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

Addictive modernity

From Lana Turner, Roberto Tejada writes:

There is a vast range of poetic practices that so work in tandem with other forms of knowledge as to provide contradictory pleasures that also hazard a diagnostic. Such writing conveys the culture concept as a system of attitudes and instruction, human sensuous activity, the broadest environments of life as activations in the public sphere by means of a daydreaming embodied as intervalsof contemplationand sense experience. If we measure the depth of Nietzsche’s claim that a word is only “a copy in sound of a nerve stimulus” and concept the “residue of a metaphor,”[ii] the political ante of the language art so escalates as to be more than an “internal relations” model for artistic change. This urgency compels us not only to redirect our assigned social scripts, but to set higher ambitions as to what can be said, in keeping with Stephen Greenblatt, about the “systemic organization of ordinary life and consciousness […], the pattern of boundary making and breaking, [and] the oscillation between demarcated objects and monological totality…”—that is, a cultural poetics. [iii]

            Inasmuch as I’ve lost faith in the sustainability of an avant-garde as a definable formation, especially in an expanding media environment of over-production and calculated obsolescence, I want writing to re-imagine citizenship today in terms that include a voluptuousness of the self and its overcast contingencies. In this, I seek to reconcile two expansive propositions that in many ways are incompatible: U.S. American minimalism, grounded in the media specificity of its objects and materiality of form, endures because it is well equipped to expose artistic autonomy with the methods of mechanized labor and thereby to reanimate the relationship of art and industry; a Latin American neo-baroque, the extension of historic surrealism, enacts a pageantry of excess and seduction as public engagement, in interplays of violence and sensuality, with a view to the social field not as system of fixed values, but as an irreverent open-ended archive of meaning.

            Central to the neo-baroque, Cuban modernist José Lezama Lima identified difficulty as a motivating feature not in terms of mere representation or strictly formal effects. He viewed difficulty with optimism as enabling of the interpretive project, a defiance given to incite the potential for knowledge as the “ordering force” of “historic vision.”[iv] In this respect, difficulty requires thoughtfulness and the unique understanding attained in the joyful labor of making things. Metaphoric language is difficult to the extent that our relationship to generosity, in the broadest sense, is likewise a problem. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor compel this question of closure and availability by asking why there exists a social anxiety around kindness when it plainly produces pleasure. They submit this is because kindness, a style of obedience to the life of others, involves, like metaphor, a loss of boundaries. [v]Dissolution, then, of the strictly formal imperative invites a more difficult reckoning with our investment in the medium as message.

            There is room for an ethos of carefulness in our era of increased mechanized labor, post-production, and outsourcing. Even as digital storage and retrieval can facilitate rhetorical possibilities and methodological scale, user interface imposes limitations also and calls for more nuanced technological imaginations to punctuate the proliferating cacophony of statistics, unwanted thoughts, accidental associations, and renewed colonies of power on the global network. Richard Sennett directly links the shifting relations of labor and workplace to manufacture. “If craftsmanship, with its vibrant tradition of … mastery of a particular skill, doesn’t constitute merit,” then with every incentive for innovation favored over verifiable aptitude “…you are constantly, as it were, walking away from your own commitments.”[vi]My desire is for careful energizing words to structure the astonishment that is our accountability to language, foresight, and gesture. Metaphoric language in the mediated world can so beckon into action—into experience and knowledge—as to prompt the unforeseen. Constitutive of social space and cultural selfhood, the syllabic realism of metaphor obliges an urgent kind of carefulness that emboldens the critical imagination to alter our picture of the present and the shape of things to come.

James Weidman

Vallejo Nocturno 2013- at An Die Musik

Best Music of 2013-Diego Urcola

 

Unnoticed bundle of high calibre chamber latin sounds, precise and dripping with the DNA of the Americas. Let's see who see reality in its plain dark lustre and truthful past.

From Percorsi Musical:

Oggi quello che non si accetta della latinità sono i suoi sconfinamenti musicali: ancora oggi esiste una pericolosa linea di demarcazione tra la sublimità di certa musica sudamericana e molto molto riciclaggio; spesso i musicisti coinvolti pensano di fare qualcosa di nuovo, ma poi in realtà sono idee innocue che non possono portare lontano. Il problema (solo apparentemente facile) è quello di far emergere un sentimento, senza che le linee melodiche diventino costruzioni poco autentiche. Direi che in Sud-america c'è un problema simile a quello dell'Italia e cioè che siano sopravvalutate certe espressioni che sono oggetto di un orgoglio nazionale mal compreso, a scapito della vera qualità. Sotto quest'aspetto il livello strumentale e l'organizzazione delle idee, ossia quegli elementi che utilmente potrebbero fare la differenza per fornire un miglior grado di valutazione delle proposte, non vengono quasi mai considerati.

Nel jazz molti mi fanno notare che oggi c'è un ritorno di tendenza che proviene dal Brasile, da Cuba o dall'Argentina, di cui sinceramente faccio fatica a trovare le sue nuove credenziali: tuttavia non è nemmeno vero che non ci siano musicisti competenti che riescono a trovare la propria espressione: tra le nuove generazioni è sempre più evidente l'integrazione nazionalistica proveniente da generi musicali diversi. E' su questo canovaccio che si inserisce il jazz latino del trombettista Diego Urcola, che filtra il jazz afro-cubano partito dal be-bop e dai ritmi di Paquito D'Rivera, il cool jazz e l'inesauribile vena argentina di un Astor Piazzolla. Urcola è già da tempo sulla scena jazzistica internazionale con un proprio sound verniciato, ma forse questo "Mates" registrato per la Sunnyside R. potrebbe contribuire ad una maggiore presa poichè è più progettualità che esecuzione: infatti il principale merito di "Mates" è il fatto di concentrarsi sugli elementi essenziali della latinità al loro stato puro, circondato dai musicisti giusti. E' una raccolta dove oltre a brani dei partecipanti, il repertorio pesca nelle tradizioni folk colombiana, santere, in Gismonti, Richie Beirach, Ariel Ramirez e Roberto Pansera.

Diversamente dall'impellicciato jazz dei suoi lavori precedenti, in "Mates" le strutture vengono tirate all'osso, senza rincorrere aggiustamenti di angolatura ritmica, e gli strumenti risultano vitali, presenti, evocativi. Il fattore Piazzolla viene garantito dal bandoneon di Juan Dargenton, mentre gli interventi dell'arpista Edmar Castaneda sono boccate d'ossigeno di questi tempi per uno strumento non avvezzo ai territori jazzistici; così come è indispensabile al risultato è il contrabbasso di Avishai Cohen, a volte discorsivo altre tinto di classicità; Dave Samuels completa saltuariamente l'organico al vibrafono e marimba.

 

From Mates liner notes:

 

The album begins with Urcola and Cohen performing an upbeat folkloric piece “Eleguá,” a tribute to the most important Santerián orisha (god), who is the owner of all roads, crossroads and doors. Pianist/composer Richie Beirach’s moody “ELM” is dramatically performed by the colorful bandoneon of Dargenton and Urcola’s lush, muted trumpet. Castañeda’s shimmering “Colibri,” meaning ‘humming bird,’ has the harp and trumpet fluttering and flitting around each other while the solemn take on Egberto Gismonti’s “A Fala Da Paixão” balances the restive tones between Samuel’s vibes and Urcola’s controlled trumpet. Cohen’s “Gadu” has the bassist and trumpeter in a synchronized Latin dance.

Urcola and Castañeda’s take on the Argentine folkloric composer Ariel Ramírez’s “Alfonsina y El Mar” is stoic and beautiful. “Preludio #3” is a tango written by legendary tango composer Roberto Pansera and is a moving vehicle for Samuel’s vibes and Urcola’s intricate lines. Urcola’s own “Milonga Para Paquito” is an Argentine tribute to Paquito D’Rivera with Dargenton playing dynamic bandoneón alongside Urcola’s dancing horn. Another Cohen original, “Float” is introduced by Urcola’s plaintive trumpet then joined by Cohen’s singing bowed bass. Samuel’s “Samba Pa’Dos” is a tricky, interlocked exercise between marimba and trumpet.

Gene de Paul’s standard “You Don’t Know What Love Is” is an introspective study for Urcola with Dargenton’s subtle and effective bandoneón coloring. The French-born, Argentinean tango legend Carlos Gardel’s lament “El Día Que Me Quieras” is heart-wrenchingly rendered by Urcola and Cohen. Castañeda is featured on his “Colombian Dixie,” a gripping, witty composition highlighting the unique mixture of jazz and South American folkloric music. Closing the album is the trumpeter’s “Final Waltz,” with a lovely yet brooding bandoneón and trumpet.

Sebald Says

Out of Sebald’s “As Day and Night . . .: On the paintings of Jan Peter Tripp”:

The photographic image makes a tautology of reality. When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, writes Susan Sontag, he shows that there are people in China and that these people are Chinese. What may be true of photography, though, is not necessarily applicable to art. The latter depends on ambiguity, polyvalence, resonance, obfuscation and illumination, in short, the transcending of that which, according to an ineluctable law, has necessarily to be the case. Roland Barthes saw in the—now omnipresent—man with a camera an agent of death, and in photographs something like the relics of life continually giving way to death. Where art differs from such a morbid affair is in the fact that the proximity of life to death is its subject, not its obsession. Art deploys the deconstruction of outward appearances as a means of countering the obliteration, in endless series of reproductions, of the visible world.

Swing

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - Oleg!

Best Music of 2013-Shigeto

 

Eliptical, music box of the future assemblages that feature beats that take into the realm of jazz, Shigeto's second album is ripe with funky overblown jams that make total sense. A super progression from the first release and logical one at that.

From XLR8R:

Synthesis is at the core of Shigeto's latest record, likely because he is simply bursting with ideas. If there's not enough space for every rhythm, soundscape, and melody he can dream up, Saginaw seems to think that meshing them all together is entirely reasonable—and luckily, he has the finesse to make it work. But even as jazz, hip-hop, samba, techno, ambient, R&B, and other genres coalesce throughout No Better Time Than Now, the moods and stylistic applications are constantly changing direction, often within singular pieces. "Detroit Part 1," for instance, gets started on a moonlit boom-and-slap vein which directly recalls Flying Lotus' now-seminal Los Angeles, but it eventually turns an unexpected corner, finishing in a more somber and delicate tone. Album standout "Ringleader" does a superb job mixing Four Tet's melodic accessibility with jazz-rooted polyrhythms that recall Tortoise's multi-percussion powerhouse, and does so for six minutes without sacrificing dynamics or sounding indulgent. Saginaw has versatility in spades, and—perhaps more importantly—he knows exactly how to distill his ambition and jaw-dropping musicianship into a coherent and consistently surprising whole.

A good portion of No Better Time Than Now deals with beats, bass, and the gritty spaces in between, but it's not at all lacking in soul or poignancy. The LP's deep, velvety moments are often where Shigeto excels the most, like on "Miss U," when his drum-oriented skills take a backseat to his Rhodes' purple and burnt-orange chords and a twinkling, astral ambiance. Though, as a number of these songs do, "Miss U" ends on an entirely different note, which feels like Saginaw offering the listener a palate cleanser, a chance to contemplate the piece and prepare for what's next. It's a brilliant trick, and one that helps give the LP an added wrinkle of character while also bringing to mind the flow of classic jazz records. Tracks like "Ritual Howl" and "Soul Searching" capture a similar vibe, albeit in a brighter light, and find Shigeto perfectly balancing the satisfying thump of sub-busting hip-hop with jazz's curiosity and uncompromising ethos.

From TinyMixTapes.com:

No better time than now. Strong words, especially coming from Zach Saginaw, the Detroit-based percussionist and producer behind Shigeto. After all, it’s hard to forget that Shigeto’s last album — 2012’s aptly-titled Lineage — took as its cover art a 1916 photograph of Saginaw’s ancestral home in pre-war Hiroshima. The choice of image was poetic: a ghostly peek back in time to a moment untouched by the war, by the internment camps, by the bomb. And indeed, these seem to be the subjects that most preoccupy Shigeto’s earlier work. But that was 2012. Welcome to 2013. And there is no better time than now.

What happened to Saginaw in the intervening year? Well, life it seems. The press material for No Better Time Than Now has been intent on framing the album within the narrative of a transformative year for the artist, a year punctuated with non-stop touring, the end of a relationship, and a fateful move back home from Brooklyn to Detroit. But forget all the pretext. What makes this album so remarkable is how little bearing this narrative — or indeed any narrative — seems to have on the music itself. This isn’t an album about a year in the life of Zach Saginaw. It isn’t about his previous work as Shigeto, some sort of climactic chapter in an artistic Bildungsroman. This is an album about the present. No exposition. No climax. Only a singular, glorious now.

How so? Simply put, there is an immediacy to No Better Time Than Now that few recent albums can match. It is a stunningly gorgeous, self-contained sonic universe that softly unfolds and neatly resolves itself. Opener “First Saturn Return” sets the mood from the opening moments, softly building up to a simple, unbearably lush climax. “Detroit Part 1” only builds from here, layering and layering waves of rich sound into increasingly complex rhythms and patterns, intersecting, diffusing, intertwining in an astonishing network of choreographed noise. And the album only continues to evolve. In the hands of a lesser musician, the result would have been exhausting. In Saginaw’s, it is nothing short of effortless.

From okayfuture.com:

Not enough people know about Shigeto.  I mean that in the best way possible.  The Ann Arbor born artist otherwise known as Zachary Shigeto Saginaw (hence, the origin of his moniker) stands above many in this moment of 2013’s run of producers, DJs and musicians.  Not least because he transcends the very categories we may rush to ascribe his artistic approach but that his originality, his expressiveness and authenticity comes through so richly in his music.

His artistry began long before he began making music with his father raising him on Motown and jazz records. By no surprise, he picked up playing the drums as a kid and spent time playing about the Detroit music scene. He went on to study jazz in New York as well as London where he eventually holed up to make more electronic-leaning music before he relocated back to New York.  It was then that he assumed his artistic identity as others began to pick up on his work.

After a number of EPs, remix releases and other collaborations mostly put out on Ghostly International – his imprint home – he debuted with his first full-length album, Full Circle, in 2010. By 2012, he had followed up with another, Lineage, the progression of both expressing his musical background as well as his ear for the present and a uniquely Shigeto frame of the future.

Lush sounds sampled and recorded simmered between jazzy chords and slack beats of live drums and programmed beats creating textures best suited for dreamy afternoons or lonely walks home.  Thoughtful not in the least but also moving in their rhythmic focus, Shigeto’s heritage as a live performer as well as a beat enthusiast becomes apparent, and familiar, listen after listen.

Scenery

Vallejo Nocturno 2013-Wuzhen surroundings

Arches

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - Pudong Airport Arches

Pudong Airport

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - Morning Travel

From Wikipedia:

Shanghai Pudong International Airport (IATA: PVG, ICAO: ZSPD) is the primary international airport serving Shanghai, and a major aviation hub for Asia. The city's other major airport, Hongqiao, mainly serves domestic flights. Located about 30 kilometres (19 mi) east of the city centre, Pudong Airport occupies a 40-square-kilometre (9,900-acre) site adjacent to the coastline in eastern Pudong. The airport is operated by Shanghai Airport Authority (Chinese:上海机场集团有限公司, SSE: 600009).

The airport is the main hub for China Eastern Airlines and Shanghai Airlines, and a major international hub for Air China. It is also the hub for privately owned Juneyao Airlines and Spring Airlines, and an Asian-Pacific cargo hub for UPS^[4] and DHL. The DHL hub, opened in July 2012, is said to be the biggest express hub in Asia.^[5]

Pudong Airport has two main passenger terminals, flanked on both sides by three parallel runways. A third passenger terminal is planned for 2015, in addition to a satellite terminal and two additional runways, raising its annual capacity from 60 million passengers to 80 million, along with the ability to handle six million tonnes of freight.^[6]

Pudong Airport is a fast-growing hub for both passenger and cargo traffic. With 3,227,914 metric tonnes handled in 2010, the airport is the world's third busiest airport by cargo traffic. Pudong Airport also served a total of 40,578,621 passengers in 2010, making it the third busiest airport in mainland China and the 20th busiest in the world. As of December 2011, Pudong Airport hosted 87 airlines serving 194 destinations.^[7]

Shanghai Pudong is the busiest international hub of mainland China, ranking 22nd globally in terms of international traffic.^[8] About half of its total passenger traffic is international.^[9]

Pudong Airport is connected to the city's urban rail network through Metro Line 2 and the Shanghai Maglev Train. The airport is open 24 hours a day.

Iran & Us

From Stephen M. Walt:

The battle lines on this issue are now easy to identify. On one side are Obama and Kerry, the U.S. negotiating team, most of the arms control community, and much of America's national security apparatus, including seventy-nine well-connected former officials who endorsed the administration's efforts yesterday. This broad group understands that Iran is not going to accept zero enrichment and that the United States cannot physically prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon if it really, really, wants to get one. Even if the US used force to damage Iran's nuclear infrastructure, they could rebuild it and disperse it and we would have to keep attacking them forever. This group believes -- correctly, in my view -- that Iran is not currently trying to build a nuclear weapon and that a deal can be struck that makes it hard for Iran to sprint toward a bomb if it ever changes its mind. This group recognizes that another Mideast war would be a disaster for us and for others and would merely increase Iran's desire to acquire an effective deterrent. Finally, this group understands that the deal is likely to get worse the longer we delay.

On the other side are Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who has already denounced the interim deal), Saudi Arabia, the hardline elements within the Israel lobby, extremist journalists like Jennifer Rubin, and various Congresspersons who are overly beholden to some or all of the above. Despite a dearth of genuine evidence, they believe Iran is hell-bent on getting a bomb and that this development would have far-reaching negative effects on world politics. They think Iran is only negotiating now because we tightened sanctions, and that tightening the screws some more will get Tehran to say "uncle" and give us everything we want. Perhaps they haven't noticed that the United States could have gotten a better deal in 2006 -- before the latest round of sanctions was imposed -- but the Bush administration foolishly spurned Iran's offer. The opponents have a lot of energy and fervor on their side, but logic and evidence doesn't seem to be their strong suit.

Which side will win? I don't know, but I do think this is a winnable fight for Obama if he tries. If the negotiators in Geneva can reach an agreement that 1) avoids war, 2) reduces Iran's incentive for a bomb, 3) moves them further from the nuclear threshold, and 4) strengthens the already-tough inspections regime, and presents it to the American people as a done deal, I think the public will support it strongly. The administration will have no trouble trotting out lots of former officials and bemedaled generals to endorse it, and to explain to skeptics or the undecided why the deal is in our interest. The rest of the P5+1 will be ecstatic (except maybe Russia and China, because they benefit from the United States and Iran being at odds), and they will be making supportive noises as well. Hardline opponents won't be able to attack the deal without engaging in transparently obvious special pleading, partly on behalf of a country that already has nuclear weapons and hasn't been all that cooperative lately. Under these circumstances, some of those diehard opponents in Congress might think twice about killing the deal, because their fingerprints would be all over the murder weapon. Indeed, that may be why they are now proposing new sanctions: better to kill the diplomatic process before it produces results than to try to discredit a reasonable deal later on.

More