Abstract Expressionism, Cool Jazz, and the CIA

No. 5, 1948, by Jackson Pollock

No. 5, 1948, by Jackson Pollock (Wikipedia)

This is not a new topic, but many people still do not realize how much the Central Intelligence Agency, through various fronts (cooperative or fake foundations, for example), influenced the artistic movements during the peak of the Cold War years—the 1950s and 1960s.

For example, Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock got huge boosts  through important exhibitions and other patronage.

Why? The Soviet Union, like Nazi Germany before it, officially disapproved of non-representational art. In that government’s view, non-representational art was morally degenerate—in other words, insufficiently propagandistic.

But we in the freedom-loving United States championed Abstract Expressionism and made it almost official in our towers of government and commerce, to the point where even people who did not like the style knew that it was High Art and above criticism.

Likewise jazz. There was no point in competing with the Soviet Union in the realm of classical music—their system identified talented musicians and ballet dancers young and trained them rigorously. They sent the best of the best on international tours, and the only problem was that sometimes the talent ran away (see, e.g., Mikhail Baryshnikov).

Soviet dissidents listened to jazz, so it was programmed on the Voice of America. And sending top American jazz musicians on world tours showed that we valued free artistic expression, etc. etc. and also, incidentally, that not all American Negroes were oppressed, an accusation frequently made by Soviet critics. We did also play up composers whom the Soviets did not like, such as Shostakovich.

It’s not exactly The Da Vinci Code, but sometimes there are indeed conspiracies behind world events.

It has always seemed to me that modern jazz began to lose its coolness cachet in the 1980s, and I cannot but think that such a loss was connected to the “winning” of the Cold War and the loss of secret funding. Abstract Expressionism has faded too, although whether the loss of secret support matters as much as the faddishness of the art world, I cannot say.

Postwar Word Follies

She likes the whole Greenwich Village life! She’s no bimbo, snookums. And other new  expressions from 1919.

Should you buy a leotard for your martial arts practice? Nah, don’t bother. And other new expressions from 1920.

Live down on the kolkholz? That’s Hicksville, Tovarich. (I better not let the Cheka catch me saying that.) And other new expressions from 1921.

Aleister Crowley’s “White Stains” summarized.

A short essay on Aleister Crowley’s book of then-pornographic verse, White Stains, with excepts of the poems. Includes Crowley comic written in Dubious Dialect.

“You people know nothing of Crowley,” writes some angry Thelemite in the comments.

For People Who Can’t Find the Spice Aisle . . .

 

. . . .  you can buy gen-u-wine witchy basil of unknown age and origin on eBay. (Click image to embiggen.)

Strange Things Have Swum in the Midnight Sun

Cryptozoologists may rejoice over a new video of a “sea serpent” in Alaska.

Quick Review: Spellbound: Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps

Karen Palmer, author of Spellbound: Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps, is a veteran journalist, not a historian of witchcraft, so for me to read the book from the latter perspective is to do her a slight disservice. (As an inside, the subtitle might  better read “Inside Ghana’s Witch Camps,” but maybe some editor thought that “West Africa’s” had more punch.)

From her website:

With these words, Karen Palmer takes us inside one of West Africa’s witch camps, where hundreds of banished women struggle to survive under the watchful eye of a powerful wizard. Palmer arrived at the Gambaga witch camp [a sort of refugee camp for accused witches] with an outsider’s sense of outrage, believing it was little more than a dumping ground for difficult women. Soon, however, she encountered stories she could not explain: a women who confessed she’d attacked a girl given to her as a sacrifice; another one desperately trying to rid herself of the witchcraft that she believed helped her kill dozens of people.

One troubling thing about studying the Renaissance and early modern witch trials (1500s-1700s) is that we never hear from the victims except through the filter of witch-trial testimony.

Now if you can assume that the phenomenon of witchcraft in northern Ghana is analogous to “our” witch trials—and it certainly sounds that way to me—then once again there are no clear answers about what is going on.

There was Ayishetu, chased from her village by a violent mob, whose life was destroyed by the accusation that she practiced witchcraft, and Winangi, a tiny splinter of a woman who’d gne seeking witchcraft to protect herself and her children. She pleaded to her husband to move her to the camp when she felt she’d lost control of the dark gift. A smart businesswoman named Asara had ended up at the camp when a debtor accused her of causing a meningitis outbreak. Napoa, mannish and grumpy, readily identified herself as a witch and caused fear among the other women living at the camp (41).

The surrounding culture is mostly Islamic but with lots of magical practitioners. Muslim polygamy also contributes to the problem. How do you get rid of the oldest wife? Accuse her of being a witch!

Another analogy with the European witch trials is this: The village shaman-herbalist is not the witch but rather the person who accuses the witch. Or if someone has accused her (usually it is her), the shaman-herbalist conducts a ritual (e.g., watching the death throes of a chicken) to pronounce whether she truly is a witch or not.

So I recommend Spellbound both for a look at contemporary West African issues with witchcraft but also for thinking more about its history in Western culture.

 

Polytheism in the Marketplace

Going to buy puja supplies from an immigrant Hindu shopkeeper. Confusion ensues, but is resolved.

Witches Keeping Silent

One coven that I used to circle with when visiting their city was big on the old Magicians’ Pyramid: To Know, To Will, To Dare, To Keep Silent.

Sarah Lawless, the “Witch of Forest Grove,” thinks that there should be more silence, writing in a post called “Oversharing Witches“:

I was taught not to share. Specifically, I was taught not to share who my familiar spirits are, to not share the exact names of my deities, not to share what my unique abilities are, not to share recent spells I’ve performed, and to only talk about my tradition when asked (especially by elders) and never say more than the absolute least I possibly can. You’re probably laughing at me because I write a witchcraft blog that’s all about sharing knowledge, practices, and experiences… but hold that laughter. Have you ever seen me state exactly what all of my animal and plant familiars are? Have you ever seen me list the names of all the ancestors I work with? Have you ever seen me state exactly which traditions I trained in? You may have even noticed that I tend to use nicknames and epithets for the deities I work with rather than their actual names. I tend to skirt around a lot of things about myself. This blog is more of a giant Sarah iceberg and you’re only ever seeing the tip.

I see her point, although what I see in too many Craft blogs is just recycling of other people’s stuff instead of sharing secrets!

Mothman, John Keel, and Weirdness

Io9,com offers a reflection by on the “Mothman Prophecies,” both the 1975 book by John Keel and the subsequent 2002 movie with Richard Gere, which has little in common except the title and infamous bridge collapse.

Grabianowski’s article is a level-headed examination of the “flap” of 1967, about which I can say little—I wasn’t there. Maybe it did all start with the sudden, startling flight of a barn owl, viewed by people keyed up by the excitement of social transgression and (probably) anticipated sexual activity.

(The “seven feet tall” part is possible too—I’ve mistaken a jackrabbit for a deer when one suddenly jumped up in front of me at dusk—your eyes can play tricks.)

John Keel’s subsequent book went way beyond those particular events, describing how even his act of trying to report on them put him into a sort of “twilight zone”  of inexplicable happenings.

Grabianowski is leery of its reporting:

Somehow, in five years, Keel went from a plain denial of any Mothman-Silver Bridge connection to one of the most elaborate and bizarre cryptid tales ever told, with himself as a central character. The clues to what sparked the change come, again, from the published letters of Keel and [Gray] Barker. To put it bluntly, in much of their paranormal and UFO writing they were “taking the piss.” As Barker put it in a 1970 letter, “the kookie books are about all that I can sell these days. I lost the ‘sensible’ subscribers…long ago, so I get a kick out of letting it reflect the utter mental illness of the field.” Lurid tales sold a hell of a lot better than dry investigations that didn’t find much of anything, and there was always some portion of the public gullible enough to swallow any story whole. So that was how they made their living.

I did not read Keel’s Mothman Prophecies until the early 1980s. (It is still in print.) When I did, I was surprised at the “twilight zone” stuff, because my own youthful adventures in investigating certain phenomena had put me into a similar zone, where, among other things, just being in “the field” caused people to act strangely, to turn on each other, become wildly paranoid, etc. No drugs involved.

So I had to respect the book for that aspect—whatever “Mothman” was, paranormal investigations can leave you with one foot on “the other side,” in a strange psychological space.

Here is a YouTube video of Keel speaking about Mothman, etc.

Who You Calling ‘Digressive’?

A review from the July 11-18, 2011, issue of The New Yorker. The Waterstons, in particular, should get more credit as early Pagan-friendly (or Pagan-inspiring) musicians.