87: Paved with good intentions
Hello, I hope you’re well.
Welcome to Border Crossing issue #87.
Thank you very much for reading and supporting my writing.
This issue I’ve written about American overseas policy as seen in the TV documentary series Corridors of Power. Also, in the gems I’ll plug a bunch of London art shows we saw this week. So it’s all a bit more review-y than usual, I hope that’s okay.
Thanks for your kind enthusiasm about my ‘creativity counselling’ program idea. The beta-test is now full, apologies if you missed out. If it goes well, I’ll launch a ‘pro’ version early next year.
New footie season! If you play FPL and fancy joining us in the Border Crossing league, click here or use this code: rkmi4p
In one month I’m ditching Twitter (like so many others). I’ll keep the account ‘live’ to auto-publish news / self-promo, but I won’t check or post. I won’t go to another short-form platform, though I have profiles on them — I’m done with the format. A sad end to a wild ride.
gems
1
James Lister interviews my old friend MJ Hibbett for Get Your Comic On about Robert Downey Jr, the MCU and specifically all things Dr Doom. This is because, aside from being an ace indie songwriting cult hero, Hibbett holds the world’s only PHD in Dr Doom. For real.
2
Unflinching, tumbling prose by Samantha Asumadu, ‘An Ethnography of Black, White and Brown Working Class Men’ in her unwieldily titled but always rewarding email newsletter, Between a Rock, a Hard Place and a Dystopia.
3
Pulp Librarian’s interesting photo-led Twitter thread on the history of the gas mask.
4
Journalist Erin Reed’s Erin In The Morning newsletter focuses on LGBTQ+ stories, and does great work analysing and clarifying particularly trans rights issues that have become clouded and obfuscated.
5a, b, c, d and e
This week, cat-sitting at Jen and Lainey’s in Tottenham, we saw eighteen art exhibitions, in ten galleries across London. My five favourites were —
• Yinka Shonibare CBE: Suspended States at Serpentine South Gallery
Shonibare gets me in the feels. He has the balance near perfect of chewy, satisfying aesthetic stuff (wot looks gorgeous and one covets it) with a deeply thought-out, powerfully conveyed purpose. He’s a recognised, establishment figure now, yet prods and pokes at what that means. Like, his ‘Decolonised Structures’ series re-makes famous statues of British Empire figures (Kitchener, Churchill, and so on) but covers them in ornate, colourful Dutch wax patterns, including gilting.
He’s made another of his ‘libraries’, this one’s called ‘The War Library’, comprising a room filled with books, each bound with the name of a conflict, or a treaty. And his ‘Sanctuary City’ is models of buildings associated with keeping people safe, painting matt black on the outside, then colourfully lit from within.
Weirdly they made me think of parachuting into Fortnite and Battlegrounds video games. I came away with some mixed feelings about the Serpentine Galleries overall, but Shonibare’s work will last a long time and he does you good.
(ends Sun 1st Sep)
• Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere at The Hayward Gallery
The PR makes much of the big model boat, installed on the flooded roof of the Hayward, to represent the Black Star Line. But for me Strachan’s enormous, artificially aged, heads of Black icons, presented as abandoned monoliths, are a highlight. There’s loads here, from sculpture to fabric to masquerade. It’s a ferocious, tangy show.
(ends Sun 1st Sep)
• Zanele Muholi at Tate Modern
Wonderful, iconoclastic South African photographer and queer, non-binary activist. A more compact touring version of this same show (basically a career retrospective) was my outright favourite exhibition in 2023, after we saw it in Reykjavík in January last year. Haunting, multi-layered, stunningly composed portraiture, documentary photos, artefacts of an activist community. Expanded for Tate Modern, to my eyes it feels very slightly stretched beyond its spacial capacity, but that’s unfair criticism, Muholi’s portraiture is exceptionally beautiful.
(ends Sun 26th Jan, 2025)
• Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain
A rich, solid, chronological history of great women artists who battled to work professionally and have their art seen, despite being pushed out to the periphery, or have their art-making was forbidden altogether by our misogynist society.
One sidenote: this show runs close to lines drawn (and examples used) in Katy Hessel’s recent popular book The Story Of Art Without Men — but it is curated and undertaken without her involvement. Then, in the nearby Tate bookshop, there are a pile of different art history books but Hessel’s is notably absent. I asked the shop staffer if they didn’t have it, and she told me they do, but in another Tate shop, not the one next to this Women Artists show. Seems daft to me, or even slightly off, as if it’s being kept at a distance.
(ends Sun 13th Oct)
• Beyond The Bassline at the British Library
An in-depth history of Black British music, from Henry VIII’s court composer John Blanke, to the rise of grime. The beginnings of Notting Hill Carnival. Early footage of Cleo Laine and a very young Shirley Bassey. Loads of dance music. One of King Tubby’s bass bins. A multi-screen film installation, where you can sit and catch your breath — a perfect chillout, after consuming so much information.
I did notice one or two intriguing omissions, for example with women basically absent from the reggae section, where was Akabu to counter-balance? And no Davey Graham, whose influence on English folk is vast, though many folkies still have no clue Graham has Guyanese heritage. Or later, where was my old lecturer Geraldine Connor and her Carnival Messiah, so important to Leeds in the 1990s? None of which is to take away from the breadth and revelatory fun experience of this exhibition.
(ends Mon 26th Aug)
potato gem
A diet story is doing the tabloid rounds claiming that new research says potatoes are better for diabetes, versus other carbs, including rice. This is from SciTechDaily, the closest I can get to a science-y article on it.
matters arising
A short upbeat coda that I missed from last issue’s essay, which (kind of) demonstrates how long-lived people can directly connect us to distant worlds-in-time. So, what happened to Charlotte Salomon’s beloved step-mum, the opera singer Paula Salomon-Lindberg, who Charlotte had named ‘Paulinka BimBam’ in her epic art work? Well, Paula survived the war. She hid out in the Netherlands with her husband Albert. She was with Albert when he travelled to France to collect Charlotte’s great bundle of paintings from Ottilie Moore. She then lived a very long, fruitful life, including as a singing teacher at Amsterdam Music Lyceum and at the Mozartium in Salzberg. There is a biannual song competition held in her name, running to this day at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Paula survived to see her stepdaughter’s work exhibited and acclaimed. Unbelievably, Paula was still alive for the new millennium: she died in the year 2000 at the age of 102, one of the tiny handful of people to witness the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
•
Paved with good intentions
I watched all eight episodes of Corridors Of Power: Should America Police The World? on BBC iPlayer, already knowing the one word answer to the question it posed.
It is dense, expertly constructed: a heavyweight documentary series and, at the same time, offensively sympathetic to a catalogue of bad American leaders and, at the same time, a relentlessly, graphically horrible, exhausting watch. It has been structured episodically around a series of military genocides and crimes against humanity (Srebrenica, Aleppo, Kurdistan, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur, Islamic State, Benghazi, Syria). It lingers long and hard on killings and dead bodies, where news broadcasts of the day usually panned away, then it brings us ‘home’ to comfortable Washington, where smart-suited talking heads appraise their own honourable intent, with sometimes disarming candour.
But Corridors Of Power is not really about those horrors, in and of themselves. It’s about how the USA reacts (or doesn’t) to them and what that means for the soul of America. While working to be honest and objective and ‘hard-hitting’ on American political and military mistakes, the series nevertheless always — without any hint of doubt of cynicism — pre-supposes good faith in response to events that were instigated (of course) largely out of America’s control. Each chosen historic episode focused on is given an over-simplified start point and end point. Everything is in isolation. So of course there are vast absences from the narrative that are important: a lack of continuance and connection, which needs to be present if one is to speak to the many ways in which the United States is so often long-term responsible for causing such humanitarian disasters in the first place.
The series does a bit of historical context for Rwanda, because this was comfortably Belgium’s fault. It was silly old Belgium who elevated Tutsis above Hutus as part of a ‘divide and rule’ policy, then left Tutsis in fragile power when Rwanda became independent. Inevitably, a bitter uprising by Hutu-led forces was going to lead somewhere awful — and the dehumanising rhetoric built into that process (often via rabid radio broadcasts by extremist leaders) gestated the horrific genocide that unfolded. The murderers were the military and police and militias, and also just people who picked up machetes to go murder their neighbours. Then it was mainly Belgians in the minuscule UN peacekeeping force, who desperately tried to create safe zones, before having to abandon those.
The documentary’s interest in Rwanda vanishes instantly, the moment the Tutsi rebel army drives into Kigali and the more organised aspects of the genocide (sort of) end. Rwanda — like all the other case studies — is there to be an emotive cipher, not a story of its own. It is the example of what can happen when the USA does not act. A cursory glance at Wikipedia reveals far more complex, multi-faceted problems and intertwined narratives in Rwanda’s history and the convoluted, stretched out attempts at real peace-making and re-emergence that take years.
Really, Corridors Of Power is exclusively interested in the impact on America’s leadership and the wealthy, privileged people around those leaders. There are a few (powerful, emotional) first-hand accounts but always from western visitors to the front-line, who get rescued and leave behind the local people they were working with. The series fails abjectly where better filmmakers’ work (Ken Burns, say, with his epic Vietnam series and more recently The American Buffalo mini-series) now can succeed on similar scale: by bringing in voices from the actual place, from all ‘sides’ and perspectives. We aren’t so scared of subtitles these days, it’s perfectly possible to achieve a global witnessing, not just a rich capitalist one. But if our story is solely about the American elite, that is who we’ll hear from.
In a funny (not funny) way, such myopic focus mirrors the weakness in USA and other ‘western’ foreign policy itself: that it brazenly creates the havoc, then worries about whether to try to fix it, forgetting any lessons from previous havoc, always crediting itself with trying to do the right thing, yet promptly moving on to create more havoc elsewhere.
There’s no mention of Burma, Yemen, China, a plethora of other locations where horrors have unfolded that don’t fit the narrative. Dr Kissinger himself is briefly a talking head in an early episode — let’s not think about the more than a million people he knowingly, deliberately had killed in Cambodia, when he illegally expanded bombings beyond Vietnam. Saudi Arabia is also only named briefly in passing, as an ally. Not an embarrassed whisper of Latin America, nor the far east. From good people, trying to make a good film, it’s a travesty and proves this conventional approach can no longer work with real integrity.
Of course, the bloody obvious, absolutely gigantic, elephant in the room is there is no mention whatsoever of Israel in Gaza.
Here lies Corridors Of Power’s great weakness, yet also perhaps offers a quietly redemptive accidental value. Such shocking, brutal images it shows us. If you do watch it, you will see lines of human beings murdered in front of your eyes. And whether it is Isis or Serbs or Janjaweed, the hand-held footage has a familiar underlying soul-drained, blood-drenched hue: it looks (it feels) exactly like the constant flow of terrifying, unedited witness footage from inside Gaza that so many of us have been exposed to this past year. Not via our television news broadcasters (who’ve shared next to nothing, panning away even faster than usual this time, in their collective need to downplay and obfuscate the scale and cause of human suffering) but via live-streams and first-hand feeds on social media.
Watching Corridors Of Power is to watch a carefully curated version of the past, which one immediately associates with a chaotic, wholly realist version of the present. Indeed, they merge together, combining to pull the scaffold out from beneath every self-justification or self-doubt expressed by a politician or peacemaker. Part of me thinks this might even be intentional on the filmmakers’ part. I can’t imagine it wasn’t discussed. It can’t just be someone like me, already engaged with the issues and history around Palestine. It has to be anyone, even loosely aware of atrocities in Gaza.
I don’t share graphic images from Gaza either, but I do watch them. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but I — yes, stupidly — took to watching everything I could, to attempt to ‘bear witness’ at the very least. This year there’ve been countless high resolution graphic moments of utter horror on our small screens.
Many things I’d never before seen — and will never be able to unsee.
Surely anyone of open mind, who witnesses raw footage from Gaza, who also watches Corridors Of Power, will instinctively and repeatedly make that connection, and I suspect will be blown away by the comparable contexts of scale and brutality it makes crystal clear. Often, the numbers discussed with wide, desperate eyes — as they strategise on how to bulwark against some crime against humanity or other — are modest, compared to the numbers of dead and injured and missing in Gaza. Not always but quite often, these images that American leaders are so heartbroken by, so moved to act by, driven to break international law for, send in the troops for, are less horrific than what they — right now — are enabling every day with constant pro-Israel rhetoric and billion dollar weapon deliveries.
I keep thinking about Samantha Power, who features heavily as a sort of progressive, sympathetic talking head, once we reach the Obama era. In the early 2000s she wrote the Pulitzer Prizewinning book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which perhaps even gives the series its structural underpinning. She became an Obama advisor and still has a position of great authority, as a Biden appointment to lead USAID. But this year she’s faced widespread open criticism and resignations from her own staff, because Power seems wholly unable to comprehend that what’s happening to Gaza objectively, factually, falls within the defining categories that she herself wrote in the first place.
And isn’t that a core point about crimes against humanity, which a major documentary series on the topic ought to have been able to make, unequivocally? That when it’s your ally doing the killing, with weapons you continue to send them, maybe that is when it’s far harder to accept reality?
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All my love,
Christopher
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