W. J. T. Mitchell: Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present

From the University of Chicago Press: The phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies. Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the Star Wars saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable “fronts” of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, Cloning Terror will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.



From Wikipedia: William J. Thomas Mitchell (* 1942) is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is also the editor of Critical Inquiry, and contributes to the journal October. His monographs, Iconology (1986) and Picture Theory (1994), focus on media theory and visual culture. He draws on ideas from Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to demonstrate that, essentially, we must consider pictures to be living things. His collection of essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005) won the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize in 2006.





From the University of Chicago (faculty profile): W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago's prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His publications include: "The Pictorial Turn," Artforum, March 1992; "What Do Pictures Want?" October, Summer 1996; What Do Pictures Want? (2005); The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Picture Theory (1994); Art and the Public Sphere (1993); Landscape and Power (1992); Iconology (1987); The Language of Images (1980); On Narrative (1981); and The Politics of Interpretation (1984).

Jay-Z: Decoded

Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969), better known by his stage name Jay-Z, is an American rapper and businessperson. He is one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs in America having had a net worth of over $450 million in 2010. He has sold approximately 50 million albums worldwide, while receiving ten Grammy Awards for his musical work, and numerous additional nominations. Jay-Z co-owns The 40/40 Club, is part owner of the NBA's New Jersey Nets and is the creator of the clothing line Rocawear. He is the former CEO of Def Jam Recordings, one of the three founders of Roc-A-Fella Records, and the founder of Roc Nation. As an artist, he holds the record for most number one albums by a solo artist on the Billboard 200. Jay-Z also has had four number ones on the Billboard Hot 100, one as lead artist. Along with his financial and musical success, Jay-Z is known for quarreling with other artists in the rap industry, the most famous feud being between him and fellow New York rapper Nas, which was eventually settled in 2005. He married American R&B superstar Beyoncé Knowles on April 4, 2008. On December 11, 2009, Jay-Z was ranked as the 10th most successful artist of the 2000–2009 decade by Billboard Magazine and ranking as the 5th top solo male artist and as the 4th top rapper behind Eminem, Nelly, and 50 Cent. Source: Wikipedia.



Excerpt (Jay-Z on Bono): The writer had asked me about the U2 record that was about to be released and I said something about the kind of pressure a group like that must be under just to meet their own standard. Bono told me that my quote had really gotten to him. In fact, he said it got him a little anxious. He decided to go back to the studio even though the album was already done and keep reworking it till he thought it was as good as it could possibly be.



Excerpt (Jay-Z on assault charges): People kept giving me the same name as the source of the bootlegging. It was someone I knew, someone I never would have suspected. One night I went to Q-Tip's solo album release party and at some point in the night, I ran into the guy everyone's been telling me is behind the bootleg. So I approached him. When I told him what I suspected, to my surprise, he got real loud with me right there in the middle of the club. It was strange. We separated and I went over to the bar. I was sitting there like, 'No the f--- this n---a did not ... " I was talking to people, but I was really talking to myself out loud, just in a state of shock. Before I even realized what I was doing, I headed back over to him, but this time I was blacking out with anger. The next thing I knew, all hell had broken loose in the club. That night the guy went straight to the police and I was charged with assault.

NPR program Fresh Air with Terry Gross featured the author and book on its program in November, 2010. This is what was said on the feature story's webpage:

Long before he sold 50 million records worldwide — and before he appeared alongside Warren Buffett on the cover of Fortune magazine, accumulated 10 Grammy Awards and became the CEO of his own record label — Jay-Z was living with his mom in the Marcy Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, just trying to survive day by day. "It was a very intense and stressful situation," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike." Now 40, Jay-Z hasn't forgotten his past — or the lyrics he's written over the years about his childhood in the projects. In his new book, Decoded, he unpacks the detailed riffs and lyrics that make up 36 of his songs — while examining both his own life and the growth of hip-hop over the last two decades.

Keith Richards, James Fox: Life

From The New York Times: For legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards is not only the heart and soul of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, he’s also the very avatar of rebellion: the desperado, the buccaneer, the poète maudit, the soul survivor and main offender, the torn and frayed outlaw, and the coolest dude on the planet, named both No. 1 on the rock stars most-likely-to-die list and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war. Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, “Life,” Keith Richards writes about the consequences of fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade. “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” he says. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.” By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy. He’s decided that he’s going to tell it as he remembers it, and helped along with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept, he remembers almost everything. [...] One of this galvanic book’s many achievements is that Mr. Richards has found a way to channel to the reader his own avidity, his own deep soul hunger for music and to make us feel the connections that bind one generation of musicians to another. Along the way he even manages to communicate something of that magic, electromagnetic experience of playing on stage with his mates, be it in a little club or a huge stadium.

"There’s a certain moment when you realize that you’ve actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you[...] You’re elevated because you’re with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you’ve got wings[...] flying without a license."

From The Guardian: The survivor's story is one of the predominant narratives of our time. It usually traces a familiar arc from excess through despair to redemption, and, as such, allows us to enjoy the vicarious thrill of voyeurism within the framework of a cautionary or salutary tale. Life by Keith Richards, the most famous survivor of them all, breaks with this tradition insofar as it contains excess aplenty but hardly any despair and very little redemption. Keith did it all, had a hell of a good time, and survived to brag about it. Life has the macho swagger that rock'n'roll in general – and the Rolling Stones in particular – once possessed. This is both its strength and its weakness. It often reads like a historical document of another time: a lost world in which women were always "chicks" or "bitches", an inflatable giant penis was a non-ironic stage prop, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's was the de rigueur rock'n'roll accessory. The Keith Richards book is a drug memoir of sorts, albeit without the hardcore confessional descriptiveness of the genre. Instead, it is almost casual in its cataloguing of excess: heroin, cocaine, Tuinal, Nembutal, STP, LSD, speedballs, Moroccan hashish, Jamaican ganja, and, inevitably, methadone, are just some of the substances mentioned – often in passing. Consider, for instance, the following passage from the book, which describes his daily breakfast routine during the 70s: "I would take a barbiturate to wake up … a Tuinal, pin it, put a needle in it so it would come on quicker. And then take a hot cup of tea, and then consider getting up or not. And later maybe a Mandrax or a Quaalude… And when the effect wears off after about two hours, you're feeling mellow, you've had a bit of breakfast and you're ready for work."

"People love that image[...] They imagined me, they made me[...] Bless their hearts. And I'll do the best I can to fulfill their needs. They're wishing me to do things that they can't. They've got to do this job, they've got this life, they're an insurance salesman[...] but, inside them, there's a raging Keith Richards."

Keith Richards's upbringing: Keith Richards was the only child of Bert Richards and Doris Dupree Richards. He was born in Dartford, Kent. His father was a factory laborer, who was injured during World War II. Their flat on Chastilian Road was hit by a Nazi V-1 flying bomb on July 5, 1944, while he and his mother were at the hospital, visiting with Bert Richards, who'd been wounded in the Normandy invasion. Keith Richards's paternal grandparents were socialists and civic leaders. His maternal grandfather (Augustus Theodore Dupree), who toured the U.K. in a jazz big band called "Gus Dupree and His Boys," was an early influence on Richards's musical ambitions; it's this grandfather that got Richards interested in the guitar. Richards's mother introduced him to the music of Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and bought him his first guitar, a Rosetti acoustic. His father was less encouraging, telling his son to "Stop that bloody noise!" Richards's first guitar hero was Scotty Moore. Richards attended Wentworth Primary School, as did Mick Jagger. The two knew each other as schoolboys, and lived in the same neighborhood until 1954. That year, the family moved to what Keith Richards has described as "a fucking soul-destroying council estate at completely the other end of town" that looked like "a disgusting concrete jungle". The move was disorienting for the young Richards, as was his transfer a year later to Dartford Technical School (now and split into two schools named Wilmington Grammar School for Boys and Wilmington Enterprise College), which he attended from 1955 to 1959. The Dartford Tech choirmaster Jake Clair noticed Richards's singing voice and recruited him into the school choir. In a trio of boy sopranos Richards sang (amongst other performances) at Westminster Abbey in front of Queen Elizabeth II.



In 1959, Keith Richards was expelled from Dartford Technical School for truancy, and the headmaster suggested he would be more at home at the art college in the neighboring town of Sidcup. At Sidcup Art College, Richards devoted his time to playing guitar after he heard American blues artists like Little Walter and Big Bill Broonzy. He swapped a pile of records for his first electric guitar, a hollow-body Höfner cutaway.

"There was a lot of music being played at Sidcup, and we'd go into the empty classrooms and fool around with our guitars. ... Even in those days Keith could play most of [Chuck Berry's] solos. In order to stay up late with our music and still get to Sidcup in the morning, Keith and I were on a pretty steady diet of pep pills, which not only kept us awake but gave us a lift. We took all kinds of things – pills that girls took for menstruation, inhalers like Nostrilene, and other stuff. Opposite the college there was this little park with an aviary that had a cockatoo in it. Cocky the Cockatoo we used to call it. Keith used to feed it pep pills and make it stagger around on its perch. If ever we were feeling bored we'd go and give another upper to Cocky." - Dick Taylor

One morning in 1961, on the train journey from Dartford to Sidcup, Richards happened to get into the same carriage as Mick Jagger, who was then a student at the London School of Economics. They recognized each other and began talking about the LPs Jagger had with him (blues as well as R&B albums he had acquired by mail-order from America). Keith Richards was surprised and impressed that Mick Jagger not only shared his enthusiasm for Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters but also that he owned such LPs, as these were extremely rare in Britain at the time. The two discovered that they had a mutual friend in Dick Taylor, with whom Jagger was singing in an amateur band called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Jagger invited Richards to a rehearsal, and soon after, Richards also joined the line-up. The group disbanded after Jagger, Richards and Taylor met Brian Jones and Ian Stewart, with whom they went on to form The Rolling Stones (Taylor left the band in November 1962 to return to art school). By mid-1962 Richards had left Sidcup Art College in favor of pursuing his fledgling musical career and moved into a London flat with Jagger and Jones. His parents divorced at about the same time; Keith Richards maintained close ties with his mother, who was very supportive of his musical activities, but became estranged from his father and did not resume contact with him until 1982. In 1963 Richards dropped the "s" from his surname and began using the professional name "Keith Richard", because Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham felt it "looked more pop". (He used the s-less version as his pen name and stage name until the late 1970s.)

Lauren Redniss: Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout

The New York Times recently said this about the book:

The graphic-novel genre is no longer young, but it retains, like Drew Barrymore and certain indie bands, a quirky and semi-adorable glow. Its fragile vibe is Etsy, not Best Buy. Attacking a pile of graphic novels is not unlike chucking a sackful of baby pandas into a river. If many graphic novels are, as Barack Obama put it about Hillary Rodham Clinton, likable enough, few are knotty works of art, things you’d eagerly give to both the sulky teenager in your life and your grandmother who reads serious nonfiction and thinks comics are infra-dig. Few zigzag toward the earth like mid-August lightning. The tail end of 2010 has delivered such a keeper, however, in Lauren Redniss’s graphic biography, “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout.” Here’s to hoping it doesn’t get lost amid the grog and tinsel and pay-per-view screenings of “Elf.”

Read that New York Times piece here.

Dana Milbank: Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America

Joseph Smith, Jr., first leader
of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) 

The White Horse Prophecy is a statement purported to have been made in 1843 by Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, regarding the future of the Latter Day Saints Mormons and the United States of America. The Latter Day Saints, according to the prophecy, would “go to the Rocky Mountains and ... be a great and mighty people,” identified figuratively with the White Horse described in the Revelation of John. The prophecy further predicts that the United States Constitution will one day “hang like a thread” and will be saved “by the efforts of the White Horse.”

“I heard Barack Obama talk about the Constitution and I thought, we are at the point or we are very near the point where our Constitution is hanging by a thread.”

- Glenn Beck

“I think that Glenn Beck is dangerous. The Anti-Defamation League has said basically, what he has done is he has taken ideas that are on the fringes of the Internet. You know, some of it is far right, talk of Nazis and fascists, the notion that FEMA may be operating concentration camps in Wyoming. And you never want to blame a television personality for some crazy thing that one of his followers do. But there are a lot of people out there who said they believe Beck is giving them a nod and a wink, that it is time to bring violence. And Beck will say, he will say -- he will talk about bullets in the brain. He will talk about fascists; he will talk about secession, a lot violent talk -- always qualified like we want a peaceful resolution to this. But he also says things like, “I want you to hear what I am saying in between the sentences. There may be a time when I’m not able to say what I want to, but hear me screaming to you in between the sentences.” So this, of course, is an invitation to the conspiracy theorists who indeed have cited Beck.”

- Dana Milbank, author of Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America

In March 2010, Joanna Brooks, renowned Mormon scholar and writer, wrote “Glenn Beck Doesn't Speak For The Mormons I Know” for the Huffington Post. This morning at 6 a.m., I received an urgent call from a Presbyterian friend in Atlanta, Georgia. She wanted me to know that Glenn Beck threatened progressive evangelical Christian pastor Jim Wallis during his television and radio broadcasts. "He's gone too far," my Presbyterian friend said. “The only thing that's going to come of this is that Christians in the South will dislike Mormonism even more.” Glenn Beck is a Mormon.

Glenn Beck's progressive
"Tree of Revolution" chalk board

So am I. During the nineteenth century, my Mormon ancestors crossed the plains to live their faith without fear of attack from the mobs that had hounded them out of Missouri and Illinois. Watching Glenn Beck threaten to "bring the hammer down" on another person of faith makes my stomach turn. I could cite a host of scriptures from the Bible and the Book of Mormon about how Beck's attack on Jim Wallis is not in keeping with faith-based values. Suffice it to say, Glenn Beck does not speak for the Mormons I know. Most Mormons I know have quite a bit in common with Reverend Jim Wallis, who has dedicated a life and a career to the service of others. By contrast, Glenn Beck has devoted his life and career to expanding the media footprint of Glenn Beck. He's done whatever it's taken: from cavorting with chimpanzees as a "morning zoo" shock jock to threatening to "bring the hammer down" on people of good will like Jim Wallis. Who knows what kind of ugliness Glenn Beck will trot out when he "brings the hammer down" on Jim Wallis next week. As a Mormon woman, I agree with my Presbyterian friend in Atlanta: Beck has gone too far.

“I don’t want to live like this... Republic’s at stake! ... They’re telling you lies... Don’t you want to live in the country that we thought we lived in? [Beck starts to cry.] I have been a lonely voice for a very long time, and no longer! You can do whatever the hell you want with me. You will replace me.”

- Glenn Beck at a show in Norfolk, Virginia

“The hammer is coming, because little do you know, for eight weeks, we've been compiling information on you, your cute little organization, and all the other cute little people that are with you. And when the hammer comes, it's going to be hammering hard and all through the night, over and over!”

- Glenn Beck

In October 2010, David Oshinsky wrote a review of the Dana Milbank book for The Statesman. The book's title, Tears of a Clown, is also its hypothesis. Beck cries a lot in public. He can't help himself. He's just an emotional guy who loves his country too darned much to keep things bottled up inside. He cries about his family, and your family, and the daily perils we all face. He cries one day because America's on the brink of becoming Nazi Germany, the next day because it's morphing into Stalinist Russia, the following day because it's behaving suspiciously like (we've hit rock bottom here) France. "On this sea of tears," says Milbank, "Beck's boat has floated to the top of cable news and talk radio, and put him at the head of a mass anti-government conservative movement."

“I signed up for the elite membership on GlennBeck.com. I think he has a lower bar, and commercially, it’s pure genius. He has found the absolute sweet spot in the market right now.”

- Dana Milbank, author of Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America

“Watching the shtick of the forty-six-year-old recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict, typical Beck viewers probably have no idea he is introducing them to some of the most controversial fields of Mormon theology, such as the White Horse Prophecy, which envisions the Latter-day Saints rescuing the U.S. Constitution.”

- Dana Milbank, author of Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America

In October 2010, Ed Pilkington wrote “Glenn Beck under fire from Dana Milbank for gold-digging” for The Guardian. Glenn Beck, Fox News's Tea Party pundit-in-chief, has made his name by pouring vitriol on progressives and liberals who he accuses of trying to destroy America. Now he's being subjected to a taste of his own medicine. Dana Milbank, a Washington Post columnist, publishes today a 261-page invective against Beck which is just as caustic and sharply-worded as his subject's televised monologues, with the important distinction that Milbank's account is factually accurate. Chapter 7 of Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America, looks at how Beck, who likes to present himself to his viewers as a regular schmo, has amassed an empire with an annual turnover of $32 million. One route to his largesse, Milbank tells us, is his relentless plugging of gold which he tells his listeners and viewers is a sure-fire way for them to protect their savings amid economic collapse. "Conveniently, enough," he writes, "a top sponsor of Beck's radio, TV, and internet ventures is Goldine, a big gold dealer."

“Ultimately, only Beck knows if he actually believes the things he says on air. Given his background as a pro-choice, ponytail-wearing, drug-using DJ on morning radio, it’s tempting to think he invented the conservative persona, and found the ideology, to exploit a market opportunity. Anger and fear always grow in times of economic trouble—and Beck’s arrival at Fox News in early 2009 just after the American economy collapsed could not have been better timed. Yet even if Beck embraced the ideology for entirely commercial reasons, it’s entirely possible that, after playing the role for so long on radio and TV, he has internalized it.”

- Dana Milbank, author of Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America

Jennifer Homans: Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet

The book and author were recently the subject of a WHYY Radio program-episode of Fresh Air. On the webpage for the show, this was said about the book and subject:

In her new book Apollo's Angels, historian Jennifer Homans — a former professional ballet dancer herself — traces ballet's evolution over the past 400 years, and examines how changes in ballet parallel changing ideas about class structure, gender, costume, the ideal body and what the body can physically do. The book chronicles ballet's transition from the aristocratic courtier world in Europe through its place as a professional discipline in the Imperial Court of Russia, and finally as a technique performed on stages throughout the world. Ballet's origins, Homans explains, grew out of the Renaissance court cultures of Italy and France. Dancers would perform at the royal courts — and then invite the audience members to participate.

Read that full Fresh Air transcript here. Read an excerpt from the book, here. Listen to the podcast of the show, down below.



The Guardian recently said this about the author and book: Jennifer Homans's history of the art, culture and political context of ballet is like a beautiful painting in a slightly askew frame. She is a former dancer who trained at the School of American Ballet in New York, and was the wife of the historian Tony Judt, who died in August. She exchanged the stage for academia two decades ago but one can still tell from her prose the kind of dancer that she was: meticulous, devoted and, au fond, profoundly romantic. Read that Guardian review, here.

Greg Lawrence: Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

The Wall Street Journal recently juxtaposed two books on the same topic:

William Kuhn's "Reading Jackie" and Greg Lawrence's "Jackie as Editor" are seemingly the same book—chronological accounts of her 19-year career at the publishers Viking and Doubleday—but they are actually very different. Mr. Kuhn's is heavy on hagiography and analysis, Mr. Lawrence's is an energetically reported and crisply written story of a whip-smart, middle-age working woman who marshaled wits, charm, steely will and, of course, unmatched connections to make a new life for herself. In 1975, Jackie (as both authors choose to call her) found herself stranded in a 15-room Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after the death of her second husband, the coarse billionaire Aristotle Onassis. Two debonair godfathers rescued her from idleness and depression. The first was Tom Guinzburg, an old friend who had inherited Viking from his father and who invited Jackie to be a consulting editor for $10,000 a year. When that job ended badly, John Sargent, another charmer, brought her to Doubleday, where she had a long and productive run.

Read that article, in full, here. The Huffington Post also covered the book and author: Lawrence, just one of the many authors whose careers she touched, says that one of the most revealing anecdotes he's ever heard about Jackie came from a friend, editor Joe Armstrong, who visited her in Martha's Vineyard less than a year before she died. "I remember in her living room she had all these books," Armstrong told Lawrence. "And she said, `These are my other best friends.'" Read that blog post here.