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

Lincoln and Trump

Vallejo Nocturno 2020-Lincoln from Abandon Capital series

From LARB, Diane Depardo-Minsky discusses the Lincoln Memorial and Trump's use of it:

Daniel Chester French successfully democratized his statue of Lincoln by showing the president fully dressed in the attire of his fellow citizens and holding no attributes of power, whether staff or sheathed sword. Other than the material (marble), hierarchy of scale (Lincoln measures 19 feet tall), and seated pose, only one vestige of the antique tradition remains: fasces. Fasces, or bundles of sticks, adorn the front of Lincoln’s armrests. Carried by lictors, the bodyguards of elected officials in ancient Rome, fasces illustrated how one thin rod gains strength when bound together with its equals. In the Roman Republic, fasces functioned as symbols of the authority and the motto of the state, SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus: the Senate and the People of Rome). Outside the pomerium, or sacred city limits of Rome, lictors’ fasces included an axe to show the magistrate’s power over life and death. Arms, whether lictors’ axes or soldiers’ swords, were not permitted inside the pomerium unless the Senate granted a general a triumphal procession. As in the American Republic, the representatives of the people checked and controlled imperium.

Emulating Rome, the Founding Fathers chose fasces, these tightly bound sticks, as a visual representation of our motto, E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One), and fasces adorn many public buildings, including the seats of all three branches of government. Since 1789, the mace or scepter of the House of Representatives has had a fascis as its handle. On top, a globe and eagle replace the axe. The mace is carried into the House to open sessions and presides there, on a pedestal, throughout the term. Two further fasces, sculpted in the mid-19th century, ornament the wall behind the Speaker’s rostrum. These have axe heads, perhaps to emphasize that only the House, the most democratic of the three branches, has the right to declare war. At the Supreme Court, fasces appear on the west facade pediment and in the frieze above the bench of the Justices. In the White House, horizontal fasces lie above the doors of the Oval Office. These ubiquitous emblems reference the citizenry as the source of authority. The significance of this symbol is probably not obscure to many who serve in the government: during particularly important legislation or hearings, the current Speaker wears a pin replicating the mace of the House.

The Lincoln monument uses fasces to characterize both Lincoln’s accomplishments and the people as the source of political power. Seated in triumphant peace, the martyred president’s long, elegant fingers rest on top of fasces, a reminder that Lincoln preserved these United States and that the will of the people, exercised by the House of Representatives, granted him imperium to do so. Thus, in perpetuity, these ancient republican symbols both support and stand guard (like lictors) of the man who saved the nation.   

In Trump’s use of the Lincoln Memorial, these vertical fasces also play a critical role. They lead the viewers’ eyes down from the majestic effigy to a diminutive Trump and his interlocutors, all perched on portable chairs. This hierarchy of scale, of importance, coupled with the symmetrical positioning of Trump and the journalists around the statue on the central axis emphasize the chasm between the two presidents: one, a lawyer who rose from poverty to power through education, eloquence, and integrity to die for our national salvation and the expansion of rights; the other, a son of privilege, with little erudition and fewer ethics, who uses bigotry to divide and denigrate the populace.

The fasces also point to a temperamental difference between the two men. Lincoln sits parallel to them, facing forward into the present and future. Similarly, the Speaker of the House and the Supreme Court Justices, stand or sit parallel, though in front of, the fasces in their halls. Backed by these ancient symbols, they shape the future with their decisions. In the Fox image, however, Trump sits perpendicular to the fasces, signaling a shift in the course of the state. His directional departure recalls that exactly 100 years ago, between 1919 and 1922, Mussolini perverted this sign of republican rule into the name and the emblem of a totalitarian regime: the fasces became a double-edged sword — or axe — with two opposing meanings. Trump and his enablers’ ignorance of visual composition, symbolism, and history created a picture which, upon close inspection, does not align Trump with Lincoln but presents him as a small man turning toward fascism.

My Day in DC

Spent Tuesday in DC to observe the lack of people on the streets by the memorials. Here is a sampling:

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- In DC in August during a pandemic

In What Reality?

Charles Blow has to bring things back to reality-from the NY Times yesterday:

In what reality has tremendous progress been made on universal equality under the Trump administration? We have seen the largest racial protests in American history under the Trump administration. Trump has used massive force against these protesters. He has demonized them.

Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, an Indian-American woman, went even broader with her revisionism, saying, “In much of the Democratic Party, it’s now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country.” She says this was personal to her as a “brown girl in a Black and white world.”

“Not a racist country?” What precisely does that mean? Was its founding caught up with enslavement? Yes. Were many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence enslavers? Yes. Were some of our presidents enslavers? Yes. Were many of them white supremacists? Yes. Was lynching allowed, sometimes by law enforcement itself? Yes. Was Jim Crow legal in this country? Yes. Was mass incarceration a thing that the country engaged in? Yes. Are Black people still the recipients of worse treatment than white people on a broad range of metrics? Yes.

Now, is everyone in the country openly, consciously, maliciously racist? No. But, do they have to be? No. Has the country, and does the country, operate in a way that disadvantages Black people and advantages white ones? Absolutely.

These Black and brown people at the Republican convention know this, but they have a job to do: the erasure of racism, the clouding of it so that one way reasons it away.

This show had two audiences: educated suburbanites who don’t want to be labeled racist and to a lesser degree Black men who have been slipping a bit away from Democrats in recent elections.

It's Coming Apart

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- In DC Yesterday

From Wade Davis at Rolling Stone, the breaking apart of our country:

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the 19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by the Great War, the British maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the empire reached its greatest geographical extent. By then, of course, the torch had long passed into the hands of America.

In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller army than either Portugal or Bulgaria. Within four years, 18 million men and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working double shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President Roosevelt promised, the arsenal of democracy.

When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll over the Nazis. At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant produced a B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock. Shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes. A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich.

 

 

 

Somo Fotos from Huancayo in 2017

Yes, we went to Huancayo in 2017 and in three days saw lots of things which I may have blogged about previously here are are some fotos from a Fiesta de Santiago which we attended and which I recently post-processed and give a new look on those days.

The Corruption Process

 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat's view of Trump's way with corruption:

“As time went on, it became clear that the sickness was a feature, that anyone who entered the building became a little sick themselves,” wrote the journalist Olivia Nuzzi in March 2018 of the Donald J. Trump White House and those who serve it. For a century, those who have worked closely with authoritarian rulers have shown the symptoms of this malady: a compulsion to praise the head of state and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own ideals, principles, and dignity to remain in his good graces, at the center of power.

In his relationship with Republican political elites, as in other areas of endeavor, President Trump has followed the model of “personalist rule” used by leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Some of these rulers destroy democracy, and others, like the Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, govern nominally open societies in undemocratic ways. Yet personalist rule always concentrates power in one individual whose own political and financial interests and private relationships with other despots often prevail over national interests in shaping domestic and foreign policy. Loyalty to this head of state and his allies, rather than expertise, is a primary qualification for serving him, whether as ministers or bureaucrats, as is participation in his corruption schemes.

While some authoritarians have political parties of their own creation at their disposal, Trump had no ready-made vehicle for his political ambitions before 2016. He had to win over the Grand Old Party to gain credibility and access to its machine and gain the collaboration of its elites. “Co-optation” is the term political scientists use for the way authoritarians bind individuals and groups to them through buy-offs or intimidation. It can also be considered a form of corruption, given the ethical compromises and changes in personal and professional practices that cooperating with amoral individuals entails.

The journeys that high-level enablers like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Senator Lindsey Graham have taken at Trump’s side since 2016 have different motivations. Some saw Trump as a means to accomplish their own goals, which had been blocked during the Obama years. That might mean promoting white Christian hegemony, for example, or securing the judicial appointments that would cement their conservative remaking of America. But collectively, they have contributed to the consolidation of an authoritarian political climate in today’s America, marked by fealty to a personalist ruler who holds his senior associates in thrall through complicity and intimidation.

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Myriam Alter's New Album

Alter's music is always so basically elemental and poetic in the best sense of those words. Here, in her new album, she is paired up with a superb bassist  who manages to integrate his sound into her pensive compositions extending their meanings. The disc is exceptionally recorded providing an intimate presence to the listener. Let's hope more musicians interpret her compact compositions in the near future as they are better than just about anything else out there. Here is a link to Alter's site and additional commentary about her new disc.

Paraiso Perdido-Interview with Photographer Adriana Loureiro

From Metal, an interview with Venezuelan journalist/photographer Adriana Loureiro:

One of your most renowned projects is Paraíso Perdido (Paradise Lost), an ongoing chronicle of Venezuela’s collapse where you document the many issues its society has to face on a daily basis. After touring around many cities, it’s now on view at the Bronx Documentary Center in NYC as part of the Latin American Foto Festival. When did you start the project, and what have you tried to focus on during these years?

The first images I made were back in 2010. Back then, I wanted to explain the experience of Latin American violence, which was rather a state of mind. I knew I was looking for something but I didn’t know what it was. The early stages of the project were very anarchic or organic, I think. I would just have this umbrella of a topic and photograph bits and pieces as I saw life unfolding. I think through this project I evolved as a photographer. It’s kind of my coming of age.
The structure came together in 2014. I was photographing very violent riots at the border and the sun was setting over a tree, with teargas filtering the sunlight. People died that day, with a surreal and dreamy sunset as the background. And in that moment, I realized how tragic it all was. I imagined all the other parallel realities that sunset could have set upon. But none of those imaginary scenarios existed. That day, there was only loss. So I was extremely nostalgic for sure, and then I realized that that moment kind of summed up my experience of this country. The feeling that we lost something wonderful – the possibility of another reality. That’s when I knew what Paradise Lost had to be.

 

Nowadays, the project develops organically, kind of following life as it unravels. I don’t know where the project will be headed a year from now, I just know it has to stay true to our collective experience, remembering that there’s always so much beauty, even in our own tragedy.

Working on long-term projects is very demanding, even exhausting. You must select and edit dozens of pictures, try to give a narrative, even ‘make justice’ to the amount of time spent documenting a specific event, city, or situation. How does your approach change from short-term to long-term projects? Do you do anything differently as a photographer?

I think short-term projects are the way to build a long-term project; long-term projects, to me, are a concerted succession of smaller ones. A long-term project can feel way too overwhelming if I can’t break it down to smaller ideas, like chapters in a book.
With short-term projects, I think I’m a bit more organized – I have my to-do list and rather specific ideas of what I need in an image. Long-term projects give me the rare privilege of time, which I use to allow life to happen naturally. I can just let relationships and events unfold naturally. I really enjoy having the space to see what becomes of people, how their experiences shape their lives.

 

I previously worked at an art gallery, La Plataforma, whose director, Claudia Costa, is Venezuelan. She always told me how much she yearned to go back, and that she’d love to grow old there because it’s a tropical paradise. I guess it’s a shared feeling among those who lived there long enough before everything collapsed… Do you have any memories of a better time in Venezuela?

I think all Venezuelans share the nostalgia. The ones who left and the ones who stayed too, because the country’s collapse has been so steady that even us who are still here struggle to recognize what we’ve become. I think we all feel estranged. I think many of us are homeless in that sense, like we don’t have a home to go back to. And this idea is heartbreaking because there’s no other feeling like the safety of feeling at home. We all lost that.
I think at its core, that is the Venezuelan struggle: us trying to find a way back to better times. That’s the ending that I’m waiting to photograph for Paradise Lost. Whenever it feels honest to say that Venezuela is doing better – that it is safe to go home.

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The Lovely and Thoughtful "La Flor" & its Incredible Women in Charge

In this last week I've spent 14 hours viewing Mario Llinas extraordinary La Flor, a film about films and about how they elicit meaning. Yes, I understand that this is merely a single reading but its a treasure trove of this against time as the film took 10 years to complete and almost the same amount of time to view (sic). For me though there are numerous genres employed in the vast narrative, the fact that there are no resolution to the complex plots that are launched throughout the film's duration makes it obvious that traditional storytelling may not be its prime objective. The intrusion of the filmaker and his accomplices into the film adds another layer for rumination. Everyone cites Rivette's classic Out1 with its long duration and cast of thousands, including several group of actors but the truth is that Llinas also has literary antecedants, writers who love to playfully diverge a narrative into autoreflection or some narrative digression that may serve no plot purpose. And its among those writers-some Argentinian, Cortazar and Macedonio Fernandez, and the collaborative nature of the story telling (Borges and Bioy Casares). Then there are the 4 actresses who create a landscape of women in charge-way to much for me to write about but let me emphasize that this is a film to see and experience if you run across it. Anyway, the long and the short is that here is a good overview of this landmark of a film that few have actually noticed. An article at Mubi site that aired it over the last month:

In the Argentinian film La Flor (2018), a certain kind of sight and a certain kind of sound predominate—spread right across its roughly thirteen-and-a-half hours and six major parts.

First, the sight. There are various directors in cinema history known for their stubborn insistence on using a particular camera lens which becomes their veritable stylistic signature: for example, the 25-millimeter lens for deep focus effect in Jacques Rivette; or the split diopter in Brian De Palma. Mariano Llinás takes the exactly opposite position in La Flor: his lens-weapon of choice is a defiantly shallow one, plunging great expanses of any frame into blur (after a while, you’ll think you need an appointment at the optometrist). Sometimes there’s a relatively traditional bit of focus-pulling back and forth between two points in a scene (between several characters, for instance). Far more often, it’s a mise en scène based on characters slowly walking out of blur and into focus—that is, if they ever make it into focus. Oddly, one of the only “characters” to get a royal, deep-focus treatment is Margaret Thatcher (played by Susana Pampín)!

Second, the sound. La Flor is a vast stream of different languages, accents, dialects, vocal tonalities. Talking, singing, laughing… but a great amount of it is post-synchronized. And the sync is deliberately off, hit-and-miss, like in some B movies (and in Orson Welles’s films, even when he’s doing Shakespeare). The lips and the words are often not matching (not to mention the framing segments where Llinás himself “speaks” to us in images where his mouth is resolutely closed!). It all has the sonic ambience of a studio recording. This sound design is not an accidental, coming-and-going effect: it’s total, from one end of this river-film to the other.

 

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It's Clear as Day

From Lawfare about how the Republicans are misrepresenting the latest Senate findings-incredible:

To hear Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee tell it, you’d think the nearly 1,000 page report the committee released today exonerated President Trump and his campaign.

The report, write six of the GOP members, “exhaustively reviews the counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities to the 2016, but never explicitly states the critical fact: the Committee found no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to meddle in the election” (emphasis in original). The current acting chairman of the committee, Marco Rubio, went further in a statement of his own: “We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.”

Really? Absolutely no evidence? Sen. Rubio can say that without even a moment’s hesitation?

Rubio should take a moment to hesitate over his own report. Reading the whole thing would, admittedly, take a while. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect him and his colleagues to have a rudimentary understanding of the findings section at the beginning, which is a kind of executive summary.

What Senate Republicans are saying about their own report comes perilously close to simple lying.

Here are some of the committee’s own findings about Trump campaign engagement with the Russian electoral interference—findings subscribed to by each and every one of the senators who protests that they did not find “collusion”:

• "The Committee found that Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services . . . represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”
• "While [Russian military intelligence] and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”
• “Trump and senior Campaign officials sought to obtain advance information about WikiLeaks’s planned releases through Roger Stone.”
• “The Committee further found that Papadopoulos’s efforts introduced him to several individuals that raise counterintelligence concerns, due to their associations with individuals from hostile foreign governments, as well as actions these individuals undertook. The Committee assesses that Papadopoulos was not a witting cooptee of the Russian intelligence services, but nonetheless presented a prime intelligence target and potential vector for malign Russian influence.”

It goes on. And on. And on.

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