Taboo: Time and belief in exotica

Representations

Volumn 103, Issue , 2008, Pages 107-135

  Ford, Phil ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Cold war; Cold war culture; Counterculture; Exotica; Primitivism; Spectacle

Indexed keywords

EID: 57749138109     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2008.103.1.107     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York, 1996), 124-25
2. Gary Snyder, "Nanao's Poems," preface to Nanao Sakaki, Real Play (Santa Fe, NM, 1981), unpaginated. For biographical material on Sakaki, see Nanao or Never: Nanao Sakaki Walks Earth A, ed. Gary Lawless (Nobleboro, ME, 2000)
3. Keir Keightley has pointed out how consistently 1950s advertisements and cartoons represented the hi-fi experience as one of immersion, in which the listener is transported out of domestic space and into a variety of virtual environments; Keir Keightley, "'Turn It Down!' She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948-59," Popular Music 15, no. 2 (May 1996): 149-77
4. Timothy D. Taylor, "Men, Machines, and Music in the Space-Age 1950s," in Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture (New York, 2001), 72-95; Leydon, "Utopias of the Tropics," 69
5. Lew Welch, "Final City," San Francisco Orach 12, February 1968, 24
6. This trope still resounds in science fiction - for example in Ursula LeGuin's 1985 novel Always Coming Home, in which a tribal society lives in peaceful coexistence with a computer system that has developed into a parallel intelligent species and has now taken upon itself the Faustian mission of interstellar conquest. Ursula LeGuin, Always Coming Home (New York, 1985). And this same trope is the dominant mood in hiphop's Afro-futurism, which in turn owes much to Sun Ra and George Clinton, who represent their homemade mythologies as a return of the lost wisdom of black ancestors by way of outer space. See especially the documentary The Last Angel of History, which discusses Afro-futurism in much the same terms as I have used to describe exotica; John Akomfrah, The Last Angel of History (New York, 1996), VHS videocassette
7. Shuhei Hosokawa, "Martin Denny and the Development of Musical Exotica," in Hayward, Widening the Horizon, 90
8. Leydon, "Utopias of the Tropics," 48
9. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York, 1996), 99-145
10. Neither the New Left nor the counterculture was solely responsible for the 1960s' unique fusion of myth and political theory. And, in any event, after 1967 they were increasingly hard to tell apart: while debates about "cultural" versus "political" modes of resistance raged in counterculture and New Left publications, a political philosophy that placed culture at the front of its understanding of oppression could never keep the two separate in theory or practice. For a good overview of the tensions between political and cultural factions of the Movement - and how those tensions have been rendered in historical writings - see Doug Rossinow, "The New Left in the Counterculture: Hypotheses and Evidence," Radical History Review 67 (Winter 1997): 79-120. While books on 1960s radical movements have multiplied in recent years, the best single meditation on the complicated relations between the Movement's "political" and "cultural" factions is perhaps still Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, 2nd ed. (New York, 1993)
11. Leydon, "Utopias of the Tropics," 69
12. Albin Zak, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Berkeley, 2001), 26-27
13. Michael Harrington, "We Few, We Happy Few, We Bohemians," Esquire 78, no. 2 (1972): 162
14. The idea of camp as "failed seriousness" is owed to Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp," Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (1964): 515-30
15. Leslie A. Fiedler, "The New Mutants," Partisan Review 32, no. 4 (1965): 505-25
16. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (New York, 1969), 14-16
17. Susan Sontag, "What's Happening in America," in Styles of Radical Will (New York, 1969), 202-3
18. One of best analyses of this critique can be read in Fred Turner, "The Whole Earth Catalog as Information Technology," in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago, 2006), 69-102. Turner's superb study of the techno-libertarian side of the Movement is relevant to this essay in a number of ways, particularly in the connection it makes between the Movement critique of consciousness and a social vision in which computer technology permits the return of an archaic communal way of life
19. The classic analysis along these lines was Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (New York, 1970), which coined the term "Consciousness III."
20. Steve Levine, "The Be-In," San Francisco Oracle 6 (February 1967), 9
21. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York, 2003), 71
22. They were not the first to adapt Indian music to rock, though; see Jonathan Bellman, "Indian Resonances in the British Invasion, 1965-1968," Journal of Musicology 15, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 116-36
23. Ed Sanders, inside front cover illustration, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts 5, no. 8 (1965)
24. Greil Marcus, "American Classical Music," San Francisco Express Times 2, no. 12, 25 March 1969, 5
25. Greil Marcus, The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes [formerly Invisible Republic] (New York, 1997), 124-25
26. Allen Cohen, "The San Francisco Oracle: A Brief History," in The San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition: The Psychedelic Newspaper of the Haight-Ashbury 1966-1968, ed. Allen Cohen (Berkeley, 1991), xxxiii
27. Mike Barnes, Captain Beefheart: The Biography (New York, 2002), 105
28. Lester Bangs, Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, ed. John Mortland (New York, 2003), 191
29. Greil Marcus, Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (New York, 1996), 67
30. For a philosophical account of how such "accidents" become compositional elements within rock's autographic ontology, see Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, NC, 1996)
31. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (New York, 2000), 92
32. Philip Deloria, "Counterculture Indians and the New Age," in Imagine Nation, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York, 2002), 183. Deloria's fine article traces the dissonance between American Indian life and the bricolage of exotic symbols that commune-dwellers used to create their alternate reality
33. John Sinclair, "The White Panther State/Meant," in Guitar Army, 103-5. Jeff Hale believes the portfolio designations of the WPP ("Minister of Defense," "Minister of Religion," etc.) were put-ons. Jeff A. Hale, "The White Panthers' 'Total Assault on the Culture,'" in Braunstein and Doyle, Imagine Nation, 125-56. The memories of WPP veterans suggest otherwise, though; see Leslie Brody, Red Star Sister: Between Madness and Utopia (St. Paul, 1999). And in any event the WPP "ministries" stayed open for years, to be filled by various people as members were arrested, were driven underground, or drifted away
34. Scott Dikkers et al., Our Dumb Century (New York, 1999), 118
35. Leydon, "Utopias of the Tropics," 48. Postwar Hollywood films about Japan similarly positioned their conventionalized exotic representations within a rhetoric of authenticity; see W. Anthony Sheppard, "Representing the Authentic: Tak Shindo's 'Exotic Sound' and Japanese American History," Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 6, no. 2 (Fall 2004), http://www.echo.ucla.edu/ volume6-issue2/sheppard/ sheppard2.html
36. Sharon Mazer, Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (Jackson, MS., 1998), 6-7
37. Roland Barthes, "The World of Wrestling," in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 15
38. Roland Barthes, "The Romans in Films," in Mythologies, 26
39. Private conversation with Heather Hadlock. The connection between operatic and exotica modes of spectacle and spectatorship is suggested by their shared place of honor in the queer avant-garde of which Smith was a founding figure. Charles Ludlam, the most prolific and celebrated playwright to emerge from the "Theatre of the Ridiculous" that Smith helped create, also worked as a librettist and opera director and wrote two major plays on operatic themes: Galas and Der Ring Gott Farblonjet. His love of opera, like Smith's love of Montez's jungle movies, came from an appreciation of its "shameless theatricality"; See Charles Ludlam, "Opera," in Ridiculous Theater: Scourge of Human Folly: The Essays and Opinions of Charles Ludlam (New York, 1992), 201-8. Ludlam and Smith were the leading exponents of what might be called an avant-garde of moldy theatricalism; for an overview of their theatrical milieu, see Stephen J. Bottoms, Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off Broadway Movement (Ann Arbor, 2004)
40. Jack Smith, "The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez," Film Culture 27 (Winter 1962-63): 28
41. Something of this divided and indeterminately compartmentalized notion of truth - and the way it is enabled by participation - is implicit in Luise White's understanding of rumor as "an official category for information said to be false, although its tellers believe it while they tell it"; Luise White, "Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History," History and Theory 39 (December 2000): 13
42. Max Black, "The Prevalence of Humbug," in The Prevalence of Humbug, and Other Essays (Ithaca, NY, 1983), 137
43. Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York, 1965), 58-59
44. Don Fabun, "Stranger in a Strange Land," Kaiser Aluminum News 27, no. 1 (May 1969): 11
45. Laurence Leamer, The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Press (New York, 1972), 49
46. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 54. See also G. A. Cohen, "Deeper into Bullshit," in Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 321-39
47. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969)
48. Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists, or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath (Brooklyn, 2005), 164
49. Some scholars, like John Hutnyk, retain a radical skepticism of any Western appropriation of nonwestern music; others, like Philip Bohlman, argue that the tension between the categories of "world music" and the exotic has lately slackened. See John Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics, and the Culture Industry (London, 2000)
50. Philip Bohlman, "World Music at the 'End of History,'" Ethnomusicology 46, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 1-32
51. This question looms over almost everything written about exotica. Writers always seem to feel compelled to say why they are discussing this music at all, or else to talk about the phenomenon of self-justification itself. See Taylor, Strange Sounds, 97-107
52. Geoffrey O'Brien, "The Return of Burt Bacharach," in Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears (New York, 2004), 12-13
53. Smith, "Maria Montez," 28
54. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington, IN, 1982), vii
55. Smith, "Maria Montez," 32
56. Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York, 1966), 3