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

A Classic From 1953

From The Guardian:

By some mysterious alchemy, the mood of a movie set is often reflected on the theater screen,” wrote Truman Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke in 1988, referring to Beat the Devil (1953), which was scripted by Capote and directed by John Huston. “One of the reasons Beat The Devil is such a lark to see is that, as Huston recalled, ‘It was a hell of a lark doing it.’” That it screens next week at the BFI bears out Clarke’s estimation that the film would keep on delighting “for a long time to come”. Where behind-the-scenes stories tend to be garnish on a film, Beat the Devil is different: what’s most enjoyable about the film has everything to do with the congenially chaotic nature of its production.

Aged 28, Truman Capote had just completed his novella The Grass Harp and left his home of two years in Taormina for Rome. Huston, meanwhile, was en route to Ravello, a coastal village near Naples, to shoot his latest film. Deeply dissatisfied with the script he was carrying, he sought out the gifted writer during a stopover in Rome, and asked would he bring it up to speed? Adapted from the novel by Claud Cockburn (using pseudonym James Helvick), the screenplay’s authors – experienced screenwriters Peter Viertel and Tony Veiller – had given it up for hooey, and with the cast already hired and Capote whisked without another word to Naples, the novelist was aware that his first film script would be written day-by-day during the shoot. He knew, but the company didn’t, and keeping the secret were associate producer Jack Clayton, and the film’s star and joint financier Humphrey Bogart.

The decision to hide the fact that there was no film to be filmed set in motion a masquerade that doesn’t sit well with surviving impressions of these venerated movie makers. Stalling for time, Clayton fibbed when he told the cast that their director wanted them not to read their lines until the last minute. The deception went further, with Huston deliberately delaying the crew with complicated camera setups to give him and Capote an hour’s grace here and there to catch up with the schedule: “It was that close,” he recalled.

The film’s story centres on four felons waiting in a port town to board a ship to Africa to make their fortunes from the continent’s uranium deposits. Their associate, the married Dannreuther (Bogart), has other things on his mind, namely the wife of an Englishman tourist, the distrait Mrs Chelm (Jennifer Jones), who contrives her husband’s participation in the underhanded scheme. One marvels at how Capote kept in his mind the development of this knotty plot when writing the script.

Truth be told, he didn’t much. It was an unusual situation in that the film had already been cast, giving Capote the rare good fortune to write prescriptively (and playfully) straight into the mouths of Hollywood stars with established reputations.

This extended to bit-parts, such as the ship’s purser, for which they’d poached a restaurant pianist in Rome (it was only on his arrival in Ravello that they realised he could barely speak a word of English). To know Capote is to know it’s no accident that the purser has a grandiose manner of speaking: “I bring you the captain’s compliments along with the sad news that the sailing of the SS Nyanga has been postponed,” is his opening line.

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Theft of Concepts

 

From Counterfire:

Yes, that urinal - "an icon of twentieth-century art" (tate.org), "the loo that shook the world" (Independent). Reputedly Marcel Duchamp (Dada* hero) signed a mass produced urinal R.MUTT and, in a radical gesture in 1917, submitted it to an open exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, New York, under the title Fountain.  It was rejected in what is now seen as a crucial turning point in art. Since then it has been celebrated (and castigated!) as the starting point for all the subsequent installation and conceptual artwork that dominates contemporary art today.

But, as a convincing article in this November’s Art Newspaper argues, Duchamp stole this iconic act from fabulous Dada poet and artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

The evidence is pretty damning: two days before Fountain was rejected, Duchamp wrote to his  sister (Dada artist Suzanne) to tell her that "one of my female friends, under the masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture."

It was not until decades later, in the late 50s/early 60s, that Duchamp, wanting to re-establish his position as an artist, started laying claim to Fountain. However he made a rather telling error: the supplier he says he got it from never stocked this particular urinal. The original was long lost but a photo survived (above) and Duchamp authorized his dealer to make copies that he authenticated and are now showcased in premier art museums around the world.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, however, has been lost from mainstream histories. Friend and colleague of Duchamp, she made Dada sculptures out of found objects and had a track record in plumbing as art – the sculpture entitled God (below) was an S-bend mounted on a wooden block.

Jane Heap, the editor of an influential journal, The Little Review, described the Baroness as "the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada" and published her poetry alongside the first appearance of James Joyce’s  Ulyesses.

Born in Germany in 1874, Elsa acquired her title from her third marriage (to an impoverished aristocrat who deserted her) and pitched up (alone) in New York in the teens of the century, a fully formed avant-gardist. She was integral to the free verse movement and one of the New York Dada group that including Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia et al. She was outrageous, a kleptomaniac and proto punk challenging all codes of behavior, arrested for dressing in men’s clothes or not dressing at all (going about semi naked). One of the first performance artists she concocted and sported amazing costumes – tomato soup tins as a bra; hats of a bird cage (with bird) or a birthday cake complete with burning candles; tea-balls and cocktail spoons as jewelry.  She shaved her head and lacquered it red, wore yellow face powder with black painted lips. She demanded equality in sexual agency and mused on ejaculation, orgasm, oral sex and impotence in her poetry which broke all boundaries of form as well as content.

Breaking the rules of gendered behaviour and totally uncompromising in her commitment to Dada, the Baroness was deeply threatening to the men in her circle.  Just as I have argued in relation to Pauline Boty (Pop artist), I think that, as a woman, she perhaps presented a transgression too far: dying, poverty stricken, in Paris in 1927  she has been written out of the mainstream histories.

How different the story of 20th century culture would feel now if a woman had been  acclaimed as an epoch shattering, free thinking, paradigm shifting creator.

But hang on.  Scholars have been aware of the Duchamp’s letter since the 1980s! It’s in the news now because, although reprinting and praising the book in which the revelation is made, Museum of Modern Art (NY) has still refused to acknowledge Elsa’s role – as does Tate (check out Tate’s  website account of Fountain  no mention of Elsa!) And this deceit is the really shocking news.  There is just too much is invested in the fiction of Duchamp’s heroic act. For a re-vision to be made acres of critical theory, art historical and curatorial analysis would, and should, be disrupted  along with comfortable, (gendered) notions of genius and innovation,

And of course the Baronness is not the only women Dadaist to be marginalised.  Check out this list of 10 women Dadaists you should know (do you?)

Doubly transgressive in rejecting both their social role as women and all  accepted notions of art they offer a radical, innovative take on the Modernist shake up of art. Artists like Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven need to be put back into the frame –  foremothers of punk, riot grrls, pussy riot et al and inspiration to all women challenging the status quo.

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Hilary's Refugees

From Foreign policy in Focus:

What beats me is why more Democrats aren’t deeply troubled by the legacy of Clinton’s foreign policy blunder in Honduras.

Maybe you’ve forgotten what happened in that small country in the first year of the Obama administration — more on that in a moment. But surely you’ve noticed the ugly wave of xenophobia greeting a growing number of Central American child refugees arriving on our southern border.

Some of President Barack Obama’s supporters are trying to blame this immigration crisis on the Bush administration because of an anti-trafficking law George W. signed in 2008 specifically written to protect Central American children, which preceded the uptick in their arrivals. But which country is the top source of kids crossing the border? Honduras, home to the world’s highest murder rate, Latin America’s worst economic inequality, and a repressive, U.S.-backed government.

When Honduran military forces allied with rightist lawmakers ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, then-Secretary of State Clinton sided with the armed forces and fought global pressure to reinstate him.

Washington wields great influence over Honduras, thanks to the numerous military bases built with U.S. funds where training and joint military and anti-drug operations take place. Since the coup, nearly $350 million in U.S. assistance, including more than $50 million in military aid, has poured into the country.

That’s a lot of investment in a nation where the police, the military, and private security forces are killing people with alarming frequency and impunity, according to Human Rights Watch.

In short, desperate Honduran children are seeking refuge from a human rights nightmare that would cast a dark cloud over Clinton’s presidential bid right now if the media were paying any attention.

That wouldn’t give Republicans a big advantage, of course. Until they stop alienating a majority of female voters and communities of color, I find it hard to see the party of Mitt Romney and John McCain winning the White House.

Given the Democratic Party’s demographic edge, progressives have nothing to lose by seizing on the GOP field’s weakness and pressing for a viable alternative to another Clinton administration. Senator Elizabeth Warren could prove a contender. Unfortunately, the consumer-rights firebrand and Massachusetts Democrat lacks any foreign policy experience.

And foreign policy is no afterthought these days. Israel — the recipient of $3.1 billion a year in U.S. military aid — is waging a ground war in Gaza, and the stakes in the Russia-Ukraine conflict just grew following the downing of that Malaysia Airlines jet. Plus, Iraq is growing more violent and unstable once more. On all these issues, Clinton is more hawkish than most of the Democratic base.

Morning Walk

Vallejo Nocturno 2016 - The Walk to Buy Bread and Avoid the Traffic

As the medicine took hold each morning we had an hour of purposeful leisure in preparation for that day's breakfast.This involved a walk down towards the water where bread was being baked and where the fruit cart stood decked in an array of mangoes and papayas and bananas. The trick was to take a different way avoiding the same streets and weaving past the traffic of desperate work goers trying to find a way around the bottle necked city streets. With the sun accompanying us we set off on our walk believing that our normal mundane life was far away on hold in a snow covered northern city and we were not fully aware in those days that an end is always nearby. Several years ago this walk was done while my mother lay in her bed delicately being tended to by two dutiful nurses back in the apartment I had just left. In a bright room full of windows  my mother after 94 years of commanding freedom was confined to a bed and a reclining chair.Though close to death I couldn't see past her daily struggles and my explanations of plot lines of both simple and complex French movies we saw religiously every night. We had inverted our positions. I was now the explainer and storyteller all in one. I was the one in charge of taking the lead and providing the daily drama such as the tragedy of spectators at local soccer stadium being thrown by the competition's fans to their painful demise down below. We couldn't believe it but the television and magazines which I read to her in the late mornings said it was true with photographs of the ledge where the young man had been pushed over circled in red. Where were the perpetrators of this crime? All this accompanied by a faint Chopin Nocturne from the CDs I had brought for her ears.

A Foreign Place By the Pacific

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2016 - El Show

It felt a bit like Fellini's 8 1/2 during one of the break at the carnival scene near the end only this was a live TV show set by the beach next to the Pacific ocean and featuring three different Peruvian groups of varying sounds. One from the 70's that had recently re-united playing soulful originals in English and a heavy horn and brass section laying down the funk quite capably. Another, a hard core alternative quartet with a series of complex bass lines, contrapuntal guitar riffs and the energetic mono syllabic singing of someone who is learning to talk that resembled an accidental mixture of punk and George Clinton. Finally, the third, was a mediocre duo of uninspiring electronics and voice, except the voice was not in tune though the audience thought the inspirational piping and repetition could solve some post-teenage dilemma. A strange brew to wander about at your mid-sixties and nearing retirement. Especially the audience that resembled a more varied and browner middle class crowd in any North American city but with odd touches of original exotic jewelry and more precise hair arrangements. And all this ebbing and flowing amid a strange sequence of events with each group playing and then pausing for the announcers who spoke into the wandering cameras in-between songs and were followed by a chorus of claps as the camera men trailed the action. The lighting was perfect all over the space considered the set for this live television program airing all over Peru and the green grass rugged rug sitting atop the dirty brown sand. Everyone across the provinces wondering what a foreign place their country had now become.

"Essayism"

From The Fortnightly Review Alan Wall writes:

IT WAS ROBERT MUSIL in The Man Without Qualities who propounded ‘Essayism’ as the necessary modern mode of thought. Essayism is characterised by an aversion to the axiomatic, a deliberated provisionality, an acceptance of uncertainty, an openness to the possibilities of intellectual adventure and discovery which Musil liked to call ‘possibilitarian’. In the face of the ruin or ossification of so many axiomatic schemata, so many ideologies, Musil asks, what is there left to us but provisionality, that testing of theory and practice which is conveyed by the word ‘essay’?

An essay means an attempt or a trial; having a go at something with the available intellectual equipment and the current knowledge. Built into its etymology is the notion of uncertainty, the endless seesawing possibilities of proof and disproof. An essay is a testing; its lexical doublet ‘assay’ highlights this feature. To assay a metal is to test it; to seek to establish its quality, its molecular structure; its mettle. To find out if it’s got the right stuff. Now Montaigne used the word essais to describe his own provisional and exploratory forays into whatever subject happened to have caught his attention most recently, and Francis Bacon followed this up in 1597 by using Essays as the title of his book. Ben Jonson gave us essayist in 1609.

But as for ‘essayism’, this word is used largely negatively in the nineteenth century, where it originates. It seems to signify something to do with the cant of current opinion, particularly the urbane prattle of the periodical press. It is to be deprecated. Musil’s retrieval of this abusive word is intended as a redemptive manoeuvre, though ‘essayism’ was not always regarded with favour by his contemporaries. Vladimir Nabokov accused Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus of ‘super-essayism’, by which he meant that the fictional narrative of that novel was constantly diverted into extended meditations on various topics like polyphony, diabolism, or whatever. The implication of Nabokov’s use of this term is that such indulgence in the essayistic mode is really not the business of fiction, which should stay with the narrative, if it knows what’s good for it. An equivalent term these days in regard to literature would be ‘info-dump’, where the writer appears determined to insert a large amount of material which has no necessary relevance to the narrative, even though it might well be a matter of obsessive interest to him.

The argument for the defence might be this. The essay is frequently the monadic unit of original and exploratory thought. Most full-length books, examined closely, will show that they are built out of essay-length units, even biographies, where the continuity between the units can be provided by the external agency of chronology. Most novels are episodic to some degree or another. They are called novels, not books of short stories, simply because the units are joined together with convincing narrative cohesion, and the characterised protagonists remain constant. Even a great deal of poetry will show itself to be essayistic, which is to say that it makes an intellectual journey in regard to a certain subject or congeries of subjects, and brings as much intellectual energy to bear on the matter as language and form allow. We see this admitted occasionally, say in the title of Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’. But we can look at Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell as an essay, an exploratory examination of the inter-dependence of the powers of good and evil in the year 1790, seen through the anode and cathode of an electrical circuit called morality.

Moby-Dick is super-essayistic in Nabokov’s usage, but then so is much of Shakespeare. What is pressed forward, in terms of dramatic action, when Ulysses delivers his grand speech on order in Troilus and Cressida? What is happening here is not the forwarding of the action, the progression of the plot, but a weighing-up of options; philosophical, even metaphysical options. The English and French form of essay take us back to the Latin exagium, which involved a trial of weight; a weighing-up, a testing-out. What we call, when the matter is not too grave or urgent, giving it a whirl. So as to see if we can try to find out what’s what.

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Birth of a Cafe

Vallejo Nocturno 2016 -At Colonia Cafe

After our fulfilling lunch at Isolia in Barranco we walked down the street to catch a coffee at a new cafe that had yet to open. They let us in and we looked at their new machinery. To accommodate our thirst they improvised some custom drip coffee from brazilian beans. I would begin to look forward to our next visit when we'd have to compete with other clients to enjoy the brew.

Lima on Saturday Morning at 5:30am

Vallejo Nocturno 2016 - The Beginning of Traffic

Our planned shoot began going off the rails when the driver that was supposed to ferry us around the colonial and decrepit parts of Lima before sunrise failed to show up and my nephew the photographer had instead to drive us averting our carefully laid out plans for his early morning shot of an over-sized crate of a building. At 5am only the street-sweepers and transvestites were out punctuating each block with their introverted presence. The general stillness of the crumbling structures and empty streets gave a calmness to our silent ride. We were the only car to obey the traffic lights as we made our slow way to our shoot. Earlier that dark morning I had woken up way too early and secretly worried that I'd miss the ride-I waited in the living room looking down at the gray street where occasional cars sped by driven by drunken husbands trying to make it home before the sun came up. My nephew showed up a little early and waited out in the side street. He texted me 5 minutes later saying he was there. I locked the apartment door and headed down the elevator  imagining we'd shoot incredible stuff in the etiolated light  . . .

Tio Melon

Vallejo Nocturno 2016 - At Ana Maria's

Barranco, Lima, Peru

Vallejo Nocturno 2016- Table and Floor at Artesania Bosco