight sensation:
Thousands of dolls in banana skirts were sold all over Europe; beauty editors advised women to rub walnut oil on their faces to darken their skin like Baker’s; postcards, featuring Baker with a glossy, slicked-down hairstyle in her famous banana skirt with jewelry strategically placed over naked breasts, were widely distributed. But beyond her beauty and charisma, Baker, who would have turned 110 today, radically redefined notions of race and gender through style and performance in a way that continues to echo throughout fashion and music today, from Prada to Beyoncé.On June 3, 1906, Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in the slums of St. Louis. Growing up, she cleaned houses and babysat for the wealthy; one employer burned Baker’s hands as punishment for putting too much soap in the laundry. But at the age of 15, Baker was recruited for the St. Louis Chorus vaudeville show; from there, she went to Harlem where she performed in musicals. Eventually, she landed a gig in France as part of an all-black revue, at a salary of $1,000 a month; she emigrated there in 1925.Baker’s arrival in Paris coincided with a newfound obsession with black culture, a generation of French men and women who collected African art, jazz, and danced the Charleston. Aside from these surface-level interests, there was a much deeper and disturbing fascination with the widely accepted belief in black people’s inherent primitiveness. When she swung onstage in that fiercely swinging banana skirt in 1926, Baker brilliantly manipulated the white male imagination. Crossing her eyes, waving her arms, swaying her hips, poking out her backside, she clowned and seduced and subverted stereotypes. By reclaiming her image, she advanced her career in ways unprecedented for a woman of that time. And though, in later years, her banana skirts would transform from rubber fruits to a powerful, aggressive spike version, that initial design remains revolutionary. Beyoncé paid homage to Baker by wearing a banana skirt in her 2006 Fashion Rocks performance. At the 2014 CFDA Fashion Awards, Rihanna memorably wore a sheer Baker-inspired dress. The Spring 2011 Prada collection and most recently Marc Jacobs’s Fall 2016 runway notably referenced Baker’s signature gelled hair.Offstage, Baker’s style grew ever more elaborate: Paul Poiret and Madeleine Vionnet, two of the leading couturiers in the ’20s, dressed Baker. For baron and fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, she posed nude, draped in a diaphanous veil. In 1927, interviewed for Vogue, Baker was reportedly “swathed in a full blue tulle frock with a bodice of blue snakeskin,” wearing an “enormous diamond ring with a very impressive diamond bracelet.” And for the Parisian fans who wanted to attempt to emulate her look, she sold Bakerskin, a skin-darkening lotion, and Bakerfix, a hair pomade. With the profits, Baker moved into the Château des Milandes, a 24-room mansion in southwestern France; adopted 12 children from around the world; and kept a menagerie of exotic companions such as a cheetah named Chiquita.And yet — and fascinatingly so! — she remained a woman of the people, for the people: During World War II, Baker aided the French Resistance by smuggling secret messages in invisible ink on her musical sheets. She hid Jewish refugees and weapons in her château that Bakerskin had helped pay for. In 1963, she was, notably, the only official female speaker to give an address at the March on Washington. She received the Croix de Guerre, the Médaille de la Résistance, and Légion d’Honneur. After she died on April 12, 1975, more than 20,000 people crowded the streets of Paris to watch the funeral procession on its way to L'Église de la Madeleine. The French government honored her with a 21-gun salute, making Josephine Baker the first American woman buried in France with full military honors.Nearly a century may have passed since that revolutionary dance, but its legacy remains as relevant as ever. Could it be that the banana skirt paved the way for Lemonade in 2016? Happy birthday, Josephine Baker!Beyoncé performing in her banana skirt on Josephine Baker's 100th anniversary
Melina Matsoukas, the director of the "Formation" music video, said that Beyoncé explained to her the concept behind Lemonade, stating: "She wanted to show the historical impact of slavery on black love, and what it has done to the black family, and black men and women—how we're almost socialized not to be together." Beyoncé wrote on this in a 2018 Vogue article about the "generational curses" in her family, explaining that she comes "from a lineage of broken male-female relationships, abuse of power, and mistrust", including a slave owner who married a slave.
Beyoncé continues, writing "Only when I saw that clearly was I able to resolve those conflicts in my own relationship. Connecting to the past and knowing our history makes us both bruised and beautiful."This theme is repeated throughout Lemonade, with Beyoncé's grief, trauma and struggle being connected to that of her family's ancestors. The sixth track "Daddy Lessons" acts as a turning point for the album, with Beyoncé linking Jay-Z cheating on her with her father Mathew Knowles cheating on her mother Tina. Towards the end of Lemonade, Beyoncé reveals the meaning behind the album title, showing Jay-Z's grandmother Hattie White saying "I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade", and describing her own grandmother, Agnez Deréon, as an "alchemist" who "spun gold out of this hard life" with the instructions to overcome these challenges passed down through generations like a lemonade recipe.On June 3rd 2017, Josephine Baker's 111th anniversary:Google Doodle Honors Jazz Age Icon & Civil Rights Activist Josephine BakerMadeline Buxton, writing for the REFINERY29 United States website says:
Today's seven-slide Google Doodle depicts the life of Josephine Baker, a woman who has been compared to Beyoncé (for her physique) and Angelina Jolie (for her many adoptions from around the world) — both of whom she predates. Featuring Baker continues this year's Google Doodle trend in honoring prominent civil rights activists.
Google Doodle honours Josephine Baker . . .
Madeline Buxton continues:
Aside from her exotic costumes, as today's Google Doodle blog notes, she became known for celebrating "female liberation and African cultural identity."
Baker was an activist, fighting racism through her work with the NAACP and participation in the March on Washington. She called the 12 children that she adopted from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds her "rainbow tribe." She also fought for the French Resistance during World War II.It's these many lives of Josephine Baker that the Doodle attempts to capture. "It's almost impossible to sum up such a multi-faceted figure, which is why today's Doodle is in a slideshow format highlighting several of Baker's most impactful accomplishments," Doodle designer Lydia Nichols told Refinery29.
So runs the headline for The Washington Post article by Jessica Goldstein (August 23, 2011).
When it comes to civil rights activism Josephine Baker was always there, and often at the front.
Although based in France, Baker supported the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s. When she arrived in New York with her husband Jo, they were refused reservations at 36 hotels because of racial discrimination. She was so upset by this treatment that she wrote articles about the segregation in the United States. She also began traveling into the South. She gave a talk at Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee, on "France, North Africa and the Equality of the Races in France."She refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States, although she was offered $10,000 by a Miami club. (The club eventually met her demands). Her insistence on mixed audiences helped to integrate live entertainment shows in Las Vegas, Nevada. After this incident, she began receiving threatening phone calls from people claiming to be from the Ku Klux Klan but said publicly that she was not afraid of them.
In 1951, Baker made charges of racism against Sherman Billingsley's Stork Club in Manhattan, where she had been refused service. Actress Grace Kelly, who was at the club at the time, rushed over to Baker, took her by the arm and stormed out with her entire party, vowing never to return (although she returned on 3 January 1956 with Prince Rainier of Monaco). The two women became close friends after the incident. When Baker was near bankruptcy, Kelly offered her a villa and financial assistance.
Baker worked with the NAACP. Her reputation as a crusader grew to such an extent that the NAACP had Sunday, 20 May 1951 declared "Josephine Baker Day." She was presented with life membership with the NAACP by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Ralph Bunche. The honour she was paid spurred her to further her crusading efforts with the "Save Willie McGee" rally. McGee was a Black man in Mississippi convicted of raping a white woman in 1945 on dubious grounds, and sentenced to death. Baker attended rallies for McGee and wrote letters to Fielding Wright, the governor of Mississippi, asking him to spare McGee's life. Despite her efforts, McGee was executed in 1951. As the decorated war hero who was bolstered by the racial equality she experienced in Europe, Baker became increasingly regarded as controversial; some Black people even began to shun her, fearing that her outspokenness and racy reputation from her earlier years would hurt the cause.Josephine Baker's speech
In 1963, Josephine Baker spoke at the March on Washington at the side of Rev. Martin Luther King. Baker was the only official female speaker. While wearing her Free French uniform emblazoned with her medal of the Légion d'honneur, she introduced the "Negro Women for Civil Rights." Rosa Parks and Daisy Bates were among those she acknowledged, and both gave brief speeches. Not everyone involved wanted Baker present at the March; some thought her time overseas had made her a woman of France, one who was disconnected from the Civil Rights issues going on in America. Baker spoke just before Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” oration.
This is what she said:
Friends and family…you know I have lived a long time and I have come a long way. And you must know now that what I did, I did originally for myself. Then later, as these things began happening to me, I wondered if they were happening to you, and then I knew they must be. And I knew that you had no way to defend yourselves, as I had.And as I continued to do the things I did, and to say the things I said, they began to beat me. Not beat me, mind you, with a club — but you know, I have seen that done too — but they beat me with their pens, with their writings. And friends, that is much worse.When I was a child and they burned me out of my home, I was frightened and I ran away. Eventually I ran far away. It was to a place called France. Many of you have been there, and many have not. But I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, in that country I never feared. It was like a fairyland place.And I need not tell you that wonderful things happened to me there. Now I know that all you children don’t know who Josephine Baker is, but you ask Grandma and Grandpa and they will tell you. You know what they will say. “Why, she was a devil.” And you know something…why, they are right. I was too. I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America too.But I must tell you, when I was young in Paris, strange things happened to me. And these things had never happened to me before. When I left St. Louis a long time ago, the conductor directed me to the last car. And you all know what that means.But when I ran away, yes, when I ran away to another country, I didn’t have to do that. I could go into any restaurant I wanted to, and I could drink water anyplace I wanted to, and I didn’t have to go to a colored toilet either, and I have to tell you it was nice, and I got used to it, and I liked it, and I wasn’t afraid anymore that someone would shout at me and say, “Nigger, go to the end of the line.” But you know, I rarely ever used that word. You also know that it has been shouted at me many times.So over there, far away, I was happy, and because I was happy I had some success, and you know that too.Then after a long time, I came to America to be in a great show for Mr. Ziegfeld, and you know Josephine was happy. You know that. Because I wanted to tell everyone in my country about myself. I wanted to let everyone know that I made good, and you know too that that is only natural.But on that great big beautiful ship, I had a bad experience. A very important star was to sit with me for dinner, and at the last moment I discovered she didn’t want to eat with a colored woman. I can tell you it was some blow. And I won’t bother to mention her name, because it is not important, and anyway, now she is dead.And when I got to New York way back then, I had other blows — when they would not let me check into the good hotels because I was colored, or eat in certain restaurants. And then I went to Atlanta, and it was a horror to me. And I said to myself, My God, I am Josephine, and if they do this to me, what do they do to the other people in America?You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I cold not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ‘cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.So I did open my mouth, and you know I did scream, and when I demanded what I was supposed to have and what I was entitled to, they still would not give it to me.So then they thought they could smear me, and the best way to do that was to call me a communist. And you know, too, what that meant. Those were dreaded words in those days, and I want to tell you also that I was hounded by the government agencies in America, and there was never one ounce of proof that I was a communist. But they were mad. They were mad because I told the truth. And the truth was that all I wanted was a cup of coffee. But I wanted that cup of coffee where I wanted to drink it, and I had the money to pay for it, so why shouldn’t I have it where I wanted it?
Friends and brothers and sisters, that is how it went. And when I screamed loud enough, they started to open that door just a little bit, and we all started to be able to squeeze through it. Not just the colored people, but the others as well, the other minorities too, the Orientals, and the Mexicans, and the Indians, both those here in the United States and those from India.
Now I am not going to stand in front of all of you today and take credit for what is happening now. I cannot do that. But I want to take credit for telling you how to do the same thing, and when you scream, friends, I know you will be heard. And you will be heard now.
But you young people must do one thing, and I know you have heard this story a thousand times from your mothers and fathers, like I did from my mama. I didn’t take her advice. But I accomplished the same in another fashion. You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself. And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun. Then you can answer them, and I can tell you — and I don’t want to sound corny — but friends, the pen really is mightier than the sword.
I am not a young woman now, friends. My life is behind me. There is not too much fire burning inside me. And before it goes out, I want you to use what is left to light that fire in you. So that you can carry on, and so that you can do those things that I have done. Then, when my fires have burned out, and I go where we all go someday, I can be happy.
You know I have always taken the rocky path. I never took the easy one, but as I get older, and as I knew I had the power and the strength, I took that rocky path, and I tried to smooth it out a little. I wanted to make it easier for you. I want you to have a chance at what I had. But I do not want you to have to run away to get it. And mothers and fathers, if it is too late for you, think of your children. Make it safe here so they do mot have to run away, for I want for you and your children what I had.
Ladies and gentlemen, my friends and family, I have just been handed a little note, as you probably say. It is an invitation to visit the President of the United States in his home, the White House.
I am greatly honored. But I must tell you that a colored woman — or, as you say it here in America, a black woman — is not going there. It is a woman. It is Josephine Baker.
This is a great honor for me. Someday I want you children out there to have that great honor too. And we know that that time is not someday. We know that that time is now.
I thank you, and may god bless you. And may He continue to bless you long after I am gone.
France is a foreign country! They do things differently there!
When Josephine Baker gave her talk at Fisk University on "France, North Africa and the Equality of the Races in France" it would surely have been framed by the American experience of a Black woman living and working in France. To some extent this was one more increment in the process of a particular Americanisation of the "idea" of "France and its culture", especially the Hollywood version, while clouding the actual attitudes to race and colonialism, embedded in French culture.
A colonial fantasy or . . .
This video montage begins with an excerpt from a documentary from Nine PBS. Living St. Louis Producer Ruth Ezell takes a special look back at the life of Josephine Baker, the first African-American female to reach international stardom. The edit begins with Josephine Baker's migration to France following her success in New York's world of entertainment.
The documentary includes an interview with Josephine Baker's biographer Bennetta Jules-Rosette, who presents the colonial context for the banana dance and costume, that is often ignored. The commentary then leads on to consider Baker's work as a film star and the 1935 film Princess Tam Tam.
The plot twist in this 1935 French black-and-white film, which stars Josephine Baker as a local Tunisian girl, is a revelation! The line in the dialogue that says it all, when translated, runs . . .
. . . "better where she is"!
This is the plot!
Frustrated writer Max de Mirecourt (Albert Préjean) goes to Tunisia in search of inspiration for his next novel. While there, Max lives in a villa with his servant Dar (Georges Peclet) and ghostwriter Coton (Robert Arnoux). Despite Coton's help, Max is unable to come up with any good story ideas. However, he soon meets a local girl named Alwina (Josephine Baker) whose personality intrigues him so greatly that he invents a character based on her for his newest (and 'most exciting') novel. His relation with Alwina serves a dual purpose in that it also angers (or at least highly annoys) his wife Lucie (Germaine Aussey) who has been flirting with the Maharaja of Datane (Jean Galland) back in Paris. Max takes Alwina under his wing and teaches her the manners and social graces of a high-society princess. He then whisks her away to Paris and presents her as Princess Tam Tam from faraway Africa.Lucie is further enraged by all the attention that Alwina receives, and after a friend sees Alwina dance provocatively in the sailors' bar, Lucie calls upon her Maharaja to craft a plan which will destroy her husband's relation with "the princess." The Maharaja throws a grand party, inviting the upper crust of Parisian society. Alwina is unable to resist the exotic music, and promptly joins the large, staged dance number, embarrassing Max – until he realizes that the entire audience is on their feet, applauding Alwina. Lucie is furious.
She is . . .
Lucie and Max forgive each other in the end and fall in love again, Alwina returns to Tunisia after the frustrating realization that, as the Maharaja puts it, "Some windows face to the West, and the others to the East."
Ultimately, however, the entire European affair is revealed to be little more than an enactment of Max's novel-in-progress. Alwina never does go to Europe, and the primary events of the film are simply a staging of how Max has imagined them. Alwina is given Max's Tunisian estate, and Max's new novel is a success. The title of his new work is "Civilisation." When asked about Alwina while back in Europe, Max states that she is "better where she is."
The film closes with a scene of Alwina and Dar back in Tunisia with their newborn child, with farm animals strewn about Max's mansion. In the final shot, a donkey eats the title page of "Civilisation" off Max's (now Alwina's) floor.So, "all's well that ends well" and when everyone is in their proper place?
"And here is now another example"
So says Roland Barthes in Myth Today:
"I am at the barber's, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. I am therefore again faced with a greater semiological system: there is a signifier, itself already formed with a previous system (a black soldier is giving the French salute); there is a signified (it is here a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a presence of the signified through the signifier."
Wikipedia says of the section Myth Today in Barthes Mythologies:
Following on from the first section, Barthes justifies and explains his choices and analysis. He calls upon the concepts of semiology developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, who described the connections between an object (the signified) and its linguistic representation (such as a word, the signifier) and how the two are connected. Working with this structure Barthes continues to show his idea of a myth as a further sign, with its roots in language, but to which something has been added. So with a word (or other linguistic unit) the meaning (apprehended content) and the sound come together to make a sign. To make a myth, the sign itself is used as a signifier, and a new meaning is added, which is the signified. But according to Barthes, this is not added arbitrarily. Although we are not necessarily aware of it, modern myths are created with a reason. As in the example of the red wine, mythologies are formed to perpetuate an idea of society that adheres to the current ideologies of the ruling class and its media.
Barthes demonstrates this theory with the example of a front cover from Paris Match edition no. 326, of July 1955, showing a young black soldier in French uniform saluting. The signifier: a saluting soldier, cannot offer us further factual information of the young man's life. But it has been chosen by the magazine to symbolise more than the young man; the picture, in combination with the signifieds of Frenchness, militariness, and relative ethnic difference, gives us a message about France and its citizens. The picture does not explicitly demonstrate "that France is a great empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag," etc., but the combination of the signifier and signified perpetuates the myth of imperial devotion, success and thus; a property of "significance" for the picture.
To what degree were the relative "freedoms" Josephine Baker experienced in France, subtly co-opted by a predominantly bourgeois ideology in France?
Roland Barthes has something to say on the matter of bourgeois ideology in the section of Myth Today headed:
The bourgeoisie as a joint-stock company
Myth lends itself to history in two ways: by its form, which is only relatively motivated; by its concept, the nature of which is historical. One can therefore imagine a diachronic study of myths, whether one submits them to a retrospection (which means founding an historical mythology) or whether one follows some of yesterday's myths down to their present forms (which means founding prospective history). If I keep here to a synchronic sketch of contemporary myths, it is for an objective reason: our society is the privileged field of mythical significations. We must now say why.
Whatever the accidents, the compromises, the concessions and the political adventures, whatever the technical, economic, or even social changes which history brings us, our society is still a bourgeois society. I am not forgetting that since 1789, in France, several types of bourgeoisie have succeeded one another in power; but the same status-a certain regime of ownership, a certain order, a certain ideology - remains at a deeper level. Now a remarkable phenomenon occurs in the matter of naming this regime: as an economic fact, the bourgeoisie is named without any difficulty: capitalism is openly professed. As a political fact, the bourgeoisie has some difficulty in acknowledging itself: there are no 'bourgeois' parties in the Chamber. As an ideological fact, it completely disappears: the bourgeoisie has obliterated its name in passing from reality to representation, from economic man to mental man. It comes to an agreement with the facts, but does not compromise about values, it makes its status undergo a real ex- nominating operation: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named. 'Bourgeois', 'petit-bourgeois', 'capitalism', 'proletariat' are the locus of an unceasing haemorrhage: meaning flows out of them until their very name, becomes unnecessary.
This ex-nominating phenomenon is important; let us examine it a little more closely. Politically, the haemorrhage of the name 'bourgeois' is effected through the idea of nation. This was once a progressive idea, which has served to get rid of the aristocracy; today, the bourgeoisie merges into the nation, even if it has, in order to do so, to exclude from it the elements which it decides are allogenous (the Communists). This planned syncretism allows the bourgeoisie to attract the numerical support of its temporary allies, all the intermediate, therefore 'shapeless' classes. A long-continued use of the word nation has failed to depoliticize it in depth; the political substratum is there, very near the surface, and some circumstances make it suddenly manifest. There are in the Chamber some 'national' parties, and nominal syncretism here makes conspicuous what it had the ambition of hiding: an essential disparity. Thus the political vocabulary of the bourgeoisie already postulates that the universal exists: for it, politics is already a representation, a fragment of ideology.
Politically, in spite of the universalistic effort of its vocabulary, the bourgeoisie eventually strikes against a resisting core which is, by definition, the revolutionary party. But this party can constitute only a political richness: in a bourgeois culture, there is neither proletarian culture nor proletarian morality, there is no proletarian art; ideologically, all that is not bourgeois is obliged to borrow from the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois ideology can therefore spread over everything and in so doing lose its name without risk: no one here will throw this name of bourgeois back at it. It can without resistance subsume bourgeois theatre, art and humanity under their eternal analogues; in a word, it can exnominate itself without restraint when there is only one single human nature left: the defection from the name 'bourgeois' is here complete.
The bourgeoisie, the nation, and the Americanisation of Paris?
The type of narcissism embedded in the bourgeois ideology of what we may call "French culture and the nation" is symmetrically mirrored in the type of narcissism of "American culture and the nation". And the mirror invariably reflects back the fact that both of these "projections" are . . .
. . . white and European!
Continued in PART 6.
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