v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Cityscape

Vallejo Nocturno 2011- sunrise in the city

Dishonest Nonsense

Helena Cobban reprints at her blog recent dishonest remarks made by Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister in charge during 2006-9 when her government launched the assoult on the Gaza population, commenting about how democratization efforts should work at a global level:

Current events in the Middle East highlight the urgency of adopting... a universal code for participation in democratic elections. This would include requiring every party running for office to embrace, in word and deed, a set of core democratic principles: the renunciation of violence and the acceptance of state monopoly over the use of force, the pursuit of aims by peaceful means, commitment to the rule of law and to equality before the law, and adherence to international agreements to which their country is bound.

Frisell & Cantuaria

Vallejo Nocturno 2011- at An Die Musik

Washcar

Vallejo Nocturno 2011-185

Military Marching Bands & Dollars

From The security Budget vs. the Necessities of Americans:

How does military spending impact Americans? President Reagan’s former assistant secretary of defense, Lawrence Korb, describes the military budget as “an annual tax of more than $7,000 on every household in the country.”  While increasing the security budget, Obama and the Democrats have proposed widespread cuts to critical programs from a 50% cut in low-income heating assistance to nearly a 30% cut to the clean drinking water fund.  They have also proposed a 25% cut ($1.3 billion) to the community development block grants used to fund local community development including affordable housing, anti-poverty programs, and infrastructure development. These are essential services needed for Americans health, safety and economic security. Of course, Republican cuts in the House budget are even more extreme but Obama set the table for them by making the debate about deficits and both parties will not touch the security budget. Military analyst, William Hartung, writes “These cuts will be painful, and they will be felt in every middle- and lower-income household in America.”

Cities and states are cutting essential services to balance their budgets.  U.S. taxpayers will spend $737 billion for Pentagon spending for FY2011 including war funding). To get a sense of what these means, for the same amount of money tax payers could provide funding for 11.3 million elementary school teachers for one year or 93.5 million scholarships for university students for one year or restart the economy by providing 166.9 million households with renewable electricity – solar photovoltaic for one year. Instead all these programs face cutbacks, while military spending grows.

To get a sense of the absurdity of protecting all military spending, the federal government spends $500 million each year for military marching bands.  In comparison it spends $430 million a year on public broadcasting. More than half of all Americans use PBS each year, 170 million people, but PBS faces cutbacks while military bands are protected from budget cuts.

The greater damage will be in the failure to restart the economy.  Economists like Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, and former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, are convincingly urging more spending. Big business is sitting on $2 trillion in cash stifling job creation and a real economic recovery. There are no signs of inflation because the recovery – if you can even it call it a recovery – is non-existent for working Americans and the unemployed/underemployed whose consumer purchases are needed to drive the economy. Obama risks a 1937 mistake – cutting spending too soon and causing another collapse.

Cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget is the goal of the Obama administration deficit plan.  All of these cuts could come from military spending and still leave the U.S. militarily dominant.  In fact, since the administration has projected an increase in spending of $6.5 trillion from 2011 to 2020, even a trillion would be a slowing of growth more than a real cut. Lawrence Korb lays out a five point plan to reduce military spending by $1 trillion without jeopardizing national security and thereby protecting U.S. economic security.

Daniel Richter

Untitled 1, 2007

From The Brooklyn Rail:

Educated in both the art school and the radical squatter movement of Hamburg, Germany in the 1980s, and subsequently working as an itinerant punk rock graphic designer, Daniel Richter developed a reputation in the mid-1990s for his small, intense, and beautiful conceptual abstractions. Richter began making anarchic, highly expressive figurative paintings in the late 1990s, often on a massive, mural-like scale. These are the works for which he is best known and are represented both at The Power Plant survey and in the current exhibition at David Zwirner, Richter’s first solo show in New York. In interviews, Richter has described himself as reviving classical history painting, and this is an intriguing if perhaps half ironic idea. History painting, from David’s "Death of Marat" to Goya’s "The Third of May" to Manet’s "Execution of Maximilian" has always concerned itself both with the depiction of events and the evocation of larger historical forces—revolution, insurrection, imperial adventures. The advent of photographic images, and their proliferation in media of every kind, from newspapers to product advertisements, means that our relationship to the history of the present is principally a relationship to an avalanche of deceptively imminent, fragmented images. This is perhaps why Leon Golub constructed his politically charged paintings of soldiers and mercenaries from a personal archive of magazine photographs, and why Gerhard Richter’s masterpiece, October 18, 1977, seems to use official photographs as a way of exploring our degraded, confused historical memories. Yet compared with the current context, the premises of both Golub’s and Richter’s earlier work are almost quaint. We now live in a continuously shifting sea of images and information, on television, on billboards, on computers, on cell phones, where pornography, politics, and private communications flow one into the other. History painting now is impossible in part because no single image can carry authentic, representative weight.

Like Golub and Gerhard Richter, Daniel Richter uses photographs as source materials, but in a way significantly different from his predecessors. In Daniel Richter’s work, images culled from what one might call our collective photographic unconscious are lost in complex, fractured, hallucinatory compositions whose bright, seeping surfaces are both psychedelic and toxic.

After the concert

 
Vallejo Nocturno 2011-snowtable

Victor Cobo

Victor Cobo

Florian Maier-Aichen

From art 21 blog:

Florian Maier-Aichen likens his use of infrared film to an in-between state, discussing photography’s role in picturing the American West and its ability to confound past and present.

Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, chooses equipment that produces accidents such as light leaks and double exposures, and uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements into images that paradoxically “feel” visually right, though they are factually wrong. Often employing an elevated viewpoint (the objective but haunting “God’s-eye view” of aerial photography and satellite imaging), Maier-Aichen creates idealized, painterly landscapes that function like old postcards. Interested in places where landscape and cityscape meet, he chooses locations and subjects from the American West and Europe—from his own neighborhoods to vistas of the natural world. Looking backwards for his influences, Maier-Aichen often reenacts or pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the nineteenth century, sometimes even remaking their subject matter from their original standpoints. Always experimenting, he marries digital technologies with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color, infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.

Raoul De Keyser
Untitled, 2006
Oil on canvas

From Whitechapel Gallery:

Flemish artist Raoul De Keyser paints highly personal works that hover between abstraction and reality. His quiet but masterful presence has been an inspiration for generations of European painters – yet this is his first major survey in the UK and the largest exhibition of his work to date.

Like a series of haiku poems his beautiful compositions evoke fleeting impressions of the world – the network of veins on a leaf, bruised skin, the glimpse of a room - but they are all abstract. The roots of his work lie in both Pop Art and Minimalism. Inspired by everything from the architecture of his house near Ghent to the markings on football pitches, aeroplane vapour trails to clothes on a washing line, De Keyser’s subject matter is always close to home. At the same time his rigorous use of pure colour, line and space triggers both a physical and surprisingly emotional response.

The elegant simplicity of his paintings conceals the struggle and experiment embedded in every canvas, as colours are repainted and surfaces overlaid. ‘I don’t want to become the ‘pretty’ painter... Ultimately I want to paint ruthlessly’ (De Keyser, 2002). Featuring over 80 paintings from 1963 to the present day this retrospective charts Raoul De Keyser’s life-long engagement with the physicality of paint and the ephemerality of images.