|
Five Days That Shook The World:
The Battle for Seattle
and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
with Photos
by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published on February 18
BEAST IN GOLD
BRAID:
GENERAL PINOCHET
The General Turns
Out to Be a Coward.
When Police Knock
at His Door and Threatended to Slap Cuffs on him, Pinochet Fainted
EMINEM:
A Hired Gun from the
Poor Part of Town, Who Preys on the
Powerless, Extorts
Money from the Poor
and Celebrates a
Thuggish Brand of
Gangster Capitalism
BOVE OF MILLAU:
If There's One Organizer
Symbolizing the Worldwide Counterattack on Corporate Agriculture
It's Jose Bove
Published on January 30
THE TERRORIST'S
RETURN:
THE CRIMES OF SHARON
From Qibya to
Beirut:
Ariel Sharon's
Bloody Record
FAKING IT
Democrats Roll
Over on Ashcroft
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
They All Love
Anne Veneman
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Gore Gets More
Votes, Doesn't Care
What William Carlos
Williams Really
Thought About
The Beats
Published on January 15
BUSH PUTSCH
OKAYED
BY SENATE DEMS AND
BLESSED BY SUPREMES
More Scandals
of Squelched
Black Votes
Outside Florida
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
Nixon Protege Rumsfled
Returns
to Pentagon as
the Keeper of
the Trough
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Russia Nukes Itself
Deregulation in
Airlines and Energy
Search CounterPunch
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore: a User's Manual
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the Press
by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
New Stories:
CounterPunch Coverage
of Election 2000
|
February 22, 2001
Giuliani as Pope
Julius II?
Hail to the Mayor
By Alexander Cockburn
Has art ever had a more gallant champion
than Mayor Rudy Giuliani? We cannot as yet set him beside Pope
Julius II as a patron of the arts, but give the man time. The
only danger is that by the stridency of his onslaught on the
Brooklyn Museum's latest, rather feeble blasphemy against the
dignity of The Last Supper, Mayor Rudy may be devaluing the effect
of his comminations.
"Disgusting, outrageous
and anti-Catholic," was the over-heated mayoral outburst
about "Yo Mama's Last Supper", a fifteen-foot photographic
panel by Renee Cox depicting a naked black woman as Christ, surrounded
by twelve white guys. The piece was shown in a church in Venice
(Italy) in 1999, apparently without arousing any fuss. The same
thing happened in Ridgefield, Connecticut, at the Aldrich Museum
of Contemporary Arts. Nobody cared. It just shows how lucky the
Brooklyn Museum is to have Rudy as its flack.
Renee Cox and her
photographic panel, Yo Mama's Last Supper.
Anyway, what was the mayor's problem?
That Christ was black; that he was getting in touch of his feminine
side? Or that somehow it somehow reminded the mayor of the scorned
and abandoned Mrs Giuliani's recent flirtation with the Vagina
Monologues. The Mayor could always strike back with His or Its
side of the story in the presumably forthcoming Penis Monologues,
starring Bill Clinton and other notables, assuming they don't
decline to testify on grounds of self-incrimination.
The local New York press has
been derisive about the mayor's roars and threats to block any
public funding to the Brooklyn Museum, but talk from the New
York Times or Daily News about First Amendment rights is hypocritical
in the extreme, given the stance of these newpapers on smut.
The New York Times has been
at the forefront of a drive to rid midtown of sex stores, thus
enhancing the value of its own real estate. And here's an editorial
outburst from the Daily News at the start of this year: "The
city is still plagued by 142 pornographic video stores, topless
bars and other X-rated businesses - 73 in Manhattan, 42 in Queens,
14 in Brooklyn, nine in the Bronx and four on Staten Island.
In the past two years, the Giuliani administration has padlocked
dozens of porn shops and dragged their owners into court. But
once there, tenacious smutlords and their lawyers have been able
to find enough wiggle room in the city's zoning rules to stay
in business and continue blighting neighborhoods."
The News's beef was that the
number of "smut shops" had only been reduced by two
since the Mayor embarked on his anti-porn rampage. On January
3 of this year The News's editorialist cheered Giuliani's renewed
efforts to shut down the crafty operators of porn video stores
who've been trying "to pass themselves off as straight businesses
by putting a few spaghetti westerns and kung-fu movies on the
shelf." How about that for respect for freedom of expression?
A few weeks
ago I found myself at a small theater in SoHo, attending what
had been billed to me as a recreation of Weimar and the world
of Sally Bowles. This same Sally Bowles, as first created in
a short story by Christopher Isherwood, then in "I Am A
Camera", a stage version that transmuted into Cabaret, was
based on Jean Ross, my father's second wife, a charming woman.
So I've always taken an interest in the fictional versions of
her time in Berlin.
The production in SoHo turned
out to have nothing to do with Berlin and everything to do with
Giuliani, since the strippers ousted from gainful employment
in their usual premises were regrouping under the banner of Art.
In fact it was a big relief not to listen to pastiche songs in
the manner of Kurt Weill. It was the night of the much heralded
snow storm that menaced New York the day of George Bush's inauguration,
so the audience of six was heavily outnumbered by the strippers.
The acts were okay, though not particularly rousing. The star
of the evening didn't take off so much as a petticoat, being
a magician who, since we're on the subject of Weill, looked
slightly like Lotte Lenya in her cameo appearance as the KGB
officer in From Russia With Love. She ogled the sparse audience
gloriously as she bumbled her way through her tricks.
Jean Ross was a gentle, cultivated and
very beautiful woman, not a bit like the vulgar vamp displayed
by Lisa Minelli. Jean died before her time at the age of 62.
Her daughter Sarah, my half sister, wrote wonderful detective
stories under the name Sarah Caudwell: among them The Shortest
Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder, Thus Was Adonis Murdered
and, posthumously published, The Sibyl in Her Grave. Before she
turned to crime Sarah was a barrister, and a very good one.
She used to negotiate my contracts with Verso and I'd pay her
by taking her to lunch at the Ritz. As in any other venue she'd
light up her pipe, then when waiters rushed up to protest, fling
the thing into her handbag, from which smoke would soon begin
to wreathe our table.
Sarah felt strongly about Isherwood's
use of her mother, and  wrote a piece about it in the British
weekly, The New Statesman, in the mid-Eighties. Her mother Jean,
she wrote, never liked Goodbye to Berlin, nor felt a sense of
identity with the character of Sally Bowles, which in many respects
she thought more closely modeled on one of Isherwood's male friends.
(His homosexuality could not at that time be openly admitted.)"
Sarah's point was that Isherwood,
supposedly so avant garde, was actually very conventional: "The
convention does not permit an attractive young woman to have
much in the way of intellectual accomplishments, and Isherwood
follows it loyally. There is nothing in his portrait of Sally
to suggest that she might have had any genuine ability as an
actress, still less as a writer. My mother, on the other hand,
was at least talented enough as an actress to be cast as Anitra
in Max Reinhardt's production of Peer Gynt and competent enough
as a writer to earn her living, not long afterwards, as a scenario-writer
and journalist
"Above all, the convention
requires that a woman must be either virtuous (in the sexual
sense) or a tart. So Sally, who is plainly not virtuous, must
be a tart To depend for a living on providing sexual pleasure,
whether or not in the context of marriage, seemed to [Jean] the
ultimate denial of freedom and emancipation. The idea so deeply
repelled her that she simply could not, I think, have been attracted
to a man who was rich, or allied herself permanently to anyone
less incorrigibly impecunious than my father. She did not see
the question as one of personal morality, but as a political
one."
The pipe smoking did in Sarah in the
end, presumably causing the cancer in her esophagus that killed
her at the age of 60, last year. I knew her best at Oxford in
the early sixties where she intrigued successfully to have women
admitted to the Oxford Union. She was always exclaiming about
so-and-so's "wonderful profile", pursuing dons with
this particular asset. One don was known for watching television
and Sarah, amid the ashes of her love, sent him this verse:
I cast aside my modesty,
I laid aside my shame
And on my knees I offered love or something much the same.
You brushed my powder from your sleeve, with elegant precision
And murmured: 'Conversation is killing television.' CP
|