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

Reunions

From a letter by writer Lucia Berlin to  The Dorns:

How lovely it was that Race brought me home—that “Sandy” came home. We are having a vacation and a rest and a honeymoon. Walk down Main St. and through these crazy flowers and grass all over—look thru boxes in the attic—with books and photos and poems by Race and have dinner in dining room with flowers and candles and butter plates and Mark picked corn from a corn field and washed it and ate it. (He is out of his HEAD!) Went to see cousin Andy and his wife Esther and Dorns, these people are TOO much— they work so hard and so easily and mulch (I love that word) and sow and reap and can and prune and graft and darn and bake and plant all their food and everything is so cyclical and ORDERED and NICE—they are all nice—with this crazy wit and an INTEREST in things, everything, and a joy from the views they see every day. I am meeting everyone. They take me in. I don’t mean they approve or accept or like me, altho they do, I think, but they take me into their War and Peace scene, to their cradles in the attic, and Jeff sleeping in Grandma Proctor’s crib that was Bobby’s crib too and it’s so nice and terrifying. I’ve never known a family.

I keep thinking of the last family reunion my family had, the children of my grandfather in El Paso and of Mamie, his wife, with big tears in her eyes as she held his coffee cup by the sides while he sat down so he could quick grab it by the handle and drink it down boiling.

That reunion was on Christmas and aside from being a house full of about 30 people there were these things happening. Most of all everyone there was wishing for my aunt to die. She and my uncle had been so bloody happy and in love and fine, all their life, but then she got very sick—really in agony—pain all the time. It was like a reverse Dorian Grey how her body began to destroy her with self-pity and fear and how she began to destroy everyone else. That Christmas Dr. Holt was there, who somehow illegally kept my aunt on cocaine and himself in terrible remorse and horror. My uncle who loved her and watched her and cried at night. Her children who hated her for making my uncle’s life so horrible. Her mother, who prayed, was crazy, and who my aunt wouldn’t let out of her room not even to eat, only twice a day to go to the bathroom. I was there and it was 2 weeks before my divorce was final and my parents were leaving in 3 weeks. Rex Kipp was there and he is a rich rancher and he and my uncle are best friends. A few days before, he and my uncle had split in a plane and everybody thought they had just gone to get drunk but I found out later they had been preparing for a Santa Claus thing in Mexico where during the night they went to this poor village and put seed and beans and meal and toys and clothes at all the doors. Which is a pretty repulsive Texan thing to do but not really if you think of two drunk millionaires putting around in a plane trying like hell to think of something nice to do, anything nice to do, with their money on Christmas.

Anyway, on Christmas Eve it was cold and there were several things going on—two factions—the drunk ones giving each other deep freezers and TV sets and telling jokes and the religious ones singing the Lord’s Prayer and some people cooking hams and turkeys. Poker games and people riding up on new Palominos and everybody had some personal scene— awful violent Faulkner scene going—aside from Christmas Eve, but it was Christmas Eve and my aunt said, “You want me to die, OK, I will,” and climbed onto a roof with only a bathrobe on and lay down and it snowed, in El Paso.

There is a crazy thing about my family. If you’re going thru a room and meet anyone going thru or sitting, you stop and you touch them, or you contact them—you affirm something—even if often it’s some bitter angry thing.

So I can’t understand these truly positive people—honest people. Here is the negative portion of my letter and this is what I meant, Edw., when I said I was afraid. I am afraid because I can’t make this scene, this nice, so really GOOD HONEST POSITIVE SCENE—where nobody weeps or screams or curses or hugs or fucks up or despairs or desires or kids themselves or dreams. Like the Newtons, truly so kind and they love Sandy (Race), very much—but when they saw him they said, “Why, hello Sanford!” But no weeping. When cousin Andy came back from the war half-dead, after horrible time, his father shook his hand. “Hello, Andrew.” Nobody is CORNY here.

And so corniness ultimately unimportant and superficial— the dependability and strength of love is here. Ah. But once when I was very little I dug Frost and “Stopping by Woods” and then I read “The Death of the Hired Man” and there is a line there that says (more or less) “Home is where, if you haven’t anywhere else to go, they have to take you in.”

I wish I had my damn typewriter—I want to write—which is crazy. I suddenly have 100s of things to write—but anyway the second day we were in Little Falls, in that lovely place, THE WELL RAN DRY! No water! First time in 60 years.

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Cindy Wolf

From the NYT, a very positive article about Baltimore's Cindy Wolf:

She cooks in Charleston’s kitchen nearly every night, as she has since the restaurant opened 24 years ago. Her decades-long mission to refine her blend of French and Southern cuisine has earned her nine nominations for the James Beard award for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic, a record for a chef (tied with Peter Pastan) in a category they have not won. “Just give it to her already,” Tom Sietsema, the Washington Post food critic, wrote in 2017, after she received her sixth nomination.

Charleston is among the relatively few still-thriving restaurants from the 1990s that helped spur the explosion of innovative New Southern cooking in the 2000s.

But after a turbulent year that has brought into question what the future will look like for restaurants catering to affluent diners, Charleston, with its Bernardaud china, cheese cart, tasting menu and long-cellared wines, feels like a throwback to a fading era.

Something similar can be said of Ms. Wolf. At 56, she is the rare chef-owner of her skill level and accomplishment who is mainly focused on her flagship, on traditional fine dining and on the daily task of cooking — something she insists will never change.

“When Tony told me he wanted to open more and more restaurants, we agreed that I would not leave Charleston,” Ms. Wolf said during one of several recent conversations in Baltimore. “Every restaurant since then really has been his dream, because I’m quite happy with this one.”

Three of the Foreman Wolf company’s restaurants are within walking distance of Charleston: Bar Vasquez, an Argentine tapas bar and steakhouse; Cinghiale, an Italian restaurant; and Cindy Lou’s Fish House, a Southern seafood restaurant that opened in October. The other two, Petit Louis Bistro and Johnny’s, a casual seafood place, are in the Roland Park neighborhood. (Mr. Foreman, who is responsible for the wine programs at all the restaurants, owns two wine shops separately from Ms. Wolf.)

The two partners don’t own the real estate for any of their businesses. As revenues shrank during the pandemic, the lease arrangements, particularly in the booming areas around Charleston, in Harbor East, made them uneasy. They decided to buy the Milton Inn, a restaurant in an 18th-century building 20 miles north of Baltimore, to give them more control over their financial future. Chris Scanga, the executive chef at Petit Louis, will be chef of the inn, as well as a business partner, the first such arrangement for Ms. Wolf and Mr. Foreman.

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Junk Food

From The Nation, a review of Mark Bittman's book on junk food:

For Bittman, the central drama of this story begins in the course of the last century, as agriculture and food processing became mass industries, and as we moved from having two types of food (plants and animals) to being overwhelmed by a new third type—one that was “more akin to poison.” These “engineered edible substances, barely recognizable as products of the earth, are commonly called ‘junk.’ ”

This junk food has created, Bittman argues, a “public health crisis that diminishes the lives of perhaps half of all humans.” Through its dependence on an agriculture that “concentrates on maximizing the yield of the most profitable crops,” it has done “more damage to the earth than strip mining, urbanization, even fossil fuel extraction.”

Any number of data points illustrate this new reality, but let’s choose a couple that show what happened to farming. In the decades since World War II, chicken production has increased by more than 1,400 percent—while the number of farms producing those birds has fallen by 98 percent. This kind of industrialization is obviously unkind to animals and to those who once raised them—the former live in tiny cages, and the latter, depending on where in the world they reside, often move to shantytowns on the edges of capital cities. And the damage to the natural world is every bit as great. In Iowa, for instance, stock living in CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, produce as much waste as 168 million people, or 53 times the state’s population. This manure is housed in giant lagoons that sometimes flood; it is perhaps not surprising that the largest municipal water treatment plant in the world is required to allow the people of Des Moines to drink the tap water.

The ability to produce massive quantities of a few commodities—wheat, corn, and corn syrup—has enriched not farmers but a few giant middlemen (companies like Archer-Daniels-Midland and Cargill) and implement dealers (John Deere makes four times as much money providing credit to struggling farmers as it does selling tractors). And it has created a new problem: what to do with the massive amount of calories that this commodity-focused agriculture produces. “The system,” Bittman explains, now “delivers a nearly uninterruptible stream of food, regardless of season,” and in the process it has created junk: the processed food that now dominates the Western diet and, increasingly, many other diets around the world. “Junk made it possible to encourage people to—really, [made] it difficult for them not to—eat too much non-nourishing food over a prolonged period.”

As Bittman notes, the calories have to go somewhere, and—thanks in no small part to the advertising industry, which attached itself to the food industry like a remora to a shark—they went inside us; we look the way we do because of the need for the Krafts and Heinzes of the world to keep their profit margins growing by finding new ways to get us to consume their limited line of basic commodities. “Global sugar consumption has nearly tripled in the past half-century,” he writes, and so has obesity; the number of people worldwide living with diabetes has quadrupled since 1980. “Two thirds of the world’s population,” Bittman tells us, “lives in countries where more people die from diseases linked to being overweight than ones linked to being underweight.”

It’s not just our bodies that suffer from this commodity agriculture; it does huge damage to communities as well. Bittman discusses how small Black farmers, especially in the South, have been systematically sidelined by federal policy and how a fairly stable system of peasant agriculture in Mexico was destroyed by the North American Free Trade Agreement, which dismantled the economic protections that allowed it to persist and flooded the country with cheap American grain. Since it took 17.8 labor days to produce a ton of corn in Mexico, and 1.2 hours to do it on industrialized farms in the American Midwest, the result was never in doubt. Now the United States supplies Mexico with 42 percent of its food, which should give you some idea of why so many people needed to come north. Adds Bittman: “NAFTA also brought junk food to Mexico. Imports of high-fructose corn syrup increased by almost 900 times, and soda consumption nearly doubled,” making Mexico the world’s fourth largest per capita consumer of soda. It also now “leads the world’s populous nations in obesity, and diabetes—almost always caused by a modern Western diet—is among the country’s leading killers.” This amounts to a “domination” more subtle than the Opium Wars or the overthrow of Central American governments—but not by much.

 

Non-violence activism is largely ignored

 

Always useful to elucidate causes of violence in a colonial structured situation, from Shadi Hamid at The Atlantic, let's face it facts and rationality aren't a strong suit of the US inhabitants:

In the case of the current situation in Gaza, the objective is not to carefully assess Hamas’s “grievances.” The group’s behavior is not particularly mysterious. Hamas leaders see anger against Israel building among ordinary Palestinians, and they see an opportunity to weaponize it. They send rockets across the border and invite destruction because they wish to project relevance and rally domestic support after years of diminished popularity. Hamas is not a bunch of crazed lunatics. Selfish, self-serving, and cavalier toward Palestinian life, its leaders are acting according to a traditional rational-actor model. Whether or not we like it, they believe they will benefit from the crisis—and they may, in reality, find themselves in a stronger position when this is over.

This is one step in the analysis, but it still doesn’t tell us much about why Palestinian anger had been rising in the first place. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party tends to emphasize the original “source” of the current violence. This source isn’t exactly a secret either. As The New York Times reported: “The trouble started on Monday, when a heavy-handed police raid at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque—the third-holiest site in Islam, located atop a site also revered by Jews—set off an instant backlash.” Yet while the police raid was actually unfolding—during the final days of Ramadan and at such a sensitive site—I found only minimal coverage in mainstream outlets. I relied instead on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts that were covering the raid and its aftermath in real time, although many were censored for “sensitive content.” The tragedy, upon other tragedies, is that the world seems to pay attention to Palestinians only when they use violence. Nonviolent activism goes largely ignored.  

Tensions had, in fact, been building for months, with the threatened eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Smaller protests in the area, taking place at a steady clip for some time, grew larger. But even these details don’t capture the broader context. What is so important about Sheikh Jarrah, and why are Palestinian families being faced with eviction in the first place? As NBC News reported: “The expansion of Jewish settlements in Sheikh Jarrah, which is on land that helps form the final link in a settlement circle surrounding east Jerusalem—an area that Palestinians hope will be the capital of a future state.”

That aspiration matters, but seemingly not much to those who see Israel’s right to self-defense as the only truly salient issue. They don’t see the occupation itself—and what has flowed from it—as the original sin. And because they don’t recognize the centrality of the occupation, they don’t acknowledge what is so obvious to the other side: the basic fact of a lopsided power dynamic, in which Israel is the aggressor and Palestinians are the aggressed. This imbalance ought to matter—and not just for moral reasons. American policy makers, regardless of whether they see Palestinians as fully deserving of rights and dignity, should understand that wildly unequal power and capabilities make peace all but impossible. Absent international pressure, the more powerful actor has few incentives to offer substantive compromises and concessions to the weaker party.

The Biden administration is acting as if the past several years (or decades) have not happened. It is repeating the same mistakes as its predecessors, while hoping that a cease-fire can bring an end to hostilities and a return to calm. But until fundamental injustices—and Palestinian national aspirations—are addressed by ending an occupation that has lasted longer than my own existence, the calm will prove uneasy. Maybe that’s good enough for Biden. But it shouldn’t be.

Riverside Pop Up Jazz Jam

From the weekly jazz series organized by Ed Hrybyk this is the session in Riverside Park near Federal Hill in Baltimore. Baltimore has a diverse and strong jazz community and these outdoor sessions during the pandemic have helped musicians and audience to stay in touch with the revitalizing powers of jazz. Some highlights:

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- Riverside Park Jazz Jam 2021

Bob Butta, Baltimore Jazz Pianist

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- Brendan brady Trio with Bob Butta on piano

Last night I got to photograph a trio with Bob Butta, a legendary Baltimore jazz pianist that i managed to muss for some strange reason. Here is a piece written by George Colligan in his blog where he mentions Bob Butta:

Another big influence on my decision to switch to jazz piano is another Baltimore native named Bob Butta. The only time I ever went to The Closet, Butta was in the rhythm section backing Gary Bartz (with Geoff Harper on bass and Steve Williams on drums). I remember thinking at the time that that was first time I ever heard a band that sounded close to what the John Coltrane Quartet must have sounded like live; they played with so much intensity, and they really stretched out. Butta is a forceful accompanist, channeling the likes of Wynton Kelly, McCoy Tyner, and Horace Silver all at once. And Butta has the "right hand of doom"; he took the Tyner pentatonic idea and put his own stamp on it.

I probably saw Butta play more than anybody in Baltimore. I followed Butta around so much that he
started joking that "Yeah, he's my son!" I tried to absorb his techniques. Butta really knows the history; in his playing you'll hear Red Garland, Bill Evans, Cedar Walton, and Theolonious Monk. Butta is a real " jazz pianist's jazz pianist". It's unfortunate that he, like Murphy, never moved to New York. Although, there is a legendary story about Butta being in New York at the Star Cafe jam session in the 80's and while he was playing, bassist Lonnie Plaxico ran in and said in Butta's ear, "Art Blakey needs a piano player, we are driving to Canada tonight!" And Butta replied, "Can I finish playing this tune first?" And then when the tune was over, Plaxico was gone, and Blakey had driven off. (At least that's how I recall Butta telling me the story, I would accept some corroboration....")

Vallejo nocturno 2021- Brendan brady Trio with Bob Butta

Advice from Poe

 

Great advice from Edgar Allan Poe on writing:

• Employ an unreliable narrator, preferably one who doesn't know he is insane and has no recollection of such events as digging into a grave to rip out the teeth of his recently departed lover.
• Include a beautiful woman with raven locks and porcelain skin, preferably quite young, and let her die tragically of some unknown ailment.
• Use grandiloquent words, such as heretofore, forthwith, and nevermore. A little Latin will also enhance the text.
• Do not shy away from such grotesqueries as inebriation, imprisonment, insanity, and men costumed as orangutans being burned to death.

Teachings

Here are some interesting rules to create writing or photography or painting or film, though at the site they are credited to John Cage they actually are from Corita Kent:

John Cage was an avant-garde composer whose work has left a lasting influence on contemporary music. (Thom York of Radiohead calls Cage one of his all-time heroes.) Cage's work included such experimentation as using a prepared piano (meaning objects are placed inside the piano to alter the sound) and a composition called 433, in which the musicians make no sounds at all for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: General duties of a studentpull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacherpull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Dont try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: We're breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everythingit might come in handy later.

From Corita Kent's book Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit.