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

Interview with Detainee

From The Guardian:

Ahmed Errachidi, 47, is a Moroccan chef. Having spent much of his adult life living in London, he was arrested in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, in January 2002. Handed over to the American authorities, he was held in military bases in Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantánamo Bay, where he spent five-and-a-half years, most of them in solitary confinement. He was released in 2007. He has never been charged with any crime.

You grew up in Tangier. What brought you to London?
I first went there in 1985, aged 19. I was young and wanted to discover the world, to meet people. I married a British woman. [The marriage later broke down.]

And you got into cooking...
I started as a kitchen porter. But I had a passion for food and I began to cook the odd thing, and my bosses saw I could do it well and gave me more responsibility. I loved bringing ingredients together, creating dishes that made people happy.

On 11 September 2001, you were in a cafe in north London... Can you describe your feelings that day?
Shock and horror. No one I was with understood what was going on. We thought it was a plane crash. Then it became clear it was a terrorist attack. I felt a terrible sense of loss.

Just a few weeks after 9/11, you travelled to Pakistan. Why?
Work was quiet and I realised I couldn't keep travelling back and forth between Morocco and London. I'd married again, and my wife and sons lived in Tangier. So I started thinking about starting a business and decided to import silver from Pakistan. In August 2001, I learned that my youngest son, Imran, had a heart problem and might need an operation. We needed money. So I went to Pakistan to get things started.

But then, while there, you decided to travel into Afghanistan...
The American bombing of Afghanistan had just begun, and I would watch the images of suffering on the news in my hotel room. It was all happening less than 100 miles away. I just had an urge to try and help. I was in pain myself because of my son and as soon as the idea crossed my mind to help those people, I started to feel better. As a Muslim, if you want God to help you in something, you need to help others. So I crossed the border.

You were arrested just inside Pakistan, on your return from Afghanistan. Did you have any inkling at this stage that you might be sent to Guantánamo?
No. When the Pakistanis arrested me, they lied. They said they just wanted to make sure I wasn't on any wanted list, then they'd let me go. I remember thinking, each week when Friday came round: "Oh no, that means I'm not going to be released till Monday." That's how optimistic I was then. It seems almost funny now.

You were held at military bases in Bagram and Kandahar before being transferred to Guantánamo. While there, you were interviewed by British interrogators. Didn't they help?
They said there was nothing they could do. Their hands were tied. Although one MI5 agent told me that, if I was telling the truth, he'd get me released. I remember asking him how long it would take to check my story. His exact words were: "It may take weeks."

What happened when you arrived in Guantánamo?
Exactly the same thing as happened to every new prisoner. After a 26-hour journey, shackled and blindfolded, I was taken to an interrogation room and the first thing they said was: "Do you know Osama bin Laden? Did you know about 9/11 before it happened?" And then a female interrogator told me that all my rights had been taken away, that if I didn't co-operate I was going to spend the rest of my life there. But since I'd done nothing wrong, I didn't know how to co-operate.

During your time there you were subjected to constant, often astonishing cruelty by the US soldiers – beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nudity. Do you feel contempt for them now?
The ordinary soldiers were executing orders. They were very cruel, but they were being used as well. They were told that we were terrorists who had been trained not to feel pain. If I was to meet them today, I would tell them that what they did was wrong, but I would forgive them. But the politicians, the generals in charge – I will never forgive those people. I believe they need to stand trial.

You were one of the few detainees who spoke English. What difference did that make?
It meant I was always in contact with the soldiers. Each time there was a problem, they called me to translate. So I was always in their face. I couldn't hide. And that made me a target. They assumed I was a troublemaker, a leader. That's why they gave me the nickname "the General".

You write of the sense of solidarity you felt with other prisoners.
We were like a family. What brings people together is having something in common, whether a religion or material interest. We shared one thing in common, and that was pain.

How did you get out?
My lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, dug around and discovered that the accusations against me couldn't be true, that I had been working in London like I'd always said. It wasn't hard to check these things. If the Americans had wanted to, they could have done this.

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Nele Azevedo

Nele Azevedo, Melting Man Berlin

Thank you, Europeans!

A fabulous historical record of a solid quartet of outstanding jazz players from the 60's-a great treat to see Yusef Lateef in his prime. It took Europeans to capture the gold here at home.

David Shapiro

Vallejo Nocturno 2013

After Poetry

‘I want my son to grow powerful and rich through science.’ — Rimbaud

Now that I have given up poetry,
The guest of poetry,
Governed poetry,
Or rather that poetry has given up me,
Has queened my pawn, how green my pawn,
Or rather that poetry died in my lap,
Any lap, like a lousy lover
In another language, and I
A Luddite with a laptop in his lap

And now that my son is subtle
And malicious as a god any god.
And bestrides the dogmatic world
As if it were a tennis court

The clouds pass by, almost inhuman
Like passers-by, the mountains like
Churches and the churches like mountains
Beautiful and untranslatable a woman
Walks past the park like a street
Or a scream or a double and triple
Loss of meaning, and I thank whatever
Nothing we actually worship, to change
Nothing and the important thing: to leave
The world alone, largely uninterpreted
For the wet pavement
On which he may scratch his poems

Escif

Escif Valencia

Monk in Denmark

Tommy Flanagan Interview

A 1994 interview with pianist Tommy Flanagan by Ted Panken:

TP:    Who are some of the other pianists, Jazz pianists, stylists you heard when you were young and who impressed you?

TF:    Well, first of all, it was local musicians.  We had a lot of people that could inspire you.  We had a gentleman named Willie Anderson, who was a self-taught musician, but he played with impeccable technique and taste.  He styled himself after Tatum and Nat Cole.  He had a trio kind of based on Nat Cole’s trio, with guitar and bass.  Kenny Burrell’s brother was the guitarist in that group.  He was a fine guitarist himself, Billy Burrell.

TP:    Was this in the early Forties, let’s say?

TF:    Yeah, you could say that.

TP:    You were 12, 13 years old?

TF:    Right.  When I first met Kenny, hearing Willie Anderson’s trio, we as kids had this inspiration we could hear them live, you know, hear them practice.  We had the Nat Cole recordings, and they were very close to that style.  Willie Anderson could certainly cover most of the things that Nat Cole played.  He was very original, too, even though he needed to get that inspiration of how to get through these technical things through listening to Tatum and Nat Cole.  But a beautiful musician.

Another musician who lived close by to where I lived, Earl Van Riper, is a wonderful pianist, very clean and more in the school of Teddy Wilson — clean-cut pianists.  He went on to play with Cootie Williams’ band and Cleanhead’s orchestra.  It was a good band.  He finally settled in Indianapolis.  I guess he wrote out some of the first things that Wes Montgomery did; Wes didn’t read himself, but he had someone that could write his music down and send the charts to his musicians.  When he first came to New York, he had his music, and I was fortunate enough to be on that date.  But this music being such a small circle that it is, that music came through Earl Van Riper, who I was inspired by at an early age.  He was the first kind of a professional pianist that I saw up close.

TP:    One thing that’s interesting in Jazz is how specific areas seem to engender particular styles.  In Chicago, a lot of the pianists were influenced by Earl Hines and went in that direction.  Is there anything that would characterize the pianists who came out of Detroit, some common strain that marks the way they developed musically?

TF:    I suppose from Tatum being in the area so much, a lot of the pianists were inspired…you know, the ones that could attain that, could grasp it, they were more influenced  by Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson.  Teddy spent a lot of time around Detroit, too.

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Warehouse Transformation

From Spoon & Tamago:

Keiichi Kiriyama is a young architect who worked under Makoto Tanijiri and went on to establish his own studio – aptly titled Airhouse – in 2009. In 2012 he renovated a warehouse in the suburban district of Yoro (Gifu prefecture), not too far from the industrial city of Nagoya. Previously used to house farming equipment, Kiriyama injected a dose of calm by inserting a large loft that houses a bedroom and 2 bathrooms.

Objective Reality

Vallejo Nocturno 2013

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line.

But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it. The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.

Thomas Pynchon, V

Interview with Sebald

Toby Green interviews Sebald:

Beginning with Vertigo, what was it that made you actually start the writing when you did?

I was in my mid-forties when I produced my first scribblings which were non-academic. I went down to London. Completely randomly, I had picked out a book by an Austrian writer, Konrad Baier, which I had not looked at for some time. The book had a footnote about a botanist who had been on Bering's Alaskan expedition. When I got to London, I went to the British Museum on a complete whim and read about it. I could not see how I could possibly write an essay or a monograph on this, but it so fascinated me that I just wrote it down in a longhand prose poem. I had no intentions to publish it. It was very liberating at the time, because it was so intensely private.

At the beginning of Vertigo, you follow the young Stendhal in Napoleon's army and introduce the central theme of the book: the unknowability of the past and memory's unreliability. As a writer you must draw on memory--do you feel that all the stories we tell are fictions, or do some stories have more truth than others?

Seen from the outside, some stories have more truth than others, but the truth value of the story does not depend on its actual truth content. The truth value depends on how it is framed and phrased. If a story is aesthetically right, then it is probably also morally right. You cannot really translate one to one from reality. If you try to do that, in order to get at a truth value through writing, you have to falsify and lie. And that is one of the moral quandaries of the whole business.

That's a theme that is evident in your books, what you term in The Emigrants "the questionable business of writing"--why do people write?

One doesn't know why one does it. You have no idea. If someone asks, you have to own up and say that you have no idea what your motives are. It could be a compulsive habit with neurotic dimensions. Or it could be vanity.

Do you think that exhibitionism comes into it?

Oh yes--that is the less savoury side, along with the mercenary considerations.

So how do you find that you are viewed, as a writer?

Usually with a mixture of admiration and contempt! But there are of course some noble motives--trying to say something that is true, and being analytical about oneself. That's all very laudable, but even these are mixed up with less savoury motives, and the commodification of literature has just made the whole thing worse.