From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: Dietrich, Madonna, etc.
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 92 13:32:26 GMT


In article <1b5su8INNo8b@mizar.usc.edu>
adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson) writes:

>Greta Garbo just *is*.  Madonna play-acts, poses, mugs, mocks, 
>squirms, imitates.

Not to gainsay anything you've said in this posting, which I
thought highly pertinent, what comes to my mind on this very
last line is views that may inhabit the people who when you
said "Ella is not an icon; Billie is" said "Wait a minute!"
Or those who've been seeing Madonna as an icon.  Or those
who wittingly or not discount the time-honored notion of
what an icon is and conflate it with "star."

"Just *is*," you said.

Well, Ella I would call an icon of jazz singers, and there
are other jazz icons: Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, etc.
Further, jazz is an icon of America, one of our two
contributions to world culture (the other is the cocktail
hour).  There are lots of jazz singers, but none with the
scope of Ella.  In the world of jazz, she just *is*, and
it's a mighty big thing that she is.

Then there's Madonna, whose aspiration to be iconic is
certainly revealed by that very name (I don't think anyone
had mentioned that yet).  For I can't imagine anyone here
arguing that *the* Madonna isn't an icon.

"Just is" is the clue, I think, to conflating what Madonna
is with the notion of icon.  For clearly in our own times,
by the very nature of things -- media saturation possibly
being the biggie -- a quasi-religious, sectarian sense akin
to worship (idolization) attaches to those whose lives do
not yet include *other* times.  Madonna sums up, if not the
whole, then a major fraction of the sentient experience of
what *is*, for those as yet too young to know a generational
change *first-hand*.

The power of an icon is less what *it* is than what *we* are
in terms of that icon.  In ways I haven't yet articulated in
any detail (and probably won't and maybe can't), one reason
this discussion has become so long is that it takes *time*,
really a lot of it, to make the distinction between icon and
star palpable in one's *own* life-experience.

It isn't just the past, which one can study in a variety of
documents.  It's more than that; it's a sense of of history
made *of* one's own personal life-stuff, of one's *own*
"what is."  Frank Maloney (bless him) has provided an
important insight here:

<> As I used to tell my Shakespeare classes, the task
<> before us is not to make Shakespeare relevant to us,
<> but rather to make ourselves relevant to Shakespeare.
<> -- Frank R.A.J. Maloney (frankm@microsoft.com)

To go very far afield from media icons in the Madonna sense,
but not from the media itself, consider war.  No one under
the age of 47 has *lived* in a time without nuclear weapons,
and even if they've read Thucydides, their notions of war
are shaped -- beyond any power of personally resisting the
intrusion of the idea -- by the threat of global
annihilation.  Yet in actual fact, nuclear weapons have only
killed about a third of a million people (not to say that's
nothing), whereas World War II, all of which lies within my
life experience, including all but the first two years of
Hitlerism, killed 55 millions.  For me the icon of war is
not a nuclear bomb; it's Auschwitz and Treblinka and
Bergen-Belsen, it's Warsaw, it's Iwo Jima and Pearl Harbor
and Dresden and Stalingrad and the greatest mass killing
there has ever been.  Most importantly in the context of the
discussion, it's *personal* history, part of what "just is,"
for me.  

Few things are more iconic than death, and for me the icon
of death is World War II.  By the time Nelson or John is my
age, the icon of death, of course, will be HIV, next to
which, by then, I fear WW II may be a pop-gun.  Where death
is concerned, WW II will have been a time of relative peace,
when what "just is" meant *only* 55 million dead.

In light of all this, I'm prepared to grant that Madonna is
an icon -- she's the icon of diversion from what "just is."

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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