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

Digitized Finds

For Christmas my daughter got me a new scanner. A Plustek OpticFilm 8200 that is small and portable. I can recommend it highly as it makes the scanning task easier and faster than the traditional Empson scanners that can do negatives (both large and small) and also actual photos. The Plustek handles negatives and slides. Here are my initial scans.

Vallejo Nocturno 2024 -Copyright

Best Music of 2023- Gwen Cahue & Babtiste Bailly

 

Surprisingly I had never heard of this talented duo and it appears from what I could find on the Internet neither has the majority of the world. No reviews are available in English though there ,ight be one behind a French paywall. But perhaps, I so much hope so,  that will change as their music has a popular appeal that a lot of my annual selections do not. Comprised of classical and jazzy components the execution of this music is precise and flawless and the "tunes" are very attractive to both to young and old. It's appeal may be that it's difficult to categorize it with some of piano descending from a Keith Jarrett vein and the guitar has some Gypsy jazz components but that would be putting them in a box that they ultimately do not inhabit. I'm hoping that more comes from this duo but if not each has a wonderful cache of excellent music with other musicians. I really like this stuff. A fabulous find!

 

The Death of Two Writers

 

From the Cleveland Review of Books, I came to McCarthy in the 90s and Glück much more recently around 2019 and I consider both to be long distance runners who will finish ahead of others:

It’s bizarre to discover that someone you believe you’ve buried, or at least consciously half-written off, can prove to have been one of the vital forces underneath the passion in your life. We may try to quash that once potent growth out, but it remains rooted, never to be questioned. A life is built on the lives before it. Ultimately, at the end of the act, we can’t fool anyone, and the most distant stranger can instantly perceive whom we revere, no matter how hard we try to hide them. If I’ve gone away from Louise Glück in recent years, I have also always carried her writing and her voice within me.

The most renowned US novelist and US poet have died, within four months of each other and in the same year—Cormac McCarthy and Louise Glück. Others will dispute those designations, but I believe their international reputations merit such titles. Both were writers of lament, and both returned to the words “earth,” “planet,” and “abyss” in trying to explicate some foremost feeling inside about living and dying, the cycle of life. I had thought to summon something on McCarthy in the weeks following his death, but as the summer days wore on, the passion proved not to be there. I found I’d somehow already said all I needed to about his work in an essay on Anthony Mann. The question of violence can go only so far, and for that we turn to McCarthy for his early work, primarily up to Blood Meridian, reading for his strange torques of syntax and gothic descriptions; the dialogue makes us laugh, but the over-reliance on it in the last books lends an unliterary twang to his orchestration. We hear a lot as if in a play, but we are in a book—an odd disjunction. If I’d written about the personal effect McCarthy had on me, I would have described how certain artists serve as markers in one’s life: their art measures time and colors our moments, so we live the art as we simultaneously live the life, as per Pater and Proust.

By chance, Glück came into my life at the same moment McCarthy did, around 2002. I didn’t really know what a poem was back then—and now I’m still not sure what poetry is or how to describe it sufficiently for another person to stop their self-chatter and feel the sound of my heart. I treated poems more as bulletins or flyers—as moments of written time bearing the long strain of hours in creation though devoured in a matter of minutes—to impress upon another person my seriousness, or to set a tone, a mood, maybe take us to another realm. All of that would change when I encountered Wallace Stevens, a poet who similarly startled Glück, who wrote, “It never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to write poetry until I read Wallace Stevens.”

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Best Music of 2023- Rajna Swaminathan

 

A testament of how music is ultimately a single language that transcends many of the cultural boundaries imposed by other forms of communication. A true unification of styles, yet i sense there is lots of room for improvisation at the time of performance. This music deserves more attention.

From Harvard Gazette:

Another reason that Swaminathan came to Harvard was Professor Vijay Iyer. She had first met the MacArthur “genius grant” winner when she was 8 years old and Iyer was collaborating on a project with her old teacher, Sivaraman. The two reconnected when Swaminathan was in college. After Iyer founded the Department of Music’s Program in Creative Practice in Critical Inquiry, Swaminathan became its first student.

“It’s been a unique opportunity to balance between research — the history and theory — and the actual practice. I can ask a question, do the reading, and then the answer can be found somewhere in the music. It’s a constant back and forth of experimentation and reading and trying new things. That’s been the process for me over the past six years.”

Iyer calls Swaminathan “a groundbreaking 21st-century composer-performer and thinker.” He says that one of the things that makes her music so exceptional is the way it reaches out from its south Indian foundation to engage with other forms, such as jazz and Black American experimental music, and to move beyond traditional categories.

“Rajna is creating a body of original, innovative, stirring work that extends and complicates the traditions she carries, imagining new possibilities for community, ethics, and collective creation,” he says. “From her unique vantage as a South Asian/American queer experimental composer-performer, Rajna is creating exquisitely imagined, beautifully executed music that transcends classification.”

With Swaminathan in the vanguard, the program has grown and shifted, embracing live performance and developing a rich culture of collaboration and improvisation that includes students at the College, GSAS, and faculty as well. Outside of Harvard, however, she has faced challenges. The mrudangam has traditionally been an instrument for men in Indian culture. Female virtuosos like Swaminathan are rare. Throughout her life, she’s had to deal with gendered expectations and assumptions about whether women had the strength and stamina to play the drum — and whether it is culturally appropriate for them to do so.

“In India, there are layers of ideas about gender and caste purity when you’re dealing with an instrument that is made in part of cowhide,” she says. “It’s a very deep and complicated story. Some people say that drumming has an association with healing traditions and as we’ve come into modern society, that power to heal through rhythm has been taken away from women.”

 

Tolerating Corruption

 

From The Atlantic  :

Meanwhile, House Democrats on Thursday released a report detailing how former President Donald Trump received, and then tried to hide, millions in payments from America’s foreign adversaries. Unlike in the impeachment inquiry, which is premised on a suspicion that Republicans hope will turn up evidence, the receipts are here.

“President Trump’s businesses received, at a minimum, $7.8 million in foreign

payments from at least 20 countries during his presidency,” the report finds. “These included payments from foreign governments and foreign government–owned or –controlled entities to properties owned by Donald Trump,” including hotels and office buildings. And the report notes that other payments may exist to other Trump-related entities that didn’t show up in the investigation.

The contrast between the wisps of smoke in the Biden investigation and the torrid flames of the Trump case is a reminder that although Trump has been a major driver of the impeachment inquiry into Biden, his own behavior on any given question is usually worse than his adversaries’. Not only is there always a tweet; there’s usually a scandal.

“Many reports get published in Congress every year and sink into oblivion, but this one is unlikely to disappear,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, wrote in a foreword. This is optimistic. The report made much less of a splash on its release than it should have, for predictable reasons: Trump-loving audiences simply ignore it or rationalize it, while Trump-skeptical ones have long assumed that he’s on the take.

The saga of the foreign payments is a good case study in how Trump has taught Americans to tolerate brazen corruption—so long as it’s his. To do this, Trump relies on two tactics. First, he does much of it out in the open, recognizing that voters tend to assume that only hidden deeds are nefarious. Second, he finds ways to slow-walk the release of the most damaging information, so that by the time the full picture is clear, the public has become almost inoculated—as though it had been out in the open all along.

The present report stems from Democrats’ allegation that Trump was violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars the president from receiving money from foreign governments. In some ways, Trump’s intention to violate the ban was clear from the start. Before taking office, he announced that he would not take any meaningful steps to prevent financial conflicts of interest. His hotel in Washington promptly became a see-and-be-seen-running-up-expense-accounts magnet for both Republicans and foreign governments. But spotting an apparent emoluments-clause violation and punishing it are two different things. In summer 2017, House Democrats sued Trump for violating the law, but their suit was stalled and eventually tossed for lack of standing.

After Democrats won the House majority in 2018, they quickly moved to flex their oversight powers on the issue. They subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, in April 2019, but Trump engaged in a long legal effort to prevent Mazars from handing over documents. He lost repeatedly, including at the Supreme Court in 2020, before an agreement was finally reached in September 2022 to provide documents to Congress. Two months later, Republicans won control of the House, and once in power began unwinding the agreement. Still, Democrats were able to obtain some documents, on which this report is based.

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Best Music of 2023- Ben Wolfe

An accomplished set of music by one of jazz's best kept secrets. Wolf works with a group of impeccable musicians to produce one of 2023's best jazz albums. But this is also a great gateway to his past recordings which are solid in every which way. You can't go wrong here.

From Downbeat:

The third in a trilogy of albums that bass-
ist-composer Wolfe recorded in 2021 during
three two-day blocks in the studio with mul-
tiple ensembles, Unjust is a brilliant work of
melodic ensemble writing and superb playing
by a stellar intergenerational crew. Things kick
off in high-flying fashion with "The Heckler,"
an uptempo number that has trumpeter
Nicholas Payton and alto saxophonist
Immanuel Wilkins taking turns wailing
against a frenet-
ic pulse laid down by drummer Aaron Kimmel
and the leader. Vibraphonist Joel Ross' mini-
malist comping creates an ethereal presence in
contrast to the runaway bum here. The loping
and moody "Hats Off To Rebay" has Ross and
Wilkins uniting on a tight, angular head, à la
Eric Dolphy's "Out To Lunch," before launch-
ing into individual riveting solos.
"Lullaby In D" is a gorgeous, affecting bal-
lad that showcases rising star tenor saxophonist
Nicole Glover, who brings a luxurious, breathy
quality that belies her young age; more Ben
Webster than Michael Brecker. The tasty medi-
um-tempo swinger "Bob French" finds the
ensemble in a relaxed groove paced by Wolfe's
solidly walking bass lines and inspired soloing
from Glover and Payton, who engage in blister-
ing exchanges at the tag. "The Corridor," show-
casing Ross' vibes, and a rare solo turn from
the bassist-leader. The angular "Mask Man"
and Monkish title track, put Payton and Glover
on the front line before freewheeling solos, are
more proof of this modernist ensemble's unity
and urge to swing.

 

From The Big TakeOver:

A bassist and composer of some twenty-five years’ standing, Ben Wolfe has attracted as much acclaim for his compositions as for his playing, with a career in chamber music alongside his jazz work. His tenth album, Unjust puts the spotlight firmly on improvisation, gathering a passel of like-minded colleagues (pianists Orrin Evans and Addison Frei, saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins and Nicole Glover, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, drummer Aaron Kimmel, vibraphonist Joel Ross) to bring his sketches to vibrant life. The first four tracks give an indication of the breadth and depth on display here: the bluesy grind of “The Heckler” (starring Wilkins’ and Payton’s growling conversation), the frenetic postbop of “Hats Off to Rebay” (which lets Wilkins off the leash), the creamy ballad “Lullaby in D” (a showcase for tight ensemble work) and the swinging hard bop of “Bob French” (featuring Glover’s soulful soloing). Wolfe and company shift back and forth between those moves, whether it’s bluesy bop or gorgeous poesy or barely tethered expression, and prove themselves expert practitioners of all of it. If you need a straight shot of pure jazz, Unjust is the highest quality stuff on the shelf.

 

 

Visual Evidence

 

From an interview with Dr. Jennifer Good at Interloper, a Substack account on photography by Alice Zoo:

AZ: Is it accurate to say that news is more visual now than it ever has been? And if so, what does that mean? Does it make it more immediate, more accessible? And what are some of the issues with consuming news via an image-led platform like Instagram, whose algorithm prioritises visual (as opposed to text-based) content?

JG: Actually, there is precedent for this. Life magazine, for a long time many people’s main source of news, was highly unusual when it began, as a distinctly image-led platform in which words took second place, not only in terms of the amount of space they took up, but in the sense that photographers and their images led the stories and dictated the balance of news values. And in a further parallel with Instagram, words became relegated to the status of captions and description. Opinion differs, of course, as to whether that was a good or a bad thing, but in my view it makes sense that this kind of news consumption exists in an ecosystem, alongside other platforms that give words the prominence and space that they need. 

To me, the biggest shift characterising Instagram and other social media platforms is not the prevalence of images over words, but the increasing prevalence of moving images over still ones. This shift, psychically speaking for viewers, is profound. In my current work, I’m preoccupied with still photography’s ‘fixity’; its inherent propensity to distance and to master, which is potentially disrupted by the moving image. But I also know that moving images have a greater power to traumatise, especially when they come to us unbidden, confronting us with horror that we cannot hold metaphorically at arms in length in the way we can with a frozen, stilled image.  

For previous generations of news consumers, photographs tended to reach us after a time lag, presenting a stilled version of a past moment, and so offering a much more stable form of engagement with violence. Now, they come immediately or even in real time, unfiltered, unedited, often with video first and stills afterwards. Crucially, when images come before the words that explain them, we have no frame of reference, no warning. The key question is not which historical period was the more visual, but rather this temporal dislocation: how time works in each. This is a difference that photography theory — even psychoanalytic theory — is not well equipped to understand. 

AZ: Obviously another major difference is the proportion of footage that comes to us from civilians on the ground, filming on their phones, as opposed to images that come to us from professional photojournalists with backing from press organisations, conflict training, and professional equipment. What kinds of new advantages and/or problems does this pose? 

I feel that in some ways the immediacy and rawness of citizen journalism seems ‘truer’ — not least because there isn’t a team of people deciding whether to go ahead and publish it or not, so it’s less mediated by multiple voices and agendas — but what do professional photojournalists provide that civilian images don’t? And how do ethical questions around images of war change given the far shorter distance between photographer and subject?

JG: For some time now, the only photographs coming to us out of Gaza have been from those already living in or based there, including professional Palestinian photographers. As in any war zone there is a mix of professional and amateur, but considering how compromised the area is in terms of internet connection and electricity, and the conditions under which these local photographers are working, many of the images are really striking in their compositional effectiveness. As a teacher, I spend a lot of time talking about the aestheticisation-of-suffering critique: the idea (originating in the 1980s, with some quite ferocious critics like Martha Rosler) that there is a disingenuousness to photography that creates visually pleasing depictions of war and suffering, flattening its complexity into an arrangement that serves to soothe rather than challenge the viewer. But in the past few weeks I’ve noticed in my own media consumption a softening of this view. I’ve found myself avoiding certain social media feeds where I know I’m likely to encounter a lot of citizen photojournalism — vital as it is — and instead kept to more mainstream sites carrying professional imagery, because in general I know that these images will convey the horror in a form that is literally easier to look at. It’s my way of ensuring that I’m able to stay informed, to not look away. But this is an ethical compromise: it’s a great privilege to choose to see ‘easier’ images of war.

I also know that, although not perfect, information from mainstream sources is more likely to have been factchecked. If my priority was getting news immediately, as quickly as possible, I’d be looking to different feeds and platforms. But personally, I would rather wait a beat, and know that the reporter had waited a beat; to get my news at a two-hour or even a two-day remove.