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

Galeano and futbol

From The Atlantic on Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer who loved soccer:

As a boy, Galeano loved football, but he didn’t play well. “By writing,” he explained in Soccer in Sun and Shadow, “I was going to do with my hands what I never could accomplish with my feet.” And so he drew political cartoons as a teenager and went on to become a journalist, a newspaper editor, and a celebrated social critic. His pioneering 1971 book, the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, implausibly landed on Amazon’s bestseller list in 2009 after Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, gave President Barack Obama a copy, calling it “a monument in our Latin American history.” (Despite its influence, Galeano appeared to renounce the book later in his life.) In the 1970s and ’80s, Galeano was forced into exile in Argentina and then Spain by Uruguay’s right-wing military regime. During that period, he wrote most of his ingenious historical trilogy, Memory of Fire, an epic retelling of 500 years of conquest, myth, and rebellion flecked with humor and invective.

As a literary writer on sports, Galeano is akin to Norman Mailer, who found poetry and politics in boxing; but where Mailer was inclined to fight, Galeano leaned toward love. His inimitable style was to write his narrative in vignettes (“story windows” he called them)—concise distillations of grand events and ordinary goings-on. The story-window approach runs all through Soccer in Sun and Shadow, which moves chronologically across the fractured history of the sport—from a Chinese leather ball filled with hemp in 3000 B.C.E. through news crawl–style reports of modern World Cup matches. Pelé, Diego Maradona, and Franz Beckenbauer make cameo appearances, too, scoring famous (or infamous) goals.

In his book, Galeano showed soccer intersecting with world history, as in the 1934 World Cup, held in Benito Mussolini’s Italy: He called it “an elaborate propaganda operation” in which fans celebrated the country’s victories with the Fascist salute. He set soccer chronology against the cultural backdrop of Adolf Hitler’s rise, Bonnie and Clyde’s bank robberies, and Mao’s Long March. From the 1960s onward, he inserted into each account of a World Cup a sly voice-over about the history that did not change: “Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.”

An instinctive social critic, Galeano saw soccer as a pitched battle between good and evil, a choreographed war in which “11 men in shorts are the sword of the neighborhood, the city, or the nation.” On the pitch and in the stands, “old hatreds and old loves passed from father to son enter into combat.” Local roots run deep and unite and divide fans, and whole nations, accordingly. Soccer’s participants are archetypal figures. The goalie: “Whenever a player commits a foul the keeper is the one who gets punished: They abandon him there in the immensity of the empty net to face his executioner alone.” The referee: “Everybody hates him.” The manager: “His mission: to prevent improvisation, restrict freedom, and maximize the productivity of the players.” For Galeano, the struggle for power was everywhere. About Argentina’s Maradona being expelled from the 1994 World Cup for having ephedrine in his urine, the writer remarked: “Maradona committed the sin of being the best, the crime of speaking out about things the powerful wanted kept quiet, and the felony of playing left-handed.”

Soccer, in Galeano’s vision of it, isn’t just a war between teams or countries: It’s also a war between humanity and technocracy. He called himself “a beggar for good soccer” and in later years found himself frustrated by the hyperprofessionalization of the sport, which “negates joy, kills fantasy, and outlaws daring.” He saw the influence of corporations (with their logos emblazoned upon the players’ uniforms) and the power of television executives to determine “where, when, and how soccer will be played.” Such standardization, he argued, caused players to “run a lot and risk little.” Readers can hear his indignation rise as he writes, “Audacity is not profitable.” Although cancer kept him from writing about the 2014 World Cup, Galeano watched as Brazilians took to the streets to protest the lavish spending on new stadiums rather than on education and infrastructure. In a statement released the year before the tournament, he said that the Brazilian people “have decided not to allow their sport to be used any more as an excuse for humiliating the many and enriching the few.”

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Night

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- Homeland at Night

The plight of undocumented immigrants

US Border Patrol agent Sal De Leon stands near a section of the US- Mexico border fence while stopping on patrol on April 10, 2013 in La Joya, TX. John Moore / Getty

From Jacobin, an interview with photographer John Moore, author of Undocumented: Immigration and the Militarization of the United States-Mexico Border:

Politicians and the media have recently been obsessed with a so-called “caravan” of asylum seekers reaching the US-Mexico border from Central America, where Undocumented begins. Can you describe the conditions that drive people to make this harrowing journey?

The caravan of immigrants traveling through Mexico this April was organized by Pueblos Sin Fronteras, which has also done this in previous years, although not all the way to the US border. President Trump seized on a story originally published by BuzzFeed and then used the caravan as a pretext to send US National Guard troops to the border.

I went to northwestern Mexico to photograph a portion of the caravan’s journey north to Tijuana. They were mostly families seeking political asylum in the United States, although many applied for asylum in Mexico. They were escaping violent conditions in their home countries, chief among them Honduras, where gang violence and political instability have become, for many people, increasingly impossible to live with. Many families had to flee suddenly, with few possessions.

In Honduras, the US government supported the 2009 right-wing coup and the presidential incumbent in the disputed 2017 election. The resulting insecurity and clashes there, combined with gang and drug violence, have driven migration from that country.

Another aspect of the US role in Central American migration that’s brought up in Undocumented is the States-side origin of the street gang MS-13. Can you discuss how MS-13 went from Los Angeles to Central America? And how fear of the street gang is now being stoked to fuel deportations?

MS-13 originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s in the immigrant Salvadoran community. In subsequent years many members were convicted of crimes and deported back to El Salvador, where they spread the gang to their home country. The “Maras” are now powerful throughout much of Central America, primarily in the “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

In the United States, MS-13 has grown in some Central American immigrant communities, which is ironic and sad, as so many asylum seekers fled their countries to the US to escape the Maras. MS-13 has committed crimes, including murder, in various US communities, and federal law enforcement, including ICE, has gone after them. President Trump recently referred to them as “animals.” The dragnet, though, has swept up many undocumented immigrants who had nothing to do with gangs. ICE sometimes refers to these people as “collaterals,” and although they may not have been gang members themselves, once they are in detention, they are subject to deportation due to current Trump administration policies.

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1934 or 1939?

Mark Graber at Balkanization writes:

Eugene Davidson’s, The Trial of the Germans was one of the most memorable books I read as a teenager.  I was particularly troubled by the chapter on Hjalmar Schacht.  Schacht played a vital role helping the Nazi party revive the German economy during the 1930s. Although not a member of the Nazi Party, he served as Hitler’s Minister of Economics and main economic advisor during the years before World War II.  His behavior was typical of many German industrialists, who saw the Nazi Party as a vehicle for their desired economic policies that they could control before the worst of Nazi rhetoric was realized.  Schacht was acquitted at Nuremburg because he played no official role in the German government after 1939 and wound up in a concentration camp during the last year of the war.

Schacht came to mind during Aziz Huq’s terrific presentation at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association.  Huq’s focus, which is in part the focus of his important new book with Tom Ginsburg, How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, was on constitutional near misses.  His argument is that at crucial points the conservative and center-right politicians who initially allied with a political leader who exhibits limited respect for the constitutional rules of the game realize that they cannot control that leader.  They then seek an alliance with the center and center-left in order to preserve the constitutional order.  When major industrialists and their political supporters realize relatively early that they cannot control the demagogue and compromise with their political rivals, the slide towards authoritarian reverses.  When they follow Hjalmar Schacht's example because they and their donors are profiting from some of the demagogue's policies, constitutional democracies collapse.

The contemporary American analogues to Hjalmar Schacht are, of course, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, their political allies and donors.  McConnell and Ryan are no more Nazis or fascists than Schacht.  Like Schacht, they are willing to empower an authoritarian figure because they believe they will get desired economic policies (and pro-life judges) in the short run and be able to control the demagogue in the long run.  As was the case long before Schacht fell from power, the evidence is now clear that McConnell is failing in his attempt to be the real power behind the throne.  Every month brings more evidence that Republicans when faced with the choice will side with the authoritarian demagogue whose bigotry is increasingly unrestrained than with the conservative businessman who needs a tax cut because annual incomes in the millions of dollars are insufficient.   The question is whether the United States is in 1934, when conservatives jumping ship might have prevented untold human misery (at the costs of some profits) or 1939, when Schacht could be pushed out of the Nazi regime without any political consequences.

Clear Turning Point

From New York Magazine:

President Trump is still trying to avoid responsibility for his administration’s brutal policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border, but a new report confirms that Trump and his advisers had been considering the extreme measures for as long as they’ve been in power. According to the New York Times, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller was “instrumental” in convincing the president to enact the policy, which applies a zero tolerance approach to prosecuting undocumented immigrants caught entering the U.S. — even if that means taking children away from their parents in the process. And while some members of the Trump administration have reportedly been uneasy over the policy and subsequent fallout, Miller is not one of them. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period,” Miller told the Times, “The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

Trump administration officials continue to defend the policy as nothing more than enforcement of the law, but in the minds of Miller and other immigration hardliners in the White House, the heartlessness of the policy, as well as all the publicity that indifference gets, are exactly the point. That’s because their goal is deter other immigrants from attempting to enter the U.S. in the first place, even though the effectiveness of such tactics is often difficult to discern.

Despite the fact that Trump had repeatedly demonized and dehumanized immigrants on his way to the presidency, he rejected the policy plan at first, but the true-believing Miller — who was also instrumental in pushing the administration’s Islamophobic travel ban — never gave up. Finally, sometime this spring, Miller convinced the president to endorse the idea. As a result, nearly 2,000 children were taken away from their parents and placed in makeshift government shelters in less than a month and a half under the new policy, and that number has undoubtedly gone up in the weeks since (and separations could soon double in some areas).

Aside from the plain cruelty of separating children from their parents, health professionals are warning that the entire experience puts children’s physical and mental health at risk. In particular, the amount of stress the children encounter as a result of being taken from their parents and thrust into a strange new environment — like one where the kids are denied physical contact — could be toxic, disrupting their developing brains and leading the long term health problems. The situation is especially dangerous for children under 10, and even more so for children under 5. With these risks in mind, about 4,600 mental-health professionals and 90 organizations have called on the Trump administration to end the separation policy.

The shelters are managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, but even presuming that workers at the shelters are doing the best they can to care for the children, the system is being pushed to its capacity. More than 11,400 migrant kids are currently in federal custody, including both minors who arrived at the border unaccompanied by an adult and children who have been separated from their parents. More than 2,400 of these children have arrived since the beginning of May. As a result of the rapid influx, HHS has already had to stand up at least one temporary shelter to provide more housing. A new Trump administration policy mandating the fingerprinting of family members in the U.S. who come to take custody of children living in the shelters will undoubtedly lead to more children being left in government custody — if their only relatives in America are also undocumented.

As outrage intensifies over the separations, President Trump has insisted he’s powerless to change the policy, in an attempt to hide his real agenda. “I hate the children being taken away,” Trump claimed on Friday, and he has continued to repeat the lie that Democrats are the ones responsible. In fact, as reported by the Washington Post, Trump believes that continuing to enforce the policy amid the uproar provides him with political leverage over Congress and could help him force Democratic lawmakers to meet his demands on border security and restrictions on legal immigration. Put another way, the president of the United States is effectively holding thousands of migrant children hostage — and likely causing them irreparable harm in the process — in the hope it will better his chances at enacting the nativist political agenda he campaigned on.

Trump and Miller are not alone in their support for the separations, either. Some administration officials, like Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have reportedly opposed the border separation policy, but whatever internal opposition there has been within Trumpworld, it has only been expressed in private. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, on the other hand, is a full-fledged supporter of the policy. Kelly infamously showed little regard for what happened to the children after they were taken from their parents during in an NPR interview in May. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who implemented the new rule, has gone so far as to claim that the administration’s lack of compassion for immigrant families is supported by the Bible — a notion which was promptly rejected by prominent Christian leaders like like Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

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Marc Ducret Guitarist

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- at An Die Musik with Samuel Blaser in June 2018

From an interview at Screwgun Records with Nate Chinen some time ago:

"Well, limitations exist only... I mean, the guitar itself is just a piece of wood with some metal in it. So if it's limited, it's just limited by whatever people who use it want it to be limited. Basically, you can do anything on any instrument, and it's just a question of time and work. Which is nothing. It's just a question of thousands of hours spent on an instrument. If the question is just that, if the problem is just work, it would be too easy. Anyone could do it. But I guess you could do basically everything on any instrument. There are stacks of records to prove it. Now, what is possible on this instrument; I must say, I don't really know. I'm not really sure. I mean, what I do is just try to get some sound from it. And if today it sounds possible, I'll go to that direction. And if tomorrow it's something else, I'll try something else. I don't know; I'm not really a guitar freak. I just happen to play it. If tomorrow I break my hand, I'm not going to stop being a musician. I definitely would see myself playing trumpet or drums, or writing. Not even writing music. I really love the sound; I really love being involved in that magic. But the way we do it; it doesn't really matter for me." Marc Ducret

Luis Arcamas Mompou

Arcama has just released his version of Mompou's Musica Callada-his interpretation and quality of recording brings out the Spanish in this music. I don't mean the stereotypical Spanish but the sophisticated and introspective. This is a very good rendition of this modern piano classic.

Happening Here on US Soil-Mass Trials and Children Taken From Their Parents

I am not sure why the inhumanity that is now occurring at our borders and within the US as it pertains to refugees and immigrants isn't having more reverberations across the wider public. Is it the ingrained racism that still breeds in this country? Or is it wilful ignorance? Let's see what history has to say about this.

From Will Bunch again:

I want to write today about a suicide that has profound moral implications for what it means to be an American in 2018. And no, I’m not talking about either Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain (although Bourdain is oddly relevant … stay with me on this.) This is about Marco Antonio Muñoz, a 39-year-old Honduran who died all alone last month in a rural Texas jail cell, with an item of clothing around his neck and a small pool of blood on a padded floor.

Muñoz was a casualty of the Trump administration’s cruel and inhuman “zero tolerance” policies. Fleeing Honduras — the Central American nation wracked by a murder epidemic, gang violence and numbing poverty, Munoz, his wife and his 3-year-old son were seized by Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande into south Texas.

At the nearby processing center in McAllen, the Munoz family asked for asylum in the nation that once celebrated its willingness to accept the tired, poor and hungry of the world. But that was a different century. This is 2018, and agents instead violently ripped the toddler out of the arms of a screaming Muñoz. 

“The guy lost his s—,” an unnamed agent told the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff, who broke the story. “They had to use physical force to take the child out of his hands.”

It seems clear that Muñoz never recovered from the trauma of that moment, or not knowing where his son had been taken. He pounded on metal bars, kicked at the van that took him away, and tried frantically to escape, leading the agents to put him in shackles before finding a padded cell for him in a county jail 40 miles away. The next morning, guards who checked on Muñoz found him praying. Thirty minutes later, they checked again and found him dead, by suicide.

Another agent told the Post’s Miroff “he couldn’t understand why Muñoz ‘would choose to separate himself from his family forever’ by taking his own life.” But it’s impossible to know how the fragile human psyche will respond to such great trauma. And since becoming president some 506 days ago, Donald Trump and his minions like Attorney General Jeff Sessions have unleashed policies on America’s southern border with the clear goal of inflicting trauma on migrant families, banishing empathy or anything else resembling simple humanity.

We’ve been talking for months about how these steps — that “zero-tolerance” policy unveiled weeks ago by Sessions to prosecute migrants asking for asylum in the United States as criminals and take away their kids, even toddlers; the militarization of America’s border; and the out-of-control deportation force that is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE — are causing a human-rights catastrophe on our own soil. Now comes the dreaded but inevitable next phase.

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The Find!

 

 

From The Guardian:

A lost album of originals by John Coltrane, the American saxophonist who took jazz to new heights of freedom and expression, has been unearthed.

The album, being released on 29 June as Both Directions at Once: the Lost Album, was recorded in a session on 6 March 1963, at the Van Gelder studios in New Jersey. Joining Coltrane in the quartet that also recorded classic albums such as A Love Supreme, Coltrane, and Ballads, are Jimmy Garrison on double bass, Elvin Jones on drums, and McCoy Tyner on piano.

The master tape left in the studio was lost, and it’s likely it was destroyed in the early 70s when the label, Impulse!, was trying to reduce storage fees. But Coltrane gave his own reference tape of the recording to his wife Naima, despite their then disintegrating relationship – the pair divorced in 1966, and the tape has stayed in her family’s possession ever since.

Sonny Rollins, a peer of Coltrane’s and also regarded as one of the greatest jazz saxophonists of all time, described the discovery as “like finding a new room in the Great Pyramid”.

Among the seven tracks are two completely unheard original compositions, called Untitled Original 11383 and Untitled Original 11386, both of which are played on soprano saxophone. Another composition, One Up, One Down, has been heard only in a live bootleg from the Birdland jazz club, and never before in this studio version.

The sessions capture Coltrane at a crucial juncture in his music. It was still two years before Ascension, where he opened up his quartet into an experimental, spiritually minded big band, but he was already heading towards its “free jazz” sound. Impressions (1963), recorded across the previous two years, features some unmoored and raw soloing quite different from the previous bebop era. Nevertheless, he was still in love with melody: Ballads, recorded during the same period and also released in 1963, features some of his most accessible material.

The 11386 recording similarly sees the quartet play in a traditional style, revisiting a melodic chorus theme between solos, and the album also features Coltrane’s first, never before heard version of Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy – unlike the freer 1965 version, the Both Directions at Once version is a straight three-minute take without solos.

Ben Ratliff, former New York Times jazz writer and author of Coltrane: the Story of a Sound, told the Guardian: “This is Coltrane’s quartet starting to move into the last stages of their stable and authoritative phase, when they were often playing the same handful of songs. There’s no concept or grand design here. But he’s trying some new tunes, and playing a strange blues, and fine-tuning Impressions – and that’s a lot.”

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© Chuck Stewart Photography, LLC

Matthew Ship at An Die Musik

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- Ship in June 2018