First snow - more questions

What's up with Kerouac lately?

Every now and then I do a web search to see if any new images of Jack Kerouac have popped up. Mostly what you get are the usual suspects, well-known images that get re-posted over and over again, but every so often new sources go public with stuff they have been sitting on for decades. This post is an opportunity to gather some of these new photo resources together...

The most exciting new series I have found consists of four portrait shots, done by Tom Palumbo, who for many years did fashion photography for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar as well as celebrity work. He later became a theatre director and was affiliated with Actor's Studio. He is now 86 or 87 and has apparently decided to have someone create a Flickr photostream for him, and to have a nice website showing much of his best work....

Some time in 1955 Palumbo did a session in New York City in a painter's studio on E. 13th Street. Kerouac looks quite aggressive and macho in the resulting shots, perhaps because he was hungry, as Palumbo notes in a caption that the painter cooked up some spaghetti for them to eat after the shoot was wrapped up... Some of the images came up on the web in connection with a Vanity Fair article by Joyce Johnson, posted last August in connection with the 50th anniversary of the US publication of On the Road. The three images below come from Palumbo's photostream:

Don't Mess with Jack Kerouac is Palumbo's caption...

Speaking of Joyce Johnson's Vanity Fair article, this piece also has some quite unusual colour photographs of Kerouac and her, apparently taken at night in New York City. One shows Kerouac leaning against a lamp-post with Joyce in the background (she is out of focus, so you need to know it's her to identify her), another has Kerouac squatting in front of the lamp-post (Joyce is not in this picture at all) with a busy luminous background of neon signs and moving cars...

Joyce was Kerouac's girlfriend at the time when On the Road first appeared and she went with Kerouac to buy the newspapers and read the first reviews of the novel in the early editions on the day of the novel's release. It would be nice to think the photo set was shot on that occasion, but I doubt that was really the case. Joyce went on to write a memoir about her life with Jack, called Minor Characters (1983), and she has also written a play based on letters exchanged between herself and Kerouac.

The photos below were taken by Jerome Yulsman for Globe Photos, Inc., and cannot be dated more precisely than late 1950s (post 1957, pre-break-up with Joyce):

Joyce describes in her article how Kerouac was ill-prepared for the fame and the attendent media frenzy that came with On the Road's success. Kerouac eventually sought refuge on the West Coast and during one of his stays with Carolyn Cassady, the wife of Neal Cassady (the hero of On the Road) and occasional lover of Kerouac, she took a serene snapshot of Kerouac in an easy chair, reading. Note the unlaced, but not discarded hiking boots. Kerouac was, as ever, ready for that 'one fast move and I'm gone'...

While actually whipping On the Road into what the publishers thought was an acceptable shape Kerouac lived a few months in Orlando, Florida. The house he lived in is now a writers' retreat where one can stay as a writer in residence for a few months. After On the Road came out a local photographer did some work for a piece in Time Magazine on the newly famous resident. One very nice shot has surfaced on the web, showing Kerouac among oranges on the back steps of the house with a cat on his lap.

Jack Kerouac on steps at Clouser St.: Orange County Regional History Center, from images by Orlando photographer Fred DeWitt.

Another rarely seen Orlando picture shows Jack with his suitcase, getting ready to leave his sister and brother-in-law's house after a 1959 visit. Note the caption in Swedish in the upper right-hand corner of the image. This may be a photo taken in connection with the collaboration Kerouac did with photographer Robert Frank on a book called simply The Americans...

As Kerouac grew more and more weary of his role as King of the Beats, his alcoholism deepened. Not surprisingly many of the sixties photos of Jack show him in bars or other public places, often clearly intoxicated.

One such picture, Bert Glinn's photo for Magnum, shows Kerouac partying among the folkies at the 7 Arts Café in Greenwich Village, 1959:

A similar picture, but of rather more cultural interest, shows Kerouac with a group of close friends at an undisclosed New York diner. The group features Allen Ginsberg, far right; Greg Corso, who is only represented via the back of his head; David Amram, who has his mouth open (Amram is a musician who frequently collaborated w. Kerouac and who was involved in the film project Pull My Daisy); and - most interestingly - New York School painter and poet, Larry Rivers, seen in profile, wearing a suit (as the only one present)...

This photo, and several others from the same day (in connection with the shooting of the film Pull My Daisy) was taken by John Cohen (who also took the famous 1959 shot of Kerouac listening to himself on the radio)...

But, let's close on a note of up-beat youth and bucolic idyl, with Walter Lehrman's amazing picture of a radiant, yet pensive Jack, anticipating his summer as a fire lookout in the Cascades, 1956:

What's up with Marilyn reading Ulysses?

A few months ago I started keeping a Tumblr log where I post pictures and texts that I find interesting - no particular agenda, no particularly explicit aesthetics. It is a strangely addictive activity - much more so than regular blogging, in fact... I am long since past 600 posts on the Tumblr.

Among the many pictures I have posted is one taken by Eve Arnold, a highly respected Magnum photographer, showing Marilyn Monroe reading a bound edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. The photo is more than 50 years old and there is a respectable amount of scholarship on the image, both from within Joyce-studies (the best is probably Richard Brown's essay in Joyce and Popular Culture, "Marilyn Reading Ulysses: Goddess or Post-Cultural Cyborg?" ) and from the wider field of cultural studies (see Thomas Rasmussen's design studies essay, or Kim Q. Hall's disability studies essay from 2002 in NWSA Journal, which comments on an art-work inspired by the photo, Barbara Bloom's piece Playboy in Braille). My own interest stems from my work on Monroe as an American icon, and let's face it, it is interesting to see an icon read a canonical work of literature! Not least when an (over)eroticized icon reads a notoriously 'dirty' book... All this, however, has been well covered by scholarship as well as more popular accounts (such as the recent book Women Seeing Women: A Pictorial History of Women's Photography from Julia Margaret Cameron to Annie Leibovitz; or the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine - blogged about here) over the last 15 years.

The connection that made me post the image was that in 2006 the English newspaper, The Guardian, had asked authors to choose their favourite image of a woman reading, and Jeanette Winterson had picked the Arnold photo. Winterson writes:

This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It’s not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her.

Arnold in fact was quite friendly with Marilyn and took many pictures of her over a number of years, including several rather private images from the home on Long Island Monroe shared with her then husband, playwright Arthur Miller. Arnold also tells all sorts of candid anecdotes about Marilyn and her balancing a vulnerable personality with a larger than life public persona (see this lovely review of Arnold's book Film Journal in New Statesman, and another in The Guardian).

A few weeks ago I added a site meter to my Tumblr, just out of curiosity as to whether anyone at all was reading my stuff. I advise against doing this - stats are also horribly addictive and you begin to wonder who these people are that keep returning to your site from Mountain View, California or Portugal, Armenia or Malaysia... Shortly after adding my site meter I had a red letter day in my stats, featuring almost 400 unique visitors on one day. This was pretty flabbergasting, and I tried to figure out why and what these people were looking for or at. I soon discovered that my Marilyn post had been 'found' by one of the main users of StumbleUpon, the well-known web bookmarks-sharing site. Her write-up seemed to generate 85-90 % of the traffic on my Tumblr as referrals almost all came from there...

So far, so good - however the StumbleUpon thing was already a couple of weeks old when I got the peak traffic, and over the next two weeks I have had other peaks of 300+ visits, sometimes even on a Tuesday. I can only conclude that people are dying to see Marilyn, and that when they have seen this sexy picture of her they all tell their friends in Kansas, Wisconsin, Malaysia, Armenia and other outposts of civilization to go see it too. There haven't been any new reviews of the Marilyn post on StumbleUpon for a couple of weeks, so I don't know exactly what drives them - not novelty, anyway...

I am, of course, happy that people want to visit my Tumblr, but I realize that this bubble will never last. And I am less happy that out of 600+ posts, the Marilyn one gets all the attention. But that's life...

Never having been one to shy away from whoring for attention, I have tried to post other good Marilyn pictures on the Tumblr - to no avail since they have not been picked up - sorry, 'stumbled upon' - by one of the star endorsers on the top 24 of full-time nerds who do nothing but stumble around the web. I actually rather think I would like to become one such myself, time allowing...

Anyhoo, knowing that almost no-one reads this blog I have decided to go for more attention by publishing no less than 3 Eve Arnold photos of Marilyn in one post. One never knows how many lonely college boys from Missoula, Montana that might attract...

Lisbon conference in images

A few informal images from the recent Lisbon event:

The 25th International Literature and Psychology Conference



The Gordons (Jan & David) and myself enjoying a post-conference glass of Port.



Sherry Zivley and myself at one of Lisbon's many miradores (Roslyn Ko w. her back turned)



Me on a bench, as usual (random Lisbon gossip girls next to me).

Camelia with the Dons: Manuel and Norm

Jeff Berman and myself at Cascais.



Me at Cabo da Roca (I love West Coasts!!!!)



Another Gordon (Andy, our head honcho) in a good mood...



Rainer Kaus and myself in Belem, ready to navigate the world...

Camelia surveying the field...

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- Till next year in Viterbo, Italy!

Upcoming conferences: Icons and Caddies

Next week will be a busy academic whirlwind tour of two Nordic capitals for me: Helsinki and Oslo. The two main American Studies events of the year are crammed together as consecutive conferences: The Renvall Institute's Helsinki do, The Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference, has reached instalment no. 12 in its fine run (it will be my third time around as a participant). The theme is always broad and this year is no exception: North America - Relations and relationships. My contribution is about the cultural importance of one specific, iconic brand of car: The Cadillac...

I approach this broad topic from a cultural text studies point of view, investigating how the cars are represented as markers of specific identity positions within specific difference hierarchies:

The Cadillac car has long featured in the American imagination as a signifier of cool masculinity, mastery of the road, financial surplus and a predilection for luxury and comfort (cf. the lyrics to ‘Cadillac Man’, quoted below). I propose to analyze a number of cultural texts that construct, establish and eventually subvert these connotations. I am particularly interested in constructions of race and sexual orientation utilizing the vehicle of the Cadillac. Texts to be analyzed include Jack Kerouac’s “fag Cadillac” in On the Road, rock singer and performer Mink DeVille, the persona of James ‘Thunder’ Early (played by Eddie Murphy) in the 2006 movie Dreamgirls, and various rock ‘n’ roll lyrics featuring comparisons of Fords and Caddies…

Well I’m the king of the road
Ain’t got no place to go, no place I call home
Seen the world from behind this old wheel
Driving away from those feelings I feel

- Cadillac Man

After a few days in Finland we'll relocate to Norway for the big European American Studies event under the auspices of the EAAS. Here my presentation is in connection with my on-going project on American Icons, more specifically some icons of transgression, associated with the 1960s. I'll give a paper on two celeb-criminals, two very different cultural texts, Patty Hearst and Charles Manson:

All iconic representations of actual persons (living or dead) are caught in a dichotomy between elements of normality/familiarity and elements of transgression. Manipulation of representations of celebrities or famous persons into hero- or other-images can either constitute adversarial or collaborative icon work. In adherence with the conference theme of “E Pluribus Unum or E Pluribus Plura” it would be interesting to examine iconic images that are meant to be particularly transgressive of normality and challenge stereotypical images of American wholesomeness. I propose to look at specific collaborative, yet provocative representations of two 1960s icons of transgression: Charles Manson and Patty Hearst, and to analyze how these particular images simultaneously stylize and sacralize these counterculture (anti)heroes, turning the viewer of the icons from passive consumers into ardent worshippers, consumers or cultural agnostics, all according to our ideas regarding the subjects and symbols in question. The images are reproduced below:

The Rebbe Sues

It seems ethnicity and commercials is a hot topic these days. Waves are still high over LeBron James allegedly being cast as 'King Kong' in Annie Leibovitz' April 2008 Vogue cover (see my recent post on this), and now the wires report that Woody Allen has decided to sue American Apparel over their allegedly unauthorized use of his likeness on commercial billboards in New York and L.A. in May 2007. What is particularly interesting about this, not in itself very unusual instance of an American celebrity engaging in the US national pastime of litigation, is that the billboards in question show Allen in costume from a scene in Annie Hall, his celebrated 1977 film, playing a Hasidic rabbi, complete with hat, full beard and ringlet tresses.

This scene from the movie is set at an Easter dinner which Woody's character is sharing with the Hall family (Here is the complete dialogue). Granny Hall's penetrating gaze 'others' Allen's character and the Hasidic stereotype is his character as seen by her "classic Jew hater"-eyes. Woody does all he can to adapt, even complementing Granny's cooking: "It's dynamite ham." Annie Hall is often considered Allen's best and wittiest film, full as it is of his trade-mark self-deprecating humour which often plays on the audience's stereotypical expectations of expressions of Jewishness.

What, then, might have possessed American Apparel, and their CEO, Dov Charney (a self-professed "Jewish hustler" - incisively profiled in this NYT piece) to use the stereotypically disguised Allen character on their billboards, complete with Yiddish writing in Hebrew letters: "Der Heilicker Rebbe" (The Holy Rabbi/Teacher)? Bloggers were intrigued already last year when the billboards made their first appearance - first in N.Y (on Allen St. of all places, indicating perhaps the jokey quality of the image!), then in a Latino quarter of L.A. - esp. when the commercials then rapidly disappeared again.

Dakota speculated on Curbed LA:

Also, founder Dov Charney is Jewish. Is it some Jewish-only hipster call? What a mystery. But better than pimply-faced teens, oops, legal-age models. Nice job, American Apparel. We hope Woody-as-a-rabbi helps you sell a lot of tube socks.

Daniel Treiman reported for the Jewish Daily Forward:

American Apparel founder Dov Charney is notorious for ads featuring scantily clad young women modeling his company’s clothes while striking provocative poses. Now, it appears, he’s found religion — or at least he’s found the appropriate rebbe: Woody Allen. Responding to an inquiry from the Forward, Alex Spunt of American Apparel explained, “Woody Allen is our spiritual leader.” But the feeling may not have been mutual. Within a week, both billboards were gone. American Apparel did not respond to a second request for comment, but the speculation in the blogosphere is that the clothing company didn’t secure permission to use the Woody Allen image. How it must sting when a rebbe spurns his Hasidim!

On BeliefNet Esther had a nifty analysis of the image on the billboard and its cultural narrative:

AA's target customers are probably too young to really know Woody Allen. But in New York, where everyone's a film expert and a vaguely Jewish neurosis seems to permeate daily life, Woody Allen may in fact be a spiritual leader of sorts. He elevates New York City as some sort of cinematic heaven, illuminating the life in different neighborhoods (most notably the Upper East Side). He shocks us with comedic human truths in his films and with scandalous behavior in his personal life. And even if we're appalled, we accept it because that's his particular genius. He's our Woody, and we laugh even if we wince, because we love him even if we hate him. By invoking the Woodman, AA's message may be that it doesn't matter how other people see you. Just be who you are.

Gawker responds to the news of the suit with horrible Woody images photoshopped into American Apparel underwear products.

The New York Post has this report on the suit in inimitable tabloid style, its headline reading: "Oh, No Jew Don't" - which goes to show that there are both kosher puns and distinctly hammy ones out there...

From my perspective the commercial is interesting as it constitutes a borderline case between collaborative and adversarial icon-work. Its indeterminable layers of irony become entangled in the interpretation the viewer reads into the image. Esther, for instance, sees it as cool and a clear homage to Allen who indeed to her is an intellectual leader in his capacity as an often imitated jester figure, constantly reminding the gentile-dominated, liberal intelligentsia of their 'others'.

Since the film where the still is taken from shows the power of the gentile gaze to 'other' even a liberal ham-eating Jew into an old-school stereotype, the billboard in a way forces us to see Allen-as-Rebbe as the Jew-haters do. This could be read as a sophisticated manipulation of the viewer into a dangerous situation where we are also prone to be Jew-haters by proxy (esp. if we do not immediately recognize Woody behind the beard)... Yet, this undercover subversion is still collaborative icon-work offering homage to Woody's powers.

Why then was Allen so upset that he sued? It is amusing to note that Allen has filed what is known as a 'trademark suit' - this at least seems to indicate that Woody has no doubts that viewers will recognize his brand (i.e. face) beneath the beard and hat. Woody has a history of suing, so maybe he is just in it for the money, as some newspapers have suggested (again treading perilously close to another cultural stereotype about Jews). Apparently AA had 'forgotten' to clear the property rights to Allen's image before posting the billboards...

Jewlicious has a more adversarial reading of the ad-campaign:

Reached for comment, American Apparel spokeswoman Alexandra Spunt stated “Woody Allen is our spiritual leader and that’s the only statement the company will make on that issue.” I definitely heard snickering in the background. The same billboard also appears on the corner of Sunset and Alvarado in Los Angeles (right next to Burrito King). There’s no telling what the mostly Latino residents of the neighborhood are expected to make of the ad.

A Canadian site, Urbanphoto, has an outsider's cooler view, analysing the ad accurately as kitsch, in effect transcending the adversarial/collaborative dichotomy:

On American Apparel’s website, the company declares its devotion to “people, places and things that surround us” with photos of everyday streetlife in Hong Kong, signs in Montreal and mid-century architecture like Habitat ‘67. (Sound familiar?) This is a company with a heightened awareness of kitsch, and a passion for kitsch is what is driving a large part of our current urban culture. That might explain why, even though many people seem repulsed by American Apparel, even more are attracted to it.

This view implicitly points to kitsch, or camp as Susan Sontag labelled this transgressive cultural strategy, being a postmodern strategy using the post-ironic, flat form of pastiche, or blank parody, as pointed social commentary.

It's a twofer: it sells underwear - and the customer laughs at the in-joke while swiping his credit card.

Beauty and Beast?

A strange and unexpected development means that an addendum to my post on Annie Leibovitz seems due. It appears Vogue (and therefore indirectly Leibovitz, who shot the offending image) is taking some flak over the cover image of the April 2008 issue which is themed to pitch superstars of sports together with supermodels (a somewhat bizarre choice of theme, but I guess one that plays into twin American obsessions: strength and beauty). Apparently certain viewers of the cover image of James LeBron and Gisele Bündchen think that the representation of LeBron is stereotyping him as a monstrous specimen of black masculinity, or downright denigrating his humanity by portraying him with a facial expression which they read as rage-filled and frustrated and showing him as holding Bündchen in much the same way that King Kong is remembered to have done when "man"handling Fay Wray...

This snippet from FOX Sports is representative of the criticism:

But the image is stirring up controversy, with some commentators decrying the photo as perpetuating racial stereotypes. James strikes what some see as a gorilla-like pose, baring his teeth, with one hand dribbling a ball and the other around Bundchen's tiny waist. It's an image some have likened to "King Kong" and Fay Wray. "It conjures up this idea of a dangerous black man," said Tamara Walker, 29, of Philadelphia.

Magazine analyst Samir Husni believes the photo was deliberately provocative, adding that it "screams King Kong." Considering Vogue's influential history, he said, covers are not something that the magazine does in a rush. "So when you have a cover that reminds people of King Kong and brings those stereotypes to the front, black man wanting white woman, it's not innocent," he said.

If nothing else, Walker said the cover underscores the need for a more diverse workplace. "If more people of color worked for Vogue in positions of editorial authority, perhaps someone in the room might have been able to read the image the way so many of us are reading it now, and had the power to do something about it," she said.

Walker and Husni to me seem to be typical of ethnic minority representatives who are prone to read specific ethnic narratives into mainstream material. One sees similar tendencies in other academic disciplines where queer academics often live to read queer narratives into canonical literature such as Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw". Such interventions are often extremely enlightening, but one should always be alert to the difference discourse hierarchies that are produced by such interventions.

To illustrate, I would propose that an equally important narrative regarding gender ideology could be read into the cover image. Why is Gisele reduced to an object for handling by the active male subject, barely more important than the basketball he is dribbling with his right hand? Are we to take it that LeBron's right hand partner is the ball - the handling of which is the key to his multimillion dollar earnings, whereas Gisele is his left-hand squeeze, the morganatic wife that all kings (also those of the NBA, where LeBron goes by the moniker King James) can afford to keep along with their other trophies (A morganatic wife. Defined by Captain Francis Grose in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) as: ' A concubine; an allusion to an ancient German custom, according to which, when a man married his concubine, or a woman greatly his inferior, he gave her his left hand.' )

The other images in the Vogue spread can also be experienced online. They feature speed skater Apolo Ohno and supermodel Doutzen Kroes, snowboarder Shaun White and model Daria Werbowy, as well as swimmer Michael Phelps and model Carole Trentini. Of these pairings Ohno is of course an Asian-American, but he is diminutive of stature and does not pose in anything approaching a threatening manner. Phelps, while big, is portrayed as an elegant aquaman throughout, and Shaun White gives new meaning to the idea of the petite male... The final pairing is more parallel to LeBron/Bündchen, pitching discus thrower Jared Rome with Raquel Zimmerman. One image - titled 'Crouching Tiger' has Rome 'bench-pressing' Zimmerman over his shoulders. This image tells the same gender specific story as the controversial one, but because there is no inter-racial dynamics in it, there have been no comments regarding this shot.

One can perhaps see more about Leibovitz's intentions behind the cover tableau by watching the so-called behind-the-scenes Diary at Vogue's web-site... Certainly the interview with Bündchen and James depicts them as equals - and they make it very clear that only one person was the boss at the shoot: Leibovitz, who literally made them jump through hoops for her...

One can also read the cover story on-line here...

Photo copyright Annie Leibovitz

Leibovitz documentary

This is an excellent PBS documentary on master photographer, Annie Leibovitz.

The program follows her to a number of spectacular photo-shoots on location, on tour with rock stars and in the studios of ballet and dance greats such as Mark Morris - but it also traces her family history, and her involvement with Rolling Stone magazine, Vanity Fair, and Vogue (all her editors are interviewed, but the footage of RS founder Jann Wenner is the most interesting). Many cult figures and celebrities appear in the film's historic clips, or are interviewed - including Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, Mikhail Baryshnikov etc.

The site PBS has set up for the movie is superb. Here is the beginning of the feature essay:

Born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, Annie Leibovitz enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute intent on studying painting. It was not until she traveled to Japan with her mother the summer after her sophomore year that she discovered her interest in taking photographs. When she returned to San Francisco that fall, she began taking night classes in photography. Time spent on a kibbutz in Israel allowed her to hone her skills further.

A particularly moving segment is dedicated to her relationship with Susan Sontag, but we also get the view point of her mother, her sisters (one of whom, Barbara Leibovitz directed the doc.), and her daughters...

Leibovitz met Susan Sontag in 1989 while photographing the writer for her book AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS. "I remember going out to dinner with her and just sweating through my clothes because I thought I couldn't talk to her," Leibovitz said in an interview with THE NEW YORK TIMES late last year. Sontag told her, "You're good, but you could be better." Though the two kept separate apartments, their relationship lasted until Sontag's death in late 2004.

Be sure to also click on the Gallery link to see samples of Leibovitz' best shots. I particularly dig her portrait work (Sontag, fx.), but Sting as a mud-man and Whoopie Goldberg immersed in milk are also cool!

More superb Leibovitz work here from The New York Times (essay by Sontag can be accessed from there too)...