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

Everest

From Codex99:

Noel was filming George Mallory and Andrew Irvine on 8 Jun 1924 when they disappeared high on the mountain, never to be seen again. Whether they reached the summit is one of the enduring mysteries of Everest. In 1999 the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition hoped to find their remains and hopefully the Kodak Vest Pocket camera that Noel supplied to all the climbers.⁶ Miraculously, they found Mallory’s body but unfortunately not the camera.

Detroit Techno Doc

Manufacture decay

Matt Peerce writes in The New Inquiry:

Every picture you upload, every cheap memory tweeted from your friend’s backyard into digital eternity, is also tied to some tendon or ankle of hardware in a faraway warehouse that corporate security would never let you enter. This is risk. Someday these places will be destroyed — by bombs, by cranes, by floods, by history, by all the kinds of things we tend to photograph — and the images will be gone if they’re not also fastened to the world somewhere else.”Perhaps you’ll care; perhaps you’re dead by then and won’t. Perhaps your children will care if they’re neurotic enough to scrutinize your history by sorting through 50 photographs from a hayride you never thought about again; perhaps they won’t.

Think of this from 50 years out, if you care. Hipstamatic and Instagram’s distortion of reality may eventually become annoying beyond faddishness and ascend to historical obnoxiousness; there’s even one filter that slaps a 30-year-old date on the photo it warps. The chasm they leap so instantly between reality and artificial antiquity — and the fact that it’s the latter that’ll be preserved for and remembered by posterity — makes me think of Borges’ wry declaration: “The original is unfaithful to the translation.” The past won’t be what it used to be. But Borges is gone. 

Borges once wrote a story about a boy named Funes who remembered everything, like a human camera, and by the end of the story, Funes was gone. If anything, I like having this gussied photograph in my living room aging with me because I don’t know the next time I’ll get one printed. The idea of a having a print already comes from an era I no longer live in; tomorrow I’ll just log on to Facebook to see the photos of my newer friends. They’re fixed to a wall of a different kind, hung in a different kind of living room, but one also accumulating the detritus of lives headed in unknown directions. We are no less alive because of it, the technology bent to no less human purposes. I feel something more than nothing when I wake to images of those strange new friends in Cairo I’d had no right to meet let alone see again, but that’s as much a commentary on the business of picture-making as it on fate.

So perhaps that’s really it: Our interesting times have met a golden age of photography. Fathom the tiny lens of an iPhone, powerful enough to depose our dictators and break our hearts in an instant. Such a strange fate for an art, Borges might’ve thought. But still no stranger than our own.

Donald Weber

From Weber's site:

The people most affected by the explosion of Reactor Number Four on the morning of April 26,1986, soon learned that the event known as Chernobyl was predicted by a feature film made seven years earlier. Stalker, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, explored the limits of our technical explanatory power against the backdrop of a mysterious force that can only be approached on foot, by forest “stalkers” who have learned to accept its risky gifts.

The portentous coincidence that links these two isolated small towns – one, the infamous home of a nuclear disaster, the other, a fictional source for metaphysical speculation – is the subject of this photographic project, ” Stalker.” Today, real stalkers live inside the official 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone in Chernobyl and secretly strip the dead city of its valuables, while avoiding the security forces – and the ghosts of the ruptured past.

Auditory beauty of Shostakovich's Quartets

From  Shostakovich's String Quartets:

Was it a coincidence that the Fifth Quartet was performed before the Fourth just as the Fifth Symphony was premièred before Fourth Symphony? Certainly. Was it pure chance that Shostakovich started his Fourteenth Quartet at about the time he visited Benjamin Britten, to whom he had dedicated his Fourteenth Symphony? Probably. But what about the overt use of twelve-tone serialism in the Twelfth Quartet? Or the 13 strikes of the bow on the viola in the Thirteenth Quartet? Or the significance of the 34th bar for the second violinist in the Twelfth Quartet?

Shostakovich's music is full of both numerical and musical references; detecting them and determining their possible significance is a daunting task. A numerical reference, such as hitting the viola thirteen times, is relatively easy to detect. But far more difficult are the musical references contained within his scores. These make connections, sometimes to other compositions by Shostakovich but often to those of other composers. And such citations are copious: Shostakovich's music is saturated with them. Some remained for a long time undetected because they blended in effortlessly with the music but when they are heard the question regarding their meaning arises. What is Shostakovich implying by quoting this other work?

Two very obvious examples appear in his last, the Fifteenth, Symphony. They are exceptional only in being so explicit. In the first movement of that symphony there is a reference to Rossini's famous fanfare motif from 'Guillaume Tell'. What does Shostakovich intend by this reference? He had already quoted it before, although not so overtly, in his Ninth Quartet, so does the citation in the symphony refer back to that quartet or to Rossini's opera? Moreover the final movement begins with an equally explicit quotation of the dramatic orchestration of the 'Fate' leitmotif which Wagner uses to depict Siegfried's funeral in 'Götterdämmerung'. Is Shostakovich referring to fate, or rather with irony to his own up-coming death? Or is he implying with these two quotes that fate has transformed him from the youthful embodiment of Rossini's romantic revolutionary into a worldly but compromised Shavian Socialist Hero²?

William P. Gottlieb, Jazz Photographer

Bill Gottlieb's great jazz photos at Flickr

3-D Maps

Detail, Rockerfeller Center, Herman Bollman, 1962

From codex99 article on maps of New York:

The thorny problems with perspective mapping of NYC were finally solved by the German graphic artist turned cartographer Herman Bollmann. In the late 1940s Bollmann began drawing picture-plans, or bildkarten, of European cities using an oblique “optically modified” axonometric projection. Initially Bollmann drew his maps by direct observation using a light table in the field and by the 1960s was employing a special camera (mounted on a VW).⁵

His New York Picture Map, published in 1962 by Pictorial Maps, was by far his most ambitious project. Over the course of only eight months, aided by 17,000 aerial and 50,000 ground photos, Bollmann and his staff created a map that not only showed an unobstructed view of Midtown, nearly to perfect scale, but included a remarkable level of architectural detail. Kevin Brown of Geographicus called it “one of the greatest cartographic feats of all time.”⁶

Some Crazy Magic: Meeting Harry Smith

Some Crazy Magic: Meeting Harry Smith from Drew Christie on Vimeo.

Our Lady of Cocharcas

 Our Lady of Cocharcas - Virgin with Indian Worshipers

The painting is part of a fascinating new show, “Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Using an incredible sampling of paintings, textiles, sculptures, feather art, folding screens, and other treasures produced in and around the two great capitals, Cuzco and Tenochtitlan, it examines how indigenous people—whether as creators of art, or as its subject—shaped South American culture from the 15^th century to the 19th.

from Let My People Show

Steve Jobs, LSD, Salesmanship, and Connections

From the blog, War in Context:

We live in a society where drug-taking — either recreationally or by prescription — has never been more commonplace. So the idea that psychedelics induce particular sensations, suggests that they are yet another tool for modulating feelings and that those feelings merely happen to be located at a rarely engaged point on the feeling spectrum.

Most striking however — and this would tend to apply to those psychedelic experiences occurring in a tranquil and natural setting — is the sense that this is not a drug-induced experience. In other words, although the drug throws open a previously invisible door which will close after just a few hours, while that door remains open the intrinsic capabilities of the human mind appear to have been unlocked revealing the indivisibility of perceiver, perception, and perceived. The gap between “in here” and “out there” has dissolved.

The drug, rather than producing some form of intoxication, seems instead to peel away those perceptual filters that in everyday awareness largely shut out the world. For those rare individuals in whom those filters have already fallen away, the drug has no effect. Neem Karoli Baba, who Jobs had hoped to meet in India, had already demonstrated such an immunity to the effects of psychedelics. But the conclusion of Jobs own brief spiritual adventure was that individuals such as that particular Indian sage had much less to offer the world than the likes of Thomas Edison.

How did Jobs interpret his own LSD experience? I can only speculate, but given his role in helping create a society where our electronic connections often seem stronger than our physical relationships, I’m inclined to think that either he couldn’t retrieve much from the depths afterwards or didn’t penetrate any more deeply than the level of aesthetics. Later, when invited to support scientific research into therapeutic applications for psychedelics, Jobs declined.

The response to Jobs’ death has become a kind of instant beatification. He has become America’s greatest inventor — even though he didn’t invent anything. He is the visionary who shaped the world we live in — but is successfully developing products that cater to manufactured needs really a vision? What’s hard to dispute is that he was one of the greatest salesmen who ever lived.

This was a man who when asked whether he was glad that he had kids, said, “It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done,” yet it seems he never found enough time to get to know them. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did,” said Jobs when explaining why he consented to having his biography written.

And therein lies the paradox of the age of global connectivity: it allows us to be part of ever expanding information and social networks which are formed by tying together bubbles of increasing isolation.