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

The Russianization of Reality

From LARB, excerpt from Peter Pomerantsev's article on Russia/US:

Ideas replaced with feelings. A radical relativism that implies truth is unknowable. Politicians who revel in lying openly, shamelessly, as if being caught out is the point of politics. The notion of the people and the many redefined ceaselessly, words unmoored from meaning, ideas of the future dissolving into nasty nostalgias with enemies everywhere, conspiracy replacing ideology, facts equated to fibs, discussion collapsing into mutual accusations, where every argument is just another smear campaign, all information warfare … and the sense that everything under one’s feet is constantly moving, inherently unstable, liquid …

Almost a decade ago I left Russia because I was exhausted by living in a system where, to quote myself invoking Hannah Arendt, “nothing is true and everything is possible.” Those were still relatively vegetarian days in Moscow — before the invasion of Ukraine — but it was already a world where terms like liberal or democracy were used to mean their opposite, where paranoia was increasingly replacing reasoned argument, and where spectacle had pushed out sense. You were left with only gut feelings to lead your way through the fog of disinformation. I returned to the thing once known as “the West,” living in London and often working in the United States, because, in the words of my naïve self, I wanted to live in a world where “words have meaning,” where facts were not dismissed as “just information war.” Russia seemed a country unable to come to terms with the loss of the Cold War, or with any of the traumas of the 20th century. It was ultimately, I thought, a sideshow, a curio pickled in its own agonies. Russians stressed this themselves: in Western Europe, America, things are “normalno” they would tell me. If you have the chance, that is where you send your wives, children, money … to “normalnost.”

Back in the West, however, I soon noticed things that reminded me of Moscow. A familiar triumphant cynicism was prevalent in the restaurants and offices of Mayfair and Manhattan, among the money and image launderers who served the newly minted global rich. No one here was even pretending they were part of some great story of liberal democracy, of capitalism as a moral project, of that notion of “freedom” that supposedly won the Cold War. “Free markets, free people” went the mantra of The Wall Street Journal, which you found in marbled meeting rooms or at glistening black bars; but no one believed that anymore.

Yet the refined anarchy of this world still seemed very aloof from the rest of America or England. Television and newspapers looked no madder than usual. America had always had loony cable channels, but in my many trips to DC, politicians still talked more or less within the boundaries of reasoned argument.

Then came the revolutionary year of 2016, and things began to go topsy-turvy. Brexit, the US elections, the bombing to bits of Aleppo: “normalnost,” and with it many norms, went out the window. Since then there has been the emboldening of the conspiracy peddling by so-called populists throughout Europe; tsunamis of social media hysteria; fake news, post-truth, alternative facts, and the sort of polarization where people can’t talk to each other anymore without spitting. Sitting in upper-middle-class homes in New Jersey or Peterborough, I would hear phrases that replicated almost word for word those I had heard throughout Russia: “You can never know the truth about anything these days. There is just too much information and disinformation out there. I just have to follow my instincts, go with my emotions.”

Paris 2007

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Business Trip to Paris

Letting the Carnage Continue

 

Molly Ivins wrote this back in 1993 about guns:

“There is more hooey spread about the Second Amendment. It says quite clearly that guns are for those who form part of a well-regulated militia, i.e., the armed forces including the National Guard. The reasons for keeping them away from everyone else get clearer by the day.

The comparison most often used is that of the automobile, another lethal object that is regularly used to wreak great carnage. Obviously, this society is full of people who haven’t got enough common sense to use an automobile properly. But we haven’t outlawed cars yet. We do, however, license them and their owners, restrict their use to presumably sane and sober adults and keep track of who sells them to whom. At a minimum, we should do the same with guns.

In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster. Those who want guns—whether for target shooting, hunting or potting rattlesnakes (get a hoe)—should be subject to the same restrictions placed on gun owners in England—a nation in which liberty has survived nicely without an armed populace.

The argument that “guns don’t kill people” is patent nonsense. Anyone who has ever worked in a cop shop knows how many family arguments end in murder because there was a gun in the house. Did the gun kill someone? No. But if there had been no gun, no one would have died. At least not without a good footrace first. Guns do kill. Unlike cars, that is all they do.

For years, I used to enjoy taunting my gun-nut friends about their psycho-sexual hang-ups—always in a spirit of good cheer, you understand. But letting the noisy minority in the National Rifle Association force us to allow this carnage to continue is just plain insane.”

 

White Nationalism & its Discontents

 

From Alexandra Minna Stern's new book, Proud Boys and the White EthnoState: How the Altright is Warping the American Imagination:

As it turns out, the rehabilitation of American eugenicists is a pastime of the alt-right. Four years earlier, in 2012, Palingenesis Press, based in the UK, published an edition (now out of print) of The Passing of the Great Race, with a forward written by Jared Taylor, the head of American Renaissance, an organization focused on so-called “race realism” and an entrenched pillar of white nationalism. Grant and his contemporary Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920), are enduring darlings of the alt-right. The highbrow white nationalist webzine Counter-Currents Publishing (which also has a book-publishing arm) annually commemorates Grant’s birthday, lauding his multipronged white advocacy. In the words of Counter-Currents, Grant was an “American aristocrat and pioneering advocate of white racial preservationism, immigration restriction, eugenics, anti-miscegenation laws, and the conservation of wildlife and wilderness.”

Counter-Currents praises Grant as an exemplary environmentalist who, alongside Stanford University’s first president, David Starr Jordan, and Sacramento philanthropist Charles M. Goethe, were “race realists and eugenicists.” Counter-Currents also memorializes Stoddard’s birthday, extolling the virtues of his racist study of the Haitian revolution and his more widely known The Revolt Against Civilization (1922). Although Counter-Currents concedes that some of Stoddard’s ideas seem trite today, it emphasizes the contemporary relevance of his contention that a “nation’s breeding policy is at least as essential a factor in geopolitical strategy as trade policy or defense.”

Like many Americans, I was disconcerted and spooked by the alt-right’s breakthrough into politics, media, and culture. Now it was surfacing in my research. I recognized its catchphrases, such as “white genocide,” and its recycling of stereotypes about people of color, crime rates, and IQ scores. Struck by both the familiarity and the strangeness of the alt-right, I decided to bear witness to it in real time.

Was the alt-right simply old wine in new bottles, the latest incarnation of American eugenics, racism, and anti-egalitarianism? Was it something novel, with the potential to reshape politics and discourse, abetted by a sympathetic Republican presidential administration, an upsurge in national populism, and a context of simmering “white rage”? Could the alt-right appeal to younger generations of white Americans, who might be swayed by anxieties over demographic despair and tantalizing visions of racially homogenous homelands? What were the cultural and political implications of the circulation of the alt-right lexicon—as terms such as “ethnostate,” “human biodiversity,” “cuckservative,” and “snowflake” entered the American vocabulary?

To answer these questions, I began to spend hours and hours online, taking deep dives in an ever-expanding sea of URLs, exploring sites such as Counter-Currents, Radix Journal, and that of Ostara Publications. Some of these sites had been actively posting without interruption for years, others distributing on-demand books and offering occasional posts, and some were moribund webzines with archived content. In order to mine the intellectual bedrock of the alt-right, I set out to read and analyze its quasi-scholarly work as a formidable form of knowledge production in an era of rising authoritarianism and ultranationalism across the globe.

Nostalgic hunting or Cowboy type shooting

Novelist Ben Fountain visits an NRA gun show:

What gun culture lacks in wit—for grown-up delinquent fun and sly-dog subversion you can’t beat a custom-car rally—it more than makes up for in design genius, precision tooling, and a long and honorable tradition of craftsmanship. But something’s happened in the past several decades, a kind of hyper-consumerist fetishizing where categories divide, then subdivide into ever narrower specialties that have little to do with utility. How many variations on the AR-15 “platform”—the civilian version of the military’s M16 assault rifle—can there be? Many. More than many. To infinity and beyond. The AR-15 was used in the San Bernardino and Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shootings, and was featured in a January 20, 2016, post on the NRA’s website titled “Why the AR-15 Is America’s Most Popular Rifle.” “The AR-15s [sic] ability to be modified to your own personal taste is one of the things that makes it so unique,” reads the post, and indeed, walking the floor of the exhibition hall I ended up cross-eyed at all the polymers, alloys, finishes, calibers, stock and barrel configurations, buffer systems, trigger systems, muzzle brakes, and so on, to, truly, infinity and beyond.

I had entered the realms of style; that is to say, the dark swamps of consumer psychology where desire, identity, and aspiration are always bubbling in a subterranean psychic stew. What kind of AR man do you want to be? Or woman, for that matter—take yours in solid pink or “Muddy Girl” camo? There’s agency in a purchase. Most of our buying these days has less to do with need than with serving fantasies and tamping down fears. Clothes do it for us. Vehicles too, profoundly; in my neighborhood in Dallas you can see plenty of gleaming pickup trucks “hauling air,” as the saying goes, driven by men with soft hands and closets full of business suits. But in our terrorized, polarized, ferociously tribalized times it’s hard to think of a more charged consumer item, one as psychologically fraught, as a gun.

For relatively not much money we can buy ourselves a piece of rugged individualism and triumphant history (“For nostalgic hunting or cowboy type shooting the 1886 Classic Carbine or Standard Rifle are perfect”) and raise a big middle finger to ISIS, the feds, the liberals, feminists, whoever we think is messing with us. A gun keeps us in character, the American character, as helpfully illustrated by all those fancy marketing visuals, which might as well be movie stills from the reel of greatest hits playing in every American’s mind. With a century’s worth of Hollywood puffing your product, not to mention the explicit blessing of the U.S. Constitution, gun marketing has to be one of the pig-laziest gigs around. What other consumer item is sanctioned by the Bill of Rights? And by God if the NRA has anything to do about it this market shall not be infringed upon in any shape, form, or fashion, even if a reading of the Second Amendment happens to turn up the words well regulated. Maybe that inconvenient phrase explains why the NRA’s extensive website neglects to include the actual text of the Second Amendment.

In Another Life

Lyrics to Sandro Perri's In Another Life

Let me into this impossible dream
And know how not to know just what that means
Except to think of all that might be seen
In another life

No position, ladder or pit
No more response correct or unfit
Except where evenly sacrifice split
In another life
In another life

Level field, what goal is the game?
Any answer, a question remains
To flourish and without expansion or gain?
In another life
In another life

No love go undiscovered in hate
Or disadvantage in tragic state
No delusion about what is great
In another life
In another life

Humiliation, nor private distress
Breed obedience nor deviants
No sway in praise over in incense
In another life
In another life

Power seen in true and clear light
Loss unburdened, in natural flight
Nothing to have, no reason to fight
In another life
In another life

Black, brown, red, blue, yellow, green and white
Seen and understood in each its own right
And how freely goes a child at night
In another life
In another life
In another life

No word sent to distract or devise
Smokescreen, lightning, filler or guise
As in distance and closeness alike
In another life
In another life

There's no intelligent test in class
No touch too soft or too crass
But physically possible one’s head up one's ass
In another life
In another life

What use grafting sport to art?
Like pulling horse from cart
Just confusion about whole and part
In another life
In another life

None imprisoned by the word free
No fool falling for what they believe
Endless chances between you and me
In another life
In another life
In another life

For the rape of mind, body and earth
And the animal of engineered worth
The seed of greed dissolved in thirst
In another life
In another life
In another life

No rhyme of any cost or expense
Beats a rhythm born of defense
True disharmony right here on the fence
In another life
In another life
In another life

Beyond the choice of create or destroy
Inherit, steal, gift or employ
Fair is far too small a word we'd enjoy
In another life
In another life
In another life

So hold a promise no bigger than two hands
Hope scaled and re-read in human
And not reduced to a list of demands
In another life
In another life

Elvin Jones in France

Here is a really great session with one of Elvin Jones' high energy groups from the 70's-featuring Dave Liebman and Steve Grossman when they were most influenced by Coltrane's playing style. It probably did not hurt that they were playing with the drumming master himself. Outside of the cloudy transfer to digital the video shows real understanding of how to shoot a jazz group. Look at the shot selection and inter-play between the cameras. So glad someone actually preserved this concert. This is why I love Coltrane. Also some excellent close-ups of Jones while he is working.

 

2013 with Macksey

Vallejo Nocturno 2013-In Macksey's Library

A Character From a Borges Short Story - Dr. Richard Macksey

It is with great sadness that I heard the news from a close friend of mine that Dr. Richard Macksey, the extraordinary professor from Johns Hopkins, had passed away yesterday. In the 70's while I attended Hopkins as an undergraduate Macksey provided inspiration and intelligence to my soul, guiding me and nurturing my hunger for books and knowledge and, of course, direction. I am fortunate in that I live here in Baltimore so I have been able to maintain a dialogue with this incredible man through the years visiting his great library or going out to see a film, eat at a restaurant and it was always a great adventure to enter a discussion with him as his stories would multiply and would lead us to the most unexpected places. He was a friend to everybody and one of the most optimistic people I've ever encountered. His memory will live on. Here is a memory of him from an article I recently encountered about him:

The lore around Macksey and his library has an air of myth—some alumni describe knocking over a sheet of paper to discover original correspondence with D.H. Lawrence (who died the year before Macksey was born), while others swear there was an original Picasso sketch in his bathroom at one time. Four-foot Chinese scrolls, tiny model skeletons, antique theater binoculars. The valuable pieces are no longer in the house; they have been locked up in Special Collections on campus. One time during class, I myself picked up the nearest book and discovered it was an inscribed advance copy of his friend Oliver Sacks’ book, Seeing Voices. The objects in his house speak to his interests, which is to say he is interested in everything.

That is not an exaggeration.

“When you listen to him talk, he begins in one place, and then it’s as though he’s crossed the room and gone to a different section of the library and pulled out a book on a different topic,” the author Jessie Chaffee (Florence in Ecstasy) noted. “He’ll take you down a path that is surprising, and then another, and another . . . until you realize that they’re all connected.”

He still speaks this way. I asked what he believes is lost in the digital humanities, aside from the physicality of books. “We no longer have to worry about memorizing things,” Dr. Macksey said. “Previously, the mark of the scholar was the ability to quote the text.” Easy for him to say. He is a polyglot with a photographic memory, so he does literally remember every single quote he’s read, and its location in the book, and the book’s location in his library.

“I think a hell of a lot is lost: the ability to see [a subject] as something more than a list of names and themes and topics.” He went on to describe Charles Sanders Peirce, a prominent figure in Hopkins’ history whose theory he finds delightful for applying to detective fiction. “He says, it’s not all induction, it’s not all deduction, it’s rather what he calls abduction, which is a combination of both, which sometimes is just guessing. He has a lot of different names for the notion of abduction.”

Right, but how does this “abduction” relate to scholars not spending as much time with their texts?

“I realize now my reading went from being too fast to too slow, without any good meeting in between. Much of our reading we don’t read the whole word, we see a syllable or perhaps two syllables. We have a context, so again it includes making a guess, a very quick guess. If you don’t read slowly, you’ll miss some of the surprises that are there.” Conversations with Dr. Macksey never cease to surprise, because he’s able to relate things like detective fiction to one’s experience perceiving language, as we’ve just witnessed.

“There was always this rumor that when he was up for his PhD and doing his orals, they couldn’t stump him on anything,” the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, a former student, said. “Finally, exasperated, one of his interviewers decided to ask him about 16th-century French cooking or something and he goes, ‘well that’s great that you should ask that question, because it happens to be one of my hobbies.’”

More

A foto from the 70's in Macksey's library- I'm sitting on the floor and Bruce Jaffe to the right of me standing and lecturing on film.  Macksey is in the back with a tie and his legendary pipe.

Violence and Guns

From a review of the compelling book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz:

Dunbar-Ortiz dismantles an argument popular among gun-control advocates: that the Second Amendment isn’t about individual rights. This argument, based on historian Richard Hofstadter’s scholarship, insists that when the Second Amendment was written, it actually referred only to state militias (and therefore eventually the National Guard, rather than private citizens).

But this isn’t so. Dunbar-Ortiz describes at length the hyperviolent, irregular warfare tactics used to make way for settlement and commodification of the United States, and the official encouragement and essential deputization of private, rogue militias (nothing more than armed civilians) that waged this warfare. The group-sounding language, Dunbar-Ortiz says, “specifically gave individuals and families the right to form volunteer militias to attack Indians and take their land.” Morally repugnant, to be sure. But legally correct.

She drives home historian John Grenier’s theory, which, once again, readers of An Indigenous Peoples’ History will no doubt recognize: the violence fueled racism, rather than merely the other way around. This point is central, and it stands out among the many conversations about guns in the United States. In this view, one finds violence itself at the root. Violence is a means to acquire land and capital, and it predates racial prejudice. Violence is a means to culture. Quoting Grenier, she writes:

Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military tradition and thereby part of a shared American identity. Indeed, only after seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Americans made the first way of war a key to being a white American could later generations of “Indian haters,” men like Andrew Jackson, turn the Indian wars into race wars.

The overwhelmingly violent settling of the United States may not in and of itself make for a broadly convincing explanation for America’s undying obsession with guns. We are not the only country with bloody origins. But Loaded does not stop at the colonies, nor at the “winning of the West.” Dunbar-Ortiz follows the imperial project of the United States as it marched into Mexico, the Philippines, Cuba, and Vietnam.

Perhaps even closer to the bone is Dunbar-Ortiz’s brief history of slave patrols, rifle clubs, and the KKK. “Southern settlers had long relied on ‘self-help’ measures to enforce slavery leading up to the formalized slave patrols,” she writes. These groups only thrived in the continued reinforcement of individual gun rights, along with the development of the arms industry in the years after abolition.

The author notes that in the decades after abolition, there would have been, for African Americans, very little distinction made between slave patrols, the KKK, and police. In some very painful and indeed deadly ways, Loaded argues, this lack of distinction more or less lives on today.

[T]he language of slave patrols is still employed in police work in the twenty-first century, “patrol” being the most obvious, but also “beat.” More disturbingly, techniques were folded into police practices, such as surveillance methods like the stakeout. And until the 1960s pushback, police had little supervision and routinely brutalized and confined suspects without consequences; even in the twenty-first century, when police torture or murder Black people, juries rarely find the involved officers guilty.

Even for gun control advocates and liberals leery of militarized police, the full depth of this idea that guns are fundamentally tools of racism may be uncomfortable to confront. But it is that depth and discomfort that sets Loaded apart from the near constant and often dead-ended discussions about gun violence in the United States. As is the case with much of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s work, Loaded demands of its readers that history be seen as a continuum to which the present belongs.