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

Dismantling Democracy Bit by Bit

 

From Jamelle Bouie in the NY Times:

The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.

And, of course, the point of this movement — the point of creating this state-sanctioned heckler’s veto — is to undermine public education through a thousand little cuts, each meant to weaken public support for teachers and public schools, and to open the floodgates to policies that siphon funds and resources from public institutions and pumps them into private ones. The Texas bill I mentioned, for instance, would give taxpayer dollars to parents who chose to opt out of public schools for private schools or even home-schooling.

The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a cover for a more material and ideological agenda. The screaming over “wokeness” and “D.E.I.” is just another Trojan horse for a relentless effort to dismantle a pillar of American democracy that, for all of its flaws, is still one of the country’s most powerful engines for economic and social mobility.

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Photos from Recent Days in March

March turned out to be a busy month of image taking:

Vallejo Nocturno 2023-March 2023

Some Believable Humor

From The Onion, but it seems oh so real:

WASHINGTON—Claiming the new system would make things simpler for everyone and avoid confusing mix-ups, Congress passed a joint resolution Tuesday that would reclassify every citizen’s race according to their net worth. “It is resolved by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives that any American whose wealth exceeds $1 million shall be white,” read the bipartisan legislation, which went on to state that citizens who were dissatisfied with the race they were assigned under the new criteria would be “free to pull themselves up by their bootstraps” in order to reach a racial category of greater privilege. “Now, regardless of the color of their skin, those who are rich will receive all the rights a wealthy person is entitled to in this country. Meanwhile, those with a net worth in the six figures, though they cannot be white, will still qualify as Asian, with the social scale moving downward from there to Latino and Black. This should go a long way toward making our racial stereotypes as accurate as possible.” In an attempt to deal a final blow to the complications of intersectionality, Congress was reportedly taking up additional legislation to ensure everyone earning above the median income level was classified as a man, and everyone below it as a woman.

 

 

A Suspect List

 

From El Pais regarding Sight and Sounds Top 100 films of all time-I have issues with this crazy list:

There is no such thing as the greatest film of all time. Keep this in mind as you read the results of the survey conducted every 10 years by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine. Ever since 1952, Sight & Sound has polled critics, historians and filmmakers from all over the world and issued its list of the 100 greatest films of all time. The surprise number one knocked off past winners like The Bicycle Thief, Citizen Kane and Vertigo. Released in 1975, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was written and directed by Chantal Akerman when she was just 25 years old. It stars Lebanese-French actress Delphine Seyrig, playing a lonely Belgian housewife who barely speaks during the three-plus hours of the film.

Jeanne Dielman broke new ground in telling a fiercely feminist story. Akerman, who committed suicide in 2015 when she was 65, wanted to portray her outrage about female oppression. She did this by focusing her camera on a mother’s three mind-numbing days of household chores and mundane routines. When Akerman was asked what distinguished her films from those made by men, she replied: “The difference is that a man would never have made this film. They learn different values from the day they are born, and a woman washing dishes is not art.” A tireless cinematic experimenter, Akerman sought to shatter the prevailing societal portrayals of women.

Sight & Sound’s survey has rekindled a prickly debate that now must contend with our contemporary culture wars. This time around, the magazine conducted a much broader survey – 1,639 participants – including this writer. This is almost double the number surveyed in 2012, which in turn was much broader than the previous decade’s survey. While Sight & Sound says that this makes room for new sensibilities and gender and racial perspectives, the survey’s detractors argue that it’s a calculated strategy to precipitate a biased and opportunistic destruction of the cinematic canon.

Only two female filmmakers made Sight & Sounds’ previous top 100 lists – Akerman and Claire Denis, whose 1998 film Beau Travail climbed this year from 78th to seventh place. One of the biggest surprises of this year’s survey is the number of women who made the grade: Céline Sciamma, Agnès Varda, Jane Campion, Věra Chytilová, Julie Dash, Maya Deren and Barbara Loden. But pioneers like Dorothy Arzner and Leni Riefenstahl dropped off the list. More Black and Asian filmmakers are in the top 100, and an astonishing number of recent releases like Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Killing off the forefathers

“There is a clear tendency to kill off the [cinematic] forefathers,” said Esteve Riambau about the top 100 list. A historian, critic and director of Barcelona’s Filmoteca de Catalunya film archive, Riambau said: “While the lists of the 1960s and 70s also killed off some of the forefathers, this one is genocidal, an indiscriminate and unjust extermination of the classics.” Riambau claims that the list is full of “political, generational and gender” biases, and has an obvious amnesia problem. “Does anyone really understand why Parasite is on the list, and not one film by [Ernst] Lubitsch or [Howard] Hawks? When the details of how everyone voted are released in January, perhaps we will be able to better understand this sham.” Riambau believes that shaking up the canon is necessary, and the broadly representative survey merits consideration. “But it demonstrates a complete disregard of cinema’s popular dimensions and an entrenched militancy and ghetto mentality.” The predominance of American and French language films on the list is, “a clear reflection of the cultural studies programs that American universities began offering in the 1980s,” said Riambau. Or as American literary critic Harold Bloom once put it, “Eskimo lesbian studies.”

American filmmaker and writer Paul Schrader (who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver) was one of the first to criticize the survey results, which he thinks were distorted by political correctness and woke agendas. Schrader says this does a disservice to Jeanne Dielman, a film he admires and considers one of the greats. Veteran American film and literary critic Janet Maslin tweeted her support for Schrader’s critique and added that the survey reflects all the worst vices of “film students and Criterion Channel junkies… Good Lord, the world is much bigger.” On the other hand, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody praised the survey: “Despite regrettable absences (Cassavetes, for example)… [the survey] provides a more lucid view of film history.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that anything too serious has happened,” notes Josetxo Cerdán, director of Filmoteca Española, the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s film institute. “The silent films that have fallen off the list are An Andalusian Dog, Intolerance and Beyond the Dreams of Avarice. In these times, the absence of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance is understandable.” Just as Leni Riefenstahl’s enormous influence on cinema has been overshadowed by her affiliation with the Nazis, “Griffith’s racism has also impugned his place in the canon,” said Cerdán. He also thinks that including any recent film is highly questionable. “We need time to reflect and decide which films have lasting value and which ones don’t. To me, what is more indicative of the shifting perceptions of cinema is that Scorsese’s Goodfellas replaced his Raging Bull on the list, because Goodfellas is much more firmly embedded in the postmodern tradition.”

Manuel Asín, the artistic director for the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival (Pamplona, Spain), says the diversity represented in the top 100 list is a sign that people are more knowledgeable about cinema. “Contemporary films incorporate more and more influences from the films from the past,” said Asín. The internet provides neutral and open access to the history of cinema, which has brought many forgotten gems to the forefront of best-film lists. “It will be interesting to get the detailed voting results to see which films just missed making the top 100, understand the general trends, and see how experimental cinema fared in the overall survey,” said Asín.

Mexican critic Fernanda Solórzano admits to having mixed feelings about lists that produce what she calls unnecessary controversies. “I understand that these lists are intended to be fun and provocative, but I don’t know if all this effort to establish a cinematic canon is worthwhile, even if the goal is just to shake things up. I think the laudable inclusion of more women voters undoubtedly influenced the outcome. As a female critic, it goes without saying that I’m glad to see many more women directors on the list. But as a voter, it puts me between a rock and a hard place. I didn’t vote for any of them [the women], which doesn’t mean that I’m not in favor of increasing awareness of their work. Had I known that the objective was to unearth underrated masterpieces directed by women, I would have voted for La ciénaga (or, The Swamp) by Lucrecia Martel.”

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Bright Visions on Display in Shorter's Night Dreamer

Speaking about Wayne Shorter's Night Dreamer album from 1964 the London Jazz Collector:

Shorter shook off his five year apprenticeship with The Jazz Messengers, having set out his stall with some tentative VeeJay albums, now embarked on his own Maiden Voyage as a Blue Note leader, a trajectory that would earn him a place in Davis second quintet, and a bigger place in the canon of Modern Jazz

You might think a first title for Blue Note Shorter would look to showcase his Coltrane-like instrumental virtuosity and improvising skills. Instead, Shorter sets out a different stall, an original composer/ensemble. The bold musical vision presented In Night Dreamer is almost a genre in its own right – not bop not yet post-bop, but bop in transition.

Shorter’s compositions are harmonic explorations outside the bebop idiom, with extended melodic lines, avoiding predictable standard forms. Spare tunes of restrained simplicity, slowly unfold, drifting towards abstraction.  You don’t listen, dance and tap your feet to a Shorter composition, so much as absorb it through the skin.

This languorous soundscape of  varying moods and tempos  is populated with bravura  solo flights. Lee Morgan, represents Messengers continuity, throws in hot pepper driving brass figures, while Shorter sour lower register and angle-grinder burr moves like slow fire, crowned with eagle squawks. Coltrane is never far away, but the voice is his own. The most lyrical is McCoy Tyner, who holds everything together on a misty spiders web of rippling arpeggios and accents.

This is perfect night music. City lights twinkling in the distance, pour yourself a glass of your choice,  settle down on the sofa, wash away the tribulations of the day, and lose yourself in this gorgeous music.

Some Recent Photos

Since I traveled to Barcelona I was not able to post with as much frequency-but here is stuff I saw:

Vallejo Nocturno 2023 -Scenes in February