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

Andy Gonzalez

 

From percussionist Bobby Sanabria, he writes about the passing of Andy Gonzalez and his influence:

Andy González, who died on April 9 in the Bronx, was a bassist who followed in the footsteps of seminal Latin players like Israel “Cachao” López and Bobby Rodriguez, eventually joining their ranks as one of the most important figures on the instrument.

His work in three groups that he co-led — Grupo Folklórico Y Experímental Nuevayorquíno; Conjunto Libre, with percussionist Manny Oquendo; and the Fort Apache Band, with his brother, the late percussionist and trumpeter Jerry Gonzalez — was prolific and historic. Each served as a testament to the musical identity of the Puerto Rican experience in New York City, showing the influence of jazz and Afro-Cuban music in ways that became defined as Nuyorican.

“Grupo Folklórico was started by Andy and Jerry,” says René López, a noted historian, musicologist and producer. “It was game-changing because it broke the barrier in Latin music of older masters playing with younger players. It came from jam sessions (descargas) they would have at their parents’ house at 1963 Gildersleeve Avenue in the Bronx.”

It was through pianist, bandleader and NEA Jazz Master Eddie Palmieri that the González brothers met López, who became a mentor, guide and guru for them and a cadre of other young Nuyorican musicians, who would become major forces in the city’s salsa scene. “I told Andy flat out, you want to learn about this music, see René,” recalls Palmieri. “He has one of the most incredible collections of Cuban music in the world, and he shared his encyclopedic knowledge with them.” . . . .

 

. . . .Felipe Luciano, the Original Last Poet and cofounder of the Young Lords, best describes Andy’s importance. “Andy, with his brother Jerry, were the conscious of Latin Music,” he says. “Never compromising, integrating the past and present while forging a new future. There’s not one living Latin musician, or jazz musician whoever heard them, who is not influenced by their thought, dedication, their purity of sound. They were priests of a new order, icons from a higher ground. May the NYC sounds of Latin music live, like them, forever.”

Link to New York Times Obituary

Stochastic Murder

From Daily Kos:

Stochastic Murder is a simple inversion of G2geek’s Stochastic Terrorism. It refers to an individual,  group, or system that causes the deaths of ecosystems, plants, animals or humans through indirect causation.  Indirect causation or George Lakoff's systemic causation. (The utilitarian version of systemic causation is indirect causation.)

These Stochastic Murderers, see diagram above, ignore statistics for their selfish gain and because our laws are mostly tribal and directly causal they remain unpunished. Our laws have not caught up with being able to deter and punish crimes committed on a global scale.

When using this new expression be sure to hyperlink it to the diary.  For example Fox News is committing Stochastic Murder by spreading lies every day on their cable show.

In closing I would like to share with a song that gave me comfort during the late 60s. during that time I felt powerless as I watched Regan elected governor. I was pepper gassed on telegraph avenue. I cried when Bobby and Martin were assassinated by the American Axis of Evil. I lived in dread that my lottery number might come up.

I’m hoping this small act of resistance might make up for my generation not stopping the 21st Century American Axis of Evil from putting Impeached Donald Trump in office.

Hal Willmer

Strange things happen during these strange days. So in my extra time I've been putting new sleeves and covers on my LP collection which numbers in the 2,000 to 3,000. I had bought these sleeves and covers about 4 years ago and the project had stalled. But with the pandemic in full force and time on my hands I started going through the discs. I decided that those which I loved I could feature on my IG account and write up a mini-review on why they are ideal for pandemic listening. So one of the first I picked out over the weekend was a 1981 Hal Willmer record on the music of Nino Rota but done by a slew of different artists including the Carla Bley Band, Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Lacy, Bill Frisell, and on and on. I put the album up-that is a photo of the cover and I got an unusually high number of likes which for those types of posts are strange for me. I did tag it with #Halwillmer tag. I played the album and it sounds impeccable - each artist interprets Rota's music in their own way but the album holds together like nothing else. So today I got to look up Hal Willmer and see if i have other discs by him and lo and behold he has succumbed to the wretched virus. Was it a coincidence? A superb producer. Here's part of his obituary in the New York Times:

Hal Willner had a dream of connecting musicians who couldn’t possibly work together to play music that didn’t obviously suit them, and he somehow made it all work, creating albums and concerts that obliterated the lines between rock, jazz, country and soul, or between the mainstream and the avant-garde. And then on Tuesday, the experiment came to an end.

Mr. Willner — matchmaker, yenta, fan, longtime music coordinator for the sketches on “Saturday Night Live” — had symptoms consistent with the coronavirus and died in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he lived with his wife, Sheila Rogers, a producer of “The Late Late Show With James Corden,” and their 15-year-old son, Arlo. He was 64.

The death was confirmed by a spokesman, Blake Zidell.

Mr. Willner was best known for assembling diverse casts of performers, including Rufus Wainwright and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, to play a slightly off-center body of work, such as the Disney songbook or the music of Nino Rota, who scored Federico Fellini’s movies. The music found a devoted following, but not breakout success.

Maybe you’ve dreamed of hearing U2 with the horn section from Sun Ra’s Arkestra in a one-time-only performance at the Apollo Theater. If so, Hal Willner made your dream come true.

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Our Devil of a President

 

It's past the point where Republicans can do the right thing-day after day this devil of a President makes decisions that kill and endanger not only people here in the US, but globally-Nicolas Kristof writes about the latest fuck-up:

Thousands of Americans would be alive today if President Trump had spent more time listening to the World Health Organization instead of trying to destroy it.

Trump’s announcement that he will halt American funding for the W.H.O. just as the world is facing a raging pandemic is a dangerous attempt to find a scapegoat for his own failings. It is like taking away a fire department’s trucks in the middle of a blaze.

Many Americans know nothing about the W.H.O., but its worldwide budget (of which the United States pays about one-fifth) is less than that of some American hospital centers. Yet it is charged with fighting Ebola and polio, saving children’s lives and keeping the world safe from pandemics like this one.

Trump says that he is cutting the funds while his administration reviews the W.H.O.’s handling of the coronavirus. His own pandemic preparedness plan, which he characteristically has failed to implement, called for building support for the W.H.O. — because it’s a critical player to keep Americans safe.

Yes, some of the complaints about the W.H.O. are valid, and I’ve made them myself. It has been too cozy with China, it made some wrong calls on the coronavirus early on (such as doubting on Jan. 14 that there was human-to-human transmission), and it should stop blocking participation by Taiwan. But it has still managed the coronavirus crisis far better than the Trump administration.

The W.H.O. tweeted its first warning about the coronavirus as early as Jan. 4 and then rang alarm bells, culminating at the end of that month when it declared a “public health emergency of international concern.” It developed an effective diagnostic test for the coronavirus that is used in dozens of countries worldwide, while the United States still cannot manage adequate testing.

In late January and February, the W.H.O. issued increasingly urgent warnings about the coronavirus. Trump ignored them, instead insisting that it was “totally under control,” predicted the number of infections would drop, declared that “it’s going to disappear” and consistently downplayed the virus while talking up the stock market.

Trump’s passivity — even as the W.H.O. and his own advisers warned him of the risks — squandered the chance to acquire more personal protective equipment for doctors and nurses. His likening of Covid-19 to the flu led people to join public gatherings like Mardi Gras and Florida spring break, and that is one reason the United States has had 80 deaths per million inhabitants from Covid-19, compared with four in South Korea and fewer than one in Taiwan.

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Pandemic Suburbs

Each day I go out and walk the neighborhood-about 3 miles and I take my camera. These are the things that I've shot during these days on my suburban streets.

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Casa Arjay Walkabouts

Remember This

December 2017: The Trump administration bans the CDC from using the terms “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

The Trump administration instructs senior officials at the CDC that they should not use the phrases “science-based” or “evidence-based” and instead use the suggested phrase: “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”

Sluggish, inept, and unprepared

A devastating detailed timeline on the way the government has dealt with the pandemic:

What follows is a comprehensive timeline of major U.S. policy events related to the novel coronavirus pandemic. We’ve focused on the U.S. government’s preparation for a pandemic, tracking warning signals of COVID-19, and public and internal responses when the outbreak hit inside the United States.

In our view, the timeline is clear: Like previous administrations, the Trump administration knew for years that a pandemic of this gravity was possible and imminently plausible. Several Trump administration officials raised strong concerns prior to the emergence of COVID-19 and raised alarms once the virus appeared within the United States. While some measures were put in place to prepare the United States for pandemic readiness, many more were dismantled since 2017.

In response to COVID-19, the United States was slow to act at a time when each day of inaction mattered most–in terms of both the eventual public health harms as well as the severe economic costs. The President and some of his closest senior officials also disseminated misinformation that left the public less safe and more vulnerable to discounting the severity of the pandemic. When it came time to minimize the loss of life and economic damage, the United States was unnecessarily underprepared, had sacrificed valuable time, and confronted the pandemic with a more mild response than public health experts recommended. These lapses meant that the United States was ultimately forced to make more drastic economic sacrifices to catch up to the severity of the pandemic than would have otherwise been necessary.

 

It begins with this:

TIMELINE

Friday, Jan. 13, 2017: The joint Obama-Trump transition teams run an exercise for pandemic preparedness.  

The outgoing Obama team runs the Trump transition team through a series of pandemic-scenarios. The transition documents, obtained by POLITICO, show that the purpose of the exercise is to familiarize the incoming team with “domestic incident management policy and practices” in the face of major crises.

Key takeaways from the exercise include: (1) a collective understanding of the science and the disease must drive response decisions; (2) days and even hours are paramount in order to build as much lead time as possible; (3) a coordinated and unified national response and message is necessary; and (4) “medical countermeasure strategy is key for success,” including social distancing and addressing shortages in ventilators and personal protective equipment.

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Spiritual poverty

 

From The Atlantic, Tom Nichol writes:

What I mean instead is that Trump is a spiritual black hole. He has no ability to transcend himself by so much as an emotional nanometer. Even narcissists, we are told by psychologists, have the occasional dark night of the soul. They can recognize how they are perceived by others, and they will at least pretend to seek forgiveness and show contrition as a way of gaining the affection they need. They are capable of infrequent moments of reflection, even if only to adjust strategies for survival.

Trump’s spiritual poverty is beyond all this. He represents the ultimate triumph of a materialist mindset. He has no ability to understand anything that is not an immediate tactile or visual experience, no sense of continuity with other human beings, and no imperatives more important than soothing the barrage of signals emanating from his constantly panicked and confused autonomic system.

The humorist Alexandra Petri once likened Trump to a goldfish, a purely reactive animal lost in a “pastless, futureless, contextless void.” This is an apt comparison, with one major flaw: Goldfish are not malevolent, and do not corrode the will and decency of those who gaze on them.

In his daily coronavirus briefings, Trump lumbers to the podium and pulls us into his world: detached from reality, unable to feel any emotions but anger and paranoia. Each time we watch, Trump’s spiritual poverty increases our own, because for the duration of these performances, we are forced to live in the same agitated, immediate state that envelops him. (This also happens during Trump’s soul-destroying rallies, but at least those are directed toward his fans, not an entire nation in peril.)

Most leaders would at least have the sense not to relitigate every vendetta in their personal Burn Book at such moments. That’s what rallies and sycophantic interviews with Fox News are for, after all. Indeed, polls now suggest that even the president’s base might be tiring of this exhibitionism. But that is irrelevant to Trump. With cable news constantly covering the pandemic, he seems to be going through withdrawal. He needs an outlet for his political glossolalia, or his constantly replenishing reservoir of grievance and insecurity will burst its seams.

Even Trump’s staff—itself a collection of morally compromised enablers—cannot cajole him or train him to sound like a normal human being. Trump begins every one of these disastrous briefings by hypnotically reading high-minded phrases to which he shows no connection. These texts are exercises in futility, but they at least show some sense of what a typical person with friends and a family might want to sound like during a national crisis. Once he finishes stumbling through these robotic recitations, he’s back to his grievances.

Each of these presidential therapy sessions corrodes us until the moment when the president finally shambles away in a fog of muttered slogans and paranoid sentence fragments. In a time of crisis, we should be finding what is best in ourselves. Trump, instead, invites us to join a daily ritual, to hear lines from a scared and mean little boy’s heroic play-acting about how he bravely defeated the enemies and scapegoats who told him to do things that would hurt us. He insists that he has never been wrong and that he isn’t responsible for anything ever.

You Never Saw What You Saw

 

Julio Vincent Gambuto writes:

What the trauma has shown us, though, cannot be unseen. A carless Los Angeles has clear blue skies as pollution has simply stopped. In a quiet New York, you can hear the birds chirp in the middle of Madison Avenue. Coyotes have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge. These are the postcard images of what the world might be like if we could find a way to have a less deadly daily effect on the planet. What’s not fit for a postcard are the other scenes we have witnessed: a healthcare system that cannot provide basic protective equipment for its front line; small businesses — and very large ones — that do not have enough cash to pay their rent or workers, sending over 16 million people to seek unemployment benefits; a government that has so severely damaged the credibility of our media that 300 million people don’t know who to listen to for basic facts that can save their own lives.

The cat is out of the bag. We, as a nation, have deeply disturbing problems. You’re right. That’s not news. They are problems we ignore every day, not because we’re terrible people or because we don’t care about fixing them, but because we don’t have time. Sorry, we have other shit to do. The plain truth is that no matter our ethnicity, religion, gender, political party (the list goes on), nor even our socio-economic status, as Americans we share this: we are busy. We’re out and about hustling to make our own lives work. We have goals to meet and meetings to attend and mortgages to pay — all while the phone is ringing and the laptop is pinging. And when we get home, Crate and Barrel and 3M and Andy Cohen make us feel just good enough to get up the next day and do it all over again. It is very easy to close your eyes to a problem when you barely have enough time to close them to sleep. The greatest misconception among us, which causes deep and painful social and political tension every day in this country, is that we somehow don’t care about each other. White people don’t care about the problems of black America. Men don’t care about women’s rights. Cops don’t care about the communities they serve. Humans don’t care about the environment. These couldn’t be further from the truth. We do care. We just don’t have the time to do anything about it. Maybe that’s just me. But maybe it’s you, too.

Well, the treadmill you’ve been on for decades just stopped. Bam! And that feeling you have right now is the same as if you’d been thrown off your Peloton bike and onto the ground: what in the holy fuck just happened? I hope you might consider this: what happened is inexplicably incredible. It’s the greatest gift ever unwrapped. Not the deaths, not the virus, but The Great Pause. It is, in a word, profound. Please don’t recoil from the bright light beaming through the window. I know it hurts your eyes. It hurts mine, too. But the curtain is wide open. What the crisis has given us is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views. At no other time, ever in our lives, have we gotten the opportunity to see what would happen if the world simply stopped. Here it is. We’re in it. Stores are closed. Restaurants are empty. Streets and six-lane highways are barren. Even the planet itself is rattling less (true story). And because it is rarer than rare, it has brought to light all of the beautiful and painful truths of how we live. And that feels weird. Really weird. Because it has…never…happened…before. If we want to create a better country and a better world for our kids, and if we want to make sure we are even sustainable as a nation and as a democracy, we have to pay attention to how we feel right now. I cannot speak for you, but I imagine you feel like I do: devastated, depressed, and heartbroken.

Life in the Distance

From Literary Hub, a humorous take on the pandemic:

Behold: the first lines of 10 classic novels, rewritten for these times of social distancing.

Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Then she remembered the florist was closed. And the party was cancelled. Finally, some time to rest and reflect on her marital choices.

Swann’s Way
For a long time, I went to bed early. I wasn’t even that tired. It was more like, hey: here’s a good way to pass the time.

Middlemarch
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by the same leggings and sweatshirt she has been wearing for the last five days.

Notes from Underground
I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man… I am a man who is going to McSorley’s to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day!!!

The Bell Jar
It was a queer, pandemic spring, the spring they cancelled all the orgies, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

The Great Gatsby
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like going to a restaurant,” he told me, “just remember there are people in this world whose immune systems haven’t had all the advantages yours has had.”

Moby-Dick
FaceTime me, Ishmael.

The Hobbit
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. He planned to stay there indefinitely in order not to make the lives of essential healthcare personnel more perilous.

Jane Eyre
There was every possibility of taking a walk that day, as long as we kept six feet between us and the others on the path.

Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be hoarding toilet paper.