1. I have a few thoughts on the CIA, literary modernism, abstract expressionism, Nina Simone, heavy metal music, torture podcasting, and, for old times sake, Jack Kirby.
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4.The podcast "Winds of Change" usefully traces the history of CIA cultural policy back to the early days of the Cold War. As with the Olympics & the space race, the USA was in a prestige competition with the USSR & was willing to spend big (covertly) on the arts
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5. The CIA had an aesthetic as well as an ideology. There was a telling difference between how it treated arts like literature & painting as against music. With lit & painting, it supposed high modernism, with music it embraced popular forms (jazz, blues, & maybe Heavy Metal).
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6. The CIA's main cultural policy was very high-brow: lit mags like The Paris Review & abstract expressionist gallery shows. According to Richard Ellman, one plan was for “T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets be translated into Russian and dropped by airplane all over the Soviet Union.”
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7. The highbrow approach came partially from fact that early CIA was headed by Ivy League blue bloods like James Jesus Angleton, head of counterintelligence who had edited at Yale a magazine that published Ezra Pound & e.e. cummings.pic.twitter.com/ikeC2sqpDo
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8. Angleton had been trained in the technique of close reading taught by the New Critics to understand modernism & he applied it with viciously in the torture program he ran interrogating Soviet defectors, using violence to pry out hidden meaning.
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9. With music, the CIA eschewed high modernism, rejecting the experimental works of Milton Babbitt & John Cage. Instead, they suborned Louis Armstrong (via the State Department) and Nina Simone (unwittingly recruited by a CIA front organization to perform in Nigeria).
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10. The preference for popular genres in music (as against literature & painting) was motivated by racial politics. Sponsoring Armstrong & Simone was a way to combat the idea America was racist & make an appeal to decolonized peoples in Africa & Asia.
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11. Music -- primarily African-American music -- was the CIA's gateway into popular culture, opening the door to later adventures like using a front to recruit Jack Kirby for a fake sci-fi movie to be shot in Iran (Argo). Here's some of Kirby's never used set designpic.twitter.com/ypPpyek83r
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12. Some more thoughts on the CIA's cultural policy here (and go listen to the Winds of Change podcast -- it's great).https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/wind-of-change-cia/ …
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End of conversation
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I don't know if "Winds of Change" was written by the CIA, but I wouldn't be surprised if this podcast was produced by it. It's like a commercial for the CIA. "See, we're cool! When we're not overthrowing governments for the United Fruit Company, we're writing power ballads!"
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