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

Fotos from My Family History

Recently, I receive photgraphs that my cousin Rafael scanned from the collection of my aunt Margarita. These include photos from Lima and my grandfather and grandmother. It was a large and varied family.

Vallejo Nocturno 2021-Fotos Familia Ribeiro

Cafe Terra Storm Session

Last Monday night's Terra Session hosted by Clarence Ward III in Baltimore was hit with a hard storm that ended up changing the direction of the evening. In a good and magical ways.

The Evolution of a Salsa Pianist

A great interview with master salsa pianist Luis Marin on how he came to play salsa with some of the great salseros and learn about the idiom.

And here is a legendary piano duel he did with Papo Luca of the Sonora Poncena in 1998 which they refer to in the interview.

 

“Theory of Memory” by Louise Glück

Vallejo Nocturno 2020-Jauja in 2017

Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet
incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious
ruler uniting all of a divided country—so I was told by the fortune-teller
who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps
behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference?
Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the
rest is hypothesis and dream.

“Theory of Memory” by Louise Glück, from Faithful and Virtuous Night. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Feliz Cumpleanos, Meche

Some images of Meche.

Vallejo Nocturno 2020-Atraves de los anos

Machaut's Music

Machaut's music which is categorized as Early Music or Medieval Music is incredible poetry and music. Listening to his Ballads you are convinced that people in the 1300's understood more about emotions and psychology than modern man today. Here is a lovely ballad with its translation. The musical rendition is by one of the foremost interpreters of his music Ensemble Musica Nova and comes from their Machaut: Ballades CD which came out in 2009.

From All About Heaven site, apparently Machaut was able to survive the Black Plaugue-here's a short biography:

Guillaume de Machaut ( c. 1300 – April 1377) was a medieval French poet and composer. He is one of the earliest composers on whom significant biographical information is available. According to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Machaut was "the last great poet who was also a composer". Well into the 15th century, Machaut's poetry was greatly admired and imitated by other poets.

Whether he can be classified as a true troubador or not is in some doubt, but there are aspects of his life that rather indicate he was one. 

Guillaume de Machaut  was employed as secretary to John I, Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia from 1323 to 1346, and also became a canon (1337).  By 1340, Machaut was living in Reims, having relinquished his other canonic posts at the request of Pope Benedict XII. In 1346, King John was killed fighting at the Battle of Crécy, and Machaut, who was famous and much in demand, entered the service of various other aristocrats and rulers, including King John's daughter Bonne (who died of the Black Death in 1349).

Machaut survived the Black Death that devastated Europe, and spent his later years living in Reims composing and supervising the creation of his complete-works manuscripts. His poem Le voir dit (probably 1361–1365) purports to recount a late love affair with a 19-year-old girl, Péronne d'Armentières, "although the accuracy of the work as autobiography is contested".

When he died in 1377, other composers such as François Andrieu wrote elegies lamenting his death.

Guillaume de Machaut, De Fortune Me Doi Plaindre Et Loer

Ensemble Musica Nova

[Jean Pichore, Arachne]

*

I must complain of Fortune and praise her.
I believe, more than any other creature.
For when I first began to love him.
My heart, my love, my thoughts and my care.
I set so much on my pleasure
That in wishing I wished in vain.
Nor would there have been found in this world
A Lady who had been so well endowed.

For I cannot think or imagine
Nor find within myself that Nature ever
Among all that one may call fair and good
Could have made a more perfect figure
Than him, on whom my desires
Are and will be always without end;
And therefore I think that never was born
A lady who had been so well endowed.

Alas! now I cannot remain at this point.
For Fortune who is never sure
Will turn her wheel against me
To distress my sad heart.
But in faith, until I die.
I wish to love and cherish my dear friend.
For never should she have false thoughts.
A lady who had been so well endowed.

 

Knausgaard Interview

I just finished the first book of Knausgaard's My Struggle and I'm impressed. This is a book for today's readers and artists. It details daily tribulations some what of mundane quality but with a Proustian lens so apparently minor details expand and envelop personal experience that meaningfully echo in the reader. It's an authentic voice and authentic book. It's quite an accomplishment and I'm only on the first book. Looking forward to the rest.

Paris Review interview with writer of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard by James Wood:

WOOD

Your six volumes have been received as an extraordinary example of literary courage—the courage to confess and the courage to take risks with form. Sometimes you take the stakes so low that fiction or drama, conflict, plot might disappear altogether. You’re also, of course, willing to look at things. In Book Three, you’ve got a bit about you and a friend shitting in a forest. Like everyone here tonight, I read it thinking, He’s going to describe the shit. Not just the act. I think, knowing Knausgaard, he’s actually going to describe what the piece of crap looks like. And you did. Then there is small stuff, like your willingness to use exclamations like “yuck,” “phew,” “oh oh oh,” “ha ha ha”—the kind of exclamation that one sees in children’s fiction or genre fiction but which is snobbishly disdained in contemporary high fiction, so to speak. Were you aware at the time that these were risks, that they were acts of daring?

KNAUSGAARD

That was the torture of writing this thing, especially Book Three, because it’s seen from the perspective of a kid between seven and ten years old, and that is the perspective of an idiot. The whole time I was writing these six books I felt, This is not good writing. What’s good, I think, is the opening five pages of Book One, the reflection on death. When we were publishing that first book, my editor asked me to remove those pages because they are so different from the rest, and he was right—he is right—it would have been better, but I needed one place in the book where the writing was good. I spent weeks and weeks on that passage, and I think it’s modernist, high-quality prose. The rest of the book is not to my standard. [Laughter from audience] I’m not saying this as a joke. This is true. 

WOOD

But to know that, at the time of writing, is to be making an experiment, no?

KNAUSGAARD

Yes, it is.

WOOD

It’s to be courageous in some way, wouldn’t you say?

KNAUSGAARD

No, it hasn’t anything to do with courage. It’s more that I was so desperate and so frustrated. The only way I could trick myself into writing was by ­doing it like this. By setting myself the premise that I would write very quickly and not edit, that everything should be in it. Without that, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I’m too self-critical to be a writer, really, and I was very critical of this project. It was torture. I had a friend, I read everything to him on the phone, all thirty-six hundred pages as I wrote them, and he had to say, This is good, you must go on. 

The part you describe about shitting in the wood, though—that was a joy to write. That’s the other side of it, you know, because it’s unheard of to go into such detail, but for a kid it’s very important how the shit looks, how it smells, all the differences between one shit and another. That’s a child’s world, and I felt connected to it through the character of the child. I ­remembered, all of a sudden, how it was. The small things mattered, like shitting. It’s easy to understand why. You don’t yet have many experiences, and it’s your body, and here is the world going into it and then leaving it, 
and although it’s not the first time that this has happened, still it is kind of a new thing. 

WOOD

And of course that’s the great theme of your work—meaning and the loss of meaning. It’s obvious enough that in your work the insane attention 
to objects is an attempt to rescue them from loss, from the loss of meaning. It’s a tragedy of getting older. We can’t ever recover that extraordinary novelty, that newness, that we experienced as children, and so you try to bring those meanings and memories back. There’s a lovely thing in 
Adorno’s Negative Dialectics that reminds me of your work. Adorno writes, “If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the ­object, not on its ­category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye.” Does that sound like a reasonable description of what you are trying to do?

KNAUSGAARD

Very much so. Before I wrote My Struggle, I had a feeling that novels tend 
to obscure the world instead of showing it, because their form is so much alike from novel to novel. It’s the same with films, with their attention to narrative structure. Most films, anyway. One thing I did while I was at work on the project was to watch the film Shoah, about the Holocaust. In the 
end, after you’ve seen these nine and a half hours, there is no form. Or it’s a kind of extreme form, which brings it closer to a real experience. I’d 
been thinking about that and about the world as it ordinarily comes to us filtered through news, through media. The same form, the same language, makes everything the same. That was a problem I had before I started 
My Struggle. The traditional form of the novel wasn’t eloquent. I didn’t 
believe in it, for the reasons I’ve said. Now, I don’t really pay much attention to the world. I’m not very present. I’m detached from almost everything. 
I’m very occupied with myself and my own mind. I’m not in connection with the world—but in writing, I can be. That’s a way for me to open a world up.

But this is a personal problem, not a general problem. 

More

Listening to New Music

 

From Jeremy Larson on Pitchfork on why we listen to new music:

If all the brain science is mostly on the side of listening to popular hits and golden oldies, that might explain why, for the vast majority of American listeners, music is just one small facet of life. Most people experience music as a passive creature comfort, like socks or reality television. In this historic moment of colossal fear and dread, music listeners are in desperate need of comfort. Of the 32 artists we asked, almost all of them were listening to music that is older, soothing, familiar; the same thing happened when we asked ourselves what we were listening to in isolation. (I do realize that old music can be new music if you’ve never heard it before, but you get it.)

The act of listening to new music in the midst of a global pandemic is hard, but it’s necessary. The world will keep spinning and culture must move with it, even if we are staid and static in our homes, even if the economy grinds to a halt, even if there are no shows, no release parties, and even artists sink even further into the precarity that defines a career as a musician. The choice to listen to new music prioritizes, if for one listen only, the artist over you. It is an emotional risk to live for a moment in the abyss of someone else’s world, but this invisible exchange powers the vanguard of art, even in times of historic inertia.

It also appears that we are in the most impressionable era in generations as each day brings some new, heretofore unfathomable statistic. In this unfamiliar world, our brains have never been more plastic—a spongy tabula rasa onto which you can imprint a new timestamp. My other argument for constant exploration is that I will assuredly remember these pandemic days, the way I remember my first breakup or my first love and the songs that defined them. Don’t let history be recursively defined by a feedback loop. Steer into the skid, pour the fear and dread leaking through your roof into something unfamiliar, because it could be the new artifact that exclusively defines this moment for you—a new friend who totally loves you for what you’ve become.

To those of you getting back into discovering new music, you’re not alone. The incredible $4.3 million Bandcamp paid out to musicians in one single day will hopefully bode well for the health of new music, and like clockwork, every Friday will still come with a big sack of new albums to open. The coda to the famous The Rite of Spring riot at its premiere in Paris is not often told, but it’s crucial to the full life of the piece. After the melee of that evening, the ballet continued running at the theater for many months. Alex Ross writes: “Subsequent performances were packed, and at each one the opposition dwindled. At the second, there was noise only during the latter part of the ballet; at the third, ‘vigorous applause’ and little protest. At a concert performance of Rite one year later, ‘unprecedented exaltation’ and a ‘fever of adoration’ swept over the crowd, and admirers mobbed Stravinsky in the street afterward, in a riot of delight.” What is unheard of could define history—might as well come for the show.

Pandemic Suburbs

Each day I go out and walk the neighborhood-about 3 miles and I take my camera. These are the things that I've shot during these days on my suburban streets.

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Casa Arjay Walkabouts

Power of Music

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Barth, Yamamoto, and Marie at An die Musik Live before the Pandemic

God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble… The musical art often speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart… Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful.

Friedrich Nietzsche