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

Ricardo Baez Duarte-Fotos

Ricardo Báez Duarte's images have a painted feel and look. He lives in Caracas, Venezuela and is a mathematician and graphics software designer, and formerly an academic administrator. He works from his own photographs. His subjects are commonplace: museum galleries he has visited, store fronts, and street scenes.

Two Gin-soaked Summers

Kelly Boler an Asheville author whose forthcoming book Drinking Companion: Alcohol and Writers' Lives (Union Square Publishing) includes a chapter on the Grove Park Inn's on F. Scott Fitgeralds and the two delirious summers he spent as a guest there. In her new book she examines the lives of 15 writers who spent most of their leisure time drinking with gusto. Here's some stories about Fitzgerald's soaking fun from an article on Boler:

Writes Boler: "Francis Scott Fitzgerald died young, but not young enough."

She elaborated recently on this observation: "If he had died at 29, he would be a golden boy, and everybody would have wondered what he might have been." In the event, he wound up an arguable failure and an undisputed drunk.

As Boler further noted during our conversation, "In America, there are no second acts."

The author is a connoisseur of literary stories, and has collected dozens that don't fit in the book. "Fitzgerald knew Thomas Wolfe pretty well," she divulges, "having met him at the Ritz in Paris, where Wolfe told him about Asheville. That's one of the reasons [Fitzgerald] wandered here.

"One day [he] walked into the public library downtown, thoroughly loaded, and dressed them down for not appreciating Thomas Wolfe the way he should be appreciated," Boler goes on. "The librarian reportedly let him have his say and then escorted him out."

In the book, Boler describes one of his final escapades, disclosing that Fitzgerald "returned to North Carolina where he checked the delusional Zelda out of the hospital and took her to Cuba, then New York. Drinking round-the-clock and wandering the city picking fights, he was badly beaten twice. At last members of his family arrived and got him to a hospital." (Fitzgerald finally died of a heart attack, in 1940.)

PHOTOMO.com

A graphic designer, born in Japan, living in San Diego produces PHOTOMO, a photoblog of juicy and colorful pixs.

File- A Photo Magazine

"A collection of unexpected photography," is the way File Magazine describes its content. High quality by both professional or amature appears at the site with links to the photographers' sites. Obviously an anagram on Life magazine! Good images.

Heavy Overnight Bombing?

I am not sure why the average American is not more enraged or conflicted by the general senselessness of the current strategy in Iraq. Is it that the news is no longer front page? Isn't it obvious that the current bombing campaign in civilian areas is counterproductive? What is wrong with this strategy? Here is a recent result of winning the hearts and minds from the Hindustan Times:

Heavy overnight US bombing of Kut killed 75 people and wounded nearly 150, one day after clashes between police and Shiite Muslim militiamen in the southern city, said Iraq's health ministry on Monday.

Many of the dead and wounded were women and children, said Kut hospital director Khader Fadal Arar.

"We have 75 killed and 148 wounded, according to what the hospitals in Kut have told us," said spokeswoman May Abdul Karim.

Police Colonel Salam Fakhri said the bombing started at 1.00 am (0230 IST and lasted until 3:00 am.

"The bombing was concentrated in the al-Sharkia district as the US military felt there were a lot of Shiite militiamen in that area. It also has an office of Moqtada Sadr," he said

A.R. Ammons-Poet

Design

The drop seeps whole
from boulder-lichen
or ledge moss and drops,

joining, to trickle,
run, fall, dash,
sprawl in held deeps,

to rush shallows, spill
thin through heights,
but then, edging,

to eddy aside, nothing
of all but nothing's
curl of motion spent.

A.R. Ammons

The Language of the Empire

From Libertad Digital an article by Amando de Miguel about the use of english in spanish:

Tenemos que convivir con el inglés dominante, la lingua franca de nuestro mundo. Lo mejor será adaptar las importaciones de ese idioma imperial a nuestras peculiaridades léxicas. Ana Manso sugiere que, cada vez que se introduzca una palabra inglesa sin traducir, la pongamos en cursiva. Así debe ser. El divertido Fray Josepho publica en LD una de esas piezas satíricas que tanto gustan. Se titula “Pronunciación homosexual” y empieza así: Si a mí me pronuncian fray / con todas las de la ley / ¿Por qué cuando escriben gay / se empeñan en decir guey?”. Es evidente que se sigue la pronunciación inglesa para ese barbarismo de gay. Dado que el género abunda y es tan vocal, ¿por qué no decir gayo? Es palabra romance que significa lo mismo, por lo menos en su origen. Se podría sacar del armario arqueológico de las palabras. Pablo Echenique Robba es informático y utiliza con naturalidad palabras como formatear, downloader o testear. Por cierto, lo de testar “no le gusta un pelo”. En cambio, lo de verse envuelto (to be involved en inglés) no lo ve claro. Prefiere “verse implicado”. Podríamos aceptar también “sentirse involucrado”. Pero, efectivamente, uno no se ve envuelto a no ser que sea un pescado de pescadería o cosa parecida.

Memory of Those Experiences

Photo-collages from Noel Myles. Here's what he has to say about his images, from his website:

These pictures represent my experiences of looking at landscape. I photograph whatever catches my eye, both distant and nearby and accumulate this information over an extended period of time.

Single frame photographs show a limited view for a brief moment. No human being experiences life in this way. We don’t close our eyes and go somewhere else and then open them for 1/250m. second and close them again.

The negatives are selected and combined to form an image that evokes a memory of those experiences. Variations in the composition are achieved by adding or removing negatives as the picture grows.

I coat artist quality paper by hand with a preparation of photosensitive platinum or palladium. The combination of negatives is printed in direct contact with the sensitised paper. This procedure produces a permanent image that has a great tactile vitality and presence.

I want to liberate my still photographs form the static viewpoint and the single moment. My pictures are created away from the camera and may be thought of as inventions of memory. In this sense they could be considered as the antithesis of a decisive moment.”

Noel Myles – July 2002 – April 2003

Truthtelling 101

Last week, President Bush made many declarations regarding the status of Iraq that did not reflect the realities. There must be some sort of unwritten rule that when President Bush says things that are not real, the U.S. press must not point this out. This is a weekly occurrance and it goes unnoticed. Why? I'll let you think of those good reasons but it certainly doesn't level the playing field for the upcoming elections. Adam Anteus of Reuters has a story that brings some light to last week's discrepancies:

Many of President George W. Bush's assertions about progress in Iraq -- from police training and reconstruction to preparations for January elections -- are in dispute, according to internal Pentagon documents, lawmakers and key congressional aides on Sunday.

Bush used the visit last week by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to make the case that "steady progress" is
being made in Iraq to counter warnings by his Democratic presidential rival, Senator John Kerry, that the situation in
reality is deteriorating.

Bush touted preparations for national elections in January, saying Iraq's electoral commission is up and running and
told Americans on Saturday that "United Nations electoral advisers are on the ground in Iraq."

He said nearly 100,000 "fully trained and equipped" Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other security personnel are
already at work, and that would rise to 125,000 by the end of this year.

And he promised more than $9 billion (five billion pounds) will be spent on reconstruction contracts in Iraq over the next
several months.

But many of these assertions have met with scepticism from key lawmakers, congressional aides and experts, and
Pentagon documents, given to lawmakers and obtained by Reuters, paint a more complicated picture.

Cecily Brown-Works

Cecily Brown's rich work resembles Abstract Impressionism and she is having a show currently at Galerie Lisa Ruyter in Vienna. From the press release, here's how it describes her work:

Cecily Brown's subjects have ranged from figures engaged in sex to landscapes, and many places in between. In a Cecily Brown painting, form and subject collide and explode, yet remain separately identifiable. De Kooning, Bacon, Goya, and Guston are referenced through moments of specificity; through a pictoral composition, a choice of color, scale, mark-making, even copying. This work is both classical and wildly experimental.

Given a shared interest in eroticism in the accumulations of flesh, it should be no surprise that Cecily Brown has looked at the work of Rubens. "Study after Paradise 1, 2 and 3" are studies made after a famous collaboration between Rubens and Brueghel the Older. In these works it becomes clear that at each pass, the artist is focusing her attentions on a different area of the original painting.