Ombre de Mon Amant
Darweesh / Ornstein / Khcheich: Ombre de Mon Amant
Rumba Para Monk
Jerry Gonzalez & the Fort Apache Band: Rumba Para Monk
Leif Ove Andsnes ~ Haydn - Piano Sonatas
Joseph Haydn: Leif Ove Andsnes ~ Haydn - Piano Sonatas
Cross-Platform Interchange
Misha Mullov-Abbado: Cross-Platform Interchange
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Vallejo Nocturno 2008- A city walk
It was 10 years ago that we had the great opportunity to visit Amsterdam between business trips. We spent 3 days there and walked and saw a lot. A truly modern city in terms of its disposition: you never saw police or guns and its tranquility haunted you.
V.S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin, in 1991, when he was feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine-art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.)
This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work himself up into a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to him, the impeccably turned-out traveler.
Naipaul was nothing if not self-aware. In his first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness (1964), he describes a visit to his ancestral village in a poor, dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, where an old woman clutches Naipaul’s shiny English shoes. Naipaul feels overwhelmed, alienated, presumed upon. He wants to leave this remote place his grandfather left behind many years before. A young man wishes to hitch a ride to the nearest town. Naipaul says: “No, let the idler walk.” And so, he adds, “the visit ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”
It is tempting to see Naipaul as a blimpish figure, aping the manners of British bigots; or as a fussy Brahmin, unwilling to eat from the same plates as lower castes. Both views miss the mark. Naipaul’s fastidiousness had more to do with what he called the “raw nerves” of a displaced colonial, a man born in a provincial outpost of empire, who had struggled against the indignities of racial prejudice to make his mark, to be a writer, to add his voice to what he saw as a universal civilization. Dirty towels, bad service, and the wretchedness of his ancestral land were insults to his sense of dignity, of having overcome so much.
These raw nerves did not make him into an apologist for empire, let alone for the horrors inflicted by white Europeans. On the contrary, he blamed the abject state of so many former colonies on imperial conquest. In The Loss of Eldorado (1969), a short history of his native Trinidad, he describes in great detail how waves of bloody conquest wiped out entire peoples and their cultures, leaving half-baked, dispossessed, rootless societies. Such societies have lost what Naipaul calls their “wholeness” and are prone to revolutionary fantasies and religious fanaticism.
Wholeness was an important idea to Naipaul. To him, it represented cultural memory, a settled sense of place and identity. History was important to him, as well as literary achievement upon which new generations of writers could build. It irked him that there was nothing for him to build on in Trinidad, apart from some vaguely recalled Brahmin rituals and books about a faraway European country where it rained all the time, a place he could only imagine. England, to him, represented a culture that was whole. And, from the distance of his childhood, so did India. (In fact, he knew more about ancient Rome, taught by a Latin teacher in Trinidad, than he did about either country.)
When he finally managed to go to India, he was disappointed. India was a “wounded civilization,” maimed by Muslim conquests and European colonialism. He realized he didn’t belong there, any more than in Trinidad or in England. And so he sought to find his place in the world through words. Books would be his escape from feeling rootless and superfluous. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, had tried to lift himself from his surroundings by writing journalism and short stories, which he hoped, in vain, to publish in England. Writing, to father and son, was more than a profession; it was a calling that conferred a kind of nobility.
From TLS, an article on Roland Barthes:
Towards the end of Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes’s study of contemporary myths, he claimed: “I have tried to define things, not words” – surprising perhaps, given the philosopher’s popular association with language, communication and meaning. It is not that words are not also things; but the comment suggests an important corrective to the understanding of his work. Barthes was not (simply) an aesthete interested in forms, but a theorist who tried to understand how these forms constructed our imagination. As an early theorist and user of semiology, the science of signs and meanings, he offered analyses that attempted to find the intelligible in almost all human activities. Barthes was a Houdini, using the essay form to wriggle his way out of (but not necessarily, away from) the tight constrictions of post-war Hegelian thought. The essay, by being both literary and scientific, allowed Barthes to apply and, at the same time, to question Hegel’s philosophy of history as well as the tight master–slave dialectic that informed it. Thus existentialism, Marxism, phenomenology, sociology, Brechtian theatre, all slowly gave way in Barthes’s work to semiology, structuralism and semiotics.
Barthes was born in 1915 in Cherbourg into a middle-class family, beset by tragedy when his father was killed the following year in a naval battle off France’s northern coast. Brought up by his mother in Bayonne and then in Paris, the young Barthes experienced further personal difficulty: his career was delayed by tuberculosis, which began in his late teens. This resulted in a lengthy stay in a sanatorium in the Alps in his mid-twenties, thanks to which he missed the Second World War. But his closeness to his mother and what he called his “Alpine Oxford”, where he spent the war (alongside Elias Canetti’s brother, Georges, for example), allowed him to develop a wide range of interests, including Ancient History (during these years he read the work of the nineteenth-century romantic historian Jules Michelet avidly), existentialist philosophy and the literary modernism of André Gide. Barthes emerged from the Second World War believing that we can explain everything in our human world – except, perhaps, the mysteries of human interaction which, involving the inter-subjectivity of at least two human beings, opened out onto a world of infinite (and thereby, unknowable) possibilities.
In Mythologies, Barthes wrote that he regretted that when travelling in a car we cannot see, at the same time, the countryside and the car-window. And yet he spent his whole career trying to perform this “double grasp” on reality: seeing the language and the human relations it implies and employs. His “double grasp” of human meanings was, he claimed, like an “illness”, in that it became obsessive, unhealthy even; but this “illness” was also salutary, because it encouraged him to use his writing as a way of stopping a fixed and simplistic understanding of human interactions. As a left-wing thinker influenced in his youth by the anti-war socialist Jean Jaurès, Barthes developed – and never lost – the sense that writing involves a degree of political and moral responsibility: writing is not a form of “art for art’s sake”, but a tool to decode social relations. Through Barthes’s reading of Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1940s, he established a maverick form of social psychology of human alienation, and posited ways to achieve forms of dis-alienation.
Barthes’s first book, Writing Degree Zero (1953), considered the ways in which writers employ, and are constrained by, language. Using the differential methodology of Ferdinand de Saussure, Barthes constantly pointed to the arbitrariness of meanings. White is the colour for weddings in Western cultures, but for death in other societies. So, as actants in different cultures, we accept the social and cultural meanings ascribed to objects merely as an agreed convention, as signs that allow a society to function. To show how society operates, we must ascertain how meanings are produced, circulated, consumed and (to some extent) interiorized: which, in short, is the function of ideology. Drawing on his left-wing journalism during the first half of the 1950s, Mythologies used contemporary French culture to consider the ideology of mass consumer society. Barthes analysed anything, from washing powder to the Citroen DS car, from recipes in women’s magazines to children’s toys, from wrestling to the Tour de France, to ascertain how we, as modern-day consumers, buy into the myths that the presentation of these culturally-specific objects – in the press, in adverts and media in general – skilfully generate. For example, washing powder does not wash clothes “deeply”, yet we persuade ourselves of this (impossible) material reality. The only route into this complex psychic activity was, following Saussure, to consider each communication act’s opposite: “always start with the antithesis” was Barthes’s motto. But this was a provisional – albeit crucial – first step. Following that, we can enumerate and explore the myriad connotations and associations that confirm, solidify and coagulate meanings for each person. These meanings confirm and configure our experience of the world. It is not surprising then that, once Barthes was appointed to the prestigious École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris in 1960, his first research projects used semiology to look at the primary elements of human existence: food, clothing, shelter. He also wrote a brilliant essay in 1964 on the Eiffel Tower, and set out the practice of semiology (Elements of Semiology, 1965). Semiology, as the science of signs, was able to “read” the complexity of meanings generated by an object in today’s modern world, by breaking each act of communication into a signifier (the physical or mental object) on the one hand, and the signified (its meaning, including connotations) on the other. To take an obvious example, the red rose can signify a range of meanings and connotations, depending above all on context: the red rose can mean, by turn, love on Valentine’s Day, the county of Lancashire, or the English rugby team. And, of course, we must not forget its “degree zero” of meaning: that is, nothing, no meaning – it is, after all, in physical terms, a mere piece of flora; however, it is hard to persuade ourselves of this last (non-)meaning, because we as humans are actively attaching meanings to, “reading” meanings into, objects that never seem to fail to signify something in our complex social world.
Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - A walk in the last decade
Sometimes its difficult to remember about a walk you have taken ten years ago, but when you have image reminders it becomes easier. We had come over from London and our friend was going to meet us in this metropolis of walks. This may have been from the first or second day and we were already enjoying the canals and the bars. This is city especially made for those who love community, I think.
Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - on a night in August
The Renaissance, taking man as the measure of all things, produced music for soloists. The Age of Revolutions, gestating democracy and the nation at arms, expressed its collectivism in orchestral music. The 20th century saw the triumph of capitalism, eventually, and the musical format of the market economy was the quartet. A quartet is the cheapest way to mimic an orchestra’s range. Ringo plays the rhythm, Paul holds down the bass, John adds the chords, and George does the decorations. The logical consequence, economically if not musically, was for all four members to sing a bit and write their own tunes. Hence the Beatles, self-contained and self-commodified, with a little help from their friend Brian Epstein.
In the modern arts, the quartet is the format of late style. The economy here is more aesthetic than financial, though it might be significant that Beethoven, the first major composer to make a living without patronage, was also the composer who hit upon the quartet as the arena for technical speculation. The quartet format allows the artist to cover the bases of rhythm, harmony, and melody, but it also leaves plenty of open spaces. The laboratory of Beethoven’s five last quartets incubates a century of harmonic experiment. T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are a titration, an apocalypse that returns art to religion drip by drip, line by line.
The concept of “late style” was formulated in 1852 by Wilhelm von Lenz. He divided Beethoven’s music into an early style, imitative of Haydn and Mozart; a middle style, grand and exhortatory like the Eroica Symphony; and a late style, more private than public, that meditates on eternal questions of form. This concept has the tripartite tidiness of the dialectic; it rests on the Hegelian assumption that musical biography, like secular history, is a progress towards spiritualization. In late style, the Romantic ego, as if preparing for death, turns inward and considers infinity. Inflated further in the politicized criticism of Theodor Adorno and Edward Said, the concept floats under Freudian cover in Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence.”
Jazz was in a sense always a late style, a timekeeper’s music out of time. In the 1920s, while jazz musicians were playing early show tunes and improvising with rudimentary harmony, the Second Viennese School was pushing ahead into total chromaticism and atonality, and Stravinsky, Milhaud, Prokofiev, and Ravel were experimenting with jazz’s musical signature—its fixed pulse, syncopated rhythm, and emphasis on flattened thirds and sevenths. Jazz was modern long before Modern Jazz was named in the 1940s, for the harmonic modernity of bebop was the chromaticism of Liszt, Chopin, and Wagner. In the wider chronology of Western music, jazz’s harmonic development is a long game of catch-up, finished too late—around 1972, when Miles Davis heard Karlheinz Stockhausen for the first time. Davis had already reached the same conclusions as the joyless German but without losing the funk.
No jazz musician incarnates the legend of late style more than the saxophonist John Coltrane. His early style is undistinguished; he was a bluesy sideman whose grasp of the instrument falls short of the reach of his ear. His middle style, stertorous and ambitious, began in his mid-1950s stint with Miles Davis’s quintet. Coltrane in this period is still less melodious than Hank Mobley and less witty than Sonny Rollins, but his chops are catching up with his ear. Only Johnny Griffin has fleeter fingers and only Rollins can beat him for persistence. Coltrane thinks aloud and never stops thinking; he is the perfect foil for Davis, who is also ironic and intellectual, also latent with eroticism and violence, but who never shows his working, only the finished idea. Coltrane’s sound waves are square and heavy, metallic and dark like lead. He is both implacable and lazy, like a bull elephant: You never know where the charge will take him, only that—as he himself admitted to Davis—once he gets going, he doesn’t know how to stop.
Coltrane’s late style emerged in his 1960s quartets. Now leading and writing for his own group, and newly clean of drink and drugs, he was finally able to pursue his vision and the possibilities of the music to the limits of form and expression—and ultimately beyond both. The further he went, the more ambitious and less accessible the music became, until it was incomprehensible to almost all of his audience and even to some of his closest collaborators. In the logic of modernism, further means better. But “faster” and “louder” aren’t necessarily better, so why should “further” be the supreme critical value? To judge Coltrane’s late-style art is, in an important sense, to judge modernism itself, and especially American modernism. And we have now an opportunity to listen afresh, with the release this summer of what may well be the last significant studio recordings of Coltrane’s classic quartet, Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album.
Odd as it seems, Grant Green (1935-1979) is simultaneously one of the most and least celebrated guitarists in jazz history. He was certainly one of the most prolific. The writer and radio personality Bob Porter, in his Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975, notes that the St. Louis native played on 15 sessions for Blue Note Records in 1961, 18 more in 1962 and another 18 in 1963. He made 22 albums as a leader between 1960 and 1965, according to veteran producer Michael Cuscuna. Only 14 were released at the time, but soon after Green’s tragic death at age 43, the shelved material began to surface. More and more has emerged from the vaults over the decades, the latest additions being two live albums from Resonance Records, Funk in France: From Paris to Antibes (1969-1970) and Slick! Live at Oil Can Harry’s (from Vancouver, 1975).
However, despite Green’s level of exposure, this swinging, bluesy, lyrical musician remains an underdog in the guitar pantheon. Wes Montgomery and Jim Hall are more commonly mentioned as influences. In soul-jazz and organ jazz, Green’s protégé George Benson became the dominant force, followed by Pat Martino. Though Green worked regularly and had staunch admirers, he chafed at the fact that “the premier black jazz guitarist slot was never opened up to him, even after Wes Montgomery’s death [in 1968],” as Sharony Andrews-Green wrote in her 1999 biography Grant Green: Rediscovering the Forgotten Genius of Jazz Guitar.
Nearly 20 years since that book’s publication, “forgotten” seems too strong. Green isn’t a household name, but his playing is widely known and respected among musicians, even if it isn’t constantly cited. He attained a new relevance in the ’90s, when his funk-oriented mid-’70s records (often with Idris Muhammad on drums) were spun obsessively by rare-groove and acid-jazz DJs and sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan, Cypress Hill and Us3—not to mention Kendrick Lamar’s more recent use of his work. And yet, when we consider Green today, we still confront what the late musician and producer Bob Belden once referred to as an “unresolved legacy.” Why hasn’t he received his full due? It’s a question worth unpacking.
Cheever couches his spiritual odyssey in the mundane torment of his domestic life, a kind of Strindbergian drama set in the deep lawns and blue afternoons of Ossining. “In church the Epistle is majestic but my mind wanders,” he writes in a 1959 entry. “Now a clearing wind has sprung out of the Northwest. I will think about Hell and the family.” His difficult marriage possessed an elliptical structure: His desire for physical intimacy, her rejection of that desire, his consolation in alcohol and hers in bitter recriminations. Particular anecdotes pierce with the pain of specificity: “Vodka for breakfast. Mary mentions her mother for the third time in thirty-five years. ‘I wanted a teddy bear for Christmas, and she said I was too old. She pronounced ‘doll’ with the same terribly Massachusetts accent you have.’ So we are people we have never met.”
Cheever’s homosexual inclinations—he lived furtively as a bisexual man for most of his married life—are seized upon as compensatory pleasures, remuneration for a passionless marriage. The journals are peppered with instances of unrequited crushes, fantasies of conquest, unconsummated cruising, the erotic possibility of the bathroom stall. In one emblematic scene, Cheever happens upon a pair of men exposing themselves to one another in a Grand Central restroom. “Here is a means of upsetting the applecart in an intimacy, a word,” he wrote of the experience. “One could, with a touch, break the laws of the city and the natural world, expose the useless burdens of guilt and remorse, and make some claim for man’s wayward and cataclysmic nature.” Mere proximity to forbidden encounter unleashes in Cheever an almost apocalyptic excitement. Reading his words, one can nearly feel his hand shaking as he wrote them.
The registers vary, though, depending on his mood, the state of his finances, and his relative intake of gin. He could sometimes transmute his carnal desperation into fine comic material (Cheever is, I think, an underrated comic writer): “Revolting, elderly, alcoholic novelist desires meaningful relationship with 24-year-old aristocratic North Carolinian with supple form and baroque biceps,” goes his imaginary classified in New York Review of Books. “Little gay experience but ready learner.” More often, the tone is one of anguished longing for tenderness, for touch. “Walking in the woods, I would like to see him; someone like him. In short, I am lascivious. This is inflamed by drink and catnaps. The dogwood petals are falling, and the flowers from the tulip tree. Highly sexual.” Cheever is not, as Philip Roth called him, an “enchanted realist,” but rather an erotic elegist, a man for whom repressed desire is a poetic engine.
Yesterday my niece, who is 16, asked me for summer reading fiction recommendations. She is thoughtful and mature for her young age so I thought about books that would provide mental excursions. I also thought about books that really inspired me when I read them around that age. I've come to revise my judgement about some of these books but then they were great. I also thought of solid narratives that tell hypnotic stories that ring true to all ages. Here are my 5 picks:
A Separate Reality - Carlos Castaneda-Technically not a fiction book but we know better today. This book and its subsequent follow ups was our mystical Netflix series back in the 70's. It also is a good discussion book on what is real or not.
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess- A book that illustrates the political perils of our future in a format that highlights the power of language.
Strangers on a Train - Patricia Highsmith - The Ripley novels are pure ecstasy but this one showcases how suspense really works.
At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien - A comic masterpiece that displays how laughter can carry a book page after page.
If on a Winter's Night -Italo Calvino - Metafiction done in an entertaining way.
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -Junot Diaz- The only book I haven't read but so many friends have recommended it that I put it as my bonus pick.
It's as much of a truism as you can manage in these chaotic political times: Republicans force everyone to play on their field. No idea is good or valid if just Democrats support it; it must have some Republicans, in or out of government, say it's good. Or so says the media all the goddamn time. When it comes to elections, Republicans always dare Democrats to campaign on some issue with the promise that it will boomerang back and smack them in the tits. It's why Democrats ran scared from Bill Clinton in 2000, it's why they were cowed into silence on terrorism and the Iraq "war" in 2002 and 2004, and it's why they avoided talking about the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Democrats always agree to be the visitors on the Republicans' home turf.
The thing is that, in all those cases and in just about any case you can think of, the motherfuckers in the GOP just went ahead and acted as if Democrats were campaigning on those issues anyways. It didn't matter if Democrats idiotically ran scared from Obamacare because some fuckstumps in colonial hats were teabagging each other in 2010. Republicans made the midterms about an evil Kenyan socialist Muslim Negro taking away your doctor.
And so, now, with the conviction of Donald Trump's former campaign manager and guy in Cell Block B most likely to sell cigarettes out of his anus, Paul Manafort, and the guilty plea of Trump's former lawyer and guy most likely to smoke those anus cigarettes, Michael Cohen, where Cohen directly implicates Trump in the commission of a felony, Republicans are doing it again for the upcoming midterms.
They are double-dog daring Democrats to talk about impeachment. "It will doom them," say Republicans, who just care so much that they're advising Democrats what they can and can't discuss. And many Democrats are buying it. House Minority Leader and the most evil woman in power now that Hillary is gone, Nancy Pelosi, said of impeachment, "It's not someplace that I think we should go...I believe that whatever we do, we have a responsibility to first and foremost to unify the nation."
That's a fundamentally wrong reading of the nation at this moment in our history. The first responsibility of Democrats should be to shit in the face of Republicanism and then turn it over and piss on it and then turn it back and shit on its face again, just to make sure Republicans got the message. And then ask if anyone wants to be part of this shit-covered, piss-soaked ideology. Unification will not do a goddamn thing except to tell conservatives that they fuckin' got away with it again.
Fuckin' promise impeachment. Fuckin' promise that you're gonna hold Trump and anyone else accountable for everything they've done to fuck this country. Lay out clearly what the conditions for impeachment are. You can explain that the most patriotic thing you can do is get rid of Trump. Why the hell do you think the election is looking like a blue wave? It's not because a Democratic House is going to get shit done. It's because people want these motherfuckers punished.
Republicans have already made the election about impeachment. Yeah, back in April, they were running ads declaring that Chuck Schumer wants to impeach Trump. Deranged, toothy ghoul Rudy Giuliani declared, "This election is going to be about impeachment or no impeachment." Sen. John Cornyn said that it's just sour grapes and that Democrats are trying to "reverse" the 2016 election (which leaves aside that Trump and the Republicans have been trying to reverse the 2008 and 2012 elections).
We will see endless ads about how Democratic candidates will impeach Trump. That shouldn't stop anyone. Vile carrion-beast Ted Cruz is making Beto O'Rourke's support of impeachment an issue, but at least O'Rourke is being honest about it. In Fucking Texas. And he's still gaining a head of steam on Cruz.
Let's do this. Let's take the ball and go back to our field. Yeah, we're talking impeachment because that's the Legislative branch doing its fucking job. Rush right at Republican talking points. Campaign on health care, on immigration reform, and on impeachment. It's as clear as can be. And GOP candidates are shitting themselves about having to defend Trump. Good. Force them to either support him or say they want him out.
The one thing that Republicans do have right here is that, whether we talk about it or not, the election is about stopping and/or removing Trump. We have no reason to hide that or ignore that. It's already in play. And that means to go for the Senate, too.
Impeachment is all well and good, but it's trial, conviction, and removal from office that really matters.
Bell, Susan: The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself
Baldassari, Anne: Picasso: Life with Dora Maar: Love and War 1935-1945 (ART - LANGUE ANGLAISE)
Umland, Anne: Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction
Oloixarac, Pola: Las constelaciones oscuras : mapa de las lenguas