This Week's Show •

The Siberian Candidate

Calling on the spies we know best – all of them fictional – to explain the Helsinki summit: If it was spy-craft in plain sight, what would James Bond or Jason Bourne have seen that we ...

Calling on the spies we know best – all of them fictional – to explain the Helsinki summit: If it was spy-craft in plain sight, what would James Bond or Jason Bourne have seen that we didn’t?  What would George Smiley have been observing – Britain’s shabby, morose Number Two spy in the Cold War novels of the great John LeCarré? The line is out there in a hostile press that Trump and Putin in Helsinki wasn’t a chiefs-of-state summit so much as a huddle in broad daylight of a Russian-intelligence asset and his KGB handler. Outrageous if even remotely true. Without evidence, it’s just political rage talking. But what would those spies, and their authors, know drawing on their experience and their imaginations?

 

The Manchurian Candidate movie script is where the Donald Trump story has been trending for almost two years now: the wild notion in the Hollywood classic from 1962 that US presidential politics could be taken hostage by a brainwashed pawn of Russian spymasters. In the movie, Lawrence Harvey played the shell of a man, Raymond Shaw, who at the sight of a playing card, a Queen of Hearts, will do anything he’s told. Frank Sinatra played his pal from Army days who trying to snap Raymond back to sanity.

From the novelist Richard Condon and screenwriter George Axelrod, The Manchurian Candidate was thriller fiction, obviously. The suspicion after the Helsinki summit – that a “treasonous” Donald Trump is the witting or unwitting stooge of Vladimir Putin – is something else: a reading of circumstances, paranoid politics, perhaps.  But fiction has its own claim on authority: it’s the lie that tells the truth, people have said; it’s the work of art and intuition, and the imagination that gets to the point ahead of the plodding facts.

Robert Baer was a CIA field operative in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in the Middle East. George Clooney played the rough and tumble Robert Baer role in the hit movie Syriana in 2005, from Baer’s first book: See No Evil — all about the evil underside of oil and arms trafficking, dynasties at risk and drone assassinations in something like the Iraq war.  He made fiction out of facts, Robert Baer, a storyline out of chaos in the news.

The premise is that it takes the mind of fiction, a make-it-up imagination, to see what was going on at the Helsinki so-called summit. Richard Lourie is a Boston-born Russianologist who had the nerve and verve to compose the late dictator Josef Stalin’s autobiography.

Our guest David Filipov came home this year from a long stint as Moscow bureau chief of the Washington Post.  He edits the News at Northeastern University.

Olen Steinhauer joins us from New York.  He’s a rising star in Spy Fi, author of five novels set in Ukraine, decade by decade since the 1940s.  The third season of his video series Berlin Station begins this fall on EPIX cable.

Who’s going to explain how it is we trust the best fiction on this stuff more than we trust the so-called intelligence?

 

 

 

Podcast • October 20, 2008

Poster Art Then and Now: RISD’s John Maeda

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Maeda (20 minutes, 9 mb mp3) Call this Take 2 on the show of Soviet poster art, through the eyes of a 40-year-old Japanese American graphic artist ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Maeda (20 minutes, 9 mb mp3)

Call this Take 2 on the show of Soviet poster art, through the eyes of a 40-year-old Japanese American graphic artist who just happens to be the new president of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda. On a gabby, impromptu stroll through Tom Gleason’s show of Russia’s 20th Century art and propaganda, what struck me in John Maeda’s presence was how familiar and modern are the tools and the underlying power of this work – how closely the red-white-and-black Soviet posters of the 1920s suggest the basic scheme of the early LIFE magazine covers; how the red silhouettes of Lenin foreshadow the brilliant figures of the street dancers in the inescapable iPod posters of this moment in global advertising; how quickly the red-and-white Lenin poster (above) could be rearranged into a Coca-Cola ad. The experiment here, maybe the longshot lesson, is in thinking out loud about new images in front of our faces: away with the earphones and the recorded tour guide; can we tear our eyes off the tags and the texts and make our own links of eye, brain, memory and imagination with the public art of another time and place. The intrepid John Maeda plunges in with the mind of a computer engineer and designer (of sneakers and clothing, among other things) who did most of his art studies in Japan, who’s the shepherd now of a rising generation of artists in many media, including paint, pottery and posters.

Speaking of poster art… I asked John Maeda about the viral power and booming prices for the iconic images that RISD’s own Shep Fairey designed for the Obama campaign. What’s the secret of the posters’ colors, half-abstraction, apparent simplicity and openness to imitation and parody? And why, by the way, do we recoil from the personality cult when we see it in images of Stalin, and tend to embrace it in Shep Fairey’s rendition of Barack Obama?

Shepard Fairey’s Obama

Yeah, did a good job with that. His style is very authentic: it’s very grounded in history, grounded in the liberal arts… The secret? It’s the timing… It could have been any image, but he hit it at the right time with the right kind of scale. He uses the Web very well – another example of an artist who uses the Web in a very propaganda-infiltrator style. Combinations of these things create these perfect storms of popularity… You’ve got to love Obama first of all. If you don’t like Obama, you’re not going to like that [Shep Fairey image]. But the reason that image is liked is because Obama is no longer a person. Obama is an icon. Obama is abstracted into fewer colors. Obama is a radiant being, a belief figure, because we are so heart love-struck for someone or something to believe in. Think about people who aren’t religious, you know, we humans survive because we were inherently religious, inherently spiritual. So people who don’t have a god per se want to expect their political, their super-whatever, to be more than human: superhuman. So the Obama poster makes him look like he’s beyond humanity. We can trust him because he’s not one of us, he’s above all of us. But he’s also one of us.

Podcast • October 16, 2008

Soviet Posters: The Art of Polarization

Click here for slideshow Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Gleason (21 minutes, 10 mb mp3) We’re on a digressive walk and talk here through a master collection of those Soviet posters we ...


Click here for slideshow

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Gleason (21 minutes, 10 mb mp3)

We’re on a digressive walk and talk here through a master collection of those Soviet posters we all half-know and half-recoil from: those cult images of Lenin in the Twenties, Stalin in the Forties and Fifties, the icons of flawless Russian workers and rapacious capitalist pigs. The pigs were Us, of course, but the over-the-top images are long ago and far away enough to bear a fresh look. We are looking and listening with Abbott (Tom) Gleason, the Russian historian at Brown University, who pulled together this show of 20th Century caricatures, cartoons, broadsides and calls-to-arms at the Bell Gallery on the Brown campus. History and humor and beauty, too, are threaded through these posters — and something like a pop version of the evolution of modernism in Russia’s visual arts. In our own meltdown moment toward the end of 2008, there’s an invitation here to reflection and introspection that we might not have been up to before this. As Tom Gleason writes in a catalog essay:

Tom Gleason: we can afford to look now

It certainly cannot be proclaimed that the various visions of the enemies of the Soviet world — these posters and especially the cartoons and satirical drawings — “hold a mirror up” to Western or American society in any straightforward way. Soviet and American cultural differences were enormous and no doubt propaganda was a good deal more focused and purposeful on the Soviet side. But especially in an age in which the worldwide image of the United States is at an all time low, it is interesting to confront these critical images from an earlier time, now emptied of any serious, practical challenge. Do we want to simply write them off as Communist propaganda? Or ought we to ask ourselves whether we can learn anything from contemplating such criticisms soberly?

Tom Gleason in Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons, Then and Now