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

Walter Mignolo on Global Coloniality

Anibal Quijano's Insights

 

"The vast genocide of the Indians in the first decades of colonization was not caused principally bt the violence of the conquest nor by the plagues the conquistadores brought, but took place because so many American Indians were used as disposable manual labor and forced to work until death."

Anibal Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America

The great Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano passed away today.

Before the Flood

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - Before the Sunday Flood

Uncharted Waters

Some great exploratory music from four veterans who manage to reach beyond the known on this surprising release. Unexpected because you do not associate these 4 great musicians with each other prior to this disc. A welcome gathering displaying the force of new improvised music.

From Free Jazz Collective blog:

Way back in the mid-1960s there was a truly creative upwelling of music coming out of England. Musicians like Derek Bailey, Kenny Wheeler, Evan Parker, Dave Holland, and many more were beginning to leave their mark on the music. One of the major documents of the music being made in and around London at that time was the Spontaneous Music Ensemble’s Karyōbin LP (read Colin Green’s review of the recent reissue here). Shortly after that recording session, Dave Holland moved to New York to begin his now legendary run with Miles Davis followed by his time with Anthony Braxton and Sam Rivers (and John Hartford, let’s not forget Holland’s excellent bluegrass phase). Evan Parker has charted his own enigmatic course over the last fifty years. Uncharted Territories is the first full album Holland and Parker have recorded together since the SME days. (There is also a single released earlier this year to raise money for the Vortex Club in London.) And Craig Taborn and Ches Smith are certainly no strangers to the creative music scene.

 

The music on Uncharted Territories is fully improvised, with the exception of Q&A, which first appeared on Holland’s Conference of the Birds. (There is also a great version on Circle’s Paris Concert from 1971.) The tracks cycle through all the subsets of the quartet, featuring duos and trios in addition to the full band, with the track names reflecting which permutation is performing. The tracks are mostly short by improvised music standards, mainly between four and six minutes. The relatively short track lengths allows for a wide diversity of ideas to be worked through over the course of the twenty-three cuts, presented on two CDs or three LPs or digital download. The album is so long, clocking in at just over two hours and ten minutes, that I was initially overwhelmed by how much music is presented here. The only choice was to dive in head first and let the ocean of sound wash over me.

 

The music is as exciting as you’d expect from four creative musicians at the top of their games. Taborn’s use of piano, organs, keyboards, and electronics offers a wide variety of timbral possibilities as does Smith’s use of the drum set and a wider percussion arsenal. I’m particularly fond of the bass and percussion duets, as well as Taborn’s organ playing, but there is so much to hear, something for everyone. The real treat is of course the cuts featuring the full quartet. The album is well worth spinning many, many times.

 

Uncharted Territories is the first time this quartet has performed together.

Official death count of 64

From Harvard School of Public Health:

The mortality rate in Puerto Rico rose by 62% [95% confidence interval (CI) 11% to 114%] after Hurricane Maria, according to a new study led by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study was conducted in January and February 2018, in collaboration with colleagues from Carlos Albizu University in Puerto Rico and the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The researchers concluded that the original estimate of 64 excess deaths due to Hurricane Maria is likely to be a substantial underestimate. The study estimates a death rate of 14.3 deaths per thousand [95% CI 9.8 to 18.9] between September 20 (date of Hurricane Maria) and December 31, 2017, up from a rate of 8.8 deaths per thousand at the same time in 2016. About one third of the reported deaths in the households surveyed in the study were attributed to delayed or prevented access to medical care.

The study was published online May 29, 2018 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, inflicting approximately $90 billion worth of damage and displacing thousands of residents. The storm disrupted medical services across the island, and many households were left for weeks without water, electricity, or cell phone coverage.

As with any major natural disaster, assessing the loss of life caused by Hurricane Maria was difficult and contentious. For disaster-related deaths to be confirmed in Puerto Rico, bodies must be transported to San Juan or a medical examiner must travel to the region to verify the death. This makes it difficult to log deaths that were caused by delays in treatment or chronic conditions that worsened in the aftermath of the storm. In December 2017, media reports suggested that the official death toll was significantly underestimated.

To produce an independent estimate of lives lost as a result of the storm, the researchers surveyed 3,299 randomly chosen households across Puerto Rico. Participants were asked about infrastructure damage, displacement, and deaths. Results from the survey showed that there were an estimated 14.3 deaths per 1,000 people between September 20 and December 31, 2017. By comparing this post-hurricane mortality rate with the same time period in 2016, the researchers estimated that there were 4,645 [95% CI, 793 to 8498] additional deaths in the three-month period following Hurricane Maria.

In addition to a significantly higher death toll, the study showed that the average household went approximately 41 days without cell phone service, 68 days without water, and 84 days without electricity following the storm. More than 30% of surveyed households reported interruptions to medical care, with trouble accessing medications and powering respiratory equipment being the most frequently cited challenges.

Household-based surveys such as these are well studied in the scientific literature and offer a cost-effective, rapid approach in the aftermath of a disaster. The researchers have made all of their anonymized data, analysis, and code publicly available for review.

Support for the study came from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, Section of Wilderness and Environmental Medicine.

False Arguments to Track Us

From the blog The Ad Contrarian:

This week, as the GDPR gets closer to implementation, we can expect to hear a lot of noise from digi-weasels here in the US explaining to us why we need to allow wide data collection as a fair "value exchange" for the free access we get to online services.

This argument is total bullshit.

Let's start at the beginning. First, the true part. The web provides us with amazing services and they are essentially all free of cost. I don't think there is any doubt that most of us don't really appreciate the benefits we get from free web services. The duopoly of Google and Facebook provide us with a whole lot of valuable stuff that we pay nothing for. Especially Google. They are entitled to recompense for the amazing services they provide.

And they are well compensated for their efforts. They are two of the most profitable companies on the planet. And essentially all of their profit comes from advertising.

This is no different from how other media, like TV, radio, and magazines, make their money. They provide us with entertainment and information, and in return they are able to reach us by selling advertising space and time to their clients. This is a legitimate value exchange.

Here's where the bullshit comes in. The online ad industry claims that they are entitled to some extra value - the value of knowing every little thing about us. This goes by the benign name of data collection, but what it really is is intrusive surveillance into personal aspects of our lives to which they have no legitimate claim.

Advertising is essential to the economic structure of the web as it is now configured. But tracking and surveillance are not.

We can have online advertising that does not rely on tracking, just as we've had TV, radio, and magazine advertising that did not rely on tracking. But the online ad industry is trying to confuse things.

They are saying the value exchange is this: we'll give you free services, you give us your data. The true value exchange is: they give us free services, we give them the opportunity to reach us with advertising.

The collection, sharing, and sale of personal, private data has no place in the value exchange.

Peonies I knew

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - My Garden's Peonies

for peony blossom viewing
a pale kimono is good
and chinese tea
~ Torin

Natalia Ginzburg's Essays

Rachel Cusk on Natalia Ginzberg:

The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been – in some mysterious sense are still being – composed. No context is required to read her: in fact, to read her is to realize how burdened literature frequently is by its own social and material milieux. Yet her work is not abstract or overtly philosophical: it is deeply practical and personal. You come away from it feeling that you know the author profoundly, without having very much idea of who she is.

It isn’t quite right to call these contradictions, because they are also the marks of a great artist, but in this case perhaps it is worth treating them as such, since they enabled Ginzburg to evolve techniques with which contemporary literature is only just catching up. Chief among these is her grasp of the self and of its moral function in narrative; second – a consequence of the first – is her liberation from conventional literary form and from the structures of thought and expression that Virginia Woolf likewise conjectured would have to be swept away if an authentic female literature were to be born. Yet this liberation is entirely towards naturalness and simplicity; it is an advance made without the propulsive force of ego, and so it is easy not to recognise it as an advance at all. Finally, Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her pre­occupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original. It is an authority grounded in living and being rather than in thinking or even in language, an authority perhaps better compared to that of the visual artist, who is obliged to negotiate first with the seen, tangible world.

Ginzburg was born in Palermo in 1916, the child of a Jewish father and Catholic mother. Theirs was a left-wing intellectual household and she grew up into a milieu of radical thinkers and writers who became, with the advent of war, the defenders of liberalism and free speech. She and her young husband Leone Ginzburg were part of a group of anti-fascist activists and were central figures in protecting the freedom of the press. As well as essays Ginzburg wrote several novels, the most famous of which, Family Lexicon, is a history of a family whose observational core – in the person of its narrator and daughter of the family, Natalia – remains opaque. Ginzburg’s distinctive writing technique is easier to analyse in the more spacious setting of the novel. What at first might seem to be a narrative strategy, whereby Natalia withholds her own thoughts and feelings while her observations of those around her pour forth, becomes a profound commentary on the nature of narrative itself and how it so often misrepresents the trauma and tragedy inherent in living. Ginzburg separates the concept of storytelling from the concept of the self and in doing so takes a great stride towards a more truthful representation of reality. She identifies narrative as being in some important sense a bourgeois enterprise, a gathering of substance from the world in order to turn it to the story’s own profit, and moreover a process of ineradicable bias, whereby things only become “real” once they have been recognized and given value by an individual. Put simply, Ginzburg attempts to show what happened without needing to show it happening to somebody. Her job – her art – is to represent the flawed charm, the tragedy and comedy of the human, to show the precise extent to which our characters shape our destinies and to watch as those destinies confer their blows and their rewards upon us.

The essays in The Little Virtues, written separately and in distinct circumstances between 1944 and 1960, comprise an autobiography of sorts. “Winter in the Abruzzi” describes a period in which the author, then a young wife and mother, was exiled in wartime with her family to the Italian countryside. In “Worn-out Shoes” she is now alone, living in post-war Rome with another solitary woman, her children being taken care of by her mother outside the city. “My Vocation” describes the dawning of her realization that creativity is a lifetime calling and is the most enduring of the relationships she will have. In “England: Eulogy and Lament” she is older and exiled again, this time in a strange country whose manners and mores she records by way of making an inventory of her own homesickness and sorrow. In “He and I” she is living with a man whose character she can only describe in terms of its differences from her own, in what is palpably a relationship of middle age; this time the sense of exile is emotional as well as geographical, the feeling of alienation from one’s own history that comes from living with a man who is not the father of one’s children. “The Little Virtues”, a work of great restraint and courage, is a look back at parenthood. Entirely without sentiment or subjectivity, it identifies the moral cowardice inherent in conventional attitudes to children and their upbringing, and the ways in which we inculcate the values of materialism and selfishness in the generations that will replace us. “As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; nor shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.” This statement of principle serves equally as a description of Ginzburg’s own life and work.

More

Charlie Rose interview with Joe Henderson-1997

Gershwin

It's always strange to hear popular interviewers speak with artists of the caliber of Joe Henderson. This is when Henderson had turned 60 and its incredible he had to wait that long to get popular recognition that arrived with his Gershwin disc. In light of his own compositions and incredible Blue Note disks from the 60's its predictable that the culture industry would wait 30 years to recognize an artist whose key work was produced back when LBJ and Nixon were in office.

Dave Liebman writes at his blog on the importance of Henderson on his evolution:

My formative musical years were the 1960s when I heard the great masters both live in New York where I lived and on recordings. The main influences were John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, followed closely by Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson, all of whom were important for my jazz studies on the tenor sax. Especially in the case of Shorter and Henderson, it wasn’t only their playing style which was so influential but also their compositions. They were the “modern” guys along with Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, writing and playing a new language. After all, 1959 had been a seminal year in the harmonic development of jazz with “Kind of Blue,” “Giant Steps,” and the arrival of Ornette Coleman all happening at the same time. It was mandatory for any serious young musician to study the compositions as well as the improvisational styles of these emerging artists of the new decade.

Joe occupies his own territory among the aforementioned players. As a saxophonist, I consider his style as an extension of Sonny Rollins, attributable mostly to his sense of phrasing and note choices and the fact that the principles of the bebop legacy are fundamental to both of their overall styles. However, Joe took the tenor sax elsewhere technically in areas such as his use of a unique set of expressive devices, unending variations of articulations, fast arpeggios, trills and the like, a looseness of rhythm that defied the bar line, his own personal way of using the altissimo (high) register of the horn and a tone that could go from liquid to coarse in a beat. Most of all was Joe’s unending creativity on a night to night basis. He was a real “club” musician, playing around the world with all levels of rhythm sections, always to his fullest capacity. He finally achieved commercial success in his last years. In the final analysis, Joe was one of the great chord change players of jazz history.

Along with his incredible saxophone contributions, as a writer Joe Henderson left a large imprint with several strong tendencies in his composing style. Overall, Joe paid a lot of attention to the blues, writing many tunes in the twelve bar format, most often with some harmonic twists. He also was attracted to latin and afro rhythmic feels often employing these idioms in the bass line and drum accompaniment. Most of all, Joe’s tunes necessitated that the players swing hard. In general, his pieces were uniformly in three or four quarter (odd meter was not a big thing at that time) and evoked the atmosphere of pure jazz, direct, to the point and always with some harmonic challenge that needed to be negotiated. On first glance, one might take a Joe Henderson tune for granted and think that the normal clichés and approach would work, but once you got into the song and noted that the chord cycles were unusual, you knew he was throwing down the gauntlet as far as “making the changes” was concerned. From the first tune he ever wrote, “Recorda-Me” to the classic “Inner Urge,” Joe’s tunes have become jazz standards.

The Beginning of the End

We have definitely crossed the line-New York Times editorial today:

Republicans in Congress compound their shame daily, either by standing by in silence or by working actively with the White House and conservative media to help expose the identity of an F.B.I. informant. Was it just a year ago that these same people professed outrage at the supposed “unmasking” of American citizens caught up in duly-authorized surveillance?

This self-interested assault is doing incalculable damage to the integrity of American law enforcement. It’s up to those people who have devoted their lives to the nation and to the rule of law, like Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray — both Republicans and Trump appointees, don’t forget — to stand up to the president and defend these institutions.

One doesn’t have to agree with the particulars of every investigation to see the fundamental difference here: The members of our law enforcement and intelligence communities are trying to protect the country. Donald Trump and his supporters are simply trying to protect Donald Trump.