The Kit Kat Club

Google Announces New/Old Name for its Operating System

———————————————by William Carter————————————————————–

Every city has its seamy side. More so, perhaps, ancient Mediterranean ports long accustomed to serving a  variety of visitors — from circulating sailors, to Saudi sheiks, to sun-seekers, to sidewalk speculators.

When Google announced “KitKat” as the name for the latest version of its Android operating system, I thought both of the Nestlé candy bar and of a formerly well-known Beirut strip joint. That bustling city has always attracted a large supply of entertainers — featuring European blondes — to work at every level, from the posh Casino du Liban, on down.

The Kit Kat Club was on the waterfront not far from where I lived from 1964 to 1966. I photographed dancers there, and later in their apartments, as part of a wider magazine story — “Women of Beirut” — a multi-leveled portrait  of this tribal/sophisticated city which I never got around to finishing.

The bottom image. below, shows a larger, seamier section of town which appeared to feature brunettes.

A year later came the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, followed by Lebanon’s long, brutal internal conflicts —  but by then I was gone.

Fast forwarding 47 years, on November 6, 2013 I was heartened to note this passage by Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal: “While the primary goal of KitKat was to run in a much smaller amount of memory, it has a few notable new features. The phone app now places recent and frequent callers first in its favorite call list and de-emphasizes the full list of contacts…”

photographs © William Carter 1966

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Them vs. Us, and Beyond, Part 3

THE KURDS  AND I

By William Carter

When I boarded the plane with a hand grenade in my coat pocket, I never thought that much about it. I just laid the fuzzy garment in the overhead rack. I was far more concerned with the camera bag containing a couple dozen canisters of undeveloped film, which I slid under the seat in front of me. If anything could still go wrong, I reasoned, those films would somehow or other make their way to Beirut – God knows what would happen to them then.

Sure enough, before the engines started, a polite announcement: “Would Mr. William Carter kindly step off the aircraft?” My limbs began to quiver. But I had already thought this through: leaving the films where they were, and the wool coat where it was, and with my passport and boarding pass in my shirt pocket, feigning calm, I unbuckled my seat belt, walked to the door, down the gangway in the spring sunshine, and stopped. What next? There was no one in sight to direct me. I stood there in the sun for a few seconds —  minutes? — my toes nervous in their hiking boots already warming on the hot tarmac.

If I were arrested, I wondered, could I call the U.S. Embassy and could they get someone in Beirut to pick up my stuff (my film) off the plane? A door in the terminal opened a crack. A hand emerged and seemed to be waving me to get back on the plane. I couldn’t be sure. I shaded my eyes with my hand and squinted. Half a person emerged, faceless but connected to the hand, which kept waving. I went back up the steps. At the top the stewardess in her high heels and perky hat was smiling professionally. “Customs wanted to be sure it was you,” she said, preventing any questions. “Customs,” I knew, meant the Shah’s secret police, the savak, which, I was to pretend I didn’t know, was tracking my movements in and out of Iran.

As I buckled my seat belt, the door closed and the engines started.

The hand grenade – it was disarmed — had been given to me days earlier just across the border in Iraq as a parting gesture of hospitality by the pesh mergas, the Kurdish guerrillas fighting for independence from the Baghdad government. This was June 1965. To this day, some friends think I was working for the CIA in that era. Far from it. I was a freelance photojournalist, on assignment in this case for LIFE Magazine. Authentic except for the explosives, the grenade had been proudly presented to me by the Kurds after  I visited a nondescript village house which my hosts had transformed into an impromptu arms factory.

Weapons factory, northeastern Iraq, 1965

This was the pesh mergas’ way of showing how self-sustaining they were while at the same time begging me to tell America how much they needed modern weaponry. That was not the first time, those past glorious weeks, when I had to improvise a semblance of diplomacy.  “America is a big ocean,” I replied, “And I have only a small spoon.” Hearing the translation, they laughed and slapped my back with that ready good cheer that has charmed many another visitor to these Swiss-like mountains of Mesopotamia, origins of those twin rivers of life—the Tigris and Euphrates – which, millennia earlier, had enabled the blossoming of man’s earliest civilizations in the vast deserts below.

But what was so obvious among the mountain-based Kurds were the profound differences between their character and those of the Arabs, Iranians and Turks under whose authority they were forced to live. After World War I, following the collapse of the centuries-old Ottoman Empire and the century-old British Empire, the international boundaries of the Middle East had been drawn in the drawing rooms of Europe, with scant regard to tribal realities on the ground. For a century, and counting, those artificial lines on the map have remained a recipe for instability — magnified now by the ever-increasing importance of energy resources in a globalizing economy.

P.S.  I made it okay back to Beirut, developed my black and white film in my impromptu bathroom darkroom, scribbled the story and some captions, and airfreighted all that — plus the undeveloped color films – to Manhattan. LIFE ran the story only in black and white. Few of the color slides have ever been published, but you can view them now by hitting the button below.

That was 47 years ago, when I was 30. Our thanks to old Kodak for creating Kodachrome, a wonderful, permanent film whose worldwide success has outlived that of the company. And to Leica for the cameras, an M3 and an M2 (later ripped off my neck covering a flood in Jordan, but that’s another story).

Oh, the hand grenade? I lost it at the Beirut airport, if you can believe that. Perhaps it got reloaded with explosives for use in one of Lebanon’s own fierce tribal wars soon to come in the later ’60s and ’70s. Which I was not around for. Except that my (now) wife (of 27 years) did live through those bleak Beirut years. Which is another story.

I recount the story of the hand grenade and the coat in this video segment.

Here is a video segment in which I recall my travels in Northern Iraq with the Kurds in 1965.

With Mullah Mustafa Barzani, Iraq, 1965

 

With Kurdish pesh mergas, Iraq, 1965

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Dave, Mao, and Me

Timing Can Be Everything

Politics — and photojournalism — make for unexpected relationships.

In 1956 the rulers of impoverished communist China tried something new. They suddenly announced North America was free to send its reporters into the insular nation. Wary of the gambit, the U.S. State Department refused to lift its own ban on Americans visiting this (then) arch-enemy. Canada, however, said okay. Quick to apply was David Lancashire, a bright 25-year-old working for an obscure provincial paper. After China accepted Lancashire’s application, the Associated Press, defying threatened U.S. sanctions, handed this Canadian photo-newbie a camera, wirephoto instructions, and a ticket to the insular Peoples’ Republic.

The first North American correspondent to cover the People’s Republic in the seven years since its birth in 1949, Lancashire travelled more than 5,000 miles across China in six weeks, producing a groundbreaking series of reports on life there — including a story on China’s Last Emperor, Pu Yi, living under house arrest. At Peking airport Dave gained unprecedented access to the makers of one of history’s most famous revolutions: his widely seen “radiophotos” featured Mao Tse Tung, Chou en-Lai, Indonesian ruler Sukarno, and associates (see below).

After that performance, the A.P. hired Lancashire permanently. In 1964 we met at A.P.’s Beirut bureau. Swapping stories of field assignments, Dave and I shared a strong side interest in jazz: he played trombone, and I played clarinet. We formed a little group rehearsing in one another’s living rooms, and even landed a theater gig as the pit band of a British musical comedy, The Boy Friend. Lancashire moved from Beirut to London about when I did, in 1966. Our friendship deepened over the years, and he became Best Man at Ulla Morris’ and my wedding in California in 1984.

Prior to Dave’s death in Toronto in 2007, he sent me some of his historic China negatives, which I hope to transfer to an appropriate institution. Below are highlights of his coverage of Mao, Chou & friends — followed by a photo of Pu Yi, the Last Emperor — then followed by one of us jamming in Beirut, and finally a 1985 wedding photo of best man Dave, bride Ulla, and groom Bill.

China’s “Last Emperor,” Pu Yi, 1956

David Lancashire (left) and William Carter jamming in Beirut, c. 1965; unknown photographer

Left to right: David Lancashire, Ulla Morris-Carter, and William Carter at Ulla and Bill’s wedding, San Marino, California, 1985. Photograph by Esme Gibson.

Update on this story from Les Daly, a friend and colleague of Dave Lancashire’s:
November 26, 2013

I am looking for the compliments desk and the complaint desk.

Compliments for the delightful report on our pal Dave. It really brought back a lot of good memories. Well done, my friend.
Which brings me to the complaint desk, and some memories of my own with Dave,
“a bright 25-year old working for an obscure provincial paper.”
Bright, yes. 25-year old, yes.
The “obscure provincial newspaper” was The Herald in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which I believe was Canada’s largest city at the time, and may still be although of that I am not sure. The Herald was a feisty tabloid, one of three or four English language dailies, that gave young reporters like Dave and me a fair amount of latitude and excitement and an opportunity to learn the craft, as we would later like to think of it, from reporting right through to putting the paper to bed. It died, as did its broadsheet parent, not long after we left, although I doubt the events were related.

Why do I care?

Because Dave and I were working on the Herald together. I was a sportswriter, my first professional newspaper job. Dave was a city-side reporter. We used to hang around together, and ski together and think about girls together. Dave thought better than I did and was far more successful. Always. It might have been the trombone or the skiing, or both. Or just Dave. After he quit the paper and went back to Toronto, he called me one night (we worked nights) and said he was going to China and asked if I wanted to come with him. I told him I couldn’t do that because I am an American and we were, as you point out, still forbidden to travel there. Then, being a sportswriter and thus with limited worldly vision, I asked him, “Why are you going to China anyway?”
“Because,” he replied in his laughing way, “I like Chinese food.”
I asked him, “Can’t you get takeout?” At which point he said goodbye and hung up.

Later on I saw Dave in Beirut, where I believe I first met Ulla, and later in London after he left Beirut claiming he was tired of the Middle East where at press conferences he “was the only guy in the room without a gun.”

More relevant is that Dave and DeeDee stayed with us in Los Angeles when they came for your wedding. I saw them several times after that in Toronto when I went there on business, and followed DeeDee’s condition, and we talked often on the phone but not often enough to know what was coming for Dave. I regret that.

Anyway , you did a fine job and the photos were notable too. Thanks for bringing him back in a way.

Crossing Party Lines – Creatively

When angry goons with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders banged on the door, the man who later married us opened with a big grin and invited them in for tea.

Such was the spirit — and cross-cultural savvy — of John Markarian, the founding President of the Armenian-American College of Beirut, a post in which he served for three decades. The date was October 26, 1975 — in the depths of the terrible civil wars that destroyed Lebanon’s old image as the Switzerland of the Middle East.

John’s invitation to the goons was the first of several similar incidents in which he effectively saved the college. A devout Presbyterian minister with a Ph.D. from Princeton, he knew Muslim society almost as well as he knew the Bible. His actions at the college door — and later the title of his autobiography — came to him from the Book of Proverbs, and Paul’s Letters to the Romans: “When your enemy is thirsty, give him a drink.”

Leaving their weapons near the door, the would-be assailants happily sat down and sipped Arab-style cups of tea with John and his wife Inge — then departed, leaving the college alone.

Not that a similar strategy would necessarily work in Cairo today. Still, it’s worth remembering that fixed positions often lead to fixed bayonets.

I am glad the U.S. State Department is no longer led by Condoleezza Rice. In Cairo, near the beginning of her term, she announced very publicly to Hosni Mubarak and the listening Arab world that the U.S. was about to confer democracy on the Middle East.

I did work out of Beirut as a photojournalist in the 1960s. For many more years I have worked as a fine-art photographer, and for even more years I’ve been a semi-professional jazz clarinetist.

But some of my richest experiences were as a devotee of spiritual master Baba Muktananda in India. The rules in his traditional Hindu ashram were strict. More broadly, that experience freed me  to more fully appreciate, later, the achievements of many other deep masters, such the Dalai Lama.

Now pushing 80, I have been assembling my jazz pictures and memories spanning six decades. Crossing – or not crossing – party lines can have consequences in this field as well. Originally a fierce traditional-jazz purist, I gradually modified that position. For one thing, I noticed that the jazz masters were less often purists than many of their fans. They played as they played — and were cordial with their colleagues across the aisles of nightclubs and recording studios.

Twenty-five years ago, in Mendota, Minnesota, I had dinner with famous bassist Milt Hinton before working a gig with him. Showing me layouts of his new photo book, Milt told me how he had transitioned through every style of jazz, from the 1920s, through years on the road with swing bands, to studio gigs in the “golden age” of modernism and after.

Later, I met other major musicians of today, like Dick Hyman, Shelly Berg, and Arturo Sandoval — all of whom continue to cross over, easily, among jazz styles.

As for me, I still just play funky New Orleans clarinet from the earliest period of jazz. The other night we played a Lindy Hop swing dance with Clint Baker’s band: not even a bandstand, and the light I could see in the dancers’ eyes and feet had no name or form.

And Egypt?

The politics appear far from hopeful for the foreseeable future.

That wonderful land, with its vast plurality of peoples,  has a long habit of being governed by pharaohs.

We can only hope Egypt, with its sophisticated depth, soon finds its way back to a sense of unity in diversity — a vision of its own stillness at the core.

Above: Pastor John Markarian officiating at Ulla’s and Bill’s wedding, March 23, 1985.

Below: Dick Hyman at Filoli, near San Francisco: the fleet, versatile jazz pianist is known for his expertise across the “party lines” of many styles and periods, from  ragtime to swing to contemporary.

Photograph of Dick Hyman © William Carter 2010

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