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

Brute of a so called President

Charles Blow telling the truth:

We are leaderless. America doesn’t have a president. America has a man in the White House holding the spot, and wreaking havoc as he waits for the day when a real president arrives to replace him.

Donald Trump is many things — most of them despicable — but the leader of a nation he is not. He is not a great man. Hell, he isn’t even a good man.

Donald Trump is a man of flawed character and a moral cavity. He cannot offer moral guidance because he has no moral compass. He is too small to see over his inflated ego.

Trump has personalized the presidency in unprecedented ways — making every battle and every war about his personal feelings. Did the person across the street or around the world say good or bad things about him? Does the media treat him fairly? Is someone in his coterie of corruption outshining him or casting negative light on him?

His interests center on the self; country be damned.

What some have always known about Trump, others are slowly coming to realize, and with great shock and horror. The presidency is revealing the essence of the man and that essence is dark.

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Guitar Girl

Vallejo Nocturno 2017 - Vera in Lima

Tarkovsky's Stalker

From Paris Review, a review on Dyer's book on Stalker:

I recently fell asleep in a movie theater. I think the movie is a masterpiece. An hour in, the three main characters, on an expedition into mysterious territory called simply the Zone, have just emerged from a slog through an aqueduct, shouting over the sound of crashing water. They each lie down, exhausted, on the brown-green moss that blankets the water’s edge. The characters speak with each other about where they are going, and for what. It is a late-night road-motel talk—fatigued, but searching. A character called Writer begins a monologue about fame, the future, technology, and soon it doesn’t matter, because he is talking to himself, in the shorthand that exists only in each individual head, using big, meaningless, opaquely personal words like “Life” and “Art.” What matters is the tone of his voice—soft and drifting and stretched seemingly over one long yawn. He is talking himself to sleep. A guitar drone intensifies. And as he went on, I found myself becoming heavily tired, too, and I slumped over. I had a dream that I cannot remember, except that it feels like a kernel lodged under my tongue, and involved a river. I woke up only when a tall man sitting next to me gently tousled my hair and told me in a stage whisper that I had spilled popcorn all over my lap. The characters are sitting up, awake now, listening to a voice telling them about his dream. In my memory of the film, there is a blank.

The movie was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, recently remastered and finishing its months-long run at the IFC Center. Geoff Dyer wrote about the film and his relationship with it for our Fall 2011 issue, in “Into the Zone,” an excerpt from his full-length book Zona. “Into the Zone” is, as much as an essay can be like a movie, an imitation of Stalker. The essay proceeds by summarizing each scene of the movie chronologically. Each scene summary takes on the pace and tone of the scene being described. When the pace picks up, so does Dyer’s prose, and his thoughts come quick and abbreviated. When the movie slows to a pan, or arrests on a static shot, so does Dyer, and he takes the placid moments to tell us things he knows, stories, about Tarkovsky: about Tarkovsky and his relationship with Michelangelo Antonioni, about the fights Tarkovsky had with Mosfilm over the meditative pace of Stalker, about Flaubert and style, inventories of films shown in other films, about time as it exists and is manipulated by movies, about his desire for a drink when he sees characters drinking, and finally, during the scene Dyer calls “one of the great sequences in the history of cinema”—the long, seemingly unbroken shot of the trolley ride into the Zone itself—about himself and things he wants and can’t have. “Into the Zone” is Dyer’s thought, in all its allusiveness and wit and sneaky brilliance, welded inextricably to the rhythms of Stalker. This is the only narrow path to Stalker—a film that is both direct and maddeningly slippery.

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The New Racism

From NYT, reader's comments to Charles Blow opinion piece on August 17, 2017:

White supremacy is entrenched in America's statute books. It's like apartheid South Africa but we cannot say that. It's morally unpalatable. Thousands of legislators in the US Congress and in dozens of state assemblies around the country supported these laws. They are no better than Trump. Michelle Alexander puts it very eloquently in her book The New Jim Crow:
"What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it."

The Way Hate Works

From The Cipher Brief an interview with Michael German:

TCB: What are some of the critical elements to understanding radicalization in the white supremacist, far right context?

German: I have concerns with the use of this term radicalization, or the concept of radicalization. If you actually look at studies of terrorists, people who commit violent acts, there is no discernible process that they follow. There’s this concept, and the government promotes this concept, that people get bad ideas and those ideas then lead them on a pathway to an ultimate destination of terrorist violence. But in reality, that’s not how it works. And that’s not how it works from my perspective as an undercover agent.

There were certainly people in the groups who were ideological, but most of the people who were ideological and who thought that understanding the philosophy or theology that supported their political position were the type of people who thought that writing, and speaking, and political organizing was the way you move forward with that agenda. People who thought violence was necessary were people who liked violence. And they weren’t people who were necessarily there because they were drawn to the ideology, but rather were drawn by acceptance in a group that accepted their interest in using violence or trafficking weapons or manufacturing explosives, and weren’t particularly ideological at all. And if the group had turned around and said, “Oh, our agenda is now the opposite of what it was yesterday,” they would say, “Fine.” These people who are involved in the violence tend to see themselves as soldiers rather than as ideologues.

TCB: Are you then looking for any key indicators to try to discern where white supremacist and far right organizations will go or try to achieve beyond Charlottesville?

German: There are two parts of these movements — there’s the ideological side and the violent fringe. I’ve been troubled over the course of the last year and a half, two years, as the Donald Trump campaign has taken what has in the past been a right-wing populist dog whistle sort of messaging to racist groups that has been part of our political discourse since the Nixon “Southern strategy” — but change the dog whistle into a bullhorn.

Trump made very clear he had extreme bias against Muslims, against Latinos, against other communities of color, and that he was intending to implement policies that would express that bias and therefore sending a message to these groups not just that “I’m going to push your agenda,” but that “I’m welcoming you to participate in the policy discussion.” And then this tacit sanctioning of violence from the fringe seems to have brought those two sections that used to keep an arms length distance apart from each other together, to where you now have the advocates of cheering at a rally and the violent fringe coming there to protect and defend them, and to mete out punishment against people who would oppose them. That is extraordinarily dangerous.

If you look at the ways authoritarian governments obtain police powers, this is exactly how they do it. They sort of turn a blind eye to street thuggery and allow people to commit political violence against opponents of the government. That street violence becomes unbearable for the public, who demand that the government do something about it so the government can justify stopping protests altogether. And, of course, what the government is really interested in is stopping protests against government policies. We’re seeing that kind of thing, where there are a number of bills in state legislatures that would remove civil liability from people who run over protesters in the street. That’s taken on a very disturbing aspect with the latest murder in Charlottesville.

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San Marcos, Lima, Peru

Vallejo Nocturno 2017, San Marcos, Lima, Peru

A Visit to Lima

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2017 - San Marcos University, La Casona in Lima, Peru

We attended a recital practice that my cousin and the accompanying pianist held at this location, La Cason, which has recently been carefully restored. It's a beautiful arrangement in the middle of old Lima and surrounded by thriving small shops but extremely dilapidated. Out taxi driver took us a s close as he could but we had to walk the last 4 blocks to get there as the was a teacher's strike and the troops were out. Despite this tension and the accompanying poverty that you see in this society there is something cohesive and unifying that you don't see in the U.S. any more. Maybe it was simply a carryover from the national celebrations just recently held but even though there is great suspicions about politicians here, at least the Courts have the power to put the most corrupt in prison.

From the New York Times:

As Peru prepares for the bicentennial of its independence from Spain in 1821, instead of looking forward with optimism, it is contemplating a dismal political landscape: Four of its former presidents are in jail or fugitives from justice for human rights crimes or corruption. A world record? Probably, but hardly one to celebrate.

In response, in his annual address to the nation late last month, the current president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, promised a crusade to rebuild the country after devastating floods and a huge corruption scandal, which together have shattered prospects of economic growth and further undermined the trust of Peruvians in the presidency itself.

All four presidents have left their imprint on the country’s history and justice.

First, Alberto Fujimori, Peru’s autocratic ruler from 1990 to 2000, was sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in jail for human rights violations in the fight against the Shining Path guerrillas and later convicted of embezzlement and corruption. He was recently joined in the Barbadillo Lima prison by Ollanta Humala, Mr. Kuczynski’s predecessor, after a judge ordered that he and his wife, Nadine Heredia, serve 18 months of pretrial detention while being investigated on money-laundering and conspiracy charges. Mr. Humala is also accused of extrajudicial killings during his time as an army captain at a remote jungle base in the 1990s.

Another former president, Alejandro Toledo, who served from 2001 to 2006 and brought democracy back after Mr. Fujimori, is fighting extradition to Peru, presumably from his home in Palo Alto, Calif., where he was once a visiting professor at Stanford University. Mr. Toledo is charged with taking $20 million in kickbacks from the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, which is at the heart of the corruption scandal that is rocking Brazil.

And last, in January a court in Rome sentenced Francisco Morales Bermúdez, Peru’s military dictator from 1975 to 1980, to life imprisonment for his role in the deaths of 23 people with Italian citizenship living in Latin America. They died during Operation Condor, a campaign of political terrorism carried out by right-wing dictatorships in South America with the technical and military assistance of the United States. Mr. Morales, who will not be imprisoned because of his age, is the only sentenced president who was not elected.

Peruvians are dismayed at having given their votes to so many presidents who have ended up being prosecuted as criminals. The only living former head of state not incriminated so far is Alan Garcia, who served two terms, from 1985 to 1990 and from 2006 to 2011, and ironically has a legendary reputation for corruption that has haunted him for decades. But he is also under investigation for financial irregularities in the construction of the Lima Metro by, once again, Brazil’s Odebrecht conglomerate.

Continue reading the main story

 

 

 

What Happened to Jutta?

 

From Longreads, Aaron Gilbreth, a perceptive article on a German woman pianist who disappeared from the jazz scene:

In 1960, four years after the venerable Blue Note Records signed pianist Jutta Hipp to their label, she stopped performing music entirely. Back in her native Germany, Hipp’s swinging, percussive style had earned her the title of Europe’s First Lady of Jazz. When she’d moved to New York in 1955, she started working at a garment factory in Queens to supplement her recording and performing income. She played clubs around the City. She toured. Then, with six albums to her name and no official explanation, she quit. She never performed publicly again, and she told so few people about her life in music that most of her factory coworkers and friends only discovered it from her obituary. For the next forty-one years, Jutta patched garments for a living, painted, drew and took photos for pleasure, all while royalties accrued on Blue Note’s books.

Hipp was Blue Note’s first white female and European instrumentalist on a roster composed largely of American men of color. Hipp’s records had never been big sellers in the United States. Her identity was obscure even to ardent jazz fans. But her four Blue Note records sold well in Japan. Japan is a hotbed of jazz fandom — when it comes to jazz there, the more obscure the better — and her cult status earned her and Blue Note a lot of money. Hipp just wasn’t getting any of it. When she quit performing, she severed contact with the label, as well as with most of the people who could have told Blue Note where to send her checks.

In 2001, Tom Evered, then Blue Note’s general manager, did some research on the money the label owed to Hipp and was surprised by what he found.  In order to get Hipp what she’d earned and to clear the company’s books, Evered got her phone number from Gundula Konitz, the wife of influential saxophonist Lee Konitz. The Konitzes were among the few people she kept in touch with from her jazz days. When he reached Hipp, he told her he had good news: There were around $35,000 in her royalties account, and he wanted to cut her a check.

The line fell silent. Seconds passed. Then, in her heavy German accent, she said, “Mein Gott.”

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