PART 7. How Playboy explains Vietnam and the Americanisation of the World . . .

Atlantic crossings

Paris, New York and New Orleans - A Sentimental Education?

'HOW THE PANAMA CANAL WILL SHORTEN WORLD TRADE ROUTES'. SHIPPING ROUTES 1907 MAP

The story behind the completion of the Panama Canal is one that involves Colombia's borders and the Americaization of the Western Hemisphere, and discussed in this Re:LODE - A Cargo of Questions article. If Rudyard Kipling was right on the dictum - Transportation is civilisation - then the translation of Flaubert's Sentimental Education to a New York setting in the late twentieth century it was a reciprocation of a precedent in the story of the Americanisation of the World. This was the translation of Jazz to Paris and the myriad cultural crossings across the Atlantic, that follow in the historical wake and consequences of capitalism and the "middle passage".

Simon says 

This Simon has a blog called Books and Boots, lives and works in London, reads books and visits art exhibitions. The blog is a diary of the thoughts arising from these activities, and includes a commentary on Flaubert's Sentimental Education. A section of this webpage is titled: 

Paris 

If Madame Bovary was a portrait of rural France, Sentimental Education, although it includes a few other settings (Frédéric’s home town of Nogent, the Fontainebleu excursion), feels like a portrait of Paris, its streets, its geography, the wide river Seine, its colourful nightlife, and then as a setting for street fighting and revolution.

A formal dinner at Monsieur Dambreuse’s, where Frédéric is surprised at how boring and staid the banking-class guests are – a day at the races in the Champs de Mars (where Madame Arnoux sees Frédéric accompanying Rosanette, one of the many small incidents which add complication to the endless bedroom farce of his love life). Here is Frédéric mingling his dopey romantic feelings with the street life of the city.

"The dinners were now renewed; and the more visits he paid at Madame Arnoux’s, the more his love-sickness increased. The contemplation of this woman had an enervating effect upon him, like the use of a perfume that is too strong. It penetrated into the very depths of his nature, and became almost a kind of habitual sensation, a new mode of existence."

"The prostitutes whom he brushed past under the gaslight, the female ballad-singers breaking into bursts of melody, the ladies rising on horseback at full gallop, the shopkeepers’ wives on foot, the grisettes at their windows, all women brought her before his mental vision, either from the effect of their resemblance to her or the violent contrast to her which they presented. As he walked along by the shops, he gazed at the cashmeres, the laces, and the jewelled eardrops, imagining how they would look draped around her figure, sewn in her corsage, or lighting up her dark hair. In the flower-girls’ baskets the bouquets blossomed for her to choose one as she passed. In the shoemakers’ show-windows the little satin slippers with swan’s-down edges seemed to be waiting for her foot. Every street led towards her house; the hackney-coaches stood in their places to carry her home the more quickly; Paris was associated with her person, and the great city, with all its noises, roared around her like an immense orchestra."

Sentimental Education, Part one, chapter five.

The "sentimental education" of Americans in Paris?

Montmartre

A contemporary scene in Montmartre with shops for tourists and the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur.

A scene, set in Montmartre, from the film "An American in Paris".  

This 1951 American musical comedy film was inspired by the 1928 orchestral composition An American in Paris by George Gershwin. 

Woody Allen's film Manhattan's use of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is a significant element in his personal homage to his vision of New York, and, more broadly, Jazz Age references help define the cultural territory for a twentieth century story of American cultural hegemony as it crosses, back and forth, across the Atlantic Ocean.

Gershwin was to make this crossing in 1926, staying in Paris for a short period, during which he applied to study composition with the noted Nadia Boulanger, who, along with several other prospective tutors such as Maurice Ravel, turned him down, concerned that rigorous classical study would ruin his jazz-influenced style. Gershwin had already composed his first major work, Rhapsody in Blue, for orchestra and piano in 1924. It was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé and premiered by Paul Whiteman's Concert Band, in New York. It subsequently went on to be his most popular work, and established Gershwin's signature style and genius in blending vastly different musical styles, including jazz and classical, in revolutionary ways. This work came about following the success of an experimental classical-jazz concert held with Canadian singer Éva Gauthier in New York City in 1923, when bandleader Paul Whiteman decided to attempt a more ambitious feat. He asked Gershwin to write a concerto-like piece for an all-jazz concert in honour of Lincoln's Birthday to be given at Aeolian Hall. Whiteman was fixated on performing such an extended composition after he collaborated with Gershwin in The Scandals of 1922, and had been especially impressed by Gershwin's one-act "jazz opera" Blue Monday.

Gershwin initially turned down Whiteman's proposal but changed his mind after he and lyricist Buddy DeSylva had a game of billiards interrupted by Ira Gershwin, George's brother, who had been reading the January 4 edition of the New-York Tribune. An unsigned article entitled "What Is American Music?" about an upcoming Whiteman concert had caught Ira's attention, as the article reported that George Gershwin was already "at work on a jazz concerto" for Whiteman's concert. In a telephone conversation with Whiteman the next morning, Gershwin learned that Whiteman's arch rival Vincent Lopez was planning to steal the idea of his experimental concert and so there was no time to lose.

With only five weeks remaining until the premiere, Gershwin hurriedly set about composing the work. He later claimed that, while on a train journey to Boston, the thematic seeds for Rhapsody in Blue began to germinate in his mind. He told biographer Isaac Goldberg in 1931:

It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty [sic] bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer.... I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise. And there I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.

Gershwin began composing on January 7 (as dated on the original manuscript) for two pianos. He tentatively entitled the piece as American Rhapsody during its composition, but the title was changed to Rhapsody in Blue on the suggestion of Ira Gershwin after his visit to a gallery exhibition of James McNeill Whistler paintings, which had titles such as Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and Arrangement in Grey and Black.

From painterly to cinematic and orchestral fireworks . . .

. . . to Midnight in Paris!

The Woody Allen Pages contain useful information about The Music of Woody Allen Films. Re:LODE Radio chooses to quote from this article: 

Si Tu Vois Ma Mère by Sidney Bechet – Midnight In Paris – Music Of Woody Allen Films

November 18, 2015 

Woody Allen has loved Paris for a long time, but it took him over 40 films before he made a film that was fully set there. The result was Midnight In Paris, as glorious a love letter to Paris as Manhattan was to Allen’s home island. Both films open with exquisite montages capturing the beauty of each city. 

Manhattan famously got Gershwin. For Paris, Allen matched the images to a tune by one of his very favourites – Sidney Bechet.

Sidney Bechet was born in 1897 in New Orleans. He would grow up and learn the music of that city, and its rich Jazz. Soon, he was travelling the world playing in bands (and met and performed with Louis Armstrong). But his own personality let him down. He was violent and mean, and found himself arrested a couple of times. He finally called it quits from the US, and well into his 50s, he moved to France. There he found a home and recorded many tributes to that city.

‘Si tu vois ma mère‘ (if you see my mother) is one of a number of French tunes recorded by Bechet in his later years. It was his own composition and was first released in 1952. He had much bigger hits with French titles – ‘Petite Fleur‘, ‘Dans les rues d’Antibes‘ and ‘Les Oignons‘. Although he is tied to New Orleans, he definitely fits with a Paris film – the city where he died and is buried. 

It’s a better fit if that film is by Woody Allen. Allen has said that Bechet is one of his very favourites, if not his actual favourite. Allen plays clarinet at least partly inspired by Bechet. He named one of his daughters Bechet. He has even said that Bechet is the person he would most like to have dinner with.

Most interestingly, Allen has been working on a biopic of Bechet. Provisionally named ‘American Blues‘, it would feature Bechet and Armstrong. Because the story would have to be shot in multiple countries and Bechet is not necessarily a big draw, Allen has never been able to get it made. But he spoke about still working on it only two years ago. We were hoping it would be the 2016 Amazon series. This could be Allen’s Napoleon.

Despite that, Allen has rarely used Bechet’s music. Done out of love, he has described using Bechet music amongst dialogue or film footage as barbaric. Especially for his big hits. Which might explain the use of ‘Si tu vois ma mère‘, a lovely tune but hardly a hit. And the sequence has no characters, no dialogue.

But that scene – which opens Midnight In Paris – could be a short film itself. Allen (and cinematographer Darius Khondji) take us on a tour of Paris, starting with the bright morning. Every scene is beautiful – be it the stunning beauty of those world famous landmarks, to the simple rustic beauty of people sitting in cafes. It’s not just a Lonely Planet reel, there are lots of deep cuts. And time passes, and the sun sets into Paris, at night and the rain.

It leads us into a different story, but it sets the scene. We are immediately on Gil (Owen Wilson)’s side. Why wouldn’t you be washed up in this place?

Paris. Allen loves her. We love her. And this week, we have all been thinking about her. Allen’s little cinematic tribute might mean little in the light of big world events. But what we learn from Allen, in ‘Manhattan‘, is you have to decide on your own list of things that make you happy and get you through this awful life.

The internet doesn’t need anymore people quoting Woody Allen dialogue and lines. In three and a half years, we’ve never done it. This is a first and only time. This is Gil from ‘Midnight In Paris‘, on the city of lights.

I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can’t. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists, these lights, I mean come on, there’s nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.

We’ll leave you with grainy but exciting footage of Sidney Bechet, rocking out.

From New Orleans, Paris and on . . .

. . . to St Louis!

This accomplished cinematography captures images of a Paris where atmosphere, places and spaces are much more than "postcards", but nevertheless echo a version of the Guidebook bubble of information and perceptions when it comes to specific locations. And the Guidebook of Paris that omits mention of the Paris Commune is one that is governed by the demands of concision and the immediate needs of the tourist. It is the guidebook's prerogative to mention La Commune, often found in the various sections expounding on the area around Montmartre and the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, for the obvious and salient of reasons. 

Also found in these guidebooks is occasional mention made of the cultural geography of the city, the significant presence of writers and artists and the American cultural phenomenon of Jazz. Paris has become associated with, and represents, an era of American cultural and political creativity, and intimately and inextricably entangled in the rise of an American cultural hegemony. And, central to Woody Allen's plot for his film Midnight in Paris, is the early twentieth century era known as the Jazz Age in the United States and the Années folles ("crazy years" in French),referring to the decade of the 1920s in France, especially Paris, a term coined to describe the rich social, artistic, and cultural collaborations of the period.

Midnight in Paris - The Plot 

In 2010, Gil Pender, a successful but disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter, and his fiancée Inez are in Paris vacationing with Inez's wealthy, Republican parents. Gil is struggling to finish his debut novel, focusing on a man who works in a nostalgia shop. Inez dismisses his ambitions as a delusional dream and encourages him to stick with lucrative screenwriting. By chance, they meet Inez's friend Paul, who is described as both pedantic and a pseudo-intellectual, and his wife Carol. Paul speaks with great authority but questionable accuracy on the highlights of Paris, even contradicting a tour guide at the Musée Rodin, where he insists his knowledge of Rodin's relationships is more accurate than the guide's. Gil finds him annoying, yet Inez adores him.

A night of wine tasting gets Gil drunk, and he decides to walk the streets of Paris to return to the hotel; Inez goes off with Paul and Carol by taxi. Gil stops to get his bearings, and at midnight, a 1920s car pulls up beside him. The passengers, dressed in 1920s wardrobe, urge him to join them. They hit a party for Jean Cocteau attended by notable people of 1920s Paris: Cole Porter, his wife Linda Lee Porter, and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda gets bored and encourages Scott and Gil to leave with her. They first head to Bricktops, where they see Josephine Baker dancing, and then to a cafe where they run into Ernest Hemingway and Juan Belmonte. Zelda gets upset when Hemingway says her novel is weak, so she heads with Belmonte to St. Germain, followed by Scott, who doesn't like his wife with the matador. After discussing writing, Hemingway offers to show Gil's novel to Gertrude Stein. But as Gil exits the building to fetch his manuscript from his hotel, he returns to 2010: the bar with the 1920s literati is now a laundromat.

The next night, Gil wants to share with Inez his time-travel experience. But she ditches Gil before the clock strikes midnight. When it does, the same car returns; Gil joins Hemingway on his way to visit a friend. Gil is introduced to Gertrude Stein and other friends — Pablo Picasso and his lover Adriana — at her apartment. Adriana and Gil are instantly attracted to each other. Stein reads aloud the novel's first line:

'Out of the Past' was the name of the store, and its products consisted of memories: what was prosaic and even vulgar to one generation had been transmuted by the mere passing of years to a status at once magical and also camp.

Adriana says that she is hooked and that she has always had a longing for the past, especially the Belle Époque.

Gil continues his time travel for the next couple of nights. Inez is unimpressed with the boulevards and bistros and Gil's disappearing, while her father is suspicious and hires a private detective to follow him. Adriana has her time with Picasso and Hemingway, and eventually Gil, although he is conflicted by his attraction to her. Gil explains his confliction to Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Luis Buñuel, but as surrealists, they find his claim about coming from the future normal. Gil later suggests the plot of the film The Exterminating Angel to Buñuel, which he doesn't understand.

Inez and her parents are traveling to Mont Saint Michel while Gil meets Gabrielle, an antique dealer and fellow admirer of the Lost Generation. He buys a Cole Porter gramophone record from her and later finds at a book stall by the Seine Adriana's diary from the 1920s, which reveals that she was in love with him. Reading that she dreamed of receiving a gift of earrings from him and then making love to him, Gil tries to steal a pair of Inez's earrings to give to Adriana, but is thwarted by Inez's early return to the hotel room. So, Gil buys earrings for Adriana.

Returning to the past, he finds her at a party and tells her, "I sense there are some complicated feelings you have for me." He takes her for a walk, they kiss, and he gives her the earrings. While she's putting them on, a horse-drawn carriage comes down the street, and a richly dressed couple inside the carriage invite Gil and Adriana for a ride. The carriage transports the passengers to the Belle Époque, an era Adriana considers Paris's Golden Age. Gil and Adriana go first to Maxim's Paris, then to the Moulin Rouge where they meet Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas. Gil asks what they thought the best era was, and the three agree it is the Renaissance. The excited Adriana is offered a job designing ballet costumes and proposes to Gil that they stay, but Gil, upon observing that different people long for different "golden ages," realizes that despite the allure of nostalgia, any time can eventually become a dull present, so it's best to embrace your actual present. Adriana, however, decides to stay in the 1890s, and they part ways.

Gil rewrites the first two chapters of his novel and retrieves his draft from Stein, who praises his progress as a writer and tells him that Hemingway likes it but questions why the main character has not realized that his fiancée (based on Inez) is having an affair with the pedantic character (based on Paul).

Gil returns to 2010 and challenges Inez. She admits to having slept with Paul, but disregards it as a meaningless fling. Gil breaks up with her and decides to move to Paris. Amid Inez's pique, Gil calmly leaves, after which Inez's father tells her and her mother that he had Gil followed, though the detective has mysteriously disappeared. It is revealed that the detective found himself in the Versailles of Louis XIV and is last seen fleeing from the palace guards amid threats of "Off with his head!"

Walking by the Seine at midnight, Gil bumps into Gabrielle; he offers to walk her home after it starts to rain. They learn that they share the love of Paris in the rain.

Modernity and the Americanisation of Paris 

From Woody Allen's version of the Belle Époque, Maxim's Paris, and the Moulin Rouge, to the 1952 film of the same name, and the 1960 musical film Can Can, the idea, and ideology, of this created and constructed virtual Paris, is essentially an American phenomenon. 

From Maxim's to . . .

. . . to an American ballet?

From Maxim's Gil and Adriana's journeys through time in Midnight in Paris end up in the Belle Époque visiting the Moulin Rouge and enjoying the spectacle of the "French Cancan", and conversing with the artists Toulouse Lautrec, Gauguin and Degas. 

WILD, WICKED, WONDERFUL PARIS . . .

. . . ALL HER LOVES, LADIES AND LUSTY LEGENDS!

This scene is preceded in the montage by a trailer for the film Moulin Rouge, the 1952 British drama film by the American director John Huston. The poster says it all. It's advertising SEX, SEX and SEX! Set in Paris in the late 19th century, the focus of the film follows the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his pornocratic relationship the city's bohemian subculture in and around the burlesque palace the Moulin Rouge. The screenplay is by Huston, based on the 1950 novel by Pierre La Mure.  The cultural appropriation of this "idea" of Paris, is part and parcel of the ideology of the American century. This film, produced in the post World War II period, reflects the interests of an American bourgeoisie fascinated with the visual arts of Parisian based artists of the nineteenth century. This fascination with the Belle Époque, is not to be understood necessarily as an interest in the realities these artists were presenting and representing, but quite the opposite. The interest was, as far as Re:LODE Radio has worked out so far, in finding a way towards a validation of a bourgeois fantasy life, of a convivial, pretty, and smooth version of the world's appearance. 

This film poster for An American in Paris is for a French audience, encouraged to experience the result of George Gershwin's inspiration to overlay American Jazz with a classical orchestral arrangement. The film goes several steps further with a modern classical ballet, dressed and defined by images of French "modern art" and the subject of Paris, appropriated from The Museum Without Walls, and filling the Hollywood studio sets with expansive versions of Lautrec and Dufy.

Dufy's Paris . . .

. . . Hollywood style!

The Parisian reality, the reality of urban experience for Parisians, the experience of class, of poverty for the many and extreme and ostentatious wealth for the few, the inequality born of the "pornocratie", has to be concealed, veiled, but also enjoyed in the acceptable, and respectable "frisson", a zone where art mixes with vice. The Can Can, for example.

The can-can is believed to have evolved from the final figure in the quadrille, a popular social dance for four or more couples. The exact origin of the dance is obscure, but the steps may have been inspired by a popular entertainer of the 1820s, Charles Mazurier, well known for his acrobatics, including the grand écart or jump splits — both popular features of the can-can.

As this new sequence was introduced, the cavalier seul, the men were allowed a moment of exuberance dancing alone, throwing themselves on the floor and sliding across the dance hall. This sequence became known as the chahut, meaning chaos, or cancan, after the noise made by parading geese or ducks. It was when women chose to dance alone and introduce their own moves, that the dance began to be identified with the laundresses of Montmartre. The mythology embedded in this account is difficult to untangle from the actuality, a mythology evident in the many narratives that accompany the emergence of this scandalous form of dance and display. The scandalousness of the can-can was part of its appeal, and down to the fact that in the 19th century, women wore pantalettes, which had an open crotch, and the high kicks were intentionally revealing. There is no evidence that can-can dancers wore special closed underwear, although it has been said that the Moulin Rouge management did not permit dancers to perform in "revealing undergarments". The idea that the origins of the phenomenon of lay with working women is another layer in a mythology that sustained the distorted pornocratic vision of both class and gender. 

As the dance became more popular, professional performers emerged, although it was still danced by individuals, not by a chorus line. The early can-can dancers were, as in the Paris Opera House ballet, or the laundry workers, more than likely to have engaged in prostitution to supplement meagre wages. However, by the 1890s, it was possible to earn a living as a full-time dancer and stars such as La Goulue and Jane Avril emerged, who were highly paid for their appearances at the Moulin Rouge and elsewhere. The most prominent male can-can dancer of the time was Valentin le Désossé (Valentin the Boneless) a frequent partner of La Goulue. The professional dancers of the Second Empire and the fin de siècle developed the can-can moves that were later incorporated by the choreographer Pierre Sandrini in the spectacular "French Cancan", which he devised at the Moulin Rouge in the 1920s and presented at his own Bal Tabarin from 1928. This was a combination of the individual style of the Parisian dance-halls and the chorus-line style of British and American music halls. 

This so-called "French Cancan" , it turns out, was an import from America. The can-can had been introduced in America on 23 December 1867 by Giuseppina Morlacchi, dancing as a part of The Devil's Auction at the Theatre Comique in Boston. It was billed as "Grand Gallop Can-Can, composed and danced by Mlles. Morlacchi, Blasina, Diani, Ricci, Baretta ... accompanied with cymbals and triangles by the coryphees and corps de ballet." The new dance received an enthusiastic reception. Outside France, the can-can achieved popularity in music halls, where it was danced by groups of women in choreographed routines. This style was imported back into France in the 1920s for the benefit of tourists, and the "French Cancan" was born—a highly choreographed routine lasting ten minutes or more, with the opportunity for individuals to display their "specialities". The main moves are the high kick or battement, the rond de jambe (quick rotary movement of lower leg with knee raised and skirt held up), the port d'armes (turning on one leg, while grasping the other leg by the ankle and holding it almost vertically), the cartwheel and the grand écart (the flying or jump splits). It has become common practice for dancers to scream and yelp while performing the can-can. 

Is the "French Cancan" . . .

. . . an American can-can?

This video montage begins with the penultimate scenes from Cole Porter's Can-Can, the 1960 American musical film. Firstly, at a court hearing just as the case against the dancers is going to be dismissed due to lack of evidence. However, the president of a local moral league demands that action must be taken against the lewd performance. A senior judge suggests that the court view the dance first-hand to determine whether it is indeed indecent. A can-can is performed to the approval of all, and the Madame president agreeing that it is not in any way obscene.

Under the dancers skirts the black underwear,  suspenders and black stockings conform to the acceptable Hollywood standards of the time. These scenes are followed by a trailer for French Cancan (also known as Only the French Can), a 1955 French-Italian musical film written and directed by Jean Renoir. Where Renoir's previous film Le Carosse d’or had celebrated the 18th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, this work is a homage to the Parisian café-concert of the 19th century with its popular singers and dancers. Visually, the film evokes the paintings of Edgar Degas and the Impressionists, including his own father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It also marked his return to France and to French cinema after an exile that began in 1940. 

Richard Brody of The New Yorker encapsulates the plot and charm of this film in a concise paragraph:

Jean Renoir’s fictionalized, music-filled, and color-splashed account, from 1954, of the founding of the Moulin Rouge and the creation of its signature dance is a poignant paean to the splendor and travails of a life in art. During a night of wild slumming in a rough Montmartre dance hall, a den of pimps and gangsters, the scuffling Belle Époque impresario Danglard (Jean Gabin) gets the idea for a retro spectacle with a flamboyant yet wholesome setting, and finds a young washerwoman, Nini (Françoise Arnoul), whom he wants as his star and his mistress. Renoir shows the constant threat of poverty, the shifting fortunes, the pressure of producers, the erotic turmoil, and the tumultuous spillover of intimate rivalry onto the stage as both the source and the price of artistic beauty. He’s the least formalist of dance directors, capturing the overheated exuberance in a swirl of curves and a swing of lines and revealing sex as the fuel on which the theatre runs. The thrilling splits and frenzied high kicks are a stylized excuse to flash pink thighs and white panties, but Renoir presents talent and vision as the ultimate objects of desire. 

A flash of the dancers white panties are obscured by the hem of a petticoat in the film poster above, the more historically accurate pantalettes promise the possibility of another kind of "revelation" in another poster design for the film shown below.

Following on, in the next sequence of this montage, an excerpt from a German softcore film version of the can-can, the flashes of dark pubic hair against the white petticoats, convey more accurately the origin of the dance's "scandalous" reputation, and reminiscent of Courbet's model for the painting Origin of the World and its critics. 

As part of the 130th anniversary celebrations of the Moulin Rouge, can-can dancers performed the "French Can-can" at the Eiffel Tower, a cultural import from America that signifies the complete failure of collective memory and total absorption of the American global cultural hegemony in the transformation of a dance that signifies "Paris".

And NO flashing of pubic hair!

All that Jazz and the Jazz Age!

Americans in Paris 

For Re:LODE Radio this stream of image/text, in what Walter Benjamin for his Arcades project called "convolutes", and trying to understand how Playboy explains Vietnam and the Americanisation of the World, is interwoven with the narratives and history associated with Jazz. Surely this must include the American legacies resulting from a culture that justified slavery through the de-humanising logic of racism, white superiority and the de-humanising logic of colonialism and Empire, situated at the heart of both American and European capitalism? 

Playboy, Jazz, New Orleans, Creole peoples, Creoles of colour, colourism, human geographies and demographies?

Americans in Paris

This video montage has a number of sequences that are all linked in this text. The text of this "convolute" works as a matrix, employing a hybrid method, a mixture of exegesis  (from the Greek ἐξήγησις from ἐξηγεῖσθαι, "to lead out", is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text), and ekphrasis (from the Greek ἐκ ek and φράσις phrásis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, and the verb ἐκφράζειν ekphrázein, 'to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name'), a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its essence and form, and in doing so, relate more directly to the audience. In this case using clips from a number of films, ekphrasis is about highlighting through a "rhetorical vividness" what is happening, or what is shown in, say, any of the visual arts, and in doing so, may enhance the original art and at the same time make a point or two, or three, and so take on a life of its own.

Traditionally, the term exegesis was used primarily for work with religious texts, especially the Bible. In modern usage, exegesis can involve critical interpretations of virtually any text, including not just religious texts but also philosophy, literature, or virtually any other genre of writing. The phrase biblical exegesis is now used to distinguish studies of the Bible from other critical textual explanations.

Textual criticism investigates the history and origins of the text, but exegesis may include the study of the historical and cultural backgrounds of the author, text, and original audience. 

The first sequence is the beginning of Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris, as shown above with reference to the Creole and African American Jazz musician Sidney Bechet. This is followed by a trailer for the Hollywood musical film of An American in Paris, with the jazz inspired Gershwin score, and homage to the "modern art" of the Belle Époque. This sequence is followed by a trailer for the film Paris Blues about two American jazz musicians one black and the other white, making American music in a Parisian setting. The next scenes in the sequence are taken from Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris  when, after midnight, the character Gil finds himself at a party in honour of Jean Cocteau and ending up talking with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, listening to Cole Porter on the piano, discussing art and writing with Hemingway and Picasso, and falling in and out of love. Next comes a scene from the musical film High Society, and Bing Crosby singing Cole Porter's song Now You Has Jazz where the global "triumph" of Jazz is underscored by the performance of Louis Armstrong and his band, individually introduced by name. This is followed by a return to the end of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris  when Gil meets Gabrielle late at night and they talk of Cole Porter's music and how beautiful Paris is when it rains. Both of the last two sequences in this montage are taken from the film Paris, je t'aime (Paris, I love you), an anthology film that consists of eighteen short films set in different arrondissements (districts) of Paris. The film begins with a segment set in Montmartre, the 18th Arrondissement, but this montage includes clips from the second segment, set in the 5th Arrondissement, and the eighteenth and last segment of the film, set in the 14th Arrondissement. The voiceover by Carol, a letter carrier on her first European holiday comes later, on her return to America, when she recites in amateur French what she loves about Paris, at her French language class in Denver, Colorado.

The first Playboy interview and Jazz

As mentioned above, the video montage begins with Woody Allen's introductory sequence of Midnight in Paris with the "sights" of Paris and the "sounds" of the jazz musician Sidney Bechet born in 1897 as a Creole of Colour in New Orleans, the human and geographical source of Jazz, and in 1959 ending his days in a western suburb of Paris. The story of this individual migration, among a myriad other migrations prompts Re:LODE Radio to follow through on the cultural, political, economic and geographic connections, especially as it relates to the way the dominant ideologies of a world dominated by a process of "Americanisation" applies to this particular "convolute".

Playboy's MISS SEPTEMBER 1962

September Playmate Mickey Winters first took to horses on a dare. She has since been balancing her big-city glamour gigs as a Chicago Playboy Club Bunny with regular sessions of riding country miles on a nearby Illinois farm. Born in Paris, Mickey (nee Michele) and her family made their move to Chicago when she was three; following Windy City schooling, she worked as a private secretary for Alcoa Aluminum before joining the Club.

Miss September stands five feet, weighs just 100 pounds, loves picnics, walking barefoot, twisting, and helping herself to huge strawberry sundaes. Our Bunny-Playmate also likes relaxing in the hay. Take a look at the gatefold where birthday-suited Mickey illustrates the finer attractions of old-fashioned country living.

The centrefold photographic model of Playboy's September issue of 1962 was Mickey Winters. According to Babepedia, Mickey Winters was born on 30th September 1940 and is 81 years young, and was born in Paris, France. 

The first of many Playboy interviews was published in this edition. It was Alex Haley, the American writer and author who conducted this first interview with Miles Davis, the American trumpeter, bandleader, composer and among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Later, in the May issue of Playboy in 1963 Alex Haley's interview with Malcolm X was published, and was followed in 1965 by his first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

This book was a collaboration, the result of numerous lengthy interviews with Malcolm X. Alex Haley was to go on to publish the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. ABC adapted the book as a television miniseries of the same name and aired it in 1977 to a record-breaking audience of 130 million viewers. In the United States, the book and miniseries raised the public awareness of black American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history.

The interview

Re:LODE Radio chooses these two excerpts from the interview. First excerpt: 

PLAYBOY: What types of people do you find especially irritating?

DAVIS : Well, these people that's always coming up bugging me until they get me to act like this crap they heard. They ask you things, you say what you think, and if it ain't what they want to hear, then something's wrong with you and they go away mad and think you don't like them. I bet I have had that happen 500 times. In this last club I played, this newspaper reporter kept after me when I told him I didn't have no more to say. He wasn't satisfied with that. After the next set, he come up again, either drunk or playing drunk, and shoved into me. I told him to get the hell out of my way, and then he was fine -- he went right out and wrote that. But he didn't tell how it happened.

And I'm mad every time I run into the Jim Crow scene, I don't care what form it takes. You can't hardly play anywhere you don't run into some of these cats full of prejudice. I don't know how many I've told, "Look, you want me to talk to you and you're prejudiced against me and all that. Why'n't you go on back where you're sitting and be prejudiced by yourself and leave me alone?" I have enough problems without trying to make them feel better. Then they go off and join the rest saying I'm such a big bastard.

I've got no plans of changing what I think. I don't dig people in clubs who don't pay the musicians respect. The average jazz musician today, if he's making it, is just as trained as classical musicians. You ever see anybody go up bugging the classical musicians when they are on the job and trying to work?

Even in jazz -- you look at the white bandleaders -- if they don't want anybody messing with them when they are working, you don't hear anybody squawking. It's just if a Negro is involved that there's something wrong with him. My troubles started when I learned to play the trumpet and hadn't learned to dance.

PLAYBOY: You feel that the complaints about you are because of your race?

DAVIS : I know damn well a lot of it is race. White people have certain things they expect from Negro musicians -- just like they've got labels for the whole Negro race. It goes clear back to the slavery days. That was when Uncle Tomming got started because white people demanded it. Every little black child grew up seeing that getting along with white people meant grinning and acting clowns. It helped white people to feel easy about what they had done, and were doing, to Negroes, and that's carried right on over to now. You bring it down to musicians, they want you to not only play your instrument, but to entertain them, too, with grinning and dancing.

PLAYBOY: Generally speaking, what are your feelings with regard to race?

DAVIS : I hate to talk about what I think of the mess because my friends are all colors. When I say that some of my best friends are white, I sure ain't lying. The only white people I don't like are the prejudiced white people. Those the shoe don't fit, well, they don't wear it. I don't like the white people that show me they can't understand that not just the Negroes, but the Chinese and Puerto Ricans and any other races that ain't white, should be given dignity and respect like everybody else.

But let me straighten you -- I ain't saying I think all Negroes are the salt of the earth. It's plenty of Negroes I can't stand, too. Especially those that act like they think white people want them to. They bug me worse than Uncle Toms.

But prejudiced white people can't see any of the other races as just individual people. If a white man robs a bank, it's just a man robbed a bank. But if a Negro or a Puerto Rican does it, it's them awful Negroes or Puerto Ricans. Hardly anybody not white hasn't suffered from some of white people's labels. It used to be said that all Negroes were shiftless and happy-go-lucky and lazy. But that's been proved a lie so much that now the label is that what Negroes want integration for is so they can sleep in the bed with white people. It's another damn lie. All Negroes want is to be free to do in this country just like anybody else. Prejudiced white people ask one another, "Would you want your sister to marry a Negro?" It's a jive question to ask in the first place -- as if white women stand around helpless if some Negro wants to drag one off to a preacher. It makes me sick to hear that. A Negro just might not want your sister. The Negro is always to blame if some white woman decides she wants him. But it's all right that ever since slavery, white men been having Negro women. Every Negro you see that ain't black, that's what's happened somewhere in his background. The slaves they brought here were all black.

What makes me mad about these labels for Negroes is that very few white people really know what Negroes really feel like. A lot of white people have never even been in the company of an intelligent Negro. But you can hardly meet a white person, especially a white man, that don't think he's qualified to tell you all about Negroes.

You know the story the minute you meet some white cat and he comes off with a big show that he's with you. It's 10,000 things you can talk about, but the only thing he can think of is some other Negro he's such close friends with. Intelligent Negroes are sick of hearing this. I don't know how many times different whites have started talking, telling me they was raised up with a Negro boy. But I ain't found one yet that knows whatever happened to that boy after they grew up.

Second excerpt:

PLAYBOY: Do you, in your position as a famous Negro, meet prejudice?

DAVIS : I told you, someway or other, every Negro meets it, I don't care who he is! Look, man, I sent for an electrician to fix something in the house. When he rang the bell, I answered and he looked at me like I was dirt, and said, "I want to see the owner, Mr. Davis." When I said, "You looking at him," the cat turned beet red. He had me figured as the porter. Now he's mad and embarrassed. What had I done to him but called to give him work?

That same week, I had seen a lot of them West Point cadets, and in a bar I asked why there was so many of them in town. Man, I just asked the cat a question and he moved up the bar and didn't speak! But then somebody recognized me and he got red as that electrician. He came trying to apologize and saying he had my records. I told him I had just paid enough taxes to cover his free ride at West Point, and I walked out. I guess he's somewhere now with the others saying I'm such a bastard. It bugged me so, man, I wasn't worth a damn for two or three days. It wasn't just him ignoring me I was thinking about, but in two or three years, Gregory, my oldest boy, may be doing some Army time. How am I supposed to feel about him maybe serving under this cat?

Then take this tour I made -- Frances and I had train reservations to California. But this clerk I showed my identification to, he took it and looked at me just like the West Point cat. When he said he had to check with somebody else, I asked him what was the trouble. You know he had the nerve to tell me I might have forged it! Ain't no need of me telling you what I told him, nobody would print it. But we went to the airport and took a plane. I'm spending my money, the railroads are broke, even this son of a bitch's job's in trouble, but all he can see is I'm black, so it's all right to insult me. Bad as I hate to fly, I ain't been on a train since, because I haven't met Jim Crow on the airlines.

PLAYBOY : In your field, music, don't some Negro jazzmen discriminate against white musicians?

DAVIS : Crow Jim is what they call that. Yeah. It's a lot of the Negro musicians mad because most of the best-paying jobs go to the white musicians playing what the Negroes created. But I don't go for this, because I think prejudice one way is just as bad as the other way. I wouldn't have no other arranger but Gil Evans -- we couldn't be much closer if he was my brother. And I remember one time when I hired Lee Konitz, some colored cats bitched a lot about me hiring an ofay in my band when Negroes didn't have work. I said if a cat could play like Lee, I would hire him, I didn't give a damn if he was green and had red breath.

Jim Crow? 

In PART 3. of this "Convolute" on How Playboy explains Vietnam and the Americanisation of the World . . .

. . . and following on from the Martini Burlesque at the Playboy Mansion, the origins of the burlesque caricature of the Jim Crow stereotype are set out in the context of the origins of the first and uniquely American popular art form of theatre - Blackface Minstrelsy.  

Double standards and double entendre? 

The Jim Crow era laws were nothing more than entrenched racist attitudes enshrined in state law. The double standards suffered and experienced by black people up until the 1960's had continued for nearly a century. The 1954–1968 civil rights movement in the United States had been preceded by a decades-long campaign by African Americans and their like-minded allies to end legalised racial discrimination, disenfranchisement and racial segregation in the United States. The movement has its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, although it made its largest legislative gains in the mid-1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the human rights of all Americans.

mm

The 1962 Playboy first interview provided a platform to draw attention to issues of race and racism that were almost taboo, and in a way that would have influenced a particular demographic in Playboy's American male audience in the months leading to the March on Washington that's credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and preceded the Selma Voting Rights Movement, when national media coverage contributed to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that same year.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

When it comes to the constellation of pornotropia, it is worth flagging Miles Davis' interview comments again on the matter of racism, sex, gender and race: 

Prejudiced white people ask one another, "Would you want your sister to marry a Negro?" It's a jive question to ask in the first place -- as if white women stand around helpless if some Negro wants to drag one off to a preacher. It makes me sick to hear that. A Negro just might not want your sister. The Negro is always to blame if some white woman decides she wants him. But it's all right that ever since slavery, white men been having Negro women. Every Negro you see that ain't black, that's what's happened somewhere in his background. The slaves they brought here were all black. 

Davis' comments clearly recognise the actuality, and also the way ideology works by turning the way things actually are upside down. Althusser's method for exposing the truth through the upturn of the ideological is reflected in the points that Davis makes about the white supremacist sense of disgust at the prospect of a white sister marrying a black man, and then turning that sensibility (or insensibility) around to face up to the facts, and the consequences, of centuries of the white man's sexual abuse of black women and girls.

"But it's all right that ever since slavery, white men been having Negro women."  

During the long period of the practice of slavery in the United States owners of slaves could legally use them as sexual objects. Therefore, slavery in the United States encompassed wide-ranging rape and sexual abuse, including many forced pregnancies, in order to produce children for sale. Many slaves fought back against sexual attacks, and some died resisting them; others were left with psychological and physical scars. "Soul murder, the feeling of anger, depression and low self-esteem" is how historian Nell Irvin Painter describes the effects of this abuse, linking it to slavery. Slaves regularly suppressed anger before their masters to avoid showing weakness.

Harriet Jacobs said in her narrative that she believed her mistress did not try to protect her because she was jealous of her master's sexual interest in her. Victims of abuse during slavery may have blamed themselves for the incidents, due to their isolation.

Rape laws in the South embodied a race-based double standard. Black men accused of rape during the colonial period were often punished with castration, and the penalty was increased to death during the Antebellum Period; however, white men could legally rape their female slaves. 

Men and boys were also sexually abused by slaveholders. Thomas Foster says that although historians have begun to cover sexual abuse during slavery, few focus on sexual abuse of men and boys because of the assumption that only enslaved women were victimized. Foster suggests that men and boys may have also been forced into unwanted sexual activity; one problem in documenting such abuse is that they, of course, did not bear mixed-race children. ( Foster, Thomas (2011). "The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 20 (3): 445–464.) Both masters and mistresses were thought to have abused male slaves. 

The "gaze" of the "master" as "abuser"?

Vasily Polenov: Le droit du Seigneur (1874); a nineteenth-century Russian artist's painting of an old man bringing his young daughters to their feudal lord

Angela Davis contends that the systematic rape of female slaves is analogous to the supposed medieval concept of droit du seigneur, believing that the rapes were a deliberate effort by slaveholders to extinguish resistance in women and reduce them to the status of animals. (Marable, Manning, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society South End Press, 2000, p 73)

The sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in a patriarchal Southern culture which treated all women, black and white, as property. Although Southern mores regarded white women as dependent and submissive, black women were often consigned to a life of sexual exploitation. Racial purity was the driving force behind the Southern culture's prohibition of sexual relations between white women and black men; however, the same culture protected sexual relations between white men and black women. The result was a number of mixed-race offspring. Many women were raped, and had little control over their families. Children, free women, indentured servants, and men were not immune from abuse by masters and owners. Nell Irvin Painter also explains that the psychological outcome of such treatment often had the same result of "soul murder". (See Children of the plantation.) Children, especially young girls, were often subjected to sexual abuse by their masters, their masters' children, and relatives. Similarly, indentured servants and slave women were often abused. Since these women had no control over where they went or what they did, their masters could manipulate them into situations of high risk, i.e. forcing them into a dark field or making them sleep in their master's bedroom to be available for service. Free or white women could charge their perpetrators with rape, but slave women had no legal recourse; their bodies legally belonged to their owners. This record has also given historians the opportunity to explore sexual abuse during slavery in populations other than enslaved women.

Three hundred years before Playboy's interview in 1962, in 1662, the Southern colonies adopted into law the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, by which the children of enslaved women took the status of their mothers regardless of the ethnicity of their fathers. This was a departure from common law, which held that children took the status of their father. Some fathers freed their children, but many did not. The law relieved men of responsibility to support their children, and restricted the open secret of miscegenation to the slave quarters. However, Europeans and other visitors to the South noted the number of mixed-race slaves. During the 19th century Mary Chesnut and Fanny Kemble, whose husbands were planters, chronicled the disgrace of white men taking sexual advantage of slave women.

Racial prejudice, the law and sexual relations

In 1962 the likelihood of a white man's sister marrying an African American man has to be set against the fact that in many southern states in the United States typically defined mixed race marriages or sexual relations as a felony. These so-called anti-miscegenation laws (also known as miscegenation laws) were laws passed by most states that prohibited interracial marriage and interracial sexual relations. Some such laws predate the establishment of the United States, some dating to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialisation of slavery. 

At the time of this first Playboy interview it was to be another five years before most U.S. states had repealed such laws when in 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional in the remaining 16 states.

These laws prohibited the issue of marriage licenses and the solemnisation of weddings between mixed race couples and prohibited the officiating of such ceremonies. Sometimes, the individuals attempting to marry would not be held guilty of miscegenation itself, but felony charges of adultery or fornication would be brought against them instead. All anti-miscegenation laws banned marriage between Whites and non-White groups, primarily Black people, but often also Native Americans and Asian Americans. 

The term miscegenation was first used in 1863, during the American Civil War, by journalists to discredit the abolitionist movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of interracial marriage after the abolition of slavery. Indeed, the history of the legal, psychological and political contortions around sex and slavery are indicative of something Re:LODE Radio considers pathological as well as ideological. 

At the root of the "fears" and the psychological framework associated with social and political control over the issue of "interracial" marriage between two human beings was the justification of an economic imperative, a capitalist system that required the labour of slaves to maximise profit. The "horror", to echo Conrad's doubling of the use of the word in his novella Heart of Darkness, "The horror! The horror!", and the accompanying corruption that ensued, was the predictable result of the abuse of an institutionalised and racist pattern of power relations. 

Slavery in North America began in the colonial period, when the European colonial powers, Britain, Spain and France held sway. The first colonies to institute laws against interracial sexual liaisons, including marriage, were enacted in the colonial era in the colonies of Virginia and Maryland, which depended economically on slavery.

At first, in the 1660s, the first laws in Virginia and Maryland regulating marriage between Whites and Black people only pertained to the marriages of Whites to Black and mulatto enslaved people and indentured servants. In 1664, Maryland criminalised such marriages — the 1681 marriage of Irish-born Nell Butler to an enslaved African man was an early example of the application of this law. The Virginian House of Burgesses passed a law in 1691 forbidding free Black people and Whites to intermarry, followed by Maryland in 1692. This was the first time in American history that a law was invented that restricted access to marriage partners solely on the basis of "race", not class or condition of servitude. Later these laws also spread to colonies with fewer enslaved and free Black people, such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Moreover, after the independence of the United States had been established, similar laws were enacted in territories and states which outlawed slavery.

The First Slave Auction at New Amsterdam in 1655, by Howard Pyle. The laws relating to slavery and their enforcement hardened in the second half of the 17th century, and the prospects for Africans and their descendants grew increasingly dim. By 1640, the Virginia courts had sentenced at least one black servant, John Punch, to slavery. In 1656 Elizabeth Key won a suit for freedom based on her father's status as a free Englishman, his having baptised her as Christian in the Church of England, and the fact that he established a guardianship for her that was supposed to be a limited indenture. 

Following her case, in 1662 the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law with the doctrine of partus, stating that any child born in the colony would follow the status of its mother, bond or free. This overturned a long held principle of English Common Law, whereby a child's status followed that of the father. It removed any responsibility for the children from white fathers who had abused and raped slave women. Most did not acknowledge, support, or emancipate their resulting children.

In the Wikipedia article on Slavery in the colonial history of the United States under the section heading; Sexual role differentiation and slavery, it sets out how a particular part of the slavery oriented economy led to a sexually violent environment and a severe impact upon the women condemned to slavery.

"Depending upon their age and gender, slaves were assigned a particular task, or tasks, that had to be completed during the course of the day." In certain settings, men would participate in the hard labour, such as working on the farm, while women would generally work in the household. They would "be sent out on errands but in most cases their jobs required that they spend much of their time within their owner's household." These gender distinctions were mainly applied in the Northern colonies and on larger plantations. In Southern colonies and smaller farms, however, women and men typically engaged in the same roles, both working in the tobacco crop fields for example.

Although slave women and men in some areas performed the same type of day-to-day work, "[t]he female slave ... was faced with the prospect of being forced into sexual relationships for the purpose of reproduction." This reproduction would either be forced between one African slave and another, or between the slave woman and the owner. Slave owners saw slave women in terms of prospective fertility. That way, the number of slaves on a plantation could multiply without having to purchase another African. Unlike the patriarchal society of white Anglo-American colonists, "slave families" were more matriarchal in practice. "Masters believed that slave mothers, like white women, had a natural bond with their children that therefore it was their responsibility — more so than that of slave fathers — to care for their offspring." Therefore, women had the extra responsibility, on top of their other day-to-day work, to take care of children. Men, in turn, were often separated from their families. "At the same time that slaveholders promoted a strong bond between slave mothers and their children, they denied to slave fathers their paternal rights of ownership and authority..." Biological families were often separated by sale.

This state of affairs was maintained in the law, particularly the aforementioned doctrine of: Partus sequitur ventrem (L. "That which is born follows the womb"; also partus), the legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there, conveniently mandating that all children would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property, that is "chattels".

The doctrine's most significant effect was placing into chattel slavery all children born to enslaved women. Partus sequitur ventrem soon spread from the colony of Virginia to all of the Thirteen Colonies. As a function of the political economy of chattel slavery in Colonial America, the legalism of partus sequitur ventrem exempted the biological father from any relationship of responsibility toward children he fathered with enslaved women, and gave all rights in the children to the slave owner. The denial of paternity to enslaved children secured the slaveholders' right to profit from exploiting the labour of children engendered, bred, and born into slavery.

A slaver sells his mulatto son into slavery. 

A detail from The House that Jeff Built, a denunciation of Jefferson Davis and slavery, by David Claypoole Johnston, 1863.

This graphic condemnation of the leader and President of the Confederacy, published as the civil war raged, and only to maintain the profit margins of plantation owners through the exploitation of slave labour, is a powerful example of abolitionist propaganda. 

A later version of this same subject, in a painting with an abolitionist message, was produced after the war had been lost by the Confederacy, by an artist who had served in the Confederate army.

This painting by Thomas Satterwhite Noble (May 29, 1835 – April 27, 1907), an American painter and the first head of the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati, Ohio, is titled The Price of Blood (1868), and depicts a white slave owner selling his half-white slave son. 

Atlantic crossings?

Noble was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and raised on a plantation where hemp and cotton were grown. His father and grandfather owned slaves. He showed an interest and propensity for art at an early age. He first studied painting with Samuel Woodson Price in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1852 and then continued his studies with Price, Oliver Frazier and George P.A. Healey at Transylvania University in Lexington. In 1853 he moved to New York city, before moving to Paris to study with Thomas Couture from 1856 to 1859.

This website, devoted to Noble's artistic legacy, has a biographical section that assumes that: 

"Although his father and grandfather owned slaves, TS Noble rejected slavery, presumably as a result of his experiences in Paris and New York which exposed him to progressive thought outside of his upbringing. From this broadening, he felt morally compelled to explore the immorality of the practice and institution"

On his return to the United States from Paris in 1859 Noble was intent on beginning his art career. However, as the Wikipedia article says; 

"with the beginning of the Civil War, as a Southerner, he served in the Confederate army from 1862 to 1865. After the war, Noble was paroled to St. Louis and began painting. With the success of his first painting, Last Sale of the Slaves, he received sponsorship from wealthy Northern benefactors for a studio in New York City. Noble lived in New York city from 1866 to 1869, during which time he painted some of his most well-known oil paintings."

"The Last Sale of Slaves" (1865) by Thomas Satterwhite Noble. The image is of a scene on St. Louis Court House steps, January 1, 1861, when a group of abolitionists bid deliberately low to undermine the practice of selling slaves.

Q. Was Noble's choice of subject matter shaped by opportunities in the art market, or "the great heart of humanity"? 

A. Probably a mixture of the two! 

In her essay Thomas Satterwhite Noble's Mulattos: From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper, Jo-Ann Morgan raises a similar question: 

With emancipation a fait accompli by 1865, one might ask why Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1907), former Confederate soldier, son of a border state slaveholder, began painting slavs then. Noble had known the "peculiar institution" at first hand, albeit from a privileged position within the master class. As a result, his choice to mark upon a career as a painter using historical incidents from slavery makes for an interesting study. were the paintings a way of atoning for his Confederate culpability, a rebel pounding his sword into a paintbrush to appease the conquering North? Or was he capitalizing on his unique geographic perspective as a scion of slave-trafficking Frankfort, Kentucky, soon to head a prestigious art school in Cincinnati, the city where so many runaways first tasted freedom?

(Journal of American Studies Vol. 41, No. 1 (Apr., 2007), pp. 83-114)

In her essay Jo-Ann Morgan draws particular attention to two of the eight paintings where Noble had used African American subjects, all but one based on historical incidents. 

From the barefoot Madonna, as in The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis, and to Maggie the Ripper, in the painting titled "Modern Medea" (1867), that depicts the fugitive slave Margaret Garner, standing over the body of her dead child, glaring in fury at her white captors.

Both these paintings feature mixed race women, or "mulattos", a racial classification to refer to people of mixed African and European ancestry, a term that Re:LODE Radio recognises is now considered outdated and offensive, but that offers an example of the twisted and torturous discourses of the time, including the political and the scientific, that Re:LODE Radio considers to be, simultaneously ideological and pathological in character.

Q. Why a "Modern Medea"? 

A. Because in Greek mythology, and as in Euripides's tragedy, Medea kills her children in an act of revenge against the children's father!

The use of this conventional and "classic" mythological source in the framing of this moment of a modern tragedy in Noble's picture of Margaret Garner, standing over the body of her dead child, detracts from the terrible truths that led to this tragic confrontation.

The story of Margaret Garner, called "Peggy" (died 1858), is that she was an enslaved African-American woman in pre-Civil War America who killed her own daughter rather than allowing the child to be returned to slavery. Garner and her family had escaped enslavement in January 1856 by travelling across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but they were apprehended by U.S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This act was nicknamed the "Bloodhound Bill" by abolitionists, after the dogs that were used to track down fugitives from slavery. Garner's defence attorney, John Jolliffe, moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, to be able to get a trial in a free state and to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law. 

Garner's story was the inspiration for the novel Beloved (1987) by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and its subsequent adaptation into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (1998). Morrison had come across an account of Garner titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child" in an 1856 newspaper article published in the American Baptist, and reproduced in The Black Book, a miscellaneous compilation of black history and culture that Morrison edited in 1974.

Garner, described as a mulatto, was born a house slave to the Gaines family of Maplewood plantation, Boone County, Kentucky. She may have been the daughter of the plantation owner John Pollard Gaines himself. In 1849 she married Robert Garner, an enslaved man. That December, the plantation and all the people enslaved there were sold to John P. Gaines's younger brother, Archibald K. Gaines. 

Three of Garner's younger children (Samuel, Mary, and Priscilla) were described as mulattoes; each was born five to seven months after a child born to Archibald Gaines and his wife. These light-skinned children were likely the children of Archibald Gaines, the only adult white male at Maplewood. The timing of the pregnancies suggests that the children were each conceived after Gaines's wife had become pregnant and was sexually unavailable to him.

"Bertram Wyatt-Brown reminds us, Southern men commonly referred to their pregnant wives' last trimester or so when they were sexually unavailable as 'the gander months' because it was supposedly natural, and to some extent informally countenanced, for them to seek intimate 'comfort' with unmarried women or with enslaved women, if they owned any."

On January 28, 1856, Robert and Margaret Garner, who was pregnant, together with family members, escaped and fled to Storrs Township, a rural area just west of Cincinnati, along with several other enslaved families. Robert Garner had stolen his enslaver's horses and sleigh along with his gun. Seventeen people were reported to have been in their party. In the coldest winter in 60 years, the Ohio River had frozen. At daybreak, the group crossed the ice in Boone County, Kentucky, just west of Covington, and escaped to Storrs Township before dividing to avoid detection.

The Garners and their four children, with Robert's father Simon and his wife Mary, made their way to the home of Margaret's uncle Joe Kite, who had himself been formerly enslaved, and who lived along Mill Creek below Cincinnati. The other nine people in their party reached safe houses in Cincinnati and eventually escaped via the Underground Railroad to Canada. Kite went to abolitionist Levi Coffin for advice on how to get the group to safety. Coffin agreed to help them escape the city, and told Kite to take the Garner group further west of the city, where many free Black people lived, and to wait until night.

Slave catchers and U.S. Marshals found the Garners barricaded inside Kite's house before he returned. They surrounded the property and then stormed the house. Robert Garner fired several shots and wounded at least one deputy marshal. Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter Mary with a butcher's knife rather than see the child returned to slavery. She had wounded her other children, preparing to kill them and herself, when she was subdued by the posse.

The entire group was taken to jail. The subsequent trial lasted for two weeks, after which the judge deliberated another two weeks. It was "the longest and most complicated case of its kind." A typical fugitive slave hearing would have lasted less than a day. The core issue was whether the Garners would be tried as persons, and charged with the murder of their daughter, or tried as property under the Fugitive Slave Law. The defense attorney argued that Ohio's right to protect its citizens should take precedence. The slave catchers and owner argued for the precedence of federal law over the state.

The defense attempted to prove that Margaret Garner had been liberated under a former law covering slaves taken into free states for other work. Her attorney proposed that she be charged with murder so that the case would be tried in a free state (understanding that the Governor would later pardon her). The prosecuting attorney argued that the federal Fugitive Slave Law took precedence over state murder charges. Over a thousand people turned out each day to watch the proceedings, lining the streets outside the courthouse. Five hundred men were deputised to maintain order in the town.

The presiding judge, Pendery, ruled that Federal fugitive warrants had supervening authority. Defense attorney John Jolliffe then tried a strategy of arguing that the Fugitive Slave Act violated the guarantee of religious freedom, by compelling citizens to participate in evil by returning slaves. Pendery rejected this argument.

On the closing day of the trial, the antislavery activist Lucy Stone took the stand to defend her earlier conversations with Margaret (the prosecution had complained.) She spoke about the interracial sexual relationship that underlay part of the case:

Recalling to everyone's memory the faces of Margaret's children, and of A. K. Gaines, Stone told the packed courtroom: "The faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation the female slaves submit. Rather than give her daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right not to do so?"

Margaret Garner's actions were driven by her master's abuse and the well known abuse slaves faced nationwide. Women were known to practice infanticide to alleviate the burden of slavery from their children; however, in Garner's case her children faced even more opposition due to their being mulattos. Mulattoes were seen as a threat as well as a disgrace among the plantation and white families, because the birth of mulatto children highlighted infidelity within the slave-owning families. They reminded the family of a perceived sin, and were often beaten or sold. Garner underwent drastic measures to protect her child not only from the cruelty of the institution of slavery, but from the double threat, due to the child's mulatto status.

Margaret Garner was not immediately tried for murder, but was forced to return to a slave state along with Robert and their youngest child, a daughter of about nine months old. When Ohio authorities got an extradition warrant for Garner to try her for murder, they were unable to find her for the arrest. Archibald K. Gaines, her enslaver, kept moving her between cities in Kentucky. Ohio officials missed finding Margaret in Covington by a few hours, missed apprehending her again in Frankfort, and finally caught up with her enslaver in Louisville, only to discover that he had put the enslaved people on a boat headed for his brother's plantation in Arkansas.

The Liberator reported, that on 6 March 1856, the steamboat Henry Lewis, on which the Garners were being transported, began to sink after colliding with another boat. Margaret Garner and her baby daughter were thrown overboard during the collision. The baby drowned. It was reported that Margaret was happy that her baby had died and that she tried to drown herself. She and Robert were kept in Arkansas only a short time before being sent to Gaines' family friends in New Orleans as a household servant. The Garners then disappeared from sight.

In 1870 a reporter from The Cincinnati Chronicle found Robert Garner and gathered more about his life. Robert and Margaret Garner had worked in New Orleans, and in 1857 were sold to Judge Dewitt Clinton Bonham for plantation labor at Tennessee Landing, Mississippi. Robert said Margaret had died in 1858 of typhoid fever, in an epidemic in the valley. He said that before she died, Margaret urged him to "never marry again in slavery, but to live in hope of freedom." 

Perhaps the first person to be inspired by Margaret Garner's life story to create a polemical artwork was the extraordinary poet and writer Frances Harper, with her 1859 poem "Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio". 

Margaret Garner's story also provided Kentucky painter Thomas Satterwhite Noble's with the subject of his 1867 painting, The Modern Medea, that was acquired by the Cincinnati manufacturer Procter and Gamble Corporation, who presented the painting as a gift to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, where it remains on permanent display. 

People get ready there's a train a comin' 

At the time of Playboy's interview with Miles Davis in 1962 Southern state legislatures had passed and maintained a series of discriminatory requirements and practices that had disenfranchised most of the millions of African Americans across the South throughout the 20th century. 

The African-American group known as the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) launched a voter registration campaign in Selma in 1963. Joined by organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), they began working that year in a renewed effort to register black voters.

Finding resistance by white officials to be intractable, even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended legal segregation, the DCVL invited Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the activists of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to join them. SCLC brought many prominent civil rights and civic leaders to Selma in January 1965.

People get ready . . .

. . . there's a train a comin'

This montage overlays the Chambers Brothers cover version of the song "People Get Ready" over newsreel film of the second Selma to Montgomery March, known as "Turnaround Tuesday". 

The 1965 single by the Impressions, and the title track from the People Get Ready album, was written by Curtis Mayfield in his growing sense of social and political awareness in his writing. Mayfield said:

That was taken from my church or from the upbringing of messages from the church. Like there's no hiding place and get on board, and images of that sort. I must have been in a very deep mood of that type of religious inspiration when I wrote that song.

Rolling Stone magazine named "People Get Ready" the 24th greatest song of all time.

Martin Luther King Jr. named the song the unofficial anthem of the Civil Rights Movement and often used the song to get people marching or to calm and comfort them.

The newsreel film shows that on this second, and controversial march, that many white Americans had travelled from all over the United States to join the action in solidarity with the African American civil rights activists and campaigners. There is a resonance here in this film footage with this years video documentation of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, with a predominantly young and diverse demographic . . .  

. . . fifty-five years on from Selma!

The duration of these struggles has and continues to be epic. Re:LODE Radio uses the term "epic" to draw attention to the way so many historically significant individuals appear and then disappear as the narrative unfolds. Above all, the concept of "epic" is inclusive of the many interwoven stories that help toward an understanding of the present. 

The English word epic comes from the Latin epicus, which itself comes from the Ancient Greek adjective ἐπικός (epikos), from ἔπος (epos), "word, story, poem." 

The 1859 poem "Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio" was inspired by Margaret Garner's story and composed by one among many poets, writers and artists who have taken part in the struggle for freedom, justice and equality. Her name is Frances Harper. 

Probably born within the decade of the birth of Margaret Garner, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born free in 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland (then a slave state), the only child of free parents. Her parents, whose names are unknown, both died in 1828, making Watkins an orphan at the age of three. She was raised by her maternal aunt and uncle, Henrietta and Rev. William J. Watkins, Sr., who gave her their last name. She was an American abolitionist, suffragist, poet, teacher, public speaker, and writer. Beginning in 1845, she was one of the first African-American women to be published in the United States.

Harper had a long and prolific career, publishing her first book of poetry at the age of 20. At 67, she published her widely praised novel Iola Leroy (1892), placing her among the first Black women to publish a novel.

As a young woman in 1850, she taught domestic science at Union Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, a school affiliated with the AME Church. In 1851, while living with the family of William Still, a clerk at the Pennsylvania Abolition Society who helped refugee slaves make their way along the Underground Railroad, Harper started to write anti-slavery literature. After joining the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, Harper began her career as a public speaker and political activist.

Harper also had a successful literary career. Her collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) was a commercial success, making her the most popular African-American poet before Paul Laurence Dunbar. 

Rosa Parks arrest 

In 1858, Harper refused to give up her seat or ride in the "colored" section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia (97 years before Rosa Parks). In the same year, she published her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" in The Anti-Slavery Bugle and it became one of her best known works. 

An excerpt from her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" is inscribed on a wall of the Contemplative Court, a space for reflection in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

A Fountain Rains Down Calming Waters

The excerpt reads: "I ask no monument, proud and high to arrest the gaze of the passers-by; all that my yearning spirit craves is bury me not in a land of slaves."

Her short story "Two Offers" was published in the Anglo-African in 1859, making literary history as the first short story published by a Black woman. 

When Harper began giving antislavery lectures, the first of which took place in 1854, her gender attracted attention. The challenges she faced were not limited to racial prejudices, for in those days Black women who spoke publicly about racial issues were still few in number and scientific racism was deeply intertwined with scientific sexism.  It was taken by some as confirmation of gendered stereotypes about the differences between Black women and white women, as in the scientific thinking of the day Black women were cast as a Jezebel type, "governed almost entirely by her libido", drawing a stark contrast with the 19th century ideal of white femininity. 

Frances Harper's activism took an intersectional approach, which combined her campaign for African-American civil rights with her advocacy for women's rights. One of Harper's major concerns regarded the brutal treatment Black women — including Harper herself — encountered on public transportation, and this matter foregrounded her advocacy for women's suffrage. In the 1860s and beyond, Harper delivered various speeches pertaining to women's issues and more specifically, Black women's issues. One of her speeches, "We Are All Bound Up Together," delivered in 1866 at the National Woman's Rights Convention in New York City, demanded equal rights for all, emphasizing the need to raise awareness for African-American suffrage while also advocating for women's suffrage. In her speech, she said:

"We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro...You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man's hand against me...While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America."

After Harper delivered this speech, the National Woman's Rights Convention agreed to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), which incorporated African-American suffrage into the Women's Suffrage Movement. Harper served as a member of AERA's Finance Committee, though Black women comprised only five of the organization's fifty-plus officers and speakers. AERA was short-lived, ending when Congress proposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which would grant African-American men the right to vote. Some of AERA's suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, did not support the Amendment's aim to enfranchise Black men without extending suffrage rights to women. Harper, on the other hand, supported the Fifteenth Amendment, and endorsed the Amendment at AERA's final meeting. Shortly afterward, AERA divided into two separate movements: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which did not support the Amendment, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which supported the Amendment. Neither organization fully promoted the rights of Black women. 

As a proponent of the Fifteenth Amendment, Harper helped found the AWSA. After all, Harper did not want to undermine the progress of Black men by choosing to fight for women's suffrage over African-American suffrage. Harper did, however, support the proposed Sixteenth Amendment, which would have granted women the right to vote. After the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, Harper also encouraged formerly enslaved people to vote.

In addition to delivering speeches, Harper also promoted her intersectional suffrage advocacy in later years by helping found the National Association for Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. Harper was often the only Black woman at the progressive conferences she attended, which isolated her from the predominantly white reformers. Harper therefore helped organize the NACW to avoid the racism of white progressives. In 1897, Harper became the NACW's vice president and used her platform to advocate for Black women's civil rights.

Alongside her poetry, Harper's prose also presents suffrage activism. Her novel Minnie’s Sacrifice, published in 1869 — in the same year as the Fifteenth Amendment debates — describes the vote as a defence mechanism for Black women as victims of racial violence in the Reconstruction South. Minnie's Sacrifice also highlights the intersectional struggles faced by Black women. For example, scholar Jen McDaneld argues in her analysis of the novel that the need for protection of the law, which the vote could help Black women obtain, is "rooted in both radicalized and gendered injustices that cannot be extricated from one another." Near the end of the novel, Minnie expresses a desire for Black women's suffrage, contending the right of suffrage should not be based upon "service or sex, but on the common base of humanity." Responding to the male character Louis, who believes the nation is "not prepared for" Black women's suffrage, Minnie states:

"I cannot recognize that the negro man is the only one who has pressing claims at this hour. To-day our government needs woman's conscience as well as man's judgment. And while I would not throw a straw in the way of the colored man, even though I know that he would vote against me as soon as he gets his vote, yet I do think that woman should have some power to defend herself from oppression, and equal laws as if she were a man."

Through Minnie's statement, Harper conveys a desire for Black women to achieve suffrage rights in order to defend themselves from oppression. Shortly after making this claim, Minnie is killed—the result of racial violence. Minnie is not protected by the law, and she is a victim of the oppression she protests against in her pro-suffrage rhetoric. In this excerpt, Minnie also shows support for the Black man's vote, stating how she "would not throw a straw in the way of the colored man." At the same time, though, similar to the speaker in "The Deliverance," Minnie additionally expresses uncertainty regarding how these men might cast their ballots. Within Minnie's Sacrifice, Harper communicates a determination for Black women to obtain the right to suffrage.

Fast-forward to Hortense Spillers m

Toni Morrison was inspired to write her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987). Morrison also wrote the libretto for the opera Margaret Garner (2005), composed by Richard Danielpour.

m 

The price of blood?

In contrast to the conscious decisions and behaviour of Margaret Garner the father depicted in Noble's painting titled The Price of Blood (1868), as a white slave owner is selling his half-white slave son. This painting is the single one among the eight of Noble's subjects relating to the experience of African Americans during the period before the end of the civil war, that is not illustrating a particular event, although it is factually accurate as regards the practices among the slave owners of the Southern states. 

The composition includes elements that are reminiscent of a work by Noble's teacher in Paris, Thomas Couture, a painting with the title The Thirst for Gold (circa1844). 

Couture's theatricality in depicting the thirst for the possession of gold involves an apparent translation of this desire into a commodification of sex as an equivalent object of exchange. The entire tableau seems to focus on a pile of gold coins arranged on a luxurious table top textile, but all within the physical grasp of the main male protagonist.

In Noble's picture of a father selling his "mulatto" son into slavery, it is as if the viewer is witness to a tableau vivant where time is slowed, frozen even, and the question of feeling, of empathy, or the lack of either, as here the deformation of feeling between fathers and sons is so pronounced, begs to intrude.

The gold on the table is within the grasp of a third party, doubtless as intimately involved in this transaction, where "the price of blood" is quantified in the number of coins being counted on this luxurious table covering.

The son looks away while the agent looks at the contract and the father looks out to the viewer, to some degree complicit, as a witness, to this betrayal of parentage. What kind of twisted and tortured thinking and NOT feeling is suggested in "the look", a look of apparent equanimity, of the gaze into nowhere for the father/master/owner who denies all bonds of a shared humanity? 

For the many women who were raped, and had little control over their families, for the children, free women, indentured servants, and men who were not immune from abuse by masters and owners, as Nell Irvin Painter explains, for them the psychological outcome of such treatment often had the same result, something terrible:  

"soul murder"!

But so too for the father/master/owner, buyer and seller of human chattels, and the price paid was equivalent to soul murder. The relations of master to slave and of slave to master have permeated discourses in European philosophy through the modern period. Hegel's famous, but puzzling, master-slave dialectic, and of Friedrich Nietzsche's works, particularly in the first essay of his book On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche argues that there are two fundamental types of morality: "master morality" and "slave morality," basing his theory on Hegel's Master-slave dialectic. Master morality values pride and power, while slave morality values kindness, empathy, and sympathy. Master morality judges actions as good or bad (e.g. the classical virtues of the noble man versus the vices of the rabble), unlike slave morality, which judges by a scale of good or evil intentions. 

According to Nietzsche, the struggle between master and slave moralities recurs historically. He noted that ancient Greek and Roman societies were grounded in master morality. The Homeric hero is the strong-willed man, and the classical roots of the Iliad and Odyssey exemplified Nietzsche's master morality. He calls the heroes "men of a noble culture", giving a substantive example of master morality. Historically, master morality was defeated, as Christianity's slave morality spread throughout the Roman Empire. Indeed some historical commentators note that the elite amongst the Roman Empire were, because of their reliance on the work of slaves, that they were educated by slaves, the entire culture was dominated by the "norm" of a "slave mentality".   

The modern legacy of a reciprocal "soul murder" in the master-slave dialectic manifests itself in:

"a pornotropic aesthetic, a racialized sadomasochism that recurs across United States culture."

This "convolute" harks back to the earlier discussion in PART 3. of How Playboy explains Vietnam and the Americanisation of the World . . .

. . . and building on the work of Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Jennifer Christine Nash, and others. In Gordon Fraser's essay, Conspiracy, Racism, Pornography, Democracy?, he argues that;

"observers should understand countersubversive political reaction as an aesthetic project, a pornotropic fantasy that distorts underlying conditions of racial subjection. In the context of a resurgent far right that describes its enemies as “cuckolds” and frequently deploys the tropes of highly racialized pornography, this essay suggests that we might find the deep origins of pornographic, reactionary paranoia in the eighteenth century. It suggests, moreover, that understanding and contesting the underlying conditions of racial subjection require that scholars consider the power of pornotropic, countersubversive aesthetics to bring pleasure, to move people, and to order the world."

White dads forced to watch!

Today there are a number of typical situations in the genre of so-called "interracial pornography", including this one where white fathers are forced to watch their daughters have sex with black men with Big Black Cocks (BBC). 

This racialised genre of pornography contributes to a style within the pornotropic aesthetic of an inversion of power relations that leads to the enjoyment of classic sadomasochistic pleasures, a perverse celebration of humiliation and subservience, where the master is rendered submissive, and, indeed, chooses the role of a "cissy man", to enhance the masochistic kick. 

This gloating "wife" taunts her "cuckold husband": 

"I'll cuckold your wimpy ass at dogfart.com"

turem 

 

Lust for . . .

pic 

ture

 

Passing for being white, whatever the racial background, social status and background might be, has in the capitalist, colonial and post-colonial universe, the potential to be translatable into an economic benefit. This deplorable fact is now a global phenomenon and a result of the Americanisation of the world.

Thai beauty ad says being white is key to success

mm 

m despite holding

picture

 

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The doctrine also meant that multiracial children with white mothers were born free. Early generations of Free Negros in the American South, apart from those manumitted, were thus formed from unions between free working-class, typically mixed-race women and black men.

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The fact of Miles Davis' experience of Jim Crow racism, of Jazz and the two worlds, white and black, colliding on the front door, in a bar, on a train, but NOT on a plane, and made accountably visible in Playboy, and in an interface with photos of predominantly white female models in the nude, and the fantasy the Playboy's Vargas' pin-ups, deserves a comment. This, the first Playboy interview, defines the evolving Playboy business model, and its cultural programme, forged from the founding of the magazine when, in the first issue of Playboy, Hugh Hefner told his readers:

We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors-d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, Jazz, Sex. 

To quote from this article in The Conversation (October 22, 2015) by Gail Dines, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, Wheelock College, and David L Levy Professor of Management, Director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and Regional Competitiveness, University of Massachusetts Boston, headlined: 

Why your father’s Playboy can’t compete in today’s world of hard-core porn

Under the heading: 

Selling a lifestyle (and nudes)

Gail Dines and David L Levy write:

Hefner was a brilliant businessman who understood that the only way to sell porn in the 1950s and also attract advertising dollars was to wrap the magazine in the cloak of upper middle-class respectability.

The markers of upper-class life were an attempt to avoid the sleaze factor that had previously been associated with porn. The articles, interviews and stories were needed as a cover during the early days of Playboy because porn use was stigmatized as low-class.

Playboy spent much of its early years crafting a magazine that taught upwardly mobile white men what clothes to wear, what furniture to buy for the office, what food to cook and, most importantly, how this consumption would attract the real prize: lots of women, just like the ones in the centerfolds.

Playboy thus not only commodified sexuality, it also sexualized commodities. Hefner revealed this strategy of sexualizing consumption when he explained:

Playboy is a combination of sex … and status … the sex actually includes not only the Playmate and the cartoons and the jokes which describe boy-girl situations, but goes right down in all the service features.

Hefner, by sexualizing consumption, provided an extremely hospitable environment for advertisers looking to expand in the post-war boom. By the end of 1955, advertisers had overcome their initial fear of advertising in a “men’s entertainment” magazine and were, according to author Thomas Weyr, “clamoring to buy.”

Selling a lifestyle "and" nudes! "Can anyone beat my pair?" asks the Vargas pin-up!

It's all about using the "AND" word! 

There is a figure of speech used for emphasis — "The substitution of a conjunction for a subordination". A name for this is Hendiadys (a Latinized form of the Greek phrase ἓν διὰ δυοῖν, hèn dià duoîn, "one through two"). The basic idea is to use two words linked by the conjunction "and" instead of the one modifying the other.  

Hendiadys is the title of a chapter in the 1970 book From Cliché to Archetype by Marshall McLuhan and Canadian poet Wilfred Watson. They write: 

The Greek word for these structures, hendiadys ("one through two"), draws attention to the Greek word for "word" - mythos.

Given that the stage on which the platform for this extended series of convolutes (as in manuscripts bound together in a single volume: a convolute: and as Walter Benjamin describes the material he produced for the Arcades project), articulates and recognises how both McLuhan and Barthes, in their different ways, use the idea of myth and the mythological as a core to their methods of inquiry, and connected to the question to be immediately posed here on the origin of a "word", the word "Jazz" (and a ricorso to The Origin of the World), it's worth quoting further from this short chapter: 

Doublets, by interface, create new forms of what James Hillman calls in Emotion "isomorphic unity". Phrases like "song and dance", "words and music" draw attention to the different senses and media that are encountered in doublets. 

Just as oxymoron is a small or compressed paradox, so this doublet form may be compressed myths. (Let us keep in mind mythos, a word). Many perceptions may enter into the formation of a single word, and these doublets may be a useful way of observing the process of "word" formation: the word within the word unable to speak a word. Or is it like the sculpture lurking in the stone, waiting to be released by interface, by the shock of encounter with some other word or instrument?

English names for hendiadys include;  

"two for one" and . . . 

. . . "figure of twins", as here in this Vargas pin-up? 

The Venus of Love "and" Life-style and her twin, the Venus of Lust "and" high class sex, open the doors to not only commodifying sexuality, but also sexualising commodities through the selling of the illusion of "status" and upward social mobility, so crucial to the lie of the "American dream" and the amplifying hype of a post-WWII cold war era boom in the American advertising industry.

What's Jazz? 

The American Dialect Society named "Jazz" the "Word of the 20th Century". 

The etymology of the word "Jazz" is discussed in the Wikipedia article on Jazz: 

The use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans was in a November 14, 1916, Times-Picayune article about "jas bands". In an interview with National Public Radio, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying: "When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies." 

The Wikipedia article on Jazz the word explains why: 

The similarity of "jazz" to "jasm", an obsolete slang term meaning spirit, energy, and vigor, and dated to 1860 in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1979), suggests that "jasm" should be considered the leading candidate for the source of "jazz". A link between the two words is supported by a February 18, 1916 article in the Daily Californian which used the spelling "jaz-m", although the context and other articles in the same newspaper from this period show that "jazz" was intended. "Jasm" derives from or is a variant of the slang term "jism" or "gism", which the Historical Dictionary of American Slang dates to 1842 and defines as "spirit; energy; spunk." 

Word association, spirit, energy, spunk, jism, popular music, race and sex? 

Word association was the subject of a lecture at Clark University given by Carl G. Jung in 1910. Jung is well known for developing the notion of what we may call the "Jungian archetype", in an approach to analytical psychology altogether different from Sigmund Freud. 

Jung begins his lecture with this introduction: 

Ladies and Gentlemen: When I was honored with the invitation from Clark University to lecture before this esteemed assemblage, a wish was at the same time expressed that I should speak about my methods of work, and especially about the psychology of childhood. I hope to accomplish this task in the following manner:

In my first lecture I shall try to present to you the view points of my association methods; in my second lecture I shall discuss the significance of the familiar constellations; while in my third lecture I shall enter more fully into the psychology of the child.

I might easily confine myself exclusively to my theoretical views, but I believe that it will be better to illustrate my lectures with as many practical examples as possible. We shall therefore occupy ourselves first with the method of association, a method which has been of valuable assistance to me both practically and theoretically. The association method in vogue in psychology, as well as its history, is of course, so familiar to you that there is no need to speak of it.

The difference between the so-called "educated" and the "uneducated" in their responses to word association 

Towards the end of his first lecture Jung makes an observation on the different responses of participants in his experiments deemed "educated" from those regarded as "uneducated". He says: 

It has long been thought that the association experiment enables one to distinguish certain intellectual types. That is not the case. The experiment does not give us any particular insight into the purely intellectual, but rather only into the emotional processes. To be sure we can erect certain types of reaction; they are not, however, based on intellectual peculiarities, but depend entirely on the proportionate emotional state. Educated test persons usually show superficial and linguistically deep rooted associations, whereas the uneducated form more valuable associations and often of ingenious significance. This behavior would be paradoxical from an intellectual viewpoint. The meaningful associations of the uneducated are not really the product of intellectual thinking, but are simply the results of a special emotional state. The whole thing is more important to the uneducated, his emotion is greater and for that reason he pays more attention to the experiment than the educated person, and that is why his associations are more significant.

From Cliché to Archetype 

The Jungian notion of the archetype, that Jung borrowed from anthropology forms a key to the already referenced 1970 book From Cliché to Archetype by Marshall McLuhan and Canadian poet Wilfred Watson, in which the authors discuss various implications in the use of the verbal cliché and of its relation to the archetype. The chapter on Archetype in this book helps Re:LODE Radio explain, in this "convolute", about the how and the why of the way possible word associations present in the origins and formation of this word jazz, as well as the origins of the musical form itself. 

In considering the extracts from this chapter below, Re:LODE Radio considers that the "educated" subjects in Jung's experiments in word association were typical of those who had experienced a conventional education, and where "literacy" and the reading of and interpretation of "printed texts", shaped the prime features of this particular way of being "led out into", and making sense of the world. As in educate; late Middle English: from Latin educat- ‘led out’, from the verb educare, related to educere ‘lead out’. 

Following this quotation from Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage: 

Archetypal enjoyed a "highbrow" popularity, ca. 1946-55; nor is it unknown today. 

McLuhan and Watson write:

E. S. Carpenter, the anthropologist, wrote about the inability of Robert Graves to grasp the multi-levelled structures. The conventional literary mind naturally tries to "connect" and to classify mythic and symbolic materials by reduction of oral to visual forms of order. Carpenter takes graves merely as typical of the literary approach to all non-literate culture. What Carpenter refers to as "adding omissions" is the habit of the visually oriented person to try to find connections where the non-literate person seeks to create intervals, gaps and interfaces: 

Emotion, interval, gaps and interfaces - that's Jazz! 

Re:LODE Radio considers the differences in response to word association that Jung identifies between the "educated" and the "uneducated" is in the types of creative and emotional response between the visually oriented and the aural and orally oriented. The difference between the participants of a bureaucratic and managerial bourgeoisie, and the creative participants of the creation of a popular musical form.  

Jism and Jazz! Version 2.0 of "The origin of the world"? 

When it comes to identifying the origin of the word Jazz, the rich field of possibilities allows for multiple associations that Re:LODE Radio considers reflect the cultural context as associated with "low life", popular culture and racial tropes, mixed in with the complex, already named - "pornotropia", rather than "high culture". The Wikipedia article on Jazz, the word, has a section called:

Other etymological proposals

In an August 5, 1917 article from the New York Sun, Walter J. Kingsley claimed that "jaz" has an African origin. "In his studies of the Creole patois and idiom in New Orleans Lafcadio Hearn reported that the word "jaz," meaning to speed things up, to make excitement, was common among the blacks of the South, and had been adopted by the Creoles as a term to be applied to music of a rudimentary syncopated type." But recent searches of the works of Lafcadio Hearn failed to find any mention of the word. Kingsley's quote from Hearn is most likely fraudulent.

Kingsley claimed the phrase "jaz her up" was used by plantation slaves and that in common vaudeville usage "jaz her up" or "put in jaz" meant to accelerate or add low comedy, while "jazbo" meant "hokum". 

Hokum?

Re:LODE Radio notes that this reference to "hokum" in the Wikipedia article is not an active hyperlink, but this "hokum" link takes the reader to an article on "hokum" as a particular song type of American blues music—a humorous song which uses extended analogies or euphemistic terms to make sexual innuendos. 

An image that accompanies the article is a detail from the cover of The Celebrated Negro Melodies, as Sung by the Virginia Minstrels, 1843, with an iconography gleaned from the stock of readily available racialised imagery, a typical caricature of the "Jim Crow" style that predominated in the nineteenth century. 

Hokum - Double and single entendre?

Race and sex were the pole stars of hokum, with booze and the law defining loose boundaries. Transgression was a given. How performers navigated through these waters varied from artist to artist. High and low culture had yet to converge as mainstream or popular culture. The convergence of performance styles, from different races that minstrelsy and by extension hokum represented, helped to define a central, ongoing tension in American culture. The cycle of rejection, accommodation, appropriation and authentication was set in motion. The infantilized and grotesque enactments and racist and misogynistic content caused many better educated observers of the day to dismiss both the Minstrel Show and hokum as simply vulgar. 

Some of the white artists, whose contributions to minstrelsy are most valued today, struggled to rise above its cruder forms in their lifetimes. Stephen Foster composed for years in obscurity, while the minstrel troupe leader Edwin P. Christy claimed credit for his songs.

The same contradictions and ambiguities were endured by African Americans like the composer James A. Bland, the actor Sam Lucas, and the bandleader James Reese Europe. The classically trained African-American composer Will Marion Cook, who toured throughout the United States and gave a command performance for King George V in England, struggled to raise his music to a public perception of distinction and merit, but was thwarted by marketing that distinguished author and music only by skin colour.

The use of dialect or faux African-American (or Irish) speech patterns also caused many minstrel compositions to be lumped into categories with interchangeable "coon song" connotations. There is no glossing over the fact that most "coon songs" revelled in ridicule. 

After the First World War, the fledgling record industry split hokum off from its minstrel show or vaudeville context to market it as a musical genre, the hokum blues. 

Hokum blues lyrics specifically poked fun at all manner of sexual practices, preferences, and eroticized domestic arrangements. Compositions such as "Banana in Your Fruit Basket", written by Bo Carter of the Mississippi Sheiks, used thinly veiled allusions, which typically employed food and animals as metaphors in a lusty manner worthy of Chaucer. The hilariously sexy lyric content usually steered clear of subtlety. "Bo Carter was a master of the single entendre", remarked the Piedmont blues guitar master "Bowling Green" John Cephas at Chip Schutte's annual guitar camp. The bottleneck guitarist Tampa Red was accompanied by Thomas A. Dorsey playing piano when the two recorded "It's Tight Like That" for the Vocalion label in 1928. The song went over so well that the two bluesmen teamed up and became known as the Hokum Boys. Both had previously performed in the band of the "Mother of the Blues", Ma Rainey, who had traveled the vaudeville circuits with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels as a girl, later taking Bessie Smith under her wing. The Hokum Boys recorded over 60 bawdy blues songs by 1932, most of them penned by Dorsey, who later picked up his Bible and became the founding father of black gospel. Dorsey characterised his hokum legacy as "deep moanin', low-down blues, that's all I could say!"

When it comes down to it, and what was transgressive about the low-down hokum blues was implicit and suggestive, and relied on a "knowing" and imaginative audience. Although the sexual content of hokum is generally playful by modern standards, early recordings were marginalized for both sexual suggestiveness and "trashy" appeal, but they flourished in niche markets outside the mainstream.

The Hokum Boys sing and play . . .

Keep Your Mind On It 

"Jim Crow" segregation was still the norm in much of the United States, and racial, ethnic and class bias was embedded in the popular entertainment of the time. Prurience was seen as more antisocial than prejudice. Record companies were more concerned about selling records than stigmatizing artists and minority audiences. Modern audiences might be offended by the packaged exploitation these stock caricatures offered, but in early 20th-century America, it paid for performers to play the fool. Audiences were left on their own to interpret whether they themselves were sharing the joke or were the butts of it. While "race" musicians traded in "coon songs" crafted for commercial consumption by catering to white prejudice. "Hillbilly" musicians were similarly marketed as "rubes" and "hayseeds". Class distinctions bolstered these portrayals of gullible rural folk and witless southerners. Assimilation of African Americans and cultural appropriation of their artistic and cultural creations were not yet equated by the emerging entertainment industry with racism and bigotry. 

The eventual success of African-American musical productions on Broadway, like Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's "Shuffle Along" in 1921, helped to usher in the swing jazz era. 

The first all-Black hit Broadway show, it was a landmark in African-American musical theatre, credited with inspiring the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s.

The show premiered at the 63rd Street Music Hall in 1921, running for 504 performances, a remarkably successful span for that decade. It was so popular it caused "curtain time traffic jams" on West 63rd Street. 

Shuffle Along's music was composed by Eubie Blake, with lyrics by Noble Sissle, and the revue-style plot was written by the comedy duo Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles.

The show's four writers were African-American Vaudeville veterans who first met in 1920 at a NAACP (a civil rights organisation in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavour to advance justice for African Americans) benefit held at the newly opened Dunbar Theatre in Philadelphia. None had ever written a musical, or even appeared on Broadway. After finding a small source of funding, Shuffle Along toured New Jersey and Pennsylvania. However, with its limited budget, it was difficult to meet travel and production expenses. When the show returned to New York about a year later, during the Depression of 1920–21, the production owed $18,000 and faced strong competition on Broadway in a season that included Florenz Ziegfeld's Sally and a new edition of George White's Scandals. It was able to book only a remote theater on West 63rd Street with no orchestra pit. In the end, however, the show earned $9 million from its original Broadway production and three touring companies, an unusual sum in its time. 

Miller and Lyles wrote thin, jokey dialogue scenes to connect the songs: "The plot of ... Shuffle Along was mainly to allow an excuse for the singing and dancing." Miller and Lyles also wore blackface in Shuffle Along. In the 21st century, this use of blackface may seem unfathomable and offensive; however, at the time the audiences understood that the “makeup” only suggested a portrayal of broad comedic characters. The use of blackface was simply a starting point, not the finish line. Miller and Lyles used the context they were given to captivate and appeal to audiences; however, they delivered their lines in their own voices rather than resorting to typically exaggerated vocal characterisations associated with blackface. So, as David S. Thompson explains in Theatre Symposium The University of Alabama Press Volume 20, (2012 pp. 97-108), “rather than entirely embrace the lingering vestiges of minstrelsy” the duo “found ways to alter the formula”. Their act initially appeared to imitate traditional minstrelsy; however, the characters they created were clever, complex, and defied traditional stereotypes.

The plot of Shuffle Along was based on Millers' and Lyles's previous play, "The Mayor of Dixie", and in Shuffle Along, they incorporated “their well-beloved characters that they had been playing for years on vaudeville”. Breaking with minstrel tradition, the principal characters wore tuxedos, conveying their dignity. In minstrel shows, characters in tuxedos and blackface typically played the “Zip Coon” type, a stock character in the entertainment genre which mocked and denigrated African American black people who, although free from slavery, suffered oppression and ridicule. This was the chosen model for Jim Crow era attitudes, stereotypes and representations.

Shuffle Along rejected this image by presenting its characters as community-oriented men seeking to run for mayor of their city. Furthermore, as recorded in Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake, by Robert Kimball and William Bolcom, New York, Viking Press (1973), “Miller” believed “that the only way to put Negro performers into white theatres with any kind of dignity was through musical comedy”.

The musical drew repeat audiences due to its jazzy music styles, a modern, edgy contrast to the mainstream song-and-dance styles audiences had seen on Broadway for two decades.

The show's dancing and 16-girl chorus line were more reasons why the show was so successful. According to Time magazine (Time magazine, May 23, 2016), Shuffle Along was the first Broadway musical that prominently featured syncopated jazz music, and the first to feature a chorus of professional female dancers.

The show introduced some musical hits such as "I'm Just Wild about Harry"; "Love Will Find a Way", the first African American romantic musical duet on a Broadway stage; and "In Honeysuckle Time". 

Composer and lyricist duo Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake created the revolutionary music of Shuffle Along. They incorporated music and visual spectacle with the preexisting narrative to create a unique show. As David S. Thompson points out in "Shuffling Roles: Alterations and Audiences in Shuffle Along" (Theatre Symposium. 20 (1): 97–108. 2012), while stereotypes were indeed present, Sissle and Blake worked "within a parallel performance form," replacing "the negative stereotypes… with a vastly more positive image." The musical score was also used to create an exceptional show. Eubie Blake's score was a way to demonstrate his "command of every important genre of contemporary commercial" music without disguising "his individuality or race." He used classical musical styles to compliment the uniqueness of African-American music, creating a distinctly novel sound.

Josephine Baker in New York - circa early 1920's 

1923: Hello, Broadway

In 1921, Josephine Baker earned her first role on Broadway with a chorus role in the musical Shuffle Along. The show was the first successful Black musical and launched her career. Soon after, she landed a role in the play The Chocolate Dandies and became the highest paid chorus girl in Vaudeville. Besides Josephine Baker, the show launched and/or boosted the careers of Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, Fredi Washington and Adelaide Hall, and contributed to the racial desegregation of theatres in the 1920s, giving many black actors their first chance to appear on Broadway. After a long run at the 63rd Street Music Hall, Shuffle Along left New York and went on tour for three years and was the first black musical to play in white theatres across the United States. Its appeal to audiences of all races, and to celebrities such as George Gershwin, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson, Langston Hughes and critic George Jean Nathan, helped forge links between the white Broadway and black jazz communities.

The stories behind the history of this breakthrough extension of hokum, jazz and the African American cultural experience, provide a rich field of material relevant to a contemporary African American artistic community. And these days, in the present era of Black Lives Matter, there's a new demographic, an audience that wants to know more about African American histories, histories that have, more often than not, been deliberately marginalised when it comes to the creation of American popular culture.

In 2016 an adaptation of the musical and its making, called Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, focused on the challenges of mounting the original production, as well as its lasting effects on Broadway and questions of race and race relations in America, then and now.

Shuffle Along . . .

. . . revisited.

This production, and the ensuing Harlem Renaissance, was accompanied by a new sense of sophistication that eventually regarded hokum as backward, insipid, and perhaps most damningly, corny. Audiences began to change their perceptions of authentic "Negro" artistry. 

Cross-racial comedy became increasingly seen as old fashioned, especially onstage, even while white comedians like Frank Tinney and singers like Eddie Cantor (nicknamed Banjo Eyes) continued to work successfully in blackface on Broadway. These racialised tropes even branched out into vaudeville-based sensations like the Ziegfeld Follies and the emerging film industry, and the success of comics such as Pigmeat Markham or Damon Wayans or bandleaders like Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan, owed a considerable debt to hokum.

Fat Tuesday

Vestiges of hokum still survive in the traditions of The Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club, a New Orleans Mardi Gras krewe, that has marched on Fat Tuesday since 1900, dressed in raggedy clothes and grass skirts with their faces blackened. Zulu is now the largest predominantly African-American organisation marching in the annual Carnival celebration.

Where locals go . . .

How to do Mardi Gras like a New Orleans local! 

Art and everyday life?

When it comes to the origin of the word "Jazz", the associations with the transgressive, of low-life, and prostitution are strong, however "atmospheric" and "mythological" these associations turn out to be. 

This reinforces the notion that Jazz comes from the bottom of society, not the top, and originates in the "other" when it comes to racial origins! High culture and Low culture, not withstanding, the story of the acceptability of Jazz as an art form, from its beginnings to its current place in a globalised and American hierarchy of cultural values, is instructive.

Storyville

There are stories and there are stories, and Re:LODE knows, for sure, that "to every story there belongs another". 

Stories abound about the beginnings of Jazz and the  brothels of New Orleans and the red-light district known as Storyville. The District was established to restrict prostitution to one area of the city where authorities could monitor and regulate such activity. In the late 1890s, the New Orleans city government studied the legalised red light districts of northern German and Dutch ports and set up Storyville based on such models. Between 1895 and 1915, "blue books" were published in Storyville. These books were guides to prostitution for visitors to the district wishing to use these services; they included house descriptions, prices, particular services, and the "stock" each house offered. The Storyville blue-books were inscribed with the motto: "Order of the Garter: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (Shame on Him Who Thinks Evil of It)". It took some time for Storyville to gain recognition, but by 1900, it was on its way to becoming New Orleans's largest revenue centre.

Establishments in Storyville ranged from cheap "cribs" to more expensive houses, up to a row of elegant mansions along Basin Street for well-heeled customers. New Orleans' cribs were 50-cent joints, whereas the more expensive establishments could cost up to $10. 

Black and white brothels coexisted in Storyville; but black men were barred from legally purchasing services in either black or white brothels. Following the establishment of these brothels, restaurants and saloons began to open in Storyville, bringing in additional tourists, and conveniently, this red-light district was adjacent to one of the main railway stations. 

At the creation of Storyville, black and white musicians were segregated. As time went on and white musicians started to enter Storyville, they increasingly were influenced by black performers. The segregation slowly started to diminish, and sharing their common interest brought the races together in some informal musical ventures. Bands signed to labels remained segregated.

Musicians were hired by the madams to entertain clients within the mansion's parlours. These audiences tended to not be very critical, giving performers the freedom to experiment with their musical styles. Performers such as Jelly Roll Morton played piano all times of the day and night in these brothel houses. In 1904, Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (Jelly Roll Morton) at the age of fourteen, began his career as a piano player in a brothel. He often sang lyrics in the hokum style of using slang and double entendre suggestive of sexual activities and even used the nickname "Jelly Roll", which was African-American slang for female genitalia. While working in the brothels, he was living with his churchgoing great-grandmother. He convinced her that he worked as a night watchman in a barrel factory. After Morton's grandmother found out he was playing jazz in a brothel, she disowned him for disgracing the Lamothe name. "When my grandmother found out that I was playing jazz in one of the sporting houses in the District, she told me that I had disgraced the family and forbade me to live at the house...She told me that devil music would surely bring about my downfall...." The cornetist Rex Stewart recalled that Morton had chosen "the nom de plume 'Morton' to protect his family from disgrace if he was identified as a whorehouse 'professor'."

Together with the dance halls and saloons seeking to hold the attention of their patrons with ragtime dance bands, the experimentation and technique advancement within the brothels, dance halls and saloons of Storyville made a significant contribution to the creative beginnings of New Orleans jazz. 

So, no wonder that Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns in Jazz: A History of America's Music (2000) and Hilton Als in the New York Review of Books on March 27, 2003, suggest "jazz" comes from the jasmine perfume that prostitutes wore in the red-light district of New Orleans. This idea derives from the recollections of jazz musician Garvin Bushell as told to Mark Tucker in Jazz from the Beginning (1988). Bushell said that he heard this derivation in the circus where he began working in 1916, but this is likely to be a false etymology unsupported by evidence. Ward and Burns also suggested "jazz" derives from "jezebel", a nineteenth-century term for prostitute.

One story associates jazz with the first part of the word 'jasmine'. The French brought the perfume industry with them to New Orleans, and the oil of jasmine was a popular ingredient. To add it to a perfume was called "jassing it up." The strong scent was popular in the red-light district where a working girl might approach a prospective customer and say, "Is jazz on your mind tonight, young fellow?"

S. Frederick Starr states the same use of jezebel, rooted in the Old Testament. In New Orleans, the term was changed to "jazzbelle", with pimps or other males called "jazzbeau".

DuBose Heyward, author of "Porgy", in his book Jasbo Brown and Selected Poems (1924), states jazz may have taken its name from Jazbo Brown.

Re:LODE Radio considers that the character of these imaginative proposals to explain a certain how a transgressive "atmosphere" associated with the beginnings of Jazz, are indicative of hierarchies, of differences, in a society shaped by the exploitation of women and proletarian classes, and where the klaxon call and hateful ideology of white supremacy served to divide and rule, along the lines of gender and of race. 

The French connection!

The underlying and complex historical circumstances that led to New Orleans becoming the place where jazz emerged as an art form is inextricably entangled in the history of the European colonisation of North America, albeit with a significant and particular role of France and its colonial ambitions. Founded in 1718 by French colonists, New Orleans was once the territorial capital of French Louisiana before becoming part of the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. 

The Kingdom of France had controlled the Louisiana territory from 1699 until it was ceded to Spain in 1762. In 1800, Napoleon, the First Consul of the French Republic, regained ownership of Louisiana as part of a broader project to re-establish a French colonial empire in North America. However, France's failure to put down the Haitian Revolution, a revolt in Saint-Domingue, coupled with the prospect of renewed warfare with the United Kingdom, prompted Napoleon to consider selling Louisiana to the United States. Acquisition of Louisiana was a long-term goal of President Thomas Jefferson, who was especially eager to gain control of the crucial Mississippi River port of New Orleans. 

However, France only controlled a small fraction of this area, most of it inhabited by Native Americans; for the majority of the area, what the United States bought was the "preemptive" right to obtain "Indian" lands by treaty or by conquest, to the exclusion of other colonial powers.

In return for fifteen million dollars, or approximately eighteen dollars per square mile, the United States nominally acquired a total of 828,000 sq mi (2,140,000 km2; 530,000,000 acres). 

This map of Louisiana by Christoph Weigel, published in 1734, uses "green" for French Louisiana, and the "pink" to signify the thirteen British colonies.

Following the Louisiana Purchase the total cost of all subsequent treaties and financial settlements over the land has been estimated to be around 2.6 billion dollars. The cost to the Indigenous Peoples of North America was a form of genocide, and the experience of;

"an inherited Indigenous trauma that cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination." 

The ideology of the so-called Manifest Destiny, depicted in this allegorical work American Progress (1872) by John Gast is rendered in an allegorical representation of the modernisation of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilisation westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a book, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation. The inevitable displacement of Indigenous Peoples from their lands is included as a "natural" consequence of American "progress".

New Orleans

The salient fact was that the immediate prize of the Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition of the port city of New Orleans. Finally, the United States had access and control to a port city with connections to a centuries old global system of exchange and transfer of goods. Trade flowing along the Spanish trades routes, in silver and precious cargo from China, from Manila in the Philippines and across the Pacific to Mexico and to Europe across the Atlantic. By the end of the period of French colonisation in Louisiana, New Orleans was recognised commercially in the Atlantic world. Its inhabitants traded across the French commercial system. New Orleans was a hub for this trade both physically and culturally because it served as the exit point to the rest of the globe for the interior of the North American continent. 

Other commodities were also traded across the Atlantic to New Orleans, human cargo. Human beings, as flesh, as energy and work, were to be consumed as commodities. The French colonists had turned to the purchase of African slaves to make their investments in Louisiana profitable. In the late 1710s the transatlantic slave trade imported enslaved Africans into the colony. This led to the biggest shipment in 1716 where several trading ships arrived with slaves as cargo to supply the labour requirements of the local residents.

By 1724, the increasing number of black people of African heritage in Louisiana prompted the institutionalising of laws governing slavery within the colony. These French laws passed by King Louis XV, required that slaves be baptised in the Roman Catholic faith, be married in the church, and have no recourse to legal rights. This slave law formed in the 1720s is known as the Code Noir. 

Louisiana slave culture had its own distinct Afro-Creole society that called on both African cultures and the situation for slaves in the New World. Afro-Creole was present in religious beliefs and the Louisiana Creole language. 

Following Napoleon's sale of Louisiana to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the city grew rapidly with influxes of Americans, French, Creoles and Africans. Later immigrants were Irish, Germans, Poles and Italians. Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated with slave labour on nearby large plantations.

Between 1791 and 1810, thousands of refugees from the Haitian Revolution, both whites and free people of colour (affranchis or gens de couleur libres), arrived in New Orleans; a number brought their slaves with them, many of whom were native Africans. While Governor Claiborne and other officials wanted to keep out additional free black people, the French Creoles wanted to increase the French-speaking population. In addition to bolstering the territory's French-speaking population, these refugees had a significant impact on the culture of Louisiana, including developing its sugar industry and cultural institutions.

As more refugees were allowed into the Territory of Orleans, Haitian émigrés who had first gone to Cuba also arrived. Many of the white Francophones had been deported by officials in Cuba in 1809 as retaliation for Bonapartist schemes. Nearly 90 percent of these immigrants settled in New Orleans. The 1809 migration brought 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color (of mixed-race European and African descent), and 3,226 slaves of primarily African descent, doubling the city's population. The city's population became 63 percent black, a greater proportion than Charleston, South Carolina's, that stood at 53 percent at that time.

As a port, New Orleans played a major role during the antebellum period in the Atlantic slave trade. The port handled commodities for export from the interior and imported goods from other countries, which were warehoused and transferred in New Orleans to smaller vessels and distributed along the Mississippi River watershed.

The river was filled with steamboats, flatboats and sailing ships. Despite its role in the slave trade, New Orleans at the time also had the largest and most prosperous community of free persons of colour in the nation, who were often educated, middle-class property owners.

Dwarfing the other cities in the Antebellum South, New Orleans had the U.S.'s largest slave market. The market expanded after the United States ended the international trade in 1808. Two-thirds of the more than one million slaves brought to the Deep South arrived via forced migration in the domestic slave trade. The money generated by the sale of slaves in the Upper South has been estimated at 15 percent of the value of the staple crop economy. The slaves were collectively valued at half a billion dollars. The trade spawned an ancillary economy — transportation, housing and clothing, fees, etc., estimated at 13.5% of the price per person, amounting to tens of billions of dollars (2005 dollars, adjusted for inflation) during the antebellum period, with New Orleans as a prime beneficiary. According to historian Paul Lachance;

"the addition of white immigrants [from Saint-Domingue] to the white creole population enabled French-speakers to remain a majority of the white population until almost 1830. If a substantial proportion of free persons of color and slaves had not also spoken French, however, the Gallic community would have become a minority of the total population as early as 1820."

After the Louisiana Purchase, numerous Anglo-Americans migrated to the city. The population doubled in the 1830s and by 1840, New Orleans had become the nation's wealthiest and the third-most populous city, after New York and Baltimore. German and Irish immigrants began arriving in the 1840s, working as port labourers. In this period, the state legislature passed more restrictions on manumissions  (the freeing of slaves), and virtually ended the future possibility of this continuing, as a result of legislation in 1852.

In the 1850s, white Francophone society remained an intact and vibrant community in New Orleans. They maintained instruction in French in two of the city's four school districts, but only for white students. In 1860, the city had 13,000 free people of colour (gens de couleur libres), the class of free, mostly mixed-race people that expanded in number during French and Spanish rule. They set up some private schools for their children. The census recorded 81 percent of the free people of colour as mulatto, a term used to cover all degrees of mixed race. Mostly part of the Francophone group, they constituted the artisan, educated and professional class of African Americans. The majority of black people were still enslaved, working at the port, in domestic service, in crafts, and mostly on the many large, surrounding sugarcane plantations.

After a population growth of 45 percent in the 1850s, by 1860, the city had nearly 170,000 people. It had grown in wealth, with a "per capita income [that] was second in the nation and the highest in the South." The city had a role as the "primary commercial gateway for the nation's booming midsection." The port was the nation's third largest in terms of tonnage of imported goods, after Boston and New York, handling 659,000 tons in 1859.

As the Creole elite feared, the American Civil War changed their world. In April 1862, following the city's occupation by the Union Navy after the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, Northern forces occupied the city. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, a respected Massachusetts lawyer serving in that state's militia, was appointed military governor. New Orleans residents supportive of the Confederacy nicknamed him "Beast" Butler, because of an order he issued. After his troops had been assaulted and harassed in the streets by women still loyal to the Confederate cause, his order warned that such future occurrences would result in his men treating such women as those "plying their avocation in the streets", implying that they would treat the women like prostitutes. 

Significantly, Butler abolished French-language instruction in city schools. Statewide measures in 1864 and, after the war, in 1868 further strengthened the English-only policy imposed by federal representatives. With an increased predominance of English speakers, English had already become dominant in business and government. Nevertheless, connections with the Francophone  world, both at a business and a cultural level continued.   

This painting by Edgar Degas of A Cotton Office in New Orleans depicts the interior of his maternal uncle Michel Musson's cotton firm in New Orleans.

Musson, Degas's brothers René and Achille, Musson's son-in-law William Bell, and other associates of Musson are shown engaged in various business and leisure activities while raw cotton rests on a table in the middle of the office. 

Degas created the painting in the early part of 1873 during an extended visit with family in New Orleans. His trip coincided with the political turbulence of Reconstruction. 

Reconstruction, as directed by Congress, abolished slavery and ended the remnants of Confederate secession in the Southern states; it presented the newly freed slaves (freedmen; black people) as citizens with (ostensibly) the same civil rights as those of other citizens, and which rights were guaranteed by three new constitutional amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

Edgar Degas had familial ties to Creole New Orleans. Germain Musson, Degas's maternal grandfather, was born of French descent in Port-Au-Prince. In the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, he relocated in 1810 to New Orleans where he established himself as a cotton exporter. Musson married Marie Céleste Désirée Rillieux who was from a prominent Creole family. They had five New Orleans-born children including Degas's mother, Marie-Célestine Musson, and Michel Musson. After his wife died in 1819, Germain Musson moved his family to Paris. He relocated back to New Orleans after the 1832 marriage of his daughter Marie-Célestine to Auguste Degas. When Edgar was born, Auguste arranged the purchase of a New Orleans cottage in his son's name.

Edgar Degas made his first and only trip to the United States and the birthplace of his mother in the fall of 1872 at the behest of his brother René. René at the time was running a cotton brokerage in New Orleans with their other brother Achille. René had married his first cousin Estelle Musson, daughter of Michel Musson. Before he left for New Orleans, Edgar was at an artistic crossroads. He was still uncertain about focusing his painting on contemporary subjects and had not yet found much success selling his art.

During his stay in New Orleans, Edgar Degas lived in Michel Musson's rented mansion in the Garden District. He spent much time painting these family members, especially Estelle. However, Degas expressed dissatisfaction with this work in letters to his friends Henri Rouart and James Tissot.

Michel Musson and his partners ran a cotton factoring firm whose office was in close proximity to Achille and René's business. William Bell and his business partner Frederick Nash Ogden worked in the cotton trade close by. Degas would spend some time each day in his brothers' office receiving and responding to mail, reading newspapers, and overhearing his brothers' and their associates' commercial conversations. Degas would write to Tissot that, in New Orleans, "One speaks of nothing but cotton."

The production and sale of cotton was vital to the Antebellum Southern US economy. It was also inextricably linked to slavery in the United States. During the American Civil War, cotton played a pivotal role in the Confederacy's diplomatic strategy. New Orleans stood at the heart of the cotton and slave trades as both the United States' most important cotton port and its largest slave market. 

Despite emancipation and the end of the plantation-slave complex in 1865, newly freed black farmers were still the main labour force in cotton production and were subjected to oppressive sharecropping systems and continued political persecution during Reconstruction.

Members of the Musson and Degas families owned slaves, supported the Confederacy, and had ties to and participated in white supremacist groups during Reconstruction. Germain and Michel Musson both owned slaves. Edgar Degas's mother had her dowry increased by her father's sale of a young slave girl. Michel Musson, Auguste and René Degas invested in confederate bonds. In 1873, Musson was briefly a supporter of the Louisiana Unification Movement, which sought interracial cooperation and public integration. However, he, René Degas, William Bell, and Bell's associate Frederick Nash Ogden, became members and leaders of the White League and would participate in the Battle of Liberty Place.

During the Civil War large numbers of rural ex-slaves and some free people of colour from the city volunteered for the first regiments of Black troops in the War. Led by Brigadier General Daniel Ullman (1810–1892), of the 78th Regiment of New York State Volunteers Militia, they were known as the "Corps d'Afrique." While that name had been used by a militia before the war, that group was composed of free people of color. The new group was made up mostly of former slaves. They were supplemented in the last two years of the War by newly organised United States Colored Troops, who played an increasingly important part in the war.

Violence throughout the South, especially the Memphis Riots of 1866 followed by the New Orleans Massacre in the same year, led Congress to pass the Reconstruction Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, extending the protections of full citizenship to freedmen and free people of color.

The New Orleans Massacre of 1866 occurred on July 30, when a peaceful demonstration of mostly black Freedmen was set upon by a mob of white rioters, many of whom had been soldiers of the recently defeated Confederate States of America, leading to a full-scale massacre. The violence erupted outside the Mechanics Institute, site of a reconvened Louisiana Constitutional Convention. The Republican Party of Louisiana had called for the Convention, as they were angered by the legislature's enactment of the Black Codes and refusal to extend voting rights to black men. White conservative Democrats considered the reconvened convention to be illegal and were hostile towards Republican attempts to gain increased political power in the state. The massacre "stemmed from deeply rooted political, social, and economic causes," and took place in part because of the battle "between two opposing factions for power and office." According to the official report, a total of 38 were killed and 146 wounded, with 34 of the dead and 119 of the wounded were black. Unofficial estimates were higher. Gilles Vandal estimated 40 to 50 blacks dead and more than 150 wounded. In addition, three white convention attendees were killed, as was one white protester.

Louisiana and Texas were put under the authority of the "Fifth Military District" of the United States during Reconstruction. Louisiana was readmitted to the Union in 1868. Its Constitution of 1868 granted universal male suffrage and established universal public education. Both blacks and whites were elected to local and state offices. In 1872, lieutenant governor P.B.S. Pinchback, who was of mixed race, succeeded Henry Clay Warmouth for a brief period as Republican governor of Louisiana, becoming the first governor of African descent of a U.S. state. New Orleans operated a racially integrated public school system during this period.

However, this progressive state of affairs was not to last. From 1868, elections in Louisiana were marked by violence, as white insurgents tried to suppress black voting and disrupt Republican Party gatherings. The disputed 1872 gubernatorial election resulted in conflicts that ran for years. The "White League", an insurgent paramilitary group that supported the Democratic Party, was organized in 1874 and operated in the open, violently suppressing the black vote and running off Republican officeholders. 

In 1874, in the Battle of Liberty Place, 5,000 members of the White League fought with city police to take over the state offices for the Democratic candidate for governor, holding them for three days.

The White League

The "Battle of Liberty Place" was the name given to the insurrection by its Democratic supporters, as part of their story of the struggle to overturn Republicans and the Reconstruction government. Although this government brought about greater equality and opportunity for blacks, white supremacists saw it as tyranny.

The Battle of Liberty Place, or Battle of Canal Street, was an attempted insurrection and coup d'etat by the Crescent City White League against the Reconstruction Era Louisiana Republican state government on September 14, 1874, in New Orleans, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. Five thousand members of the White League, essentially a paramilitary terrorist organisation made up largely of Confederate veterans, fought against the outnumbered New Orleans Metropolitan Police and state militia. The insurgents held the statehouse, armory, and downtown for three days, retreating before arrival of Federal troops that restored the elected government. No insurgents were charged in the action.

In 1891, the city erected the Battle of Liberty Place Monument to commemorate and praise the insurrection from the Democratic Party point of view, which at the time was in firm political control of the city and state and was in the process of disenfranchising most blacks. The white marble obelisk was placed at a prominent location on Canal Street. In 1932, the city added an inscription that expressed a contemporary white supremacist view. 

In July 2015, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu proposed removing the monument altogether and in December 2015 the New Orleans City Council voted to remove the monument, along with three others deemed a "nuisance" (statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard and Confederate States President Jefferson Davis). The monument was removed on April 24, 2017 by workers with a police escort, due to threats made by supporters of the monument.

Jim Crow era and racial segregation 

By 1876, such tactics resulted in the white Democrats, the so-called Redeemers, regaining political control of the state legislature. The federal government gave up and withdrew its troops in 1877, ending Reconstruction. 

White Democrats passed Jim Crow laws, establishing racial segregation in public facilities. In 1889, the legislature passed a constitutional amendment incorporating a "grandfather clause" that effectively disfranchised freedmen as well as the propertied people of colour who had been freed from slavery before the war. Unable to vote, African Americans could not serve on juries or in local office, and were excluded from formal politics for generations. The Southern States in the U.S. were ruled by a white supremacist section of the Democratic Party. Public schools were racially segregated and remained so until 1960.

Against this racist politics New Orleans' large community of well-educated, often French-speaking free persons of colour (gens de couleur libres), who had been free prior to the Civil War, fought against Jim Crow. They organized the Comité des Citoyens (Citizens Committee) to work for civil rights. As part of their legal campaign, they recruited one of their own, Homer Plessy, to test whether Louisiana's newly enacted Separate Car Act was constitutional. Plessy boarded a commuter train departing New Orleans for Covington, Louisiana, sat in the car reserved for whites only, and was arrested. The case resulting from this incident, Plessy v. Ferguson, was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. The court ruled that "separate but equal" accommodations were constitutional, effectively upholding Jim Crow measures.

In practice, African American public schools and facilities were underfunded across the South. The Supreme Court ruling contributed to this period as the nadir of race relations in the United States. The incidence of lynchings of black men increased across the South, as other states also disfranchised blacks and sought to impose Jim Crow laws. 

Nativist prejudices also surfaced. Anti-Italian sentiment in 1891 contributed to the lynchings of 11 Italians, some of whom had been acquitted of all charges of the murder of the police chief. Some were shot and killed in the jail where they were detained. It was the largest mass lynching in U.S. history. 

In July 1900 the city was swept by white mobs rioting after Robert Charles, a young African American, killed a policeman and temporarily escaped. The mob killed him and an estimated 20 other black people; seven white people died in the days-long conflict, until the state militia intervened to suppress the violence.

By the end of the 19th century, French language usage was fading. It was also under pressure from a growing population of Irish, Italian and German immigrants. However, as late as 1902 "one-fourth of the population of the city spoke French in ordinary daily intercourse, while another two-fourths was able to understand the language perfectly," and as late as 1945, many elderly Creole women spoke no English. The last major French language newspaper, L'Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans Bee), ceased publication on December 27, 1923, after ninety-six years. According to some sources, Le Courrier de la Nouvelle Orleans continued until 1955.

Creoles of color and Jazz

 

 

 

  

 

Lust for Life where

 Belle Moulin Rouge to

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LIDO de Paris

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A plaque also marks the wall in Père Lachaise Cemetery where 147 Communards were executed, commonly known as the Communards' Wall.[132] Memorial commemorations are held at the cemetery every year in May to remember the Commune. Another plaque behind the Hôtel de Ville marks the site of a mass grave of Communards shot by the army. Their remains were later reburied in city cemeteries.

Two squares named after the Paris Commune. One is the Place de la Commune-de-Paris [fr], the another is the Công xã Paris Square of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

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Josephine Baker's activism had been actively targeted by U.S. authorities in the 1950's as she raised issues on an international stage, especially in Latin America, a potential challenge to U.S. policy in the propaganda war taking place in the  intersection of race and Cold War foreign relations. 

What it means to be American

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Thai beauty ad says being white is key to success from Philip Courtenay on Vimeo.