Thoughts on reading The Art Of Yesterday's Crash, Pt 3.at http://theendagain.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html
It is a shame that you [the blog's author, Dan] have put all this work into this blog post, and the only response was from a robospammer. I hope I can make up for this a little bit. I ran across your blog while researching a question about Richard Huelsenbeck. I grasped right away that you relied heavily on Greil Marcus, as your scholarship seemed similar. I have a hard time telling what Marcus is going on about; he makes the most tenuous links between unrelated events, and has no problem fudging the facts to make them fit (I'm sure he would say he is making poetic links that are truer and deeper than mere facts can communicate.
Richard Huelsenbeck described the encounter with Ephraim in Zürich in his Memoirs of a Dada Drummer. The tone of his account is quite different from what you (and Marcus) suggest:
"Mynheer Ephraim, [a Dutch former sailor and Cabaret Voltaire 's landlord], told me about his seafaring days that evening, but when I recited some Negro poems that I had made up myself, he motioned me to join him outside.
'They sound very good,' he said, 'but unfortunately they're not Negro poems. I spent a good part of my life among Negroes, and the songs they sing are very and the songs they sing are very different from the ones you just recited.'
He was one of those people who take things literally, and retain them verbatim. My Negro poems all ended with the refrain 'Umba, umba,' which I roared and spouted over and over again into the audience.
But when we sat down together on one of the wooden benches that lined the walls of the main room, I was impressed by the seaman's well-meaning ways. I asked him about his experiences, and he narrated a long yarn, which I have since forgotten. I told Ball about our conversation. He knew my Negro poems from the Berlin 'expressionist evening,' where I had caused a great sensation.
'Perhaps,' he said, 'it might be interesting to recite something authentic. 'So I asked the Dutchman for advice, and a few days later he came to me with a sheet of paper on which he had scribbled the following:
Trabadya La Modjere
Magamore Magagere
Trabadja Bono
I read the lines through slowly while Ephraim sat there smiling, and I ended up liking them. I went to the cabaret...
I recited my new 'authentic' Negro poems, and the audience thought they were wonderful. Naturally, no force on earth could have gotten me to leave out the "Umba" at the end of every verse, although my Dutchman shook his head disapprovingly. He wanted everything to be 'authentic,' literal, factual, just as he had heard it in Africa and the South Seas."
His description of his interactions with Ephraim are a good deal more congenial than you or Marcus suggest (and less profane - no "fuck offs" or "shit" to be had here).
I haven't seen any other sources that suggest Huelsenbeck was making monkey sounds (can you share them with me, please) - coupled with the mention of blackface, it suggests to me that you are implicating him as a racist. Minstrelsy was the most popular form of entertainment in America for the better part of a century (and popular in Europe as well) with a large set of complicated agendas. The mimicry was as much admiration as contempt - a notion that is hard to accept for people today, who imagine they are so sophisticated, who could never see admiration in their mimicry, yet they only see admiration in the mimicry of the (for example) the Rolling Stones.
It seems to be a common trope about the Cabaret Voltaire and their love of black art forms, which they emulated as best they could with the poverty of means and information available to them. I find it significant that Huelsenbeck surrendered to the authority of Ephraim (born of his alleged experiences in Africa) after a single conversation. I found the recounting of Ephraim's disapproval over the inauthentic version of the lyrics he passed to Huelsenbeck amusing - similar to the Pete Seeger's snitty response to the "Lion Sleeps Tonight" as being a terrible offence to his wildly inaccurate phonetic recreation of Mbube as "Wemoweh." I could think of countless other examples where the quest for a mythical authenticity has led people (usually hipsters rather than hard-bitten Dutch Seamen) into some silly places, but I'll save them for some other argument.
Speaking of hipsters, Huelsenbeck's description of the Cabaret patrons certainly has a familiar ring: "The drunken students pushed their chairs aside and began spinning around. There were almost no women in the cabaret. It was too wild, too smoky, too way out."
A night out at the Tropicana! But on the other hand, it's a scenario familiar to many cultures throughout history. The bonding and stimulation seeking of unattached young adult males accounts (at least in part) for everything from the Ku Klux Klan to the Beatles and other English and American beat groups, from jihadists to any number of art movements. I feel Marcus errors when he pulls out some examples he likes from history, then tries to string them together, forcing them together when they fit, ignoring a great deal of history that doesn't fit (for him, though I would argue that it does). I was surprised to learn he's an academic, his work is so lacking in rigor, so full of bias and conjecture.
Of course the Sheffield crowd tried to beef up their avant garde credentials by appropriating names and forms from the past. That is the oldest trick in the book, an absolutely establishment and reactionary gambit. Are there any real connections ? I would argue only the connections that anybody who can open a book can make. Did anybody in Joy Division ever experience being forced into prostitution in a concentration camp? Did anybody in Jethro Tull ever farm? I won't belabour the point any further.
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