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

Barranco to Miraflores

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- During a walk back in 2009 along the coast of Lima

Controlling our future

From The Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris articulates what I think is critical direction for the Democratic party if democracy is to survive:

As Democrats think and argue about how to win back power, and what policies to implement when they do, one crucial fact is missing from the conversation: it will take something very special—some very new thinking—to avoid the fate that always befalls Democrats, namely, losing control of government after two years.

There was a time when divided government didn’t have to mean bad government. That time has passed. If the Obama years showed anything, it is that, when in opposition, the modern Republican Party has no goal beyond blocking the Democratic agenda, whatever that may be, and will transgress hitherto undisputed democratic norms to do so. Operationally, the GOP’s governing objectives have devolved to two base goals: transferring wealth upward, and staying in power. Because the former goal is unpopular, achieving the latter increasingly requires the party to rely on anti-democratic means: voter ID laws and voter roll purges designed to suppress minority and youth turnout; hyper-partisan gerrymandering; filling the federal judiciary with ideological conservatives committed to weakening the power of unions and enhancing that of corporations; and so on. (That’s all on top of constitutional features, like the Electoral College and the Senate, that give the GOP representation that is out of proportion to its votes.)

The election of Donald Trump has pushed the Republican Party even further in this direction, to the point where it is now openly enabling corruption and autocracy. Republican leaders have tried to stymie the Russia investigation. They have supported Trump’s effort to get the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. They have refused to investigate his brazen violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution (from, among other things, foreign governments spending lavishly at Trump hotels). They have barely raised a word of protest, much less taken meaningful action, when Trump undermines relationships with America’s democratic allies, does favors for authoritarian adversaries, and says nice things about white nationalists here and abroad. Republican lawmakers uncomfortable with their party’s drift are being forced either to fall in line or leave office, because base GOP voters, fed by right-wing media, demand nothing less. Under such circumstances, no good—and a lot of harm—can come from Democrats losing Congress in 2022 and sharing power with the Republicans.

The fact that America now has only one party committed to small-d democracy changes everything. It’s no longer acceptable for Democrats to look at politics as a way to win the next election so as to jam through a bunch of their preferred policies before the Republicans inevitably take back power. They must instead see the purpose of politics as building sustained power for Democrats, period—but, unlike the other side, they must do this in part by strengthening the democratic process, not by undermining it. If passing this or that liberal policy helps in that effort, fine, pass it. If not, don’t. The overriding aim has to be getting and holding power—not for its own sake, but to keep the flame of democratic self-government alive unless and until the Republican Party abandons its authoritarian ways or is replaced by a new, small-d democratic party. Indeed, such a transition, which many committed conservatives and lifelong Republicans are now desperate to see happen, is only likely to come about if the Republican Party is locked out of power for several cycles in a row.

Since 2016, various factions on the left have debated whether Democrats’ strategy should revolve around boosting turnout among its base while drawing in more highly educated suburban white voters, or, on the other hand, trying to regain the support of rural and working-class whites.

They’re asking the wrong question. The truth is, a Democrat could probably eke out a win in 2020 by following either approach. But merely winning isn’t enough. To save our democracy, Democrats need to win big. They not only have to beat Donald Trump in 2020, but also have to achieve majorities in the House and Senate that are big and stable enough to survive the 2022 midterms. Doing that will require winning back states and districts that they lost in 2014 and 2016, taking others that have long been in GOP hands, and governing in a way that keeps those states and districts from turning red again. That will mean both turning out their base and making inroads among the white working class.

Though shrinking as a demographic, whites without a college degree still make up 45 percent of the electorate, and they dominate in many swing states and in exurban and rural areas where Democrats need to make inroads. As the Center for American Progress has shown, if Hillary Clinton had enjoyed the same high turnout among African Americans in 2016 as Obama did in 2012, she still would have lost, but had she matched Obama’s share of the white working-class vote, she’d have taken Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Florida, and Ohio and won easily.

The dilemma for Democrats is that many of the issues that resonate with their base—gun control, racial justice, support for immigrants—hurt them in exurban and rural areas. That leads many moderates to advise downplaying “identity politics.” The problem with that advice is that, besides being wrong on principle, following it would risk alienating the base voters whose votes are crucial to winning.

How, then, do Democrats square that circle?

The answer is twofold. To maximize the voting power of its core supporters, the party must get over its squeamishness and aggressively push policies designed to raise turnout among young people and minorities. At the same time, to expand its geographic reach, it needs to introduce new ideas into its agenda that appeal both to the base and to rural and working-class whites, or at least to the persuadable among them, such as the millions who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016.

Fortunately, if Democrats do take back at least one house of Congress in November (and I’m well aware that this is far from guaranteed), they will have a powerful platform from which to formulate new ideas. The question is whether they will use that power shrewdly. The future of American democracy may ride on the answer.

The Horse

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 -after the protest

Families Belong Together Protest

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- Protest & Protection

Time . . .

From  Robert Grudin's Time and the Art of Living :

We commonly conceive of time as something external to ourselves. Modern physics has established time and space as parts of the same continuum and thus by implication integrated time into the heart of all things perceived; but modern language, common sense, and humanistic inquiry lag far behind. We still speak and think in clichés which suggest that time is outside of us, something which “passes,” something we can “spend,” “serve,” or “kill”; something which, though admittedly a part of the natural order, runs a course of its own. While natural science has attained a temporal understanding which is not only realistic but strangely beautiful and evocative, our own more general awareness of time has changed little since the days when Galileo was hauled before the Inquisition. Our world of time is as flat and exclusive as some medieval map.

What, if anything, are you willing to risk

From LARB, Marc Cooper writes:

If the time for that raucous outburst isn’t now, when will it be? Let me be clear. I am hardly in favor of randomly seeking out Trump supporters and berating them or heckling them or punching them out. I’ve got friends and even family members who support Trump. In many, if not most cases, Trump boosters are also unwitting victims, either of their own ignorance, delusion, or both — often reinforced by 40 years of abandonment by the Democratic Party. Though I have been on the left in some form or another for a half century, I have always been an ardent defender of dialogue, debate, and, yes, civil discussion with those with whom I disagree. This is, however, a two-way street. Just as I will not waste my time debating flat-Earthers, nor will I squander my energies with those who are convinced that Obama was a Kenyan Muslim, that Latinos are killers and rapists, and that a child porn ring was run out of a pizza parlor by Hillary Clinton.

Yet, in my call for escalation of raucous incivility, I am talking about specifically targeting the officials, representatives, operatives, and institutions of this administration through a combination of vigorous street protest, nonviolent disruption, civil disobedience, and strategic voting and voter registration campaigns. And that movement should be as broad-based, as inclusive, and ecumenical as possible. But, wait, doesn’t incivility and disruption alienate that 10 percent of middle of the road “undecided” voters? Maybe. But I don’t care. Because a true resistance movement would not be worried about pandering to that indecipherable breed of “undecideds,” but would rather concentrate on engaging and organizing that 50 percent or more of eligible voters — mostly the poor and marginal — who while they bear the brunt of these noxious policies, simply do not vote, let alone act. Of course, they contribute no money and therefore are soundly ignored by both parties.

Further, it seems that the notion of American exceptionalism is held not only by the military-industrial National Security Blob, but also by much too large a segment of liberals, “progressives,” and others currently outraged by Trump. Americans are notoriously parochial and inward looking as a nation, but do they know nothing of the recent history of other liberal democracies in the world? Are they fully unaware that democracy is so precious that many millions who have lived under dictatorship and authoritarian regimes were willing to sacrifice, to take some bumps on the head, to bleed, and, in some cases, to die to defend the democratic rights they recovered after darker periods in their history? Whether it be in Spain, Greece, France, Italy, or even Germany, have citizens not resorted on many occasions to marches, occupations, blockades, and even barricades to defend their basic rights and to resist erosion of their social benefits? Aren’t the students of Venezuela now fighting and dying to rid themselves of the broken and corrupt Maduro government? In the last month, 200 people, mostly students, have been killed resisting a growing dictatorship in Nicaragua. And just this spring, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in Armenia, with no real opposition party on the scene, spent weeks nonviolently in the streets to successfully force the collapse of an autocratic regime, the first real revolution in a post-Soviet state. Having spent a month in Armenia just a few weeks before the uprising, I honestly think that while it was a democracy on paper, there was no real or sizable opposition party and that was, in fact, a blessing. The people of Armenia knew that if they wanted real change and democratization, they themselves would have to seize the initiative and forgo investing false hopes in some intermediary political party.

What makes American liberals think we are so different from almost every other democracy in the world? Do we think we are somehow entitled to a clean-functioning democracy just because once every two or four years we spend five minutes in a voting booth or maybe make a phone call to a senator or two? How about our responsibility to fight for that democracy? Do we never need to actually get our hands dirty to defend what we have earned? Or as in the case of our now eternal overseas wars, is that just somebody else’s job? Perhaps the booby prize of the week goes to that mummified and bottomless font of conventional wisdom David Gergen, who lamented to CNN that “the anti-war movement in Vietnam, the civil rights movement […] both of those were much more civil in tone” than the current anti-Trump atmosphere. Huh? As a frontline veteran of that antiwar movement, I seem to remember that our guiding slogan was “No Business As Usual.” Perhaps I only imagined the massive confrontations with police, the clubbings, the killing of the Black Panthers, the COINTELPRO tricks of the FBI, the arrests and the tight cuffs that cut into my wrists. I guess when we chanted, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war,” we were using the Queen’s English. Talk about a political elite detached from ground-level reality! This is your man.

When Trump was elected I took a lot of heat from friends when I said that we were not entering a fascist period. I even predicted, and still believe, that a combination of Trump’s own incompetence and corruption will be the key ingredient to his eventual downfall (though it is easy and certainly presumptuous for me to prescribe a resistance strategy from my keyboard, I am more than skeptical about its real emergence). As a journalist and writer, I had also visited and lived under real dictatorships and knew what they looked like, I was an assiduous student of European history, and I saw — and I see — no real parallels between the rise of Hitler and the election of Donald Trump (though I have no doubt he would make a great obergruppenführer if he had been born 60 years earlier).

By the lake

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 -homes

Godard and Rohmer's first together from 1957

From Facets.org, a brief overview of Godard and Rohmer's short film done in 1957, featuring the lovely Jardin du Luxembourg:

All The Boys Are Named Patrick (1957) is an early short film by French-new wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, written by fellow new-waver Eric Rohmer, made before either had breakthrough successes in the 1960s. The short has striking similarities to Godard’s debut feature Breathless and other work, as well as Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales series.

In the film, two roommates, Véronique and Charlotte, are pursued and seduced by the same man — Patrick — in a single afternoon in Paris. After comparing each other’s Patricks in competition, the two see Patrick later that day getting into a cab with a third girl and realize they’ve been had by a player.

Cinephile Interest:

A motif common throughout Godard’s filmography, especially so in his 1960’s output, is characters obsessed with American culture, and Godard’s own constant critique of it. This is true even in All the Boys are Named Patrick, only his second short film, made three years before Breathless. Véronique and Charlotte, roommates and best friends, cannot seem to go a minute without some mention of American pop-culture. From their dark sunglasses, to describing Patrick as being like various male American movie stars, to the large posters of James Dean and Elvis Presley that run rampant in their apartment, both of the young women are culturally indebted to Hollywood.

The farce that is the plot of Patrick is itself very classic Hollywood comedy. Godard even takes this homage a step further by specifically imitating silent-era comedies. Several sequences in the film appear to have been shot at a lower frame rate, 12FPS or 18FPS giving the film a jumpy, sped-up look when projected at 24FPS . This is akin to the look of silent films that were shot at the same lower frame rate. The film’s score, Beethoven on piano, also alludes back to the atmosphere of an in-theater accompaniment that was commonly used before the advent of soundtracks. However, this is not the kind of cinema Godard wants for France.

Early in the film, after Charlotte is picked up by Patrick, they end up at a street café. They sit at a table in front of a Frenchman who is masqueraded by his giant newspaper that states in bold, “French cinema is dying under the weight of our false legends.” Hidden in the background, this headline can be easily missed, yet when seen clearly, it states the grand argument Godard presents in the film. French cinema is dying because the French are trying so hard to imitate Hollywood. After shooting the couple a few dirty looks, the newspaper man, young and cool, gets up and leaves, clearly visible in the deep focus of the shot.

Later, Patrick ends up at another street café, this time with Charlotte’s roommate Véronique. Another stranger eavesdrops on the conversation, this time an older man who can’t keep his eyes off the couple. Godard cuts to the man three times. In the first two cuts we see the man looking up from an avant-garde looking French magazine. Later, almost two minutes later in fact, Godard cuts back to the man again and we see him reading a new magazine with Donald Duck on the cover.

Godard uses both these men as symbols of contemporary French attitudes. The newspaper man — young, pessimistic, and full of attitude — is a stand in for Godard and his contemporaries. The older man is a stand in for the older generation of French who have set the country’s current tastes for mimicry. They are drawn in by the banal romanticism of American culture, and end up craving the even more lackluster French imitations, personified by Véronique and Patrick’s scene at the table across the way.

Still alive and making innovative and cut-throat films, such as last year’s acclaimed Goodbye To Language 3D, Godard has a deep love of cinema, as well as a continuing contempt for its present state. This duality is especially true for Godard’s view of American cinema, which his work often seems to both imitate and make fun of. Like Breathless or Pierrot Le Fou’s twists on the crime thriller and gangster genres, All the Boys are Named Patrick is Godard’s swipe at farcical comedy, created with equal parts love and sneer.

Frode Haltli's Avant Folk

 

From DereksMusicBlog, a detailed review of this release by an adventurous and talented musician:

Buoyed by the commercial success and critically acclaimed Air, Frode Haltli was keen to begin work on the followup album Avant Folk, which would eventually feature five compositions. Frode Haltli composed two new compositions Hug and Neid. Of the other three compositions, Trio was based upon two traditional Norwegian songs; King was based upon a traditional Faroese Kingo hymn; and Gråtar’n was a traditional waltz from Finnskogen. The five compositions that later became Avant Folk were recorded in Oslo, Norway, in February 2017 by an all-star band.

Frode Haltli had decided to record Avant Folk at the Riksscenen studio, in Oslo, where he would co-produce the album with his friend Maja S.K.Ratkje. Joining accordionist Frode Haltli was a rhythm section that featured Trondheim Jazz Orchestra’s drummer and vocalist Siv Øyunn Kjenstad, Moskus and Skadedyr double bassist  Fredrik Luhr Dietrichson and Moksha’s  guitarist and vocalist Oddrun Lilja Jonsdottir. They were joined by The Island Band’s guitarist and electronic guru Juhani Silvola; Supersilent and Motorpsycho keyboardist Stale Storlokken who plays harmonium and synths; Hardanger fiddle players Erlend Apneseth; violinist Hans P. Kjorstad; saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrøm and Hildegunn Øiseth who played trumpet, bukkehorn (goat horn) and adds vocal. This talented and versatile band spent part of February 2017 recording Avant Folk with recordist Fridtjof A. Lindeman, and over the days and weeks, the album started to shape.

Once the recording was complete, Maja S.K.Ratkje edited and mixed Avant Folk, before the album was mastered at Audiovirus Lab by Helge Sten a.k.a. Deathprod. With the album mastered, Avant Folk was ready for release and on ‘15th’ June 2018 Frode Haltli’s much-anticipated album was released.

Hug which opens Avant Folk, is best described as a dreamlike fusion of contemporary experimental folk, jazz and chamber-music. The galloping, off-kilter rhythm adds a cinematic quality as the unmistakable sound of Frode Haltli’s wheezing accordion is augmented by a violin, Hardanger fiddle and samples, as an array of sounds assail the listener. Later, this includes a guitar, horns and standup bass as the arrangement floats and meanders dreamily along, sometimes growing in power and drama, before latterly becoming understated. Briefly, the galumphing cartoon rhythm returns before the arrangement dissipates after seven magical minutes.

Pizzicato strings open Trio and create an understated backdrop, and eventually grows in power  before the  arrangement becomes wistful as the Hardanger fiddle and violin combine and tug at the listener’s heartstrings. Meanwhile, beauty is omnipresent throughout this melodic example of Nordic folk music.

Initially, Kingo features mesmeric drums that sounds as if they’ve been inspired by traditional African music that combine with an accordion and later, a melancholy fiddle. By then, it sounds as if the accordion is playing fragments of sea shanty as the drums never miss a beat and add an element of drama. Soon, the tempo increases and ethereal harmonies and handclaps and searing guitar are added  and transform the arrangement. Later, the accordion takes centre-stage as drums pound and instruments flit in and out of the carefully crafted arrangement. This includes the harmonium before Hildegunn Øiseth adds an improvised trumpet solo and scratchy strings played with freedom add a degree of urgency to this genre-melting track. It features elements of African music, avant-garde, folk, free jazz and rock. However, it’s a gypsy violin, accordion, drums,  harmonies and handclaps that join forces latterly with a free jazz horn during this eleven minute epic.

A myriad of disparate sound combine before Gråtar’n reveals its secrets. This includes pizzicato strings, an eerie rasping horn and haunting strings that sound as if they belong in a horror film. Even the wheezing accordion has an eerie, otherworldly sound that is matched by the violin. Later, the Hardanger fiddle plays what sounds like a lament as the arrangement becomes dark, dramatic and haunting. Always, though, it’s rich in imagery and guaranteed to paint pictures.

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The Truth

Vallejo Nocturno 2018-Puppet Master