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

Young vs. Old

 

From How Things Work:

But here is what many professional commentators have chosen to spend their time and energy drawing our attention to instead: The annoying things that young people are saying and doing. Many people who hold prestigious and well-paid media jobs, and who control an influential megaphone at a time when that is of incredible importance, squander their time and ours with wheedling complaints about bullshit. Bret Stephens spends his column grinding familiar axes about campus protests and local DSA rallies; Pamela Paul complains about how stuff is being debated on campus at Stanford; Ross Douthat takes this opportunity to unleash some zingers against “woke-speak” among student groups about decolonization; even Michelle Goldberg, who is supposed to represent the left, focuses her column on… campus protests and local DSA rallies and how the angry kids on the left are not protesting in the proper way. These are the voices that dominate the opinion section of the most influential news organization in the English-speaking world. You will never find a more pathetic failure to rise to the occasion than this collection of navel-gazing cranks, the journalistic equivalent of suburbanites complaining about the annoying smell of smoke ruining their weekend dinner party as the city burns down around them.

Who is being childish here? Is it the young college students, appalled at genocide looming in front of their eyes, possessed with the overwhelming urge to do something, who—despite not possessing a PhD in global affairs—flood into the streets and rage against the atrocity? Or is it the well educated and highly placed and influential adults, granted positions of great importance, who, as a crisis unfolds, as civilians are murdered, as neighborhoods are bombed, as oppression and religion collide in war, use their time griping about the hotheadedness of the young people protesting in the streets? Which of these groups has more accurately identified what should be our current topic of attention—the young people whose focus is on the governments that possess militaries and missiles and are poised to cause thousands of deaths, or the adults whose focus is on how some college kid said something annoying at a DSA rally? Wake the fuck up. The adults in the room are everywhere proving the kids’ critique to be true.

Young people have a voice, but no power. Old people have a bigger voice, and all of the power. Guess which group has a greater responsibility not to waste the current moment moaning about petty bullshit? An inability to ignore the small annoyances of youth in order to welcome the indispensable purity of morality that young people give to us is not a mark of wisdom. It is evidence that one has maintained immaturity even as they have gotten older. It is proof that you have allowed age to shrink your moral universe, rather than expand and deepen it. It is, above all, a reason to think that you should stop talking for a minute and listen to what the angry young people are saying.

Yesterday, I was in Times Square for a rally in support of the endangered citizens of Palestine. Most of the people there were young. But there were also quite a few elderly people, some hobbling on canes, who had painfully dragged themselves out to stand and be a part off the supportive crowd. Because they knew it was important. Because they understood what is at stake. They were not there to compete with the young, to mutter snide takedowns of the speakers, to talk about why the rally should have been framed differently in order to attract the support of more moderate figures in Washington. They were there because people are dying. They had perspective. They had wisdom. I hope that we can all get there, one day.

 

From LA Riview of Books, a review by Eric Gudas  of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, a great book from last century that only recently is receiving the attention it so deserves:

NATALIA GINZBURG’S novel-cum-memoir, Lessico famigliare (1963), masterfully translated by Jenny McPhee as Family Lexicon, plunges its reader into a maelstrom of fart jokes, mimicry, conversation scraps overheard in childhood and repeated for decades, loudly bellowed parental edicts and epithets, invented idioms, puns, libretto excerpts, doggerel, and, occasionally, lyric poems. Often, Ginzburg remembers, their mother “recited poetry or sang” after dinner; at other times, the whole Levi family “had heated discussions over how ugly or good-looking someone was.” This cacophony of words sometimes verges on pure sound, as when the narrator’s father “let[s] out a long roar” in the shower each morning, or when her friend Lola eschews words for a “guttural and affectionate dove cry.” Gradually, a sense of time and place — Italy between the 1920s and ’50s — emerges from this barely controlled aural chaos, just as the hesitations and unfinished sentences of James Joyce’s Dubliners reveal glimpses of turn-of-the-century Ireland, or the brutally formal dialogue of Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose novels Ginzburg revered, gestures toward Edwardian social hierarchies. In the author’s “Avvertenza” (“warning”) that opens the book, Ginzburg states rather elliptically, “Even though the story is real, I think one should read it as if it were a novel, and therefore not demand of it any more or less than a novel can offer.” Indeed, Family Lexicon recalls the great modernists’ reimaginings of childhood — Joyce, Compton-Burnett, Katherine Mansfield, parts of Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, and, farther back, Swann’s Way, which Ginzburg translated into Italian while in exile and then in hiding during World War II.

In her novel, Ginzburg, the daughter of a Jewish-born father and a Catholic-born mother — adamant nonbelievers and socialists both — grows up as the youngest of five siblings during Mussolini’s rise to power. The scene is Turin, home of an antifascist resistance movement into which Ginzburg’s family is increasingly drawn. The young Natalia Levi marries Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Russian-Italian literary scholar active in the resistance, who will be killed in a Nazi prison before the war’s end, leaving his widow and their three children to return, eventually, to her parents’ home. (The chronological straightforwardness of my last three sentences differs totally from Ginzburg’s own mode of narration.) But it would be wrong to classify Family Lexicon as a historical memoir — say, My Childhood in Mussolini’s Italy — or the portrait of a writer as a young woman, since Ginzburg, one of Italy’s best known and most beloved postwar writers, ruthlessly downplays her own artistic development. In fact, Ginzburg announces that she has left out “much that concerned [her] directly”: “I had little desire to talk about myself. This is not in fact my story but rather, even with gaps and lacunae, the story of my family.”

Family Lexicon doesn’t so much narrate that story as immerse us in a language-world of dialect (Triestine and Milanese), memory (of Ginzburg’s own childhood, inextricable from her parents’ retellings of their childhoods), and, above all, conflict. When the Levis aren’t squabbling about their friends’ relative ugliness, they have “ferocious arguments over politics, which ended in tantrums, napkins hurled into the air, and doors slammed so hard the whole apartment shook.” McPhee’s translation expertly retains what critic Lorrie Goldensohn has called Ginzburg’s “own indelible voice-print,” a “tough, residual boniness carried over from the original sentences [that] gleams through even as they move in their new English sound.” That “voice-print” is intimately connected with her characters’ speaking voices, and in particular with a “brutal frankness” prized both in Ginzburg’s own family and subsequently in all of her writing, where it erupts on almost every page, often peppered with exclamation points. Family Lexicon is studded, for instance, with her father’s caustic barbs, including my absolute favorite, uttered at various times to different members of his family: “You’re bored because you have no inner life.” And in the novel’s leftist milieu, where characters accuse each other of being “bourgeois” time and again, Lidia Levi candidly and hilariously critiques herself: “‘If Stalin came to take away my maid, I’d kill him,’ my mother said. ‘What would I do without my maid? I, who don’t know how to do a thing?’”

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Interview with Charlie Smith

 

 

From an interview with poet/novelist Charlie Smith in Bomb Magazine in 2010:

JR Okay. Let’s see, my first question for you: the relation of poetry and novels. There seems to be some kind of mystical connection, poets as novelists—apropos here, James Dickey, E. E. Cummings, Jessica Hagedorn. Insights?

CS I don’t see that very often—novelists writing poems that have any kind of power and authority particularly, and vice versa. Many of the poets I know don’t read novels at all; they don’t read any fiction. And my close friends who are novelists don’t read any poems; they are not even interested in reading mine. So I don’t know if there is that kind of crossover. It’s not necessary, in fiction, to concentrate in the same way—to bring the same intensity, spirit, language, into the line—as it is in writing a poem.

In my case, I just happened to write both right at the beginning. I was exposed to both as a youngster and then, in boarding school, we were required in ordinary assignments to write short stories and poems. I fell in love with both, and began to write both on my own. What I began to see was that the two disciplines could cross over to a certain extent. Poems can cross over to fiction, but I haven’t seen fiction cross over to poems much. A fiction line in a poem—I mean, you sometimes run into what passes as poetry, which is often just prose chopped up into lines, but it doesn’t have intensity. Real poems can’t exist anywhere but in the lines of the poem. If you try to take a fiction line and insert it into a poem, it’ll sag like a swayback mare. I found that to be pretty strictly true, at least in my case. But it’s possible to take poems and shift them into fiction; I used to take poems and de-line them like you debone a trout. Then, I’d just lay them into a page of fiction and they would pass perfectly well. I did it in most of my earlier novels: Canaan (1984), Shine Hawk (1988), The Lives of the Dead (1990) . . . There may have been others. Before poetry broke loose from the continental shelf, it was the easiest thing to haul lines over to the fiction side.

I try to bring as much energy and penetration into my fiction as possible. To hold onto the line of expression as earnestly as possible, like you’re holding onto a mustang out in the desert, letting it be fully itself but, as firmly and inevitably as possible, bringing it into the remuda. Because I also write poems, I have access—if I’m lucky—to those particular acts of imagination that take place in a poem—I can sometimes see that things that appear to be disparate actually are connected.

I tend to like fiction that jumps and yips, fiction that moves around, that’s got language barreling through it. The best at it in my generation are probably Denis Johnson, Javier Marías, and Martin Amis. Maybe if I’d never written a poem I would still seek something like that out. I hope I would.

Our Recent Addition- Camila

On the 23rd of this month my son and his wife welcomed Camila into their life. Here are some photos from Camila's new life:

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-Welcome Camila

My Photo Essay

Article a BmoreArt.com

 

Here's an article about my photography project I'm doing here in Bmore. One of the more satisfying pieces of work (not really work) that I've ever done. I will have to post my feelings and progress on this but you can read in this article what I'm doing.

Innovations

Composer, pianist Henrique Eisenmann writes about Joao Gilberto's innovations:

 Furthermore, João’s biggest and most impactful innovation was on the vocal realm. In clear defiance against the paradigm of the operatic style from the radios and casinos, João started to sing with a rather dry voice: clear, no vibrato, no sense of humor, with quiet volume and uniform tone. One more time we can notice the influence and similarity between João and American Jazz singers such as Chet Baker, as one can notice in the following video of a performance of the charming American singer after a street fight that cost him his central incisor (https://youtu.be/0ybMVHeJZ7w).  The difference is that João became a master in displacing the melodies, delaying and anticipating it in relation to the original format, making his interpretations unique, surprising, fresh and elegant. Despite his emotional dryness, the friction between vocal melodic displacement and constant guitar syncopation opened a universe of expression and improvisation possibilities. This became the new “school” of Brazilian vocal and songwriting style, influencing generations of musicians such as Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Edu Lobo, Paulinho da Viola, Roberto Carlos, Milton Nascimento, Geraldo Vandré and many others.

 

Six Recent Photographs

Vallejo Nocturno 2022- View from March 2022

Jessica Williams Gone

Yesterday I read the news on the internet,  on a Ted Goia email, that Jessica Williams, the extremely talented jazz pianist, had passed away. The news has been slow coming but I'll link to several sites that have examples of her work or interviews with her. We are fortunate in that she is very well represented via her broad discography. Years ago when I attempted to learn about her talents I read that she actually grew up in Baltimore and attended Peabody Prep which stunned me as I had never heard her name mentioned here in Baltimore. Part of that reason is that she left for Philadelphia nd then San Francisco in the mid-70's. That still meant I could have run into her when I was an undergraduate at Hopkins and going to the Ballroom. From the an announcement at KNKX:

Two-time Grammy nominee Jessica Williams was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and classically trained at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. In her teens, Williams moved to Philadelphia and began playing with drummer Philly Joe Jones.

Relocating to San Francisco in 1977, Williams became the house pianist at the famous Keystone Korner jazz club. She also worked with Eddie Harris, Dexter Gordon, Tony Williams, Stan Getz, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, Charlie Rouse, John Abercrombie, Charlie Haden, Leroy Vinnegar, and others.

Williams received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rockefeller Grant for composing, the Alice B. Toklas Grant for Women Composers, and the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She was an honored guest on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. She also wrote musical scores for PBS and HBO programs.

Williams recorded more than 40 albums over her career, eight of them on the Seattle-based Origin Records label.

Celebrated for her absolute control of the keyboard, her wit, and her solid sense of swing, the influence of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane was evident in many of Williams' performances and recordings.

Williams settled in Portland, Oregon in 1993, and then later in Yakima, Washington. She created a her own record label and music publishing company in an effort to retain control of her creative output.

Severe spinal problems sent Williams through major surgery in 2012. The medical procedures and recovery were lengthy, complicated and expensive; she ended up having to sell her beloved Yamaha piano.

A cancer diagnosis came in 2017. Williams tried to stay positive and active, posting on her website, "I have decided that the best thing I can do for myself is to do what I do, and be who I am. I love my music, and I will soon release new music and begin performing again. There are many things to do, and I will start slow, but speed alone is not music — soul and passion are. I am not done."

Jessica Williams' music will be featured on Jim Wilke's Jazz Northwest program on KNKX this Sunday, March 20, at 2 p.m.

From Ted Goia's site:

She had recently moved to the Bay Area, and was all but unknown even among jazz insiders—but not for long. She would occasionally play piano at the Keystone Korner during the break between the headline acts, and her powerful command of the keyboard was immediately apparent to listeners. This wasn’t tinkly intermission piano, but something quite extraordinary.

You could hear the magic in her playing. Her tone control and ease of execution were the first things that hit you. But Williams also had a remarkable ability to enter into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the ‘flow state’—a openness to the possibilities of the immediate moment that is the ideal mindset for jazz improvisation.

I’d always believed that music was an ecstatic vocation, and here was someone demonstrating it right before my eyes. It might just be an intermission between sets, but Jessica had blocked out all the noise and conversation, and was flying off into some higher sphere of music-driven nirvana.

I became an ardent fan, and bought copies of the few indie albums featuring Williams that were now showing up in record stores. I had heard of her quirks and eccentricities—and even just seeing her in live performance I could tell that Jessica Williams would not be a typical teacher. But that didn’t deter me. Her approach to the keyboard—with that singing tone, harmonic richness, and melodic freedom—was very closely aligned with what I was pursuing in my own music.

I tracked her down at gigs, and we eventually had several conversations. Her first reaction was that she had no idea how to teach what she did. Her music just happened. She didn’t have a method to share.

My glib response was: “No worries. We will do stop-and-cop.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I’ll watch you play the piano. And at certain junctures, I will ask you to stop. And I’ll cop what you just did. That’s the stop-and-cop method—and it always works.”

Jessica eventually agreed to be my teacher—but now things really got strange. She set certain conditions: (1) I had to provide the piano and a place for the lesson, (2) I had to drive her to and from the lesson, and (3) the lesson had to be in the middle of the night. 3 AM was the best time for her.

Yes, jazz education was a little different back then. The students at Berklee have no idea.

On You Tube where one of her great recordings is located at, she comments about her situation before she passed away and reveals, as I had read earlier that she was Trans and had paid dearly in the industry for it. Here are her comments:

I’m married to a great guy named Atherton and I finally quit playing jazz and married him after knowing him for 34 years. I did not take my site down- it was stolen from me 5 years ago during the cyber war between Trump and Truth began. I lost $200,000 and I had a nervous breakdown. But I’m fine now. I’m a good cook and my husband is a health care provider. He watches over me. He’s my fourth and final marriage! As for jazz, I made some really beautiful music with the best musicians in the world and I got to live in Italy and France and Denmark. I’ve been to Tokyo and I played in South Korea. I quit smoking and drinking 27 years ago. I’m not a jazz musician anymore but I love good music. Now is my time to enjoy myself! All light and love to you ! Jessica Jennifer Williams pianist and composer.

But I really use Jessica Jennifer Williams as a work and medical name but everyone else calls me Angie or Angela Emily Atherton because that’s my chosen aka and my husband is named Atherton and so after all these years my life is safe and good. I went through a lot of operations and then I was attacked viciously by jazz musicians and critics. The audience was cool but a lot of people hated on me with their prejudices. A white trans girl playing with Hutch or Getz or Dexter Gordon or Philly Joe Jones or Pharoah. And many more. It’s hell for trans people and for women. Enjoy the music and know that you are still just one person among billions who loved me and it’s still me. I’m changing every day and its been my entire life and I love it.

Here's a link to a live performance of hers

 

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.