Heart of Ardor

“Heart of Ardor” is a book of paintings by Daniel Marlin, an old friend who lives in Berkeley. Grouped by theme, they are prefaced by comments by Daniel, who is also an accomplished poet and Yiddishist. For example, the section on Rockaway paintings is introduced as follows by Daniel, who grew up in this narrow peninsula jutting off of the borough of Queens:

As a sixteen-year-old New York City Parks Department beach cleaner, I used to ride past the boardwalk early summer mornings on the back of a garbage truck. The elderly people who gathered on the boardwalk near seasonal hotels and rooming houses were of my grandparents’ generation and did not attract my attention. In the late 70s and early 80s two new interests—drawing strangers in public places and the Yiddish language and its diminishing world of speakers began to connect me to those boardwalk bench sitters, conversationalists, and snoozers.

His fascination with the Yiddish milieu inspired the work above, titled “Warsaw and the Boardwalk“. Many of Daniel’s paintings are close observations of a New York that is rapidly disappearing under the impact of big money and the homogenization that goes with it, especially in Manhattan. Daniel’s deep interest in the immigrant world that made New York the memorable place it once was will be shared by anybody who loves to wander about gazing at the sights of New York’s less glamorous but all the more enchanting neighborhoods that have not “benefited” from gentrification. In this respect, Daniel is a kindred spirit of Ben Katchor, another artist who has sought to keep memories of the Jewish immigrant past alive. The following is an illustration from Katchor’s “The Rosenbach Company”, a musical about Jewish book dealers in the 19^th century Philadelphia!

Although Daniel has been an activist for about as long as I have been, he states, “I rarely make consciously political art.” He made an exception for a “mail-art” exhibit in Japan that is a product of invitations sent out on the Internet and other locales. In 2005 he co-organized a “mail-art” event inviting submissions on the theme of Article Nine, the pacifist clause of the Japanese Constitution which is now under serious threat of being undermined. Here was his one of his contributions to the exhibit that can be viewed in its entirety here.

Despite Daniel’s reluctance to do “agit-prop”, there is no question about his class loyalties, which is to the working people. For many years, Daniel has been painting sewing machines and the people who work for living at them. Although most people associate them with the sweatshops of today that largely employ Latinos and Asian women, there was a time when they were used by immigrant Jews such as the women who died tragically in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster of 1911. Daniel introduces this section of his book thusly:

The sewing machine, first mass-produced in the late nineteenth century, found its way into private homes and soon became part of modern labor history. My grandparents’ generation of Eastern European immigrants organized the sweatshops they worked in.

Today dangerous and exploitative sewing factories abound in the globalized economy, from El Salvador to China. The sewing machine, though, can also be a means of self-sufficiency. I have seen tailors at work at machines in their doorways in mountain towns in Colombia, and in the vast marketplace of its coastal city Barranquilla.

I have never operated a sewing machine, but am fascinated by their practical elegance and power. I cannot explain why I paint angels sewing in the night sky.

Here is a work in that series, “Seamstress Angel”.

To order your copy of “Heart of Ardor,” contact Daniel at dandotdan@yahoo.com

 

Forcing culture down peoples’ throats

Last Friday my Turkish professor showed us a Youtube video that is the rage now among Turkish students at Columbia. It deals with the “cultural revolution” of the young Turkish Republic that sought to erase all Ottoman and Islamic influences and replace them with a version of the French republic cooked up by Mustafa Kemal. It is no accident that both Turkey and France have been going through battles lately over the right of Muslim female students to wear headscarves to public school classes. This kind of overzealous secularism was at the core of constitutional thinking in both countries. Of course, in Turkey it was much more of a Western import.

In the image from the video below, you can see Turkish soldiers on orders to arrest anybody who was playing native Turkish music as was being done when the video begins. They then order the cowed villagers to “be happy” (mutlu ol). Just before the soldiers arrive, there are some Turkish words that provide a set-up. Loosely translated (which is all I am capable of at this point), they mean: “The Turkish government declared that Turkish music was to be banned from the radio. The goal was the widespread dissemination of Western music. It wanted to replace the Turkish musical style with French as part of forcing ‘Western culture’ on society.” The soldiers proceed to read off a list of acceptable Western composers, whose names they all butcher.

Although I think everybody understands the joke, let me spell it out. When the soldiers order them to play some Mozart and Beethoven, the saz player responds with an excerpt from Mozart’s Symphony Number 40, accentuating its affinities with native Turkish music. Mozart was very enthusiastic about Turkish music and wrote a famous “Rondo alla Turca” in his piano sonata number 11 as well as the finale to the “Turkish” violin concerto number five that incorporated the same types of harmonies. He follows up with the “Ode to Joy”, whose melody Beethoven lifted from Janissary marching bands.

The very day I saw this video, I read a wonderful story from Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” titled “Kim Wilde”. It revolved around the efforts of Marjane’s parents to smuggle in an Iron Maiden poster from Turkey into Iran in the early 1980s, when the Iranian “cultural revolution” was in its most virulent stage. Everything Western was banned, including rock music. As urbane and educated Iranians, the Satrapis resented this kind of forced acculturation just as much as the Anatolian villagers in the Youtube video.

Understandably, the Islamic Republic was seeking to overthrow the kind of vicious Western “modernization” norms of the Shah who made the 1934 Turkish assault on Turkish music look tame by comparison. But in making it a crime to bring Iron Maiden posters into the country, clearly it was just as mad in its own way as the Westernizers. The bottom line is that cultural change must not be enforced. That is the main lesson that is found in the Youtube video and in “Persepolis” and clearly one that socialists should embrace.

Art as commodity

Will be joined by “Blood Meridian” as part of a film director’s oeuvre?

My review of “No Country for Old Men” has generated a more general discussion about art and politics on my blog and on Stan Goff’s Feral Scholar. Although the debate has been pretty polarized over the role of Cormac McCarthy in realizing some ideal about Great Literature, just about every participant lays claim to radicalism or Marxism.

One of the more ubiquitous posters is one John Steppling, who seeks to rescue art from commissars like myself who are represented as latter day partisans of the proletarian novel and socialist realism:

You cannot attack Mccarthy for not writing a book making the didatic points you want him to make. Thats not what literature does at any time. I find a lot of people on all political sides become a bit frightened by characters when they are constructed as McCarthy constructs them…by which I mean without conventional sentimentality and motivation.

I should add that Steppling’s comments are almost always marked by such spelling and grammatical errors which led blogger Martin Wisse to observe: “How can anyone take a John Steppling seriously on literature when the fellow doesn’t even have a basic command of English?”

One of the benefits of the debate for me has been its triggering in my mind of some deeper considerations of the social role of art (I use the word art in reference to painting, music, theater, poetry, novels and all the rest), especially in light of a re-reading of the early chapters of volume one of Karl Marx’s “Capital”. When you think of the creation of art in the context of the commodity, use value and exchange value, certain thoughts come to mind that might help put the debate on a more “materialist” foundation.

Keep in mind that art only began to become a commodity in the mid-19^th century as the artist was freed from feudal ties. For the musician and painter, the need for support from the prince or the church was obvious. A piano was expensive, not to speak of the orchestra needed to perform a composition. For the painter, fixed capital was fairly minimal: a canvas and some paint. But since each work was non-reproducible, there had to be a wealthy backer to support his efforts. This meant that the typical painting was a laughing cavalier or a crucifixion. The artist only became to be emancipated from feudal dependence when a new bourgeoisie began to emerge. For the musician the struggle was longer and harder as Mozart’s life story demonstrates.

In distinction to the painter or composer, the novelist benefited from the mechanical printing press and could get into commodity production simply by securing a pen, some paper and a good idea. It is no accident that the first modern novel–Don Quixote–takes as its theme the emergence of bourgeois society in Spain.

In the renaissance, paintings and musical compositions were not commodities. They only had use value. The Church or a monarch would commission a work that was used for the spiritual edification of the flock or for flattering the court. There was only a difference in degree between such works and the fine meals and fancy clothing that were also put together by the rest of the household staff.

By the mid-19^th century, novels became the quintessential commodity with Charles Dickens’s novels being serialized in the newspapers. It took much longer for music to catch up, but with the introduction of the phonograph, the composer found a way to tap into the mass market as well. Painters are much more of a throwback to the age of feudalism as they have had to rely on the ruling class for patronage. But even in the case of one-of-a-kind works of art, you are dealing with the exigencies of the marketplace and the fetishism of commodities.

As the nation-state consolidated around the class rule of the bourgeoisie and replaced the latticework of feudal principalities that served as a platform for the arts, new use values began to emerge. The composer and the artist articulated the ruling class’s political and ideological ambitions even if in an indirect fashion. The use value of a Wagner opera was to articulate the yearnings for German national unity, just as Klimt’s paintings were seen by his Austrian governmental benefactors in the same fashion. Klimt’s modernism was meant to counter folkloric works of “lesser nationalities” resisting assimilation by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In Great Britain, the prototypical capitalist nation-state, “Great Literature” was drafted to serve the same purpose. As religion and belief in the monarchy began to subside among the working class in the Victorian era, astute servants of the ruling class came to the conclusion that Shakespeare, Jane Austin, et al could help bind the nation together in pursuit of the ruling class’s ambitions. Before literature became elevated to this lofty status, it was simply seen as entertainment–something that ladies and gentlemen enjoyed in their leisure.

All this is discussed in some detail in “The Rise of English”, an article in Terry Eagleton’s “Literary Theory, An Introduction”. Eagleton states:

If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than reply: ‘the failure of religion’. By the mid- Victorian period, this traditionally reliable, immensely powerful ideological form was in deep trouble. It was no longer winning the hearts and minds of the masses, and under the twin impacts of scientific discovery and social change its previous unquestioned dominance was in danger of evaporating. This was particularly worrying for the Victorian ruling class, because religion is for all kinds of reasons an extremely effective form of ideological control…

Fortunately, however, another, remarkably similar discourse lay to hand: English literature. George Gordon, early Professor of English Literature at Oxford, commented in his inaugural lecture that ‘England is sick, and . . . English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.’ Gordon’s words were spoken in our own century, but they find a resonance everywhere in Victorian England. It is a striking thought that had it not been for this dramatic crisis in mid-nineteenth- century ideology, we might not today have such a plentiful supply of Jane Austen casebooks and bluffer’s guides to Pound.

I would argue that the elevation of reading novels and poetry into a kind of transcendental sacrament roughly equivalent to eating communion wafers in the 20^th and 21^st century is a direct result of the British transformation of what was basically entertainment into the “Classics”. When you think of all the papers delivered on Austen and Pound to Modern Language Association conferences over the years, it is helpful to understand their real purpose, which is as Eagleton points out, a mechanism to “save our souls and heal the state”.

This might not be so obvious with the MLA Conferences, stocked to overflowing by one type of Marxist professor or another, but it becomes more obvious when you consider the high priests of modernism such as Harold Bloom and Saul Bellow. They were quite conscious of why Great Literature serves as totems for the Great Civilization they beat the drums for. Obsessions with “Canon” at places like Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago unwittingly betray religious antecedents when you consider that the term referred originally to the books considered authoritative by religious sects, either Judeo-Christian or Moslem. Controversies have broken out at prestigious universities over whether non-Western literature should be added to the Canon. My tendency would be to get rid of the idea of a Canon altogether.

If saving our souls and healing the State serves as the ultimate use value of “Great Literature”, there is also exchange value to be considered. A book is the ultimate commodity as the proliferation of Barnes and Nobles in every major city would demonstrate, not to speak of amazon.com. Authors are under enormous pressure to differentiate their commodity from the competition, just as laxative manufacturers must.

The marketplace demands novelty. When a young novelist is considered by the NY Times Book Review section, saying something “fresh” and “new” is about as important as it is in the clothing business. Nothing could be more superfluous than last year’s designer jeans or novels.

One should never underestimate the power of the capitalist system to absorb, assimilate and co-opt even the most “daring” forms of art, including surrealism which emerged in the 1920s as a revolutionary cultural movement led by a Trotskyist André Breton.

On October 2, 1998, the Times reported on “A new spot for Chanel No. 5 dabs on some sex and surrealism.” Chanel ads always featured the work of leading-edge photographers. From 1979 to the 1990’s, their products were peddled in highly sophisticated, sex-suffused images reminiscent of Salvador Dali paintings. They were the work of Ridley Scott, who went on to become a movie director with mixed results. Here’s one of his best-known ads.

And here’s word on Ridley Scott’s possible new project:

According to The Hollywood Reporter, William Monahan is in negotiations to adapt Scott Rudin’s long-gestating feature film of Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed novel “Blood Meridian,” which is now set up at Paramount Pictures.

Although no offer has been made, Ridley Scott has been approached to direct. Scott and Monahan are currently writing and directing two projects together — “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Tripoli,” which are both set up at 20th Century Fox. In the last incarnation of “Blood Meridian” in the late 1990s, Tommy Lee Jones was set to direct and rewrite Steve Tesich’s adaptation and take a small role in McCarthy’s dark Western.

Klimt

At the risk of sounding like a complete philistine, I have to confess that I had more interest in Gustav Klimt as a mover and shaker in fin-de-siècle Vienna than as an artist. When I received a DVD of the 2006 movie “Klimt” from Koch-Lorber, it sat on my desk for a month or two. I finally decided to take a look at it when I discovered that the Neue Galerie, a nearby museum specializing in German and Austrian art, was running a show devoted to the artist. After watching the movie, attending the show this weekend and reading the chapter on Klimt in Carl E. Schorske’s “Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture,” I am now ready to say a few words about a very interesting artist who lived in a very interesting period with some strong similarities to our own.

While there is no denying the power and beauty of Klimt’s paintings, some people might have the same reaction that I do to them. They strike me as somewhat kitschy, especially since they frequently adorn the windows of those tacky poster and reproduction shops that you find in cities everywhere. They usually can be found next to a picture of Al Pacino or a New Yorker cartoon. One of the most famous–”The Kiss”–adorned the cover of a Danielle Steele novel (shown above to the left).

But in his time, Klimt was anything but kitschy. He defied conventional attitudes about what constituted art and became an early martyr in the kind of culture wars that have embroiled Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and Chris Ofili’s dung Madonna in recent years.

Gustav Klimt with a friend

Gustav Klimt started off as a traditional figurative artist. Many of his early works can be seen at the Neue Galerie and are nearly photographic in their realism and detail. Even early in his career, Klimt was fixated on nude bodies and was not shy about depicting female genitalia in a fairly openly erotic manner.

Although Klimt led a rather conventional existence as an artist (he never married and lived with his mother and sisters as an adult), he also had a ravenous sexual appetite and fathered 30 out-of-wedlock children by some accounts. As a typical fin-de-siecle figure, he shared Freud’s belief in the need to combat sexual repression by any means necessary. He wore flowing smocks in his studio with nothing on underneath (one was on display at the Neue Galerie) in the belief that clothing inhibited his artistic and psychological creativity.

A seed of rebelliousness that was always present came to full fruition in 1897 when Klimt and like-minded artists (including Egon Schiele, who is a character in the biopic) launched the Vienna Secession Movement, a bid to break with the academy that forced artists to work in the sterile “historicism” vein, which involved painting pictures of Greek or Roman gods, the Saints, etc. in a dated style.

The Vienna Secession was part and parcel of a cultural trend in pre-WWI Vienna that posed some of the basic issues associated with modernism. In music, Schoenberg was a prototypical figure as was Karl Kraus in belles-lettres. The artist, writer and philosopher of this period was conscious of imperial decline, but lacked the class insights to conceive of an alternative. Liberation was seen not so much in terms of breaking with the bourgeoisie, but carving out a space in society so as to allow the beautiful soul and his or her follower to breathe free.

One of the more interesting figures in this general current was the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach whose Cartesian-like belief in the power of subjectivity was greeted with open arms by Gustav Klimt. He interpreted Mach’s philosophy as legitimating his own rather fantastic visions of people and the world. (As some of you might now, Mach was a bête noir for Lenin who regarded his influence on the Bolshevik party as a threat to Marxism.)

Friedrich Jodl: Klimt’s nemesis at the U. of Vienna

At the pinnacle of his prestige in 1894, Klimt was commissioned to paint murals for the Law, Medical and Philosophy departments of the University of Vienna, which were so out of whack with the prevailing tastes of the professorate that a petition drive was organized to remove them from the premises. However, Friedrich Jodl, the petition drive organizer, was not the typical yahoo of today like Rudolph Giuliani who used “Piss Christ” as a rallying cry for New York City reactionaries. Jodl was a highly respected progressive who founded the Vienna Ethical Culture movement in the spirit of the American Ethical Culture society in order to promote a scientific morality freed from religious dogma. According to Schorske, Jodl championed woman’s emancipation, civil liberties and an adult education program that was meant to reduce class inequalities.

One might understand how Jodl’s very rationalism mitigated against his ability to appreciate Klimt’s murals since they were drenched in obscure, sexually explicit and somewhat confrontational imagery that hearkened back to Bosch and Breughel. Jodl told a liberal newspaper that it is “not against nude art, nor against free art that we struggle, but against ugly art.”

If his critics were not exactly true to form reactionaries, neither were his defenders particularly the kind of people you would find on the barricades. Indeed, the Austrian state looked to the Secessionist movement as a battering ram against the resentful nationalist movements that felt oppressed by the Empire, even as it was now devoted to Enlightenment values. The ruling class of Austria considered economics and culture two highly strategic areas to consolidate its power. On the economics front, the symbol of this struggle was Minister of Finance Eugen Boehm-Bawerk who was charged with developing a progressive taxation structure. Some of you might know Boehm-Bawerk as one of the earliest critics of the Marxist theory of value. He was one of the first to address what is called the “transformation problem”, which revolves around the alleged failure of prices to map to the labor time required in commodity production. In this instance, the “transformation problem” was clearly understood by Boehm-Bawerk as a way to undermine the revolutionary appeal of Marxism. What he failed to understand is that exploitation is felt deeply by workers, whatever theories are deployed to explain it away.

On the cultural front, the work of Gustav Klimt and his associates was understood as a means of “defending a purely Austrian culture” in the words of a woman in the Secessionist movement. In taking this approach, the Austrian state clearly saw their work as performing the kind of function that the State Department and the CIA reserved for the Abstract Expressionists, who were trotted out as proof of the kind of freedom that the American Empire could only guarantee. Schorske writes:

Within this framework of supra-national policy, state encouragement of the Secessionist movement made complete sense. Its artists were as truly cosmopolitan in spirit as the bureaucracy and the Viennese upper middle class. At a time when nationalist groups were developing separate ethnic arts, the Secession had taken the opposite road. Deliberately opening Austria to European currents, it had reaffirmed in a modern spirit the traditional universalism of the Empire. A Secession spokesperson had explained her commitment to the movement as “a question of defending a purely Austrian culture, a form of art that would weld together all the characteristics of our multitude of constituent peoples into a new and proud unity,” what, in another place, she called a “Kunstvolk” (an art people). The Minister of Culture, even before the formation of the Koerber ministry, revealed in strikingly similar terms the assumptions of the state in creating an Arts Council in 1899 as a body to represent its interest. He singled out the potential of the arts for transcending nationality conflict: “Although every development is rooted in national soil, yet works of art speak a common language, and, entering into noble competition, lead to mutual understanding and reciprocal respect.” Even while proclaiming that the state would favor no particular tendency and that art must develop free of regimentation, according to its own laws, the minister showed special solicitude for modern art. He urged the new Council “to sustain . . . the fresh breeze that is blowing in domestic art, and to bring new resources to it.” Thus it came about that, while other European governments still shied away from modern art, the ancient Habsburg monarchy actively fostered it.

Klimt’s run-in with the University of Vienna faculty left him bitter and convinced him to give up making universal statements about the human condition that would be similarly misunderstood. From around 1905 until his death in 1918, Klimt focused more on landscapes and portraits commissioned by the Viennese bourgeoisie, particularly the Jews who tended to be more open-minded. One of his patrons was Karl Wittgenstein, who had made a fortune in the mining industry and who was the father of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ludwig Wittgenstein, along with Ernst Mach, was largely responsible for the positivist turn in modern philosophy. Although Lenin would have been just as hostile to Wittgenstein as he was to Mach, he certainly would have appreciated Wittgenstein’s professed sympathies for the USSR. One of Klimt’s most famous paintings from this period is a portrait of Ludwig’s sister, Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein.

 

Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein

Although Klimt would have come to mind as the prototypical “decadent” artist for the Nazis, Hitler’s Gauleiter in Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, organized a Klimt show in Vienna in 1943 that was far more ambitious than the one at the Neue Galerie. In keeping with Nazi standards, however, the displayed art had largely been looted from a leading Jewish family, Serena and August Lederer. In an article on the Neue Galerie show, the New York Jewish Forward reported on November 7^th that the Lederers had taken possession of the murals spurned by the U. of Vienna. Shortly after the 1943 show, the Nazis prepared for “total war” with the USSR that led to the destruction of these paintings as the Forward reported:

Von Schirach’s Klimt retrospective ended up being the last hurrah of his ambitious Austrian cultural program. The war’s turning point had come just a few days before the exhibition opened with the surrender of the Germans at Stalingrad. By March 1943, the entire Third Reich had been mobilized for “total war,” and, as the threat posed by air raids became increasingly real, it was determined that the Klimts would be better off in storage. Soon after the exhibition closed, more than 10 paintings from the Lederer collection, including the three faculty pictures — along with a number of other Klimt canvases — were hidden in a castle in Immendorf, a hamlet in lower Austria not far from the Czech border. (The Beethoven Frieze was stored elsewhere.) In May 1945, as the Russians came over that border, the German unit that had been garrisoned in the castle retreated, but not before laying explosives. Between May 8 and May 11, the building and its contents burned to the ground.

I want to conclude with some brief remarks about the Klimt biopic, which I would have probably appreciated more–but not much more–if I were more familiar with the artist’s life beforehand. Directed by Raoul Ruiz, the 66 year old Chilean who fled the country in 1973, it is a surrealist exercise that is far less interested in the facts of Klimt’s life than it is in creating vivid, dream-like images that actually have more to do with the surrealist tradition than Klimt’s own. It is arguably not even a true biopic, but a film that is only “inspired” by Klimt’s life.

One of the more egregious liberties taken with Klimt’s biography is to represent him as psychotic in the style of Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind”. Throughout the film, John Malkovich as Klimt has extended conversations with a character that nobody else can see or hear. While this might have some value dramatically (provided that it is done well as it is in “A Beautiful Mind”), it has never had anything to do with medical science. Schizophrenia does not involve visual hallucinations of this sort. It is mostly a disease of the emotions that is typified by auditory hallucinations, which involve humiliating and shameful accusations against the sufferer. One might hope that screenwriters might find a way to put this cliché to rest, but I don’t hold out much hope.

Ronald Lauder: barbarian at the gate

One final word on Ronald Lauder, the Jewish billionaire who launched the Neue Galerie in 2001. Heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, he is reportedly worth $3 billion. He is a leading figure in the Republican Party and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO policy under Reagan. In 1989 Lauder vied with Rudolph Giuliani to become Mayor of New York, spending an obscene $20 million in the failed venture. Politically, he staked out the same ground (pro-death penalty, etc.) but lost out to the more “appealing” Giuliani.

When he is not dabbling in politics, Lauder has taken up the cause of Jewish families like the Lederers whose art was looted by the Nazis. His performance in this area leaves something to be desired, according to the wiki article on the rightwing billionaire:

Lauder has been instrumental in some cases of recovering “lost” art from the Nazi period. However, he has been broadly criticized for failing to step forward and resolve a case involving the Museum of Modern Art, which in 1997 exhibited some paintings owned by Rudolph Leopold, a Viennese doctor. An investigative article in the New York Times on Dec. 24, 1997 — “A Singular Passion for Amassing Art, One Way or Another” — outlined a case involving Portrait of Wally by Egon Schiele, which was in the MoMA exhibition but was obtained by Leopold soon after the Nazi era. The Manhattan DA stepped in to help restore the piece to descendants of its owner, but ownership of the painting is still in contention, nearly 10 years later. Lauder did nothing on the case, despite being MoMA chairman at the time.

How did Buñuel put it? The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie?

Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle and a new graphic history of SDS

Last week I received a copy of “Students for a Democratic Society: a Graphic History” from Hill and Wang. This book was written mostly by Harvey Pekar, with art (again, mostly) by Gary Dumm, a long-time Pekar collaborator, and edited by Paul Buhle. The publisher enclosed a letter that said:

“Harvey Pekar requested that we send along advanced copy of Students for a Democratic Society: a Graphic History in thanks for your hospitality while he was in town earlier this week. I hope you enjoy the book.”

The hospitality took the form of allowing Harvey to spend the night at my apartment while he was in town. His co-author Paul Buhle was a guest the previous evening. Both were in town discussing future projects with their publisher, including a series of graphic books on jazz musicians that would cover two of my favorites, Lester Young and Django Reinhardt.

Harvey Pekar

Writing about jazz might seem like a natural topic for Harvey Pekar since he used to be a free-lance reviewer for Downbeat years ago, but SDS? As it turns out, Harvey has always had a deep interest in politics even though it is obvious from his ongoing graphic memoir “American Splendor” that he is not an activist. Partnering with Paul Buhle makes perfect sense, however, since Paul is evolving more and more in the direction of this medium himself as his book on the IWW should make obvious.

For all three of us, the comic books of the 1950s were a big influence. Paul and I have discussed the importance of Mad Magazine, Tales from the Crypt, Little Lulu, Scrooge McDuck et al to us when we were 10 years old or so. If you were looking for something off the beaten track in the 1950s, but were just a bit too young to have discovered the Beats, there was nothing that could top comic books. In May, 2003 Paul wrote an article titled “The New Scholarship of Comics” in the Chronicle of Higher Education that noted:

The growing interest in researching and writing about comics by intellectuals who were born in the 1940s only partly reflects what’s happened in the world of commerce. More, I think, many of us are attempting to find, or relocate, ourselves — almost like an earlier generation tried psychoanalysis. Some of today’s more indulgent theorizing about comics, indeed, suggests a considerable overlap between the two. Most of us, however, have simply been struck by how much mass culture, from the early moments when we could take it in as children, has affected us. Memories of childhood grow more intense with aging, and we find Unca Donald (of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, that is), Wonder Woman (speaking for boys, our first sex goddess), and the hilarious Mad comics satires of the likes of them considerably more vivid in recollection than our real-life relatives.

His article also singled out the work of Harvey Pekar, who sought to bring his own working-class experience in Cleveland to life using this medium:

The never-say-die types continue, with a lot of nearly thankless effort. Two decades along, past Crumb-collaborator Harvey Pekar, an occasionally hectoring presence on the Letterman show of the 1990s, still brings out American Splendor, a narrative description of daily life in Cleveland, mostly his own life. An independent film under the same title, barely fictionalizing Pekar’s story, won the drama category at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.

Indeed, it was my own passion for Harvey Pekar’s work that connected me with Paul originally. Scott McLemee, a book reviewer for a number of venues including the Chronicle of Higher Education at one time, was a subscriber to the Marxism mailing list that I had launched in 1998. After I wrote something about Harvey Pekar to the list, he sent me a copy of an interesting article on Harvey that he had written and put me in touch with Paul, another fan.

Paul Buhle

Harvey Pekar’s approach to SDS is an unlikely but altogether compelling mixture of “American Splendor” and Paul Buhle’s radical history, a perfect marriage of art and scholarship. If you are going to tell the story of SDS, you are naturally going to have to bring together personal human drama and the overarching struggles of the period.

Some of the stories involve people who eventually left SDS and joined the Trotskyist movement, where I first came in contact with them. Two are now highly regarded scholars of the left, Alan Wald, the literary critic who acknowledges Paul Buhle as a primary influence, and Paul LeBlanc, who–like Paul–is a CLR James scholar. I should add that CLR James, who had a life-long interest in popular culture, is an important figure for people like LeBlanc and me who went through the painful sectarian experience of American Trotskyism and seek a more nuanced kind of Marxism today.

Alan Wald’s story is of particular interest since it situated in Cleveland, Harvey’s home town:

When I read this story, a flood of associations came to the surface like the madeleine in Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”. Just 4 years later Alan and Cecilia Wald (they had since married) found themselves on the opposite side from me in a bitter faction fight in the Socialist Workers Party. They were in something called For a Proletarian Orientation (FAPO) that was viewed as a concession to the PLP Worker-Student Alliance in SDS. As the name implied, it urged that the SWP send some members into the trade unions.

Up in Boston, FAPO had many supporters. I was asked to move up there in early 1970 to work with Peter Camejo, who had been assigned to do combat with FAPO. Peter, like the majority of SWP leaders, thought that the real action was on campus and sought to keep young Trotskyists in Boston on campus. One of the FAPO supporters was a Harvard student named John Barzman, the son of Hollywood blacklistees Ben and Norma Barzman (Norma was interviewed in Paul Buhle’s “Tender Comrades”). John had taken a job as a hospital worker alongside SDS’ers, who disdained the antiwar movement as “petty bourgeois”.

Peter Camejo, who is now battling lymphoma and working on a memoir that he hopes he can finish before fate gets in the way, asked me to prepare a contribution to the debate with FAPO on the Cochranites, a group that had been expelled from the SWP in the 1950s. Led by Bert Cochran, an organizer in the UAW in the 1930s, and Harry Braverman, the author of “Labor and Monopoly Capital”, this tendency sought to root Marxism in the American rather than the Russian experience and break with sectarianism–just like CLR James and Paul Buhle.

But for the SWP leadership in 1970, the Cochranites were a symbol of capitulation to capitalism. By downplaying the need for a vanguard party and urging the need for broad unity on the left, the Cochranites were supposed to be a symbol of how petty-bourgeois tendencies can afflict even auto workers, who in this case were supposedly being bought off by the 1950s economic boom. I made all these points in my report to the Boston branch, but never really thought that much about what the Cochranites really stood for.

Suffice it to say that both Peter Camejo and I came around to seeing things in the same terms as the Cochranites. For the past 27 years, a much longer time than I ever spent in the Trotskyist movement, I have been advocating the need for Marxism to be rooted in the American experience and to shun sectarianism. While the SDS of the 1960s imploded–largely as a result of the enormous frustrations of trying to end a seemingly endless war–there are many lessons that can be learned from Pekar, Dumm and Buhle’s graphic history.

SDS was a grass roots phenomenon that sought to build a movement from the bottom up. Despite the enormous media attention that figures such as Mark Rudd received, SDS was fundamentally a movement that was built from the initiative of young people acting on their own. There will obviously always be a need for such an organization as the rapid growth of the new SDS would indicate. Let’s hope that the young radicals of today can withstand the enormous pressures that a new seemingly endless war will generate. So far, the picture looks pretty good. Today’s SDS is militant but not self-destructive. Hopefully, its members and young activists in general will read this book to get a better grasp of the problems a previous generation tried to grapple with.

I want to conclude with some brief impressions of Harvey Pekar, who alongside Charles Bukowski, remains one of my favorite cultural icons. Although I didn’t have that much time to chat with him, we did manage to cover some topics that are very important to us. Paul had already mentioned to Harvey that I was interested in Jewish popular culture and he wanted to find out a bit about my experiences growing up in the Catskills.

I told him about how Murder Incorporated, a gang of Jewish hit-men led by Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, used to throw their victims in nearby Loch Sheldrake. I told him about all the famous comedians who used to work at local hotels, including Sid Caesar–a vegetarian–who used to buy vegetables from my father’s store. I studied piano briefly with the sister of the man who owned the Avon Lodge, where Sid got his start. She was just one of dozens of Communists in my little village that had been driven out of New York City. She had copies of Soviet Life all around her little house. I told Harvey about delivering fruit and vegetables to Joseph Greenstein’s bungalow colony. Better known as “The Mighty Atom”, Greenstein was a strong man who grew his hair long like Samson and followed a vegetarian diet like Sid Caesar, a strong man in his own right. Harvey had been checking out the career of another famous Jewish strong man, a Pole named Hersche Steinschneider who was the subject of Werner Herzog’s “The Immortal.”

I was curious about Harvey’s father. He told me that he was a shopkeeper like my own father, but a bit older. If he were alive today, he’d be 102. (Harvey is 6 years older than me.) Born in Poland, Harvey’s father was a bit more old country than my own father, who was European in his own way. Deeply religious, Harvey’s father spent his free hours studying the Talmud. After he retired, he became completely devoted to religious studies and even began wearing a fedora.

Harvey’s mother was a communist. She was also quite short, 4′9″ to be exact. Harvey’s father, who was living as a bachelor in the U.S., hooked up with her on a trip back to the old country. Here’s how Harvey described his background and his interest in Jewish culture to ClevelandJewishNews.com:

 Pekar, whose picture adorns a wall in the new Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, admits he doesn’t stay in contact with Jewish institutions much anymore. He went to Hebrew school and had a bar mitzvah ceremony, but grew increasingly alienated from the organized community. “I didn’t show much interest,” admits Pekar about his Hebrew education. “In those days, they didn’t concentrate much on teaching what the (words) meant. Just reading what was there.”

Pekar’s father was a Talmudic scholar who loved cantorial music. His mother was a socialist who supported Progressive candidate Henry Wallace for President in 1948. Both parents had an impact on young Harvey’s views.

“I’m strongly influenced by Jewish culture, but I’m not a nationalist,” he says. “I’d like to see (Israel) make an agreement with the Arabs, get an independent Arab state over there. Maybe internationalize Jerusalem.”

Pekar says he used to speak Yiddish fluently, and characters in his comic books spend a lot of time kibitzing in Jewish delis. Pekar even worked in a deli for a time during his fallow period and occasionally refers to himself in his comics as a “Yid.”

“I got a strong dose of things Jewish,” he says.

Although Harvey comes across as somewhat overwrought in the movie “American Splendor” and in appearances on the David Letterman show, he seemed perfectly relaxed in the time he spent with me. I imagine that being retired and being able to write full-time must go a long way to overcoming a sense of futility that comes with working in a low-paying job in a veteran’s hospital. One hopes that he and Paul, who has also just retired, will have many fruitful years of writing projects ahead of them. Insallah, I will be joining them soon.

One of my favorite Harvey Pekar stories from “American Splendor” is about a bit of an argument that took place between him and his father when he still lived at home. As an avid jazz fan, Harvey’s tastes were not identical to his father’s who preferred Jewish cantorial music. In the story, we see his father playing a record of one of his favorite chazzans (cantors) in the final panel for Harvey, slapping the record cover and proclaiming, “Now that’s music.”

As it turns out, I am both a jazz fan and a fan of cantorial music. Towards the end of our conversation, I played a performance of “Rozo D’Shabbos” by Pierre Pinchik– a renowned chazzan–for Harvey. I can only agree with his father: “Now that’s music.”

Lagerfeld Confidential

When I was invited to a press screening of “Lagerfeld Confidential,” now playing at the Film Forum in New York, about six weeks ago, my first reaction was to decline the offer. What possible interest could the Unrepentant Marxist have in one of the world’s highest profile haute couture designers? I am glad that I decided to watch a screener. Not only is Karl Lagerfeld a truly compelling figure; the film also provided an entrée into the role of designer clothing in bourgeois society.

Long ago, when I worked at Goldman-Sachs on Wall Street and had money to burn, I got hooked on luxury items myself. I bought my suits at Paul Stuart and kept a Mount Blanc pen in my shirt pocket. Not long after I started working at Columbia University, I donated all the suits to a thrift shop but kept the Mount Blanc pen. I never use it because the refills are exorbitantly expensive. Although I lead a simpler life now, I do understand the mystique that such goods have. Even Fidel Castro wears a Rolex.

Perhaps the last word on dressing up comes from Thorstein Veblen. In chapter seven (”Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture”) of “Theory of the Leisure Class,” Veblen observes:

The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The psychological law has already been pointed out that all men — and women perhaps even in a higher degree abhor futility, whether of effort or of expenditure — much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure; and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore intrinsically ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each added or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense. Even in its freest flights, fashion rarely if ever gets away from a simulation of some ostensible use. The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and their substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our attention as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a new style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste allows us is to seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and equally untenable. Hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change of fashionable attire.

Notwithstanding Veblen’s insights, there is another dimension to designer clothing that “Lagerfeld Confidential” conveys. While such clothing is not “functional” in any real sense, it is often beautiful and can even rise to the level of art as should be obvious from a trip to the Metropolitan Museum or even the Guggenheim, which mounted a controversial exhibit of Giorgio Armani clothing in 1999. Some journalists made the obvious point that the museum was blurring the lines between art and commerce:

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum announced last month that it would pay homage to the Italian designer Giorgio Armani next fall with a major retrospective of his work. The museum will turn its rotunda over to his ball gowns and pants suits and tuxedos, providing a breathtaking backdrop for an opening soiree and adding even more luster, if such a thing is possible, to the fashion designer’s name.

What the museum did not acknowledge was that some eight months earlier, Mr. Armani had become a sizable benefactor to the Guggenheim. The size of his contribution has not been disclosed, but one participant in museum meetings at which it was discussed said it would eventually amount to $15 million, an initial $5 million with a pledge to donate $10 million more over the next three years.

Asked about the gift, museum officials said it was part of a “global partner sponsorship,” gifts that can go to Guggenheim projects anywhere in the world, and denied that it was a quid pro quo for organizing the Armani show. The show is being sponsored by the fashion and celebrity magazine In Style, in which Armani is an advertiser…

But the debate began earlier. In the last three years, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, fashion designers like Dior have sponsored shows devoted to their work. When the museum held a show of Gianni Versace’s fashions, it was paid for in part by Conde Nast, publisher of fashion magazines like Vogue that depend on Versace for advertising. Next year the museum hopes Chanel will finance a show of its work. Tiffany, Faberge and Cartier also paid for shows about their products. The museum won’t say how much any of these shows cost.

–NY Times, December 15, 1999

If there is a case to be made that fashion is a form of art, Karl Lagerfeld would be prima facie evidence. “Lagerfeld Confidential” consists almost entirely of interviews with the seventy-something designer as he works in his studio, attends runway shows, dines with fashion industry muck-a-mucks, etc. Although I knew him only by name in the past (I might have even had a bottle of Lagerfeld cologne in my decadent youth), I came away from this documentary directed by Rodolphe Marconi with a deep respect for the creativity and intelligence of an admittedly cynical subject. Like his friend Andy Warhol, Karl Lagerfeld is a true expression of how bourgeois decadence can be seductive, not unlike the pearl generated by an infected oyster.

As the son of Swedish merchant-banking family that grew up in Germany, Lagerfeld enjoyed material privilege and emotional hardship. His mother Elizabeth, a native German, was cold and abusive as a New Yorker profile revealed:

He was devoted to his mother, who seemed rarely to miss an opportunity to criticize him. He has said that he decided never to smoke cigarettes after his mother told him that his hands were exceptionally ugly and that smoking would only draw attention to them; she also told him that his stories were “so boring” that he should hurry up and tell them—he says this accounts for his rapid speech. Lagerfeld recounts these instances of maternal cruelty without self-pity and even defends his mother, saying that children’s stories are indeed boring. His mother was tough, he concedes, “but right for a boy with a head like this”—he throws his hands wide apart.

In adolescence, Lagerfeld became consumed with design and women’s fashion in particular. As he reveals in the documentary, he knew early on that he was gay and never made an effort to conceal that fact. He moved to Paris in his teens and launched a successful career immediately. His main complaint about the fashion world then was that it was too “bourgeois”, a term that he uses throughout the film as an epithet. Unlike Marxists, his contempt stems from his identification with the feudal aristocracy that was overthrown by a bourgeoisie that disdained the peacock dress of the royal courts. It is obvious from this excerpt from the New Yorker profile that he would like to turn the clock back:

Two decades before it became de rigueur for designers to do so, Lagerfeld haunted flea markets and thrift shops for vintage dresses, dismantling them in order to learn the secrets of their construction and design. He studied books on Madeleine Vionnet and the other pioneers of fashion from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he translated this knowledge into his work, pairing historical references with contemporary trends. Lagerfeld became a fixation of the fashion press, which chronicled his life and style, noting the changes in his home décor, and his habit of dressing in Edwardian collars and ascots, and wearing a monocle. When he moved into the house on the Rue de l’Université, in 1977, he did not use electricity in some of the rooms but lit them with candles. Buck visited him there. “It was extraordinarily beautiful,” she says. “I slept in this bedroom with a lit à la polonaise, with a semicircular canopy—very high, with ostrich feathers on top. Next to that room was his study, and he slept in this tiny little room that had the actual lacquer furniture that had belonged to Mme. de Pompadour.”

While he is totally consumed with the fashion world and his place in it, Lagerfeld is by no means a one-dimensional figure. He is devoted to fine literature and has launched publishing company that is devoted to works that he deems worthy. His tastes run to Rilke and Emily Dickinson but when he discusses his favorite writers in the film, it is not from the perspective of a literary scholar. He is the quintessential fan, who makes no distinction between high and pop culture. You can get a sense of his unique conversational style from this New Yorker snippet:

“For me, the perfect writing is E. B. White—that’s how one should write English,” he told me at his home on the Rue de l’Université. “The sound, the language, what it evokes for me. I see New York with the eyes of his book about New York. Like Colette in French. Even someone like Léautaud—whom you probably don’t know. Léautaud was the son of a courtesan and his father was a bad actor who became a souffleur in the Comédie-Française—you know, the one who sits in a box onstage and whispers lines to the actors when they forget them? Prompter! He wrote three books and then he started a publishing house, a very good one, the Mercure de France, and stayed all his life there as the editor of the Mercure literature review, and he loved cats and animals—which I’m not crazy for. Everything he did all of his life, I don’t like, but his writing, for me, his descriptions of Paris—I go to the street where he went for fifty, sixty years, and I see it only with his eyes.

Clothing has always been connected with class issues. The French Revolution attempted to uproot all vestiges of the Ancien Régime including the ostentatious costumes of King and aristocrats, even though many in the middle class adopted the style of the rulers as is the case today with rappers wearing bling.

In the nineteenth century, clothing styles became more and more bourgeois, stressing sobriety and uniformity. With the advent of the industrial revolution, clothing not only began to come off the assembly line but expressed the aesthetic of the factory, especially men’s clothing.

The abandonment of display and color was more than mere Anglomania. The new dress embodied the ideological justification for and social legitimacy of the bourgeois. Clothing reaffirmed the concepts of modesty, effort, propriety, reserve, and “self-control,” which were the basis of bourgeois “respectability.” They combined a moral rejection with their political rejection of color. “The world of colors,” writes Jean Baudrillard, “is seen as opposed to that of values. ‘Chic’ effaces appearance so that being might stand revealed. Black, white, and grey, the very negation of color, were the paradigm of dignity, control, and morality.” Ideally, the bourgeois’s rather stiff black suit, like that of a clergyman, disguised or effaced his body, allowing the wearer to distance himself from it, abandon it, and forget its embarrassing or inopportune presence. It became, as Theophile Gauthier pointed out, “a sort of skin that no man will shed under any pretext. It sticks to him like the pelt of an animal, so that nowadays the real form of the body has fallen into oblivion.”

(Phillipe Perrot, “Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: a History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century)

As class distinctions began to emerge in the 19^th century, elite dress began to reflect this fact. Industrialists, bankers and their wives began to wear clothing that distinguished them from the commoners, in the same manner that the aristocrats distinguished themselves from the lower classes in the 18^th century. Ironically, bourgeois clothing often had egalitarian roots despite the “conspicuous consumption” uses it now had. The top hat, which had became a symbol of bourgeois excess, typified this paradox. Turning once again to Perrot:

In nineteenth-century streets the top hat covered every bourgeois head. To trace its history would entail a story of geographical displacement (because of its Quaker origins it emigrated from England to America), of amazing diffusion (the War of Independence made it prestigious, notably among the victorious French troops who brought it back to France and turned it into an emblem of liberty), and finally, of significant monopolization (it became the prerogative of the bourgeoisie).

After the July Monarchy the top hat was made no longer of felt but of black silk, and its crown was lower and narrower. Yet, it remained exceptionally uncomfortable, even after the spring system of a new, more practical model, the gibus, made it possible to open and collapse it. It fulfilled no useful purpose: its narrow brim provided little protection from rain or sun, and its height exposed it to every wind. It had no aesthetic alibis: everyone criticized “this unattractive and unfortunate form, known as the stovepipe,” and excoriated those “responsible” for it, “the ignorant hat-makers who for fifty years have been stuck in the groove of routine.” This gleaming cylinder owed its long life to other virtues: notably, that of incorporating both bourgeois propriety, through its stiffness and funereal sobriety, and aristocratic bearing, because it made any physical activity completely impossible, and that of simultaneously integrating democratic equality, by abandoning feathers or embroidery, with hierarchical difference, through a new play of distinctive details, particularly luster and cleanliness.

Today haute couture is not what it used to be. As described by Dana Thomas in the recently published “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster,” designer clothing is no longer the province of small, specialized manufacturers who produce for the carriage trade. It has become big business for two reasons. First of all, the growth of a new middle class worldwide has created a new inexhaustible market for Gucci, Prada, Yves St. Laurent et al, especially in Japan, Russia and China. Secondly, globalization has made it possible for such goods to be produced cheaply in China and other East Asian sweat shops. If you look carefully at Coach handbags, for example, you will notice that they are made in China. Like anything else coming out of China, the workers get the shitty end of the stick, as Dana Thomas reports:

Production in China costs 30 to 40 percent less than in Italy. “So we aren’t dirt cheap,” the manufacturer said. “There is a preconception in the U.S. and Europe that if the brands move to China they’ll get it for 10 percent. Sure, there are factories that will do that, but the quality won’t be there and the brand will suffer. If we do it right and they get good products from our effort, they will make money. In the end, we are the money generator for them.”

Indeed they are. The evening after I visited the factory in China, I met some friends for a drink at the bar at the new Harvey Nichols store in Hong Kong. As I entered the store from the Landmark luxury shopping mall in the heart of the Central business district, I passed through the handbag department. To my right, on the shelf, sat the exact same bag I saw the Chinese girls making in the factory. It cost the brand $120 to produce. It was for sale at Harvey Nick’s for $1,200.

Today nearly all the designer labels that you see in advertisements in the NY Times are not independent companies, but are subsidiaries of huge conglomerates that roam the planet relentlessly in search of new markets and cheap labor. LVMH (formed as a merger of Louis Vuitton, Moët et Chandon and Hennessy) is typical. These are some of the other properties they have acquired over the years: TAG Heuer, Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Donna Karan, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy, Kenzo, Marc Jacobs, Parfums Christian Dior, Guerlain, Parfums and Givenchy.

The CEO of LVMH is one Bernard Arnault, who is the seventh richest man in the world. Arnault has brought the MBA, bottom line mentality to all the companies in his fold and most journalists in the fashion industry, including Dana Thomas, believe that his products have suffered as a consequence. Clearly, with the same process taking place in the film and wine industries, you are seeing the decline of quality as a function of rising profits.

And each time Arnault has taken over a fashion company, someone has ended up with a bloody nose.

The story of his dramatic climb started in 1984 when he returned to France from the US after a frustrated attempt to expand his family property company overseas.

It was then that the French government let him pay the insolvent Agache-Willot textiles and stores group a token one franc to acquire all its subsidiaries, including Christian Dior. The acquisition demonstrated Arnault’s lateral thinking. While all the other companies chasing the same prize would talk only to the government, Arnault instead reached an agreement with the Willot brothers who had run Agache-Willot into the ground.

This left the government with an easy choice. If it plumped for Arnault, it could get rid of the Agache-Willot problem. If it chose one of the others, the affair would drag on for years because the Willot brothers would have challenged its decision in the courts.

Predictably, it chose Arnault - but there there was a hitch.

Although Arnault’s optimistic business plan led the government to believe he would carry on running the textile and hygiene companies with a specified number of employees, he quickly took steps to sack workers in their thousands before selling off his textile and hygiene assets at a profit.

–London Mail, November 8, 1992, Sunday

Whatever criticisms one might have of Karl Lagerfeld and his feudal pretenses, he at least has the right attitude toward Arnault as found in the article cited above. Lagerfeld, who was the head designer at Christian Dior at the time when Arnault was making a takeover bid, said that he would “rather be a beggar in the streets of Paris than work for Bernard Arnault“.

Camille Pissarro at the Jewish Museum

Camille Pissarro

Despite the heavy pall of Zionist propaganda that covers The Jewish Museum in New York, there are occasionally some good exhibits. Yesterday I strolled over to the museum with an old friend from my misspent Trotskyist youth to look at the Camille Pissarro show. Pissarro, a French impressionist, was a Sephardic Jew who was born to a shopkeeper in the Caribbean island of St. Thomas in 1830. Although Pissarro was about as observant as me, the museum decided to mount a show because he belonged to the tribe. I was particularly interested in seeing his paintings in light of the NY Times article titled “The Radical Eye of Impressionism’s Patriarch” by Karen Rosenberg:

He is known as the father of Impressionism, yet Camille Pissarro has always been eclipsed by his more charming brood. Last year’s Cézanne and Pissarro exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, for instance, was billed as a dialogue in the mold of Matisse-Picasso, but it quickly became a one-sided conversation. Pissarro on his own is not blockbuster material; his paintings have a muddy, homely aspect next to Cézannes or Monets or Renoirs. Yet for Pissarro, an anarchist and a Jew (albeit a secular one) in 19th-century France, Impressionism was about much more than the fleeting effects of light. It was about labor, the elimination of hierarchies and an idealized balance between urban and rural life.

The Jewish Museum’s “Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country” contains few out-and-out masterpieces, but it does give us a rare look at the radical philosophies behind paintings that to a modern eye appear harmlessly bourgeois. (That most of the works in the show come from private collections suggests that anarchy is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.)

Two Young Peasant Women

Pissarro’s anarchism is very much suggestive of Kropotkin. His vision of socialism involved a return to the countryside and collective work on peasant communes. His paintings do not make any kind of obvious political statements, but are content to represent agricultural workers in a positive light. Chapter two of T. J. Clark’s “Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism” is titled “We Field Women” and is devoted to a discussion of Camille Pissarro’s 1891 painting “Two Young Peasant Women” within the context of anarchist movement politics. Clark writes:

One cannot stand in front of Two Young Peasant Women very long without wondering what the protagonists are (really) talking about, and how much more work they are likely to do before turning in. Answering the latter question would be easier if the picture gave a clue - of costume, maybe, or physiognomy - to the two women’s relation to the means of production. Are they day laborers, or servants living in a household, or members of the family? How hard is the work they are taking a break from? Who is the cider and cheap wine for? Is it for sale or use? How strong are the women? How healthy? Are they married or single? “The body’s worth more than the dowry,” as the saying had it. “Fille jolie, miroir de fou.” Idleness is ultimately a political matter. Pastoral is a dream of time - of leisure sewn into exertion, snatched from it easily, threaded through the rhythms of labor and insinuating other tempos and imperatives into the working day. I did say a dream.

They are going to take the fields and harvests from you, they will take your very self from you, they will tie you to some machine of iron, smoking and strident, and, surrounded by coalsmoke, you will have to put your hand to a piston ten or twelve thousand times a day. That is what they will call agriculture. And don’t expect to make love then when your heart tells you to take a woman; don’t turn your head towards the young girl passing by: the foreman won’t have you cheating the boss of his work . . .

Then, there will be no women and children coming to interrupt toil with a kiss or caress. The workers will be drawn up in squadrons, with sergeants and captains and the inevitable informer . . .

These words were written by one of Pissarro’s anarchist friends, Elisee Reclus, in a little pamphlet often reprinted in the 1890s, A Mon frere, le paysan. I think that some such scheme of values, and maybe even some such foreboding of the century to come - of course neither Reclus nor Pissarro could imagine the true horrors of agribusiness - lay at the root of Two Young Peasant Women, and made its dreamworld worth realizing.

While we were at the museum, we also took in a photography and video exhibit by Bruce Davidson titled “Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, wrote exclusively in Yiddish, a language that was spoken all around me growing up in the 1950s. Except for Hasidic Jews, the language is not spoken nowadays at all. When the state of Israel was created, there was a concerted effort to wean people off of Yiddish and to begin speaking Hebrew. Yiddish symbolized everything about ghetto culture that the new muscular state was anxious to put behind it.

Bruce Davidson photograph of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Davidson and Singer lived in the same Manhattan apartment building. In 1972, they collaborated on a humorous and surreal film, Isaac Singer’s Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko’s Beard, based on a Singer story. During and after production, Davidson photographed Singer in his apartment and around the Upper West Side.

A year later, Davidson took a series of photographs on the Lower East Side that are included in the exhibit. They feature customers of the Garden Cafeteria, an East Broadway restaurant that Singer frequented on his trips to The Jewish Daily Forward, where his stories appeared over the decades. Davidson also photographed local merchants, rabbis, and storefronts on Essex and Orchard Streets. The pictures are magnificent as should be obvious from the one below:

Heshy Stolzenberg and a carp at the Essex Street Market

The Cats of Mirikitani

I doubt that I will see a film this year that is more emotionally involving, politically relevant and artistically realized than “The Cats of Mirikitani,” now playing at the Cinema Village in New York City. This is a 74 minute documentary about Jimmy Mirikitani, a homeless 80 year old Japanese-American who eked out a living selling his art on the streets of downtown New York, and whom director Linda Hattendorf invited into her apartment  shortly after September 11th 2001. She refused to allow him to be exposed to the toxic substances in the air that have already cost the lives of many rescue workers and sickened others.

The film takes its title from the favorite subject matter of the artist, who appeared to care little about anything else in the world except his work. Like many of New York’s homeless, he initially appears rather withdrawn and confused. It is only after Hattendorf takes the time to draw him out that she discovers his story.

Linda Hattendorf

Jimmy Mirikitani was born in Sacramento, California in 1920 but spent time with his family in Hiroshima as well. On the eve of WWII, he decided that he was an artist and not a soldier, and came to the United States to work in freedom. Immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was thrown into the Tule Lake concentration camp in California, where he was confined for 3 ½ years. All of his relatives in Japan died in the bombing of Hiroshima.

One of Jimmy’s cats

After Jimmy takes up residence in the film-maker’s living room, he begins to relate his background to her and the viewing audience as well. His story is one of profound dislocation and demonstrates the precedence for the assault on civil liberties that took place after September 11th. As he sits on the sofa watching TV coverage of attacks on Arab-Americans and the bombing of civilian homes in Afghanistan, he shakes his head in dismay at the obvious connections with his own experience.

But this is not just a film about politics. It is about human relationships. Although Jimmy has lost just about every blood relative or friend he ever had in Hiroshima or at Tule Lake, Hattendorf–who begins to become both a surrogate daughter and a mother to him–discovers that there are some other Mirikitanis.

One of them is Janice Mirikitani, the poet laureate of San Francisco, whose poetry often refers to the internment camps, a subject of Jimmy’s paintings as well. During WWII, she and her family were imprisoned in Arkansas. In the 1960s, she emerged as a leader of the Third World cultural revolt in San Francisco. The other is his older sister Kazuko, living in Seattle in 2001, who he had not spoken to since they were released from Tule Lake. We listen to their phone conversation in the film. When it is over, he remarks that her voice has not changed much in 45 years. If his reaction to her seems muted, it is understandable. Given the terrible suffering and disappointment he has had to endure, he is wary of allowing himself to expect much out of life even as it is approaching its end.

Tule Lake internment camp

But that is what director Linda Hattendorf is determined to accomplish. Feeling a deep sense of loyalty to a fellow artist and a victim of racism, she does everything in her power to make sure that Jimmy is paid back for his suffering and is reconnected with loved ones. She is also obviously very committed to educating the general public about the work of a major artist, a project that the film itself is part of. Throughout, we see Jimmy Mirikitani at work. In some ways, watching the film is like going to a gallery that is displaying the work of an important but unrecognized talent.

Although my reviews generally focus on the ideas and social relevance of films, a word must be said about the artistic merits of this documentary. It unfolds like a piece of music, with certain leitmotifs appearing over and over–such as Jimmy’s remembrances of Tule Lake, the bonding between the artist and the film-maker and the parallels between Pearl Harbor and September 11^th. Joel Goodman’s excellent film score is always highlighting the emotional content of the drama, but is never intrusive.

Using archival film from prewar Japan, Tule Lake during WWII and family photos of the Mirikitanis, we can place the artist into a broader social context and more deeply understand the great crime committed in the name of “national security”.

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