So, just what has been normalised? The Americanisation of the World?

So, what's normal? 

Women reading Cosmo? Men reading Playboy? Just look!

This is the magazine cover for the December/January 2020 issue of Cosmopolitan. The covers for this woman's magazine have, in recent years, prompted concerns in  particular about its cover stories, which have become increasingly sexually explicit in tone, and using images on these covers  with models wearing revealing clothes.

This cover includes items about  "Here's when stuff will go back to normal-ish!!!", and "Never thought we'd print this but: dating lessons from pandemics past. The 14th century called and it wants its sex spree back". 

The question of what is normal in 2020 has an added resonance in a time during a global pandemic and impending environmental catastrophe. So what has SEX got to do with it? 

Just LOOK!

The New York Times featured this image in a story in 2015 about how retailers in the United States were shielding the covers of Cosmopolitan from view. This story was picked up later by Lydia Wheeler (08/07/15) in The Hill:  

Retailers to shield customers from Cosmopolitan magazine

Cosmopolitan magazine has proven to be too risqué for some retailers.

Late last month, Rite Aid and Food Lion announced they were working to shield customers from the content on the magazine’s cover. In a statement, Rite Aid said it is still going to carry the publication, but future issues will be behind pocket shields. Food Lion, meanwhile, said it’s asking the publisher of the magazine to provide a screened holder.

"We encourage those with concerns about the content of this or other magazines to contact the publishers directly, as we believe this is the most effective way to address these matters,” the company said in a statement.

Now Wal-Mart is taking similar steps to protect customers. Wal-Mart spokesman Kory Lundberg said the company has provided stores with blockers for more than 10 years but has recently decided to send out a communication to remind stores about their use.

“We’re making sure the right people know this is available,” he said.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE), which has been behind the push for the magazine cover-up, said Wal-Mart had become increasingly lax in enforcing the use of company-provided blinders in recent years.

The NCSE, which links pornography to sex trafficking, violence against women and child abuse, said the magazine targets children, yet continues to print adult content. Past Cosmo covers have donned headlines that include, “10 Things Guys Crave in Bed,” “His #1 Sex Fantasy” and “25 Sex Moves.”

“In its current issue, Cosmopolitan features a drawing by a sixth grade girl scout reader in the same issue that gives detailed descriptions of sexual acts for the purpose of pleasing a man,” NCSE Executive Director Dawn Hawkins said in a news release.

What's in a name? 

The Cambridge Dictionary says that "cosmopolitan" means "containing or having experience of people and things from many different parts of the world", as in: New York is a highly cosmopolitan city. And Cosmopolitan as a magazine was first published and based in New York City in March 1886 as a family magazine; it was later transformed into a literary magazine and, since 1965, has become a women's magazine. It was formerly titled The Cosmopolitan.

What is now generally known as "Cosmo" was widely known as a "bland" and boring magazine by critics. Cosmopolitan's circulation continued to decline for another decade until Helen Gurley Brown became chief editor in 1965. She changed the entire trajectory of the magazine during her time as editor. Brown remodelled and re-invented it as a magazine for modern single career women completely transforming the old bland Cosmopolitan magazine into a racy, contentious and well known, successful magazine. As the editor for 32 years, Brown spent this time using the magazine as an outlet to erase stigma around unmarried women not only having sex, but also enjoying it. 

In How Cosmo Changed the World, an article by Jennifer Benjamin for Cosmopolitan (May 3 2007), Helen Gurley Brown is quoted as saying:   

"I knew that women were having sex and loving it," she says. "I wanted my magazine to be their best friend, a platform from which I could tell them what I'd learned and talk about all the things that hadn't been discussed before. I wanted to tell the truth: that sex is one of the three best things out there, and I don't even know what the other two are."

Known as a "devout feminist", Brown was often attacked by critics due to her progressive views on women and sex. She believed that women were allowed to enjoy sex without shame in all cases. She died in 2012 at the age of 90. Her vision is still evident in the current design of Cosmopolitan Magazine. The magazine eventually adopted a cover format consisting of a usually young female model (in recent years, an actress, singer, or another prominent female celebrity), typically in a low cut dress, bikini, or some other revealing outfit.

The magazine set itself apart by frankly discussing sexuality from the point of view that women could and should enjoy sex without guilt. The first issue under Helen Gurley Brown, July 1965, featured an article on the birth control pill, which had gone on the market exactly five years earlier.

This was not Brown's first publication dealing with sexually liberated women. Her 1962 advice book, Sex and the Single Girl, had been a bestseller. Fan mail begging for Brown's advice on many subjects concerning women's behavior, sexual encounters, health, and beauty flooded her after the book was released. Brown sent the message that a woman should have men complement her life, not take it over. Enjoying sex without shame was also a message she incorporated in both publications.

In Brown's early years as editor, the magazine received heavy criticism. In 1968 at the feminist Miss America protest, protestors symbolically threw a number of feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can." These included copies of Cosmopolitan and Playboy magazines.

The dramatic, symbolic use of a trash can to dispose of feminine objects caught the media's attention. Protest organiser Carol Hanisch said about the Freedom Trash Can afterward, "We had intended to burn it, but the police department, since we were on the boardwalk, wouldn't let us do the burning." 

A story by Lindsy Van Gelder in the New York Post carried a headline "Bra Burners and Miss America". Her story drew an analogy between the feminist protest and Vietnam War protesters who burned their draft cards. Individuals who were present said that no one burned a bra nor did anyone take off her bra.

The parallel between protesters burning their draft cards and women burning their bras were encouraged by organizers including Robin Morgan. The phrase became headline material. 

The photograph above shows Dan Mouer in Vietnam in 1966. The magazine was sent by his wife, along with a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

The image was used in an Opinion piece by Amber Batura for The New York Times, with the headline:

How Playboy Explains Vietnam

There’s a famous scene about halfway through “Apocalypse Now” in which Martin Sheen’s river boat pulls into a supply base, deep in the jungle. While the crew members are buying diesel fuel, the supply clerk gives them free tickets to a show — “You know,” he says, “the bunnies.” Soon they’re sitting in an improvised amphitheater around a landing pad, watching as three Playboy models hop out of a helicopter and dance to “Suzie Q.”

The scene is entirely fictional; Playboy models almost never toured Vietnam, and certainly not in groups. But if the women were never there themselves in force, the magazine itself certainly was. In fact, it’s hard to overstate how profound a role Playboy played among the millions of American soldiers and civilians stationed in Vietnam throughout the war: as entertainment, yes, but more important as news and, through its extensive letters section, as a sounding board and confessional.

Playboy’s value extended beyond the individual soldier to the military at large; the publication became a coveted and useful morale booster, at times rivaling even the longed-for letter from home. Playboy branded the war because of its unique combination of women, gadgets, and social and political commentary, making it a surprising legacy of our involvement in Vietnam. By 1967, Ward Just of The Washington Post claimed, “If World War II was a war of Stars and Stripes and Betty Grable, the war in Vietnam is Playboy magazine’s war.”

The most famous feature of the magazine was the centerfold Playmate. The magazine’s creator and editor, Hugh Hefner, had a specific image in mind for the women he portrayed. The Playmate, originally introduced as the Sweetheart of the Month, represented the ultimate companion to the Playboy. She enjoyed art, politics and music. She was sophisticated, fun and intelligent. Even more important, this ideal woman enjoyed sex as much as the ideal man described in the publication. She wasn’t after men for marriage, but for mutual pleasure and companionship.

She enjoys art . . .

The sexualized, yet familiar, "girl next door" . . .

Though following in their legacy, the Playmate models differed from the pinups of World War II. Hefner wanted images of real women their readers might see in their everyday life — a classmate, secretary or neighbor — instead of the highly stylized and often famous women of an older generation. The sexualized, yet familiar, “girl next door” was the perfect accompaniment for soldiers stationed in Vietnam. This conception of wholesome, all-American beauty and sexuality acted out by largely unknown models reminded young soldiers of the women they left behind, and for whom they were fighting — and could, if they survived, imagine returning to.  

The centerfold and other visual features in the magazine served another, unintentional purpose for American troops in Vietnam.

Playboy’s pictures and often-ribald cartoons conveyed changing social and sexual norms back home.

"Don't call me 'boy'!"

The introduction of women of color in 1964 with China Lee and in 1965 with Jennifer Jackson reflected shifting attitudes regarding race. Many soldiers wrote to both the magazine and the Playmates thanking them for their inclusion in Playboy. Black soldiers, in particular, felt that the inclusion of Ms. Jackson extended the promise of Mr. Hefner’s good life to them. Viewing these images forced all Americans to rethink their definitions of beauty.

Over time, the centerfolds pushed the boundaries of social norms and legal definitions as they featured more nudity, with the inclusion of pubic hair in 1969 and full-frontal nudity in 1972. The Washington Post reported that American prisoners of war were “taken aback” by the nudity in a smuggled Playboy found on their flight home in 1973.

 

The nudity, sexuality and diversity portrayed in the pictorials represented more permissive attitudes about sex and beauty that the soldiers had missed during their years in captivity.

Playboy’s appeal to the G.I. in Vietnam extended beyond the centerfold. The men really did read it for the articles. The magazine provided regular features, editorials, columns and ads that focused on men’s lifestyle and entertainment, including high fashion, foreign travel, modern architecture, the latest technology and luxury cars. The publication set itself up as a how-to guide for those men hoping to achieve Mr. Hefner’s vision of the good life, regardless of whether they were in San Diego or Saigon.

For young men serving in Southeast Asia, whose average age was 19, military service often provided them their first access to disposable income. Soldiers turned to the magazine for advice on what gadgets to buy, the best vehicles and the latest fashions — products they could often then buy at one of Vietnam’s enormous on-base exchanges, sprawling shopping centers to rival anything back home.

The magazine’s advice feature, “The Playboy Advisor,” encouraged men to ask questions on all manner of topics, from the best liquor to stock at home to bedroom advice to adjusting to civilian life. Troops found Playboy a useful tool in figuring out their roles in the consumer-oriented landscape they were now able to join because of the mobility and income their military service provided them.

The content moved beyond lifestyle and entertainment as the editorial mission of the magazine evolved. By the 1960s, Playboy included hard-hitting features on important social, cultural and political issues confronting the United States, often written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, government and military leaders and top literary figures. The magazine took on topics like feminism, abortion, gay rights, race, economic issues, the counterculture movement and mass incarceration — something soldiers couldn’t get from Stars and Stripes. It offered exhaustive interviews with everyone from Malcolm X to the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, exposing young G.I.s to arguments and ideas about race and African-American equality they might not have been introduced to in their hometowns. Service in Vietnam put many soldiers in direct contact with diverse races and cultures, and Playboy presented them new ideas and arguments regarding those social and cultural issues.

As early as 1965, Playboy began running articles about the Vietnam War, with an editorial position that expressed reservations about the escalating conflict. The editors were smart about it, of course: Their stance may have been critical of the president, the administration, the military leaders and the strategy, but they made sure the contributors made every effort to stay supportive of the soldiers. In 1967, troops read the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith arguing that “no part of the original justification” for the war “remains intact,” as he dismantled the idea of monolithic Communism and other Cold War justifications for war. But that was different from attacking the troops themselves. In 1971, the journalist David Halberstam wrote in an article for Playboy that “we admired their bravery and their idealism, their courage and dedication in the face of endless problems. We believed that they represented the best of American society.” Troops in Vietnam could turn to Playboy for coverage of their own war without fearing criticism of themselves.

Playboy was also useful as a forum for the men engaged in the fighting. The publication was unique in its number of interactive features. Soldiers wrote into sections like “Dear Playboy” for advice and with reactions to articles. But those correspondents also freely described their wartime experiences and concerns. They often described what they saw as unfair treatment by the military, discussed their difficulty in transitioning back to civilian society or thanked the magazine for helping them through their time in-country. In 1973, one soldier, R. K. Redini of Chicago, wrote to Playboy about his return home. “One of the things that made my Vietnam tour endurable was seeing Playboy every month,” he said. “It sure helped all of us forget our problems — for a little while, anyway. I thank you not only for myself but also for the thousands of other guys who find a lot of pleasure in your magazine.”

In “The Playboy Forum,” another reader-response section, many wrote in addressing specific aspects of Hefner’s lengthy editorial series “The Playboy Philosophy,” including drugs, race and homosexuality in the military. The forum format allowed those who served in Vietnam to reach out not just to other soldiers, but also to the public, providing them a safe space to voice their opinions and criticisms of their service. “Traditionally, a soldier with a gripe is advised by friends to tell it to the chaplain, take it to the inspector general or write to his congressman,” a soldier wrote. “Now, probably because of letters about military injustice in The Playboy Forum, another court of last resort has been added to the list.”

Playboy magazine’s significance to the soldiers in Vietnam spread far beyond the foldout Playmate. Troops appropriated the magazine’s bunny mascot and the company’s logo, painting it on planes, helicopters and tanks. They incorporated the logo into patches and “playboy” into call signs and unit nicknames. Adopting the symbol of Playboy was a small rebellion to the conformity of military life and a testament to the impact of the magazine on soldiers’ lives and morale.

And the magazine returned the favor. Long after the war ended, it funded documentaries on the war, Agent Orange research and post-traumatic stress disorder studies. It is a commitment that testifies to this enduring relationship between the publication and the soldier, and reveals how the magazine is a surprising legacy of one of America’s longest wars. 

"Can anyone beat my pair?"

Double entendres are frequently featured in the world of the American pin-up girl, and would shape something of the future aesthetic of the pin-up in Playboy.

These techniques of ideological and industrial seduction and deception have a long history in the aesthetics that revel in aspects of sexual violence, and crucially associated with power and patriarchy.

The utilisation of the silent but obvious double entendre and explicit phallic symbolism, that's primarily about militant power in this poster, has a long back story. 

Shock and/or/awe and Pornotropia?

The effect of this image is intended to encourage a connection between the aesthetic support systems of capitalist and imperialist power as an ideology steeped in another kettle (that's actually the same kettle), pornography!  

Bringing out the big guns/dicks . . .

In this World of Warships YouTube channel video the persistence of this "trope" is what it is all about, and concluding with a "retro" escapist fantasy, a Hollywood pin-up inspired dance and music number taking place on the deck of a carrier.

The fantasy is extended to the inclusion of the "pretty girl" in a cosplay outfit on the World of Warships stand at the Tokyo Gaming Show, though admittedly the big guns are not so big, but the signification structure remains intact, with the cosplay girl's hand on a big symbolic phallus.

World of Warships stand at the Tokyo Gaming Show in 2014. 

"Cosplay Is Not Consent", is the movement started in 2013 by Rochelle Keyhan, Erin Filson, and Anna Kegler, bringing to the mainstream the issue of sexual harassment in the convention attending cosplay community. Harassment of cosplayers include photography without permission, verbal abuse, touching, and groping. 

In fantasy depictions, as in this example of the pornotropia of pornographer Julius Zimmerman a cosplay style nurse grabs a big penis and holds it to her big boobs.  

Cosplay has influenced the advertising industry, in which cosplayers are often used for event work previously assigned to agency models. Some cosplayers have thus transformed their hobby into profitable, professional careers. Japan's entertainment industry has been home to the professional cosplayers since the rise of Comiket and Tokyo Game Show. 

The phenomenon is most apparent in Japan but exists to some degree in other countries as well. Professional cosplayers who profit from their art may experience problems related to copyright infringement. 

A cosplay model, also known as a cosplay idol, cosplays costumes for anime and manga or video game companies. Good cosplayers are viewed as fictional characters in the flesh, in much the same way that film actors come to be identified in the public mind with specific roles. Cosplayers have modeled for print magazines like Cosmode and a successful cosplay model can become the brand ambassador for companies like Cospa. Some cosplay models can achieve significant recognition. While there are many significant cosplay models, Yaya Han was described as having emerged "as a well-recognized figure both within and outside cosplay circuits". Jessica Nigri, used her recognition in cosplay to gain other opportunities such as voice acting and her own documentary on Rooster Teeth. Liz Katz used her fanbase to take her cosplay from a hobby to a successful business venture, sparking debate through the cosplay community whether cosplayers should be allowed to fund and profit from their work.

In the 2000s, cosplayers started to push the boundaries of cosplay into eroticism paving the way to "erocosplay". The advent of social media coupled with crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and OnlyFans have allowed cosplay models to turn cosplay into profitable full-time careers.

USS Missouri underway in August 1944.

The fetishising of "big guns" merges with history and ideology when it comes to the World of Warships story of the USS Missouri, and extends into science fiction fantasy with the film Battleship. 

This newsreel film footage of General MacArthur on his way to receive the surrender of the Japanese aboard the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay has a whiff of triumphalism peppered with a pinch of revenge, and that casts a veil over the substantial fact that the war with Japan resulted in U.S. hegemony in the Pacific being put in question.

Any doubts as to the future of U.S. hegemony in the Asia Pacific region would have to be countered by all available means. The expected result would be a re-established "Pax Americana". 

The use of this term "Pax Americana", latin for an "American Peace", originates in the 1890's, and echoes the use of the term "Pax Britannica", a term that recast the "Pax Romana", the 200-year-long timespan of Roman history which is identified as a golden age of Roman imperialism, order, prosperity stability, hegemonial power and expansion. 

The use of this term is, in chronological order first: 

The use of the term Pax Romana to pretend that peace is a benefit of empire. 

That the late nineteenth century use of the terms Pax Britannica and Pax Americana are bound together in the shifting geopolitical patterns of global power, with a British Empire finding itself as a European colonial and imperialist power contending with an increasingly imperialist United States.

HANDS OFF!

"This in reality entails no new obligation upon us, for the Monroe Doctrine means precisely such a guarantee on our part" - President Roosevelt

A 1906 political cartoon depicting Theodore Roosevelt using the Monroe Doctrine to keep European powers out of the Dominican Republic.

The Goddess Pax appears as a "Calendar Girl" by pin-up artist Ted Withers in 1960. 

The goddess Pax under Augustus Caesar was utilised as an ideological image, a demonstration that peace brought wealth, a contradiction, given that the traditional Roman understanding was that only war and conquest afforded wealth in the form of loot and plunder. Fruits and grains were incorporated into Pax’s image and this was maybe done to show the return and abundance of agriculture at the time, as many veterans during the empire where often settled onto farms - particularly after the civil wars. Pax was also shown with twins, maybe representing domestic harmony achieved through the Pax Romana. This was because fertility at home was spurred when the father of the household was around and not fighting in the legions. Cows, pigs and sheep imagery on the Ara Pacis showed the abundance of food and animal husbandry during the Pax Romana and these animals were also regularly scarified to Pax. Pax is also shown with a cornucopia to further emphasise the opulence and wealth during this Roman golden era. During the latter years of her worship she was very rarely shown holding the caduceus and she was increasingly shown sharing many more features common with Augustus - hinting at the Pax Augusta.

The Goddess Pax - Ara Pacis, Rome 

"They that make them shall be like unto them!"

Q. Is this image uploaded below a pornographic image?

A. YES and NO!

YES, as in a dictionary definition of printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, but NOT as intended to stimulate sexual excitement. 

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones article on Penises of the ancient world, references an article in Vice's Garage on the archaeological discovery of a mosaic found in a Roman toilet in Turkey depicting a young man holding his erect penis. Jonathan Jones writes: 

When excavations began at the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in the 18th century, the place turned out to be full of penises. The ancient art preserved under ash from the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius was so rich in willies that the English antiquarian Richard Payne Knight argued for the existence of an ancient fertility cult there. After all, there was one still alive in southern Italy at the time. His 1786 book An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus has an engraved frontispiece showing an array of contemporary wax phalluses made as votive offerings.

More than 200 years later, the priapism of the ancient world can still astound us. Archaeologists have uncovered a Roman public toilet in southern Turkey with some filthy and funny floor decorations. As they hitched up their togas or reached for sponge on a stick, users of this men’s loo could look down at a mosaic of a young man holding his cock. He is labelled in the mosaic as Narcissus, who in Greek myth fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away gazing at it. Here, his attention is more focused: he’s obsessed with his own erection. As he plays with it, he looks sideways to reveal a ludicrous phallic nose.

Reports on this intimate uncovering show that for all our modern sophistication we can still be as amazed as 18th-century dilettanti were by ancient erotic art. One article even asks: 

“Is this the first historical dick pic?

Re:LODE Radio seeks to offer a different account of the myth of Narcissus and Echo from the usual and common interpretation given by Jonathan Jones in his article, i.e. that:  

"Narcissus, who in Greek myth fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away gazing at it." 

Echo and Narcissus, 1630, by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) 

Marshall McLuhan in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, has a chapter, Chapter 4, titled:  

THE GADGET LOVER

The subheading for this chapter is: 

Narcissus as Narcosis

McLuhan writes: 

The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall deepest in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!

Is the battleship's 16 inch gun an archetype of the Narcissus as narcosis effect, and a substitute version of the phallus, a tool of power, an extension of man?

When it comes to a dictionary definition of pornography, and the particular intention to stimulate sexual excitement, the "big dick" here is simply another example of "clickbait" on the internet, in this case pointing to the serious cultural, psychological and perceptual fallout that stems from the use of mechanical technological forms as powerful extensions of man. But everything has changed. As McLuhan said in the opening paragraphs of Understanding Media, back in 1964: 

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.

The intention here is, as with previous representations of a "big dick", to explore just how far a discussion like this can explore the extent to which a battleship is capable of becoming a fetishised "power and/or sex" thing in the service of ideology. Re:LODE Radio proposes for the sake of making a point; substitute the erect penis for a 16 in (406 mm) /50 caliber Mark 7 gun, and Julius Zimmerman's "pretty girl" for Cher!

Cher's performance of the pop rock song "If I could turn back time" among the big guns of USS Missouri for a video shoot that took place at the end of June, 1989, coincides with a period when the power politics underpinning the Cold War, and the accompanying contestation of spheres of influence, began to unravel. The lyrics of the song are about feelings of remorse following a reflection on past actions and a willingness to reverse time to make things right. If only!

Well . . . Hello Sailor!

The music video for Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time", directed by American television director Marty Callner, shows Cher and her band performing a concert for the ship's crew. The video footage was shot on June 30, 1989. 

Earlier that month tanks and troops had rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush the protests that were taking place there on 4 June 1989. Although they were not effectively organised and their goals varied, the students called for greater accountability, constitutional due process, democracy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech. At the height of the protests, about one million people assembled in the Square. The Chinese Communist Party continues to forbid discussions about the Tiananmen Square protests and has taken measures to block or censor related information, in an attempt to suppress the public's memory of the Tiananmen Square protests. Textbooks contain little, if any, information about the protests. After the protests, officials banned controversial films and books and shut down many newspapers. Within a year, 12% of all newspapers, 8% of all publishing companies, 13% of all social science periodicals, and more than 150 films were either banned or shut down. The government also announced that it had seized 32 million contraband books and 2.4 million video and audio cassettes.[ Access to media and Internet resources about the subject are either restricted or blocked by censors. Banned literature and films include Summer Palace, Forbidden City, Collection of June Fourth Poems, The Critical Moment: Li Peng diaries and any writings of Zhao Ziyang or his aide Bao Tong, including Zhao's memoirs. However, contraband and Internet copies of these publications can still be found.

On the day following the massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square a lone protester stepped in front of a column of tanks rolling down the northeast edge of Tiananmen Square, along Chang'an Avenue, shortly after noon  . . .

. . . in Beijing 5 June 1989!

Amazingly, the tank stopped. The protester then engages with the tank crew, then the CNN film footage ends. The incident was shared to a worldwide audience. Internationally, it is considered one of the most iconic images of all time, but inside China, the image and the accompanying events are subject to censorship.

There is no reliable information about the identity or fate of the man; the story of what happened to the tank crew is also unknown. At least one witness has stated that Tank Man was not the only person to have blocked the tanks during the protest, but Tank Man is unique in that he is the only one who was photographed and recorded on video. 

On the same day as the Tiananmen Square protests were being crushed by the Chinese Communist party, an election victory for Solidarity in the first partially free parliamentary elections in post-war Poland sparks off a succession of anti-communist Revolutions during 1989 across Central Europe, and later in  South-East and Eastern Europe. 

A "pretty girl" turning back time? 

Cher's outfit for the original video, a fishnet body stocking under a black one-piece bathing suit that left most of her buttocks (and a tattoo of a butterfly) exposed, proved very controversial, and many television networks refused to show the video. MTV first banned the video, and later played it only after 9 PM. A second version of the video was made, including new scenes and less overtly sexual content than the original. 

The outfit and risque nature of the video were a complete surprise to the Navy, who expected Cher to wear a jumpsuit for the concert, as presented on storyboards during original discussions with producers. The sailors were already in place and the band had begun playing when Cher emerged in her outfit. Lieutenant Commander Steve Honda from the Navy's Hollywood Liaison office requested Callner briefly suspend shooting and convince Cher to change into more conservative attire, but Callner, refused.

The Navy received criticism for allowing the video shoot, especially from World War II veterans who saw it as a desecration of a national historic site that should be treated with reverence. 

As the concerns over an "historic site" were being expressed by World War II veterans, the consequences of the Revolutions of 1989 and the adoption of a foreign policy based on non-interference by the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved on 1 June 1991 and Soviet troops began withdrawing back to the Soviet Union, completing their withdrawal by the mid-1990s.

Today the United States military, industrial and capitalist complex would probably dearly love to "turn back time" to 1945 or even 1898. 

Cher cavorting amongst the big guns and sailors aboard the Missouri has the same "tongue in cheek" attitude of the many forms originating in American entertainment and popular culture. 

It's a "put on" or putting "it" on as much as it's a "take off" or taking "it" off!  

And "it", in both cases, is the audience for the artist/performer, the observer, whether participant observer or observant participant, or as in this famous line, referenced in T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922), from one of the poems in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and addressed to the reader: 

Au Lecteur 

Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

Hypocrite reader! — My twin! — My brother!

Frontispiece for Baudelaire's collection of poems "Les Fleurs du Mal" 1857 by Félix Bracquemond.

A skeletal spectre of death is depicted in this image, arising out of the dung heap of modernity, covered with new but sickly vegetation, The Flowers of Evil.

For Baudelaire, the city has been transformed into an anthill of identical bourgeois that reflect the new identical structures that litter a Paris he once called home but can now no longer recognise, following Haussmann's renovation of Paris. Together, the poems in Tableaux Parisiens act as 24-hour cycle of Paris, starting with the second poem Le Soleil (The Sun) and ending with the second to last poem Le Crépuscule du Matin (Morning Twilight). The poems featured in this cycle of Paris all deal with the feelings of anonymity and estrangement from a newly modernised city, following th demolition of some of the old medieval districts.

Baudelaire is critical of the clean and geometrically newly laid out streets of Paris which alienate the unsung anti-heroes of Paris who serve as inspiration for the poet: the beggars, the blind, the industrial worker, the gambler, the prostitute, the old and the victim of imperialism. These characters whom Baudelaire once praised as the backbone of Paris are now eulogized in his nostalgic poems. 

NOT "the prostitute"!

The Romans had adapted the myths and iconography of Venus from her Greek counterpart Aphrodite for Roman art and Latin literature. In the later classical tradition of the West, Venus became one of the most widely referenced deities of Greco-Roman mythology as the embodiment of love and sexuality, and usually depicted nude in paintings.

From antiquity . . .

Fresco from Pompei, Casa di Venus, 1st century AD. It is supposed that this fresco could be the Roman copy of famous portrait of Campaspe, mistress of Alexander the Great.

. . . to the Paris Salon of 1863

The Birth of Venus (French: Naissance de Venus) is a painting by the French artist Alexandre Cabanel. 

Shown to great success at the Paris Salon of 1863, The Birth of Venus was immediately purchased by Napoleon III for his own personal collection. The Birth of Venus was one of a multitude of female nudes. Bathed in opalescent colours, the goddess Venus shyly looks to the viewer from beneath the crook of her elbow.

Olympia - a prostitute

Two years later, Manet presented his now renowned painting Olympia at the Salon. 

Today both hang in the Musee’d’ Orsay. Unlike Venus's ethereal-like palette, Manet painted Olympia with pale, placid skin tone, and darkly outlined the figure. Her only seemingly modest gesture is her placement of her hand over her leg, though it is not out of shyness- one must pay before they can see. James Rubin writes of the two works: 

“The Olympia is often compared to Cabanel’s Birth of Venus, for the latter is a far more sexually appealing work, despite its mythological guise… It is evident Manet’s demythologizing of the female nude was foremost a timely reminder of modern realities. The majority of critics attacked the painting with unmitigated disgust…: “What is this odalisque with the yellow belly, ignoble model dredged up from who knows where?” [And] “The painter’s attitude is of inconceivable vulgarity.” 

(Rubin, James H. (1999), Impressionism, London: Phaidon Press Limited 67 - 68)

The dialectics of Olympia and the Venus/Aphrodite binary

What shocked contemporary audiences was not Olympia's nudity, nor the presence of her fully clothed maid, but her confrontational gaze and a number of details identifying her as a demi-mondaine or prostitute. These include the orchid in her hair, her bracelet, pearl earrings and the oriental shawl on which she lies, symbols of wealth and sensuality. The black ribbon around her neck, in stark contrast with her pale flesh, and her cast-off slipper underline the voluptuous atmosphere. "Olympia" was a name associated with prostitutes in 1860s Paris.

The Venus of Urbino

Manet's Olympia painting is modelled after Titian's Venus of Urbino (c. 1534). 

Whereas the left hand of Titian's Venus is curled and appears to entice, Olympia's left hand appears to block, which has been interpreted as symbolic of her role as a prostitute, granting or restricting access to her body in return for payment. Manet replaced the little dog (symbol of fidelity) in Titian's painting with a black cat, a creature associated with nocturnal promiscuity.

The aroused posture of the cat was provocative; in French, chatte (pussy) is slang for female genitalia. 

Olympia disdainfully ignores the flowers presented to her by her servant, probably a gift from a client. Is she is looking in the direction of the door, as a client intrudes, barging in unannounced?

Unlike the smooth idealized nude of Alexandre Cabanel's La naissance de Vénus, also painted in 1863, Olympia is a real woman whose nakedness is emphasised by the harsh lighting. The canvas is larger than usual for this genre-style painting. Most paintings that were this size depicted historical or mythological events, so the size of the work, among other factors, caused surprise. Olympia is fairly thin by the artistic standards of the time and her relatively undeveloped body is more girlish than womanly. Charles Baudelaire thought this thinness was more indecent than fatness.

The model for Olympia, Victorine Meurent, would have been recognised by viewers of the painting because she was well known in Paris circles. She started modelling when she was sixteen years old and she also was an accomplished painter in her own right. Some of her paintings were exhibited in the Paris Salon. The familiarity with the identity of the model was a major reason this painting was considered shocking to viewers. A well known woman currently living in modern-day Paris could not simultaneously represent a historical or mythological woman.

Then there's Olympia's maid! A binary pairing? 

The figure of the maid in the painting, modelled by a woman named Laure, has become a topic of discussion among contemporary scholars. 

As T. J. Clark recounts of a friend's disbelief in the revised 1990 version of The Painting of Modern Life: "you've written about the white woman on the bed for fifty pages and more, and hardly mentioned the black woman alongside her." 

Olympia was created 15 years after slavery had been abolished in France and its empire, but negative stereotypes of black people persisted among some elements of French society. In some cases, the white prostitute in the painting was described using racially charged language.

It was not for following an artistic convention that Manet included Laure but to create an ideological binary between black and white, good and bad, clean and dirty and so on.

When paired with a lighter skin tone, the Black female model stands in as signifier to all of the racial stereotypes of the West.

"Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity" 

This link is to an essay by Lorraine O'Grady, an American artist, writer, translator, and critic, originally published in 1992 in the book, New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action. The first part of the essay was published in Afterimage 20 (Summer 1992). Widely referenced in scholarly works, it is a cultural critique of the representation of Black female bodies, and the reclamation of the body as a site of black female subjectivity, and the West's construction of not-white women as not-to-be-seen. 

O’Grady uses the painting Olympia by Édouard Manet as an example of Eurocentrism and its manifestation in both historical fact and in imaginative fiction. She begins: 

The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather, like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, non-white or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in the West's metaphoric construction of "woman." White is what woman is; not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gathers in) is what she had better not be. Even in an allegedly postmodern era, the not-white woman as well as the not-white man are symbolically and even theoretically excluded from sexual difference. Their function continues to be, by their chiaroscuro, to cast the difference of white men and white women into sharper relief. 

She continues, asking . . . 

How could they/we not be affected by that lingering structure of invisibility, enacted in the myriad codicils of daily life and still enforced by the images of both popular and high culture? How not get the message of what Judith Wilson calls "the legions of black servants who loom in the shadows of European and European-American aristocratic portraiture," of whom Laura, the professional model that Edouard Manet used for Olympia's maid, is in an odd way only the most famous example? Forget "tonal contrast." We know what she is meant for: she is Jezebel and Mammy, prostitute and female eunuch, the two-in-one. When we're through with her inexhaustibly comforting breast, we can use her ceaselessly open cunt. And best of all, she is not a real person, only a robotic servant who is not permitted to make us feel guilty, to accuse us as does the slave in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). After she escapes from the room where she was imprisoned by a father and son, that outraged woman says: "You couldn't think up what them two done to me." Olympia's maid, like all the other "peripheral Negroes," is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background drapery.

To repeat: castrata and whore, not madonna and whore. Laura's place is outside what can be conceived of as woman. She is the chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West's construct of the female body, for the "femininity" of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight. Thus only the white body remains as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze. The not-white body has been made opaque by a blank stare, misperceived in the nether regions of TV.

"And here is now another example"

The Arcades Project 

For Walter Benjamin, the philosopher, cultural critic and essayist (already mentioned re: aestheticisation of politics), the phenomenon of "Paris" had a particular importance in his thinking. In his major work, The Arcades Project, begun in 1927, but never completed (and in a way this was always to be so, given the use of his fragmentary style in presenting thoughts and questions), was about the rise of modern European urban culture, and Paris becomes important, not just as the capital city of France but, as evidenced in these two Exposés: 

"Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1935) 

"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1939)

An exposé being something, whether a film, other various media or a piece of writing, which reveals the truth about a situation or person, especially something involving shocking facts. According to the Wikipedia article on the subject of Benjamin's project: 

Parisian arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire (ca. 1850–1870). Benjamin linked them to the city's distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the flâneur (i.e., a person strolling in a locale to experience it). 

Benjamin first mentioned the Arcades Project in a 1927 letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, describing it as his attempt to use collage techniques in literature. Initially, Benjamin saw the Arcades as a small article he would finish within a few weeks. 

However, Benjamin's vision of the Arcades Project grew increasingly ambitious in scope until he perceived it as representing his most important creative accomplishment. On several occasions Benjamin altered his overall scheme of the Arcades Project, due in part to the influence of Theodor Adorno, who gave Benjamin a stipend and who expected Benjamin to make the Arcades project more explicitly political and Marxist in its analysis. 

It contains sections (what he terms convolutes) on Arcades, Fashion, Catacombs, iron constructions, exhibitions, advertising, Interior design, Baudelaire, The Streets of Paris, Panoramas and Dioramas, Mirrors, Painting, Modes of Lighting, Railroads, Charles Fourier, Marx, Photography, Mannequins, Social movements, Daumier's caricatures, Literary History, the Stock exchange, Lithography, and the Paris Commune. 

In considering:  

"French culture and the nation" . . . 

. . . Re:LODE Radio sees this phenomenon as symmetrically mirrored in the type of narcissism of:  

"American culture and the nation". . .

. . . And when it comes to the notion of;  

"the nation", 

. . . the follow up to the question that the French historian Ernest Renan (1823–1892) asked in his 1882 lecture: 

Q. "What is a Nation?" ("Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?") 

includes the idea that a nation is; 

"a daily referendum", 

and that nations are based as much on; 

"what the people jointly forget, as what they remember," 

and this observation is frequently quoted in historical discussions concerning nationalism and national identity. 

Revolution on the streets! The Paris Commune - what is remembered and what is NOT!

This painting by Manet of the aftermath of the Haussmannisation of Paris with the Road-menders in the Rue Mossnier (1878) belies the trauma of the barricades that took place seven years earlier during the Paris Commune of 1871.

The Bloody Week 

In 1871 the enemy of the French state was not the Prussian military ensconced in the Palace of Versailles (where, and when, the nation of a unified German Empire was proclaimed), for the bourgeoisie, for the conservative political class, the enemy was the proletarian working class citizens of Paris who refused to surrender, were later summarily executed in the thousands (estimates of 20,000 fatalities have been revised down to half that number in recent calculations) by the French army in the streets of Paris and the executions that took place in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Map illustrating war between Paris Commune and National government

Benjamin's take on: 

E. Haussmann, or the Barricades

I venerate the Beautiful, the Good, and all things great; Beautiful nature, on which great art rests -
How it enchants the ear and charms the eye!
I love spring in blossom: women and roses.

Baron Haussmann, Confession d'un lion devenu vieux!

Haussmann's activity is incorporated into Napoleonic imperialism, which favors investment capital. In Paris, speculation is at its height. Haussmann's expropriations give rise to speculation that borders on fraud. The rulings of the Court of Cassation, which are inspired by the bourgeois and Orleanist opposition, increase the financial risks of Haussmannization. Haussmann tries to shore up his dictatorship by placing Paris under an emergency regime. In 1864, in a speech before the National Assembly, he vents his hatred of the rootless urban population. This population grows ever larger as a result of his projects. Rising rents drive the proletariat into the suburbs. The quartiers of Paris in this way lose their distinctive physiognomy. The "red belt" forms. Haussmann gave himself the title of "demolition artist." He believed he had a vocation for his work, and emphasizes this in his memoirs. The central marketplace passes for Haussmann's most successful construction - and this is an interesting symptom. It has been said of the Île de la Cité, the cradle of the city, that in the wake of Haussmann only one church, one public building, and one barracks remained. Hugo and Merimee suggest how much the transformations made by Haussmann appear to Parisians as a monument of Napoleonic despotism. The inhabitants of the city no longer feel at home there; they start to become conscious of the inhuman character of the metropolis. Maxime Du Camp's monumental work Paris owes its existence to this dawning awareness. The etchings of Meryon (around 1850) constitute the death mask of old Paris.

The true goal of Haussmann's projects was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in the streets of Paris impossible for all time. With the same end in mind, Louis Philippe had already introduced wooden paving. Nevertheless, barricades had played a considerable role in the February Revolution. Engels studied the tactics of barricade fighting. Haussmann seeks to forestall such combat in two ways. Widening the streets will make the erection of barricades impossible, and new streets will connect the barracks in straight lines with the workers' districts. Contemporaries christened the operation "strategic embellishment."

Civil War! 

For Manet his 1878 picture of road menders may have contained echoes of his earlier prints titled Civil War (Guerre Civile) 1871–73, published 1874. After serving in the National Guard during the Siege of Paris, Manet remained outside the city for most of the Commune but returned to witness the atrocities of its violent suppression in late May 1871. According to his friend Théodore Duret, he based this lithograph on a sketch made from life near the Madeleine Church, the site of one of the first massacres of Communards by Versailles government troops. The dead National Guardsman lying beside the barricade stands for one of many, while the pinstriped pant legs in the right corner refer to additional civilian casualties.  

Manet’s animated use of the lithographic medium, which included employing the side of the crayon for broad strokes, as well as scratching into the greasy black marks, suggests that the dust has barely settled on this scene. The role of Manet, the "flâneur", as a witness to state led atrocities upon citizens, in revolt, and revolutionary, contrasts with the artist who possessed a lifelong interest in the subject of leisure, entertainment, and the distractions of modern life.

The flâneur is a French noun referring to a person, literally meaning "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer", but with some nuanced additional meanings and as a loanword in English. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier. Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life.

The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from 19th-century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. It was Walter Benjamin, drawing on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, who made this figure the object of scholarly interest in the 20th century, as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern (even modernist) experience. Following Benjamin, the flâneur has become an important symbol for scholars, artists, and writers. 

Manet's interest in all aspects of modern life, the various manifestations of cultural, economic and political exchanges, be they characterised by the exchange of bullets, or sex for money, along with champagne and red triangles on bottled beer, ends in this work. 

The "pretty girl", is she a sex worker on the side? 

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Un bar aux Folies Bergère) 

This is Édouard Manet's last major work. It was painted in 1882 and exhibited at the Paris Salon of that year. It depicts a scene in the Folies Bergère nightclub in Paris. 

No dust in this scene of new building developments in Paris!

This painting of 1877 by Gustave Caillebotte, best known for his paintings of urban Paris, is titled Paris Street; Rainy Day (Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, also known as La Place de l'Europe, temps de pluie) and shows new paving glistening in the rain. Any sense of a potential weaponising of the architecture, and the street itself, has been removed and replaced by the denizens of a bourgeoisie surveying entirely new and unthreatening prospects. 

She wears a hat, veil, diamond earring, demure brown dress, and a fur lined coat, described in 1877 as "modern – or should I say, the latest fashion". The man wears a moustache, topcoat, frock coat, top hat, bow tie, starched white shirt, buttoned waistcoat and an open long coat with collar turned up. They are unambiguously middle class. Some working class figures may be seen in the background; a maid in a doorway, the decorator carrying a ladder, cut-off by the umbrella above him. Caillebotte juxtaposes the figures and the perspective in a playful manner, with one man appearing to jump from the wheel of a carriage; another pair of legs appear below the rim of an umbrella.

This painting is almost unique among his works for its particularly flat colours and photo-realistic effect, which give the painting its distinctive and modern look.

The Paris Commune remembered and/or a memory erased and/or conveniently forgotten? 

The echoes of this cultural and political trauma cut through those efforts of denial, or forgetting, for those on the "Left" the Commune is both a lesson and an emblem. Karine Varley, in her paper: Memories Not Yet Formed: Commemorating the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, explores this complex situation in the context of attempts to the memorialising the Franco Prussian War inevitably evoking memories of the Commune that required control management, and suppression. However, such control management of history and memory is made somewhat more difficult when an iconic Parisian landmark is the site of the burial of that history and the erasure of a collective memory. 

Q. And what is this iconic landmark? 

A. Montmartre, including the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur

In this video France 24 takes its audience on a tour of the history of Montmartre that includes the iconic structure that overlooks Paris, the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur, that, in its purpose, and in its construction, was and is, sheer counter-revolutionary propaganda. 

A tourist destination and . . .

. . . history buried?

The Paris Commune was the main insurrectionary commune of France in 1870-1871, based on direct democracy and established in Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871.

During the Franco-Prussian War, Paris had been defended by the National Guard, where working class radicalism grew among soldiers. 

Everyday life for Parisians became increasingly difficult during the siege. In December temperatures dropped to −15 °C (5 °F), and the Seine froze for three weeks. Parisians suffered shortages of food, firewood, coal and medicine. The city was almost completely dark at night. The only communication with the outside world was by balloon, carrier pigeon, or letters packed in iron balls floated down the Seine. Rumours and conspiracy theories abounded. Because supplies of ordinary food ran out, starving denizens ate most of the city zoo's animals, then resorted to feeding on rats.

By early January 1871, Bismarck and the Germans themselves were tired of the prolonged siege. They installed seventy-two 120- and 150-mm artillery pieces in the forts around Paris and on 5 January began to bombard the city day and night. Between 300 and 600 shells hit the centre of the city every day. 

Between 11 and 19 January 1871, the French armies had been defeated on four fronts and Paris was facing a famine. General Trochu received reports from the prefect of Paris that agitation against the government and military leaders was increasing in the political clubs and in the National Guard of the working-class neighbourhoods of Belleville, La Chapelle, Montmartre, and Gros-Caillou.

At midday on 22 January, three or four hundred National Guards and members of radical groups — mostly Blanquists — gathered outside the Hôtel de Ville. A battalion of Gardes Mobiles from Brittany was inside the building to defend it in case of an assault. The demonstrators presented their demands that the military be placed under civil control, and that there be an immediate election of a commune. The atmosphere was tense, and in the middle of the afternoon, gunfire broke out between the two sides; each side blamed the other for firing first. Six demonstrators were killed, and the army cleared the square. The government quickly banned two publications, Le Reveil of Delescluze and Le Combat of Pyat, and arrested 83 revolutionaries. 

At the same time as the demonstration in Paris, the leaders of the Government of National Defence in Bordeaux had concluded that the war could not continue. With Paris starving, and Gambetta's provincial armies reeling from one disaster after another, French foreign minister Favre went to Versailles on 24 January to discuss peace terms with Bismarck.  

Bismarck agreed to end the siege and allow food convoys to immediately enter Paris (including trains carrying millions of German army rations), on condition that the Government of National Defence surrender several key fortresses outside Paris to the Prussians. Without the forts, the French Army would no longer be able to defend Paris.

Although public opinion in Paris was strongly against any form of surrender or concession to the Prussians, the Government realised that it could not hold the city for much longer, and that Gambetta's provincial armies would probably never break through to relieve Paris. President Trochu resigned on 25 January and was replaced by Favre, who signed the surrender two days later at Versailles, with the armistice coming into effect at midnight.

Following the Siege of Paris and the military defeat of French forces by the Prussian war machine, on 26 January 1871 the Government of National Defence based in Paris negotiated an armistice with the Prussians with special conditions for Paris. The city would not be occupied by the Germans. Regular soldiers would give up their arms, but would not be taken into captivity. Paris would pay an indemnity of 200 million francs. At Jules Favre's request, Bismarck agreed not to disarm the National Guard, so that order could be maintained in the city. 

The national government in Bordeaux held national elections  on 8 February. Most electors in France were rural, Catholic and conservative, and this was reflected in the results; of the 645 deputies assembled in Bordeaux on February, about 400 favoured a constitutional monarchy under either Henri, Count of Chambord (grandson of Charles X) or Prince Philippe, Count of Paris (grandson of Louis Philippe).

Of the 200 republicans in the new parliament, 80 were former Orléanists (Philippe's supporters) and moderately conservative. They were led by Adolphe Thiers, who was elected in 26 departments, the most of any candidate. There were an equal number of more radical republicans, including Jules Favre and Jules Ferry, who wanted a republic without a monarch, and who felt that signing the peace treaty was unavoidable. Finally, on the extreme left, there were the radical republicans and socialists, a group that included Louis Blanc, Léon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau. This group was dominant in Paris, where they won 37 of the 42 seats.

On 17 February the new Parliament elected the 74-year-old Thiers as chief executive of the Third Republic. He was considered to be the candidate most likely to bring peace and to restore order. Long an opponent of the Prussian war, Thiers persuaded Parliament that peace was necessary. He travelled to Versailles, where Bismarck and the German Emperor were waiting, and on 24 February the armistice was signed.

A Battery in the Montmartre Hills.

At the end of the war 400 obsolete muzzle-loading bronze cannons  . . .

. . . paid for by the Paris public via a subscription, remained in the city. The new Central Committee of the National Guard, now dominated by radicals, decided to put the cannons in parks in the working-class neighborhoods of Belleville, Buttes-Chaumont and Montmartre, to keep them away from the regular army and to defend the city against any attack by the national government. Thiers was equally determined to bring the cannons under national-government control.

Clemenceau, a friend of several revolutionaries, tried to negotiate a compromise; some cannons would remain in Paris and the rest go to the army. However, neither Thiers nor the National Assembly accepted his proposals. The chief executive wanted to restore order and national authority in Paris as quickly as possible, and the cannons became a symbol of that authority. The Assembly also refused to prolong the moratorium on debt collections imposed during the war; and suspended two radical newspapers, Le Cri du Peuple of Jules Valles and Le Mot d'Ordre of Henri Rochefort, which further inflamed Parisian radical opinion. Thiers also decided to move the National Assembly and government from Bordeaux to Versailles, rather than to Paris, to be farther away from the pressure of demonstrations, which further enraged the National Guard and the radical political clubs.

On 17 March 1871, there was a meeting of Thiers and his cabinet, who were joined by Paris mayor Jules Ferry, National Guard commander General D'Aurelle de Paladines and General Joseph Vinoy, commander of the regular army units in Paris. Thiers announced a plan to send the army the next day to take charge of the cannons. The plan was initially opposed by War Minister Adolphe Le Flô, D'Aurelle de Paladines, and Vinoy, who argued that the move was premature, because the army had too few soldiers, was undisciplined and demoralized, and that many units had become politicized and were unreliable. Vinoy urged that they wait until Germany had released the French prisoners of war, and the army returned to full strength. Thiers insisted that the planned operation must go ahead as quickly as possible, to have the element of surprise. If the seizure of the cannon was not successful, the government would withdraw from the centre of Paris, build up its forces, and then attack with overwhelming force, as they had done during the uprising of June 1848. The Council accepted his decision, and Vinoy gave orders for the operation to begin the next day.

Early in the morning of 18 March, two brigades of soldiers climbed the butte of Montmartre, where the largest collection of cannons, 170 in number, were located. A small group of revolutionary national guardsmen were already there, and there was a brief confrontation between the brigade led by General Claude Lecomte, and the National Guard; one guardsman, named Turpin, was shot, later dying. Word of the shooting spread quickly, and members of the National Guard from all over the neighbourhood, along with others including Clemenceau, hurried to the site to confront the soldiers.

While the Army had succeeded in securing the cannons at Belleville and Buttes-Chaumont and other strategic points, at Montmartre a crowd gathered and continued to grow, and the situation grew increasingly tense. The horses that were needed to take the cannon away did not arrive, and the army units were immobilized. As the soldiers were surrounded, they began to break ranks and join the crowd. General Lecomte tried to withdraw, and then ordered his soldiers to load their weapons and fix bayonets. He thrice ordered them to fire, but the soldiers refused. Some of the officers were disarmed and taken to the city hall of Montmartre, under the protection of Clemenceau. General Lecomte and his staff officers were seized by the guardsmen and his mutinous soldiers and taken to the local headquarters of the National Guard at the ballroom of the Chateau-Rouge. The officers were pelted with rocks, struck, threatened, and insulted by the crowd. In the middle of the afternoon, Lecomte and the other officers were taken to 6 Rue des Rosiers by members of a group calling themselves The Committee of Vigilance of the 18th arrondissement, who demanded that they be tried and executed.

At 5:00 in the afternoon, the National Guard had captured another important prisoner: General Jacques Leon Clément-Thomas. An ardent republican and fierce disciplinarian, he had helped suppress the armed uprising of June 1848 against the Second Republic. Because of his republican beliefs, he had been arrested by Napoleon III and exiled, and had only returned to France after the downfall of the Empire. He was particularly hated by the national guardsmen of Montmartre and Belleville because of the severe discipline he imposed during the siege of Paris. Earlier that day, dressed in civilian clothes, he had been trying to find out what was going on, when he was recognized by a soldier and arrested, and brought to the building at Rue des Rosiers. At about 5:30 on 18 March, the angry crowd of national guardsmen and deserters from Lecomte's regiment at Rue des Rosiers seized Clément-Thomas, beat him with rifle butts, pushed him into the garden, and shot him repeatedly. A few minutes later, they did the same to General Lecomte. Doctor Guyon, who examined the bodies shortly afterwards, found forty bullets in Clément-Thomas's body and nine in Lecomte's back. By late morning, the operation to recapture the cannons had failed, and crowds and barricades were appearing in all the working-class neighborhoods of Paris. General Vinoy ordered the army to pull back to the Seine, and Thiers began to organise a withdrawal to Versailles, where he could gather enough troops to take back Paris.

On the afternoon of 18 March, following the government's failed attempt to seize the cannons at Montmartre, the Central Committee of the National Guard ordered the three battalions to seize the Hôtel de Ville, where they believed the government was located. They were not aware that Thiers, the government, and the military commanders were at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where the gates were open and there were few guards. They were also unaware that Marshal Patrice MacMahon, the future commander of the forces against the Commune, had just arrived at his home in Paris, having just been released from imprisonment in Germany. As soon as he heard the news of the uprising, he made his way to the railway station, where national guardsmen were already stopping and checking the identity of departing passengers. A sympathetic station manager hid him in his office and helped him board a train, and he escaped the city. While he was at the railway station, national guardsmen sent by the Central Committee arrived at his house looking for him.

On the advice of General Vinoy, Thiers ordered the evacuation to Versailles of all the regular forces in Paris, some 40,000 soldiers, including those in the fortresses around the city; the regrouping of all the army units in Versailles; and the departure of all government ministries from the city.

Late on 18 March, when they learned that the regular army was leaving Paris, units of the National Guard moved quickly to take control of the city. The first to take action were the followers of Blanqui, who went quickly to the Latin Quarter and took charge of the gunpowder stored in the Pantheon, and to the Orleans railway station. Four battalions crossed the Seine and captured the prefecture of police, while other units occupied the former headquarters of the National Guard at the Place Vendôme, as well as the Ministry of Justice. That night, the National Guard occupied the offices vacated by the government; they quickly took over the Ministries of Finance, the Interior, and War. At eight in the morning the next day, the Central Committee was meeting in the Hôtel de Ville. By the end of the day, 20,000 national guardsmen camped in triumph in the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville, with several dozen cannons. 

A red flag was hoisted over the building.

The events that instigated the revolutionary process on the hills of Montmartre are dramatised in the Soviet Russian 1929 silent historical film The New Babylon, written and directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg.  

The film deals with the 1871 Paris Commune and the events leading to it, and follows the encounter and tragic fate of two lovers separated by the barricades of the Commune. 

Leonid Trauberg, later admitted, the film as it stands is a little difficult to follow. Its subtitle Assault on the Heavens: Episodes from the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, 1870-71 makes it fairly obvious that it is a principally a political film, and not a love story. Some background knowledge of the Paris Commune is needed to understand what's going on around the two lovers. As Fiona Ford remarks, "Both New Babylon and Eisenstein's October are episodic in structure and require an intimate knowledge of their relevant historical periods (the Paris Commune of 1871 in the case of New Babylon) to better appreciate the directors' intentions and often simply to follow the diegesis." 

With Eccentrism there's . . .

. . . no empathetic bourgeois aesthetics!

The New Babylon was staged with members of the "Factory of the Eccentric Actor" (FEKS) - an avant-garde artists' association founded by Kozintsev and Trauberg in 1922 that sought to create new paths in the performing arts. FEKS first began as a theater group, but in the following years, many of its members shaped the Russian-Soviet film history when working as actors, outfitters, and cinematographers. They wanted to get away from the naturalism and empathy aesthetics of bourgeois art, and saw Eccentrism (as laid out in Trauberg's Eccentric Manifesto) as a new direction within the avant-garde that sought to find a place between Futurism, Surrealism and Dadaist Constructivism.

The Russian premiere of The New Babylon took place on 18 March 1929 in Leningrad, the anniversary of the events that instigated the beginning of the Paris Commune. 

Re:LODE Radio considers the significance of the fact that The New Babylon was one amongst a number of films that were included in a "jumble of footage from feature films juxtaposed with still photographs, industrial films, early 1970s glossy 'lifestyle' TV ads, and news footage of unrest in the streets ", a montage that became a 1974 film La Société du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) by the Situationist Guy Debord, and based on his 1967 book of the same name. It was Debord's first feature-length film. It uses found footage and détournement in a radical Marxist critique of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society. Other feature film footage included excerpts from The Battleship Potemkin, October, Chapaev, The Shanghai Gesture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, They Died with Their Boots On, Johnny Guitar, and Mr. Arkadin.

The title The New Babylon refers to a fictional twin of the Parisian department store (magazin): 

Le Bon Marché 

See more: "clickbait" -On stage & on display in Bon Marché & the brothels of Paris

Women participants!

This visually striking poster for The New Babylon, foregrounds the image of a working class woman in the active role of one of the main protagonists in this revolution, meanwhile capitalist businessmen drink their wine and cavort with their female playthings. The central role of "Louise", a worker at the department store, the New Babylon, stresses the equal importance of women in this radical insurrection. The film directors, Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg include many scenes with women as workers, in both the industrial and domestic spheres, as active and activist, instigating a collective response to this moment of crisis. This is evident in the treatment of the events on the hills of Montmartre that sparked the insurgency and as depicted in the film, and contributes to the received idea in images of the Commune, of the role of the unruly women of Paris.  

Les Pétroleuses 

NOT this film The Legend of Frenchie King (French: Les Pétroleuses). 

The 1971 French, Spanish, Italian and British international co-production western comedy film directed by Christian-Jaque and starring Claudia Cardinale and Brigitte Bardot.

 

These Pétroleuses . . . 

. . . arrested in Versailles in the aftermath of the failed revolution!

A significant material consequence of the storming of the Commune by the Versaillais, as the French forces were called, included the destruction by fire of many buildings and neighbourhoods, including the Fields of Elysium (Champs-Élysées) . . .

. . . the Hôtel de Ville, Paris, and . . .

. . . most traumatically for the French Bourgeoisie, . . .  

. . . the destruction by fire of the Tuileries Royal Palace. 

Pétroleuses were, according to popular rumours at the time, female supporters of the Paris Commune, accused of burning down much of Paris during the last days of the Commune in May 1871. During May, when Paris was being recaptured by loyalist Versaillais troops, rumours circulated that working class women were committing arson against private property and public buildings, using bottles full of petroleum or paraffin (similar to modern-day Molotov cocktails) which they threw into cellar windows, in a deliberate act of spite against the government. 

Many of the Parisian buildings, including the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries Palace, the Palais de Justice and many other government buildings were in fact set afire by the soldiers of the Commune during the last days of the Commune, prompting the press and Parisian public opinion to blame the pétroleuses. 

However, of the thousands of suspected pro-Communard women tried in Versailles after the Commune ended, only a handful were convicted of any crimes, and their convictions were based on activity such as shooting at loyalist troops. Official trial records show that no women were ever convicted of arson, and that accusations of the crime were quickly shown to have no basis. Nevertheless, although few of the women brought to trial were executed, many working-class women were killed on site by Versaillais troops. Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray reported in his memoirs:

“Every woman who was badly dressed, or carrying a milk-can, a pail, an empty bottle, was pointed out as a petroleuse, her clothes torn to tatters, she was pushed against the nearest wall, and killed with revolver-shots"

The history of the Paris Commune by Maxime Du Camp, written in the 1870s, and more recent research by historians of the Paris Commune, including Robert Tombs and Gay Gullickson, concluded that there were no incidents of deliberate arson by pétroleuses. 

There is some debate on this, as the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune approaches, and some now believe that the buildings destroyed at the end of the Commune were not burned down by pétroleuses but were largely caused by Versailles cannon fire. The Hôtel de Ville, the Palais de Justice, the Tuileries Palace and other government buildings and symbols of authority were burned by Commune forces as they retreated. Other fires were started by Communard forces, as a tactic to push back Versailles' troops if ground was lost. Some buildings along the Rue de Rivoli were burned down during street-fighting between Communards and Versaillais troops. Gullickson suggests that the myth of the pétroleuses was part of a propaganda campaign by Versaillais politicians, who portrayed Parisian women in the Commune as unnatural, destructive, and barbaric, giving loyalist forces a moral victory over the "unnatural" Communards.

Kate Rees, writing in the TLS on Peter Brooks’s Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, writes that:  

Brooks analyses a comment reportedly made by Flaubert to his friend Maxime Du Camp as they surveyed the ruins of Paris in the wake of the turbulent year 1870–71. Flaubert maintained that the national shock and disgust which followed capitulation in the Franco–Prussian war, and the devastation of the French capital in the subsequent siege and Commune, might have been avoided had readers better understood Sentimental Education, which was published to general public and critical bafflement in 1869. Like many other fascinated tourists, Flaubert went to Paris immediately after the short-lived Commune was brutally suppressed by the French army, to gawp at the still smoking ruins of the city. Du Camp records Flaubert’s wry observation that a more nuanced reading of his novel could have enabled the course of French history to circumvent the debacle of this “terrible year”.

Another race? 

In the Introduction to his book Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, an introduction subtitled: The Terrible Year, Two Writers, and a Novel, Brooks writes concerning the permitted level violence exercised during the bloody week that saw the abject crushing of the Communards: 

"French army troops, or the Versaillais, as they were known, their ranks bolstered by prisoners of war released by Bismarck to counter the proletarian insurgency, fought their way through Paris and levelled the Communard barricades with a vindictive force that is difficult to fathom. A number of the generals had experience of fighting in the French colonies of North Africa and treated the Communards as if they were "natives." Indeed they were made to seem like they were of another race, degenerate, alcohol fuelled, vicious."

Classism, colonialism and racism provides an explosive combination of prejudice, projected and expressed in unaccountable and arbitrary acts of extreme violence. The proletarian hordes, and especially those women evidently demonstrating their agency and their activism, would be dismissed as less than human. The diarist Edmond de Goncourt, wrote, three days after La Semaine Sanglante;  

". . . the bleeding has been done thoroughly, and a bleeding like that, by killing the rebellious part of a population, postpones the next revolution... The old society has twenty years of peace before it . . ."

Hundreds of prisoners who had been captured with weapons or gunpowder on their hands had been shot immediately.

Detail of Manet's Civil War - The Barricade

Others were taken to the main barracks of the army in Paris and executed there after summary trials. They were buried in mass graves in parks and squares. 

Not all prisoners were shot immediately; the French Army officially recorded the capture of 43,522 prisoners during and immediately after Bloody Week. Of these, 1,054 were women, and 615 were under the age of 16. They were marched in groups of 150 or 200, escorted by cavalrymen, to Versailles or the Camp de Satory, where they were held in extremely crowded and unsanitary conditions until they could be tried. More than half of the prisoners, 22,727, were released before trial for extenuating circumstances or on humanitarian grounds. Since Paris had been officially under a state of siege during the Commune, the prisoners were tried by military tribunals. Trials were held for 15,895 prisoners, of whom 13,500 were found guilty. Ninety-five were sentenced to death; 251 to forced labour; 1,169 to deportation, usually to New Caledonia; 3,147 to simple deportation; 1,257 to solitary confinement; 1,305 to prison for more than a year; and 2,054 to prison for less than a year. 

The photographs that document the aftermath of the La Semaine Sanglante were later supplemented by other photographic images. These images are significant because they were staged to produce a fake narrative, and one that helped pro-government forces to make a dramatic case of their crimes against humanity.

Massacre des dominicains d'Arcueil, route d'Italie no. 38, le 25 mai 1871, à 4 heures et demie 

This phenomenon is discussed by Richard B. Woodward of The New York Times in article: The Uses of a Young Art at a Devastating Moment (May 7, 2000). In particular he draws attention to the work of Ernest Eugene Appert. He writes of Appert's work: 

The key figure in this activity is Ernest Eugene Appert (1831-90?), a painter manque whose works dominate the last third of the exhibition. Fervently pro-Versaillais, he produced not only portraits of the Communards as they awaited trial in prison -- when arranged on a grid they read as wanted posters -- but also a series of small tableaus that may be the first political photomontages. His ''Crimes of the Commune,'' made between 1871 and 1873, illustrate in some 17 scenes the deaths by firing squad of priests, hostages, generals and other opponents brutally liquidated by the Commune. The realism of the photograph meets the fantasy of a zealot in these re-creations of history. Pasting the photographed heads and bodies of the victims onto photographs of the scenes of the crimes, Appert arranged events as he imagined they had happened. 

Prison des Chantiers, le 15 août 1871, Versailles 

One of these constructed images, in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum in New York, has a webpage with this accompanying explanatory text:

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, issued “Crimes of the Commune,” a tendentious series of nine photographs of the insurrection that emphasized the criminal brutality of the rebels. Although based on real events, the photographs were utterly fabricated. Appert hired actors to restage each scene in his studio then cut and pasted the figures onto the appropriate backgrounds; atop the actors’ bodies he pasted headshots of the Commune’s key participants. The photographs were later banned by the French government for “disturbing the public peace” by sustaining anti-Communard sentiments — a testament to their effectiveness as political propaganda.

In the bottom left of this cut and paste assemblage the women of the Commune are depicted indulging in the despicable vice of consuming alcohol.

"Indeed they were made to seem like they were of another race, degenerate, alcohol fuelled, vicious."

A separate and more formal trial was held beginning 7 August for the Commune leaders who survived and had been captured, including Théophile Ferré, who had signed the death warrant for the hostages, and the painter Gustave Courbet, who had proposed the destruction of the column in Place Vendôme.

They were tried by a panel of seven senior army officers. Ferré was sentenced to death, and Courbet was sentenced to six months in prison, and later ordered to pay the cost of rebuilding the column. He went into exile in Switzerland and died before making a single payment. Five women were also put on trial for participation in the Commune, including the "Red Virgin" Louise Michel. She demanded the death penalty, but was instead deported to New Caledonia.

It is no coincidence that the character named "Louise" dominates the revolutionary narrative in the film The New Babylon, and that she proves to be an instigator of the resistance to remove the cannon from the hill battery of Montmartre. 

Five years before the War of 1870 (as it is known in France) Louise Michel opened a school in Paris which became known for its modern and progressive methods. Michel corresponded with the prominent French romanticist Victor Hugo and began publishing poetry. It was at this time that she became involved in the radical politics of Paris and among her associates were Auguste Blanqui, Jules Vallès and Théophile Ferré. In 1869 the feminist group Société pour la Revendication des Droits Civils de la Femme (Society for the Demand of Civil Rights for Women) was announced by André Léo.

The group had close ties with the Société Coopérative des Ouvriers et Ouvrières (Cooperative Society of Men and Women Workers) leading to the July 1869 manifesto of the Revendication des Droits de la Femme being also signed by the wives of militant cooperative members. The manifesto was also supported by Sophie Doctrinal, signing with the name Citoyenne Poirier (citizen Poirier), a seamstress who later became a Republican activist during the Paris Commune in 1871. She became president of the Montmartre Vigilance Committee and a close associate of Michel in the Paris Commune. At the start of the Siege of Paris, in November 1870, Léo in a lecture declared "It is not a question of our practicing politics, we are human, that is all". 

During the siege, Michel became part of the National Guard. When the Paris Commune was declared she was elected head of the Montmartre Women's Vigilance Committee. Michel thus occupied a leading role in the revolutionary government of the Paris Commune. In April 1871 she threw herself into the armed struggle against the French government. She closely aligned with Ferré and Raoul Rigault, two of the most violent members of the Paris Commune. However, Ferré and Rigault persuaded her to not carry out her plan to assassinate Adolphe Thiers, the chief executive of the French national government. Instead Michel fought with the 61st Battalion of Montmartre and organised ambulance stations. In her memoirs she later wrote "oh, I'm a savage all right, I like the smell of gunpowder, grapeshot flying through the air, but above all, I'm devoted to the Revolution." 

Women played an important role in both the initiation and the governance of the Commune, though women could not vote in the Commune elections and there were no elected women members of the Commune itself. Joséphine Marchias, a washer woman, picked up a gun during the battles of May 22-23rd and said, "You cowardly crew! Go and Fight! If I'm killed it will be because I've done some killing first!" She was arrested as an incendiary, but there is no documentation that she was a pétroleuse. She worked as a vivandière with the Enfants perdus. While carrying back the laundry she was given by the guardsmen, she carried away the body of her lover, Jean Guy, who was a butcher's apprentice. 

Women such as Joséphine Marchias and Louise Michel played a key role in the Paris Commune. They not only chaired committees, but they also built barricades and participated in the armed violence as well as caring for wounded fighters. Michel ideologically justified a militant revolution, proclaiming: "I descended the Butte, my rifle under my coat, shouting: Treason! . . . Our deaths would free Paris". Michel would be among the few militants who survived the Paris Commune and reflected: "It is true, perhaps, that women like rebellions. We are no better than men in respect to power, but power has not yet corrupted us." In her memoirs Michel confessed that the realities of the revolutionary government strengthened her resolve to end the discrimination against women. On the attitude of her male comrades, she wrote "How many times, during the Commune, did I go, with a national guardsman or a soldier, to some place where they hardly expected to have to contend with a woman?" She challenged her comrades to "play a part in the struggle for women's rights, after men and women have won the rights of all humanity?" 

As in the 1789 French Revolution and in 1848 some women organised a feminist movement. Nathalie Lemel, a socialist bookbinder, and Élisabeth Dmitrieff, a young Russian exile and member of the Russian section of the First International, created the Women's Union for the Defence of Paris and Care of the Wounded on 11 April 1871. Together with the feminist writer André Léo, a friend of Paule Minck, who was also active in the Women's Union, and believing that their struggle against patriarchy could only be pursued through a global struggle against capitalism, the association made the following demands: Gender and wage equality; the right of divorce for women; the right to secular education; and professional education for girls. They also demanded suppression of the distinction between married women and concubines, and between legitimate and illegitimate children.

They advocated the abolition of prostitution and the closing of the maisons de tolérance, or legal brothels. The Women's Union also participated in several municipal commissions and organised cooperative workshops. Along with Eugène Varlin, Nathalie Lemel created the cooperative restaurant La Marmite, which served free food for people in need. 

Nathalie Lemel went on to fight on the barricades as did the Russian Anne Jaclard, who founded the newspaper La Sociale with André Léo. She was also a member of the Comité de vigilance de Montmartre, along with Louise Michel and Paule Minck, as well as of the Russian section of the First International. Victorine Brocher, close to the IWA activists, and founder of a cooperative bakery in 1867, also fought during the Commune and the Bloody Week. 

The arrest of Louise Michel in May 1871

In December 1871, Michel was brought before the 6th council of war, charged with offences including trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves, and herself using weapons and wearing a military uniform. Defiantly, she dared the judges to sentence her to death, saying "It seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no other right than a bit of lead, so I claim mine!" Further, she declared: "If you let me live, I shall never stop crying for vengeance, and I shall avenge my brothers by denouncing the murderers". The military court refused to make her a martyr. Michel was sentenced to penal transportation. 

Michel was imprisoned for two years before she was deported. While in prison she demanded to be treated just like the other prisoners and rejected efforts by her friends Hugo and Georges Clemenceau to have her sentence commuted. She considered preferential treatment a dishonour. During the four-month journey to New Caledonia Michel re-examined her belief in revolutionary socialism. She embraced anarchism and for the rest of her life rejected all forms of government. In 1896 she wrote about her change of mind:

"I considered the things, events and people of the past. I thought about the behaviour of our friends of the Commune: they were scrupulous, so afraid of exceeding their authority, that they never threw their full energies into anything but the loss of their own lives. I quickly came to the conclusion that good men in power are incompetent, just as bad men are evil, and therefore it is impossible for liberty ever to be associated with any form of power whatsoever."

Michel was introduced to the tenets of anarchism by a fellow prisoner Nathalie Lemel, with whom she was imprisoned in a large cage for several months. Michel became known for her selfless generosity and devotion to others. In the penal colony she lived in voluntary poverty, giving away her books, clothes and any money she acquired. Michel took up teaching again. She spent time with the indigenous Kanak people, teaching them French so that they could challenge the French authorities. Michel supported them in their revolt against the colonial power.

Eventually an amnesty was granted and when Michel returned to Paris in November 1880 she was greeted by Henri Rochefort, Clemenceau, a crowd of 20,000 and the police.

Michel soon began her career as a public speaker and found an audience all over Europe. In 1882 she staged her first anarchist play Nadine. As a public speaker Michel became skilled in advancing pragmatic arguments to attack capitalism and the authoritarian state, while holding open the possibility of a positive outcome. When she was put on trial in 1883 for leading a group of unemployed workers, she attacked shortcomings in the implementation of the French republican constitution, saying:

"They keep talking to us about liberty: There is the liberty of speech with five years of prison at the end. In England, the meeting would have taken place; in France, they have not even made a legal admonition in order to let the crowd retreat, which would have left without resistance. People are dying from hunger, and they do not even have the right to say that they are dying from hunger."

One of the first known anarchist uses of the black flag was by Louise Michel, when she flew the black flag during a demonstration of the unemployed which took place in Paris on March 9, 1883. With Michel at the front carrying a black flag and shouting "Bread, work, or lead!," the crowd of 500 protesters soon marched off towards the boulevard Saint-Germain and pillaged three baker's shops before the police arrested them. Michel was arrested and sentenced to six years solitary confinement. Public pressure soon forced the granting of an amnesty. She wrote, "the black flag is the flag of strikes and the flag of those who are hungry".

Michel frequently spoke on women's rights from an anarchist perspective. She not only advocated education for women, but also that marriage should be free and that men should hold no property rights over women. In the late 1880s she authored several works in which she revisited the themes of her earlier works, but also portrayed the demise of the old order and its replacement with a society of equals. Michel embarked on a journey towards a new political philosophy. The revolutionary characters in The Strike expected to die, but instead they gave life to a new age and Michel discussed the rights and responsibilities of the people who lived in the aftermath of a revolution.

She staged her plays in accordance with Jean Grave's theory on audience participation. The audience was integrated through a political and artistic program of lectures, poems and songs. The audience was encouraged to react and re-enact the conflicts of the plays. In her plays The Human Microbes (1886), Crimes of the Times (1888) and The Bordello (1890) an agricultural utopia emerges from a devastated Europe. Michel's political ideals owed much to the French romanticism of Hugo and are described at length in The New Era, Last Thought, Memories of Caledonia (1887):

"It is indeed time that this old world die since no one is safe any longer . . . We can no longer live like our Stone Age ancestors, nor as in the past century, since the series of inventions, since the discoveries of science have brought the certainty that all production will increase a hundredfold when these innovations will be used for the general good, instead of letting just a handful of vultures help themselves in order to starve the rest."

Michel lived at a time when hunger was widespread among the working poor of Europe. She believed that technological progress would replace physical labour with machines. In combination with anarchist politics, she argued, this could lead to equal distribution of wealth. In 1890 she reasoned that "the attractive power of progress will demonstrate itself all the more as daily bread will be assured, and a few hours of work which will have become attractive and voluntary will be enough to produce more than what is necessary for consumption." Like other anarchists of her time she did not believe that history was a record of constant improvement, but that it could become so. However, constant economic growth was not an improvement in itself. Michel argued instead, that progress came through intellectual development, social evolution and liberation. Her vision of the future was shaped by a supreme confidence.

"Science will bring forth harvests in the desert; the energy of the tempests and whirlpools will carve paths through the mountains. Undersea boats will discover lost continents. Electricity will carry ships of the air above the icy poles. The ideas of Liberty, Equality and Justice will finally burst into flame. Each individual will live his integral part within humankind as a whole. Progress being infinite, transformations will be perpetual."

Michel did not only bemoan the poverty in which people across Europe lived, she also advanced a detailed critique of 19th century capitalism. She lamented the deficiencies of the capitalist banking system and predicted that the concentration of capital would result in the ruin of small enterprises and the middle class. In her memoirs Michel said that the Anarchist Manifesto of Lyon (1883) precisely expressed her views. The Manifesto had been signed by Peter Kropotkin, Émile Gautier, Joseph Bernard, Pierre Martin [fr] and Toussaint Bordat. Kropotkin, like Jules Guesde and Émile Pouget would become close friends and associates of her. Instead of focusing on violent revolution, as she had done in her earlier works, Michel in her later works emphasised the spontaneous uprising of the people. She came to reject terror as a means of bringing about a new era. She wrote "Tyrannicide is practical only when tyranny has a single head, or at most a small number of heads. When it is a hydra, only the Revolution can kill it". She took the view that it is best if the leaders of such a revolution would perish, so that the people would not be burdened with surviving general staff. Michel thought that "power is evil" and in her understanding history was the story of free people being enslaved. In an 1882 speech she said "All revolutions have been insufficient because they have been political". Organisation was, in her view, unnecessary because the poor and exploited would inevitably rise up and, through their sheer numbers, would force the old order to shrivel and expire.

Michel's legacy 

Michel was among the more influential French political figures in the second half of the 19th century. She was also one of the more powerful women political theorists of her day. Her publications on social justice for the poor and the cause of the working classes were read in France and all over Europe. When she died in 1905 she was mourned by thousands. Memorial services were held all over France and in London. Although her writings are today forgotten, her name is remembered in the names of French streets, schools and parks. Michel became a national heroine in France and was revered as the "great citizen". A cultish image of Michel emerged.

Shortly before her death, when returning from her exile in London, Michel had been dubbed "the angel of petrol", "the virago of the rabble" and "queen of the scum" by the conservative French press. In turn, Charles Ferdinand Gambon compared her to Jeanne d'Arc in reference to her role in the Paris Commune. This imagery was further propagandized by Edmond Lepelletier in 1911. The image of Michel as vierge rouge (red virgin) came to be used by conservative and liberal historians alike when recounting the story of the Paris Commune.

A graphic novel from writer Mary M. Talbot and graphic-novel pioneer Bryan Talbot comes The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, a portrait of revolutionary feminist Louise Michel, Published June 01, 2016

Founder of anarcho-feminism

Michel is regarded as a founder of anarcho-feminism. Despite the anti-authoritarian rhetoric, early anarchist thinkers maintained cultural orthodoxy when it came to the division of domestic labour and their personal relationships with women. The founder of French anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was notorious for his sexist views.

This painting of 1865 by Courbet is a posthumously-produced image of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and His Children. Proudhon had died earlier in the same year the work was completed, and Courbet's picture wittingly, or unwittingly, presents the first person to refer to himself as an "anarchist", as a traditional French bourgeois "family man" and "patriarch".

While his undoubted racism was not overtly part of his political philosophy, Proudhon did express sexist beliefs as he held patriarchal views on women's nature and their proper role in the family and society at large. In his Carnets , unpublished until the 1960s, Proudhon maintained that a woman's choice was to be "courtesan or housekeeper", alternatively translated as "a "harlot or a housewife". To a woman, a man is "a father, a chief, a master: above all, a master". His justification for patriarchy is men's greater physical strength and recommended that men use this greater strength to keep women in their place, saying that "a woman does not at all hate being used with violence, indeed even being violated".

In her study of Gustave Courbet,  the prominent American feminist art historian Linda Nochlin points out that alongside his early articulations of anarchism Proudhon also wrote La Pornocratie ou les femmes dans les temps modernes, described as "the most consistent anti-feminist tract of its time, or perhaps, any other" and which "raises all the main issues about woman's position in society and her sexuality with a paranoid intensity unmatched in any other text". (Nochlin, Linda (2007). Courbet. Thames & Hudson. p. 220. n. 34)

The Origin of the World?

This "scandalous" painting by Courbet is part of the collection of art and design on display at the Musée d'Orsay. This museum is perhaps the ultimate validation of Walter Benjamin's assertion that Paris was the "Capital of the nineteenth century" and the realisation of a project to establish a museum of the nineteenth century in the defunct Parisian railway station the "Gare d'Orsay", situated on the banks of the River Seine.

An obvious link in the layering of art over railway tracks is the fact of the ramping up of various technological modes of communication, shaping "modernity" in the 19th and 20th centuries, and encapsulated in Rudyard Kipling's observation that "transportation is civilisation". 

Another layer of consideration is immanent in the links embedded in many of the artworks on display in this museum, and situated in parallel to the paranoid style of Proudhon's notion of "La Pornocratie". 

From Pornotropia back to La Pornocratie via Pornocrates!

Pornocrates, Pornokratès, La dame au cochon, or The Lady with the Pig is a work by the Belgian artist Félicien Rops, created in 1878. 

The work depicts a woman, holding a swine on a leash, viewed from the left side. The woman,  a courtesan, is almost naked, with the exception of long black silk gloves, a blindfold, a plumed hat, black shoes and stockings, and a band of gold and blue silk – accessories which only emphasize her nakedness. Above the pig with golden tail, three winged putti fly away in what looks like shock or horror. Rops refers to them as "Three loves – ancient loves – vanish in tears".

Various interpretations for the work exist. The woman  as a powerful female, led by the hog, which can be seen as an image of a man in a bestial, submissive and ignorant state, kept in check by the woman. The pig with golden tail can also be seen as an allegory for luxury, or even as an animal of the devil, a symbol of fornication, steering the woman in blindness. In any case the work represents Rops' vision of the woman of his time: a "femme fatale", increasingly assertive, ruthless and seductive. According to Dijkstra, Bram in his Idols of perversity : fantasies of feminine evil in fin-de-siècle culture (1986):

"She was the human animal viciously depicted by Félicien Rops as "Pornokrates", ruler of Proudhon's "Pornocracy", a creature blindly guided by a hog, the symbol of Circe, the bestial representative of all sexual evil".

Circe as "clickbait"? 

The best known of Circe's legends is told in Homer's Odyssey when Odysseus visits her island of Aeaea on the way back from the Trojan War and she changes most of his crew into swine. He manages to persuade her to return them to human shape, lives with her for a year and has sons by her, including Latinus and Telegonus. 

Her ability to change others into animals is further highlighted by the story of Picus, an Italian king whom she turns into a woodpecker for resisting her advances. Another story tells of her falling in love with the sea-god Glaucus, who prefers the nymph Scylla to her. In revenge, Circe poisoned the water where her rival bathed and turned her into a dreadful monster.

Depictions, even in Classical times, wandered away from the detail in Homer's narrative, which was later to be reinterpreted morally as a cautionary story against drunkenness. Early philosophical questions were also raised whether the change from a reasoning being to a beast was not preferable after all, and this paradox was to have a powerful impact during the Renaissance. 

Circe was also taken as the archetype of the predatory female. In the eyes of those from a later age, this behaviour made her notorious both as a magician and as a type of the sexually-free woman. As such she has been frequently depicted in all the arts from the Renaissance down to modern times.

With the Renaissance there began to be a reinterpretation of what it was that changed the men, if it was not simply magic. For Socrates, in Classical times, it had been gluttony overcoming their self-control. But for the influential emblematist Andrea Alciato, it was unchastity. In the second edition of his Emblemata (1546), therefore, Circe became the type of the prostitute.

His Emblem 76 is titled Cavendum a meretricibus; its accompanying Latin verses mention Picus, Scylla and the companions of Ulysses, and concludes that: 

"Circe with her famous name indicates a whore and any who loves such a one loses his reason". 

His English imitator Geoffrey Whitney used a variation of Alciato's illustration in his own Choice of Emblemes (1586) but gave it the new title of Homines voluptatibus transformantur, men are transformed by their passions. 

This idea is reflected in the appearance of Circe in the Nighttown section named after her in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Written in the form of a stage script, it makes of Circe the brothel madam, Bella Cohen. Bloom, the book's protagonist, fantasizes that she turns into a cruel man-tamer named Mr Bello who makes him get down on all fours and rides him like a horse.

The Pornocracy 

Was The Lady with the Pig by Félicien Rops inspired by Proudhon's, La Pornocratie ou Les Femmes dans les Temps Moderne?  

This infamous work, published posthumously, a diatribe against women and their increasingly active roles in 19th century society, which he viewed as having become a pornocracy, the rule by prostitutes and corrupt individuals.

If the name of Circe was associated with prostitution the historical and societal facts of prostitution in the capital of the nineteenth century was to create a galaxy of different terms to name the different classes of prostitute in the city of Paris. For the economy of Paris in the hundred years from the fall of the Bastille to the construction of the Eiffel Tower,  prostitution was at the epicentre of an entire era.  

Pavement Nymphs and Roadside Flowers: Prostitutes in Paris After the Revolution (March 1, 2019) by Victoria Dailey, begins with a quote from the author of Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert:

"C’est peut-être un goût pervers, mais j’aime la prostitution et pour elle-même, indépendamment de ce qu’il y a en dessous."

(It might be a perverse taste, but I love prostitution and for itself, regardless of what's underneath.)

Pierre-Numa Bassaget, called Numa (1802-1872). Libre Exchange. J’ai Le Sac. (A Fair Exchange. I Have the Purse.) Colour lithograph, c. 1864. 

Numa created many images of prostitution; in this one, a client bows down to a prostitute who holds the “power of the purse.” 

Victoria Dailey begins her article with mention of the Dictionnaire Anecdotique des Nymphes du Palais-Royal et autres Quartiers de Paris par un homme de bien where in 124 pages, the anonymous author lists scores of Parisian prostitutes alphabetically by their first names, from Adelaide to Zoe, and gives the streets where they could be found along with descriptions of their physical appearance and personalities, including:

Olympe, rue du Richelieu, who is beautiful, tall like a man, and is said to flirt with the lovers of her friends — and that her desires are not always satisfied by just one.

Véronique (La Blonde), rue Traversière, is far from pretty, but her blond hair, falling with grace over her beautiful pale skin, sets her apart. 

"Candy" is in today's internet version . . .

Victoria Dailey then looks at Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s De La Prostitution dans La Ville de Paris, 1836. She explains that this "is not a guide to pleasure but rather, an extensive textbook, the first attempt to investigate and analyse prostitution scientifically in order to create effective solutions to the problems it was creating". 

The alluring sirens described in the dictionary, she says, and "the nymphs who had been sought by flâneurs, philanderers and married men, had become, within ten years, clinical objects of scientific inquiry". Dailey observes that prostitutes were to be studies as; "exotic specimens from the animal kingdom, they were probed, questioned and examined by doctors and experts in the newly emerging fields of hygiene, statistics, and sociology". And, she comments:  

"In ten years, a portable, somewhat prurient  “gentleman’s guide” had been displaced by a substantial, authoritative, government-sponsored work on prostitutes’ sexual habits, health, and attitudes, one filled with analytic texts and tables based on facts." 

Dailey continues: 

Parent created lists and tables showing the distribution of Parisian prostitutes by quartier, surveying areas throughout the city including the Île St. Louis, where, alone among neighborhoods, there were none; the Place Vendôme, where he found thirty-nine; and the Palais Royal, center of all things illicit, where he counted 346 prostitutes. They were also grouped by street, by suburb, and by which département in France they had come from, even by which floor of a building they most frequently occupied. (It was the French first floor, the floor above street level.) Parent took advantage of the information supplied to him by the police, who, in 1816, had begun to keep more accurate data on the prostitutes they arrested than they had previously. By 1832, he had access to just over 5,000 records which included information on each woman’s place of birth, the occupation of her father, the determining causes of her becoming a prostitute, her education level, the number of children she had, as well as the age at which she registered as a prostitute. (The ages ranged from ten to sixty-five.)

Yet within this methodical work, I found one bit of whimsy, certainly unintended, that called to mind my Dictionnaire: in a chapter on the pseudonyms prostitutes gave themselves, Parent included a double-columned table of these assumed names, arranged by social class. The first column contains the Classe Inférieure, including such ribald, lewd, and comical nicknames as Rousselette (Little Red Pear), Poil-Long (Long Hair), Belle-Cuisse (Nice Thighs), Faux-Cul (Fake-Ass), and Raton (Little Rat). 

In the second column, the Classe Elevée, are such names as Amanda, Calliope, Delphine, Paméla, Olympe, and Flore, names associated with Greek mythology, literature or the upper class. This classification by descriptive name was maintained throughout the century, helping men choose women based not only on her physical attributes, but also on what class she was likely to be from as revealed in her nickname. Later, the astute and often pontifical observer of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Octave Uzanne, used the exact same method to describe Parisian prostitutes in 1910:

"At the very bottom of the ladder is the woman who haunts the fortifications… The soldiers do not even know her name; they call her la paillasse… A much more formidable species of prostitute is the gigolette [who] is almost always young, and often pretty… There are grades and degrees in all this peripatetic prostitution… In Paris, there are about 60,000 filles insoumises. They constitute the main part of what [is] called middle-class prostitution."

As for upper-class prostitution, Uzanne refers to it as “clandestine prostitution” and the women who represent it are known as belles petites, tendresses, agenouillées, horizontales, and dégrafées. He also refers to Parent, complaining that of all the writers on prostitution who came after him “not one has sounded its deepest depths or probed its darkest mysteries.” 

Many tried. Parent’s formidable work became the cornerstone of a staggering amount of art and literature — he has been called “a veritable Linnaeus of prostitution.”  Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Hugo, Huysmans, Sue, and Zola were all familiar with Parent and each created novels based on the lives of prostitutes that were based, in part, on data gathered by him. In art, the prostitute became a frequent figure in the caricatures and chromolithographs of the 1840s-1860s, as she did in the subsequent works of Manet, Degas, Lautrec, and Picasso, whose Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) refers not only to the name of a Barcelona brothel, but also — and originally — to one of the old slang words for prostitute, Pont-d’Avignon, so-called for  the bridge under which many prostitutes met their customers during the Avignon Papacy in the 14th century. 

"Sur le pont d’Avignon on y danse, on y danse."

But perhaps Parent’s most devoted acolyte was Alexandre Dumas (père), who acknowledged him not only on the first page, but throughout Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843), his analysis and description of the Byzantine typology used to describe each of the three levels of Parisian prostitution, elaborating on Parent’s original list. From the lowest working-class filles de la Cité (known as numéros, chouettes, calorgnes and trimardes), to the middle-class filles du boulevard (grisettes, lorettes, ratons, louchons), and up to the highest level of filles en maison (courtisanes, femmes du monde), Dumas inventoried them all. Although such terms were included in other works, notably those on slang, no other book had been devoted exclusively to the subject, and in such a literary way. As Dumas observes in his introduction: “Here is a corner of the grand Parisian panorama which no one has dared to sketch, a page in the book of modern civilization whose base is a word no one has dared utter.” 

Dumas had the audacity and honesty to assert that prostitution was at the base of Parisian society.  

Yet Dumas, who understood so much about prostitution’s place in 19th century Paris, made no mention of the sexism that accompanied and regulated it. 

Others, steeped in misogyny, did not hesitate to express their sexist views, although not as metaphorically as Dumas. 

 

   

Adah Isaacs Menken and Alexandre Dumas. 

Carte de visite photograph, 1867. This photograph was taken on March 28, 1867. 

Dailey then mentions that: 

"Noted historian and sociologist Jules Michelet held that the social order was in grave danger due to women’s “weak, atavistic and deranged sexuality” as evidenced by prostitution. Writing about women’s “natural inferiority,” he asserted that women were only fit to be wives and mothers". 

And so she comes to the brutal attitude found in Proudhon's La Pornocratie where as an extreme misogynist whose views, although widely shared, were rarely put into print with such viciousness. She writes: 

He did not think twice in declaring in his most shocking work, La Pornocratie (1875), that a woman was capable of being only “a harlot or a housewife” and that “a woman does not at all hate being treated with violence, indeed even being violated.”  (Little wonder that so many women, thwarted and abused mentally, emotionally and physically, were diagnosed with “hysteria.”) Many of these presumptuous attitudes about women may be traced back to Parent, whose classification and regulation of prostitutes heralded the 19th century’s determination to proscribe women’s opportunities, education, and sexuality. Yet Proudhon’s words seem more monstrous than most, and I wondered how deeply his views were embedded in French culture. With Dumas as a guide, I began to compile my own list of French synonyms for prostitute, reasoning that such words would reveal a great deal about how the French regarded women and sex. I didn’t realize just how long the list would become — it now has 400 entries.

Four hundred French words . . .

. . . for "prostitute"!

Why such a rich array of terms, an array that allows for differentiation, nuance and discrimination? All to the purpose of the naming and locating of a prostitute, in the multiple layers of social class?  

Alexandre Dumas' Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843), neither entirely scientific, nor entirely fictional, a curious hybrid of sociology and storytelling, echoes and continues Parent's project, exposing the threat of prostitution to health and the moral order by corrupting the wives and daughters of the bourgeoisie. The contradictions are obvious when it comes to who is buying and who is selling, and the complexity of this transactional economy and culture, and the attendant techniques of display and commodification, seemingly require the client to have recourse to a vast vocabulary to help navigate pathways through this territory.  

Why so many different yet connected words?

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.

The claim that Eskimo languages (specifically, Yupik and Inuit) have an unusually large number of words for "snow", first loosely attributed to the work of anthropologist Franz Boas and particularly promoted by his disciple Benjamin Lee Whorf, has become a cliché often used to support the controversial linguistic-relativity hypothesis, which posits that a language's vocabulary reflects and shapes its speakers' view of the world. The "strong version" of this hypothesis is questioned, though the basic notion that Eskimo languages have many more root words for "snow" than the English language is itself supported by a 2010 study. 

The first re-evaluation of the claim was by linguist Laura Martin in 1986, who traced the history of the claim and argued that its prevalence had diverted attention from serious research into linguistic relativity. A subsequent influential and humorous, and polemical, essay by Geoff Pullum repeated Martin's critique, calling the process by which the so-called "myth" was created the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax". Pullum argued that the fact that the number of word roots for snow is about equally large in Eskimoan languages and English indicates that there exists no difference in the size of their respective vocabularies to define snow. 

The present use of the word "Eskimoan" is clearly anachronistic, an echo of the colonial mindset in relation to Indigenous Peoples. 

Other specialists in the matter of Eskimoan languages and Eskimoan knowledge of snow and especially sea ice argue against this notion and defend Boas's original fieldwork amongst the Inuit of Baffin Island.

Some anthropologists have argued that Boas, who lived among Baffin islanders and learnt their language, did in fact take account of the polysynthetic nature of Inuit language and included "only words representing meaningful distinctions" in his account.

Studies of the Sami languages of Norway, Sweden and Finland, conclude that the languages have anywhere from 180 snow- and ice-related words and as many as 300 different words for types of snow, tracks in snow, and conditions of the use of snow.

Four hundred French words for prostitute points to the need for complex and nuanced ways to map this territory. If this is so, then the acceptance of this state of affairs by Alexandre Dumas that prostitution, the exchange of money for sex, was the basis of modern society, the lived life, of modernity, shaped by  the capitalist system, would require this vocabulary to veil the reality as much as to reveal it. 

Fanciful, imaginative, allusory, metaphorical, facetious and derogatory?

Dailey shares her conclusions with her readers: 

I discovered that the majority of the words were fanciful, imaginative, allusory or metaphorical; many were facetious and derogatory; and some were outright expressions of disgust, à la Proudhon, including salope, latrine, and cul crotté (filthy woman, latrine, and shit ass.) The crudest words were, like anarchism’s father, in the minority, but they do exist.

Having collected so many words, I decided that a good place to study their evolution would be at the beginning, in the first French dictionary, Jean Nicot’s Thrésor de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (1606), in which Nicot includes courtisane, cantonnière, fille de joye [sic], paillard, chienne, and putain. From this base, the vocabulary would multiply over the centuries, but Nicot’s six words would remain stalwarts, persisting along with the classification of prostitutes based on the rank of their clients. The courtisane would remain at the top — the lover of aristocrats and the rich — while the clients of the filles de joie and paillards were from lower ranks, but whatever their station, men had no trouble finding women to hire for sex: prostitution is as much a part of Parisian history as Notre Dame, and as important — the city, its streets and its prostitutes have had a long-term relationship. As my little dictionary indicated, women and streets were intimately linked: the pavement nymphs and roadside flowers — the fleurs du macadam — were categorized by the street names or area where they worked, and had been for centuries.

A study of some of Paris’ old street names reveals the longevity of the link. The tiny rue du Pélican might strike one as merely fanciful since pelicans don’t roost in Paris, but the name derives not from sea birds but from its bawdy 14th-century name: the rue Poil au Con (Puss Hair Street), so-named for the many prostitutes who worked there; with a nod to propriety, the street later assumed its less vulgar homophone. Similarly, the medieval rue Pute-y-Muce (Hidden Whore Street) would later become the rue du Petit Musc (Little Musk Street).

The lure of the streets was so potent that each image in Les Lionnes de Paris, a set of chromolithographs depicting individual prostitutes published circa 1855, shows each one identified only by the dress and décor of the street or neighborhood where she could be found: each title is the name of a street. 

The cocotte from the Boulevard St. Denis (currently and historically known for prostitution) reclines seductively on her lush bed, her left breast exposed as she fondles a gold necklace — prostitutes were typically portrayed as rapacious deceivers. 

As the Goncourts declared, “Women only consider their sex as a livelihood!… their sex is a career.” 

Back to the origin of the world . . .

Halil Şerif Pasha (Khalil Bey), an Ottoman diplomat, is believed to have commissioned the work shortly after he moved to Paris. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve introduced him to Courbet and he ordered a painting to add to his personal collection of erotic pictures, which already included Le Bain turc (The Turkish Bath) from Ingres and another painting by Courbet, Le Sommeil (The Sleepers), for which it is supposed that one of the models was Joanna Hiffernan, and who may have also been the model for The Origin of the World.

Art historians have speculated for years that Courbet's model for L'Origine du monde because Hiffernan was his favourite model. Hiffernan was the subject of a series of four portraits by Courbet titled Jo, la belle Irlandaise (Jo, the beautiful Irishwoman) painted in 1865–66. In spite of Hiffernan's red hair contrasting with the darker pubic hair of L'Origine du monde, the hypothesis that Hiffernan was the model continues. 

Jacky Colliss Harvey puts forward the idea that the woman's body-hair suggests a more obvious candidate might be the brunette painted with Hiffernan in Courbet's Le Sommeil; and that the identification with Hiffernan has been greatly influenced by the eroticised and sexualised image of the female redhead. 

(Colliss Harvey, Jacky (2015). RED: A History of the Redhead. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal. pp. 119–120)

In February 2013, Paris Match reported that Courbet expert Jean-Jacques Fernier had authenticated a painting of a young woman's head and shoulders as the upper section of L'Origine du monde which according to some was severed from the original work. Fernier has stated that because of the conclusions reached after two years of analysis, the head will be added to the next edition of the Courbet catalogue raisonné. The Musée d'Orsay has indicated that L'Origine du monde was not part of a larger work.

The Daily Telegraph reported that "experts at the [French] art research centre CARAA (Centre d'Analyses et de Recherche en Art et Archéologie) were able to align the two paintings via grooves made by the original wooden frame and lines in the canvas itself, whose grain matched." According to CARAA, it performed pigment analyses which were identified as classical pigments of the 2nd half of the 19th century. No other conclusions were reported by the CARAA. The claim reported by Paris Match was characterized as dubious by Le Monde art critic Philippe Dagen, indicating differences in style, and that canvas similarities could be caused by buying from the same shop.

Documentary evidence however links the painting with Constance Quéniaux, a former dancer at the Paris Opera and a mistress of the Ottoman diplomat Halil Şerif Pasha (Khalil Bey) who commissioned the painting. The Guardian covered this story in a report from Agence France-Presse in Paris (Tue 25 Sep 2018) with the headline and subheading:

Mystery solved? Identity of Courbet's 19th-century nude revealed

Experts say they are 99% sure model who posed for L’Origine du monde was ballet dancer Constance Queniaux

One of the greatest mysteries in art history appears to have been solved. The identity of the model who posed for the most scandalous painting of the 19th century, Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), has finally been revealed.

Experts say they are “99% sure” the painting depicts the Parisian ballet dancer Constance Queniaux. The canvas has never lost its power to shock – bringing out the prude in Facebook, which censored profiles using it as late as 2011.

For decades art historians have been convinced that the naked torso and genitalia it depicts belonged to Courbet’s lover, the Irish model Joanna Hiffernan, who was also romantically linked with his friend, the American artist James Whistler. But doubts persisted – mainly because the dark pubic hair in the painting did not correspond with Hiffernan’s mane of flaming red curls.

Now documentary evidence found in the correspondence between the French writers Alexandre Dumas fils – the son of The Three Musketeers author – and George Sand points directly to a former dancer at the Paris Opera.

Queniaux was a mistress of the Ottoman diplomat Halil Şerif Pasha – aka Khalil Bey – when the picture was painted in the summer of 1866. And it was Halil who commissioned the painting from Courbet for his personal collection of erotica.

The French historian Claude Schopp discovered the Queniaux connection when he was going through copies of Dumas’s letters for a book. One particular passage perplexed him: “One does not paint the most delicate and the most sonorous interview of Miss Queniault (sic) of the Opera.”

It was only when he consulted the handwritten original that he realised there had been a mistake in its transcription. “Interview” was in fact “interior”.

“Usually I make discoveries after working away for ages,” said the writer, whose new book on the find will be published this week. Here I made it straight away. It almost feels unjust,” Schopp joked.

Schopp shared his discovery with the head of the French National Library’s prints department, Sylvie Aubenas, who is also convinced that Queniaux was the model.

“This testimony from the time leads me to believe with 99% certainty that Courbet’s model was Constance Queniaux,” she told Agence France-Presse.

Queniaux was 34 at the time and, having retired from the Opera, was competing with the famed courtesan Marie-Anne Detourbay for Halil Pasha’s affections.

Detourbay, sometimes known as Jeanne de Tourbey, held a famous salon and would later become the Comtesse de Loyne. She was also thought by some to be the model for L’Origine du monde.

But Aubenas said contemporary descriptions of Queniaux’s “beautiful black eyebrows” corresponded better with the model’s pubic hair.

The library has several photographs of her including one by the famed photographic pioneer, Nadar.

Aubenas believes the secret of the model’s identity was known by the cognoscenti but was lost over time as Queniaux became a highly respectable lady of leisure known for her philanthropy.

Another discovery by Schopp helped to clinch the argument, she said. When she died in 1908, Queniaux left a Courbet painting of camellias in her will at whose centre is a lusciously open red blossom. Camellias were strongly associated with courtesans at the time thanks to Dumas’s novel The Lady of the Camellias, which was adapted into Verdi’s opera La Traviata.

“What better tribute from the artist and his patron to Constance?” Aubenas said. She also believes it may have been a gift from Halil.

Constance Quéniaux was born to Marie Catherine Quéniaux in Saint-Quentin on 9 July 1832. Her mother was unmarried and she grew up in poverty. She joined the ballet corps of the Paris Opera in 1847, performing minor roles in its repertoire. She rose to secondary soloist position along with Claudina Couqui, receiving acclaim. 

Like many ballet dancers at the Paris Opera Ballet she combined her dance career with prostitution. However in her case she was able to secure a wealthy lifestyle as a courtesan. This was not unusual in this glamorous and not-so-glamorous backstage world of the Paris Opera.

Ballet - l'étoile (Rosita Mauri)

Edgar Degas' painting Ballet - l'étoile (Rosita Mauri) circa 1878, forms the starting point in an article on how wealthy men turned the famous Paris Opera Ballet into a brothel posted on the History website (Updated: AUG 22, 2018 Original: JAN 5, 2018) by Erin Blakemore with the headline:

Sexual Exploitation Was the Norm for 19th Century Ballerinas

The star’s moment should be triumphant. She’s brilliantly lit, her leg lifted in a graceful ballet pose, and she’s clearly the star of the show. But in the wings lurks a black-clad figure—a symbol for the sordid backstage reality of the ballerina.

It’s not clear who Edgar Degas used as the model for the 1879 painting, L’Etoile, that depicts that tense moment. But it’s likely that she was a prostitute. Sex work was part of ballerinas’ realities during the 19th century, an era in which money, power and prostitution mingled in the glamorous and not-so-glamorous backstage world of the Paris Opera.

The Paris Opera Ballet, founded in the 17th century, was the world’s first professional ballet company, and continues as one of the preeminent outfits today. Throughout the 19th century, it raised the bar for dance — but on the backs of many exploited young women.

Women entered the ballet as young children, training at the opera’s dance school until they could snag a coveted position in the corps de ballet. Girls who studied at the school became apprentices to the Opera; only after years of militaristic training and a series of brutal exams could they get guaranteed, long-term contracts.

In the meantime, they attended classes and auditioned for small, walk-on roles. Often malnourished and dressed in hand-me-downs, the “petits rats” of the ballet were vulnerable to social and sexual exploitation. And the wealthy male subscribers of the Paris Opera — nicknamed abbonés — were often on hand to exploit them.

“The ballet is…what the bar-room is to many a large hotel,” wrote Scribner’s Magazine in 1892, “the chief paying factor, the one from which the surplus profits come.” Men subscribed to the opera not for the music, but for the beautiful ballerinas who danced twice per show—and, behind the scenes, they bought sexual favors from the women they ogled on stage. 

Rehearsal on the Stage’ by Edgar Degas, 1874. 

The abonnés were so powerful, they were part of the Opera’s very architecture: When Charles Garnier designed his iconic opera house in the 1860s, he included a special separate entrance for season ticket holders. The building also included a lavish room called the foyer de la danse. Located directly behind the stage, it was a place where ballet dancers could warm up and practice their moves before and during performances. But it was designed with male patrons, not dancers, in mind. The foyer was a place for them to socialize with—and proposition—ballet dancers.

At the time, women’s bodies were typically covered by lots of clothing. In contrast, ballet dancers wore skimpy and revealing outfits (though ballet costumes of the time, which included skirts, were much less form-fitting than today’s leotards and tights). Subscribers could, and did, go backstage to ogle women. Due to their social status, they were free to socialize with them, too.

“Epic scenes took place backstage,” wrote the Comte de Maugny, who described the foyer de la danse as a kind of meat market. For subscribers, backstage was a kind of men’s club where they could meet and greet other power brokers, make business deals and bask in a highly sexualised atmosphere.

A painting by Jean Beraud of ballet dancers in the wings of the opera house, 1889. 

For dancers, though, it was a place where they were subject to scrutiny and harassment. Dancers were expected to submit to the attentions and affections of subscribers,most of whom were nobleman and important financiers and whose money underwrote the majority of the opera’s operations.

Since subscribers were so powerful, they could influence who made it into coveted roles and who was fired from the ballet. They could lift a girl out of poverty by becoming her “patron,” or client, setting her up in comfortable quarters and paying for private lessons that could increase her cachet in the ballet. Often, girls’ own mothers—who acted not unlike entertainment agents today—helped set up and maintain these relationships. For many Paris Opera ballerinas from poor backgrounds, a relationship with a rich man was their only chance at stability.

Some dancers managed to advance without a rich patron, becoming celebrities on the merits of their own abilities, notes historian Lorraine Coons. But even those dancers who did succeed independently were looked down on as suspected prostitutes.

Little Dancer of Fourteen Years by Degas, 1881

One influential Parisian couldn’t afford the expensive subscription that allowed special access to ballerinas: Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. During the 1870s and 1880s, he produced hundreds of drawings and paintings of Paris Opera dancers, relying on his friends tosecure backstage passes so he could sketch the dancers in their habitat. There, he recorded behind-the-scenes views of dancers practicing—and captured glimpses of the world of the lecherous male subscribers, too.

One of Degas’ best-known works is his Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, a life-sized statue of a teenage “petit rat,” or ballet dancer in training. To modern eyes, it’s the portrait of a child who eagerly awaits her next dance step. But when Degas exhibited it in 1881, it was panned by the critics, who called the dancer “frightfully ugly,” monkey-like, and “marked by the hateful promise of every vice.”

Degas’ subject may have been vulnerable, but for 19th-century observers, she was marked by the sordidness of the sexual harassment that was baked into ballet. Teenager Marie van Goethem, a Paris Opera petit rat who modelled for the sculpture, likely traded sex for money in order to survive — but even if she hadn’t, it’s almost certain Degas’ audience would have assumed she did.

Constance Quéniaux retires from the Opera to become a "kept" mistress!

By the age of 34 Constance Quéniaux had retired from the Opera and was eyeing the favour of the aforementioned Ottoman diplomat, Halil Şerif Pasha.

Quéniaux in later life was well-off, owning a villa in Cabourg. She became a philanthropist, actively supporting, for instance, the Orphelinat des Arts, an institution for orphaned or abandoned children of artists.

She died in Paris on 7 April 1908. As mentioned in Guardian story, in her will Quéniaux left a Courbet painting of camellias. This flower, since the publication of Alexandre Dumas fils' La Dame aux Camélias had been associated with courtesans. This common euphemism for a "kept" mistress or prostitute, particularly one with wealthy, powerful, or influential clients, remains a popular subject today in a literature that celebrates the women who created and owned resources garnered from a corrupt social and economic system, founded on inequality. The term courtesan historically referred to a courtier, a person who attended the court of a monarch or other powerful person. 

LES GRANDES HORIZONTALES: The Lives and Legends of Marie Duplessis, Cora Pearl, La Pava, and La Présidente (2003) by Virginia Rounding,

The Publishers Weekly Review says: The horizontal women of the title were four of Paris's most renowned, or notorious, courtesans immediately before and during the glittering Second Empire. But anyone looking for lubricious reading will be disappointed. British translator Rounding is more interested in how these four lives reflect the place of women in 19th-century France than in the details of their erotic adventures,

though we are informed of who their various protectors were, and they included some of Paris's most prominent and powerful men. Rounding's aim is to separate the real lives from the myths surrounding the women, which, she asserts, reflect stereotypes of prostitutes as depraved, even denatured, women. Yet strangely, she ends up partially confirming them, there is something almost vampiric in how the wildly ostentatious Cora Pearl and Thérèse Lachmann (known as La Païva) bled men of their money to satisfy their taste for luxury. Marie Duplessis, Alexandre Dumas fils's model for La Dame aux camélias, died too young to do much harm (or to be of much interest), and La Présidente, Baudelaire's muse Apollonie Sabatier, retains an affecting dignity through her ups and downs. But Rounding's points are well taken: the men were willing dupes, proud to parade these high-priced lovelies on their arm; these men ultimately retained the power of the purse; and her four subjects were spirited, independent-minded women who rose from poverty to great heights (and, in the case of Cora Pearl, ended with a corresponding descent). Still, primarily avid students of women's studies and French cultural history will be gratified by this judicious account.

Clickbait? Yes, clickbait!

The image that is used for the cover of the GRANDES HORIZONTALES is a painting by the French artist Henri Gervex titled "Rolla" (1878). the model for this picture was Ellen Andrée. The use of this image, is an example of a style, a "clickbait" style, that Re:LODE Radio considers relates to the digressions and détournements of the pornotropic aesthetic, discussed in a previous PART of this work, and reflecting the spirit and method of Walter Benjamin's . . .   

. . . Convolutes!

Modernity, mythology, the birth of Venus . . .

Henri Gervex's early work belonged almost exclusively to the mythological genre, which served as a good excuse for the painting of the nude. The lineage for this "taste" for the nude in art jumps effortlessly into a world of images destined for their reproducibility, continued and continues . . .

. . . to the Playboy centrefold!

Henri Gervex's Rolla of 1878, based on a poem by Alfred de Musset, was rejected by the jury of the Salon de Paris for immorality, since it depicted a scene from the poem of a naked prostitute after having sex with her client. However, the censorship only made Gervex's painting even more famous, and launched the career of Gervex, then age 26. Although banned from the Salon, Rolla was exhibited in a nearby private gallery and became, according to the book Famous Pictures Reproduced from Renowned Paintings By the World's Greatest Artists, "probably the most successful private exhibition made in Paris." The book also called Rolla "a masterpiece, one of the few real great works on modern art." 

Counter-subversive aesthetics?

Display is everything when it comes to the power of pornotropic, counter-subversive aesthetics to bring pleasure, to move people, and to order the world, and look no further than the exhibition Splendeurs et misères that was "staged" at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, in 2015. 

Staging the . . .

. . . l’exposition ‘’Splendeurs et misères’’

As Kim Wilsher says in the Guardian article:

Cocottes, courtesans and sex in the city: Paris celebrates art of the demi-monde (Sat 19 Sept 2015):

The event’s title Splendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution 1850-1910, is borrowed from Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie Humaine novel A Harlot High and Low (Splendeurs and Misères des Courtisanes). It focuses on the work of the painters, artists and photographers who, with a blend of fascination and growing disgust, captured this shadier, decadent side of the City of Light during the period between the Second Empire and the Belle Epoque.

The images they left romanticise the depravity of the age.

 

“Every major artist at the time tackled the subject of prostitution in one way or another,”  

Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon professor of fine art at the Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) and a curator of the exhibition, told the Observer. 

“It was a subject that interested them. Why? The obvious answer is that they were men, but another reason was that prostitution was linked to the idea of modernity. People had moved to the city, which was in itself a new concept, where the moral strictures of the village had disappeared. The city was fluid and this excited the artists.”

Easy virtue, splendours . . .

. . . and miseries!

Later, in 2016, a spin off was staged at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam under the title: Easy Virtue: Prostitution in French Art 1850 -1910. This video montage shows some of the publicity (or clickbait) for the Amsterdam exhibition, followed by the inaugural conference in Paris, held on the opening of the exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay, in 2015.

Migration, prostitution and economic necessity 

From the 1830s onwards, the number of prostitutes working in Paris increased dramatically as a result of political and demographic changes. First, the transformation of Paris into a modern industrial city encouraged the migration of women from the countryside towards the urban centre. According to a study of Paris-based registered prostitutes, conducted in 1889, 75 percent were not born in Paris. Secondly, widespread migration to industrial centres coincided with a low point in demand for women in the labour force. What work there was for women, mostly in the garment industry or domestic service, was often terribly underpaid and unstable. One contemporary writer, Maxime De Camp, estimated that Paris had 155,000 prostitutes between 1870 and 1900.

In almost every line of work, the salary for women fell below what was needed to cover basic living expenses. Milliners earned a salary between 2 and 4 francs per day. Taking into consideration the average food costs from this period, women would be left with approximately 40 cents per day for all other living expenses. By this estimate, women in these circumstances would be at least 200 francs short at the end of the year. Faced with unemployment or underemployment, prostitution became a necessary choice for many women. Indeed, the only options open to a working-class woman at this time - in order to make up the difference between income and living expenses - was through cohabitation with a man or prostitution.

Robert L. Herbert writing on the subject of Degas & Women for the April 18, 1996 issue of The New York Review, says:

The most extensive study of Degas’s representations of prostitutes is Hollis Clayson’s Painted Love (1991), an investigation of prostitution in the art of Degas and Manet, with some attention also to Cézanne, Renoir, and illustrators for the popular press. Clayson stresses that clandestine prostitution was perceived as a new social scourge when it became, during the Seventies, more common than “tolerated” prostitution in registered brothels. Clandestine prostitution was seen by many as especially troublesome because these freelance prostitutes looked like many other women, and therefore could not be readily categorized. Clayson writes mostly about restaurant servers, café-concert entertainers, milliners, and laundresses, all of whom were widely perceived as including clandestine prostitutes, but she has an important chapter on Degas’s monotypes of brothel workers. 

She reminds us that Degas’s idiosyncratic shorthand has been seen as modern because its spontaneous realism seems free of the usual artistic formulas, lacking the finished surface and treatment of details that were required by convention. Clayson does not accept this definition of “modern” because it is limited to issues of style. She acknowledges that the monotypes have a radically new pictorial form; but she argues that instead of dealing with the clandestine prostitution that was current in the Seventies and Eighties, they conform to the old-fashioned image of the police-regulated brothel staffed by a single brutalized and criminal type. From the perspective of sexual politics of the Impressionist era, Degas, she concludes, cannot be judged as progressive or modern.

Signs of confusion! Back to Venice and the origins of capitalism . . .

This troubling phenomenon of clandestine prostitution, because these freelance prostitutes looked like many other women, and therefore could not be readily categorised, takes this "convolute" back to Venice and the inception of this problem, and how it is immanent in the emergence of capitalism. Venetian authorities became concerned that it was impossible to distinguish between courtesans and respectable women. Rules drawn up in 1543 determined what the courtesans could wear. In Venice there were educated prostitutes who were refined and well dressed in expensive textiles, often rented rather than owned, enabling them to service the social elite, and with the look of wealth and social standing. Such an "appearance" led the Venetian authorities to become concerned. 

It was impossible to distinguish between courtesans and respectable women.

This situation repeats itself in nineteenth century Paris but with the added dimension of a working class condemned to supplement meagre earnings with sex work.

Edgar Degas, The Milliners, about 1882 - before 1905. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Edgar Degas, The Laundresses, c. 1880-1882 Minneapolis Institute of Art

In this increasingly industrialised capitalist economy, where the mass production of clothing fabrics resulted in class distinctions in the context of "public appearance" becoming equally problematic. The appearance of the middle-class bourgeois mistress of the domestic sphere began to blur, exactly where the boundaries of difference between the couture fashions of the upper class merged with a mass produced fashion phenomenon. At the same time, the bourgeois mistress of the respectable home, required her servants to replace their equally presentable "respectable" clothing with a uniform that would more clearly, and publicly, communicate the actual difference in social status.

Personality in public?

Chapter 8 of Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man begins with this short paragraph: 

"In asking what effect new material conditions had on public life, in particular the effects of industrial capitalism upon it, we find ourselves having to ask a second question, how personality entered the public realm. The system of profits couldn't succeed without this intrusion of personality, and the system of profits won't explain why it arose." (page 150)

Re:LODE Radio considers that this chapter offers an indispensable method and approach to addressing this crucial question. Sennett says: 

"As the gods are demystified, man mystifies his own condition, his own life is fraught with meaning, yet it remains to be played out. Meaning is immanent in it, yet the person is unlike a stone or fossil which is fixed and so can be studied as a form."

"As the gods fled, immediacy of sensation and perception grew more important: phenomena came to seem real in and of themselves as immediate experience. People in turn were disposed to make more and more of differences in the immediate impressions they made upon each other, to see these differences, indeed, as the very basis of social existence. These immediate impressions different people produced were taken to be their "personalities"." (page 151) 

"One is what one appears, therefore people with different appearances are different persons. When one's own appearance changes, there is a change in the self. As the Enlightenment belief in a common humanity is eclipsed, the variation in personal appearance becomes tied to the instability of personality itself." (page 152)

"The two phenomena which bourgeois people personalised in public appearance were class and sex. Through reading details of appearance strangers tried to determine whether someone had metamorphosed economic position into the more personal one of being a "gentleman". sexual status became personalised in public as strangers tried to determine whether someone, for all her seeming propriety, gave out little clues in her appearance which marked her as a "loose" woman." (page 164-165)   

This new "economy" of appearances, specific to the Parisian scene, is picked up in the Guardian article on the exhibition Splendours and Miseries. Kim Wilsher writes: 

As Gustave Flaubert wrote to his politician friend Ernest Chevalier in June 1842: “What seems to be most beautiful in Paris is the boulevard … at the hour when the gas lamps shine in the mirrors, when the knives ring against the marble tables, I’m going to walk there, peacefully, enveloped in the smoke of my cigar while looking at the women who pass. This is where prostitution is on display, this is where eyes shine!”

“What is art? Prostitution,” Charles Baudelaire declared in his Journaux Intimes. The exhibition attempts to put 19th and early 20th-century prostitution in France within the moral and social framework of an era when a demographic shift brought many country dwellers to the city and when the authorities regarded prostitution as a necessary evil to blunt the rampant nature of the male libido. For centuries, French kings and aristocrats had kept courtesans and mistresses; but in Paris in the second half of the 19th century, the sex-for-sale business democratised, invaded the public space and boomed.

The exhibition begins on the streets, the rues and boulevards where during the day the scenes are ambiguous and visitors are encouraged to spot the telltale signs that distinguished a prostitute from an “honest woman”: a bold stare, a lifted hem, a female drinking alone in a bar. “There are codes that give us clues,” Thomson said. “But during the day, it was slippery trying to identify who was or who wasn’t. This ‘was-she-wasn’t-she’ was the great question of the age.”

The exhibition moves into the Maison Clos (closed house). In the second half of the 19th century, prostitutes – who registered with the local police and were obliged to have regular medical checks – worked in around 200 legalised brothels and maisons closes.

Many thousands more worked on the streets illegally. Their activity centred around cafes and bars, depicted so colourfully by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, where no “decent” woman would enter without a male escort. Cafe terraces, visible from the street and from inside, were the domain of those who were soliciting.

In a red velvet curtained side room at the exhibition, some early photographs capture the debauchery: there are women in suggestive poses and pornographic scenes of heterosexual and homosexual relations inside the closed houses.

Next, the exhibition moves into the boudoir. If the clandestine streetwalkers, who were often forced to supplement their incomes by charging for sex, were at the bottom of the pile, the young female “courtesans” often actors or singers, were at the top. Kept by powerful, aristocratic or high-ranking “protectors” as a sign of wealth and virility, these demi-mondaines were a subject of fascination for the upper class who looked down on them but also observed them as a reference for fashion and taste. Emile Zola’s character Nana is a streetwalker who makes a meteoric rise to become a high-class cocotte, wrecking the lives of all who fall for her and dying eventually of smallpox.

The exhibition also features Edouard Manet’s Olympia, the nude that shocked and outraged the Paris Salon in 1865, not because she was unclothed but because her gaze was defiant and a number of not-so-subtle details – including the orchid in her hair – identified her as a prostitute. (In fact, the model was Manet’s friend, the painter Victorine Meurent). The work, condemned as immoral and vulgar, became a landmark work in art history.

It ends with the harsh and often cruel portrayal of prostitutes by early 20th-century artists, including Picasso. “By the time you get to the last room of the exhibition and the beginning of the 20th century, the artists’ attitude has changed. The pictures are more caricatural, nasty even, reflecting a misogynist society,” said Thomson.

“We don’t exactly know why, but at the time France had some serious problems, like a low birth rate, and questions over whether the country was degenerating. There were high levels of alcoholism and syphilis, and people were scared.”

He said the courtesans were a world away from the misery on the streets. “The high-class prostitutes had a very, very substantial time. They weren’t paid in anything so vulgar as money, but in diamond bracelets and racehorses.”

For the majority of the prostitutes portrayed, however, the paintings romanticised the wretchedness of the circumstances that drove poorly paid women to sell their bodies, turning their misery into a celebration of art and personal talent.

“The social history was horrible,” said Thomson. “But the paintings are fantastic.”

L'Absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker or Glass of Absinthe) is a painting by Edgar Degas, painted between 1875 and 1876. Its original title was Dans un Café, a name often used today.

A bourgeois ideological projection?

While the trend in interest, as shown in the exhibition of nineteenth and early twentieth century art, and in recent literature and the exhibition itself, prurient or otherwise, surrounds the demimonde of the courtesan, the sordid reality for the many working class women who prostituted themselves to survive, is not so easily romanticised. For the bourgeois, the class that was driving the system of profit and exploitation, the fear and panic provoked by the social epidemic of prostitution, could be easily managed. Ideologically, in discourses that claimed the scourge of vice was the result of the unstable, and unbridled sexuality of the lower class woman, the victims of the system would carry the blame and the responsibility. While the bourgeois woman, as mistress of her household's servants might fret at those details of appearance that would mark her as a "loose" woman, the epidemic of prostitution would be down to the base sexuality of the women of a downtrodden poor. 

When it comes to a mythological Circe turning Odysseus' men into swine, in Paris the modern associates of a modern Ulysses were more than capable of undertaking the transformation themselves. 

The class and gender oriented psychological and ideological "projection", emanating from the patriarchal condition of this industrial and capitalist system, is by any standard - grotesque.

La Commune

Addressing the reality and its alternative? The Paris Commune and the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés . . .

. . . (Women's Union to Defend Paris and Care for the Wounded) was a women's group during the 1871 Paris Commune. 

Founded by Nathalie Le Mel and Elisabeth Dmitrieff  on April 11 1871, the group set about fundamental changes to the conditions of working class women.

In Genderquake: socialist women and the Paris Commune by Judy Cox, posted on the International Socialism's quarterly review of socialist theory (5th January 2021). She writes:

On 11 April 1871, three weeks into the life of the Paris Commune, a poster appeared on the walls of France’s capital:

Citizenesses, we know that the present social order bears within itself the seeds of poverty and of the death of all liberty and justice… At this hour, when danger is imminent and the enemy is at the gates of Paris, the entire population must unite to defend the Commune, which stands for the annihilation of all privilege and all inequality.

All women who were prepared to die for the Commune were urged to attend a meeting at 8pm at the Salle Larched, Grand Café des Nations, 74 Rue de Temple. Laundresses, seamstresses, bookbinders and milliners attended and there they established a new organisation, the Union of Women. This Union was a part of the socialist First International, which had been established by Karl Marx and other socialists and trade unionists in London in 1864 with the aim of uniting workers across national borders. Within a few days, the Union became one of the most important organisations of the Paris Commune. Socialist women played an indispensable role in organising the working women of Paris to become Communards. 

Judy Cox continues her article, covering some familiar ground, articulating the significance of the historical context. She writes: 

Two opposing traditions relating to women co-existed uneasily inside the French socialist movement. One went back to the utopian socialism of the 1830s, when Flora Tristan became the first reformer to argue that women could only win equality through the emancipation of the working class. This tradition was developed in the 1848 Revolution by the great socialist leaders Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland, who organised women to fight for their rights to work and to vote.

A very different tradition was represented by the misogynistic anarchist-socialist writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon argued that women were physically weak, incapable of abstract thought and naturally immoral, fit only for marriage or prostitution. In his last work, Pornocracy: Women in Modern Times, Proudhon argued that husbands had the right to kill wives who were adulterous, immoral, drunk, thieving, wasteful or obstinately insubordinate. Jules Michelet further popularised these misogynistic views in his accessible novels Love (1858) and Women (1859). Michelet blamed women for the failure of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and considered them to be prisoners of their biology, which left them unreliable, capricious and unsuited to work outside the home. Proudhon and Michelet were very influential in the French section of the International. At the French section’s inaugural meeting in 1866, delegates passed a motion that stated: “From a physical, moral and social viewpoint, women’s work outside the home should be energetically condemned as a cause of the degeneration of the race and as one of the agents of demoralisation used by the capitalist class”. There were opposing voices, including those of future Communards Varlin and Benoît Malon, but the French section of the International remained deeply Proudhonist.

Female campaigners fought back against the sexist ideas of Proudhon and Michelet. One combatant was André Léo. Léo had lived in Switzerland with her husband, a utopian socialist who had been inspired by the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon and was forced into exile after 1848. Léo was widowed and to survive she published several novels exploring the oppression of women and affirming women’s abilities. In 1866 she hosted the inaugural meeting of a new feminist group at her house. The group included Paule Mink, Louise Michel, Eliska Vincent, Noémi Reclus and her husband Élie Reclus, all future Communards. The group established improving girls’ education as their campaigning priority.

Mink and Michel were two of the leading women of the Commune. They both stood in the revolutionary socialist tradition of Deroin and Roland. Mink was the daughter of an exiled Polish nobleman. When her marriage broke down, she worked as a seamstress and language teacher. She also edited a radical newspaper and built a reputation as an orator in Paris’s radical circles. At a public meeting in 1868, Mink challenged Proudhon: “By ceasing to make woman a worker, you deprive her of her liberty and, thereby, of her responsibility so that she no longer will be a free and intelligent creature but will merely be a reflection, a small part of her husband”. Michel was the daughter of an unmarried servant. She trained as a teacher but refused to teach in state schools because it would have meant swearing an oath of loyalty to the French Empire. Michel came to Paris to further both her education and the revolution. She was one of the most courageous, determined and audacious women in the revolutionary tradition.

Some male members of the International supported the women against Proudhonism. In 1866, Malon wrote to Léo as a member of the International, assuring her that he was not, “forgetting about the emancipation of women and we receive new support each day. We have convinced almost the entire association of the idea; only the pontiffs of Proudhon remain unconvinced”. The first edition of the paper issued by the Batignolles-Ternes section of the Parisian International included a programme, signed by Léo and 16 others, which declared: “It is time to have women participate in democracy instead of making them its enemy by senseless exclusion”. The following year Varlin argued:

Those who wish to refuse women the right to work want to keep them permanently dependent on men. No-one has the right to refuse them the only means of being truly free. Whether done by man or women, there should be equal pay for equal work.

Léo, Mink and Varlin consistently agitated for the International to support both civil rights for women and women’s right to work.

Throughout the 1860s women joined the political clubs that attracted large audiences in Paris’s poorer districts, at least some of which discussed how to campaign against women’s low wages. The political clubs also incubated the desire, “to establish a commune based on cooperation of all energies and intelligences instead of government composed of traitors and incompetents”. Early in 1869 demands for a commune could be heard in many clubs, and proceedings often closed with the cry, “Viva la Commune”. When the Commune became a reality two years later, the clubs continued to provide a space for debate and organisation and became a living link between the Central Committee and the people. The clubs debated what actions the Commune should take and made their views and priorities known to the Central Committee. Through the clubs, women could organise direct action against profiteers and urge support for reforms they wanted. Many Parisian women were in relationships with members of the National Guard, but few went through a marriage ceremony. Only married women could claim a wives’ allowance from the Commune, a discriminatory policy that caused much anger. The demand for allowances for the unmarried partners of national guardsmen originated in the clubs and was later granted by the Commune.

Some clubs were mixed, some were segregated and both provided a platform for female leaders to emerge. An English reporter from the Daily News described one club where “respectably dressed women with their grown up daughters, little shopkeepers’ wives with their young families” mixed with “those repulsive females of almost all degrees of age who form the typical furies of excited Paris mobs”. Reporters were horrified to hear women advocating not only an end to marriage but also for equality between the sexes. Michel presided over the Club of the Revolution, which voted to arrest any priests who were in league with the “monarchist dogs” and to set up corporations of women and men to undertake necessary public works. At the Club of the Free Thinkers, Nathalie Lemel and Lodoyska Kawecka, who dressed in trousers and wore two revolvers hanging from her sash, argued for divorce and the liberation of women. At the Club of the Proletarians a laundress, known only as Madame Andre, was the secretary. One regular speaker was a Citizeness Thiourt, who demanded that cannons be placed in the well-to-do squares of Paris and that women be given the right to bear arms. Léo, Michel and Lemel toured the clubs arguing that capitalist exploitation must be abolished.  

The revolutionary fact, rather than the theoretical abstract, was that, as Judy Cox sets out in her article:

The Commune demonstrated that working class people were capable of organising society more efficiently and fairly than the privileged politicians and bureaucrats that they had replaced. However, many of the Commune’s supporters had a wider ambition: to lay the basis of a socialist society. Elise Reclus, who had been a member of André Léo’s feminist circle, wrote:

The Commune set up for the future a new society in which there are no masters by birth title or wealth, and no slaves by origin, caste or salary. Everywhere the word “Commune” was understood in its largest sense as referring to a new humanity, made up of free and equal companions, oblivious to the existence of old boundaries, helping each other in peace from one end of the world to the other.

They believed that the Commune could inspire an international movement towards egalitarianism and freedom.

Further, as Judy Cox writes later in her article: 

The Union aimed to organise the defence of Paris’s revolution and to instigate long-term changes in women’s labour to eradicate the masters and exploiters. It issued an address calling on the Commune to abolish all forms of gender inequality and describing sex discrimination as a means employed by the ruling class to maintain their power. This was the first time a significant French women’s organisation explained their inferior status in terms of class.

The achievements of the Union were huge. It provided staff for orphanages and care for old people, recruited nurses and canteen workers, provided speakers for public meetings. The Union asked for space in local halls so it could meet and staff a desk providing information, aid and expenses for printing leaflets and posters—all of which the Commune provided. Nightly meetings of the Union were attended by between 3,000 and 4,000 women.60

The driving force behind the Union was an outstanding revolutionary socialist leader, Elisabeth Dimitrieff. Dimitrieff had escaped from her native Russia for less repressive Geneva, where she was one of the signatories of the founding document of the Russian section of the International. The document sought to synthesise Marx’s economic theories with the beliefs of the influential writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky in the emancipatory potential of the traditional peasant commune. In Geneva, Dimitrieff met future Communards and supporters of women’s rights, Eugène Varlin and Benoît Malon. Dimitrieff also edited a journal, The People’s Cause. Its founding statement declared:

As the foundation of economic justice, we advance two fundamental theses:

The land belongs to those who work it with their own hands: to the agricultural communes.

Capital and all the tools of labour belong to the workers: to the workers’ associations.

These ideas resurfaced in the Commune. Dimitrieff spent three months in London, discussing her journal with the Marx family. She requested to be sent to Paris and there she established the Union of Women. Dimitrieff ’s politics shaped everything she did. She sought out working-class women, recruiting laundresses and seamstresses to the Union. 

In Judy Cox's: Conclusion: agitating and squawking, she writes:

One historian of the Commune (Eichner, Caroline J, 2004, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune p18), describes it as an “incubator for embryonic feminist socialisms”. It would be more accurate to say that women’s role in the Commune encouraged experienced socialist women to reach out to other working women. Mink wrote in the Geneva-based newspaper of the International, Equality, addressing women:

It is in the name of women that I speak, in the name of women to whom the International has given the rights and duties equal to those of men… Only socialism will be able to emancipate women materially and morally, as it will be able to emancipate all those who suffer!

Socialist men who supported women’s emancipation were also keen to draw the lessons of the Commune. In 1871, just weeks after the defeat, Malon argued that “one important fact demonstrated by the revolution in Paris is the entry of women into political life… Women and the proletariat can only hope to achieve their respective liberation by uniting”. At the same time, Leó Frankel wrote:

All the objections produced against equality of men and women are the same sort as those which are produced against the emancipation of the Negro race. Firstly, people are blindfolded and they are told that they have been blind since birth. By claiming that half of the human race is incompetent, man prides himself on appearing to be the protector of women. Revolting hypocrisy! Just let the barriers of privilege be lowered and we shall see.

In 1879, the national workers’ congress in Marseille marked a decisive shift in attitude of organised French workers and a “majority rallied behind the notion of complete civil and political equality”. The motion was ardently defended at the congress by Hubertine Auclert, a working-class socialist. She was acclaimed by the Congress, elected as chair of both the session and the commission, and the Congress adopted a resolution proclaiming the “absolute equality of the sexes”. 

Judy Cox ends her article with her contention that:

The Commune was a working-class revolution that was necessarily also a “great gender event” because it depended on women’s active involvement, creativity and courage. It was the visible involvement of women that made the Commune so appalling to its opponents. One wrote:

Those females who dedicated themselves to the Commune—and there were many—had but a single ambition: to raise themselves above the level of man. They were all there, agitating and squawking, the gentleman’s seamstresses, the gentleman’s shirt makers, the teachers of boys, the maids of all work. During the final days all these bellicose viragos held out longer than the men did behind the barricades.

Across the English Channel, a Times reporter joined in the abuse, sneering: “If the French nation were composed only of the French women, what a terrible nation it would be”. If the unruly women of Paris had been in charge of the whole country, it is conceivable that the revolution could have spread across Europe. Perhaps then, this brief but inspiring example of workers’ power could have won more time and so provided us with many more examples of how working-class people can organise together to create a socialist society. 

Pan-European and American anarchism 

Along with Louise Michel, Teresa Claramunt, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman became prominent figures in the late 19th century pan-European and American anarchist movement. With the formation of the First International anarchist sections in various European countries under the leadership of Mikhail Bakunin, anarchism became noted for not only encouraging female participation in the political movement, but also for espousing the ideal of female emancipation.

Forgetting and/or remembering?

Michel was rediscovered by French feminists in the 1970s through the works of Xavière Gauthier, and academic interest in Michel's life and political writings was prompted in the 1970s by Édith Thomas's comprehensively researched biography.

Louise Michel station on the Paris Metro, located in Levallois-Perret, is named after her.

In 2020, street artist Banksy was credited for sending a rescue ship in the Mediterranean Sea and naming it after Michel.

M.V. LOUISE MICHEL

While Louise Michel is remembered by the M.V. Louise Michel project in its humanitarian effort, in her own time the French government sought to erase the significance of La Commune, especially the site of resistance on the hills of Montmartre, with the construction of an architectural and topographical spectacle, the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur.

Construction of the Sacré-Cœur, 10 March 1882

The National Assembly decreed a law on 24 July 1873 for the construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre, near the location of the cannon park and where General Clément-Thomas and General Lecomte were killed, specifying that it be erected to:  

"expiate the crimes of the Commune".

Against this attempt at expiation there runs another tradition, the political requirement, individual and collective need to remember. 

This painting by Maximilien Luce, A Street in Paris in May 1871, 1903–1906 is an early twentieth century artwork to excavate history, in a reprise of the work of Manet, in the avant-garde style of an impressionism informed by pointillism. Luce aligned with the Neo-impressionists not only in their artistic techniques, but also in their political philosophy of anarchism. Many of his illustrations were featured in socialist periodicals, notably La Révolte, Jean Grave's magazine which was later called Les Temps nouveaux. Other socialist/anarchist publications which he contributed to include Le Père Peinard, Le Chambard,[11] and La Guerre sociale.

On 8 July 1894, Luce, suspected of involvement in the 24 June assassination of President of France Marie François Sadi Carnot, was arrested and was confined to Mazas Prison. He was released forty two days later, on 17 August, following his acquittal at the Procès des trente. He published Mazas, an album consisting of ten lithographs documenting the experiences of himself and other political prisoners incarcerated in Mazas; accompanying the lithographs was text by Jules Vallès. 

"Reprise", meaning "verb: repeat (a piece of music or a performance)", is a word that Re:LODE Radio chooses, with a deliberate nod to the word "reprisal", meaning "noun: an act of retaliation". Manet was in a "reprise" mode when depicting the scene of French soldiers firing on Parisians on the barricades.

The image "repeats", or "echoes", Manet's own performance in his painting of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868–69), Kunsthalle Mannheim. 

And, this painting was itself a reprise of Goya's Third of May 1808, completed in 1814, now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. In the work, Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon's armies during the occupation of 1808 in the Peninsular War.

The Wikipedia article on this painting quotes the art historian Kenneth Clark, who considered that The Third of May 1808 was "the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention". 

Like other Spanish liberals, Goya was personally placed in a difficult position by the French invasion. He had supported the initial aims of the French Revolution, and hoped for a similar development in Spain. Several of his friends, like the poets Juan Meléndez Valdés and Leandro Fernández de Moratín, were overt Afrancesados, the term for the supporters — collaborators in the view of many — of Joseph Bonaparte. Goya's 1798 portrait of the French ambassador-turned-commandant Ferdinand Guillemardet betrays a personal admiration. Although he maintained his position as court painter, for which an oath of loyalty to Joseph was necessary, Goya had by nature an instinctive dislike of authority. He witnessed the subjugation of his countrymen by the French troops. During these years he painted little, although the experiences of the occupation provided inspiration for drawings that would form the basis for his prints The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra).

In February 1814, after the final expulsion of the French, Goya approached the provisional government with a request to "perpetuate by means of his brush the most notable and heroic actions of our glorious insurrection against the Tyrant of Europe". His proposal accepted, Goya began work on The Third of May. It is not known whether he had personally witnessed either the rebellion or the reprisals, despite many later attempts to place him at the events of either day.

Goya's picture of the execution of resistance fighters echoes one of his prints from his "The Disasters of War" (Los desastres de la guerra), Y no hay remedio (And it can't be helped) from his own private and personal album of intaglio prints. 

His handwritten title on an album of proofs given to a friend reads: Fatal consequences of Spain's bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices (Spanish: Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos). Aside from the titles or captions given to each print, these are Goya's only known words on the series. 

For Manet, the picture of Parisians on the barricades being fired upon by French soldiers echoes a feature of both the National Gallery, London, version, an assembly of fragments, and his final version in Mannheim of the execution of Emperor Maximilian, in both pictures the military firing squad are dressed in 19th-century field dress, common to many armies at that time, and Manet would have recognised the irony that they could be easily mistaken for French soldiers rather than Mexican troops. Also, the sergeant in both versions wearing a red cap clearly resembles Napoleon III. 

Elected to the presidency of the Second Republic in 1848, he had seized power by force in 1851, when he could not constitutionally be reelected; he later proclaimed himself Emperor of the French. He founded the Second Empire, reigning until the defeat of the French Army and his capture by Prussia and its allies at the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The bungling of Napoleon III in this affair is implicit in Manet's work as someone profoundly critical of the "pornocracy" of Empire, but from an entirely different critical place from Proudhon. In Mexico too, the execution of Maximilian was bungled, and a coup de grâce was required. For Flaubert this era informed the entire world of fact and fiction in his novel Sentimental Education.  

France versus Paris? Paris versus France? The bourgeois "nation" at war with the "people"? 

Besides the likes of Benjamin, trying to make sense of modernity in the twentieth century, the cultural role of Paris in the nineteenth century, and that had stalked the parlours of the bourgeoisie in the United States, like a spectre (but it wasn't communism), through a civil war, the manifest destiny of continental expansion, the genocide of Indigenous Peoples, and that took on a new form in the period that was once termed the American Century. 

This photo by Edwin Levick of Fifth Avenue at 43rd Street, New York, was chosen as the banner image for the article: 

New York: Capital of the Twentieth Century 

by Nancy Levinson

This quotation from Mark Kingwell's, “New York, Capital of the 20th Century,” from Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, 2008 introduces the article:

Walter Benjamin labeled Paris the “capital of the nineteenth century” in his monumental work of cultural excavation, The Arcades Project, that dense, unparalleled, unfinished flotsam-and-jetsam chronicle of revolutionary history, literary struggle and sexual ambition in the West’s most beautiful and sedimentary city, the birthplace of modernity. New York’s essence will not surrender the same kind of archaeological depth…because it tends to erase and rebuild rather than layer; it has always been more tabula rasa than palimpsest.…New York, like Paris, occupies the world-historic position relative to its century, maybe an even greater one than the French capital, and it demands an equally nuanced connoisseur’s gaze. All the more so because New York’s reign, like Paris’s when Benjamin came to construct his elaborate intellectual billet-doux during the 1930s, is now over. 

Nancy Levinson begins the article: 

It’s an easy riff, and the Canadian philosophy professor Mark Kingwell got there already: New York was the capital of the twentieth century. Or at least for part of it. Just as Paris was capital of the nineteenth century for several decades from the end of the Second Empire to the fin-de-siècle, so too New York didn’t become a world city until the middle decades of the twentieth century. You could date its ascent to the postwar years of the pax Americana, of Henry Luce’s American Century; but you could also date it back a decade or so, to the mid-1930s, when the modern skyline was being contoured by the now celebrated buildings — Chrysler, Empire State, Rockefeller Center, et al. — and when the city rehabilitated twelve hundred acres of an old ash dump in Queens to create the spectacular 1939 World’s Fair, even as the world war was already consuming Europe and Asia.

Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of a DC 4 flying over mid-town New York circa 1939. 

In December 2015 the Guardian ran an article (The 10 Dec 2015) in its Book of the day, History books sections, on the publication of: 

Kenneth Goldsmith - Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century review – a monumental hymn to the city  

Under the subheading paragraph: 

From sex and the subway to loneliness and gentrification, Goldsmith’s collage of many voices captures the complexity of New York life

Brian Dillon writes: 

In November 1938, exiled in New York, Theodor Adorno wrote to his friend Walter Benjamin concerning some pages the latter had sent from The Arcades Project, his vast prismatic study of 19th-century Paris. The text, Adorno complained, was ruinously addicted to the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts”. Benjamin had been at work on the book – it’s not clear he intended a “book” as such – since the late 1920s, trawling the city itself and the Bibliothèque Nationale for images and anecdotes, setting thousands of quotations in devious array with his own reflections. These fragments orbited a central motif: the network of phantasmagoric shopping arcades that had flourished in Paris at mid-century. The only way to write about such things was in the collage style of a shop window. Benjamin tartly replied that, in accusing him of a stupefied empiricism, Adorno had simply identified “the true philological attitude”.

“Wide-eyed presentation of mere facts”: the phrase appears to suit the work, if that’s the word for so insouciant an oeuvre, of poet and theorist Kenneth Goldsmith. With Capital – both a challenge and a homage to The Arcades Project – Goldsmith extends (or does he extinguish?) a practice of borrowing and citation to which, since the mid-1990s, he has given various names, notably “conceptual poetry” and “uncreative writing”. Originality and expression are over, he contends: we’re in the era of literary sampling. Earlier projects involved verbatim transcripts of a New York radio station’s weather reports and of traffic bulletins; one volume recorded the author’s every spoken utterance during one week. Now, with the scholarly endorsement of the critic Marjorie Perloff – she was among the first to note an affinity between Goldsmith’s appropriations and Benjamin’s quotation hoard – he has composed a 1,008-page hymn to New York, created almost entirely from other people’s words.

Capital is a monumental, admirable undertaking: a richer, more surprising, frankly more readable book than Goldsmith’s blank conceptual gambit seems to promise. Here is “the capital of the 20th century” anatomised according to 52 diverse themes. Goldsmith begins with the familiar image of New York as dream city, a glittering vision that turns out to be real. (Surely, Joan Didion wrote of her own youthful arrival there, “one does not live in Xanadu”.) Among the teeming quotations on advertising and empire, sex and the subway, loneliness and gentrification, we get many passages on the visual blare of the city. Thomas Wolfe remarked the “great slant beacons of moted light” at Grand Central Station; Truman Capote wrote that being in New York was “like living inside an electric lightbulb”; F Scott Fitzgerald called the sight of Manhattan “a miracle of foamy light suspended by the stars”.

At its best, Capital scintillates, with celebrated and obscure writers. But Goldsmith’s method is also frustratingly slapdash. He fails to note when he is quoting one writer quoting another; when he hits on an eloquent source such as Peter Conrad’s The Art of the City, he relies on it for page after page: you may as well go and read the original book. Perhaps, as with his occasional recourse to Wikipedia, he is making a point: his democratic levelling mirrors street-level New York itself. The lapses hardly matter, in a way, when the book gives us such curiosities as wine cellars beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, or the public electrocution of the troublesome Coney Island elephant, Topsy, in 1903. Along the way, there are vivid descriptions from voices as diverse as American historian Lewis Mumford, Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and music journalist Legs McNeil.

The book stalls to a predictable gridlock – predictable chiefly because it seems to lead straight to the arrival of one K Goldsmith. I love Andy Warhol’s moaning, gossipy, phoned-in diaries as much as the next masochist, but you have to wonder why appropriating Andy looms so large here. There’s an absurdly inflated section on Robert Mapplethorpe – no other artist gets the full chapter treatment – that leads one to suspect he functions as a personal talisman (or warning) for Goldsmith when it comes to uptown avant gardism. And in that chapter there is not one quotation from Patti Smith, who is reduced instead to Mapplethorpe’s muse – a reminder of the general scarcity of female writers and artists in Goldsmith’s collage.

Goldsmith probably doesn’t care if you notice such things; he famously considers his books unreadable. But anybody taking Perloff’s advice and reading Capital against the grain of its conceptual intentions would do well to have a small stack of other NYC books to hand: it might include Smith’s memoir Just Kids, Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights, Maeve Brennan’s essays in The Long-Winded Lady. Not only because Goldsmith has scanted or – as in the case of Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities – simply ignored certain essential voices. But because, as Benjamin the rigorously seductive essayist well knew, assemblage is just half the work when it comes to capturing the modern city; the other half is style. Despite himself, Goldsmith has produced a book that reminds us how close we can still get, via the labour of sound and thought and syntax, to the rhythms of a real city.

Manhattan - Hot jazz in stone and steel . . .  

. . . according to Le Corbusier. In 1935, Le Corbusier made his first visit to the United States. He was asked by American journalists what he thought about New York City skyscrapers; he responded, characteristically, that he found them "much too small". He wrote a book describing his experiences in the States, Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches, Voyage au pays des timides (When Cathedrals were White; voyage to the land of the timid) whose title expressed his view of the lack of boldness in American architecture.

Manhattan, the film (1979), directed by Woody Allen with a screenplay written by Allen and Marshall Brickman, begins with a montage of images of Manhattan and other parts of New York City accompanied by George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, with Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) narrating drafts of an introduction to a book about a man who loves the city. Isaac is a twice-divorced, 42-year-old television comedy writer who quits his boring job. He is dating Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), a 17-year-old girl attending the Dalton School. His best friend, college professor Yale Pollack (Michael Murphy), married to Emily (Anne Byrne), is having an affair with Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton). Mary's ex-husband and former teacher, Jeremiah (Wallace Shawn in his film debut), also appears, and Isaac's ex-wife Jill Davis (Meryl Streep) is writing a confessional book about their marriage. Jill has also since come out as a lesbian and lives with her partner, Connie (Karen Ludwig).

When Isaac meets Mary, her cultural snobbery offends him. Isaac runs into her again at an Equal Rights Amendment fund-raising event at the Museum of Modern Art hosted by Bella Abzug (playing herself) and accompanies her on a cab ride home. They chat until sunrise in a sequence that culminates in a shot of the Queensboro Bridge. In spite of a growing attraction to Mary, Isaac continues his relationship with Tracy but emphasizes that theirs cannot be a serious relationship and encourages her to go to London to study acting.

In the dénouement, Isaac lies on his sofa, musing into a tape recorder about the things that make "life worth living". When he finds himself saying "Tracy's face", he sets down the microphone. Unable to reach her by phone, he sets out for Tracy's on foot. He arrives at her family's apartment building just as she is leaving for London. He asks her not to go and says he does not want "that thing about [her] that [he] like[s]" to change. She replies that the plans have already been made and reassures him that "not everybody gets corrupted" before saying "you have to have a little faith in people". He gives her a slight smile, with a final look to the camera then segueing into final shots of the skyline with some bars of Rhapsody in Blue playing again.

From Sentimental Education . . .

. . . to Tracy's face!

When it comes to "corruption" and the city . . .

. . . a Playboy cartoon on the subject of New York's street plan and the modernist art of Mondrian, echoes Le Corbusier's views. On the opposite page to this image in a Playboy Cartoon Album another cartoon encapsulates the twentieth century New York version of Flaubert's Sentimental Education.

Woody Allen's reference to Sentimental Education in his film Manhattan captures Flaubert's feeling and relationship to Paris, and translates this condition to a typical situation in the lives of a privileged and highly educated class of "liberal" New York bourgeoisie. Flaubert's novel describes the life of a young man (Frédéric Moreau) living through the revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire, and his love for an older woman (based on the wife of the music publisher Maurice Schlesinger, who is portrayed in the book as Jacques Arnoux). Flaubert based many of the protagonist's experiences (including the romantic passion) on his own life. He wrote of the work in 1864:

"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation—or, more accurately, the history of their feelings. It's a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays—that is to say, inactive."

The novel's tone is by turns ironic and pessimistic; it occasionally lampoons French society, as does Woody Allen. Isaac, the main character in Manhattan corresponds loosely to the main character in Sentimental Education, Frédéric, who regularly gives himself over to romantic flights of fancy. 

Coda 

The final pages of Flaubert's Sentimental Education are, as Simon says, genuinely emotional:

Burnt out, abandoned, Frédéric leaves France and goes travelling to lose himself and when he returns, is a broken man.

He travelled.

He knew the melancholy associated with packet-boats, the chill one feels on waking up under tents, the dizzy effect of landscapes and ruins, and the bitterness of ruptured sympathies.

He returned home.

He mingled in society, and he conceived attachments to other women. But the constant recollection of his first love made these appear insipid; and besides the vehemence of desire, the bloom of the sensation had vanished. In like manner, his intellectual ambitions had grown weaker. Years passed; and he was forced to support the burden of a life in which his mind was unoccupied and his heart devoid of energy.

‘Towards the end of March, 1867, just as it was getting dark, one evening, he was sitting all alone in his study, when a woman suddenly came in.’

It is Madame Arnoux. She and her husband are living in obscurity in rural Brittany. She and Frédéric swear their undying love to each other. Maybe their love has survived and meant so much because they were never together. She takes her cap off to cut a lock of her hair for him, and he is stricken to see that her hair has gone completely white. She is an old lady. She leaves. It is the last time they will meet.

In the final final scene, years later, Frédéric encounters Deslauriers again and the novel ends the way it began, with the pair swapping stories of the past. On the final page they decide that their best memory is of being about 16 and trying to sneak into the town brothel in Nogent. Like simpletones they picked nosegays for the girls but, once inside, all the girls laughed at their sweet innocence and, overcome by embarrassment, first Frédéric and then Deslauriers had fled.

Now they sit by the fire, too old men reminiscing and agreeing that, yes, that was probably the happiest moment in their lives.

The bourgeois personality? 

This ending, was to be followed in 1870-71 by the end of the Second French Empire in France, the birth of a united Germany (the German Empire), and the savage suppression of an uprising, La Commune. What was left was the burnt out ruins of Paris and a ruthlessly selective, and bourgeois, version of false memory syndrome. 

Richard Sennett's chapter eight of The Fall of Public Man, "Personality in Public", begins with a short introductory paragraph that ends with this line: 

"The system of profits couldn't succeed without the intrusion of personality, and the system of profits won't explain why it arose." (page 150)

A couple of pages further on he writes: 

"The 19th century bourgeois is always remembering what it was like when in youth he was really alive. His personal self-consciousness is not so much an attempt to contrast his feelings with those of others as to take known and finished feelings, whatever they once were, as a definition of who he is."

The reference to Sentimental Education in Manhattan is pivotal in considering the idea mooted at the top of this page, that leads inexorably to a bourgeois and capitalist ideology and the Culture of Terrorism:  

"French culture and the nation" . . . 

. . . Re:LODE Radio sees this phenomenon as symmetrically mirrored in the type of narcissism of:  

"American culture and the nation". . .

 

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.

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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.

m

  

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? 

m

 

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. 

. . . and the pretty "girl next door"?

Gillette Elvgren (March 15, 1914 – February 29, 1980) was an American painter of pin-up girls, advertising and illustration. Best known for his pin-up paintings for Brown & Bigelow, Elvgren studied at the American Academy of Art.

The Vanishing Sex "Come now - I'll match you for it" 

Elvgren was strongly influenced by the early "pretty girl" illustrators, such as Charles Dana Gibson (above) and Andrew Loomis (below).

Gee!! I wish I were a man I'd join the Navy

Howard Chandler Christy was another influence on Elvgren. His WWI poster of 1917 for the Navy is an example of the crossover of advertising with propaganda, and that intriguingly includes a "take" on the gender identity agenda. Elvgren was a commercial success. His clients ranged from Brown & Bigelow and Coca-Cola to General Electric and Sealy Mattress Company. During the 1940s and 1950s he illustrated stories for a host of magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping.

"Take off . . . refreshed" 

Although best known for his pin-ups, his work for Coca-Cola and others depicted typical Americans, ordinary people doing everyday things, yet even here in this advert there's a subtle invitation to multiple readings. 

A Coca-Cola? Or a Quickie?

The women Elvgren painted are typically the girl next door rather than the femme fatale, and whose charms are innocently revealed in that fleeting instant when she is caught unaware in what might be an embarrassing situation.

All the pretty girls!

FILM FUN? 

Arnold Armitage (1899–1991) was a British-born artist and illustrator, best known for his work with pin-up art. He moved to the United States around 1925 and settled in Hollywood, California, working for the Foster and Kleiser Company, which produced billboards. During the 1930s, he developed a reputation as a designer specialising in billboards, and he designed many of these for American corporations.

About 1940, Armitage began a series of "pretty girl" paintings for the calendar market. While not strictly pin-ups, these works were very reminiscent of the work of Gil Elvgren. Armitage's pretty girls were well received in both the United States and England.

A portfolio of artwork by Arnold Armitage

And though deliberately risqué, of course all these "pretty girls" were white! The wider context is, to put it bluntly, that in the American century being black and beautiful consigns all material discussion to the lands of . . . 

. . . PORNOTROPIA!

Meanwhile, at the Playboy Mansion the partying continued . . .

. . . with the Martini Burlesque! 

The term "burlesque" is used to apply to a "concept" as well as a "category" (as is the word "art"), and derives from the Italian burlesco, which, in turn, is derived from the Italian burla – a joke, ridicule or mockery. 

So, a burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects. However, in its contemporary condition as a "genre" of popular culture, burlesque is more than capable of taking itself too seriously.

Burlesque overlaps in meaning with caricature, parody and travesty, and, in its theatrical sense, with extravaganza, as presented during the Victorian era. "Burlesque" has been used in English in this literary and theatrical sense since the late 17th century. A later use of the term, particularly in the United States, refers to performances in a variety show format. These were popular from the 1860s to the 1940s, often in cabarets and clubs, as well as theatres, and featured bawdy comedy and female striptease. 

Victorian burlesque, sometimes known as "travesty" or "extravaganza", was popular in London theatres between the 1830s and the 1890s. It took the form of musical theatre parody in which a well-known opera, play or ballet was adapted into a broad comic play, usually a musical play, often risqué in style, mocking the theatrical and musical conventions and styles of the original work, and quoting or pastiching text or music from the original work. A staple of burlesque was the display of attractive women in travesty roles, dressed in tights to show off their legs, but the plays themselves were seldom more than modestly risqué.  

American burlesque shows were originally an offshoot of Victorian burlesque. The English genre had been successfully staged in New York from the 1840s, and it was popularised by a visiting British burlesque troupe, Lydia Thompson and the "British Blondes", beginning in 1868. New York burlesque shows soon incorporated elements and the structure of the popular minstrel shows. 

Once upon a time in America - Blackface

The minstrel show, was an American form of racist entertainment developed in the early 19th century. Minstrel shows were popular before slavery was abolished, sufficiently so that Frederick Douglass, the American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer statesman and escaped slave, described blackface performers as ". . . the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens."

Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people specifically of African descent. The shows were performed by mostly white people in make-up or blackface for the purpose of playing the role of black people. Minstrel shows lampooned black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.

Minstrel shows emerged as brief burlesques and comic entr'actes in the early 1830s in the Northeastern states of the United States. They were developed into full-fledged form over the next decade. 

An American artform?

By 1848, blackface minstrel shows were the first uniquely American theatrical art, translating formal art, such as opera, into a popular and accessible form, albeit one that established a profoundly racist trope, intended for, and reflecting the tastes and confirming the attitudes of a general audience. 

My consumers are they not my producers?

The typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure. The troupe first danced onto stage then exchanged wisecracks and sang songs. The second part featured a variety of entertainments, including the pun-filled stump speech. The final act consisted of a slapstick musical plantation skit or a send-up of a popular play.

Minstrel songs and sketches featured several stock characters, most popularly the slave and the dandy. These were further divided into sub-archetypes such as the mammy, her counterpart the old darky, the provocative mulatto wench, and the black soldier. 

Jim Crow 

These earliest minstrel characters took as their base popular white stage archetypes — frontiersmen, fishermen, hunters, and riverboatsmen whose depictions drew heavily from the tall tale — and added exaggerated blackface speech and makeup. These Jim Crows and Gumbo Chaffs fought and boasted that they could "wip [their] weight in wildcats" or "eat an alligator". As public opinion toward blacks changed, however, so did the minstrel stereotypes. 

Eventually, several stock characters emerged. Chief among these were the slave, who often maintained the earlier name Jim Crow, and the dandy, known frequently as Zip Coon, from the song Zip Coon. 

"First performed by George Dixon in 1834, Zip Coon made a mockery of free blacks. An arrogant, ostentatious figure, he dressed in high style and spoke in a series of malaprops and puns that undermined his attempts to appear dignified." 

The white actors who portrayed these characters spoke an exaggerated form of Black Vernacular English. The blackface makeup and illustrations on programs and sheet music depicted these grotesque caricatures with huge eyeballs, very wide noses, and thick-lipped mouths that hung open or grinned foolishly; one character expressed his love for a woman with "lips so large a lover could not kiss them all at once". They had huge feet and preferred "possum" and "coon" to more civilised fare. Minstrel characters were often described in animalistic terms, with "wool" instead of hair, "bleating" like sheep, and having "darky cubs" instead of children. Other claims were that blacks had to drink ink when they got sick "to restore their color" and that they had to file their hair rather than cut it. They were inherently musical, dancing and frolicking through the night with no need for sleep.

Thomas "Daddy" Rice introduced the earliest slave archetype with his song "Jump Jim Crow" and its accompanying dance. He claimed to have learned the number by watching an old, limping black stable hand dancing and singing, "Wheel about and turn about and do jus' so/Eb'ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow." Other early minstrel performers quickly adopted Rice's character.

Minstrels claimed that their songs and dances were authentically black, although the doubtful extent of African American cultural influence remains debated. Spirituals (known as jubilees) entered the repertoire in the 1870s, marking the first undeniably black music to be used in minstrelsy.

What does it signify, that as a truly American art form, it was blackface minstrelsy that was to become the first theatrical form that was distinctly American? 

During the 1830s and 1840s at the height of its popularity, it was at the epicentre of the American music industry. For several decades, it provided the means through which American white people viewed black people through a prism that divided and separated strong racist aspects on one side, while on the other, it afforded white Americans an awareness, albeit distorted, of some aspects of black culture.

By the turn of the 20th century, the minstrel show enjoyed but a shadow of its former popularity, having been replaced for the most part by vaudeville and burlesque. 

Jim Crow Law 

The phrase "Jim Crow Law" can be found as early as 1884 in a newspaper article summarizing congressional debate. The term appears in 1892 in the title of a New York Times article about Louisiana requiring segregated railroad cars. The origin of this phrase "Jim Crow" is obvious, generally attributed to the "Jump Jim Crow" song-and-dance caricature of black people by the aforesaid white actor Thomas D. Rice, performing in blackface. As a result of Rice's fame, "Jim Crow" by 1838 had become a pejorative expression meaning "Negro". When southern legislatures passed laws of racial segregation directed against black people at the end of the 19th century, these statutes became known as Jim Crow laws. 

The cultural envelope of American burlesque had huge influence on American films made during the Great Depression era of the 1930's. Roman Scandals was one such movie from 1933. This American black-and-white pre-Code musical film was directed by Frank Tuttle. However, the film's significance rests on the fact it features a number of intricate production numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley. This includes the song "Keep Young and Beautiful" and where Berkeley's film treatment absorbs and reflects the racist tropes of minstrelsy. In addition to the starring actors in the picture, the elaborate dance numbers are performed by the "Goldwyn Girls

The "Goldwyn Girls" in this film included future stars such as Lucille Ball, Paulette Goddard and Barbara Pepper.

Keep young and beautiful . . .

. . . if you want to be loved!

Berkeley's popularity with an entertainment-hungry Depression audience was secured when he choreographed five musicals back-to-back for Warner Bros: 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933, Dames, and Fashions of 1934. 

Busby Berkeley's "numbers" are characterised by starting out in the realm of the stage, but quickly exceeding this space by moving into a time and place that could only be cinematic, to return to shots of an applauding audience and the fall of a curtain. As choreographer, Berkeley was allowed a certain degree of independence in his direction of musical numbers, and they were often markedly distinct from the narrative sections of the films. The numbers he choreographed were mostly upbeat and focused on decoration as opposed to substance. One dramatic exception was the heart-rending and notably martial "Remember My Forgotten Man" from Gold Diggers of 1933, which dealt with the mistreatment of World War I veterans during the Great Depression. "Remember My Forgotten Man" is performed by Joan Blondell, with featured vocal solo by Etta Moten – who also dubbed Blondell's singing voice at the end of the number – and features sets influenced by German Expressionism and a gritty evocation of Depression-era poverty. 

Berkeley was inspired by the May 1932 war veterans' march on Washington, D.C. and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech about the "Forgotten Man" from the same year. Roosevelt had appropriated this phrase in a speech, using it to refer to those at the bottom of the economic scale whom Roosevelt believed the state needed to help. When the number was finished, Jack L. Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck (the studio production head) were so impressed that they ordered it moved to the end of the film.

This video montage begins with this musical number from Gold Diggers of 1933, and then followed by a couple of clips from the 1942 American biographical musical film Yankee Doodle Dandy about George M. Cohan, known as "The Man Who Owned Broadway" and starring James Cagney. The plot begins in the early days of World War II, Cohan comes out of retirement to star as President Roosevelt in the Rodgers and Hart musical I'd Rather Be Right, a Depression-era political satire set in New York City about Washington politics. The plot centers on Peggy Jones and her boyfriend Phil, who needs a raise in order for them to get married. The President steps in and solves their dilemma. On the first night, he is summoned to meet the president at the White House, who presents him with a Congressional Gold Medal. Cohan is overcome and chats with Roosevelt, recalling his early days on the stage. The film flashes back to his supposed birth on July 4, whilst his father is performing on the vaudeville stage. The first clip used from this film in this Re:LODE Radio montage shows Cohan working on the idea for a patriotic song designed to galvanise American young men to enlist and fight the "Hun" "Over There".

The final clip is the finale of the film where the President presents Cohan with the Congressional Gold Medal. As he leaves the White House, he descends a set of stairs while performing a tap dance (which Cagney thought up before the scene was filmed and undertook without rehearsal). Outside, he joins a military parade, where the soldiers are singing "Over There", and, at first, he isn't singing. Not knowing that Cohan is the song's composer, one of them asks if he knows the words. Cohan's response is a smile before joining in to sing too. Cagney had initially been opposed to a biopic of George M. Cohan's life, having disliked Cohan since the Actors' Equity Strike in 1919, in which he sided with the producers. In 1940, Cagney was named, along with 15 other Hollywood figures, in the grand jury testimony of John R. Leech, the self-described 'chief functionary' of the Los Angeles Communist Party who had been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The New York Times printed the allegation that Cagney was a communist on its front page. Cagney refuted the accusation and Martin Dies, Jr. made a statement to the press clearing Cagney. William Cagney, one of the film's producers, is reported to have said to his brother that "we're going to have to make the goddamndest patriotic picture that's ever been made. I think it's the Cohan story".

Forgotten men . . .

. . . over there, over there, the yanks are coming, the yanks are coming . . .

This report from the Congressional Research Service lists hundreds of instances in which the United States has used its Armed Forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes. It was compiled in part from various older lists and is intended primarily to provide a rough survey of past U.S. military ventures abroad, without reference to the magnitude of the given instance noted

Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020

July 20, 2020

Barbara Salazar Torreon Senior Research Librarian

Sofia Plagakis Research Librarian

The list . . . 

. . . was compiled in part from various older lists and is intended primarily to provide a rough survey of past U.S. military ventures abroad, without reference to the magnitude of the given instance noted. The listing often contains references, especially from 1980 forward, to continuing military deployments, especially U.S. military participation in multinational operations associated with NATO or the United Nations. Most of these post-1980 instances are summaries based on presidential reports to Congress related to the War Powers Resolution. A comprehensive commentary regarding any of the instances listed is not undertaken here.

The instances differ greatly in number of forces, purpose, extent of hostilities, and legal authorization. Eleven times in its history, the United States has formally declared war against foreign nations. These 11 U.S. war declarations encompassed five separate wars: the war with Great Britain declared in 1812; the war with Mexico declared in 1846; the war with Spain declared in 1898; the First World War, during which the United States declared war with Germany and with Austria-Hungary during 1917; and World War II, during which the United States declared war against Japan, Germany, and Italy in 1941, and against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania in 1942.

Some of the instances were extended military engagements that might be considered undeclared wars. These include the Undeclared Naval War with France from 1798 to 1800; the First Barbary War from 1801 to 1805; the Second Barbary War of 1815; the Korean War of 1950-1953; the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1973; the Persian Gulf War of 1991; global actions against foreign terrorists after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States; and the war with Iraq in 2003. With the exception of the Korean War, all of these conflicts received congressional authorization in some form short of a formal declaration of war. Other, more recent instances have often involved deployment of U.S. military forces as part of a multinational operation associated with NATO or the United Nations.

The majority of the instances listed prior to World War II were brief Marine Corps or Navy actions to protect U.S. citizens or promote U.S. interests. A number were engagements against pirates or bandits. Covert operations, domestic disaster relief, and routine alliance stationing and training exercises are not included here, nor are the Civil and Revolutionary Wars and the continual use of U.S. military units in the exploration, settlement, and pacification of the western part of the United States.

"To the shores of Tripoli"

From the Halls of Montezuma to . . .

. . . the shores of Tripoli

The "Marines' Hymn" is the official hymn of the United States Marine Corps, introduced by the first director of the USMC Band, Francesco Maria Scala. Its music originates from an 1867 work by Jacques Offenbach with the lyrics added by an anonymous author at an unknown time in the following years.

The line "To the shores of Tripoli" refers to the First Barbary War, and specifically the Battle of Derna in 1805. Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon and his Marines hoisted the American flag over the so-called "Old World" for the first time. This overseas military deployment was the second of hundreds more.

Black and white and the White House?

As Cohan leaves the White House two African American actors play the attendants who serve him. 

In the "Remember My Forgotten Man" episode, the finale of Gold Diggers of 1933 with Joan Blondell, the featured vocal solo is performed by Etta Moten. 

On January 31, 1934, Etta Moten became one of the rare black stars to perform at the White House since Marie Selika Williams performed for President Rutherford B. Hayes and First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes in 1878. Etta Moten performed The Forgotten Man from her movie Gold Diggers of 1933 for President Roosevelt at his birthday celebration. The song echoed Roosevelt's campaign promise that he would remember the "forgotten man."  

NOT the "Mammy"! 

Up until this point, the representation of black women in movies was limited to maids or nannies (the Mammy archetype). Moten made a breakthrough with her roles in a number of movies and is generally recognized as the 1st black woman to do so. Etta Moten Barnett crossed over decades before that music-industry phrase existed. Disturbed by subtle but persistent racial discrimination, Etta persevered, believing she had to be “twice as good to get anywhere at all.”

George Gershwin discussed her singing the part of "Bess" in his new work Porgy and Bess, which he had written with her in mind. She was concerned about trying a role above her natural range of contralto. In the 1942 revival, the part of Bess was rewritten. She did accept the role of "Bess", but she would not sing the word "nigger", which Ira Gershwin subsequently wrote out of the libretto. Through her performances on Broadway and with the national touring company until 1945, she captured Bess as her signature role. 

Etta Moten Barnett hosted a radio show in Chicago called I Remember When before the United States government appointed her to be a representative on cultural missions to ten African nations. Dozens of recordings of I Remember When are available at the Library of Congress and at the Schomburg Library in New York City. Etta's marriage to Claude Barnett gave her the opportunity to travel to Africa. Claude, as the head of the Associated Negro Press, along with Etta and other members of the organization visited the continent frequently to gain African news information for the ANP to include in their issues. 

On March 6, 1957 Moten Barnett interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Accra, Ghana, where they were both attending the celebration of Ghana's independence from Great Britain — she as the wife of Claude Barnett, a prominent member of the official U.S. delegation headed by Vice President Richard Nixon; and King, fresh from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as a man interested in the liberation of oppressed people globally, but with no official place in Ghana's Independence Day festivities. 

The recording of this conversation, conducted in a Ghanaian radio studio where Moten Barnett was gathering recordings for her Chicago broadcasts, is also available at the Library of Congress and the Schomburg Library.

It was during World War I that Berkeley served as a field artillery lieutenant, drilling 1,200 soldiers in complex formations that became the basis for his highly sophisticated choreography in musicals and films. 

Re:LODE Radio makes a connection between the "reel" world of the movie and the way a linear sequence of images projected on the silver screen translates to movement. The organic quality of movement, as encapsulated in the use of the term "Bioscope" for early cinema venues in England, is in Berkeley's choreographic film treatment is layered with a "mechanical" and "clock time" musical rhythm. In this video montage the sequence begins with a popular scene from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, his 1936 American comedy film in which his iconic Little Tramp character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialised world. The film represents a critical commentary on the desperate employment and financial conditions many people faced during the Great Depression — conditions exacerbated, in Chaplin's view, by the drive to pursue efficiencies in modern industrial processes, in order to maximise surplus value and profit for the capitalist owners of the means of production. This is followed by a montage of clips from Busby Berkeley's "production" "numbers". Next comes Berkeley's 1969 ad for Contac. In the late 1960s a nostalgia for this camp style brought the Berkeley musicals back to the forefront. He toured the college and lecture circuit, and even directed a 1930s-style cold medication commercial for Contac capsules entitled the "Cold Diggers of 1969", complete with a top shot of a dancing clock. The final clip in the sequence has Imogen Kelly (renowned as Australia's Queen of Burlesque and crowned World Queen of Burlesque in 2012 at the Burlesque Hall of Fame, Las Vegas), in a nostalgic reprise of a Berkeley routine with a modern burlesque version thrown in at the end.

Assembly line rhythms . . .

. . . machine time and glamour?

The burlesquerie of a deliberately escapist style in American films such as Roman Scandals provided an aesthetic envelope adapted from the racialised trope of minstrelsy. Cinema in the United States had a brief period of relative freedom from the censor up until the strict enforcement of the "Hays Code" in mid-1934. This short period, beginning with the production of "talking pictures" in 1929, is known as Pre-Code Hollywood. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor, and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934. 

American social mores and . . .

. . . "reel" life, according to Hollywood?

This montage of clips from the Pre-Code era includes video edits by Kevin Wentinck. First a trailer followed by: The Unmentionables and the video edit: Pre-Codes: Sadism, Masochism, Misogyny & Grapefruit that reveals more than female anatomy and styles of  underwear. What it lays bare is the uncomfortable truth about what were acceptable American social mores that censorship sought to hide from public view.

The emergence of the "talkies" in American cinema in 1929 coincided with the Great Depression that started in the United States after a major fall in stock prices around September 4, 1929, and became worldwide news with the Wall Street stock market crash of October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%. By comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. 

The impact of the Great Depression that began in the United States in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s was global in scale. This was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. The Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how intensely the global economy can decline. In this case the decline in the U.S. economy was the factor that pulled down most other countries at first; then, internal weaknesses or strengths in each country made conditions worse or better. Frantic attempts by individual countries to shore up their economies through protectionist policies – such as the 1930 U.S. Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act and retaliatory tariffs in other countries – exacerbated the collapse in global trade, contributing to the depression. By 1933, the economic decline pushed world trade to one third of its level compared to four years earlier. 

The Great Depression hit Germany hard. The impact of the Wall Street Crash forced American banks to end the new loans that had been funding the repayments under the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan. The financial crisis escalated out of control in mid-1931, starting with the collapse of the Credit Anstalt in Vienna in May. This put heavy pressure on Germany, which was already in political turmoil with the rise in violence of Nazi and communist movements, as well as with investor nervousness at harsh government financial policies. Investors withdrew their short-term money from Germany, as confidence spiraled downward. The Reichsbank lost 150 million marks in the first week of June, 540 million in the second, and 150 million in two days, June 19–20. Collapse was at hand. U.S. President Herbert Hoover called for a moratorium on Payment of war reparations. This angered Paris, which depended on a steady flow of German payments, but it slowed the crisis down, and the moratorium was agreed to in July 1931. An international conference in London later in July produced no agreements but on August 19 a standstill agreement froze Germany's foreign liabilities for six months. Germany received emergency funding from private banks in New York as well as the Bank of International Settlements and the Bank of England. The funding only slowed the process. Industrial failures began in Germany, a major bank closed in July and a two-day holiday for all German banks was declared. Business failures became more frequent in July, and spread to Romania and Hungary.

In 1932, 90% of German reparation payments were cancelled. Widespread unemployment reached 25% as every sector was hurt. The government did not increase government spending to deal with Germany's growing crisis, as they were afraid that a high-spending policy could lead to a return of the hyperinflation that had affected Germany in 1923. 

Germany's Weimar Republic was hit hard by the depression, as American loans to help rebuild the German economy now stopped. The unemployment rate reached nearly 30% in 1932, bolstering support for the Nazi (NSDAP) and Communist (KPD) parties, causing the collapse of the politically centrist Social Democratic Party. 

Hitler ran for the Presidency in 1932, and while he lost to the incumbent Hindenburg in the election, it marked a point during which both Nazi Party and the Communist parties rose in the years following the crash to altogether possess a Reichstag majority following the general election in July 1932.

Hitler followed an autarky (national self-sufficiency) in economic policy, creating a network of client states and economic allies in central Europe and Latin America. By cutting wages and taking control of labour unions, plus public works spending, unemployment fell significantly by 1935. Large-scale military spending played a major role in the recovery.

Re:LODE Radio chooses to connect the historical situation in Germany in 1935, and the aesthetics of Busby Berkeley through the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, originally published in 1935, by Walter Benjamin. This is an essay proposes and explains how the mechanical reproduction of art devalues the aura (uniqueness) of an objet d’art. But the essay does much more than consider the impact of the shift in the information environment from the typographic to a graphic, and photographic world and experience. 

Photography does not simply represent the world, it substitutes itself for the world!

Walter Benjamin's essay is headed by a quote from the essay "The Conquest of Ubiquity" (1928), by Paul Valéry: 

Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.

Symptomatic of this shift is the Dadaist art work L.H.O.O.Q. (French pronunciation: ​[ɛl aʃ o o ky]) a work of art by Marcel Duchamp. First conceived nearly a decade before "The Conquest of Ubiquity" (1928), in 1919, the work is one of what Duchamp referred to as readymades, in this case a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's early 16th-century painting the Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp had drawn a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title.

L.H.O.O.Q.

It's a pun! On pronouncing L.H.O.O.Q. "Elle a chaud au cul" (which translates as "She is hot in the arse")

The original title of Benjamin's essay was, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, in 1935; followed by the French edition, L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée, in 1936; and the German revised edition in 1939, from which derive the contemporary English translations of the essay.

The point that Benjamin makes in this essay that provides Re:LODE Radio with a connection between the Hollywood entertainment industry and the rise of Hitler, the Nazi ideology, and Bolshevik communist ideology in the 1930's is this. That in the age of mechanical reproduction and the absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of art would be inherently based upon the praxis of politics. 

Written during the Nazi regime (1933–1945) in Germany, Benjamin’s essay presents a theory of art that is “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art” in a mass-culture society. More specifically Benjamin comes up with the notion of the aestheticisation of politics, an idea first coined by Benjamin in this essay, as being a key ingredient to fascist regimes. He says; "fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics", in the sense of a spectacle in which it allows the masses to express themselves without seeing their rights recognised, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate. He ends the essay thus: 

The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!”

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, (Re:LODE Radio translates as: "Let tech rip - and the world to perish") says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. 

In Benjamin's (original) formulation, the politicization of aesthetics was considered the opposite of the aestheticization of politics, the former possibly being indicated as an instrument of "mythologizing" totalitarian Fascist regimes. Benjamin's concept has been linked to Guy Debord's 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle.

Another détournement?

Re:LODE Radio chooses to montage an excerpt from Gold Diggers of 1935, an American musical film directed and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. The musical number "Lullaby of Broadway" is a short film-within-a-film, and tells the story of a Broadway Baby who plays all night and sleeps all day. Of all the musical numbers Berkeley created in his career, he named this as his personal favourite. As everyone rushes off to work, she returns home from her night's carousing and goes to sleep. When she awakens, that night, we follow her and her beau from club to club, with elaborate large cast tap numbers. This spectacle in allows the audience, living through the Great Depression, to escape the everyday reality, and experience the ecstatic flow of choreographed image, sound, movement and rhythm, to vicariously "express themselves without seeing their rights recognised, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate".

Another film, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) was released in 1935. This Nazi propaganda film directed, produced, edited and co-written by Leni Riefenstahl chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters. 

Writing in 1975, Susan Sontag considers Triumph of the Will the "most successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made, whose very conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker's having an aesthetic or visual conception independent of propaganda." 

Sontag points to Riefenstahl's involvement in the planning and design of the Nuremberg ceremonies as evidence that Riefenstahl was working as a propagandist, rather than as an artist in any sense of the word. With some 30 cameras and a crew of 150, the marches, parades, speeches, and processions were orchestrated like a movie set for Riefenstahl's film. Further, this was not the first political film made by Riefenstahl for the Third Reich (there was Victory of Faith, 1933), nor was it the last (Day of Freedom, 1935, and Olympia, 1938). "Anyone who defends Riefenstahl's films as documentary", Sontag states, "if documentary is to be distinguished from propaganda, is being disingenuous. In Triumph of Will, the document (the image) is no longer simply the record of reality; 'reality' has been constructed to serve the image."

This is considerably different from the position she had taken ten years earlier in a 1965 essay entitled "On Style," where she opposes the idea that Riefenstahl's propaganda films are purely propaganda, and writes: "To call Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too, which we reject at our loss. Because they project the complex movements of intelligence and grace and sensuousness, these two films of Riefenstahl (unique among works of Nazi artists) transcend the categories of propaganda or even reportage. And we find ourselves—to be sure, rather uncomfortably—seeing 'Hitler' and not Hitler, the '1936 Olympics' and not the 1936 Olympics. Through Riefenstahl's genius as a film-maker, the 'content' has—let us even assume, against her intentions—come to play a purely formal role." 

Brian Winston's essay on the film in The Movies in History (2000) is largely a critique of Sontag's 1975 analysis. Winston argues that any filmmaker could have made the film look impressive because the Nazis' mise en scène was impressive, particularly when they were offering it for camera re-stagings. In form, the film alternates repetitively between marches and speeches. Winston asks the viewers to consider if such a film should be seen as anything more than a pedestrian effort. He finds the film tedious, and believes anyone who takes the time to analyse its structure will quickly agree. 

Purely for the purpose of achieving a détournement effect, Re:LODE Radio edits film footage from newsreel coverage of military and Nazi party "choreography", including clips from The Triumph of the Will. This sequence is then dubbed with a replay of the sound track from Busby Berkeley's "Lullaby of Broadway" that includes the sound effect all those stamping and tap dancing routines. And . . . 

. . . it works!

Even more outrageous burlesquerie takes place in this final scene in this Re:LODE Radio montage, taken from the 2005 film reprise of Mel Brooks' The Producers, and the musical number "Springtime for Hitler". As the show opens, the audience is horrified at the first song, and people begin leaving out of disgust until the entrance of an over-the-top camp Hitler ("Heil Myself"). Playing Hitler very flamboyantly, causes the audience to misinterpret the play as satire, resulting in the show becoming a smash, instead of the intended flop

Burlesque and . . . 

. . . the aestheticisation of politics?

Gold Diggers in Paris (1938) was the fifth and last in Warner Bros.' series of "Gold Digger" films, and was directed by Ray Enright with musical numbers created and directed by Busby Berkeley, starring Rudy Vallee, Rosemary Lane, Hugh Herbert, and Allen Jenkins.

"Gold Diggers in Paris" - The Plot

Maurice Giraud (Herbert) is sent to New York to arrange for the Academy Ballet of America to come to Paris to compete for cash prizes at an international dance festival, but a cabbie takes him by mistake to the Club Ballé, a nightclub about to go under. The desperate owners of the club, Terry Moore (Vallee) and Duke Dennis (Jenkins), know that an error has occurred, but see the invitation as a way out of their financial problems. To get some ballet into their nightclub act, they hire ballet teacher Luis Leoni (Fritz Feld) and his star (and only) pupil Kay Morrow (Rosemary Lane) to teach their girls ballet on the boat crossing the Atlantic. Terry finds Kay very attractive, but things are complicated when his ex-wife, Mona (Gloria Dickson), invites herself along, rooming with Kay. 

Meanwhile, the head of the real ballet company, Padrinsky (Curt Bois), finds out what has happened and cables Giraud aboard ship, then heads to Paris with his patron, a ballet-loving gangster named Mike Coogan (Edward Brophy), who intends to rub out Terry and Duke. Giraud is upset about being hoaxed, but is mollified when a "talking dog" (a ventriloquist hired by Terry and Duke) convinces him that Padrinsky is the liar. 

After they arrive in Paris, a representative of the exposition, Pierre Le Brec (Melville Cooper), wants to watch the group's rehearsals, and Duke tells his new friend Coogan, the gangster, that Le Brec is causing him trouble. Coogan goes to "take care" of the problem, but by mistake knocks out Leoni instead of Le Brec. 

Padrinsky shows up and arranges for the imposters to be deported on the day of the contest, but Mona manages to change the order so that Coogan and Padrinsky are shipped out, instead, which allows the company to perform and win the grand prize.

From New York . . . 

. . . to Paris!

 

 

 

Burlesque and "taking off her clothes"? 

Burlesquem

 

American burlesque shows usually consisted of three parts: first, songs and ribald comic sketches by low comedians; second, assorted olios and male acts, such as acrobats, magicians and solo singers; and third, chorus numbers and sometimes a burlesque in the English style on politics or a current play.  

The finale ended up taking over the show - as Striptease!

The entertainment was usually concluded by an exotic dancer or a wrestling or boxing match. The transition from burlesque on the old lines to striptease was gradual. At first, soubrettes showed off their figures while singing and dancing; some were less active but compensated by appearing in elaborate stage costumes. The strippers gradually supplanted the singing and dancing soubrettes; by 1932 there were at least 150 strip principals in the US. Star strippers included Sally Rand, Gypsy Rose Lee, Tempest Storm, and Lili St. Cyr. 

By the late 1930s, American burlesque shows would have up to six strippers supported by one or two comics and a master of ceremonies.  

When it comes to striptease Paris is a foreign country! They do things differently there!

 

That is according to Roland Barthes in his essay on Striptease in Mythologies. 

Le Crazy Horse Saloon or Le Crazy Horse de Paris is a Parisian cabaret known for its stage shows performed by nude female dancers and for the diverse range of magic and variety 'turns' between each nude show and the next.  

The Paris Crazy Horse occupies former wine cellars of an impressive Haussmanian building at 12 Avenue George-V. 

Alain Bernardin opened the business in 1951 and personally operated it for decades until his death by suicide in 1994. The enterprise remained a family business, in the hands of Bernardin's three children, until 2005, when it changed hands. By this time the name "Le Crazy Horse de Paris" was used for the original venue and Crazy Horse Paris for one in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand.

Along with its dancers, the Crazy Horse has also been a popular venue for many other artists, including magicians, jugglers, and mimes. Bernardin explained that he loved magic because it corresponded with his vision: 

"[Magic] is a dream. There is no show that is more dreamlike than a magic show. And what we do with the girls is magic, too, because they aren't as beautiful as you see them onstage. It's the magic of lights and costumes. These are my dreams and fascinations that I put onstage."  

The Crazy Horse Paris was the subject of Crazy Horse, a film by Frederick Wiseman (2011). The "clickbait" pages for Re:LODE - A Cargo of Questions includes this  multimedia article:

Display - behind the scenes - "clickbait"?

Under new shareholders and new management from 2005, Crazy Horse started featuring famous or prestigious artists stripping for a limited number of shows, including burlesque star Dita Von Teese.

From the Crazy Horse Paris . . .

. . . to Dita Von Teese

In the 1957 book by Roland Barthes, Mythologies, a collection of his essays taken from Les Lettres nouvelles, he considers the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths.

Then came striptease! Uncovering is "covering"!

Barthes' Mythologies is much more than a collection of essays. While the first section, Mythologies, describes a selection of modern cultural phenomena, chosen for their status as modern myths and for the added meaning that has been conferred upon them, the second section, Myth Today, offers further and general analysis of the concept.

Later in this article one of Barthes' essays, Ornamental Cookery, is used to consider various techniques for "covering", or "glossing over", actuality. This essay by Barthes on Striptease considers how "uncovering" is potentially another form of "covering", and a highly functional way to hide reality in plain sight. There is NO sign of "revelation" here except in the apocalypse of Barthes' thinking. He writes:

Striptease - at least Parisian striptease - is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.

It is only the time taken in shedding clothes which makes voyeurs of the public; but here, as in any mystifying spectacle, the decor, the props and the stereotypes intervene to contradict the initially provocative intention and eventually bury it in insignificance: evil is advertised the better to impede and exorcize it. French striptease seems to stem from what I have earlier called 'Operation Margarine', a mystifying device which consists in inoculating the public with a touch of evil, the better to plunge it afterwards into a permanently immune Moral Good: a few particles of eroticism, highlighted by the very situation on which the show is based, are in fact absorbed in a reassuring ritual which negates the flesh as surely as the vaccine or the taboo circumscribe and control the illness or the crime.

Pigalle, Montmartre, Pose for me . .

. . . Moulin Rouge, Mon Cherie!

There will therefore be in striptease a whole series of coverings placed upon the body of the woman in proportion as she pretends to strip it bare. Exoticism is the first of these barriers, for it is always of a petrified kind which transports the body into the world of legend or romance: a Chinese woman equipped with an opium pipe (the indispensable symbol of 'Sininess' *), an undulating vamp with a gigantic cigarette-holder, a Venetian decor complete with gondola, a dress with panniers and a singer of serenades: all aim at establishing the woman right from the start as an object in disguise. The end of the striptease is then no longer to drag into the light a hidden depth, but to signify, through the shedding of an incongruous and artificial clothing, nakedness as a natural vesture of woman, which amounts in the end to regaining a perfectly chaste state of the flesh.

The classic props of the music-hall, which are invariably rounded up here, constantly make the unveiled body more remote, and force it back into the all-pervading ease of a well-known rite: the furs, the fans, the gloves, the feathers, the fishnet stockings, in short the whole spectrum of adornment, constantly makes the living body return to the category of luxurious objects which surround man with a magical decor. Covered with feathers or gloved, the woman identifies herself here as a stereotyped element of music-hall, and to shed objects as ritualistic as these is no longer a part of a further, genuine undressing. Feathers, furs and gloves go on pervading the woman with their magical virtue even once removed, and give her something like the enveloping memory of a luxurious shell, for it is a self-evident law that the whole of striptease is given in the very nature of the initial garment: if the latter is improbable, as in the case of the Chinese woman or the woman in furs, the nakedness which follows remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful slippery object, withdrawn by its very extravagance from human use: this is the underlying significance of the G-String covered with diamonds or sequins which is the very end of striptease. 

This ultimate triangle, by its pure and geometrical shape, by its hard and shiny material, bars the way to the sexual parts like a sword of purity, and definitively drives the woman back into a mineral world, the (precious) stone being here the irrefutable symbol of the absolute object, that which serves no purpose. 

Exotic? Erotic? High class?

In the United States an American burlesque performer Lili St. Cyr's reputation in the burlesque and stripping world was that of a quality and high-class performer, unlike others such as Rosa La Rose, who flashed her pubic hair.

Lili St. Cyr and "the spectrum of adornment"! 

 Two years after she started her career as a chorus line dancer, her stripping debut was at the Music Box, in an Ivan Fehnova production. The producer had not even seen her perform—her striking looks won him over. The act was a disaster, but instead of firing her, Fehnova put together a new act. At the end of the dance, a stagehand pulled a fishing line attached to St. Cyr's G-string, which flew into the balcony as the lights went dim. This act was known as The Flying G, and such creative shows became St. Cyr's trademark.

While performing in 1947 at Ciro's nightclub in Hollywood, billed as the "Anatomic Bomb", St. Cyr was arrested by police and taken to court by a customer who considered her act lewd and lascivious. Represented by the infamous Hollywood attorney Jerry Giesler in court, St. Cyr insisted to the jury that her act was refined and elegant. As St. Cyr pointed out, what she did was slip off her dress, try on a hat, slip off her brassiere (there was another underneath), slip into a négligée. Then, undressing discreetly behind her maid, she stepped into a bubble bath, splashed around, and emerged, more or less dressed. After her appearance as a witness, as a newspaper account of the time put it, "The defense rested, as did everyone else." After just 80 minutes of deliberation by the jury, St. Cyr was acquitted.

St. Cyr retired from the stage, and began a lingerie business that she retained an interest in until her death. Similar to Frederick's of Hollywood, the "Undie World of Lili St. Cyr" designs offered costuming for strippers, and excitement for ordinary women. Her catalogs featured photos or drawings of her modeling each article, lavishly detailed descriptions, and hand-selected fabrics. Her marketing for "Scantie-Panties" advertised them as "perfect for street wear, stage or photography."

#630 QUEEN OF THE CATS 

Scanty panty that conceals and reveals. Shaped with Lili's hip-hugging flattery. 

#625 AFRICAN QUEEN 

You'll see spots before your eyes in this tantalizing bosom-baring jumpsuit that's the jungle's answer to the topless craze.

#685 SLAVE TRADE 

She'll be your slave gladly . . . if you gift her with this gorgeous fringe-trimmed torso twirler. Breezy bolero is tops in glamour . . . and the hip-hugging bottom is almost too much to bare. Brilliant design creation in a snarling leopard print. 

#640 RESTLESS NATIVES 

Tantalizing twosome drives men mad. Barely decent bra PLUS high-on-the-hip scandal-making panty in a marvelous life-like leopard print. 

The past is another country! They do things differently there! 

What stands out in the sales pitch for Lili St. Cyr's "spectrum of adornment" is the evocation of "Passion" and the "Primitive", the "African Queen", the "Slave Trade" and "Restless Natives" in a mix of the erotic and the exotic, that is clearly an extension of the culture of European, or WHITE, colonial imperialism, into what for now we can classify as being part of the territory of Pornotropia. 

Erotic or Exotic? 

The difference between the two adjectives is rooted in their Greek etymologies: exotic is from exo, "outside," though that meaning of "alien" has been extended to flavours or looks as "mysteriously different." Erotic, as Eros, god of sexual love, would tell you, can describe action at home. 

The adjectival difference is the easy part: exotic is "strange, foreign," while erotic is "sexy." But when married to the noun dancer, the meanings of the phrases get tricky. 

In her 2004 book, "Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show," Rachel Shteir quoted the famed striptease artist Georgia Sothern's letter to the columnist-semanticist H. L. Mencken: "I hope that the science of semantics can find time to help the verbally underprivileged members of my profession." He accommodated her with his coinage of ecdysiast, rooted in ecdysis, "the act of molting," which Gypsy Rose Lee dismissed with "We don't wear feathers and molt them off. . . what does he know about stripping?"

Burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee

"In Philadelphia the word exotic described performers who abandoned bumps and grinds for slinking across the stage in a tiny costume," Shteir wrote, which was "partly motivated by local censors' attacks on striptease and burlesque, but I like to think they also revealed the genre's variety." Although Ms. Shteir cited Billboard's contrary differentiation noted above, she recently informed me that "exotic dance sounded classier than striptease because it did not suggest the removal of clothing to music. It suggested undulating in Middle Eastern or Latin American garb." 

Despite the legality of her art, Lili St. Cyr was put on trial in Montreal during 1951. Shortly before Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, she decided to present a show called Salomé et les sept voix (Salome and the seven veils), the dancer who asks Herod for the head of John the Baptist. The Roman Catholic clergy demand that the show not take place, which Lili St. Cyr refuses. Her trial took place at the Montreal courthouse, and she wins.

Like Lilli St. Cyr Playboy was always "classier"!

The use of feathers and fans as a device to "cover" and "uncover" continues in the contemporary revival of burlesque or Neo-Burlesque. 

So, it appears that the ideological construct of "uncovering to conceal" continues to function to this day.

Soft focus? The glaze and "the gaze"? Sheer ideology!

Soft focus, the veil, the covering, the glamour, hiding a reality, and substituting itself for the reality, has an economic and political aspect, and identified by Roland Barthes when discussing "Ornamental Cookery". 

Set in aspic . . . 

In Mythologies, a 1957 book by Roland Barthes, consisting of a collection of essays taken from Les Lettres nouvelles, examines the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths. Barthes also looks at the semiology of the process of myth creation, updating Ferdinand de Saussure's system of sign analysis by adding a second level where signs are elevated to the level of myth. He writes thus on:  

"Ornamental Cookery"

The weekly Elle (a real mythological treasure) gives us almost every week a fine colour photograph of a prepared dish: golden partridges studded with cherries, a faintly pink chicken chaudfroid, a mould of crayfish surrounded by their red shells, a frothy charlotte prettified with glacé fruit designs, multicoloured trifle, etc.

The 'substantial' category which prevails in this type of cooking is that of the smooth coating: there is an obvious endeavour to glaze surfaces, to round them off, to bury the food under the even sediment of sauces, creams, icing and jellies. This of course comes from the very finality of the coating, which belongs to a visual category, and cooking according to Elle is meant for the eye alone, since sight is a genteel sense. For there is, in this persistence of glazing, a need for gentility. Elle is a highly valuable journal, from the point of view of legend at least, since its role is to present to its vast public which (market-research tells us) is working-class, the very dream of smartness. Hence a cookery which is based on coatings and alibis, and is for ever trying to extenuate and even to disguise the primary nature of foodstuffs, the brutality of meat or the abruptness of sea- food. A country dish is admitted only as an exception (the good family boiled beef), as the rustic whim of jaded city-dwellers.

But above all, coatings prepare and support one of the major developments of genteel cookery: ornamentation. Glazing, in Elle, serves as background for unbridled beautification: chiseled mushrooms, punctuation of cherries, motifs of carved lemon, shavings of truffle, silver pastilles, arabesques of glacé fruit: the underlying coat (and this is why I called it a sediment, since the food itself becomes no more than an indeterminate bed- rock) is intended to be the page on which can be read a whole rococo cookery (there is a partiality for a pinkish colour).

Ornamentation proceeds in two contradictory ways, which we shall in a moment see dialectically reconciled: on the one hand, fleeing from nature thanks to a kind of frenzied baroque (sticking shrimps in a lemon, making a chicken look pink, serving grapefruit hot), and on the other, trying to reconstitute it through an incongruous artifice (strewing meringue mushrooms and holly leaves on a traditional log-shaped Christmas cake, replacing the heads of crayfish around the sophisticated bechamel which hides their bodies). It is in fact the same pattern which one finds in the elaboration of petit-bourgeois trinkets (ashtrays in the shape of a saddle, lighters in the shape of a cigarette, terrines in the shape of a hare).

This is because here, as in all petit-bourgeois art, the irrepressible tendency towards extreme realism is countered - or balanced – by one of the eternal imperatives of journalism for women's magazines: what is pompously called, at L'Express, having ideas. Cookery in Elle is, in the same way, an 'idea' - cookery. But here inventiveness, confined to a fairy-land reality, must be applied only to garnishings, for the genteel tendency of the magazine precludes it from touching on the real problems concerning food (the real problem is not to have the idea of sticking cherries into a partridge, it is to have the partridge, that is to say, to pay for it).

This ornamental cookery is indeed supported by wholly mythical economics. This is an openly dream-like cookery, as proved in fact by the photographs in Elle, which never show the dishes except from a high angle, as objects at once near and inaccessible, whose consumption can perfectly well be accomplished simply by looking. It is, in the fullest meaning of the word, a cuisine of advertisement, totally magical, especially when one remembers that this magazine is widely read in small-income groups. The latter, in fact, explains the former: it is because Elle is addressed to a genuinely working-class public that it is very careful not to take for granted that cooking must be economical. Compare with L'Express, whose exclusively middle-class public enjoys a comfortable purchasing power: its cookery is real, not magical. Elle gives the recipe of fancy partridges, L'Express gives that of salade niçoise. The readers of Elle are entitled only to fiction; one can suggest real dishes to those of L'Express, in the certainty that they will be able to prepare them.

An aesthetic governed by the "diaphanous", a "see through", "sheer ideology" . . .

The girl next door talks dirty . . . 

"So... I only told you how I look in my shirt, but, that's just the beginning. I also know that you love it when I talk about my big, juicy breasts. Well, how about we start playing around with the sheer chemise and see how hot my tits will look in it. Hhmm You know, I just hate wearing bras when I'm home. It just feels much better letting my boobs move freely under my clothes when I walk around the house. So... right now, I'm still looking in the mirror and if I just... shake my shoulders a little, like that, my tits look so hot when they wiggle around. Can you picture that? They almost want to slip out of my chemise. See, I'm... still shaking them and they bump into each other, just like that. Hmm, this is fun. Oh... I can even hear them clapping, now. I love to hear that, it's so sexy. Hhmm all that chest meat, just bumping into each other... Can you hear it? What if I move my phone down there . . ."

Reason and philosophy tearing the veil from truth

Enlightenment? 

This is a detail from the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie (1772). It was drawn by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost. The work is laden with symbolism: The figure in the centre represents truth—surrounded by bright light (the central symbol of the Enlightenment).  

Two other figures on the right, reason and philosophy, are tearing the veil from truth.

Re:LODE Radio considers Playboy to reflect aspects of ongoing social change (or turmoil) in capitalist societies, and in its primary influences, patriarchal. 

This type of patriarchy and social agenda are more in line with the so-called "freedoms" so beloved of neoliberals, and the dominant version of global capitalism, freedom to express, to choose (but in a market skewed toward the pursuit of private profit), to make money etc. A key promise of the enlightenment was the possibility of "emancipation", but social values shaped by aspirations in a consumer society, also created new "constraints". Wealth and glamour became the goal rather than self actualisation and the emancipatory potential has withered in a cold wind. Meanwhile gendered roles were mobilised and  defined by materials such as in these "public information" films. These propaganda efforts sought to promote the commodification of the suburban woman into a "thrifty wife", and co-opt the "family" as the antidote to the spectre of communism "at home".   

The woman who runs the home is . . . 

. . . the thrifty wife!

These obviously propagandistic films run in a seamless sequence in an ongoing production and process of acculturation. Its smoothness, its fairytale attractiveness, enables the efficient internalisation of an oppressive ideology. An ideological programme developed over the previous two hundred years in what we may call "conduct" literature. This literature, often written by men for women to read, and for their "instruction", reinforces the existing and regressive gender definitions of "economic man" and his helpmate, "domestic woman".

The hot wife starter kit

Gender related patterns of power don't shift much, but the terms of the fantasy are increasingly wide open, and freely applied in the retrograde and regressive evolution of things, as in this example of a 2015 conduct book advising readers on how to get: 

Your Sexy Back

Dear Overwhelmed and Under-appreciated Wife, it’s hard to be a grownup these days, especially when you’re trying to hold together a home and family, and even more so when you’ve got kids. As women, it’s our nature to put our families before ourselves, and often to our own detriment. 

Despite our best intentions, marriage often causes this odd phenomenon I like to call Mrs. Scrunchie-Sweats. Whether you had kids or you just got busy with the daily grind, one day, you look the mirror and you notice something: 

Your standards have changed. You’re walking around in the world wearing sweats and a scrunchie. In public. And you’re justifying it to yourself, most likely thinking you’ve got more important things to worry about than the way you look or carry yourself.

Or maybe you’re just not putting yourself together like you used to, and you might even think that’s what you’ve got to deal with when you’re a busy married woman - you’re not the only person you’ve got to worry about, right? 

But something inside you feels a little twinge of jealousy every time you see a woman who seems totally put-together. You know the type - she makes “having it all” look like a breeze - and she looks freaking fabulous while she does it. 

Discover the closely-guarded secrets of the hottest, most amazingly sexy women in the world- the simple-to-apply principles they use in their day-to-day lives that separate you from the sexy, stylish wife you want to be. 

Get an inside look into why The Hot Wife Guide will work for you, and find out how a taking a few minutes for yourself each day can change your entire life. With this free starter kit, you’ll learn some of the great tips from The Hot Wife Guide.   

The trophy wife?

The marriage of former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith to oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall was widely followed by the US mass media as an extreme example of this concept. At the time of their marriage, he was 89 years old and she was 26.

The objectification implicit in the notion of the trophy wife, a wife who is regarded as a status symbol for the husband, is not far from the explicit commodification involved in the hotwifing fantasy of a husband showing off and sharing his “hot wife.” The term is misogynist in its use, derogatory or disparaging, implying that the wife has value only in her physical attractiveness, a value that requires substantial expense in maintaining her appearance, and does very little of substance beyond remaining attractive.  

Goodbye Vietnam! 

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The Letter by The Box Tops (1967; No. 1 Billboard Hot 100) was popular with American troops, for obvious reasons. Mail call was a sacred ritual in Vietnam and this song captured its importance lyrically and musically. Didn’t hurt that it spoke of “getting a ticket for an airplane” and “going home” because “my baby just wrote me a letter.” Nothing kept guys going more than love letters from home — and the dream of getting back to their beloved.

The reality of this dream, and the fantasy version of the Playboy centrefold "at home" connect in the imagery, but only to be disconnected, and amplify aspirations toward an unfulfillable "American dream". The commodification and objectification of this "sexual revolution" might be seen to begin on boarding a flight.

Coffee, Tea or Me?

The steamy stories of Coffee, Tea or Me? along with Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones were the brainchild of Donald Bain, who started writing in the mid-‘60s, often as a ghostwriter.

Bain, whose day job was writing PR for American Airlines, was set up with two flight attendants who thought they might have some salacious stories to tell. Bain was underwhelmed by their tales, but he believed in the idea of a flight attendant tell-all, so he just went ahead and wrote it himself. The two original stewardesses went on the road to promote the book claimed it as their own real memoir.

PSA Keeps The Hemline Up 

Air stewardesses in the 50s and 60s had to be single, under 29, weigh less than 135lbs, "smile like they mean it" - and would be fired on the spot if they married or got pregnant.

The "smile like they mean it" quasi-pornographic trope has proved long lasting, providing readers of newspapers, magazines and the internet with titillating tales of sex in the skies.  

Fact? Fiction? Fantasy - It sells and smells!

ture 

Flight attendants in this pornotropia are synonymous or exchangeable with "high class sex workers" and "escorts" (but not with prostitutes), along with the added aura of the kind of "glamour" associated with the high life, including the so-called mile-high club. 

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The Slovenian Playboy model Andreja Karba features in two Playboy publications, according to Babepedia, as December Playmate of the month in 2008 for Playboy Colombia and on the cover of Playboy Slovenia, in the March issue that same year.

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The attractive female flight attendant, as "offered" to the passenger via the "male gaze" embedded in airline advertising imagery, and the succeeding soft-core and hard-core pornographic trope, revels in fantasy cliché, so much so that it rarely emerges as a shocking and transgressive mode of subversive cultural activity. And when examples of this pornographic trope generates a Brechtian "distancing" effect, more as a parody of the oldest profession, it does so unintentionally. Except in pornotropia.

Et in Arcadia Ego 

picture

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ture

 

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pic

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ture

 

The Americanisation of the World . . . 

Trains and boats . . .

. . . and planes 

Transportation is civilisation . . . 

. . . and the arrival of Hugh Hefner's Playboy Bunnies in 1966 at London Heathrow airport was a moment and sign of (a semiological matrix) the times. In 2017 the BBC looked back to these times, prompted by the death of Hugh Hefner at the age of 91. 

Emma Thelwell reports for BBC News on 28 September: 

2017English girls were flown to the US to train as Playboy bunny waitresses and croupiers.

A select few were invited to do magazine shoots and to stay at the infamous Playboy mansion in Los Angeles.

Carol Needham, 57, from Surrey, was one of them.

"I lived there for about four months because they were waiting to shoot my centrefold," she told the BBC.

"Looking back it was quite an amazing thing to have happened, I think only a few from England have been a centrefold."

Ms Needham said Hefner was "a very clever man" to publish such a controversial magazine at that time.

She added: "Actually believe it or not he was quite a shy man - he was quiet.

"They [people] probably think he was quite flamboyant because of the image, the parties. But he was actually a gentleman, he was kind, and he was a nice man."

The UK's capital was a natural fit for Hefner's bunnies.

Britain was more susceptible to Americanisation than other places in Europe, social historian Dr Laura Carter explained.

"Since the 19th Century, London has been an experimental urban place where the most extreme things could happen - a hotbed of sexual transgression," Dr Carter said.

"Although for the ordinary young woman living in say Bradford or Bristol in the 60s, it was still fairly conservative."

The 1960s marked the beginning of a 20 year period that would see women living more socially and sexually freely, Dr Carter added.

Male dominated British media fall in love . . .

. . . on the arrival of Playboy Bunnies in the UK

Hefner went on to open two more clubs in the UK - in Portsmouth and Manchester - raking in bumper profits for the parent company.

He also acquired the Clermont Club in London's Berkeley Square - the exclusive club above Annabel's nightclub - whose members once included Lord Lucan and James Bond author Ian Fleming.

But in 1981, amid a government crackdown on the gaming industry, Playboy's London casinos lost their licences, slashing the group's income and contributing to a major decline in Hefner's fortunes.

For 30 years the Playboy clubs were considered part of the UK's social history. The flagship Park Lane club has long-since been replaced by a hotel.

But in 2011, the bunnies were back.

Hefner opened a new Playboy club in London's Mayfair, recruiting 80 bunnies and signing up about 850 new members, including 350 women and stars including Elton John's partner David Furnish and the model Yasmin Le Bon.

Not all were so welcoming. Angry protestors gathered outside arguing that bunnies championed the use of women as sex objects.

Feminist writer Laurie Penny criticised the reopening, calling Playboy "wilting, impotent and dated".

At the time, Hefner told the BBC: 

"Well for some people's tastes, freedom has its downsides."

But he argued: 

"Far more damage is done by the repression of sexuality, historically, than the liberation."

Re:LODE Radio considers that Hugh Hefner was a businessman first and an ersatz philosopher second. Personal freedom and making money? It's the American way and ideology rules! 

A wonderful sorority . . .

. . . to be a part of?

Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny is a New York Times bestselling memoir by ex-Playboy Bunny Holly Madison that's an exposé that according to the New York Times Inside the List :

"paints a fairly tawdry picture of Madison’s years as Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend — or, more accurately, as the “No. 1 girlfriend” in a volatile harem rife with infighting, sexual competition and petty jealousies over money and favors. (I told you it was tawdry.) 

Gregory Cowles goes on to say that:

Hef has accused Madison of “rewriting history,” a claim she shrugged off in a recent interview with The Associated Press: “He doesn’t have any mental or emotional power over me anymore,” she said. “He’s somebody that I look back on as somebody who treated me really poorly, who I tried to convince myself was a great person but I don’t think is. And I don’t want negative, toxic people in my life anymore.” All of this is a good excuse, if you needed one, to dig up a copy of Gloria Steinem’s 1963 exposé of the Playboy Club in New York City, where she briefly assumed a false name and went undercover in the standard satin costume, complete with ears and a rabbit tail. “A middle-­aged man in a private guard’s uniform grinned and beckoned,” Steinem wrote. “ ‘Here bunny, bunny, bunny,’ he said, and jerked his thumb toward the glass door on the left. ‘Interviews downstairs in the Playmate Bar.’ ” Madison might recognize the world Steinem was writing about, even if it had less silicone than she’s used to; evidently, the bunnies of Steinem’s era padded their bosoms with plastic dry-cleaning bags.

This image of Gloria Steinem in her Bunny outfit and a more recent photo of the American feminist journalist and social political activist, can be found on the Guardian webpage from May 2013 in an Op ed piece marking the fifty year anniversary of her ground breaking article. 

The Brand and its LOGO

The logo was the work of Playboy’s Art Director Art Paul. After the success of Issue #1, Bunny HQ jumped on an idea and devised a plan for a logo to brand the product. The original vision, according to Paul, was for something that was “frisky and playful…but had a humorous sexual connotation.”

Hefner revealed a raw take on the idea saying that in America, the rabbit, or bunny has a sexual meaning. He liked the concept because he viewed rabbits and bunnies as “shy, vivacious, jumping – sexy.” 

In other words: "fucking like rabbits!" 

The Playboy logo itself first appeared in Issue #2. A running joke in the Editorial Department was to ‘hide’ the rabbit logo somewhere on the front cover, turning each monthly issue of the magazine into an unofficial puzzle with the Rabbit logo being well disguised with the creative placement of props and the front cover photographic design elements. 

The Playboy LOGO and the "brand", has turned out to be Playboy's biggest asset.

NO LOGO 

When it comes to globalisation, advertising and the "brand", it is but a part of the capitalist Americanisation of the World. 

No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies is a book by the Canadian author Naomi Klein. First published in December 1999, shortly after the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference protests in Seattle had generated media attention around such issues, it became one of the most influential books about the alter-globalization movement and an international bestseller. While the book focuses on branding and often makes connections with the anti-globalization movement, globalization appears frequently as a recurring theme, but Klein rarely addresses the topic of globalization itself, and when she does, it is usually indirectly. She goes on to discuss globalization in much greater detail in her book, Fences and Windows (2002).

Throughout the four parts of NO LOGO ("No Space", "No Choice", "No Jobs", and "No Logo"), Klein writes about issues such as sweatshops in the Americas and Asia, culture jamming, corporate censorship, and Reclaim the Streets. 

Klein pays special attention to the usual suspects, to the deeds and misdeeds of Nike, The Gap, McDonald's, Shell, and Microsoft – and of their lawyers, contractors, and advertising agencies. Many of the ideas in Klein's book derive from the influence of the Situationists, an art/political group founded in the late 1950s.

The fall of Playboy . . .

. . . and the rise of the Bunny LOGO

One of the Playboy Interviews mentioned in the Insider News article has a wider relevance for Re:LODE Radio in that it includes:

"a candid conversation with the high priest of pop cult and metaphysician of media Marshall McLuhan"

The Interview

HOT & COOL

In this interview for Playboy Magazine Marshall McLuhan talks about media (McLuhan introduced this term we now use everyday) in terms of a "fallacy" (fallacy as concept NOT as a falsehood), that a medium such as photography, which is a high definition medium, is a "HOT" medium, while TV, as a low definition medium is a "COOL" medium.

 

So COOL . . .

. . . if only life could be like this?

Explaining his "fallacy" this is what McLuhan says in response to the Playboy interviewer's question:

Interviewer: But isn’t television itself a primarily visual medium?

McLuhan: No, it’s quite the opposite, although the idea that TV is a visual extension is an understandable mistake. Unlike film or photograph, television is primarily an extension of the sense of touch rather than of sight, and it is the tactile sense that demands the greatest interplay of all the senses. The secret of TV’s tactile power is that the video image is one of low intensity or definition and thus, unlike either photograph or film, offers no detailed information about specific objects but instead involves the active participation of the viewer. The TV image is a mosaic mesh not only of horizontal lines but of millions of tiny dots, of which the viewer is physiologically able to pick up only 50 or 60 from which he shapes the image; thus he is constantly filling in vague and blurry images, bringing himself into in-depth involvement with the screen and acting out a constant creative dialog with the iconoscope. The contours of the resultant cartoonlike image are fleshed out within the imagination of the viewer, which necessitates great personal involvement and participation; the viewer, in fact, becomes the screen, whereas in film he becomes the camera. By requiring us to constantly fill in the spaces of the mosaic mesh, the iconoscope is tattooing its message directly on our skins. Each viewer is thus an unconscious pointillist painter like Seurat, limning new shapes and images as the iconoscope washes over his entire body.

Since the point of focus for a TV set is the viewer, television is Orientalizing us by causing us all to begin to look within ourselves. The essence of TV viewing is, in short, intense participation and low definition – what I call a “cool” experience, as opposed to an essentially “hot,” or high definition - low participation, medium like radio. 

He continues with his understanding of the impact of TV on those growing up in its illuminating effects later in the interview saying:  

In the absence of such elementary awareness, I’m afraid that the television child has no future in our schools. You must remember that the TV child has been relentlessly exposed to all the “adult” news of the modern world — war, racial discrimination, rioting, crime, inflation, sexual revolution. The war in Vietnam has written its bloody message on his skin; he has witnessed the assassinations and funerals of the nation’s leaders; he’s been orbited through the TV screen into the astronaut’s dance in space, been inundated by information transmitted via radio, telephone, films, recordings and other people. His parents plopped him down in front of a TV set at the age of two to tranquilize him, and by the time he enters kindergarten, he’s clocked as much as 4000 hours of television. As an IBM executive told me, “My children had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one.”

Later, McLuhan says, explaining something of his intellectual journey and of his methodology says: 

As someone committed to literature and the traditions of literacy, I began to study the new environment that imperiled literary values, and I soon realized that they could not be dismissed by moral outrage or pious indignation. Study showed that a totally new approach was required, both to save what deserved saving in our Western heritage and to help man adopt a new survival strategy. I adapted some of this new approach in The Mechanical Bride by attempting to immerse myself in the advertising media in order to apprehend its impact on man, but even there some of my old literate “point of view” bias crept in. The book, in any case, appeared just as television was making all its major points irrelevant. 

The role of the artist's creative activity as a "probe"!

For McLuhan the role of the artist in society, exploring what is actually "happening", is a crucial nexus in the understanding of what's going on, as it is going on in real time. Five years after the publication of McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride a group of friends and artists in London were putting together what today would be described as an "installation" for the exhibition This Is Tomorrow. Richard Hamilton and his friends John McHale and John Voelcker had collaborated to create a room that became the best-known part of the exhibition.

This image, a collage, now well known as Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? was created in 1956 for the catalogue of the exhibition, where it was reproduced in black and white. Richard Hamilton, who is credited as being the artist responsible for this image, along with John McHale and John Voelcker, were at this time members of the Independent Group, where the term "pop art" was first used in IG discussions by mid-1955. The future, it seems for these Anglophone innovators, was an overlapping of a technological transformation of culture and society with the Americanisation of the World. 

BUNK!

The Independent Group had its first meeting in April 1952, which consisted of artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi feeding a mass of colourful images from American magazines through an epidiascope. These images, composed of advertising, comic strips and assorted graphics, were collected when Paolozzi was resident in Paris from 1947-49. Much of the material was assembled as scrapbook collages and formed the basis of his BUNK! series of screenprints (1972) and the Krazy Kat Archives now held at the V & A Museum, London. 

In fact, Paolozzi's seminal 1947 collage I was a Rich Man's Plaything was the first such "found object" material to contain the word ″pop″ and is considered the initial standard bearer of “Pop Art”. The rest of the first Independent Group session concentrated on philosophy and technology during September 1952 to June 1953, chaired by design historian, Reyner Banham. 

The IG chose a non-hierarchical approach to cultural production and knowledge

Key members included Paolozzi, the artist Richard Hamilton, surrealist and magazine art director Toni del Renzio, sculptor William Turnbull, the photographer Nigel Henderson and fine artist John McHale, along with the art critic Lawrence Alloway. 

Hamilton's early work was much influenced by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's 1917 text On Growth and Form providing for the development of a non-Aristotelian and non-hierarchical approach to all kinds of phenomena, whether "natural" or "cultural". In 1951, Hamilton staged an exhibition called Growth and Form at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. A pioneering form of installation art, it featured scientific models, diagrams and photographs presented as a unified artwork. Assembling and disassembling the products of popular culture, and considering on the same level, and equal terms as the products of a so-called "high culture", created the conditions for a new kind of post-surrealist art, "pop art".

In the corner of yesterday's "home", pasted behind the "burlesque" woman of the house, is what turned out to be the implosive and de-centred "centre of attention".

It was TV that brought the Vietnam War into the American suburban home, exposing the brutal realities of WAR as something RAW, and at the same time completely CRAZY, more akin to the Theatre of the Absurd and Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty.

Bringing it all home . . .

This report, part of  the CBS coverage of the Vietnam War, brings it all home, and for the TV generation this home is no longer a place of refuge, and the possibility of alternative becomes the focus of countercultural rejection and resistance, as acted out here in these clips from the 1970 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point.

BLAST . . .

. . . and counterblast!

No wonder an "un-American" counterculture burst out from "underground" and upon a scene from a "Soap Opera" or "Mini-series" world, where the fake and ideologically constructed so-called "family values", instrumental in the oppressive force behind that ideology, were challenged, and, lo and behold, began to crumble. 

New circles of HELL? 

The American dream is also its opposite, an American nightmare. Beneath the idyll of modern life new circles were being carved into the republic of HELL.

The scene with the Playboy Playmates in the film Apocalypse Now is an exotic apparition, an artificial and electric brightness set against the night, a scene of "modern civilisation" amidst the many other scenes of a lush landscape, haunted by random acts of violence, in a ponderous journey through zones of  darkness. But nevertheless the Playboy Playmates scene is one among many new circles of a modern . . .  

. . . Inferno. 

 A Divine Comedy? 

The Divine Comedy is a lengthy Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is NOT written in LATIN, but in the common Tuscan language spoken in the city of Florence, and consequently regarded widely to be the pre-eminent work in what was to become Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. 

The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

The narrative takes as its literal subject the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward, and describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven. Allegorically the poem represents the soul's journey towards God, beginning with the recognition and rejection of sin (Inferno), followed by the penitent Christian life (Purgatorio), which is then followed by the soul's ascent to God (Paradiso). 

The Inferno describes Dante's journey through Hell, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth; it is the; 

"realm ... of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen".

Canto I

The poem begins on the night of Maundy Thursday on March 24 (or April 7), AD 1300, shortly before dawn of Good Friday. The narrator, Dante himself, is thirty-five years old, and thus "midway in the journey of our life". The poet finds himself lost in a dark wood (selva oscura), astray from the "straight way" also translatable as the "right way" to salvation. He sets out to climb directly up a small mountain, but his way is blocked by three beasts he cannot evade: a lonza ("leopard" or "leopon"), a leone (lion), and a lupa (she-wolf). However, Dante is rescued by a figure who announces that he was born sub Iulio (i.e. in the time of Julius Caesar) and lived under Augustus: it is the shade of the Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid, a Latin epic. 

Canto II

On the evening of Good Friday, Dante hesitates as he follows Virgil; Virgil explains that he has been sent by Beatrice, the symbol of Divine Love.

A version of "courtly love", and a fantasy and projection upon the "love object/subject", and all from a safe distance . . . 

This is a detail of Dante and Beatrice, a painting dated 1883 by the artist Henry Holiday and is well known and admired by visitors to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, England. The moment depicted in the painting is based on Dante's 1294 autobiographical work La Vita Nuova which describes his love for Beatrice Portinari.

According to the autobiographic La Vita Nuova, Beatrice and Dante met only twice during their lives. Following their first meeting, Dante was so enthralled by Beatrice that he later wrote in La Vita Nuova: "Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi" ("Behold, a deity stronger than I; who coming, shall rule over me"). 

Dante - the poet and stalker?

Indeed, Dante frequented parts of Florence, his home city, where he thought he might catch even a glimpse of her. As he did so, he made great efforts to ensure his thoughts of Beatrice remained private, even writing poetry for another lady, so as to use her as a "screen for the truth". Dante's courtly love for Beatrice continued for nine years, before the pair finally met again. This meeting occurred in a street of Florence, which she walked along dressed in white and accompanied by two older women. She turned and greeted him, her salutation filling him with such joy that he retreated to his room to think about her. In doing so, he fell asleep, and had a dream which would become the subject of the first sonnet in La Vita Nuova. 

In the second Canto Virgil explains to Dante that Beatrice had been moved to aid Dante by the Virgin Mary (symbolic of compassion) and Saint Lucia (symbolic of illuminating Grace). Rachel, symbolic of the contemplative life, also appears in the heavenly scene recounted by Virgil. The two of them then begin their journey to the underworld. 

Canto III 

In this drawing and watercolour by William Blake, Dante passes through the gate of Hell, which bears an inscription ending with the famous phrase "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", most frequently translated as: 

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Dante and his guide hear the anguished screams of the Uncommitted. These are the souls of people who in life took no sides; the opportunists who were for neither good nor evil, but instead were merely concerned with themselves.

After passing through the vestibule, Dante and Virgil reach the ferry that will take them across the river Acheron and to Hell proper. The ferry is piloted by Charon, who does not want to let Dante enter, for he is a living being. Virgil forces Charon to take him by declaring, Vuolsi così colà dove si puote / ciò che si vuole ("It is so willed there where is power to do / That which is willed"), referring to the fact that Dante is on his journey on divine grounds.  

Hell has an Aristotelian hierarchy

Dante's Hell is structurally based on the ideas of Aristotle, but with "certain Christian symbolisms, exceptions, and misconstructions of Aristotle's text", and a further supplement from Cicero's De Officiis. Virgil reminds Dante (the character) of “Those pages where the Ethics tells of three/Conditions contrary to Heaven’s will and rule/Incontinence, vice, and brute bestiality”. Cicero for his part had divided sins between Violence and Fraud. By conflating Cicero's violence with Aristotle's bestiality, and his fraud with malice or vice, Dante the poet obtained three major categories of sin, as symbolized by the three beasts that Dante encounters in Canto I: these are Incontinence, Violence/Bestiality, and Fraud/Malice. Sinners punished for incontinence (also known as wantonness)  –  the lustful, the gluttonous, the hoarders and wasters, and the wrathful and sullen  –  all demonstrated weakness in controlling their appetites, desires, and natural urges; according to Aristotle's Ethics, incontinence is less condemnable than malice or bestiality, and therefore these sinners are located in four circles of Upper Hell (Circles 2–5). These sinners endure lesser torments than do those consigned to Lower Hell, located within the walls of the City of Dis, for committing acts of violence and fraud  –  the latter of which involves, as Dorothy L. Sayers writes, "abuse of the specifically human faculty of reason". The deeper levels are organized into one circle for violence (Circle 7) and two circles for fraud (Circles 8 and 9). As a Christian, Dante adds Circle 1 (Limbo) to Upper Hell and Circle 6 (Heresy) to Lower Hell, making 9 Circles in total; incorporating the Vestibule of the Futile, this leads to Hell containing 10 main divisions. This "9+1=10" structure is also found within the Purgatorio and Paradiso. Lower Hell is further subdivided: Circle 7 (Violence) is divided into three rings, Circle 8 (Fraud) is divided into ten bolge, and Circle 9 (Treachery) is divided into four regions. Thus, Hell contains, in total, 24 divisions.

Nine circles of Hell . . .

Virgil proceeds to guide Dante through the nine circles of Hell. The circles are concentric, representing a gradual increase in wickedness, and culminating at the centre of the earth, where Satan is held in bondage. The sinners of each circle are punished for eternity in a fashion fitting their crimes: each punishment is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice. The representation of this "poetic justice" has, to modern eyes, a quality that may well be justifiably and recognisably described as sadomasochistic. 

Whipping girl and whipping boy?

When it comes to an example of both the fantastic and American exceptionalism, you can't beat the creation of Superman by Joe Shuster along with the comic strip writer Jerry Siegel. Shuster also created a new kind of Hell with Nights of Horror, an American series of fetish comic books, created in 1954 by publisher Malcla. 

Crime, punishment and misogyny?

What did she do to deserve this?

 Just because she is female?

For Dante, and his readers, there is a degree of personal gratification and release that comes from the infliction of physical pain or humiliation upon those considered an enemy, lumping them in with other "wicked" characters who receive due and "poetic justice".  In the Fifth Circle of Hell, reserved for the wrathful, Dante and Virgil find Filippo Argenti. The scene is a bizarrely personal one, and it shows that some people really will write their enemies into the master work. Argenti was one of Dante’s political rivals, but the animosity between the characters has led historians to suspect there was something more behind his reason for this hatred. Some suggest that Argenti’s family seized Dante’s property when he was exiled from Florence or that there had been a physical altercation between the two. 

Dante and Virgil visit the first two bolge of the Eighth Circle

In this illustration of Dante's Inferno by Sandro Botticelli we are shown the first two bolges of the Eighth Circle of Hell. 

In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, part of the Divine Comedy, Malebolge is the eighth circle of Hell. Roughly translated from Italian, Malebolge means "evil ditches". Malebolge is a large, funnel-shaped cavern, itself divided into ten concentric circular trenches or ditches. 

Each trench is called a bolgia (Italian for "pouch" or "ditch"). Long causeway bridges run from the outer circumference of Malebolge to its center, pictured as spokes on a wheel. At the center of Malebolge is the ninth and final circle of hell. 

Canto XVIII 

Dante now finds himself in the Eighth Circle: the upper half of the Hell of the Fraudulent and Malicious. The Eighth Circle is a large funnel of stone shaped like an amphitheatre around which run a series of ten deep, narrow, concentric ditches or trenches. Within these ditches are punished those guilty of Simple Fraud. From the foot of the Great Cliff to the Well (which forms the neck of the funnel) are large spurs of rock, like umbrella ribs or spokes, which serve as bridges over the ten ditches. Dorothy L. Sayers writes that the Malebolge is, "the image of the City in corruption: the progressive disintegration of every social relationship, personal and public. Sexuality, ecclesiastical and civil office, language, ownership, counsel, authority, psychic influence, and material interdependence – all the media of the community's interchange are perverted and falsified".

In Bolgia 1 Dante places the Panderers and seducers: 

These sinners make two files, one along either bank of the ditch, and march quickly in opposite directions while being whipped by horned demons for eternity. They "deliberately exploited the passions of others and so drove them to serve their own interests, are themselves driven and scourged". In the group of panderers, the poets notice Venedico Caccianemico, a Bolognese Guelph who sold his own sister Ghisola to the Marchese d'Este. In the group of seducers, Virgil points out Jason, the Greek hero who led the Argonauts to fetch the Golden Fleece from Aeëtes, King of Colchis. He gained the help of the king's daughter, Medea, by seducing and marrying her only to later desert her for Creusa. Jason had previously seduced Hypsipyle when the Argonauts landed at Lemnos on their way to Colchis, but "abandoned her, alone and pregnant".

In Bolgia 2 Dante places the Flatterers: 

These also exploited other people, this time abusing and corrupting language to play upon others' desires and fears. They are steeped in excrement (representative of the false flatteries they told on earth) as they howl and fight amongst themselves. 

A Comedy? 

The work was originally simply titled Comedìa; so also in the first printed edition, published in 1472), Tuscan for "Comedy", later adjusted to the modern Italian Commedia. The adjective Divina was added by Giovanni Boccaccio, due to its subject matter and lofty style, and the first edition to name the poem Divina Comedia in the title was that of the Venetian humanist Lodovico Dolce, published in 1555 by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari. 

Erich Auerbach has said that Dante was the first writer to depict human beings as the products of a specific time, place and circumstance as opposed to mythic archetypes or a collection of vices and virtues; this along with the fully imagined world of the Divine Comedy, different from our own present, but fully visualized, suggests that the Divine Comedy could be said to have inaugurated modern fiction. 

Fact and fiction. The innocent and the guilty?

This video montage juxtaposes the filmed CBS News report from the Vietnam War, a factual documentation, with scenes from two film versions of The Stepford Wives, a 1972 satirical novel by Ira Levin. 

The CBS News report shows us a new ditch in an ongoing modern tragedy. The story of a young mother in the fictional narrative is another "bolgia". This "comedy" concerns Joanna Eberhart, a photographer and young mother who suspects the submissive housewives in her new idyllic Connecticut neighborhood may be robots created by their husbands. At the end of the 1975 film version of The Stepford Wives Joanna is eventually confronted by her own unfinished robot replica, and shocked when she witnesses its soulless, empty eyes. The Joanna-replica brandishes a nylon stocking and smilingly approaches Joanna to strangle her. Some time later, the artificial "Joanna" placidly peruses the local supermarket amongst the other "wives," all glamorously dressed. As they make their way through the store, they each vacantly greet one another. The android "Joanna" now has the normal-looking eyes of her original human counterpart. 

In both fact and fiction, it's the innocent that are punished in . . .

. . . a divine tragi-comedy? 

The video montage then cuts to a performance by the UK group The Animals of a song that has resonated with veterans of the Vietnam War who found themselves stuck in a Hell of the U.S. governments making: 

We Gotta Get Out of This Place

In their 2015 book We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans - black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and "grunts" - whose personal reflections drive the book's narrative. Many of the voices are those of ordinary soldiers, airmen, seamen, and marines. But there are also "solo" pieces by veterans whose writings have shaped our understanding of the war - Karl Marlantes, Alfredo Vea, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bill Ehrhart, Arthur Flowers - as well as songwriters and performers whose music influenced soldiers' lives, including Eric Burdon, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Country Joe McDonald, and John Fogerty. Together their testimony taps into memories -- individual and cultural - that capture a central if often overlooked component of the American war in Vietnam.

Of their project Doug Bradley says in an article, that first appeared on the PBS site Next Avenue. The Vietnam War, a 10-part Emmy-nominated PBS series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick:

I first became a soldier in a war zone on Veterans Day (Nov. 11) 1970. It’s an irony I’ve wrestled with for 45 years, due in part to the precise timing of U. S. Army tours of duty in Vietnam, which meant that Uncle Sam would send me back home exactly 365 days later — on Nov. 11, 1971.

Needless to say, the date is etched in my mind and will always be. It’s personal, of course, but in a way it’s lyrical, too. I say that because my earliest Vietnam memories aren’t about guns and bullets, but rather about music. As my fellow “newbies” and I were being transported from Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base to the Army’s 90th Replacement Battalion at Long Binh, I vividly recall hearing Smokey Robinson and The Miracles singing “Tears of a Clown”. That pop song was blasting from four or five radios some of the guys had, and with the calliope-like rhythm and lines like “it’s only to camouflage my sadness,” I was having a hard time figuring out just where in the hell I was.

But I knew one thing for sure. Music was going to get me through my year in Vietnam. Did it ever. In fact, it’s sustained me for the past 45 years, as it has countless other Vietnam veterans.

Craig Werner and I discovered the power of music from a decade of interviews with hundreds of Vietnam vets. Our new book, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War shows how music helped soldiers/veterans connect to each other and to life back home and to cope with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight.

Many of the men and women we interviewed for We Gotta Get Out of This Place had never talked about their Vietnam war experience, even with their spouses and family members. But we found they could talk about a song — “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”, “My Girl”, “And When I Die”, “Ring of Fire” and scores of others. And the talking helped heal some of the wounds left from the war.

When we began our interviews, we planned to organize it into a set of essays focusing on the most frequently mentioned songs, a Vietnam Vets Top 20 if you will, harkening back to the radio countdowns that so many of us grew up listening to.

Well, it didn’t take long for us to realize that to do justice to the vets’ diverse, and personal, musical experiences would require something more like a Top 200 — or 2,000! Still, we did find some common ground. 

These are the 10 most mentioned songs by the Vietnam vets we interviewed. 

Realizing, of course, that every soldier had their own special song that helped bring them home . . .

. . . but coming in at No 1 - We Gotta Get Out of This Place by The Animals

No one saw this coming. Not the writers of the song — the dynamic Brill Building duo of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil; not the group who recorded it — The Animals and their iconic lead singer, Eric Burdon; not the 3 million soldiers who fought in Vietnam who placed extra importance on the lyrics. But the fact is that We Gotta Get Out of This Place is regarded by most Vietnam vets as our We Shall Overcome, says Bobbie Keith, an Armed Forces Radio DJ in Vietnam from 1967-69. Or as Leroy Tecube, an Apache infantryman stationed south of Chu Lai in 1968, recalls: “When the chorus began, singing ability didn’t matter; drunk or sober, everyone joined in as loud as he could.” No wonder it became the title of our book!

Following The Animals in this video montage is a clip of the 2004 film version of The Stepford Wives. The clip shows all of the Stepford wives, including Joanna, who is now transformed into a blonde, and all dressed in their Sunday dresses, to go shopping at the grocery store.

Just prior to this in this "updated" narrative adaptation of the original satire, a group of the Stepford husbands had cornered Joanna and her husband Walter, and forced them toward the cyborg transformation room where she is to have a microchip implanted in her brain. But before Joanna enters, she makes a final appeal by asking whether the new wives really mean it when they tell their husbands that they love them.  

The montage follows on from the grocery store with Joanna and Walter as the guests of honour, as the Stepford elite hosts a formal ball.   

A happy ending? 

This 2004 remake includes an updated ending, that is ostensibly offering a more progressive conclusion than the bleaker 1975 version.

It turns out that during the festivities of the Stepford ball, Walter slips away returning to the transformation room, where he destroys the software that renders all the Stepford women so submissive and obedient to their husbands. Walter returns to the ball, where the baffled husbands are cornered by their vengeful wives. Walter reveals that Joanna never received the microchip implant because her argument during the struggle had won him over. Out of his love for and loyalty to the human being he married, he joined her plan to infiltrate Stepford, with her pretending to be a cyborg. 

Six months later, Larry King is interviewing Joanna, Bobbie, and Roger, with Walter also in attendance. They have all met with success; Joanna has made a documentary, Bobbie has written a book of poetry, and Roger broke up with Jerry and won his State Senate seat as an Independent. As King asks about the fate of the other husbands of Stepford, Roger and Bobbie explain that they are still in Stepford, under house arrest, and are being retrained to become better people. The closing scene of the film reveals that the irate wives have taken over Stepford and are forcing their husbands to atone for their crimes by making them do housework and shop for them.

Re:LODE Radio considers this film to be yet another example of the mobilisation of the propaganda machine, with another fairytale ending that presents the ideological version of reality. 

Ideology inverts the actuality!

The recent pandemic shows that when it comes to the domestic sphere, economic man goes about his business from home or at work, while domestic woman also works and has to do everything else too, including all the unpaid care roles that keep capitalism viable as a profit oriented systemic system based on inequalities.

This WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM story on a report in November by UN Women found clear evidence that, although both genders have seen their unpaid workloads increase, women are bearing more of the burden than men.

Before the pandemic, women were spending on average three times as many hours on unpaid domestic and caring work - and this contribution was grossly undervalued. The ILO in 2018 reported that the 16 billion hours spent on unpaid caring every day would represent nearly a tenth of the world’s entire economic output if it was paid at a fair rate.

Now a landmark ruling in China which ordered a husband to pay his wife for the housework she had done during their five-year marriage has renewed debate around how we recognize and value unpaid work. 

Under China’s new marriage law, which came into effect at the start of this year, a clause entitles the party taking on more childcare and domestic duties to ask for compensation during a divorce, a lawyer told the South China Morning Post.

In the case in Beijing, the wife was awarded a one-off payment of $7,700 for housework she had done during their marriage.

But while it recognized the wife's contribution, the ruling ignited debate online about how we value unpaid work, with some claiming the payment was too little, reported the paper.

The UN Women WOMEN COUNT webpage asks the question:

WHOSE TIME TO CARE?

UNPAID CARE AND DOMESTIC WORK DURING COVID-19

Meanwhile, fiction becomes reality . . .

DEBORA - PREMIUM SEXDOLL

Wine, cheese and BDSM 1,949.00€

Hi guys! My name is Deborah and I’m from Switzerland. I’m 25 years old and love to drink wine and taste different cheeses of the world.

If you like it too, we can spend some good time together. I’m going to tell some more things about me, so you can make up your mind! I live in this little country surrounded by mountains and have a comfortable life. I’m so young and here it’s all so calm that I need some thrilling. That’s why I’m on this website looking for somebody to have fun with.  I need to be punished. Do you get me? I lost my virginity when I was 15 so I’m not new in sex. I feel that I did everything I wanted with my boyfriend, but something is missing.

First of all, I like BDSM. If you are not ready for this, do not contact me, please. Boyfriends I’ve had many so I don’t need a loving relationship anymore. You know, just some thrilling. I have played dominatrix, but I prefer to be the submissive one. My dream is to be whipped by a beautiful woman while her husband looks on. I want to be the one for you both. We’d discuss what we are going to do and the codes we’re going to use before our reunion. Anything you want to do with me must be previously accepted by me.

I like it rough, hard, aggressive. I might bite your neck or scratch your back. I prefer to wear my leather rather than being naked. I’d love to see your wife in her leather as well and all the elements you bring for our romantic date. Hope you don’t get scared about my intentions. Life is so short I don’t want to pretend about my desire.

For a commentator on the VPorn blog this new reality is greeted with unabashed enthusiasm: 

I don’t know about you, but I find this idea genius. Fucking a human-like doll allows you to do to her pretty much whatever you want, plus, it is not considered cheating. You can do all the things you see pornstars do in all those dirty movies. We have a win-win situation right here. All the dudes out there who don’t want to book a hooker for an hour of mind blowing ramming due to having a loving girl back home, now is your chance. Now is your chance to bang other pussies too without any regret. How cool does that sound?

But seriously, are we starting to live in some sort of a television show. Is this even good for us? I am sure some of the folks will be fully against it while the others fully supportive.

Let’s face it, robots are a thing of the future so why not introducing them into the adult entertainment, too. However, you might look a total weirdo, having a silicone love doll at home, but no one will really know if you are spending kinky moments with one if you visit Barcelona’s sex doll brothel.

Are sex dolls the future of prostitution? 

This video montage begins with the SEXBOTS that will replace women followed by Joel Golby from VICE visiting the centre of this strange battleground for the future of sexual politics. 

Capitalist commodification . . .

. . . and the ultimate objectification of sex

There are a number of articles to be found on the Re:LODE A Cargo of Questions blog that address the matter of "clickbait" on the internet, especially in regard to the "use of art", and are particularly relevant at this point in the article. 

"clickbait" Alert (Adult Content)

Also, at this juncture, Re:LODE Radio references a Guardian Opinion piece from the Re:LODE A Cargo of Questions article: 

"clickbait", Helen of Troy, Marie Antoinette, Sex & the Incel story

This Opinion piece by Rebecca Solnit from 2018 (Sat 12 Nay 2018) has the headline:

A broken idea of sex is flourishing. Blame capitalism

Rebecca Sonit's Opinion piece runs with the subheading: 

In this world, women are marketed as toys and trophies. Are we surprised when some men take things literally?

Rebecca Solnit writes: 

Since the Toronto bloodbath, a lot of pundits have belatedly awoken to the existence of the “incel” (short for involuntary celibate) online subculture and much has been said about it. Too often, it has been treated as some alien, unfamiliar worldview. It’s really just an extreme version of sex under capitalism we’re all familiar with because it’s all around us in everything, everywhere and has been for a very long time. And maybe the problem with sex is capitalism.

What’s at the bottom of the incel worldview: sex is a commodity, accumulation of this commodity enhances a man’s status, and every man has a right to accumulation, but women are in some mysterious way obstacles to this, and they are therefore the enemy as well as the commodity. They want high-status women, are furious at their own low status, but don’t question the system that allocates status and commodifies us all in ways that are painful and dehumanizing.

Entitlement too plays a role: if you don’t think you’re entitled to sex, you might feel sad or lonely or blue, but not enraged at the people who you think owe you. It’s been noted that some of these men are mentally ill and/or socially marginal, but that seems to make them only more susceptible to online rage and a conventional story taken to extremes. That is, it doesn’t cause this worldview, as this worldview is widespread.

Rather, it makes them vulnerable to it; the worldview gives form or direction to that isolation and incapacity. Many of the rest of us have some degree of immunity, thanks to our access to counter-narratives and to loving contact with other human beings, but we are all impacted by this idea that everyone has a market value and this world in which so many of us are marketed as toys and trophies.

If you regard women as people endowed with certain inalienable rights, then heterosexual sex – as distinct from rape – has to be something two people do together because both of them want to, but this notion of women as people is apparently baffling or objectionable to hordes of men – not just incels. 

Women-as-bodies are sex waiting to happen – to men – and women-as-people are annoying gatekeepers getting between men and female bodies, which is why there’s a ton of advice about how to trick or overwhelm the gatekeeper. Not just on incel and pick-up-artist online forums but as jokey stuff in movies. You could go back to Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Casanova’s trophy-taking, too.

It goes back before capitalism, really, this dehumanization that makes sex an activity men exact from women who have no say in the situation. The Trojan war begins when Trojan Paris kidnaps Helen and keeps her as a sex slave. During the war to get Helen back, Achilles captures Queen Briseis and keeps her as a sex slave after slaying her husband and brothers (and slaying someone’s whole family is generally pretty anti-aphrodisiac). His comrade in arms Agamemnon has some sex slaves of his own, including the prophetess Cassandra, cursed by Apollo for refusing to have sex with him. Read from the point of view of the women, the Trojan wars resemble Isis among the Yazidi.

Feminism and capitalism are at odds, if under the one women are people and under the other they are property. Despite half a century of feminist reform and revolution, sex is still often understood through the models capitalism provides. Sex is a transaction; men’s status is enhanced by racking up transactions, as though they were poker chips.

Which is why the basketball star Wilt Chamberlain boasted that he’d had sex with 20,000 women in his 1991 memoir (prompting some to do the math: that would be about 1.4 women per day for 40 years). Talk about primitive accumulation! The president of the United States is someone who has regularly attempted to enhance his status by association with commodified women, and his denigration of other women for not fitting the Playmate/Miss Universe template is also well-known. This is not marginal; it’s central to our culture, and now it’s embodied by the president of our country.

Women’s status is ambiguous in relation to sexual experience, or perhaps it’s just wrecked either way: there’s that famous scene in The Breakfast Club in which a female character exclaims, “Well, if you say you haven’t, you’re a prude. If you say you have then you’re a slut. It’s a trap.” Reminiscing about these 1980s teen movies she starred in, Molly Ringwald recently recalled: “It took even longer for me to fully comprehend the scene late in Sixteen Candles, when the dreamboat, Jake, essentially trades his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, to the Geek, to satisfy the latter’s sexual urges, in return for Samantha’s underwear.” The Geek has sex with her while she’s unable to consent, which we now call rape and then called a charming coming-of-age movie. 

This idea of sex as something men get, often by bullying, badgering, tricking, assaulting, or drugging women is found everywhere. The same week as the Toronto van rampage, Bill Cosby was belatedly found guilty of one of the more than 60 sexual assaults that women have reported. He was accused of giving them pills to render them unconscious or unable to resist. Who wants to have sex with someone who isn’t there? A lot of men, apparently, since date rape drugs are a thing, and so are fraternity-house techniques to get underage women to drink themselves into oblivion, and Brock Turner, known as the Stanford rapist, assaulted a woman who was blotted out by alcohol, inert and unable to resist. 

Under capitalism, sex might as well be with dead objects, not live collaborators. It is not imagined as something two people do that might be affectionate and playful and collaborative – which casual sex can also be, by the way – but that one person gets. The other person is sometimes hardly recognized as a person. It’s a lonely version of sex. Incels are heterosexual men who see this mechanistic, transactional sex from afar and want it at the same time they rage at people who have it. 

That women might not want to grow intimate with people who hate them and might want to harm them seems not to have occurred to them as a factor, since they seem bereft of empathy, the capacity to imaginatively enter into what another person is feeling. It hasn’t occurred to a lot of other men either, since shortly after an incel in Toronto was accused of being a mass murderer the sympathy started to pour out for him.

At the New York Times, Ross Douthat credited a libertarian with this notion: “If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?” Part of what’s insane here is that neither the conservative Douthat nor libertarians are at all concerned with the just distribution of property and money, which is often referred to as socialism. Until the property is women, apparently. And then they’re happy to contemplate a redistribution that seems to have no more interest in what women want than the warlords dividing up the sex slaves in the Trojan war.

Happily someone much smarter took this on before Toronto. In late March, at the London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan wrote: “It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalisation with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, women who experience sexual marginalisation typically respond with talk not of entitlement but empowerment. Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies.”

That is, these women who are deemed undesirable question the hierarchy that allots status and sexualization to certain kinds of bodies and denies it to others. They ask that we consider redistributing our values and attention and perhaps even desires. They ask everyone to be kinder and less locked into conventional ideas of who makes a good commodity. They ask us to be less capitalistic. 

What’s terrifying about incel men is that they seem to think the problem is that they lack sex when, really, what they lack is empathy and compassion and the imagination that goes with those capacities. That’s something money can’t buy and capitalism won’t teach you. The people you love might, but first you have to love them.

Rebecca Solnit is a freelance columnist and the author of Men Explain Things to Me.

Welcome to Uncanny Valley

In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects which imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. "Valley" denotes a dip in the human observer's affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica's human likeness.

Examples can be found in robotics, 3D computer animations, and lifelike dolls. With the increasing prevalence of virtual reality, augmented reality, and photorealistic computer animation, the "valley" has been cited in reaction to the verisimilitude of the creation as it approaches indistinguishability from reality. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers. 

The concept was identified by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori as bukimi no tani genshō (不気味の谷現象) in 1970. The term was first translated as uncanny valley in the 1978 book Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction, written by Jasia Reichardt, thus forging an unintended link to Ernst Jentsch's concept of the uncanny, introduced in a 1906 essay entitled "On the Psychology of the Uncanny". Jentsch's conception was elaborated by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay entitled "The Uncanny" ("Das Unheimliche").

Mori's original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. However, as the robot's appearance continues to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely human" and "fully human" entity is the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that an almost human-looking robot seems overly "strange" to some human beings, produces a feeling of uncanniness, and thus fails to evoke the empathic response required for productive human–robot interaction.