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

Goldberg Variations

"I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse, I detest audiences. I think they’re a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law."

- Glenn Gould (September 25, 1932 – October 4, 1982)

Clear Minded Living

Vallejo Nocturno 2014- peaks

Bluest of blue and sad tripolations, setting the stage for a selection of hues. We sat, we ate, we pondered. Later, outside, in midst of the pandemonium, we believed the day would get better, and it did. It did. Criss-crossing the river-walk of time.

So Wrong

From Tom Dispatch:

Though it’s now difficult to imagine, by mid-2002 there was no insurgency in Afghanistan: al-Qaeda had fled the country and the Taliban had ceased to exist as a military movement. Jalaluddin Haqqani and other top Taliban figures were reaching out to the other side in an attempt to cut a deal and lay down their arms. Tens of thousands of U.S. forces, however, had arrived on Afghan soil, post-9/11, with one objective: to wage a war on terror.

As I report in my new book, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, the U.S. would prosecute that war even though there was no enemy to fight. To understand how America’s battle in Afghanistan went so wrong for so long, a (hidden) history lesson is in order. In those early years after 2001, driven by the idée fixe that the world was rigidly divided into terrorist and non-terrorist camps, Washington allied with Afghan warlords and strongmen. Their enemies became ours, and through faulty intelligence, their feuds became repackaged as “counterterrorism.” The story of Jalaluddin Haqqani, who turned from America’s potential ally into its greatest foe, is the paradigmatic case of how the war on terror created the very enemies it sought to eradicate.

The Campaign to Take Out Haqqani: 2001

Jalaluddin Haqqani stands at about average height, with bushy eyebrows, an aquiline nose, a wide smile, and an expansive beard, which in its full glory swallows half his face. In his native land, the three southeastern Afghan provinces known collectively as Loya Paktia, he is something of a war hero, an anti-Soviet mujahedeen of storied bravery and near mythical endurance. (Once, after being shot, he refused painkillers because he was fasting.) During the waning years of the Cold War, he was beloved by the Americans -- Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson called him “goodness personified” -- and by Osama bin Laden, too. In the 1980s, the U.S. supplied him with funds and weapons in the battle against a Soviet-backed regime in Kabul and the Red Army, while radical Arab groups provided a steady stream of recruits to bolster his formidable Afghan force.

American officials had this history in mind when the second Afghan War began in October 2001. Hoping to convince Haqqani (who had backed the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the post-Soviet years) to defect, they spared his territory in Loya Paktia the intense bombing campaign that they had loosed on much of the rest of the country. The Taliban, for their part, placed him in charge of their entire military force, both sides sensing that his could be the swing vote in the war. Haqqani met with top Taliban figures and Osama bin Laden, only to decamp for Pakistan, where he took part in a flurry of meetings with Pakistanis and U.S.-backed Afghans.

His representatives also began meeting American officials in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, and the United Arab Emirates, and the Americans eventually offered him a deal: surrender to detention, cooperate with the new Afghan military authorities, and after a suitable period, he would be free to go. For Haqqani, one of Loya Paktia’s most respected and popular figures, the prospect of sitting behind bars was unfathomable. Arsala Rahmani, an associate of his, who would go on to serve as a senator in the Afghan government, told me, “He wanted to have an important position in Loya Paktia, but they offered to arrest him. He couldn’t believe it. Can you imagine such an insult?”

Haqqani declined the American offer, but left the door open to future talks. The prevailing ethos in the U.S., though, was that you were either with us or against us. “I personally always believed that Haqqani was someone we could have worked with,” a former U.S. intelligence official told journalist Joby Warrick. “But at the time, no one was looking over the horizon, to where we might be in five years. For the policy folks, it was just ‘screw these little brown people.’”

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The Improbable

From The New Yorker blog:

On Tuesday night, the visiting Washington Wizards defeated the Chicago Bulls, 75–69, completing an unexpected four-games-to-one series victory in the opening round of the N.B.A. playoffs. In any other week—one without the Donald Sterling saga—this would have been the biggest story in professional basketball. How unexpected was it? Before the postseason began, not a single N.B.A. expert on panels convened by Sports Illustrated, CBS Sports, or ESPN predicted that the Wizards would advance. Even among the devoted Washington hoops bloggers at Bullets Forever, there was little more than cautious optimism and “riding-with-our-hearts” hopefulness that the Wizards might somehow eke out a tough series win in seven games.

And who can blame them? The Wizards had not been to the postseason since 2008 and before Tuesday had won only one playoff series in the past three decades. Led by the young guards John Wall and Bradley Beal, Washington averaged more than a hundred points per game during the regular season, but their style of play—dynamic, up-tempo, and free-flowing—seemed ill-suited to the attrition of the playoffs, where tenacious defenses usually prevail. Chicago has long succeeded by stifling their opponents, grinding them down in physical, low-scoring games. Even without their star guard, Derrick Rose, the Bulls finished fourth in the Eastern Conference, for their sixth straight trip to the playoffs, and boasted the top defense in the N.B.A., anchored by Defensive Player of the Year Joachim Noah. But the Wizards, who tied Toronto and Miami for the conference’s best road record this year, surprised the Bulls and the prognosticators by getting three of their four wins in the unfriendly confines of Chicago’s United Center. Tuesday night’s clincher, an ugly affair full of turnovers and blocked shots, was precisely the kind of contest the Bulls normally win, but the Wizards beat Chicago at their own game, with hustle, urgency, and seven offensive rebounds in the fourth quarter.

Given the franchise’s lacklustre history, Washington fans (including this one) have been slow to embrace the team. Until the playoffs wins started coming, there were many calls for both Ernie Grunfield, the team’s general manager, and Randy Wittman, its coach, to be fired. The Wizards were eighteenth in the N.B.A. in attendance this year, selling out their home court at the Verizon Center only four times. The team improved as the season wore on, but there was a still sense that the Wizards were at least a year (and maybe a new coach) away from making a deep playoff run. The series victory may finally allow Washington to root for the Wizards wholeheartedly.

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Wizards vs. Bulls: Game 5 Score and Twitter Reaction from 2014 NBA Playoffs

Wizards eliminate Bulls with 75-69 victory

A Prison

Vallejo Nocturno 2014- rothko-like

A strange yet ebullient mind split open like dream brain spilling carefully concealed pellets like the dark, sticky main neck of our lost and hiding mesiah.

The Desk

Vallejo nocturno 2014- at citizenM

Sitting, focused on the screen, taking into account the pace of the meticulous mice rambling over our drift life after the amber waves of pain trickle over painlessly, love.

Sky Lite

Vallejo Nocturno 2014- at citizenM

Libros de Argentinos

 

From Eterna Cadencia:

Eduardo Fonseca era, al menos a los ojos de su familia, un esposo y padre esquivo y distante, un gris empresario textil y un escritor disciplinado y poco reconocido. Un día, sin dar explicaciones, bajó, del altillo donde se encerraba a escribir, sus manuscritos, sus cuadernos y el puñado de ejemplares que conservaba de sus libros y vio desaparecer al escritor en las cenizas de una fogata. Tres semanas después, su propio cuerpo desaparecería tras un accidente fluvial en el delta del Tigre. Una década y media más tarde, su hijo Santiago, ahora un muchacho de veintitrés años, haciendo orden en el altillo encontró, al mover el escritorio, las únicas cosas que se habían salvado del fuego tanto tiempo atrás: un cuaderno negro y, en su interior, la foto de una adolescente desnuda recostada en un sillón.

Este es el punto de partida de la historia narrada por Javier Núñez (Rosario, 1976) en La doble ausencia, su primera novela, que mereció el Premio Latinoamericano Sergio Galindo 2012 convocado por la Universidad Veracruzana de México y que, tras la correspondiente edición azteca, acaba de ser publicada en Argentina por Eduvim.

Núñez también publicó dos libros de cuentos (La risa de los pájaros y Praga de noche) y es contratapista de Rosario/12. En La doble ausencia despliega una notable capacidad narrativa para contar una historia que con el correr de las páginas se va volviendo cada vez más vertiginosa hasta transformarse en una suerte de relato policial lleno de vueltas de tuerca. El cuaderno encontrado es sólo la punta de uno ovillo que Santiago intentará desmadejar en un viaje a Rosario que lo llevará a cruzarse con la ex amante y los viejos amigos de Fonseca, en busca de pistas que le permitan descubrir quién fue realmente su padre.

-La doble ausencia es una novela sobre la identidad, en más de un sentido: sobre la búsqueda de la identidad propia que hace el narrador a través de la memoria del padre, pero también sobre la necesidad de modificar la identidad que atraviesan varios personajes…

-Sin dudas es una novela atravesada fundamentalmente por esas cuestiones: la búsqueda y la reconstrucción que emprende el narrador a partir de sus lazos originales, y los pequeños o no tan pequeños virajes que forman parte de la historia de algunos personajes que en diferentes momentos y por distintas situaciones se vieron enfrentados a la necesidad de reinventarse. El primer sentido viene dado por el eje de la trama, y probablemente surge de la idea original. El segundo sentido, tal vez, es más producto del proceso mismo de escritura, o de ese punto en que la historia empieza a tomar forma. Lo que me atrajo de esta historia era poner a Santiago ante la reconstrucción de ciertos huecos o espacios oscuros de la biografía familiar que lo reconfiguraran. La novela parte de un hallazgo de Santiago, que por azar descubre la relación clandestina que había sostenido su padre con una adolescente, porque creo que hay, en ese momento, una ruptura que es clave para el devenir del personaje: la de la idea que tenía de su propio padre, ese momento de revelación en el que alguien cercano del que creíamos saber bastante nos parece un completo desconocido. De algún modo se trata de una búsqueda vinculada con la necesidad de indagar en lo inasible, en lo oculto de un hombre, que en este caso es nada menos que el propio padre, y eso se transforma al mismo tiempo en un indagar en la propia identidad.

Mas

Bankside Tea Appointment

Vallejo Nocturno 2014-citizenM

Aeby's Good Stuff

Subtle and meticulously measured to assure that your soulful timepiece is there to mark the drops of melancholy and leisure down the colorful stairways of morning knows.

From All About Jazz:

Despite its ambitious, other-worldly title, this album by the young Swiss piano trio is a very grounded product, highlighting the compositional skills of its leader Stefan Aeby. On this his second album with the trio, Aeby continues his relaxed, sometimes lugubrious style of tune, making for a selection of tracks that meander along well trodden routes but also can bring the listener up short.

"Bruine," the sixth track, epitomises this with a languorous fade out that tempts the listener repeatedly to check that the disc is still playing, before merging directly into the combatively assertive "Riot" where Aeby takes on his rhythm section's grinding riff and gradually worms it into submission. The source of the convoluted percussive resistance appears to be the trio's former drummer Julius Sartorius, now replaced by fellow countryman Michi Stulz.

This is a very engaging disc, from the heady opening "Vevey" through some minimalist, delicately treated sounds to the final gentle chords. Aeby's partnership with bassist André Pousaz continues where it left off on the previous album in 2010 Are you..? His steady phrasing brings the album to its mellow conclusion, with Aeby's melodic but cheeky, light runs never stretching the envelope more than it can bear.

From Zona de Jazz:

El sueño de un mundo perfecto. De un mundo de libertad. De la igualdad. De autorrealización. Un mundo en proceso de cambio y renacimiento. La curiosidad y la búsqueda de la coherencia y la familiaridad. Lo grande se hace pequeño y los límites desaparecen. Todo parece posible… Y en medio de esto un trío de piano que sueña con ser libre, pero estando juntos. Un trío con un espíritu curioso y abierto que permite que los límites desaparezcan sin perder sus raíces.

A pesar de su título ambicioso y como de otro mundo, “Utopía” planea muy a ras de tierra con temas compuestos por el pianista Stefan Aeby con un estilo relajado, lúgubre y oscuro en ocasiones. Melodías pegadizas con un lirismo mezclado con armonías coloridas y ricas.

Cada tema es interpretado en una forma completamente nueva cada vez, con una energía dinámica y viva, y espacio libre para sus propias personalidades singulares.

Este es un disco muy interesante, desde la apertura embriagadora de “Vevey”. La asociación de Aeby con el bajista André Pousaz continúa donde se quedó en el álbum anterior del 2010 “Are you…?”. Con la combinación perfecta de Michael Stulz en la batería y André Pousaz en el bajo, el piano de Stefan Aeby ha encontrado una nueva dimensión tonal con un fuerte espectro de sonido personal.