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

Sunday Photographing Experience

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - nueva leica

Suicide Campaigns

From The New Inquiry, Dan Nemser writes:

Since last July, about 20 people have killed themselves in the face of imminent eviction. These numbers should be considered a rough estimate, due to the diversity of circumstances and the difficulty of deciphering “causes.” Useful resources for tracking eviction suicides are the Wikipedia page and a blog called Los desahucios matan (“Evictions kill”). Since I started writing this piece, I’ve had to update the count three or four times. At least four hung themselves in or near their homes just hours before the police arrived to remove them. At least six jumped from their balconies in similar circumstances. On February 12, a married couple in their late 60s overdosed in their home after receiving an eviction notice. The following week, a woman walked into a bank, poured flammable liquid over her head, and lit herself on fire yelling, “You’ve taken everything from me!” (me lo habéis quitado todo). She held on for three months in the hospital with severe burns covering half her body, but passed away at the beginning of May.

Suicide is paradigmatic of subalternity. It constitutes the ultimate limit on speech: The protagonist can no longer tell her own story, explain the sequence of experiences that led to the decision, or describe the hesitation of feet at the edge or the joy and terror and speed of the fall. And yet, it is only after death that the act can be brought to life. Only when it has been silenced can that death made sense of, pieced together into a chain of events that says something about the world and how it works. While Spanish activists and politicians have sparred over how best to interpret the suicides, therefore, the tasks of narration and emplotment belong to the writer and historian. Perhaps this is why Talal Asad has suggested in On Suicide Bombing that suicide is intimately tied up with fiction and the desire to craft “plausible histories.” One way to tell this story would start from the recognition that the suicides bring into sharp relief a set of structural factors that can otherwise be difficult to see with the naked eye. With general unemployment currently at 26 percent — though the figure for youth is more than double that — it isn’t hard to imagine plausible scenarios in which spiraling interest payments converge with ever increasing desperation. Since the financial crisis hit in 2008, foreclosures have skyrocketed: Some 400,000 evictions have taken place, which amounts to hundreds a day. At the same time, the most recent census data shows that between five and six million housing units currently sit empty, approximately 20 percent of the country’s housing stock. In this way, crisis intensifies the structural contradictions of capitalism. The Spanish countryside is now littered with half-built subdivisions, carcasses of concrete, brick, and rebar, the scars of a construction boom fueled by northern European banks.

More

Pepa's Backyard

Vallejo Nocturno 2013- In June before lunch

KiNK live analog dub session for Dub Laborant radioshow

 

From RBMA Radio:

Strahil Velchev aka KiNK is an innovative, uncompromising producer, captivating DJ and live performer from Bulgaria, uniting the roots and fruits of electronic music in his music with a very special KiNK twist. Being a raver in his early teenage years and breathing acid, techno, proto-hardcore and jungle, he got his hands on one of the first modular software synthesizers by the time he turned 20 and held his first self-produced 12" in his hand just a few years later. There are several things that shape KiNK’s expert sound: patience and persistence in the studio, a long experience as a music listener, a love for the soul and the pristine sound of old music as well as his passion for futurism. KiNK is a multi-style producer, but he is probably best known for his proto-house music project with Neville Watson through their releases on Amsterdam’s imprint Hour House Is Your Rush. In the following two years KiNK (solo and with Neville) produced music for high profile labels like Rush Hour, Ovum, Poker Flat, Systematic, Mule Musiq, Get Physical, liebe*detail and others. He used to perform as a dynamic and skilful DJ mainly, when he decided to take a new challenge: finding a way to play his own music live. The Bulgarian artist found his live setup as a mixture of dusty analogue gadgets and modern digital technology. KiNK performs with his machines in the same way as he plays records: fast, busy, risky and pushing his tools to the limit.

Hungry Curiosity

William Gaddis' advice to his young son from a letter he wrote to him:

Of course the problem is setting the goals in the first place; many enough ‘successful’ men end up drunks for having fulfilled goals the world set for them and then finding they’ve fulfilled nothing in themselves; many enough kids end up junkies for having decided the world’s goals aren’t worth trying for and being unable to set any of their own. A few fortunate combine the two (I don’t mean drink and drugs, but meaning your own and wordly goals), and your education and growing up now are vitally important because learning the world’s goals (even marks in school) gives you the material to form your own—and don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean that by your 16th birthday you should know whether you want to be a poet or an astronaut, but only have a hungry curiosity in all directions for anything that brings you and your mind to life.

ANFASEP - Love and the Search for the Disappeared

Obsession

Vallejo Nocturno 2012-In the Amazon in 1982

Feliz Cumpleaños, Ana

Rare as it may seem, this is a "call out" to my dear cousin from Lima, a painter of great talent, and more important, a human being of great sensibility and caring: Feliz Cumpleaños, Ana. . .
por Ximena, 2012

Vallejo Nocturno 1974- Ana & Javier

Margarita's Birthday Walk

Vallejo Nocturno 2012-On my aunt's birthday and a walk on the beach

Lis Lis [Dot] Net

Lis Lis [Dot] Net