Not sure with what camera these photos were taken but it wasn't my father's Leica though he took most of these in the mid-late 60's. There is one here of my dad which I'm wondering if I may have taken it as there is a photo, taken a year or two later of my father reading a paper on the very sofa that he sits in this photo below. Anyway the one good thing about these photos is that a year and month when they were developed is printed on the side. Several are from Argentina with my grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins. Fewer and fewer people are alive that knew these characters. One day it will be the same with me.
Vallejo Nocturno 2022- Family Photos from the 60's
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.
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?
The overlap between the failures of America’s own democracy and of its mission in Afghanistan is nowhere clearer than in the creation of a kleptocracy. One of the most basic functions of a democratic system is ensuring accountability for the use of public money. The Americans knew when they entered Afghanistan that corruption was already widespread. Their main response was to feed it with billions of taxpayers’ dollars. This was not naive or innocent. It too was policy. It was based on an article of faith for conservative Americans: trickle-down economics. If, in the US, you believed that it did not matter if some people became filthy rich by dubious means because some of their wealth would leak out to ordinary folk, why not apply that to Afghanistan?
In his SIGAR interview, Boucher said that it was better to funnel the vast sums of US aid to Afghan power brokers who “would probably take 20 percent for personal use” than to give it to “a bunch of expensive American experts.” He said, “I want it to disappear in Afghanistan, rather than in the Beltway. Probably in the end it is going to make sure that more of the money gets to some villager, maybe through five layers of corrupt officials, but still gets to some villager.”
Particularly striking here is Boucher’s assumption that genteel corruption is as endemic in Washington as the more flagrant kind is in Afghanistan. A democracy that cannot create accountability for the use of public money at home could not do so in a faraway society. This was also, for the entire project of building an Afghan democracy, ruinous. The villager who gets the last drops of aid after most of it has been filtered through five layers of corrupt officials knows all too well that he or she is not an equal citizen.
What was corrupted in all of this was the sense of an ending. “What,” as Major Joseph Claburn rather plaintively asked in 2011, “does it look like when it comes time for us to leave?” Because the ends being pursued were so ill-defined, the idea of an ending could not be fixed either. Twice—in 2003 and in 2014—the US officially declared an “end to combat operations” in Afghanistan. On neither occasion was this real or truthful or reflected on the ground. Finality, for the US, was something to be declared, not to be accomplished. Those who do not know what the last stage of their mission is will be outlasted, as America has been by the Taliban. It is an iron law that what cannot be concluded will be abandoned. That has been Afghanistan’s bitter fate.
Biden’s fate is to be the one who gave up the pretense of endless progress. It fell to the mournful man of compassion and empathy to deliver a heartless coup de grace. And even that parting shot was botched. It is a bleak commentary on the whole twenty-year episode that the US, on its departure, was almost as much in the dark as it had been on arrival, and no less concerned to keep up appearances. On July 23 Biden told his Afghan counterpart Ashraf Ghani that the critical question was the “perception” that “things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban.” He suggested that “there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
Less than a month before Ghani fled from Kabul, the US could not break the long-established habit of valuing a positive story more than the realities revealed by its own intelligence reports. This attitude extended even to the plight of Afghans whose lives were known to be in danger because they had worked with the Americans. The White House delayed for months the process of getting them to safety because it wanted to maintain the fiction that Afghan government forces would hold out against the Taliban. The great cloud of unknowing enveloped even the obvious truth that the circular progression of the war was about to close in on itself, forming a great hollow 0.
What is also unknown is how much this failure of American democracy will recoil on the politics of the homeland. Defeat in war has been, for some nations, the beginning of radical political change. It prompts reflection on the nature of the political order that has failed so badly. But the problem with the defeat in Afghanistan may be that, for America, it does not matter enough to make such self-examination imperative. Malkasian concludes that “the bigger story is probably how little the war featured in national life. Failure or success, Afghanistan was unimportant. Less than 0.3 percent of the population, including diplomats and contractors, served there.”
This is not a national trauma like Vietnam. There will be no great Maya Lin memorial to the Americans who gave their lives, still less to the 200,000 or so Afghans and Pakistanis who died. (Whitlock writes that the US started to count Afghan civilian deaths only in 2005, but then abandoned the database “for unspecified reasons.”) The shame and terror of the botched withdrawal has already become mere fodder for the tribal warfare of American politics, with Donald Trump recasting his own abject surrender to the Taliban—when he went over the heads of the supposedly sovereign Afghan government to negotiate an unhindered withdrawal—as Biden’s fault, and moreover as the “dumbest move ever made in US history.”
Roberto Roena was an inspiring band leader, percussionist, and dancer from Puerto Rico who had a world wide impact on the music of rhythm and celebration. This is agreat video showing his prowess as a percussionist and dancer. Hope to meet him soon.
Looking for information on filmaker Guy Gilles after seeing his advanced La Claire de terre (1969) this evening I ran into a post at writer Dennis Cooper's blog. From Dennis Cooper's Blog:
‘An unclassifiable filmmaker in 20th century French cinema, Guy Gilles is the director of a little-known body of work, melancholic and poetic, that combines nostalgia for the past with a haunting evocation of the present. His work was a passion of many of the most respected French actors and actresses, and it remains a favorite of film buffs, who love his films for their acute literary references and close attention to private emotion.
From Love of the Sea (1965) to Nefertiti (1996), Guy Gilles developed his films on the sidelines of the New Wave, his work sometimes colliding painfully with the contemporary trends, and often facing the indifference of a public confused by the precious uniqueness of his vision.
‘It is in precarious conditions – three years of work and a more than limited budget – that, in his first film, Guy Gilles turned to the sea for a romantic love story of two protagonists who do not live with the same intensity. Already, in the film’s many obsessions (thematic and aesthetic), we see the lifelong interests of its director. We meet for the first time the actor who would become his favorite (Patrick Jouane) and number of stars attracted by the enthusiasm of the young filmmaker. He will always convince stars to volunteer their contributions to his cinema: Jean-Claude Brialy, Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Greco appear in his work repeatedly, contributing to their poetic strangeness a sense of timelessness that one can already see clearly in as early a work as Love of the Sea.
‘This atmosphere is also reflected in Au pan coupé (1967), starring Patrick Macha Meril Jouane, who created his own production company, Machafilms, in order to enable the film to be made. The charm of this sensitive film rests on the memory of a lost love. It shows none of the indifference of the work being made and celebrated at the time, by such as Jean-Louis Bory or Marguerite Duras.
‘While Gilles hoped to shoot his next film, Le Clair de terre (1969), in his native Algeria, he was forced by circumstance to do so in Tunisia. This delay forced him to replace Simone Signoret in the central role of the retired teacher. Edwige Feuillère accepted the role, and brings much to the film’s character and its imperial, faded elegance. Considered Gilles’s masterpiece, Le Clair de terre is a concentration of all of his art, lingering between nostalgia and modernity.
‘He would never again find this delicate balance, even in Absences répétées (1972), despite winning the Prix Jean Vigo for the film. Darker than his previous films, Absences répétées follows the deadly process of a young man isolating himself in a haze between drugs and a desire to commit suicide. Apart from the very impressionistic Jardin qui bascule (1974) starring Delphine Seyrig, Guy Gilles made no feature films for the next decade.
‘Le Crime d’amour (1982) is a flawed film situated between a police investigation and the story of a crazy and tragic love affair between a young man and an older woman (Macha Meril), and it exudes a strange and powerful latent homosexual drive. The film’s staging rarely succeeds in articulating these various levels. This failure is even more obvious with Nuit docile (1987) which was met with general indifference from both critics and the French public.
‘Although he was already very ill, Gilles then began to make the film Nefertiti, an ambitious international co-production that exhausted him and was considered a fiasco. In 1995, an unfinished version was shown very quietly on television. On February 3, 1996, Gilles Guy died from complications from AIDS. His brother, Luc Bernard, later devoted a documentary to Gilles’s work in 1999: Letter to my brother Guy Gilles, filmmaker too soon.
‘Parallel to his achievements in film, Guy Gilles was a prolific director for television. He directed a very highly regarded documentary about Marcel Proust (Proust, art and pain, 1971) and another successful documentary about Jean Genet (Holy martyr and poet, 1974). He was also a cultishly beloved photographer and painter, and he wrote several books, most of them as yet unpublished.’ —
Fortunate enough to have taken a couple of years of literary courses on Borges given by Alicia Borinsky back in the 70's at Hopkins. She instilled in me a love for Borges' erudite fiction and understated humor. Reading recently an analysis of the famed “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” , a story on misinformation and conspiracy written 80 years ago, I googled for the massive book by Bioy Casares on Borges (2006), which appears not yet to be translated, and came up with this nice article on Borges and Bioy's love of crime fiction in Crime Reads:
As the authors cited by Borges suggest, the crime fiction he and Bioy Casares preferred were complex tales of detection. After kicking off the series with Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die, they followed up with novels by John Dickson Carr, Michael Innes, and Anthony Gilbert. Borges and Bioy Casares had a predilection for British mystery writers, and from 1945 to 1955, when they ran The Seventh Circle, the majority of books they selected were from Britain. They did make exceptions—titles by James M. Cain, Vera Caspary, and Margaret Millar—but what the pair most wanted to display to Argentinian readers were confounding puzzles and whodunnits with clues, narratives where disorder hides behind the scrim of respectability and brutality squares off against the cerebral.
They had, under the name H. Bustos Domecq, collaborated on a detective story collection before creating The Seventh Circle. This book was Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi), published in 1942. Inspired by sedentary sleuths like Baroness Orczy’s The Old Man in the Corner and Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, Parodi is an armchair detective taken to an absurd degree. He’s a man who has been imprisoned for a murder (wrongly), and who solves crimes from a jail cell. Famous in Buenos Aires for his mental abilities, he receives visitors in his cell, and while he smokes cigarettes, brusque and aloof in his manner, they present “the mystery that troubles them.” On their second visit, they hear the solution, “which astounds young and old alike.” Through a tongue in cheek forward written by a fictional critic about Domecq, Borges and Bioy Casares lay out their purpose and method. The critic states that “an Argentine hero has made his appearance in a purely Argentine setting. What an uncommon pleasure it is…to savor a detective story which does not obey the rigid rules of a foreign Anglo-Saxon market.”
In actuality, the six stories are exaggerated versions of Anglo-Saxon detective fiction, working as both parodies and genuine mysteries. The “Nights of Goliadkin” features a phony priest calling himself Father Brown and takes place on a sleeper train filled with ridiculous, secret-laden passengers. “The God of the Bulls” has an impossible crime taking place on an isolated estate, but this being Argentina, the estate is on the pampas and a prime suspect is a man obsessed with gauchos. “Tai An’s Long Search” is narrated by a Chinese man, whose extreme humbleness and amiability seem to mock a stereotype in part reinforced by the Charlie Chan novels. Borges and Bioy Casares wrote stories that entertain in Don Parodi, but at the same time, to a certain extent, they deconstruct a genre they love.
The stories also illuminate Argentina in the early 1940’s. The tail end of what became known as the “Infamous Decade,” this was a period, before the rise of Juan Perón, marked by fraudulent elections and corruption. Though not known as political writers, Borges and Bioy Casares do present a great deal of social commentary in the book, integrated into the convoluted plots. “A satire on the Argentine,” is how Borges, in his “Autobiographical Essay,” describes it, and what a barbed picture the book gives. Starting with the verbose fictional critic, Gervasio Montenegro, who writes the collection’s forward, pomposity and falsehood are everywhere. Class divisions cause problems, families implode because of rivalries and cruelty, there’s a large divide between rural people and urban, and everybody seems to be commenting on the foreign roots of other people, though Argentina is a nation of immigrants. Not a single person who comes to Don Parodi with a story uses language in a direct manner; voice after voice he listens to is florid and deceptive. His logic cuts through all the pretension, and when he speaks, he is concise and clear. In a world of the self-serving, of dupes and schemers, Parodi stands for intellectual honesty. That he is in prison, and for a crime he didn’t commit, emphasizes the topsy-turvy quality of the world he inhabits.
Four years later, Bioy Casares collaborated on a second mystery, this one a novel. Written with his wife, Silvina Ocampo, Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (Los que aman, Odian) came out in 1946 from Seventh Circle. It would be one of the few Spanish language works the imprint published.
From this weekend concert/gathering of the Cantors de Bomba de Puerto Rico in Loiza, here are some of the photos from this historic event. The music was transformational for my understanding of Puerto Rican music and that is with over 40 years of knowledge and experience coming to the island. A wondrous event!:
Vallejo Nocturno 2021-Encuentro de Cantaoras de Bomba de Puerto Rico en Loiza
In the spring of 1996, Owais Tohid, a well-known Pakistani journalist, travelled around Afghanistan speaking to Taliban fighters and commanders. The west didn’t understand them, they told him again and again. “Americans have the clocks,” a young Talib quoted Mullah Omar, “but we have the time.”
The United States and their Nato partners had technology and weapons, but the Taliban were fighting for their home. For all their sophistry, the west had no persistence. The west’s arrogance hasn’t changed much, no matter the case, they imagine that they can land their military might on top of a political terrain and forever transform it. But violence has never worked, not once, in all the United States’ misadventures – it didn’t work in Vietnam, Laos, Korea, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Afghanistan.
The Vietnamese believed the same thing during their war with the United States: as long as we persist, we win. Ho Chi Minh said: “You can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.” Persistence. The Vietnamese and the Taliban controlled time, and ultimately victory, because the idea of home will always be a stronger force than military might, technology or violence.
Occupiers can only have temporary power, eventually they have to leave. They have to go back somewhere. But men fighting for their home cannot be defeated. You give them no choice, they have to fight you. They have nowhere else to go, nowhere to retreat to.
This is a lesson the feverish colonisers of the west cannot seem to learn: the concept of home, not violence, is how wars are won. The west’s profound misunderstanding of Islam – and proud refusal to learn anything about it as they launched wars all over the Muslim world over the last two decades – coupled with this ignorance is what made defeat in Afghanistan inevitable.
2. Moira Donnega
In the weeks and months after 9/11, all sorts of justifications were proposed for the predetermined invasion of Afghanistan. One of the pretexts on offer was the Taliban’s treatment of women, which, before the American intervention, was indeed brutal and tyrannical. The neoconservative elite then in power used Afghan women’s suffering as a moral shield, claiming that feminists should back the invasion.
It was a cynical bit of PR, though it did succeed in persuading some American feminists to wave the flag. In practice, the neoconservatives largely ignored the feminist movement’s substantive concerns in Afghanistan, and actively worked against their goals domestically. Their commitment to women’s rights was always a matter of pretense, not principle.
Now, after the spectacular failure of the American occupation and the return of Taliban rule, feminists have become a convenient scapegoat for the invasion. Renewed feminist concerns about the Taliban’s violent oppression of women are being cast as imperialist, rather than humanitarian – a point of view that ignores the perspectives of Afghan women themselves, who have been vocal about their alarm. Meanwhile, the politicians who were actually responsible for the invasion have faced no accountability, or even had their reputations rehabilitated.
But where western feminists do bear responsibility is in their failure to comprehend Afghan women’s oppression as related to, though different from, their own. In discussions of the Taliban, western feminists tended to exoticize the group’s culturally specific forms of male supremacy (notably, the enforced burka) rather than emphasizing the connections between the Taliban’s logic of misogyny and that professed by women’s oppressors in the west, including those who perpetrated the 2001 invasion. If western feminists want to build a truly global feminist movement, they will need to approach their Afghan counterparts with solidarity, not paternalism.