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

Innovative Music Therapy . . .We Hope

From The Washington Post:

When we listen to music we enjoy, it makes us feel different. Truly beloved songs inspire a different state of mind than the average pretty background noise. A study published Thursday in Scientific Reports pinpoints the changes in neurological activity behind that experience.

In the small study (with 21 young adults, total), participants with different genre preferences were exposed to entire songs while in an MRI. They were exposed to a liked genre, a disliked genre, and their self-reported favorite song. They were looking for changes in brain activity that related to preference for the music being listened to, as opposed to changes that might occur based on differences in the musicality or lyrics of the tune. If your favorite artist is Beyoncé, her dance anthems probably make you feel as focused as a classical music lover listening to Beethoven — and that's pretty crazy. The researchers wanted to understand how people could have the same feelings associated with their favorite music (greater self-reflection and inward thought) regardless of genre.

When listening to a preferred genre or a favorite song, the participants had greater connectivity between regions of the brain called the default mode network (DMN). The DMN is associated with that switch we can flip between inner and outer thought. When the DMN is active, you're not focused on what's happening in the physical world around you — you're using internal stimuli, like memories and your imagination.

Of course, you probably already knew that your favorite music could make you zone out. The study authors hope that these findings will encourage innovative music therapy in individuals who have conditions associated with poor DMN activity and connectivity, like autism and schizophrenia.

Submerse @@Blips Mix

Lumping nationalist resistance

From Rami G. Khouri:

One of the fascinating dimensions of the battle between Israel and Palestine is how Israeli leaders and their American apologists keep changing their propaganda message aimed at generally ignorant Western audiences. The core, but always evolving, message that Zionists keep sending out is that Palestinians who challenge Israel are part and parcel of a larger universe of frightening figures that espouse criminal values, and represent a direct, mortal threat to Israel and also to all Western civilization.

The latest version of this fear-mongering campaign of lies and fantasy seeks to paint Hamas and others militant Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza as integral elements in the world of vicious actors and terrorists who fight in the name of Islam, such as the Salafist-takfiri extremists Islamic State in Syria-Iraq, Al-Qaeda, or the Taliban in Afghanistan. Most people in the United States or other Western lands who hear these messages lack the base of factual knowledge to understand that Israel’s accusations are bold and ridiculous lies; yet these lies often strike a receptive chord among uninformed audiences that only have two images drilled into them year after year: Israel and Jews are threatened with death and extinction in the Middle East, and the region is full of rabid killers who want to kill Christians and Jews and turn the world into one big Islamic society that enslaves women and martyrs its children.

The problem with this latest twist of Zionist propaganda is that it tries to put into a single basket a series of very different groups with totally unrelated inspirations, agendas and operating methods. It aims to tar Hamas, and also Hizbullah in Lebanon, with such extreme attributes that foreigners refuse to deal with them, and only see them as part and parcel of that frightening body of Islamic State and Al-Qaeda killers who claim to speak in the name of Islam and go around crucifying and cutting people’s heads off.

This strategy has actually worked for some time, as most Western powers have shunned dealing with Hamas or Hizbullah. Yet that pattern has started to break down in recent years, as foreign governments and civil society activists alike come to understand that groups like Hamas and Hizbullah essentially are locally anchored, state-based resistance groups that fight two battles at once: They seek to reverse the Israeli occupation, colonization and subjugation of their countries (Palestine and Lebanon), and they seek to create a more efficient, less corrupt domestic governance system that responds to the needs of all its citizens. (On balance, they have done much better at fighting Israel than at generating better domestic governance).

Resisting and reversing Israeli actions forms the core of Hamas and Hizbullah strategies, therefore the Israeli spin masters try at all costs to prevent anyone abroad from seeing these Lebanese and Palestinian groups as having been born primarily to fight back against Israel’s excessive occupation and colonization. The easiest way to do this in the fact-light minds of many Western citizens and politicians is simply to associate Hamas and Hizbullah with Al-Qaeda, Islamic State and Taliban.

This strategy has started to wear thin and collapse in places because reasonable people in the world have repeatedly seen the overwhelming evidence of Israel’s own violence and occasional criminal atrocities in Lebanon and Palestine. The many pictures of Lebanese and Palestinians simply protecting their lands from repeated Israeli attacks — including by attacking Israel with small rockets and as yet mostly harmless projectiles — have been coupled with repeated Israeli destruction of thousands of Arab homes, and many schools, hospitals, power plants and other civilian facilities.

More and more governments and observers around the world have realized that Hamas and Hizbullah have nothing to do with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, whose agendas reflect bizarre religious fantasies rather than state-based resistance goals. We started to see this rejection of Israeli propaganda over a year ago when Americans and Europeans ignored the wild scare tactics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and went ahead with negotiations with Iran on nuclear and sanctions issues. The Western ability to ignore Zionism’s wild men in favor of a more rational approach to the world was also evident after the formation of the Palestinian national unity government several months ago, which the United States and EU among others accepted to engage with, rather than to boycott, as Israel desired.

Israel and its howlers in Washington will continue to try and lump nationalist resistance groups like Hamas and Hizbullah with criminals like Al-Qaeda and its offshoots, but the efficacy of such crude propaganda is steadily decreasing. This means we should be alert to the next set of exaggerations, diversions and lies that Israel and its Western hit men and women will use in their attempt to prevent any rational accountability of Israeli actions.

Deanna Kruger Interview

From Others People Pixel blog an interview with artist Deanna Krueger:

OtherPeoplesPixels: Could you explain the different parts of the process of creating the works in your series Shards.

Deanna Krueger: I begin by printing acrylic monotypes onto recycled medical diagnostic film (X-Ray/MRI film). The film is then torn apart and the shards are reconnected into new configurations using thousands of staples. The process yields large wall-hanging pieces that are semi-translucent and slightly dimensional.

OPP: What's your favorite part? Least favorite part?

DK: The painting and printing is probably my favorite part. It always seems to happen too quickly, though I also really enjoy combining the various nuances of colors on the shards. Tearing the film creates quite a bit of noise. It sounds like I am taking out my aggression, but it just makes me laugh as that is usually not the case.

I assemble the pieces while seated on the floor of my studio, which is tile that I painted white so I can see the translucent colors. I set out the shards into little piles of color, much the way a painter lays out her palette. Then it is kind of like a game of seated Twister as I reach and staple, reach and staple. The repetition is meditative. At times I wish I could get my process off the floor to lessen the physical strain, but I always go back to that tile.

OPP: When did you first start working with recycled medical diagnostic film? Where do you get so much of it?

DK: In grad school I was experimenting with translucency on small discarded Mylar retail signs. My adviser saw what I was doing and mentioned that someone had dropped off some medical film years ago to the studio. She gave me about twenty sheets of 14” x 17” film. I instantly fell in love with the stuff. Acrylic won’t usually stick to plastic, but the film has a chemical substrate designed to absorb pigment. At that time, I was working as a preparator and assistant to the Visual Arts Coordinator at an arts program at the University of Michigan Health System. I made a lot of contacts with clinics and stockpiled the stuff. Most of what I got are clear “cleanup” sheets. They are run through the diagnostic machines between scans to clean off the print rollers, so when you go for your brain scan there are no accidental ink blobs on your results. Sometimes people give me their own personal X-Rays and MRIs, and I have also gotten some over-exposed film. I did some other things with the film for my MFA thesis show, but my Shards series started the year after I finished.

OPP: Tell us about your choice of staples as the connecting element for the Shards.

DK: In undergrad, I found a used, specialty hand-held stapler. I appreciated its elegance and simplicity. I am a bit obsessed with tools! After my MFA, the medical film and the staples came together. They seemed the perfect match. There is also the connection that staples are often used in surgery. The staples add an edge to the work. I welcome this bit of darkness. . . though they also add sparkle. So there is dark and there is light.

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A Question of Humor

From Hazlit:

In one study, published in April in the Journal of Research in Personality, 159 people were given two New Yorker cartoons, one with a caption and one blank. They rated the captioned cartoon’s funniness on a scale of 1-7, then tried to caption the other cartoon, in what was basically a scientific version of the New Yorker back page contest. The captions were then judged by four independent judges on two measures: general coherence, to see if participants were even able to generate something that could credibly be called a joke, and the caption’s actual funniness.

The researchers found that humour appreciation was in fact negatively correlated with humour production. The people who laughed the most wrote the worst jokes, while those least amused by the cartoons wrote the best captions (people, presumably, like this guy). Here, the idea that someone with a “good sense of humour” is someone who both laughs at your jokes and makes their own gets complicated.

Another study, recently published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, attempts to unpack various types of funniness and how they’re perceived. Studies have long shown that “a good sense of humour” consistently ranks as one of the most important qualities in a romantic partner, with people’s happiness in a relationship linked to how funny they find their spouse, and men more likely to get a woman’s phone number when they were funny with their friends. But “a sense of humour,” as an umbrella term, encapsulates any number of different joking styles, not all of which seem obviously desirable.

The researchers used a formulation that divides humour into four broad categories. “Affiliative humour” is the kind of joking around that amuses people without insulting anyone, strengthening social bonds, while “Aggressive humour” is the teasing, jousting sort often used to subtly display your superiority. “Self-enhancing humour” is an attempt to use humour to make the best of a bad situation, while “self-defeating humour” is the self-deprecating, Woody Allen-ish joking that attempts to wring laughs out of the joke-teller’s own humiliations and shortcomings.

Participants received the “Humor Styles Questionnaire,” a personality test that attempts to determine your style of humour by asking you to rate how much you agree with statements such as: “Even when I’m by myself, I’m often amused by the absurdities of life,” or, “I will often get carried away in putting myself down if it makes my family or friends laugh.” In one study, 50 students used the HSQ to judge whether each action described showed someone with a good sense of humour or a bad one. They also rated how “socially desirable” each action was. Is the person who says that, “If I don’t like someone, I often use humour or teasing to put them down” a lovable clown, or just a jerk?

The results indicated that being aggressively humourous was actually social disadvantageous; quipping about your friend’s disastrous fashion makes you seem like an asshole. And self-deprecating humour, whatever its charms, generally made the joker look unattractive—belittle yourself too much and your audience starts to believe it. The results, the researchers argue, show that “a more nuanced view of humour is needed to appreciate its tactical uses and its multiple roles in social interactions.”

This isn’t the most earth-shattering conclusion; at times, both studies can feel as hopelessly literal and earnest as the wikiHow guide—written with the same joke-deflating seriousness and from the same man-from-Mars perspective. But, as they argue, if we’re consistently talking about the importance of “a sense of humour,” surely we should at least know what that means. These studies are a start, and don’t call me Shirley.

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Perfiles de Peret-Ciao

From PRI:

Spain’s General Society of Authors and Editors (SGAE), announced today that Pedro Pubill Calaf, better known as Peret, died today at the age of 79 in Barcelona. Peret’s official website reported that he died of cancer. Peret was best known as “the father of Catalan rumba”, a musical style developed by merging Spanish gypsy rumba with mambo and guaracha. In 2010, Peret received the Lifetime Award from Spain’s Academy of Music, granted by the SGAE and AIE, in recognition of his professional career.

Peret recorded over 250 songs as a composer and lyricist. He wrote unforgettable songs that became part of Spanish popular tradition, such as ‘Borriquito’ (little burro or donkey), ‘Una lágrima cayó en la arena’ (A tear fell in the sand ), ‘Gitana hechicera’ (Gypsy sorceress ), ‘El jilguero’( The Goldfinch ) and ‘Que levante el dedo’ (Raise the finger ), to name only a few.

Members of the Board of the General Society of Authors and Editors expressed their condolences to the family and friends of the great artist.

Peret was born in Mataró in 1935, but grew up in Barcelona’s El Raval barrio. There, gypsy clans carried out a musical revolution led by Peret. The gypsy rumba mixed with guaracha and Perez Prado’s mambo gave birth to a new genre: the Catalan rumba. It featured the percussive strumming known as the hand fan. “That trick so ingenious and easy to implement,” said Catalan rumba renovator Gato Pérez.

Peret had a free and happy childhood, learning in the streets and markets, where he accompanied his father, a textiles dealer whom everyone knew as the half friend (Mig Amic). That’s how Peret titled one of his songs, a tribute to his father.

The boy had a musical vocation unknown to his family. Soon, the guitar became his best friend and his innate wit helped him at rumba parties that took place in the clothing markets. Peret changed his life after a motorcycle accident he had at 16. At that time, music became his full-time career. From there, Peret went on to perform at the Victoria Theatre, released his first singles, moved to Madrid in the late 1960s, and reached immense popularity in the 1960s and 70s, a time when disco DJs set aside a space for his rumbas.

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From El Mundo:

Pedro Pubill Calaf, el artista conocido como Peret, ha muerto en Barcelona a los 79 años, unos meses después de anunciar que padecía cáncer y 60 años después de inventar el género de la rumba catalana, una de las aportaciones más auténticas que ha dado España a la música popular.

Aunque, en realidad, eso de la invención de la rumba es una de esas leyendas peretianas, encantadoras y llenas de picardia. La rumba catalana nació porque lo natural era que naciese; no vino de un mente preclara, y eso que la de Peret lo era, sino de un mundo que ya quería ser moderno, guasón y mestizo, y que no sonaba a copla ni a sardana ni siquiera a cante jondo. En realidad, la rumba nació simultanemanete en dos zonas de Barcelona, en la calle de la Cera, por el Raval (la calle de Vázquiez Montalbán), donde reinaba Peret; y en el barrio de Gràcia, donde el chico listo era Antonio González, el Pescaílla, el marido de Lola Flores. Peret dijo siempre que lo 'del Pesca' estaba bien, sí, pero que no era exactamente rumba catalana, que sólo lo suyo era 'pata negra'. Pero, ahora que ya ha pasado todo, no hay por qué darle más vueltas.

Además, si hiciéramos sociología de la rumba, veríamos que Peret y el Pescaílla tenían vidas paralelas: los dos eran gitanos relativamente prósperos. La familia Pubill-Calaf salía adelante con la venta de textiles, igual que los González se dedicaban al flamenco con cierto éxito. No busquen demasiadas escenas de miseria y sordidez. Después llegó el debut temprano (con 12 años, en el Tívoli, acompañado de la prima Pepi) y, un poco más tarde, el hallazgo de que el flamenco, alejado de sus fuentes y aligerado con un compás de cuatro por cuatro (robado de la música cubana que también había llegado al Puerto de Barcelona), podía tener un encanto irresistible.

Y descubrir aquella mezcla tuvo que ser como echarle coca-cola al ron por primera vez. No había nada comparable por entonces en las radios, ya que el rock no había llegado, al tango ya se le había pasado su momento, el flamenco era aún un asunto de señoritos que daban propinas a los gitanos en las ventas, y las coplas y la canción española... ¿Quién querría bailar una copla pudiendo bailar una rumba?

Peret fue el protagonista de ese momento, su mejor intérprete y también su caricatura: chuleta, locuaz, encantador, golfo. Hacía cabriolas con la guitarra igual que El Cordobés con los toros (aquello del ventilador), protagonizaba películas malísimas y cantaba versos un poco bobos sobre borriquitos y lágrimas en la arena, porque la música popular es así, un poco vulgar y esa es parte de la gracia. Pero el caso es que por esos equívocos, los chicos con aspiraciones intelectuales de la generación de Peret no se dieron cuenta del genial invento que era la rumba. ¡Como si las películas de Elvis fuesen buenas! Luego, un día vimos a Los Manolos en los Juegos Olímpicos y en España caímos en que todos podíamos sentirnos bastante orgullosos de esa música barcelonesa.

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Mexico City was the Setting

Interview of Francisco Goldman at LARB:

SARAH WANG: The Interior Circuit is both a deeply personal memoir that takes place five years after Aura’s death, and an account of the shifting politics of Mexico City. The book is part love story, part political reportage, framed by an Oulipian-like constraint of navigating the city while learning to drive. How did this book come together?

FRANCISO GOLDMAN: The seed of this book was in a magazine article I was talking about writing for The New Yorker. I was going to do the driving project as a piece for them. The summer of 2012 became an incredibly intense summer. I had had a few really rough years. I felt like I was dragging a heavy weight behind me. I felt imprisoned by it. I just couldn’t free myself of it. I was afraid of time passing. There was a sense that I had to make time move again. Time had stopped moving. Nothing ever changed.

This book emerged because I wasn’t ready to go back to fiction. I had a form of survivor’s guilt, I suppose. For me, writing imaginary fiction is an ideal. If I could write The Hobbit, I would. I felt like I didn’t have permission to do that again yet. I always want to write novels but, in the last decade especially, reality is always intruding into my life. Aura’s death was the boulder that crushed that impulse to live in an imagined reality. Annie Proulx once wondered if I would ever be able to not write about Aura again. But I felt I owed Aura another book.

A lot of important things happened in my life during that summer, including finally being in a relationship again, falling in love again. It was also a hugely transformative summer in the history of contemporary Mexico with incredible repercussions for Mexico City. That summer I was living very intensely.

Say Her Name came out in Spanish in 2012, and it was really a big hit in Mexico. It was a crazy thing; and it wasn’t easy for my girlfriend. I was constantly giving interviews about Aura. I was traveling to other parts of Latin America too, and I had to fly back to New York to teach my classes throughout the fall semester. I knew I wasn’t going to be doing any writing in the fall. Then in the winter, a cataclysm occurred. My girlfriend suddenly left me. It was a complete shock. It plunged me into a state of despair. It was as if all those trauma symptoms — my mind knew it wasn’t the same, but my body didn’t — all that craziness, the inability to sleep, all that bedlam inside me came flooding back.

The first half of the book chronicles the summer of 2012, when the driving project took place. I am reminded of a quote from Maurice Blanchot, which I can only partially recall. But he said something like — you have to allow yourself to become weary, you have to be brought back to a place where you’re weary. This is the condition of writing. This is the condition of possibility.

In some ways, it sounds like this is what happened to you that summer, hitting a nadir and reaching a threshold.

I knew that I couldn’t fall back into the abyss again. I couldn’t fall back into the abyss of loss that ruined my life for five years, and I couldn’t fall back into the self-destructive chaos — the march to the nadir as you say — that defined so much of that summer. I pulled myself out of it. I told myself, I’m not going to let this happen. It’s time to write this thing. I felt like I had finally emerged from the cave of grief, from the solipsism of grief, from the murk of grief. I had finally gotten onto a constructive path. I had finally begun to embrace life again and feel productive, like I was all right and in control of myself. I told myself, I’m going to write my way out of this. I’m going to do it by retracing my steps of the summer of 2012, by mapping my steps, mapping the ways in which I managed to recover myself from grief. And that’s what the first half of the book in so many ways is. It was a celebratory story fought onto a good path. I re-embraced life. I experienced a reawakening.

Mexico City was the setting, the place. It was an important part of everything that was happening to me. I finished the first half of the book the summer of 2012. And at that point I was thinking, let’s go ahead and publish this with the magazine pieces that Grove wanted me to publish in a book [a few previously published articles, including a New Yorker piece on the children of the disappeared in Argentina], but those pieces didn’t seem to have that much to do with what I’d already written. Then I looked around and realized that if in some ways what I’d written was a celebration of Mexico City — written with a kind of innocence, with a kind of romance; I was in thrall to the romance of the city — the city was changing right under my nose, changing in dangerous ways, or at least in ways I felt challenged to understand and chronicle.

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Mompou's Magic Music

‘Art’ and advertising

From 3am:

Why discuss The Arcades Project now? The book, for all its chaos and eccentricity, is an attempt to provide a record of capitalist development in a particular place and time, namely 19th-century Paris. As we know, capitalism hasn’t gone away, and neither have the particularities discussed by Benjamin – the ‘phantamasgoric’ nature of a society created by an economy in which exchange and representation suppress use and experience, the power of commodity fetishism and its extension into the field of sexual relations, the bourgeois domination of inner-city space, and the voluntary nomadism of the middle-class flaneur.

There is a further reason why this is an opportune moment to critically examine the relationship between cultural studies and radical theory, and Benjamin is perhaps best placed to provide an example for discussion, given he was as much enamoured of the former as committed to the latter.

The global economic infrastructure has been subject to a process of radical development since the crisis proximately initiated in 2007 by the sale of ‘default-ready’ loans to low-income home buyers. One salient result of this has been the progressive immiseration of large segments of the bourgeoisie in the developed world, now subject to the same insecurity of salary and job longevity as the working class has always traditionally been. This unmooring from old certainties has led to an objective loss of ‘stake’ in this society, and it remains to be seen what the reaction to this will be by those affected.

Some will cling to the intellectual sense of superiority pertaining to the possession of “cultural capital” (Pierre Bourdieu), while others will come to realise the truth, namely that art in ‘civil’ society is the amanuensis of a system that prices out the majority in the interests of galloping property valorisation, a system for managing cultural assets (meant in both senses of the term), etc. Having been ‘realised’ in an apparently endless cycle of ‘specialist’ comments on the ‘human condition’, art must now, as the Situationists recommended nearly 50 years ago, be suppressed.

 

Culture and marketing

The arcades represented the most integrated hybrid thus far of ‘art’ and advertising. What is striking is the extent to which, as the Situationists noted, everything becomes subject to promotion and ideologies that become commodities of the intellectual market-place as much as things are the stock in trade of the agora. Radical, ‘agitational-propaganda’ art illustrates this point – the cause is made more attractive by the application of strong design values.

Military Architecture and Regeneration

Just as the skills of presentation, display, and positioning are brought into the service of the commodity, Haussmann’s pre-emptive re-design of the city makes a militarised architecture the help-meet of social peace, and aesthetics, ambience, and spatial resonance are sacrificed to the straight lines of the city as, [literally] regimented space. Haussmann was not concerned with aesthetics, and could be described as an architectural nihilist, or “demolition artist” as he termed himself, responsible for “strategic embellishment”.

Haussmann’s work displaces and uproots the urban poor, forcibly compressing in time the process of organic assimilation of villages that characterises urban development. We shall return to the theme of time and the city in due course, but we should give honourable mention to Eugene Atget for his evocative photographs of Paris in just such a state of transition.

Planned urban environments from Haussmann to Le Corbusier (by way of Albert Speer) are instances of coordinated and major upheaval based on a grafted ideal or model, designed to engineer human behaviour through the manipulation of the urban landscape. Haussmann’s priority was socio-military pacification, Speer’s was a combination of military and other concerns (the free passage of commodities), and Le Corbusier’s the creation of efficient productive and socially reproductive environments, machines for living.

In the present phase, the agenda has become simultaneously more narrow and more amorphous – the creation of; (A) homes and playpens for the rich in close proximity to financial centres and (B) investment sites, in which the surplus value extracted from proletarians in underdeveloped countries (such as China) is revalorised via property trading in the West.

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Crowd Control

A protestor takes shelter from smoke billowing around him, Ferguson, Missouri, 13 August 2014.
AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Carson, www.parade.condenast.com

From Jadaliyya, Megan French Marcelin  writes:

The troubling trend of increasing militarization is made more so by how political leadership has displaced responsibility for such violence. In Ferguson, as in Gaza, official US demands for peace ignore the fact that the supply of military weaponry negates such a call to action. This irony has not been lost on residents in Missouri and abroad. One Palestinian tweeter, displaying an empty tear gas canister reading “Made in USA,” offered satirical assurance to the citizens of Ferguson, saying that there should be no worry because the tear gas they faced had been tested on Palestinian civilians. If, as Missouri Congressional Representative Emanuel Cleaver rightly states in The Guardian, that it is “unconscionable that we would convert a city in the middle of America into a war zone,” it is equally unconscionable that we would provide Israel with the means to do so in Gaza.

This drawing of connections between Ferguson and Gaza also offers important critiques of power, space, and the politics of occupation. In Ferguson, a town where seventy percent of residents are black, yet the power structure is predominantly white, protestors have readily evoked the language of an “occupied territory,” reminding those watching that their citizenship has always been second-class. The language of occupation signifies an appraisal made long ago by Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, among other civil rights organizations, who have used such a concept to critique the relationship of US power to communities of color nationwide. As residents of Ferguson chant “Gaza strip” at local police forces, they also connect to present-day struggles for liberation worldwide; they seek not only justice, but also self-determination.

Representing police activity in Ferguson as a colonial occupation brings to bear the connections between occupied spaces such as Gaza and low-income communities of color in the United States, where residents have been physically barricaded from resources, denied access to education, redlined from housing opportunities, stripped of citizenship, and segregated in apartheid-like conditions. The kind of outrage growing in Ferguson, Palestine, and other colonized spaces responds not only to the immediate events that have triggered action, but to decades upon decades of repressive occupation and the denial of social and political enfranchisement.

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