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The Wall Street Journal (New York, NY)
There's Art and Music in These American Ambassadors'
Portfolios (Page D6) Naomi Schaefer 28 January 2004
Circulation: 1,820,600
New Yorkers who walk into the oak-paneled Carnegie Club on West
56th Street will encounter a now unfamiliar scent—cigar smoke. The
club, which is one of a few legal cigar bars in a city gone
smoke-free, has nostalgia written all over it: musty bookshelves,
waitresses who don't carry the drinks themselves but are followed by
tuxedoed men who perform that service, and, most of all, Cary
Hoffman and the Stan Rubin Orchestra.
Every Saturday night, it turns out, Mr. Hoffman, a Jewish,
70-something Queens native, sings Sinatra. Or channels him. I'm no
Sinatra expert, but the critics—and the middle-aged woman in the
front row who could hardly stop swooning—seem to agree that Mr.
Hoffman sounds exactly like Sinatra. The show is not an
impersonation, though. It's just a delightful combination of
Sinatra's early songs, a few tidbits about his career, and some
patter about Mr. Hoffman's own love affair with the Chairman. At one
point in the show just before New Year's, Mr. Hoffman introduced the
band and noted the absence of its leader, another gentleman from
Queens, Stan Rubin. "He's in Iraq," said Mr. Hoffman, "bringing
swing to the Shiites."
Mr. Hoffman was joking, but he needn't have been. Through a
program called CultureConnect run by the U.S. State Department, Mr.
Hoffman and Mr. Rubin can take their act on the road. Launched a
little over a year ago, as a response to the attacks of 9/11, the
program sends prominent American writers, artists and musicians to
foreign countries to serve as "cultural ambassadors." And they, in
turn, pick artists from those countries to visit the U.S. "It gives
us a vehicle for people of good will to connect," says Patricia S.
Harrison, assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural
affairs. She explains, "One easy way to do this is through art and
music because you don't need translation." (And given the dearth of
translators available in the U.S., that's no small advantage.)
In the next several months the program will be sending cellist
Yo-Yo Ma to South Korea as well as somewhere in the Middle East and
singer Mary Wilson to Ethiopia, Oman, India and Bangladesh. There
are also tentative plans for author Frank McCourt to visit Syria and
Algeria. Ms. Harrison emphasizes that these artists will not just be
giving a free performance and then jetting off to their next
engagement. Rather, they will be meeting with high-school and
college students in each of these countries, giving master classes
and hosting discussions, to find what Ms. Harrison calls "common
ground." Opera singer Denyce Graves, who has traveled to Venezuela,
Poland, Russia and Romania for the program, explains that such
exchanges "make people more compassionate and tolerant and
understanding. We realize that we are more alike than unalike."
Though most of these students are not destined to become
world-class artists, Ms. Harrison acknowledges, "they still want to
know, `do I have a place in this world?'" And in countries where
young men and women are encouraged to believe their "place" is to
act as explosive material in the holy war against America, it's hard
to overestimate the utility of these conversations.
But there is another sense in which it is important to send
artists like Ms. Graves and jazz musician Wynton Marsalis (another
of the program's ambassadors) to Muslim countries. Though one
hesitates to say there is anything reasonable in the impression that
these young people have of America as the Great Satan, it is
certainly true that the parts of American culture that get through
to these countries are often crude, sexually explicit and lowbrow.
Ms. Graves notes, "I see what's being imported in terms of American
culture, and it's not a fair representation of who we are. I have
cringed at what people think is American, but if you don't have a
chance to visit, all you have is what's being said to you."
Indeed, one needn't go as far as Pakistan to find religious
people who see American culture as a potentially destructive
influence. Plenty of religious communities in the U.S. are disgusted
with offensive rap lyrics or installation art like the elephant-dung
painting of the Virgin Mary. But many of these communities have
tried a policy of cultural discernment, in which they teach young
people to take what is best from American culture, to examine it
through the eyes of their religious beliefs, and to adopt the parts
of it they find in keeping with their principles. Such discernment
requires an acceptance that they will encounter elements of American
culture they don't like, but that this, in and of itself, is no
reason to shut out the secular world. By sending abroad the best of
what American art, music or literature has to offer, CultureConnect
can perhaps move the Muslim world to let some of Western culture
seep in.
Ms. Harrison, who has already spent some time in Iraq with
Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser (another ambassador), says
she has big plans for the country. The Iraqi National Symphony
Orchestra visited the U.S. a few weeks ago as part of the
reciprocation program, and Ms. Harrison hopes to arrange a concert
in Iraq by Yo-Yo Ma. It's too late, of course, for the residents of
Baghdad to hear Frank Sinatra, but there are a couple of guys from
Queens who might be able to fill in.
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