From the exotic beauties in turn-of-the-20th-century magazine ads for a nascent soap company called Palmolive to dark Desert Storm-era computer games, fantasies about the Middle East have cast a long shadow over American pop culture.

"Orientalism surrounds us," said Jonathan Friedlander, assistant director of UCLA's Near Eastern Studies Center. "It's ingrained in pop culture. We import it, appropriate it and continually reinvent it for mass consumption."

A new exhibit at UCLA's Powell Library explores this rich and little-known history. "Seducing America: Selling the Middle Eastern Mystique" presents hundreds of pieces from Friedlander's personal collection of Middle East-inspired ephemera. The exhibit runs to Dec. 16.

Highlights include:
· Early 20th-century sheet music, magazine advertisements, fruit packing labels and packaging for stimulants such as coffee and cigarettes.
· Mid-century pulp fiction and comic books, richly illustrated children's books, Barbie dolls in harem pants, vinyl recordings with campy record sleeves, and Las Vegas souvenirs.
· Contemporary DVDs, video games and other entertainment informed by the Persian Gulf and Desert Storm conflicts, including "Iraqi Most Wanted" playing cards and a cellophane-wrapped Saddam Hussein voodoo doll.

"The images were so powerful that they drew me in," Friedlander said. "I got seduced."

The Van Nuys collector who has spent more than a decade assembling the pieces hopes his admittedly kitsch collection will inspire scholars to take a hard look at the uses and abuses of Middle Eastern representations at the hands of marketers and manufacturers.

"Since Middle Easterners are rarely the producers of this material, and these advertisements, consumer goods and pieces of entertainment are geared for someone else, this is all about fantasies - not encounters with real Middle Easterners," Friedlander said. "Yet, they subtly shape our views of Middle Easterners and help define ourselves as Americans."

And with so much of the entertainment and media industry in Los Angeles, the phenomenon appears to be largely homegrown.

"Los Angeles," he insists, "is the Mecca of Orientalism."

The Powell exhibit is one of three UCLA events this fall that will look at Western perceptions of the Middle East and Middle Easterners. The other two explore "The Arabian Nights," written in French in 1704 by Antoine Galland and first translated into English in 1706, although the most famous English translation, by the Victorian author Richard Burton, wasn't produced until 1850. "The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: From Galland to Burton" is an Oct. 21-22 scholarly conference at UCLA's William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and "300 Years of 1001 Nights" is a display throughout the month of October at UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library of rare and valuable editions of "Arabian Nights" from UCLA's library holdings. They include several volumes from the first edition of Galland's 12-volume "Les Mille et Une Nuit."

"We still portray the East as a mishmash of religious excess, superstition and despotism, whereas conventional wisdom holds that the West stands for truth, good and justice," said Saree Makdisi, co-organizer of the Clark Library conference with fellow UCLA English professor Felicity Nussbaum. "Of course, nothing is that simple."

A series of free talks at Powell Library will complement the exhibit:
· Michael Cooperson, an associate professor of Near Eastern languages and cultures at UCLA, will discuss cinematic portrayals in the Friday, Oct. 28, talk, "Baghdad and Hollywood." The talk takes place at 3 p.m. in room 270-1.
· Charles Perry, a food writer for the Los Angeles Times, Arabic speaker and UCLA alumnus, will discuss the culinary legacy of "The Arabian Nights" in the Saturday, Nov. 5, talk, "One Thousand and One Bites: Food in the Tales." The talk takes place at 8 p.m. in the Second Floor Rotunda.
· Friedlander will discuss American sheet music with Middle Eastern themes in the Thursday, Dec. 1, talk, "Rebecca Came Back From Mecca and Other Follies From the Annals of American Orientalism." The talk takes place in the Second Floor Rotunda at 3 p.m.

A portion of the exhibit will allow visitors to listen to selections from Middle Eastern inspired American music. Friedlander has amassed 150 pieces of Middle Eastern inspired sheet music going back to the turn of the century. He also owns more than 40 different recordings of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade," many with campy album covers. He also collects Middle-Eastern-themed American rock music, including Dick Dale's "Misirlou," which was inspired by a Lebanese folk song.

"He'd heard it growing up at his grandmother's house," Friedlander said. "He took it and made it the surf anthem."


Juvenilia comprises a significant portion of the collection, including Golden Book versions of tales from "Arabian Nights," props for magic acts, a doll inspired by the 1970s sitcom "I Dream of Jeannie" and, more recently, such computer games as "Prince of Persia" and "Back to Baghdad."

"American kids briefly study the Middle East in sixth or seventh grade," Friedlander said. After that point, pop culture is - for better or worse and mostly for the worst - the major source of information that they encounter."

If Middle Eastern images have amused and shaped generations of American children, they have an even more colorful track record for adults. The exhibit brims with entertainment and consumer goods with a racy or sinful edge.

"The adventures of a modern man among the cruel men and the passionate women of Algiers," reads the jacket copy of the pulpy paperback "Musk, Hashish and Blood." Imagery of veiled temptresses and sword-wielding hunks abound.

"The Middle East is the land of conspiracy and romance - or at least the producers of this material think it is," Friedlander said. "It's all about the thrill."

Yet, in early cigarette ads and fruit packing labels, Middle Eastern imagery, particularly designs that include the ubiquitous camel, is equated with sturdier values.

"It's a powerful image and a symbol of endurance," Friedlander says of the beast of burden.

Still, the complexity and contradictory natures of the messages defies easy categorization, which is why Friedlander hopes his collection will inspire scholarship on the topic.

"The idea is to provide primary and secondary sources of this phenomena, which is constantly evolving and reproducing," he said.

For more information, go to http://www.college.ucla.edu/orientalism/.