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.
-
-
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.”
Show this thread -
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
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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).
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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
Show this thread -
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/ …
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
Whatever they rationalize as representative of freedom because it is being repressed somewhere else...AE is freedom painting, jazz is music of freedom, etc.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
Was just looking at this: https://tinyurl.com/yaw64kk4 , which is a link to the Amazon page for _Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (New American Canon)_ by Eric Bennett. Apropos.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
Jazz is surely not a " popular" form. I don't want to say it is an " elite" art form. But it is certainly not a " popular form" in the sense in which R&B, rap, reggae, country, rock etc are.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.