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

The Winogrand Problem

From Gery Badger write ASX:

At his death in March 1984, Winogrand left some 2,500 rolls of film unprocessed. When John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art in New York came to plan a major Winogrand memorial exhibition, he and his colleagues were faced with the daunting task of sifting through in excess of 300,000 images left unedited by the photographer. Such unbridled profligacy prompts a question, and points to the existence of what one might term the ‘Winogrand Problem.’ For that matter, it perhaps raises uncomfortable questions about the problem of photography in general.

Photographers all too frequently make pictures so conceptually casual and brainlessly superficial that their minimal meaning is exhausted at a glance. A great deal of film is wasted by even the best photographers, and almost criminally squandered by the bad and the mediocre. Garry Winogrand, however, was hardly mindless. He possessed one of the most acute of photographic intelligences, and the best of his pictures exhibit a truly virtuoso use of the 35mm camera, demonstrating a Rabelaesian formal energy that seldom has been equalled. Yet can we say that, if not mindless, much of the gargantuan amount of film he exposed was to somewhat meaningless effect? Did all this exuberant pointing of the camera, this machine gun clicking of the shutter on more than half-a-million occasions, have meaning, or enough meaning beyond a kind of automatic writing, a stream of consciousness tracing of fleeting sense impressions? This is the primary question that would seem to nag at John Szarkowski (in top authorial form) in his profound, disturbing, and moving essay to Figments From the Real World,3 the monograph accompanying MOMA’s retrospective tribute to one of the figures specifically nurtured by the museum’s photography department in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It may be remembered that Szarkowski performed a similar memorialising function for another leading protegé, Diane Arbus, some dozen years or so earlier.4 Then, he was able to organise a brilliantly cogent overview of the photographer’s work. But Winogrand, so much broader in scope as well as so prolific, could not be rounded off so neatly. Despite external problems caused by her choice of subject-matter, Arbus worked within a relatively narrow, familiar photographic framework. Winogrand was by far the more puzzling, enigmatic, and genuinely ‘difficult’ photographer.

The work that clearly bothers Szarkowski emanates mainly from the vast amount of film shot by Winogrand in his latter years and left in an unedited state. The bulk of it was shot in Austin and Los Angeles, the photographer’s last two cities of residence. Faced by this accumulation of material, Szarkowski seems bemused by such first hand evidence of Winogrand’s wayward profligacy, and positively frustrated by the fact that no discernible grand theme emerges from the mass. Much of this late output seems aimless and repetitive, the photographer operating almost on automatic pilot, one might say. Reading between the lines of his essay, I feel that Szarkowski is troubled because photography itself might be implicated as much as a burnt-out, unhappy Winogrand, forcing himself to function in cities where clearly he did not feel at home, in contrast to the well remembered sidewalks of New York. Having proclaimed Winogrand as photography’s leading light for over twenty years, it must have been painful for Szarkowski to admit the following:

‘. . . it seems to me that Winogrand was at the end of a creative impulse out of control, and on some days a habit without an impulse, one who continued to work, after a fashion, like an overheated engine that will not stop even after the key has been turned off.’5

Occasionally, Szarkowski notes, Winogrand dragged himself back to something like his old form, but would seem to have gone beyond the usual artistic process of attempting to make ‘good’ pictures, impelled on a largely aimless course that was compulsively awful but nevertheless fascinating, like a slow motion nervous breakdown:

‘Yet to a biographer the most compelling of the late work would perhaps not be the work of the good days – work with which we are relatively familiar – but the doggedly repetitive, absent minded, oddly ruminative work of the other days.’6

The familiar work of the ‘good’ days – a ‘good Winogrand’, in other words – presupposes a lightning fast, usually candid street shot, a fusing of disparate visual elements into a characteristically choreographed melange of some complexity. This image cannot be foreseen. The motifs gathered together by the camera do not exist prior to their presentation in the frame, and they do not exist afterwards. They are sensed, felt . . . divined subliminally by the photographer and plucked, just as subliminally, out of a flux of shifting visual sensation. Their only existence, their reality, is the picture. Then, as the New York critic Max Kozloff has written, that piece of sensation so intuitively frozen can hopefully be assigned a useful role within the realm of culture – a meaning:

‘To be swayed by photography, it must create a dialogue, that is, enter culture and be assigned mutually enhancing relationships with its own kind. That desirable state, for all serious photographers, is embodied in the problem of recurrence, of recurrent imagery.’7

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The Photography of Rinko Kawauchi

Some spirited photography from Rinko Kawauchi-check out his works at his site.

Photos of Rinko Kawauchi

Microscopic Listening

From Fred Thomas' essay on Joao Gilberto's artistry:

My proposition is that what João didn’t do is at least as important, if not more important, than what he did do. His artistry is best understood in terms of the strict limits he imposed on himself and the soaring freedom he attained within them. João is the ultimate archetype of this time-honoured paradox. His musical process involved a search for what he called “the simple truth”. With his recordings and live concerts as our deep listening guide, we will try to find out what his truth means.

With a tenacity bordering on obsessive-compulsive, João delineated his stylistic perimeters, rejecting many of the characteristics most commonplace in music for voice and guitar. Through sheer stubbornness, he managed to set up an enclosed and rule-based system that nevertheless cultivates a specific kind of infinite freedom of phrasing. Beneath their surface layer of simplicity, his recordings are intricate, elusive and, above all, subtle. In other words, João unearthed the holy grail of music making: the transformation of extreme complexity into sounds that are simple, relaxed and clear. Sounds that just float into our minds.

João’s musical style balances exquisitely at the edge of a precipice: just a hint of lush orchestration plunges it into an abyss of queijo. On richly orchestrated and over-produced albums such as “João” and “Amoroso”, arrangers lead us by their grubby hands straight into the elevator: a sublime Japanese ink-drawing transformed into a sicky oil painting hung on a hotel room wall. To those who associate João with easy listening, I simply say, “your listening is too easy, try harder”. His musical essence is minimalist, single-minded, rigorous, unsentimental and child-like: “maybe I would like to go back to when I was a boy,” he said. “After that I learned too many things, and they came out in my music. So now I refine and refine until I can get back to the simple truth. Like when I was a boy”. 

Instrumentation and Repertoire

Within João’s earliest work there are many exceptions to the claims set out below. But I’m going to be dealing with his mature solo albums: “JoãoVoz e Violão”, “In Tokyo”, “Live in Montreux”, “Live at Umbria Jazz” and “Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar”. To my taste, as soon as other instruments were added to his voice and guitar, the music very quickly got worse. My one exception to this rule are Sonny Carr’s narcotic hi-hats on the 1973 album “João Gilberto”, often referred to as the white album (which I will therefore add to my list). By purging everything from his percussion set except these essential hi-hats, Carr mirrors João’s stripped back musical proposition, blending perfectly with the guitar meanwhile. Whether it was Carr, producer Rachel Elkind or João himself who took this radical instrumental decision, it was a masterstroke that lends this hugely influential album its uniquely soporific atmosphere. 

Apart from the odd song in Spanish (“Besame Mucho”), Italian (“Estate”), English (“’S Wonderful”), French (“Que Reste-T-Il De Nos Amours”) and the few pieces he composed himself such as “Bim Bom” and “Hô-bá-lá-lá“, João’s huge repertoire derived from three essential Brazilian sources. Having started his career as a drummer in Bahia, João broke through showcasing the radical songs of Tom Jobim/Vinicius de Moraes and other late ‘50s composers, before going on to combine these Bossa Novas with older tunes by composers such as Ary Barroso, Denis Brean and Dorival Caymmi, excavated from the forgotten past. To complete the triangle, the Tropicália movement from the late ‘60s and ‘70s – founded by young apostles such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil  – provided João with the likes of “Coracão Vagabundo”, “Menino do Rio” and “Sampa”. To this extent, João encompasses the past, present and future. Yet it is remarkable that, filtered through his ultra-fine stylistic sieve, every song he interpreted sounded fundamentally the same. And I mean that as a great compliment. In precisely that way, João is a true minimalist.

Until his last performance in 2008, João continued to play the same hit songs. This insistence was not only generosity to his audience, always gagging for yet another version of “Desafinado”. It also speaks to the sense that, as in jazz, the process was more important and more interesting than the content. During the performance of a song, João would often repeat it over and over, more times than the average listener with limited concentration considered reasonable. Yet each round was phrased uniquely. His search for perfection was obsessive, devotional even; he could repeat forever without repeating himself. “Fazendo sempre a mesma coisa que nunca é a mesma” – always doing the same thing that’s never the same, said Caetano Veloso.“Refine and refine”, even within a six-minute song. 

Matthew Finn's Excellent Photography

I was just introduced to this photographer from the UK that captures a familiar sensibility with true artistic skill. Here are some of Matthew Finn's photograph's and a link to his website and a fabulous interview at A Small Voice, Ben Smith's podcast of interviews with photographers.

Matthew Finn from his Mother "project"

Here is a link to his website:  Matthew Finn

Here is a link to an interview at the always excellent A Small Voice, Ben Smith's Podcast with photographers.

15 Question Interview with Tomas Phillips

 

Words On Music · TOMAS PHILLIPS + MARIHIKO HARA - Prosa

 

From 15 Questions, an interview with sound composer, novelist, etc.:

How do you feel your sense of identity influences your creativity?

My sense of identity has certainly changed over the years. There was a time when identity and the creative act were inextricable in my case. Even as I embraced a minimalist sensibility that ostensibly influenced my sense of self, I took great pleasure in identifying with the role of specialized artist.

For the most part, I’ve been able to distance myself from this perspective and now reserve pleasure for the creative act alone. The latter is always better, more profound, innovative, enriching, when stripped of the personality that would grasp at self-expression and recognition, in my experience.  
 
What were your main creative challenges in the beginning and how have they changed over time?

This really takes me back to the earlier question regarding imitation. The central challenge was alleviating that impulse. On the other hand, it’s useful to have a notion that what you’re doing will go somewhere, find some kind of audience, no matter how small or large, to feel oneself part of a community. That took time, particularly given that what I was doing tended to be quite marginal, which is still generally the case.

Having come from an early 80s punk scene, of course, went a great distance in affirming the value of community and transgressive artistic practices.

How do you see the relationship between style, form, plot and storytelling – and how would you rate their importance for you, respectively?

The first two of these are inevitable, one way or another, while the latter two are common but inessential. Even when I’m working with relatively conventional literary devices or meolodies, form is always at the forefront of my process.

What I find most exciting about writing or composing along the lines of convention is, first, learning how to do that, and then subverting it enough to make it interesting. Telling a story the plot of which is more accessible than the work of the nouveau roman writers, for example, is difficult, though the difficulty lies not simply in reporting events but in marrying clarity and ingenuity. Moreover, I’m usually prone to some level of artistic provocation, form being a perfect medium for that in light of how attached many people are to convention in this regard.

Observation and research are often quoted as important elements of the writing process. Can you tell us a bit about your perspective on them?

It really depends on the project. I’ve done a great deal of research about places, customs, classical composers, historical moments, to help inform certain narrative events. Because I’m an academic, it’s a familiar, mostly enjoyable process. As for observation, I jot things down on occasion, when something strikes me as especially amusing, remarkable, or disturbing. They’re both necessary in the right context.

How do you see the relationship between conscious planning and tapping into the subconscious; between improvisation and composition? When dealing with the end of a story, for example, do you tend to minutely map it out or follow the logic of the narrative as it unfolds itself?

It’s the same between music and writing for me: there’s always a balance there. For a novel, I make notes but never too far in advance of where I am in the writing. Certainly ideas will occur as to a conclusion or other key events, and those are recorded, though I write better, more fluidly, when I’m allowing it to happen, as opposed to imposing too rigid a frame.

Teaching is identical to this, at least when leading a seminar. It’s critical to let other voices enter, work off and through them. With writing, those voices may be your own, but they’re true to the immediate operation rather than a fixed idea or mode.

 

The Mental Health of our Courts

 

The problem with today, from the Intercept:

After the plea, Harmony spoke up, according to the court transcript.

THE DEFENDANT: Can I ask you something?

THE COURT: Yes.

THE DEFENDANT: Can I ask you something? I know that you the judge and lawyer — judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: What was your question?

THE DEFENDANT: Judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: Judge, lawyer does what now?

THE DEFENDANT: I said judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: What about the case being dismissed? I don’t understand your question.

THE DEFENDANT: I said help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: You want the case to be dismissed?

THE DEFENDANT: I said, I’m telling you all four names, four names y’all said. I’m telling you four names: Judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: Okay.

THE DEFENDANT: I said that’s what I wanted to tell you.

THE COURT: You wanted to tell me to dismiss the case?

THE DEFENDANT: Huh-uh. I had wanted to tell you that.

DEPUTY: I’m sorry. Is she in court right now?

THE COURT: Yes.

THE DEFENDANT: Yeah, I’m in court.

THE COURT: But I can’t understand what she’s saying. Judge, lawyer, help —

THE DEFENDANT: I said I had wanted to tell you something. That’s all I wanted to tell you.

DEPUTY: She just wanted to tell you those words.

THE DEFENDANT: I had wanted to tell you something.

THE COURT: Okay. You wanted to tell me judge, lawyer, case dismissed?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

THE COURT: Okay. But you told me earlier that you wanted to plead guilty to the charges.

THE DEFENDANT: Yeah. I said — I just said that — really I took my time served. But I just said case dismissed. Other than saying time served, I said case dismissed.

THE COURT: Okay. Well, I can’t dismiss the charges because the State is going forward. The prosecution is moving forward with this case. And that’s why you have an option of pleading guilty or going to a jury trial. And you told me that you wished to plead guilty.

DEPUTY BELL: I think she was trying to tell you she knows those words.

THE DEFENDANT: I said, can I — can I ask you this? Can y’all give me time served?

DEPUTY BELL: She’s trying to tell you she knows those words.

THE COURT: I did give you time served. I sentenced you to five years on —

THE DEFENDANT: I thought Eddy Cossio —

THE COURT: I sentenced you to five years on probation and the jail time that I ordered that you have to serve I’m giving you credit for time served. Now, where do you —

THE DEFENDANT: Okay. Okay.

Harmony told the court she was homeless. The court instructed probation to send her to the Rainbow Community Shelter in Covington because her uncle would no longer take her in. (I have been unable to locate her uncle.) Three days later, the shelter kicked her out for misbehavior, and she found her way back to a downtown Atlanta street corner.

Some shots from Fall

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- Fall Excursions

 

It's been different this fall. We are vaccinated and have greater confidence that we will not die by accident. Instead our fears continue to be a country whose third of the population is actively working to disrupt the traditional democratic election. We have seen this movie many times in Latin America and it has a rotten taste. So we walk during the day to remind us of the other things in life. Lucky us.

Interview with Photographer Ron Jude

Interview with photographer Ron Jude at American Suburb X:

Carl Fuldner: There’s a curious sense of time and place reflected in these works that seems to operate beyond a human framework. It brings to mind ‘deep time,’ a concept attributed to the 18th-century Scottish geologist James Hutton to describe a timescale reflected in sedimentary rock formations that lies beyond human apprehension. Likewise, the end matter mentions that you made these works over the last four years in four U.S. states (Oregon, California, New Mexico, Hawaii) and Iceland, but those place markers are notably omitted from the inventory of works. The implication seems to be that such geographic designations cease to hold their significance deep within a lava tube or on the edge of a cataract. How have place and time factored into your thinking about this work?

Ron Jude: Your take on the omission of named territories is on target with what I had in mind with the index. I thought it would be useful for the reader to be able to reference the various phenomena depicted in the photographs, but counterproductive to the spirit of the piece to locate the images within the framework of mapping, which carries with it the tangled nature of the human endeavor and our impulse to lay claim to things.

The role of ‘place’ and the narrative baggage it brings to photographs has been something I’ve explored routinely in my work. In Alpine Star, Emmett, and Lick Creek Line, place figures as an essential element of the narratives we construct around lived experience. In work like Executive Model and Other Nature, on the other hand, place is used in an intentionally overstated way. In these works place assumes an implicit authority that collapses under its own weight and can’t be fulfilled. This ultimately undermines the meaning and value of place within the work, calling into question the usefulness of some of the basic documentary-grounded assumptions we have about notions such as ‘place.’ For 12 Hz I intentionally avoided references to place, not wanting to tether the individual images to mappable ‘locations,’ for the reasons stated above.

Time is also something I’ve thought about frequently in my work, typically as it relates to the fallible, slippery nature of human memory and cognition. When I set out to make work that considered forces that fall outside of human experience, however, it made sense to dig into the idea of ‘deep time’ and contemplate a scale that lies beyond our perception. The end result, I hope, is a look at the raw materials of the planet in a way that considers time on a completely different scale and leads to a rediscovery of a sense of awe. So yes, diminishing the prevailing sense of self-importance we share as a species through suggestions of deep time was definitely one of the aspirations I had in mind for the photographs.

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Seizure, Exhaustion and Partial Abandonment

 

George Mombiot on our current predicament with a system run by very rich people:

Whenever there’s a leak of documents from the remote islands and obscure jurisdictions where rich people hide their money, like this week’s release of the Pandora papers, we ask ourselves how such things could happen. How did we end up with a global system that enables great wealth to be transferred offshore, untaxed and hidden from public view? Politicians condemn it as “the unacceptable face of capitalism”. But it’s not. It’s the face of capitalism.

Capitalism was arguably born on a remote island. A few decades after the Portuguese colonised Madeira, in 1420, they developed a system that differed in some respects from anything that had gone before. By felling the forests after which they named the island (madeira is Portuguese for wood), they created, in this uninhabited sphere, a blank slate – a terra nullius – in which a new economy could be built. Financed by bankers in Genoa and Flanders, they transported slaves from Africa to plant and process sugar. They developed an economy in which land, labour and money lost their prior social meaning and became tradable commodities.

As the geographer Jason Moore points out in the journal Review, a small amount of capital could be used, in these circumstances, to grab a vast amount of natural wealth. On Madeira’s rich soil, using the abundant wood as fuel, slave labour achieved a previously unimaginable productivity. In the 1470s, this tiny island became the world’s biggest producer of sugar.

Madeira’s economy had another characteristic, that also distinguished it from what had gone before: the astonishing speed with which it worked through the island’s natural wealth. Sugar production peaked in 1506. By 1525, it had fallen by almost 80%. The major reason, Moore believes, was the exhaustion of accessible supplies of wood: Madeira ran out of madeira. Sixty kilogrammes of wood were needed to refine one kilogramme of sugar. As wood had to be cut from ever steeper and more remote parts of the island, more slave labour was needed to produce the same amount of sugar. In other words, the productivity of labour collapsed, falling roughly fourfold in 20 years. Around the same time, the forest clearing drove several endemic species to extinction.

In what was to become the classic boom-bust-quit cycle of capitalism, the Portuguese shifted their capital to new frontiers: establishing sugar plantations first on São Tomé, then in Brazil, then in the Caribbean, in each case depleting resources before moving on. As Moore points out, the seizure, exhaustion and partial abandonment of new geographical frontiers is central to the model of accumulation we call capitalism. Ecological and productivity crises like Madeira’s are not perverse outcomes of the system. They are the system.

Madeira soon moved on to other commodities, principally wine. It should come as no surprise that the island is now accused of functioning as a tax haven, and was mentioned in this week’s reporting of the Pandora papers. What else is an ecologically-exhausted island, whose economy depended on looting, to do?

What is Bomba

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- Bomba en Loiza

From a three year old article in the NYT on Bomba:

For generations of Afro-Boricua workers and families, bomba has remained central to community, with the drum acting as an instrument of political power, entertainment and spiritual release. Some may even call bomba the soundtrack of Puerto Rican resistance. At this year’s May Day march in San Juan, its lyrics and drumbeats echoed through the crowds airing their opposition to austerity measures, including school closures and university tuition hikes, before police fired pepper spray and tear gas to end the protest.

Bomba’s resilient spirit has become more pronounced in the face of the island’s economic crisis and the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria.

At La Terraza de Bonanza, any given bomba night is bound to be packed with young people. Some dance with exaggerated technique, their faces pinched tight with discipline. Traditionalists flick a fan or a skirt to mark their control over the physical space. Others are more avant-garde and incorporate acrobatic moves, or an arrhythmic dance known as flossing.

These nights began with just a few friends getting together to play drums, said Otura Mun, the frontman of the Afro-Caribbean electronic band ÌFÉ, and grew through social media and word of mouth. Attendance really swelled after Hurricane Maria in September 2017; because Bonanza had a generator still on hand from Hurricane Irma, the no-frills, open-air bar was one of few places in the neighborhood with power. It opened for business just two days after the storm.

The resurgence of bomba owes something to formal experimentation. La Tribu de Abrante, a high-energy, 12-piece fusion orchestra, has blended the sounds of bomba with reggaeton, reggae and hip-hop. The openness to new sounds has helped expand bomba’s audience locally, through live performance and radio, and globally, by associating it with popular genres.

“When I traveled to other countries, people would say reggaeton is the traditional music of Puerto Rico,” recalled Hiram Abrante, the band’s frontman, who is from Loíza. “I’d say, ‘What? It’s bomba.’”

His goal has always been to make bomba more accessible to listeners around the world while maintaining respect for its traditions and history. At the recent Festival del Apio in Barranquitas, Mr. Abrante acknowledged bomba’s heritage by closing La Tribu’s set with a salute to two of San Juan’s oldest bomba families: the Cepedas and the Ayalas.

“With evolution, there is responsibility,” said Victor Emmanuelli, 41, a member of the musical group Bomba Evolución and a historian of the genre. “It’s important for young people to have the fundamentals in order for the genre to evolve.” He started playing bomba at age 8 in Carolina, a town between San Juan and Loíza.

Jerry Ferrao, who played with the Cepedas for 20 years, has noticed that some younger players seem overly concerned with playing fast, favoring the rhythm of the dance over the poetry of the songs.

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