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

From 2011 Trip to India-Jama Masjid Mosque

Vallejo Nocturno 2021-The Mosque

From Britanica:

Jama Masjid is Delhi’s principal mosque, the place where the city’s Muslims traditionally gather for Friday communal prayer; Jama Masjid is Arabic for “Friday mosque.” The mosque is near the Red Fort, yet another of Shah Jahān’s buildings. Jama Masjid and its courtyard stand on an outcropping more than 30 steps higher than the street, giving the mosque a commanding view of the surrounding area. The longer name, Masjid-i Jahānnumā, translates to “world-reflecting mosque” or “world-displaying mosque.” The mosque was built by a crew of some 5,000 workers. The principal construction material was red sandstone, but some white marble was also used.

Jama Masjid is oriented toward the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which lies to the west. An open courtyard facing the eastern gateway of the mosque building is at least 325 feet (99 metres) square and can accommodate 25,000 people. The eastern gateway itself was originally reserved for royal use exclusively. Others used smaller gates on the north and south sides of the building. Two 130-foot (40-metre) minarets mark the northeast and southeast corners of the building. The largest interior space is the prayer hall, 90 × 200 feet (27.4 × 60.96 metres). Above the prayer hall’s entrances are calligraphic inscriptions in Persian. Three large marble domes rise from the prayer hall’s roof.

In the 21st century Jama Masjid was the scene of two violent incidents possibly connected with terrorism. In 2006 13 people were injured when two bombs went off in shopping bags left in the courtyard, and in 2010 two people were wounded in an attack by gunmen on a tourist bus parked outside the mosque.

Disfunctional Congress

 

From NYRB Michael Tomasky writes about KillSwitch, Adam Jentleson's book about the filabuster:

Adam Jentleson’s Kill Switch is the most exquisitely timed book I’ve encountered in years. Jentleson’s explanation of the filibuster’s ignominious roots, and of the mendacious arguments made today by its defenders, is careful and thorough and exacting. Every senator should be forced to read it and then reread it.

If they did, they would know that the notion of “unlimited debate”—the claim that the Senate is a special institution because it accommodates endless discussion of legislation—is a lie. They would know that the idea that the Senate was somehow designed to defend the rights of the minority is also a lie, and a particularly pernicious one, as the filibuster was invented by John C. Calhoun to uphold slavery and white supremacy. They would know how the Senate, sometimes by unhappy accident and sometimes by the malevolent design of those who exploited its rules, has become the graveyard of progressive legislation.

Jentleson, a former aide to Democratic senator Harry Reid, begins Kill Switch by emphasizing that the Founders were opponents of supermajorities, precisely because they gave a minority the power of a majority. In today’s Senate, the “cloture” procedure, which ends debate and calls for a final-passage vote, requires sixty votes, which in essence means that forty-one senators can block legislation. Jentleson demonstrates that, with very few exceptions, “whenever proposals for supermajority thresholds were raised at the [constitutional] convention they were summarily dismissed.” James Madison, the father of the Constitution and its leading theorist, was a firm opponent of minority rule from 1787 (the year of the convention) until his death. “To establish a positive and permanent rule giving such a power, to such a minority, over such a majority,” he wrote, “would overturn the first principle of free government, and in practice necessarily overturn the government itself.”

Originally, the Senate had a rule, called the “previous question” rule, that held that after sufficient debate, the president of the Senate could decide to force a vote. It was the precursor to today’s cloture vote—the crucial difference being that a simple majority could then call the question. By design, debate in the Senate was allowed to carry on, but with firm limits. Five of the original nineteen Senate rules placed limits on debate. And a certain decorum obtained such that senators—gentlemen all, in those days—agreed when it seemed about time to vote. So in 1806, in an effort to clear away some rules that were thought unnecessary, the Senate ended the previous question motion.

With this stroke, there was no way to cut off debate—but no one really exploited this change until Calhoun, representing South Carolina, did so in 1841. His opposition was to a bank bill, though the fight, as Jentleson notes, “was really about slavery” and the southern planters’ fear that a national bank would erode the power of the slave states. Calhoun organized the southern senators to speak and speak and speak, hoping to run out the clock until a scheduled summer adjournment. Henry Clay of Kentucky moved to restore the previous question rule, and Calhoun, in Jentleson’s words, “erupted. He invoked the loftiest of principles to cast Clay as a tyrant, and himself as the oppressed minority guarding Senate tradition.” The bank bill ultimately passed, but the filibuster, even though it had no name yet, was born. After an (also unsuccessful) 1848 filibuster against a bill banning slavery in the Oregon territory, Calhoun wrote a treatise making an unapologetic case for minority rule, all in the name of defending slavery and white supremacy.

Throughout the nineteenth century, senators occasionally attempted reform. One fateful Friday in 1891, the powerful senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island left work thinking that he had the votes to restore the previous question rule. But his opponents—again, chiefly racist southerners—spent the weekend organizing, and Aldrich’s motion failed by one vote. Another pivotal moment came in 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson, in the waning days of the Sixty-Fourth Congress, sought a bill to arm American merchant ships. This time it was progressives who filibustered, led by Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette, running out the clock on the session. This inspired Wilson’s famous remark that “a little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.” It led the Senate to pass Rule 22, a formal procedure through which to end filibusters. However, whereas the old previous question motion could be invoked by a simple majority, the 1917 Senate decided that all debate could be ended by a two-thirds majority (reduced in 1975 to the three fifths of today). Ironically, a majority of the committee that wrote Rule 22 wanted the threshold to be a simple majority, but they compromised with the minority.

The more recent villain of the story is master of Senate rules Richard Russell of Georgia, like Calhoun an avowed white supremacist. In 1949 Russell fought an attempt by President Harry Truman’s administration to pass an anti–poll tax bill by expanding and strengthening Rule 22 and making it almost impossible to change. Russell, Jentleson writes, “had not just won a skirmish over an obscure rule, he had chosen the Senate’s future.”

The filibuster had chiefly been used to block civil rights legislation. But once the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, something odd and important happened. The filibuster lost much of its stigma as a tool of white supremacy. Jentleson quotes the CBS News reporter Roger Mudd, who passed away on March 9: “The filibuster began to lose its mystique, and without its mystique it slowly became just another run-of-the-mill legislative tactic of delay, no longer the exclusive weapon of the South.” As a result of other rule changes, senators no longer had to execute a real, “talking” filibuster. Now the mere threat is enough, and it can be made by Senate aides: “All you have to do,” writes Jentleson, “is call the cloakroom, tell them the senator you work for intends to place a hold on the bill, and the bill is filibustered.”

Continuation from our Past

 

From The New Republic, Kimberle Williams Kershaw  writes:

“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us … history is literally present in all that we do.”—James Baldwin, 1965

In the weeks since the storming of the U.S. Capitol by a lie-emboldened mob of Trump-branded insurrectionists, many political leaders and mainstream pundits across the political spectrum have assiduously sought to displace white supremacy’s starring role in the attack. On the far right, those who stormed the Capitol to “Make America Great Again” understood themselves to be patriots—asserting their standing as supercitizens, unbound by either election results or civil legal restraints, thanks to their privileged relation to American politics as a white propertied project.

In response, hand-wringing moderate commentators reached for their well-worn “this is not who we are” response. Their plea to conjure up the better angels of American memory amounted to a séance for the countless lives lost in the overthrow of Reconstruction’s multiracial democracy. Meanwhile, left pundits debated the “are we there yet?” question by looking to European history to find out whether January 6 signaled the onset of fascist decline. Neatly sidestepping the centuries-long reign of white supremacy in America that fed and sustained distinctly fascist currents in our politics long before Kristallnacht and long after the fall of the Third Reich, they inadvertently revived the same amnesiac refrain that prompted Langston Hughes to note, in 1937, “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

Indeed, each story line on the Capitol insurgency—particularly from the left and center—reflects a great deal of bowdlerized history, especially when it comes to the enduring legacies of American racial terror. This denialism bespeaks a broader failure to face up to the real nature of white supremacy across the political spectrum. Even at this late date, our commentariat overwhelmingly treats white supremacy as an over-there topic that warrants cursory interrogation and minimalist intervention—an excusable affliction of prejudice, an ancillary dimension of class power, or the distant echo of a long-ago social order with secondary significance in today’s crisis. Only the far right takes white supremacy onboard directly as its stolen birthright, and even the Confederate flag–wavers in its ranks routinely often deny that the “way of life” it symbolizes was grounded in defending the dehumanization of Black people.

To understand how explicitly anti-democratic desires can be framed as defending freedom, as well as how moderate and left responses to this political violence seem to underestimate its continuity from the past and its threat to our future, we have to grapple with the foundational role of white supremacy in our republic. Indeed, the drafters of our Constitution sanctioned the very notions of security and property as racialized interests hardwired into our political system. As a result, subsequent actions seeking to dismantle this legacy have been framed as illegitimate, preferential, and deeply threatening to the social order. The retraction of entitlements that were once taken for granted within a white supremacist order not only spurs vigilante violence; it also infects the color and code of law enforcement itself.

This racialized construction of law and order explains the jaw-dropping difference in the fully militarized response to Black Lives Matter protests and the collegial escort of the insurrectionists out of the ransacked Capitol. To begin to address this obscene disparity between those who marched to uphold the republic’s ideals and those who spilled blood to overthrow them, we must grapple with the fact that whiteness—not a simplistic racial categorization, but a deeply structured relationship to social coercion and group entitlement—remains a vibrant dimension of power in America.

As Cheryl Harris, David Roediger, and others have argued, property in whiteness has long served as a critical source of sociopolitical status. As a robust ideology, it ties wildly conflicting cross-class interests into a political stranglehold denying any sustainable and actionable sort of racial or socioeconomic equality. The cry of law and order has wrapped this family bond into a repetitive refrain in modern American politics, obscuring the violent ways in which a racialized underclass has been repeatedly disenfranchised and disciplined by the dictates of a white majority. The murderous January 6 insurrection furnished a snapshot of this racialized model of social order that’s long been familiar to America’s racialized others. Under this hermetic system of repression, white disorder simply does not compute as an existential threat to the republic. Even though the nation was nearly destroyed by the treasonous explosion of white rage in the Civil War, the would-be cautionary tale about the mortal threat of a fully weaponized supremacist agenda has largely remained, in the words of President Woodrow Wilson, a “quarrel forgotten.”

Thanks to the privileges and immunities of whiteness, those who have credibly questioned its hold—dreamers like Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X—were targeted, surveilled, and martyred before they reached the age of 40, while white supremacist agitators and murderers lived long lives as their suit-and-tie enablers brokered power in an unrepentant republic. To this day, racial justice advocacy comes with risks that few white nationalists will ever know—even those who kill. Kyle Rittenhouse has largely resumed his life; protesters from Ferguson to D.C. who took no one’s life have been arrested, dragged through the legal system, and even killed.At the center of this twisted notion of law and order is the nation’s hagiographic self-narrative of being “born perfect and improving ever since.” Dominant in popular and political culture, this ideological mythmaking was scaffolded into political discourse over a century ago by the likes of the filmmaker D.W. Griffith. Still heralded as the father of American film, Griffith supplied a vigilant defense of the Confederacy’s Lost Cause mythos in The Birth of a Nation, which was purportedly hailed by President Wilson as “like writing history with lightning.” This propaganda offensive has hidden in plain sight in textbooks throughout the twentieth century, and in rituals that celebrate the American nation’s supposedly unbroken commitment to freedom and justice for all—a story that again demands a virtual conspiracy of silence about that ugly little matter called the Civil War. 

More

From Paris in 2007 Some More Images

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- Paris in 2007

Complex Definitions

 

From an interview with philosopher and writer Theodore Gracyk on his thinking about music and art, on the blog 3:16AM :

3:16:  So is it possible to give a unified definition of jazz given the historical discontinuities it contains? Can you sketch for us the difficulties in doing so and if your definitional strategy works give us the definition you’d be happy to endorse and why? 

TG: This problem is parallel to the familiar problem of constructing a unified definition of art given its historical discontinuities. The history of that problem informed my recent attempt to provide a definition, in the book Jazz and the Philosophy of Art (Routledge, 2018), co-authored with Lee Brown and David Goldblatt. Let me say a bit about that book and how it came about. Lee had been working for several years to assemble a set of his essays on jazz into a monograph that would stand as his definitive word on the topic, and he and I talked and corresponded about it while he worked on it. When he became ill and then passed away before he could complete the book, David and I were invited to look at the manuscript and see if we could bring it fruition. We looked over what he’d been doing, which included alternative arrangements of chapters, and we took account of his plan to alter his past work in light of his more recent thoughts and in response to more recent developments. We could see that he’d over-hauled and polished some chapters, but had only fragments toward some others. For the chapter on defining jazz, we started from his own writings and revisions and then we proposed a definition that, we felt, reflected our conversations with Lee on this topic over the years. 

Many philosophers now agree that the key to a definition of art or any of the specific arts is to regard cultural achievements as historical developments of specific cultures and to proceed accordingly. In the wake of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s 1951 article on the formation of the “modern” system of the arts, a number of philosophers—most notably Peter Kivy, Denis Dutton, Lydia Goehr, and Stephen Davies—have explored the idea that Western music’s status as fine art—think here of Beethoven and Wagner—is an offshoot of a long history of music as it developed in one small part of the planet. Once you see it that way, it opens the door to the possibility that most music is more like jazz than the ninth symphony or the Ring cycle. 

So a good definition of jazz, or of country music, or heavy metal, or any other genre, is going to be complex: it should take account of what all music has in common, really thinking non-prejudicially about all music, while also treating that genre as having both continuities with and divergences from earlier music. We can debate the details, including details about which musical elements are standard and non-standard for the genre we’re defining, but a definition of any art or music genre should pursue that strategy. 

3:16: You see jazz very much in relation to historical social developments, and in particular in relation to issues of race and gender, and America. Can you say something about these issues and what you think are the most salient aspects of this dimension of understanding jazz. 

TG: Yes, once you start to see the arts and their boundaries as historical developments, it invites you to think more about their social dimension. With jazz, it’s not enough to say that it’s based on improvisation. You have to acknowledge that it arose as, and remains closely identified with, African-American music. This is something that Lee Brown was also very concerned with, and which he and I often discussed. I should also give a shout out to Kathleen Higgins here: I came to think much more about this both from her books and thanks to a critique of my early work at a session of the American Society for Aesthetics. And Paul C. Taylor’s published exchange with Joel Rudinow on race and blues music moved me forward, too. 

Philosophically, once you’ve made the move toward a historically-aware, contextualist understanding of both aesthetic judgment and artistic value, it’s a short step to the idea that any and all aspects of the social context of production and reception might be relevant to the music’s characteristics and value. (I stress “might be” here: any and all might be, but in any given case only some will be.) Given my broader interest in how popular music differs from the Western art music, it was only natural to want to think about how American popular music might differ from Bach, Beethoven, and Schoenberg because its form and associated practices of use originated in the music of the African diaspora and as the music of Black Americans. 

From Paris in 2007

Some of what we saw in Paris back in 2007:

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- Paris in 2007

Morgan's Search for a New Land

 

Time has treated Lee Morgan's Search for a New Land well. Recorded in 1964 but released two years later this landmark Morgan disc could have sent him into a fabulous direction. His success with The Sidewinder made the jazz establishment with more of that and less of this. Here's a good discussion by Derek Walmsley of The Wire on this classic recording:

Before free jazz broke through in the 1960s, you could read a desire for liberation unfolding in the titles jazz musicians gave their compositions from the mid-1950s onwards. In previous years, players might have dedicated a piece to a woman or a passed colleague. Now, they were naming them after newly independent nations of Africa, to underline their Afrocentric solidarity; after locations in the Far East, to flaunt a growing interest in Eastern philosophical systems; or after cities in the Middle East from before Western countries changed the history of that region. From bebop to hard bop to modal jazz, many albums of the era had a blues, a ballad, a swinging workout, and another piece, sometimes a mere afterthought, namechecking a far-off land.

Often these were places the musicians had never been, and might never go: “Angola”, “Basra”, “Isle Of Java”, “Saturn”, “Utopia”. But the locations themselves are less important than the ideas they stood for in the minds of the players. These titles are social manifestos, polemical provocations and utopian hypotheses all rolled into one. A complete index of the freedoms which jazz musicians desired – political, spiritual and aesthetic – can be read through these geographic fascinations and the music that they inspired.

Lee Morgan’s 1964 piece “Search For The New Land” might be read as an unofficial anthem for this mode of jazz. Its title makes explicit the subtexts of liberation and movement already present in John Coltrane’s “India” and “Africa”, and its open-ended structure attempts to reboot the vocabulary of jazz in a manner as radical as Coltrane’s Ascension or Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz.

“Search For The New Land” wasn’t released the year it was recorded; Blue Note had their own search to worry about. Distributors and record shops were demanding a follow-up to Morgan’s 1963 jukebox smash “The Sidewinder” causing his album Search For The New Land to be delayed until 1966. Blue Note had spent the years in between trying, and failing, to replicate the hit formula Morgan established on “The Sidewinder” with mediocre jams like “The Rumproller” and “Cornbread”.

There’s a poignancy in how Morgan’s search itself ended up lost. He was perhaps the most lauded trumpet player of the post-Miles Davis era, but his life and work had been brutally derailed by drugs and fame. In the late 50s and the mid-60s he scraped a living by recording constantly, sometimes reportedly finishing the sheet music in a taxi on the way to a recording session. Like many hard bop players, his more adventurous work often took a back seat to the kind of orthodox workouts that kept the pot boiling. At that time, Blue Note was not above letting junkies churn out quick albums to make a modest profit for all involved.

“Search For The New Land” looked beyond all of this. The cover of the album alone marks it out as different. Morgan is usually depicted as a player of inscrutable cool, blowing his trumpet with eyes closed and a cigarette in hand or tucked into the pipes of his instrument. Here, he is caught in an unguarded moment, looking vulnerable as he gazes contemplatively back at the camera.

The contours of the track are extraordinary. Running for 15 minutes, it takes up most of the first side of the original LP, and each solo (saxophone, trumpet, guitar, piano) lasts several minutes. The group don’t begin to play so much as let their instruments start to gently appear on the horizon. It opens with no rhythm, just a deep bass vibration from Reggie Workman and cymbal washes from Billy Higgins, while Herbie Hancock weaves clouds of modal trills. The piece returns to this starting point between each solo, leaving the pulse behind as if the players are trying to stretch time and space.

Morgan had long explored the possibilities of under- and overblowing his trumpet to expand his tonal vocabulary, as well as to distract attention from a youthful recklessness in his solos. Tom Perchard, in his book Lee Morgan: His Life, Music And Culture, writes how “air… seeped out around the sound’s edge like blue, unlit gas”. At the end of his solo Morgan restates the main theme twice, the first time so gently that the air seems to leak back out of the trumpet and drag the tone down, the second time overblowing so the sound distorts into pure tone. The deliberate exploration of extended techniques connects him to a continuum running from Louis Armstrong in the 1920s to Radu Malfatti in the 2000s.

“Search For The New Land” has simple, shuffling chord changes over which the players improvise modal melodies. But its wide-open spaces give them licence to explore in radical ways. Guitarist Grant Green alights on small figures and repeats them obsessively, and when he states the main theme, he pulls off away from its notes as if he is searching for the microtones between.

Morgan and his ensemble were attempting to leave chord changes and melody behind as decisively as the practitioners of free jazz. The new land they create is impeccably democratic – everyone has their say, and no one is shackled by everyday time constraints – but the role of each instrument is fluid and up for grabs. Like many of the more adventurous pieces of the time, “Search For The New Land” was obscured by the relentless treadmill of bread and butter recording sessions. But with the benefit of hindsight, many others were on the same page. Following this search for new lands takes us to Africa, to Jackie McLean and Wayne Shorter’s evocations of freedom struggles in Ghana and Angola, and Herbie Hancock imagining the birth of man in Tanzania; to the Middle East, via the exotic rhythms of Pete LaRoca, Bobby Hutcherson and Horace Silver; the rarefied heights of John Zorn’s Masada and to the cosmos and outer space, via the planetary harmonies of Sun Ra and the imaginary worlds of McCoy Tyner and Yusef Lateef.

 

Deja Vu

By luck or lack of it, I became acquainted with the films of Hong Sang-soo this new year even though the filmaker has been busy putting out films almost monthly for the last 15 years. And what films! My favorite director has always been Eric Rohmer and I find a strange similarity with Hong Sang-soo's work where so much is dependent on the words that the characters utter. There is an element of narrative disruption in his films that just delights me. Here's an article by Romain Lefebvre I found that talks about his method and his madness:

Several weeks before the start of Cannes 2016 – where she was due to present Elle by Paul Verhoeven – Isabelle Huppert was contacted by director Hong Sang-soo, who asked her whether she had any free time to film with him. The actress agreed. And although the festival lasts a “fortnight [quinzaine]”, it would only take nine days for a small team, gathered around the director, to wrap up a new film, and one day to edit. The genesis of Claire’s Camera offers a fresh example of the rapidity with which Hong Sang-soo shoots (Grass, his next film, apparently only took three days to shoot); a rapidity which does not cease to amaze, evoking jealousy in colleagues or serving as fuel for detractors. It makes sense to use the upset of the release of Claire’s Camera to better understand the production process of a director which can, as we shall see, be structured into three indispensable stages: (1) the preparation or the conceptual base; (2) the intuitive decision or chance; (3) the composition or the structure. Along the way we shall see in what way this process, even when disdainful of any notion of “intention,” responds to a permanent project of the director: to combat ready-made images.

It’s a notorious fact: Hong Sang-soo does not write screenplays. Or, rather, the practice of scriptwriting melted away as time passed: meticulously drafted for his first three films, scripts were subsequently reduced to mere treatments or increasingly scattered notes – from about thirty pages for Turning Gate to an estimate of five for Hahaha1 to nearly nothing for Claire’s Camera. The act of writing, if it takes place at all, is worth little more than as an initial impetus:

“I do not want a scenario in which 95 percent of the elements are fixed in advance since, in the end, the rest of the creative process would be about working on details, the remaining 5%. What I do want is to find an approximate 30 to 40 percent of the elements in the treatment, 30 percent in the casting and dialogues, and the rest during the shoot. During the editing process as well, where I sometimes end up cutting out thirty minutes of the film.”2

This evaporation of the screenplay corresponds to the privilege granted to the fragmentary and to discovery. Indeed, Hong Sang-soo distinguishes himself by a way of thinking about his films in a mode of fragmentation. For him, making a film is not the same as unrolling a narrative thread, but rather organizing “surfaces” or putting “fragments” to use within a given structure:

“Organizing surfaces? By that I mean my desire to show that everything, every event, even the most insignificant episodes in our lives, contains everything inside of it. Something very concrete, with a banal appearance, always harbours more. A little episode of our lives can obscure an ensemble of symbols and meanings which pile up as layers, a series of superimposed surfaces. Afterwards they form into a block, a structure, which gives the impression of an entity. But this entity never contains just one idea!”3

“I believe that my films are not made to express a story, but to feature some fragments. I don’t think I have any other option. I take those so-called fragments and, with them, derive a whole structure centred on everyday situations. And within that structure, I select an appropriate rhetoric. And when I go into the shoot, a new process of discovery begins.”4

These declarations raise several remarkable points. Firstly, that structure for Hong Sang-soo is always derivative; it is secondary to the units which make up that very structure. Subsequently, that the point is not to achieve an unexpected structure by organizing parts which are determined in advance, but rather a process of discovery which comprises both the parts and the totality. The director expressively puts an emphasis on the necessity for each stage of the process to be a creative stage, as well as his interest in events that go beyond it.5 These various disclosures of Hong Sang-soo allow us to grasp the principal traits of the process during which fragments are discovered, determined and organised – even if it might seem paradoxical to define such a process, given the degree of fixity this would presuppose.

First, there would thus be – pitted against “the intention” or “the message” – the privilege granted to “the situation.” The projects are truly launched from the moment when Hong Sang-soo runs into a certain “incentive,” which could be a formal idea as much as a narrative situation – in a sense, this will be the nodal point around which other elements will be clustered and distributed.6 Some examples are in order here. In the case of Woman on the Beach, the incentive is the fortuitous encounter of a woman on a beach who happens to resemble one of her acquaintances, an encounter which drove a curiousness in Hong Sango-soo on the possible relation between physical and inner resemblance. For Tale of Cinema, it concerned the state experienced when leaving a film screening, when we are still under the influence of what we have just seen.7 For Yourself and Yours, it was about the conflictual relationship between the love we feel for someone and the evil others can speak of that person. These situations-slash-incentives, particular in their relatively ordinary nature and “encountered” by the director in his own experience, can serve as a concrete starting point: Hong Sang-soo does not seek to develop them on a conceptual or abstract level, but rather to deploy these incentives and to embody them in other derivative situations which imply a group of characters and their actions.8 In this way, intentions do not regain the upper hand once the first situation has been put in place, but rather its primacy is reaffirmed with the arrival of each new narrative situation. The first question the director asks himself is never “what do I want to say?” but always “what is going to happen?” And the answer is never given in advance, since it will be decided in accordance with a given place.

Indeed, Hong Sang-soo does not look for locations to shoot what he has already written out, but he rather imagines his scenes, whether at the time of preparing his treatment or during a shoot, based on these places. Situations are thus located, and the films incorporate some traces of this method, if one judges them by his instruction plans or the signs which intersperse them, delineate the sequences and indicate where the characters are to be found: the sequential unity often rhymes with the unity of a place.

More

 

Here is a link to the excellent film publication which carried the article above-it is from Belgium and called Sabzian - articles relating to Hong Hang-Soo

Patricia Brennan's Maquishti

A new album, her first, by Patricia Brennan, a Mexican-born vibraphonist entered my field of hearing and I like her sensibilities and introspective approach. A bit like Mompu. Here's what others have had to say about it. Donna Lee Davidson at I Care if You Listen:

Maquishti can be consumed in the nuances of these senses, like shifting between listening and hearing. Listening requires attention to the sounds; try listening to this album with a creative conundrum in mind, and let Brennan’s music nourish it. Hearing requires surrender; try hearing this album without anything in mind, and Brennan forges visuals for seeing with new eyes.

Most tracks on the album use pedal points, either sustained alone or as an anchor for a larger concept. In I Like For You To Be Still, the pedal is a single note, whereas in Point of No Return, the pedal is a low tone that begins a seven-note rhythm going by as quickly as a snap of the finger. In Magic Square, the pedal sits on the precipice of an overhanging rhythmic pattern; it always catches the beat even though it’s barely clinging on, making the sensation of falling the pedal of choice. The repetitive strokes required to sustain a note on a melodic percussion instrument make even this sense of touch a pedal point in itself.

On the vibraphone tracks, electronic enhancements give the false impression that there are more percussion instruments being played. Improvisation III begins with a low pedal point that sounds like the pairing of an orchestral bass drum and pitched gong. This trades with open, parallel moving chords in the high register of the vibraphone that sound more like a celesta. In I Like For You To Be Still and Episodes, the vibraphone mimics a flexatone, an instrument that produces sound by bending metal. In Point of No Return, the vibraphone transforms into a glockenspiel, then crotales, then a kalimba.

On Away From Us, Brennan’s use of a string bow on the vibraphone’s metal bars is thick. Not layered in height as if the electronic sounds are added on top or slipped in below the vibraphone, but thick in width as if these sounds are coming directly out of the resonators. In Solar and Episodes, these electronic manipulations concur, coexist, and commingle simultaneously–they happen before anyone can catch them in the act. In Episodes, they sneak in ever so deceitfully. It is a task listening for the electronic sounds, but repeated listens to this album sharpen their sensations.

Throughout this album, wood and metal also get to exist in their natural form with hammering, cutting, scraping, and forging. When sustaining a note on marimba, percussionists usually mask the sound of repeatedly striking the wood by using certain mallets and specific techniques. But in Improvisation VI and Improvisation VII, every stroke is audible and every touch is felt. Brennan takes a similar approach to the vibraphone in Point of No Return, scraping the keys as if the metal has been melted and doing the work of a blacksmith to shape the metal anew.

Ralph Peterson Jr Passed Away on Monday

Peterson was one of the most potent drummers in contemporary jazz over the last 30+ years. I finally had a chance to meet him at a Todd Marcus session several years ago. Also I was fortunate to hear him with the talented Curtis Brothers both in NYC and here in Baltimore. Though I'm not a musician, many attest to his teaching skills. But it's in his music that I knew him. Here is an obituary on his passing at NPR:

Ralph Peterson Jr., a drummer, bandleader, composer and educator whose lunging propulsion and volatile combustion were hallmarks of a jazz career spanning more than 40 years, died on Monday in North Dartmouth, Mass. The cause was complications from cancer, his manager, Laura Martinez, tells NPR Music; Peterson had been living with the disease for the last six years. He was 58.

The sheer, onrushing force of Peterson's beat, paired with his alert ear and agile dynamism, made him one of the standout jazz musicians to emerge in the 1980s. Part of a striving peer group known as the Young Lions, which coalesced around the resurgence of acoustic hard bop, he distinguished himself early on as a powerful steward of that tradition.

"It's music that revolves around richly ambiguous harmonies and shifty, mercurial melodies," wrote Jon Pareles in 1990, reviewing a performance for the New York Times. "Difficult as it is to play, Mr. Peterson and his group rekindled the style's sense of risk and triumph."

Risk and triumph, each inextricable from the other, aptly describes nearly all of the music associated with Peterson — as a locomotive engine on the first several albums by trumpeter Terence Blanchard and saxophonist Donald Harrison; as a leader of bands like Triangular, a venturesome piano trio, and the Fo'tet, with a frontline of saxophone and vibraphone; and as the anointed heir of Art Blakey, a hard-bop progenitor and drummer-bandleader of the Jazz Messengers, whose ranks produced several generations of major jazz talent.

More

Here are some photographs of Ralph taken at the various sessions and gigs that I attended:

Vallejo Nocturno 2021-Ralph Peterson Jr Medley

The fotos above have Ralph at an An die Musik Live trio session with Zacai Curtis on piano. The remaining photos are from a session with Todd Marcus that also feature Sean Jones, Jeff Reed, and Ameen Saleem. Fortunate to have been a part of that.