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

Mose Code Pictures

Sir W. Mitchell Thompson

From Triple Canopy:

David Horvitz: This is a photoradiogram of Sir W. Mitchell-Thomson by the Radio Corporation of America. It was made in 1926, when photographs were first being transmitted through radio waves and telegraph and telephone wires, which, up until that point, only transmitted language. Barriers between spaces seemed to become obsolete as communications began to travel from one place to another almost instantaneously. With photoradiograms, the image of an event could travel as well.

How does this work? The machine scans the image line by line and encodes it into an electrical signal—like Morse code—then sends it by radio wave to another machine, which reconstructs and prints the image. (This image was scanned in London; Mitchell-Thomson was the postmaster general of the United Kingdom at the time.) The result is a kind of halftone picture. The photoradiogram machine was a precursor of the fax machine and of what would become the Internet.

William Smith: It’s easy to imagine Morse code operating in a visual or mimetic rather than symbolic or coded way here, given that the image is actually composed of discrete marks that vary in density to convey areas of light and dark. At the time, people might have compared the photoradiogram to a coarse engraving; to us it looks pixelated. Was the technology developed in a commercial context or a military or government context?

DH: The government consolidated this technology during the First World War, when it took over the radio industry and put a moratorium on patents. Afterward, there was an efflorescence of inventions. RCA was one of the main companies using this kind of technology for consumer applications after the war. Richard Ranger, who worked for RCA, designed the photoradiogram in 1924. The photoradiogram and similar technologies were used by wire services and to send weather information to ships at sea. But the first image transmitted across the Atlantic was of President Calvin Coolidge, sent from New York to London.

Brian Droitcour: When was the first cat picture sent by radio?

DH: I don’t know, but we could find out.

WS: This photoradiogram is a picture of Mitchell-Thomson, but it might as well depict a LOLcat. The real subject is the image’s own transmission and the technology underlying it. It is a proof of concept. The technology came first; the production of images that needed to be transmitted instantaneously followed.

You say that this image renders barriers between different spaces obsolete through the speed of its transmission. Yet the low resolution of the picture may also represent vast distances as well. The pixelated quality of the image points to an important delay inherent in its production. So while we may view this as a precursor to the Internet, it also makes us aware of the physical dimension of image transmission even at a moment when real-time viewing appears seamless.

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Mike Cockrill Interview

Mike Cockrill's Baby Doll Clown Killer painting on studio wall with new-work

Interview of painter Mike Cockrill at whitehot magazine:

Heaps: Mike, I'm eager to hear what you have to say about these new paintings, but I want to get some background in the conversation too. My goal is to make everybody get an idea of what kind of painter you are.

Cockrill: I've done straight ahead figurative painting for about 40 years. I was academically trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I was painting like Edward Hopper and Thomas Eakins when I was in school. That was the time people considered painting dead. The big struggle was to figure out how to make painting not dead, how to paint something relevant, that led me to switching over to cartoon painting and using completely over the top subject matter. Kennedy assassination, incest in the American home, I was working with a collaborator who was fearless. It made me kind of fearless. Together we created these pieces as Cockrill/Judge Hughes, and that was a big break from my academic formal training. But I think every 10 years I feel like I get to the point where I understand the form, and I need to do something different to keep myself interested and growing as an artist. After the Cockrill/Judge Hughes cartoon paintings, which were acrylic, I switched over to oil, or back to oil, trying to figure out how to paint a figure again. It kind of culminated in the Baby Doll/Clown Killer series in '95. Those were the first paintings that people actually wanted to buy. And it was the first time I got press that was positive. After doing about 20 of those, and selling most of them, I began to look at childrens' illustration, childrens' books, I started doing tableaus of boys, girls, moms, the kind of sexual awakening, coming of age. That sort of genre. I painted that up until this year, still pushing the narrative nostalgic figuration. It looked like it was from my childhood. I set it in that era so that if I'm doing a boy looking at a mom without a shirt on, it was funnier and more satirical and socially significant to make it in the 60s, because it's a look back at your childhood, the things that I was aware of growing up, that the girl next door was changing over into a young woman, these kind of things are really charged, and not something that you are supposed to talk about. Not anything that anybody wanted to acknowledge. And they still don't in our culture, want to acknowledge that children, at 9, 10, 11 start becoming aware of their bodies and the bodies of each other. This is supposed to be buried until we're 18. So when I was painting it, some people got really upset. They called it child pornography, they called me a pervert, a pedophile, and that's so dishonest. Because other people come up and say, Are you kidding? This is totally my experience too when I was a kid, I had a big crush on the girl in front of me in class. So to deny that that exists is completely corrupt.

Heaps: Do you find that in the art world, because everyone is so sophisticated, there is a prejudice against nostalgia? Like nostalgia would be a bad thing to have in your paintings, and this is part of the reason that nobody likes Norman Rockwell, for example?

Cockrill: I don't think that's really true, because if you look at John Currin, or Neo Rauch, or some of the figurative painters that came along in the 90s, they were working with costumes, or a look that seemed divorced from our moment. They were turn of the century, or Neo Rauch, I don't know what costumes those people are wearing. It doesn't look like today.

Heaps: The way they are drawn looks like the boy scout handbook, East German version.

Cockrill: Yeah, exactly. I thought all that stuff was great, and I was doing it too. I loved that stuff. Who did it first? I was doing sexually charged imagery in the 80s, so some people thought I was a little ahead of the curve when they started seeing Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin doing it in the 90s, but I had been doing it for 10 years and getting a lot of shit for it! They were able to dress it up in kind of a goofy kitsch look that deactivated the content.

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Mike Cockrill, Gossip Girls, 2010. Oil on Canvas, 62 x 50 inches.

Edge

Vallejo nocturno 2012- At the edge of translations

Augusto Monterroso

MAIDS

I love maids for their unreal aspect, because they always end up leaving, because they don’t like obeying anyone, because they incarnate the last vestiges of free work and voluntary contract, receiving neither health insurance, nor bonuses, nothing at all; because they arrive like the ghosts of an extinct race, enter our houses, sniff around, rummage, peer into the abysses of our petty secrets as they read the dregs of coffee cups or wine glasses or cigarette stubs or quite simply by insinuating their furtive glances and greedy hands into our wardrobes and under our pillows, or even when they gather up small pieces of torn-up paper and the echo of our quarrels, while they shake out and sweep away our perpetual miseries and the remains of our hatreds when they’re alone all morning, singing triumphantly; we receive them like annunciations the day they arrive with their luggage just a packet of Starbucks Via or value box of Pop-Tarts containing their linen, their hairpins and the tiny mirrors which preserve the powdery traces of the last unreality from which they were displaced; and at that moment they say yes to everything and it seems that their protecting hand will never fail us; and yet, finally, they decide to leave exactly as they came but with a more profound knowledge of human nature, an enlarged comprehension and solidarity; because they are the last representatives of Evil, and our wives, not knowing what to do without the presence of Evil, cling to them and beg them not to abandon this earth; because they are the only beings who avenge us for the affronts of these same wives by just leaving, gathering up their dresses in every color, their stuff, their pots of third-rate beauty cream filled with slightly dirty first-rate beauty cream, the fruit of their miniature maladroit thefts. I’m off, they say with vigor as they pack up their things in their cardboard luggage. But why? Just because. (O ineffable liberty.) And they’re off like sly angels in search of new adventures, a new house, a new bed, a new sink, a new employer who won’t be able to live without them and who will love them; they plan a new life, refusing to display any gratitude at all for the care they received when they fell ill nor for the aspirin they were given with love, out of anxiety that the next day they might not be well enough to wash the dishes, because I mean sure, the cooking, that’s OK, but the dishes, they’re the worst. I love seeing them arrive, knock at the door, smile, enter, say yes to everything; because it must always end in renunciation, even when they’ve found a Mary Poppins of an employer who will resolve all their problems, along with those of their parents, their brothers, younger and older, one of whom once raped them; who will teach them in the evenings to sing do-re-mi do-re-mi until they fall asleep, their sweet thoughts tending toward the next day’s pile of dirty plates, drowning in a fresh wave of fa-sol-la-si washing-up foam, who will caress their hair with tenderness, leave without making any noise, on tip-toe, and put out the light at the very last moment, before leaving the bedroom with its vaguely unreal outlines.

 

El perro que deseaba ser un ser humano

En la casa de un rico mercader de la Ciudad de México, rodeado de comodidades y de toda clase de máquinas, vivía no hace mucho tiempo un Perro al que se le había metido en la cabeza convertirse en un ser humano, y trabajaba con ahínco en esto.

Al cabo de varios años, y después de persistentes esfuerzos sobre sí mismo, caminaba con facilidad en dos patas y a veces sentía que estaba ya a punto de ser un hombre, excepto por el hecho de que no mordía, movía la cola cuando encontraba a algún conocido, daba tres vueltas antes de acostarse, salivaba cuando oía las campanas de la iglesia, y por las noches se subía a una barda a gemir viendo largamente a la luna.

Ferreira Gullar

Barulho

Todo poema é feito de ar
apenas:
               a mão do poeta
               não rasga a madeira
               não fere
                              o metal
                              a pedra
               não tinge de azul
               os dedos
               quando escreve manhã
               ou brisa
               ou blusa
                              de mulher.

O poema
é sem matéria palpável
               tudo
               o que há nele
               é barulho
                              quando rumoreja
                              ao sopro da leitura.

Interview with Paul Elie

From The Millions:

The Millions:  When did you decide to write a book about Bach?

Paul Elie: I think I suspected that my interest in Bach would turn into a book even before I wrote my first book, but I didn’t know enough about Bach yet to write it. I had the ardor without the sense to know what to do with it. I kept making notes and listening to recordings and putting myself into encounters with Bach’s music, aware that after some time something would come of it.

TM: Were you conscious of the connections between your two books as you were writing this new one?

PE: Very much so, in the sense that I knew that in the new book as well as the old one I was telling distinct stories that come together as one story. I realized that Albert Schweitzer and Pablo Casals were near-exact contemporaries, that they had similar preoccupations, and that they made their crucial Bach recordings in London in the middle thirties. Casals’s famous recording of Bach’s cello suites, which he began at Abbey Road studios in November 1936, follows Schweitzer’s recording at the church of All Hallows in the old City by about a year. You read those dates in CD liner notes and feel connections emerging unbidden.

Also, the two books are alike in the sense that they are meant to represent areas where transcendence still feels authentic in our society. The four writers whose stories I told in The Life You Save May Be Your Own make Christian belief credible to people for whom it might not otherwise be so, and that’s true of Bach, too. His music seems to find receptive ears among people of faith, people of no faith, and people who don’t think the matter of faith makes any difference one way or the other.

[Elie pauses and smiles at the music being played on the radio -- the slow organ opening to Procol Harum’s "A Whiter Shade of Pale."]

Listen to that. That organ riff is basically the same riff as in Bach’s “Air on the G String.” Gary Brooker of Procol Harum said that he was noodling around on Bach on the piano and the song came out — a song that has made millions of dollars for him and the rest of the band. It’s not just the two of us sitting here in a café saying, “That sounds like Bach.”  The songwriter himself actually said so. People often describe the instrumental middle section of the Beatles’s song “In My Life” as Baroque-like, but it’s not just an impression: John Lennon himself said to George Martin, “Play like Bach” — and then went out for a smoke or whatever.

TM:  When you first mention Abbey Road (in regard to Casals’s recording of the cello suites), I of course thought of the Beatles and hoped they’d come into the story, and they do.

PE: If you are writing a narrative work, you never flash-forward if you can help it; you forbid yourself to make comments like “Abbey Road, which would later become famous as the studio of the Beatles.” So many biographies are ruined by that move: it’s a biography of Shelley, say, and the author will intone, “It was now a week before Shelley’s death.” And so you know when Shelley goes out sailing that he’s never coming back — when the power of Shelley’s story lies in the fact that his life was cut off abruptly when he was still a young man.

TM: Takes away the suspense.

PE:  Withholding some of the information you have is a way to produce the narrative effect that you need. The excitement of writing the book is figuring out where to do certain things — when to withhold, and when to disclose.

TM:  How, in the practical sense, did you work out a story that covers 75 years and brings in Bach’s own story, which took place two hundred years earlier? Did you have timelines? An architecture you were trying to fit the pieces into?

PE:  At one point early on I had a giant piece of graph paper, as big as a tablecloth, with a lot of Post-Its on it — but that was just a way to get the brain working; once it was made, I never looked at it again. The decision to give Schweitzer, Casals, and Stokowski each his own part or suite came pretty early. When I realized that each suite coincided with a great leap forward in audio technology, the structure firmed up considerably. The wild card was Bach — how to get Bach himself in there. When I realized that he was an inventor­­ — the composer of the Two- and Three-Part Inventions — it clicked. Bach’s way of invention could run in parallel to the inventive powers of his modern interpreters and of pioneers in recording technology. But that was several years in. You have to be ready to work in the dark.

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Top Ten Mitt Romney Solutions to our Problems

From Juan Cole:

1. Expensive emergency room care for those who have no health insurance.

2. Higher taxes on the middle class.

3. Lower taxes on millionaires.

4. War with Iran.

5. Intervention in Syria.

6. Make Egypt understand what the rules are.

7. Annoy both Russia and China. Brand the Russian Federation no. 1 enemy of the United States for no known reason.

8. Free skin dye kit for every American who wants to enjoy the tremendous advantages of becoming Latino in America–including the chance to join the ranks of all our past Latino presidents (who had this unfair advantage).

9. Cold fusion
.
10. Airplane windows that can easily be opened in flight whenever there is a fire on board at 30,000 feet. Also, free parachutes for all the passengers who will be sucked through the open window.

Martin Elder

Concrete

Toothache by Mari Kojima

Toothache by Mari Kojima

Biography:

Mari Kojima was born in Shimane, Japan, in 1982. She studied fashion design and lived abroad for several years before a family crisis precipitated her return home – and her discovery of photography as a means to express the divergence between her inner turmoil and happiness. In addition to taking photographs, Mari runs a publishing company called Bathysphere Books. She is currently living and working in Tokyo.

www.marikojima.com

The Black Power MixTape 1967-1975