Dear Gregory,

What a strange and moving text.

Full of layers and crossing metaphores hitting each other. Politics and entertainment, professors and auctions pirates, terrorists and Graceland tourists, glorification of rock and roll myths, money and mourning, all freneticly in search for relics. Tracks and traces from the past, that people need when uncertainty and fear is in the air. Through sharp laser techniques and scanning the curbs and endless circles ( I'm in my alliteration days! can't stop it, I have also my rime days)of one's brains.

It looks like a story of what is hidden in the secret caves of history, linked by mysterious corridors, in a labyrinth of dark intrigues. One lesson, autopsy seems legal.

Your text has the allures of Orwell. A suffocating universe, and a boat( cargo, ergo sum) is the perfect image. Captains, pirates, slaves. Black hoods. Storm. Drowning people. And the all-seeing eye.

Like the painting from Delacroix, "Le radeau de la Méduse". Could it be I saw it in Chicago this summer, in the same museum where I saw Gerhard Richter? Nothing hirts more than the cry of innocent people.

Thank you Greg, for this strong, sad and beautiful lines.

Edwin.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Replying to:

for the interest of "the family" --- a few thoughts on the spirit of the times, here and there. it will not be published until the spring (in a lovely magazine, Cabinet, that has a sister website: immaterial.net) --- but it will still be autumn, I am sure.



America in Autumn

Gregory Whitehead

(Cabinet, Spring, 2003)



Elvis Aaron Presley died on August 16, 1977 at his Memphis home, Graceland. His funeral offered a spectacle befitting the King of Rock and Roll, and was attended by one Caroline Kennedy, who reported in the pages of Rolling Stone that "Winslow "Buddy" Chapman, the director of police who looked like the advance man from Nashville, invited me into the house, where a scarlet carpeted hall led into a large room with gold and white folding chairs. At the far end of the room was the gleaming copper coffin that contained the body of Elvis Presley. His face seemed swollen and his sideburns reached his chin." Many mourners commented later that the corpse in the coffin could not have been Elvis. It was too bloated, too horribly unsexy. The real Elvis must be somewhere else.



Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in the Federal Republic of Germany, second generation members of the Rote Armee Faktion (RAF), popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, had launched a series of actions intended to secure the release of members then incarcerated in the Stammheim high security prison.

These actions included the ruthless execution of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the hijacking (by four Palestinian associates) of a Lufthansa Boeing 737, eventually terminated by a German special forces raid while the plane idled on a runway in Mogadishu. That same night, three members of the RAF (Andreas Baader, Gudren Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe) committed suicide in their cells under circumstances that remain open to dispute.



After a solemn state funeral, Herr Schleyer was buried on October 25. By contrast, the three RAF bodies were unceremoniously stacked in a group grave two days later, then covered over by two tons of lead. The emotional riptides of both funerals are well documented by the masterful group-film Deutschland Im Herbst, and by Gerhard Richter’s provocative cycle of extrapolated photographs, October 17, 1977, now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art: Youth portrait; Arrest 1; Arrest 2; Confrontation 1; Confrontation 2; Confrontation 3; Hanged; Cell; Record Player; Man Shot Down 1; Man Shot Down 2; Dead 1; Dead 2; Dead 3; Funeral.



Twenty five years later, during our own American Autumn, marked by real and imagined terror threats, economic fragility and fits of high security, the King of Rock and Roll finds himself once again chronographically linked with the RAF, but now as part of the forensic theater whose uncanny players perform so much of our present; memory theaters everywhere, but in pieces, often hard to fathom and always hard to name.



Over the course of several weeks in October and November of 2002, Elvis fans and professional dealers in the world of celebrity memorabilia bid competitively, via internet auction, for a small plastic bag of The King’s hair. The hair had been saved by Homer "Gill" Gilleland, Elvis’ personal barber for more than twenty years, and the keeper of many secrets, including the precise formula used to maintain a jet-black polish to Elvis’ naturally sandy-blonde locks.



It seems that shortly before his own death in 1995, Mr. Gilleland passed the bag to his friend, a Memphis municipal employee named Tom Morgan. Requiring funds for his retirement, Mr. Morgan decided to auction the hair as a single clump, together with letters of authentication from Mr. Morgan, Elvis expert John Heath and forensic specialist John Reznikoff. "Short of a DNA test, any relic associated with a famous person requires somewhat of a leap of faith," said Reznikoff, though he also noted that the hair was an exact match with other strands of hair obtained as gifts either from Homer Gilleland, or from Elvis himself.



After a spirited series of thirty-two bids, the electronic gavel finally came down at $100,105. Since tiny strands of Elvis hair (measuring less than a quarter of an inch), from the ample reserves of a business named "Historical Hair", regularly sell on Ebay for over $100, the new owner will undoubtedly one day be confronted by the most vexing of investment decisions, whether the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts.



At roughly the same time, back in the Federal Republic of Germany, controversy boiled around another relic, a brain belonging to none other than Ulrike Meinhof, founding member of the RAF. In 1997, a Tübingen pathologist named Jürgen Peiffer had passed Meinhof’s brain to a psychiatrist named Bernhard Bogerts, from the University of Magdeberg. Dr. Bogerts conducted an intensive study over the next five years, comparing Meinhof’s tissue to the brain of a serial killer, eventually concluding that an operation performed on Meinhof in 1962 to stem an engorged blood vessel had precipitated certain "pathological modifications" that may well have been responsible for Meinhof’s transformation from a well behaved journalist into an ultraleft psychokiller. Therefore, she may not have been competent to stand trial.



Dr. Bogerts’ examination was not the first time Meinhof’s brain had been subjected to involuntary scrutiny. When Meinhof was first arrested in Hanover on June 15, 1974, the police were uncertain of her identity, as there were no recorded fingerprints to confirm. They did, however, possess an X-ray of Meinhof’s brain taken at the time of her surgery,distinguished by the presence of a tiny metallic capillary clamp. After forcibly anesthetizing her, they took another X-ray, revealing the presence of the tell-tale device.



In November, one of Meinhof’s daughters, Bettina Roehl, already well known for having disclosed photographs documenting the participation of Green Party foreign minister Joschka Fischer at a violent 1970s anti-war demonstration, submitted an op-ed essay to the Magdeburger Volkstimme, stating that "a dead terrorist has a right to be treated fairly and the right to a decent burial." At the same time, Meinhof’s other daughter, Regine, filed a criminal complaint against Peiffer for illegally disturbing the peace of the dead. Since a subsequent investigation confirmed that Meinhof had indeed not granted permission for her body to be used for scientific purposes, her brain was subsequently released into the custody of the Roehl sisters, and on December 20, was finally interred with the rest of Meinhof’s remains, after a private ceremony in a Berlin cemetery.



Catalyzed by the media heat released during the Meinhof affair, the Institute for Brain Research at the University of Tübingen divulged that three other brains had mysteriously disappeared from its archive, brains that had been removed from the bodies of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe and sent to Tübingen for pathological evaluation. "When I took over the institute in 1990, the brains were not there, although they were still listed in our files, " Dr. Richard Meyermann, director of the institute, told Reuters in mid-November. He also speculated that they may have been incinerated, to make room for more timely specimens.



Inside this curious confluence of histories between the hair of Elvis --- America’s first globalized cultural icon --- and the top brains of the German urban guerilla movement, which some have suggested provided an early prototype for Al Qaeda, it is hard not to reflect upon the treatment of yet another dead body, belonging to a figure who achieved both Pop celebrity status and revolutionary notoriety: Che Guevara .



Like Meinhof’s, Che’s body was subjected to abuse while in possession of the state. Indeed, purportedly under direct instructions from the CIA, his hands and head were severed from his body like common hunter’s trophies, under the pretense of acquiring "positive identification". The rest of his remains were discarded in a secret grave beneath the airstrip at Vallegrande until their recovery by a team of forensic anthropologists in 1997. They were returned to Guevara’s widow in Havana, who was already in possession of the hands, which had been saved from destruction by Interior Minister Antonio Arguedas, at great risk, and smuggled to Cuba in 1969.



In his remarkable film essay, "El Día Que Me Quieras", Leandro Katz resurrects the haunted dramaturgy of Che’s autopsy as recorded in the famous photographs taken by Freddy Alborta, and transmitted by newswire around the world. Through a subtle interweaving of photographic documentation, Borgesian text and footage from a local Bolivian event commemorating Che, Katz both discloses the eroticized thrill exuded by the predators in the carnal presence of their defeated prey, and celebrates the persistence of the human spirit even in the midst of a brutal blood lust.



Returning to the United States, November 2002 saw the release of one other disembodied organ into the public realm, this time as part of a graphic logo for a comprehensive system of citizen surveillance and control named Total Information Awareness: A single eye, floating above a brick pyramid, "illuminating" the whole world above the motto: scientia est potentia, knowledge is power. Under the direction of yet another spook from the Reagan days, John Poindexter, the Total Information Office would aim to consolidate all public and private records belonging to each American into a vast centralized database, which would then be constantly "mined" for deviant patterns, and range across everything from email to body language. An all-seeing eye that in the name of defending what was once the world’s greatest democracy, will someday look inside its own governing brain, and find that the vital blood vessels have been clamped shut.



Exhibit A: On November 8, radio host Art Bell published a photograph on his website that I submit as the emblematic image for America in Autumn. The photograph depicts the interior of a cargo container. The presence of various men in uniforms around the edges of the space would seem to suggest that the cargo is of a military nature. The walls of the container are padded; the light, dim.



On the floor, an assortment of figures --- humans? ---have been arranged in rows, bound by some sort of nylon straps that are affixed to the walls of the container.

The figures wear garments that look like hospital smocks. Their feet are shackled together, and each head is covered by a black hood, of the kind used for executions. Above the hoods hangs Old Glory, in all her quiet majesty. One might imagine these figures prisoners of war, but surely it is not possible that prisoners of the United States would be "packaged" in this way. America in Autumn: a season with no end in sight. The real Elvis must be somewhere else.

Sorry, the painting " Le radeau de la Méduse" must be of Géricault, I guess. Not from Delacroix.

Edwin.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Replying to:

Dear Gregory,

What a strange and moving text.

Full of layers and crossing metaphores hitting each other. Politics and entertainment, professors and auctions pirates, terrorists and Graceland tourists, glorification of rock and roll myths, money and mourning, all freneticly in search for relics. Tracks and traces from the past, that people need when uncertainty and fear is in the air. Through sharp laser techniques and scanning the curbs and endless circles ( I'm in my alliteration days! can't stop it, I have also my rime days)of one's brains.

It looks like a story of what is hidden in the secret caves of history, linked by mysterious corridors, in a labyrinth of dark intrigues. One lesson, autopsy seems legal.

Your text has the allures of Orwell. A suffocating universe, and a boat( cargo, ergo sum) is the perfect image. Captains, pirates, slaves. Black hoods. Storm. Drowning people. And the all-seeing eye.

Like the painting from Delacroix, "Le radeau de la Méduse". Could it be I saw it in Chicago this summer, in the same museum where I saw Gerhard Richter? Nothing hirts more than the cry of innocent people.

Thank you Greg, for this strong, sad and beautiful lines.

Edwin.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Replying to:

for the interest of "the family" --- a few thoughts on the spirit of the times, here and there. it will not be published until the spring (in a lovely magazine, Cabinet, that has a sister website: immaterial.net) --- but it will still be autumn, I am sure.



America in Autumn

Gregory Whitehead

(Cabinet, Spring, 2003)



Elvis Aaron Presley died on August 16, 1977 at his Memphis home, Graceland. His funeral offered a spectacle befitting the King of Rock and Roll, and was attended by one Caroline Kennedy, who reported in the pages of Rolling Stone that "Winslow "Buddy" Chapman, the director of police who looked like the advance man from Nashville, invited me into the house, where a scarlet carpeted hall led into a large room with gold and white folding chairs. At the far end of the room was the gleaming copper coffin that contained the body of Elvis Presley. His face seemed swollen and his sideburns reached his chin." Many mourners commented later that the corpse in the coffin could not have been Elvis. It was too bloated, too horribly unsexy. The real Elvis must be somewhere else.



Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in the Federal Republic of Germany, second generation members of the Rote Armee Faktion (RAF), popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, had launched a series of actions intended to secure the release of members then incarcerated in the Stammheim high security prison.

These actions included the ruthless execution of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the hijacking (by four Palestinian associates) of a Lufthansa Boeing 737, eventually terminated by a German special forces raid while the plane idled on a runway in Mogadishu. That same night, three members of the RAF (Andreas Baader, Gudren Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe) committed suicide in their cells under circumstances that remain open to dispute.



After a solemn state funeral, Herr Schleyer was buried on October 25. By contrast, the three RAF bodies were unceremoniously stacked in a group grave two days later, then covered over by two tons of lead. The emotional riptides of both funerals are well documented by the masterful group-film Deutschland Im Herbst, and by Gerhard Richter’s provocative cycle of extrapolated photographs, October 17, 1977, now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art: Youth portrait; Arrest 1; Arrest 2; Confrontation 1; Confrontation 2; Confrontation 3; Hanged; Cell; Record Player; Man Shot Down 1; Man Shot Down 2; Dead 1; Dead 2; Dead 3; Funeral.



Twenty five years later, during our own American Autumn, marked by real and imagined terror threats, economic fragility and fits of high security, the King of Rock and Roll finds himself once again chronographically linked with the RAF, but now as part of the forensic theater whose uncanny players perform so much of our present; memory theaters everywhere, but in pieces, often hard to fathom and always hard to name.



Over the course of several weeks in October and November of 2002, Elvis fans and professional dealers in the world of celebrity memorabilia bid competitively, via internet auction, for a small plastic bag of The King’s hair. The hair had been saved by Homer "Gill" Gilleland, Elvis’ personal barber for more than twenty years, and the keeper of many secrets, including the precise formula used to maintain a jet-black polish to Elvis’ naturally sandy-blonde locks.



It seems that shortly before his own death in 1995, Mr. Gilleland passed the bag to his friend, a Memphis municipal employee named Tom Morgan. Requiring funds for his retirement, Mr. Morgan decided to auction the hair as a single clump, together with letters of authentication from Mr. Morgan, Elvis expert John Heath and forensic specialist John Reznikoff. "Short of a DNA test, any relic associated with a famous person requires somewhat of a leap of faith," said Reznikoff, though he also noted that the hair was an exact match with other strands of hair obtained as gifts either from Homer Gilleland, or from Elvis himself.



After a spirited series of thirty-two bids, the electronic gavel finally came down at $100,105. Since tiny strands of Elvis hair (measuring less than a quarter of an inch), from the ample reserves of a business named "Historical Hair", regularly sell on Ebay for over $100, the new owner will undoubtedly one day be confronted by the most vexing of investment decisions, whether the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts.



At roughly the same time, back in the Federal Republic of Germany, controversy boiled around another relic, a brain belonging to none other than Ulrike Meinhof, founding member of the RAF. In 1997, a Tübingen pathologist named Jürgen Peiffer had passed Meinhof’s brain to a psychiatrist named Bernhard Bogerts, from the University of Magdeberg. Dr. Bogerts conducted an intensive study over the next five years, comparing Meinhof’s tissue to the brain of a serial killer, eventually concluding that an operation performed on Meinhof in 1962 to stem an engorged blood vessel had precipitated certain "pathological modifications" that may well have been responsible for Meinhof’s transformation from a well behaved journalist into an ultraleft psychokiller. Therefore, she may not have been competent to stand trial.



Dr. Bogerts’ examination was not the first time Meinhof’s brain had been subjected to involuntary scrutiny. When Meinhof was first arrested in Hanover on June 15, 1974, the police were uncertain of her identity, as there were no recorded fingerprints to confirm. They did, however, possess an X-ray of Meinhof’s brain taken at the time of her surgery,distinguished by the presence of a tiny metallic capillary clamp. After forcibly anesthetizing her, they took another X-ray, revealing the presence of the tell-tale device.



In November, one of Meinhof’s daughters, Bettina Roehl, already well known for having disclosed photographs documenting the participation of Green Party foreign minister Joschka Fischer at a violent 1970s anti-war demonstration, submitted an op-ed essay to the Magdeburger Volkstimme, stating that "a dead terrorist has a right to be treated fairly and the right to a decent burial." At the same time, Meinhof’s other daughter, Regine, filed a criminal complaint against Peiffer for illegally disturbing the peace of the dead. Since a subsequent investigation confirmed that Meinhof had indeed not granted permission for her body to be used for scientific purposes, her brain was subsequently released into the custody of the Roehl sisters, and on December 20, was finally interred with the rest of Meinhof’s remains, after a private ceremony in a Berlin cemetery.



Catalyzed by the media heat released during the Meinhof affair, the Institute for Brain Research at the University of Tübingen divulged that three other brains had mysteriously disappeared from its archive, brains that had been removed from the bodies of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe and sent to Tübingen for pathological evaluation. "When I took over the institute in 1990, the brains were not there, although they were still listed in our files, " Dr. Richard Meyermann, director of the institute, told Reuters in mid-November. He also speculated that they may have been incinerated, to make room for more timely specimens.



Inside this curious confluence of histories between the hair of Elvis --- America’s first globalized cultural icon --- and the top brains of the German urban guerilla movement, which some have suggested provided an early prototype for Al Qaeda, it is hard not to reflect upon the treatment of yet another dead body, belonging to a figure who achieved both Pop celebrity status and revolutionary notoriety: Che Guevara .



Like Meinhof’s, Che’s body was subjected to abuse while in possession of the state. Indeed, purportedly under direct instructions from the CIA, his hands and head were severed from his body like common hunter’s trophies, under the pretense of acquiring "positive identification". The rest of his remains were discarded in a secret grave beneath the airstrip at Vallegrande until their recovery by a team of forensic anthropologists in 1997. They were returned to Guevara’s widow in Havana, who was already in possession of the hands, which had been saved from destruction by Interior Minister Antonio Arguedas, at great risk, and smuggled to Cuba in 1969.



In his remarkable film essay, "El Día Que Me Quieras", Leandro Katz resurrects the haunted dramaturgy of Che’s autopsy as recorded in the famous photographs taken by Freddy Alborta, and transmitted by newswire around the world. Through a subtle interweaving of photographic documentation, Borgesian text and footage from a local Bolivian event commemorating Che, Katz both discloses the eroticized thrill exuded by the predators in the carnal presence of their defeated prey, and celebrates the persistence of the human spirit even in the midst of a brutal blood lust.



Returning to the United States, November 2002 saw the release of one other disembodied organ into the public realm, this time as part of a graphic logo for a comprehensive system of citizen surveillance and control named Total Information Awareness: A single eye, floating above a brick pyramid, "illuminating" the whole world above the motto: scientia est potentia, knowledge is power. Under the direction of yet another spook from the Reagan days, John Poindexter, the Total Information Office would aim to consolidate all public and private records belonging to each American into a vast centralized database, which would then be constantly "mined" for deviant patterns, and range across everything from email to body language. An all-seeing eye that in the name of defending what was once the world’s greatest democracy, will someday look inside its own governing brain, and find that the vital blood vessels have been clamped shut.



Exhibit A: On November 8, radio host Art Bell published a photograph on his website that I submit as the emblematic image for America in Autumn. The photograph depicts the interior of a cargo container. The presence of various men in uniforms around the edges of the space would seem to suggest that the cargo is of a military nature. The walls of the container are padded; the light, dim.



On the floor, an assortment of figures --- humans? ---have been arranged in rows, bound by some sort of nylon straps that are affixed to the walls of the container.

The figures wear garments that look like hospital smocks. Their feet are shackled together, and each head is covered by a black hood, of the kind used for executions. Above the hoods hangs Old Glory, in all her quiet majesty. One might imagine these figures prisoners of war, but surely it is not possible that prisoners of the United States would be "packaged" in this way. America in Autumn: a season with no end in sight. The real Elvis must be somewhere else.