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Ricky Renuncia DC Protest

All fotos by Vallejo Nocturno 2019- DC Protest of Puerto Rico's Corrupt Governor to Implore Him to Resign

The Dream of Unifying Images

Albert Kahn, the French Banker from the turn of last century, decided to photograph the world:

When Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and philanthropist, decided he wanted to commission a photographic “archive of the planet” he wasn’t joking. And though the idea of cataloging the earth seems whimsical in scope today, the pictures he helped create between 1909 and 1931 hold our attention like few others from the era.

They are some of the finest examples of early color pictures made using the Lumière brothers’ innovative Autochrome process. Autochromes employed microscopic grains of dyed potato starch to filter the color spectrum into three additive shades. The results, when viewed through a stereoscope or back-lit by a light box, were among the first natural color images in that their tones were derived from the color spectrum of light and not the artist’s hand.

In all, Kahn’s team of cameramen visited fifty countries to collect 72,000 photographs, some of which are among the first color images ever made in places like Vietnam, Brazil, Norway, and Mongolia. But with its essentialized worldview, Archives of the Planet also laid groundwork for the kind of exotic voyeurism made ubiquitous by publishers like National Geographic.

Nonetheless, the images Kahn was instrumental in producing retain a sense of idealism which is hard to ignore—their unnervingly contemporary feel a projection of a distinct color palette clashing with the unselfconscious postures of another era.

Kahn’s ambitions were cut short in the 1930s when he lost his fortunes to the Great Depression. But for a brief period he had hoped to promote peace and cultural solidarity through photography—a sentiment to which the medium has returned frequently, if unconvincingly, ever since.

Overreading Trump

 

From a reader of The Atlantic, a reading of Trump:

I had an epiphany sometime around the midterms, after about 2 years of watching and reading heavy duty analysis by so many serious folks who, because it’s their job I suppose, tend to *project* seriousness, intent, thought, strategy, forethought, planning, and other such things, each time Trump does something. No matter how loose the cannon gets, most serious journalists default to a polite interpretation that suggests, say, Trump had something in mind when he just did that ridiculous thing.

Put another way, they’re suggesting he’s crazy like a Fox, not just an idiot.

At some point I found myself trying to explain to a friend why Trump did something kooky. As I considered everything I concluded what he was doing was strictly for the attention. It was for one news cycle. No strategy, no planning, no idea about implications. And no intention of following up even a day later.

That’s when it hit me: he’s running a reality tv show out of the Whitehouse. Every day is a new episode, and every single move is designed to get better Nielsen ratings, improve the brand, or whatever it is that drives that peculiar form of celebrity. Mostly he’s feeding the monster that is 24/7 cable news.

Think about it this way: you’ve spent your life as a journalist, traveling, flying, writing, running, thinking about how sausages and laws are made. You view the world, your daily routine, even your own self … through that lens. If by some glitch in the matrix you found yourself Commander in Chief then that is the lens by which you’d view your new job. Everything you’ve done before would impact your schedule, your routine, and how you view the world.

More importantly, your serious effort over many years to think long and hard, to write out your thoughts, to bring wisdom and facts to the observations you share, even the reasons you share, how you pick what is a priority for the next issue … all those things would have an impact on the way in which you’d present your public face, your presidential face. In turn, people covering your administration would figure out the above almost immediately and do what they do accordingly.

Trump is a guy who has known only a very narrow slice of the world (NY real estate), has never been curious, or thoughtful, and certainly never cared about the ideals of good government, nor the welfare of others. For decades he has mixed his person with his public persona to the point of reaching some warped public media brand that eventually landed him on a fake tv show about how he runs the fake parts of his mostly fake company. And then one day, through a glitch in the matrix, he woke up the President of these United States.

So he put on a show. Some people liked it. He’s worked every day to get those ratings up. He blows his top when they have a bad day—not because a little kid dies in a camp, not because something doesn’t get out of a committee, not because of anything substantive being analyzed by reporters—no, he’s mad because of the bad optics, because someone upstaged him in an interview, because someone coughed while he was talking.

America has elected a carnival barker with absolutely no clue about history, government, the machinations of global finance, nor even GOP politics. There is no plan, there is no strategy, there is no underlying wisdom or thought with each step. There’s today’s show, a manic struggle to find new content, cliff hangers, figuring out who gets killed off next. Our economy, foreign policy, place on the world stage, is based on tv production values, or some formula.

Once you see it you can’t unsee it and suddenly everything makes sense.

PS have you ever seen the riff by John Mulaney making the case that Trump is like a horse loose in a hospital? This is so good (jump to 7:20).

Pierre Molinier Auto Portrait

Pierre Molinier's Auto Portrait

Dora Maar's Art and Life

 

From NYRB, on Dora Maar's exhibition in Paris and her life with Picasso:

By the time of the International Exhibition, Maar’s life had taken an unexpected turn. In late 1935, she had been working as a stills photographer on the set of Jean Renoir’s film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, and at the press screening in January 1936, Paul Éluard introduced her to Pablo Picasso. Maar was twenty-eight and Picasso was fifty-four; his marriage to Olga Khokhlova had collapsed, and he was living with the young Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had recently borne his daughter Maya. Picasso later said that this was the most difficult time in his life. Maar revived him, bringing new inspiration: he was fascinated by her love of extremes, her aura of danger, her wit, her elusiveness. She photographed him in her studio and soon they were lovers.  

Along with Éluard, Maar encouraged Picasso to take a stand against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and was intimately involved when he began to work on his response to the German bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937. From May to June that year, Maar recorded every stage of his painting Guernica for the magazine Cahiers d’art, and as the studio light was poor, she touched up the negatives to show every subtle change and nuance. This careful documentation, an invaluable source for art historians, was itself a kind of Surrealist project—recording the gradual morphing and metamorphosis of a painting.

Maar and Picasso were together for eight years, and under his influence Maar began to paint as well as use her camera: several portraits and still lives she made in these years are on show at the Pompidou. At the start of their relationship, Picasso painted her as a bird, a water nymph, a flower, but as time went on, he showed her caught in a mesh, and depicted her again and again as the grief-wracked figure of The Weeping Woman (1937). The designation—which she always hated—was prophetic. Their relationship was marred by physical and mental abuse, with Marie-Thérèse always in the background. As Françoise Gilot described in her memoir, at one point he encouraged the two women to wrestle while he watched; at another he beat Maar into unconsciousness. After 1943, when Picasso met Gilot, their relationship stuttered on for three years, but Maar collapsed with a nervous breakdown, receiving electric shock treatment—banned at the time—and then beginning two years of analysis with Éluard’s friend Jacques Lacan.

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Show Me Your Papers

From  California Sunday Magazine one of their many stories about immigrants in the US and their plight in Central America:

In 2011, South Carolina’s then-governor, Nikki Haley, signed what was known as a “show me your papers” law, modeled on Arizona’s infamous SB 1070, which allowed police to turn routine traffic stops into immigration checkpoints. The state also made it harder for undocumented immigrants to get jobs or driver’s licenses. The new laws were part of an effort to make immigrants’ lives more difficult, pushing them toward what some politicians at the time were calling self-deportation. 

Ashley’s parents began to feel anxious. Basic parts of their daily lives — driving, working, shopping — suddenly seemed risky. They thought of what had happened a few years before, when a South Carolina poultry plant was raided and many of its workers deported without their children. “What happens if they separate us?” wondered Berenice, Ashley’s mother. “We were thinking of the good of the family.” They decided it was time to move their three children — Lesly, 12; Ashley, 9; and Angel, 5, all American-born citizens — from the only home that they knew. In the jargon of immigration, the family was planning to “return migrate.” But the kids could hardly return to a place where they had never been. They were just … leaving.

The flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, landed in Mexico City two months after the new immigration law went into effect. The family took a series of buses away from the city, toward the tiny community where the children’s parents and grandparents had all grown up. The stores and highways dropped away as they climbed higher, along steep hillsides draped with dozens of thin black pipes, the local farmers’ ingenious but jury-rigged solution for irrigation. The buses passed adobe-brick buildings with tin roofs and donkeys carrying loads of wood. Oh my gosh, Ashley thought, are we going to live here?

The girls enrolled in the local school, and Ashley soon found herself bullied again. This time, though, it was for being American. Kids laughed at her weird name and her terrible Spanish. Though she’d been a top student back in South Carolina, she was suddenly trying to learn in a language that she couldn’t read or write and could barely speak.

When her classmates told Ashley that she didn’t belong, she refused to cry in front of them. When she arrived home, though, the tears flowed. It wasn’t an easy thing to hear. But that didn’t mean she didn’t agree with them.

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Joao Gilberto's History

One of the best online sources about Joao Gilberto for English speaking aficionados is Daniella Thompson's Musica Brasiliensis, there she has this compact history of Joao that will elucidate who the man was and his great impact on contemporary music-here is from Plain Joao:

Bossa nova, that most personal and international of Brazilian musical forms, has been blessed with numerous gifted composers. By far the greatest was Antonio Carlos (Tom) Jobim. Alone or in partnership with poet Vinicius de Moraes, fellow composer Newton Mendonça, and other illustrious collaborators, Jobim created some of the most famous and enduring bossa nova standards, such as “Garota de Ipanema,” “Desafinado,” and “Corcovado.”

Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, the seminal bossa nova songwriting team, met in 1956, but the songs they turned out at the time were not particularly innovative. For two years, Jobim/de Moraes tunes sounded like traditional samba-canção (samba-song, a slower and more lyrical version of samba). Nobody got particularly excited over them. Then a certain young singer and guitarist came out of nowhere to give these songs a new vocal interpretation and a new beat. The year was 1958, and the new beat was soon known throughout the world as bossa nova.

That singer and guitarist was João Gilberto.

His seductive vocals caressed the ear as well as the soul, while his guitar set an insouciant swinging rhythm going. The voice pulled in one direction, the beat in another. The combination was mesmerizing and highly addictive, refreshing and modern. It opened a new page in the history of popular music. Yet it all began at the most traditional roots.

Bahia

João Gilberto do Prado Pereira de Oliveira was born on 10 June 1931 in Juazeiro, a small provincial town in the interior of the state of Bahia. His father, a prosperous merchant, was a stickler for education and insisted that each of his seven children obtain a school diploma. He was successful with six of them. The exception was the most intelligent child: Joãozinho, who from an early age was interested in only one thing—music. When João was fourteen, a bohemian godfather gave him a guitar that soon became an extension of his body. By the age of fifteen, he was the leader and arranger of a boys’ musical group that rehearsed under an old tamarind tree in the center of town and performed regularly at social functions.

The music João heard during his childhood in the 1940s emanated from the loudspeaker of a local store. It included U.S. hits like “Caravan” with Duke Ellington, “Song of India” with Tommy Dorsey, “Dream Lover” with Jeanette MacDonald, and “Ménilmontant” with the French singer/composer Charles Trenet. Of course, there was also a host of Brazilian successes of the period, such as Geraldo Pereira’s “Bolinha de Papel” with Anjos do Inferno; Herivelto Martins’ “Ave Maria no Morro” with Trio de Ouro, whose members included the composer and his wife, Dalva de Oliveira; Bide and Marçal’s “A Primeira Vez” with João’s singing idol Orlando Silva; and “Samba da Minha Terra,” composed by the great Bahian songwriter Dorival Caymmi and recorded by Bando da Lua. In later years, many of these old songs would find their way into João Gilberto’s repertoire and recordings, much to the consternation of his modernist fans.

By the time he was eighteen, João had outgrown Juazeiro and moved to Bahia’s capital, Salvador, to try his luck as a radio singer. Many singers of the period derived their sole income from performing on live radio shows. Traditionally, gambling casinos had provided the best employment for musicians, but when gambling was declared illegal in 1946, performers fell upon hard times, and competition for radio contracts became fierce.

João never became a radio success in Salvador, but while he was there, someone heard him sing and liked his voice. That someone was a member of the vocal group Garotos da Lua, who sang daily on Radio Tupi in Rio de Janeiro. Radio Tupi had just hired a new artistic director, Antônio Maria, who was to become a powerful columnist and successful songwriter (he would write the lyrics of “Manhã de Carnaval,” theme of the film Orfeu Negro). Maria took a dislike to the intimate singing style of the group’s lead singer, Jonas Silva. Complaining that Silva was singing baixinho and forcing the whole group to “whisper”—and when it came to singing carnaval songs, they “just didn’t make it”—Maria threatened to cancel the Garotos’ contract unless they replaced their crooner with someone who sounded more like Lúcio Alves, the highly popular founder and leader of the premier vocal group Namorados da Lua.

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Joao Gilberto is Gone

 

From the La Times, an appreciation of the fantastic Joao Gilberto who passed away this weekend:

Gilberto’s death at age 88 was announced Saturday through the Facebook page of the musician’s son, João Marcelo Gilberto. The son offered no details on Gilberto’s death.

Over a seven decade career, the guitarist’s quick, liquid acoustic chords hit with a smooth but percussive energy, and coupled with his subtly expressive voice, transformed the music of his country and helped spread the sound across the world.

One of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Gilberto and his peer and collaborator Antonio Carlos Jobim helped create and popularize bossa nova, a toned-down and romanticized take on Brazilian samba music.

“He could read a newspaper and sound good," Miles Davis once said of Gilberto’s tone.

As much a feeling as a set of musical rules, Gilberto’s aesthetic has resonated in the work of artists including Caetano Veloso, Sade, Gal Costa, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Stereolab, Seu Jorge and pretty much every Brazilian songwriter since 1960. Gilberto’s daughter Bebel has been a guiding force in carrying bossa nova into a new electronic century.

"I owe João Gilberto everything I am today,” fellow Brazilian Veloso has said. “Even if I were something else and not a musician, I would say that I owe him everything."

If it’s true that some cultures are just better at making music, Brazil’s reputation was solidified when Gilberto and Jobim, both then based in Rio de Janeiro, joined forces in the late 1950s. Born 1,200 miles north in the province of Bahia, Gilberto was first drawn to the guitar at age 15.

Preternaturally artistic, he drew the concern of his parents at an early age. One story described the son during a mental evaluation. “Gilberto looked out of the window and noted the ‘wind tearing out the trees' hair … Told by the psychologist that ‘trees don't have hair,’ Gilberto replied, ‘And some people have no poetry in their souls’,” according to a 2003 story in The Times.

In 1958, Gilberto recorded “Chega de Saudade," a mesmerizing Jobim-penned crooner. Never much of a songwriter himself, Gilberto, then in his late 20s, regularly tapped Jobim’s work. That symbiotic musical relationship defined a movement, and along the way, bossa nova integrated itself into the global conversation in much the same way rock ’n’ roll did.

The difference? Where Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley upped the tempo, attitude and energy, Gilberto and Jobim soothed and seduced their way onto dance floors.

When the late Brazilian guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves heard his first Gilberto record, he recalled to The Times that he was astonished, comparing it to the first time he heard trumpeter Charlie Parker.

"It changed everything, for every young musician in Brazil. Once we heard what João was doing with the guitar and the voice, we all had to find a way to figure out how he did it," Castro-Neves told writer Don Heckman.

Rather than building Carmen Miranda-esque samba wildfires of big beat percussion to propel loud, expressive singers, Gilberto lighted a few candles and channeled the breathy tones of Chet Baker, Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra, as well as successful Brazilian singers Lucio Alves and Dick Farney. His success earned him a U.S. deal with Capitol Records in 1960.

Joag, Miucha, and Chico Buarque

For those wanting to listen to one of Gilberto's most pure albums that capture his magic and beauty, try Joao Gilberto (1973) which ripples with amazing rhythms and melodies that transcend time.Listen to Eu vim da Bahia.