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

Democracy for Realist

“Unfortunately, while the folk theory of democracy has flourished as an ideal, its credibility has been severely undercut by a growing body of scientific evidence presenting a different and considerably darker view of democratic politics. That evidence demonstrates that the great majority of citizens pay little attention to politics. At election time, they are swayed by how they feel about “the nature of the times,” especially the current state of the economy, and by political loyalties typically acquired in childhood. Those loyalties, not the facts of political life and government policy, are the primary drivers of political behavior. Election outcomes turn out to be largely random events from the viewpoint of contemporary democratic theory. That is, elections are well determined by powerful forces, but those forces are not the ones that current theories of democracy believe should determine how elections come out. Hence the old frameworks will no longer do.”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

Worse than a Failure

From The New Yorker:

Of course, anybody who has followed Trump’s career already knew that much of what he said was erroneous and deceptive. He financed the parts of his business portfolio that he didn’t inherit from Fred by taking on huge loans. During the recession of the early nineteen-nineties, four of his highly indebted businesses declared bankruptcy—three casinos in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Other Trump businesses only survived because they were sold or his lenders decided they were worth more as going concerns and allowed him to write down some of his debts.

The Times reporters and other journalists have already covered some of this troubled history. In September, 2016, the Times received a copy of part of Trump’s 1995 tax return, which showed that he declared a massive tax loss, of nine hundred and sixteen million dollars. Under tax laws, business owners are allowed to carry losses into subsequent years and offset them against income. Trump’s loss was so huge in 1995, the Times noted, that it “could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.” In response to that Times scoop, Trump’s campaign released a statement that didn’t challenge the nine-hundred-and-sixteen-million-dollar loss but claimed that he “has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes.”

By lumping all the different taxes together, this statement seemed to concede that Trump’s federal-tax payments after 1995 weren’t very large. The latest Times report confirms that Trump didn’t pay much tax in the decade before 1995, either. To wit: “Over all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years.” (The story also notes, “It is not known whether the I.R.S. later required changes after audits.”)

This revelation confirms another thing that many Trump skeptics have long suspected. The financial problems his businesses faced predated the bust of the early nineteen-nineties. “The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses—largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings,” the Times reported. “They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.” In 1987, Trump published a ghostwritten book—“Trump: The Art of the Deal”—that became a best-seller and cemented his status as a celebrity. By the time the book came out, the story notes, Trump “was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals.”

 

 

Faure's Piano Music Done Right

Strangely, a day after having been mesmerized by Faure's Nocturnes I read this  article by the New Yorker's cinema critic Richard Brody and I'm in very much agreement as I listen to Heidsieck's 1972 recording:

Yesterday morning at home over coffee, when I heard on our local classical-music station, WQXR, that today is Gabriel Fauré’s birthday, I foresaw the occasion to chat about some music that means a lot to me. The composer, who is doubtless best known for his Requiem, is, for me, above all, a composer of piano music. Born in 1845, he died in 1924, and his music ranges, in style and tone, from the romantic through the modern. His two great cycles of piano music—thirteen Nocturnes, composed from 1875 through 1921, and thirteen Barcarolles, composed between 1880 and 1921, move from the limpidly melodic to the ethereally abstract; following them on their course reveals the severe thought and exquisite touch that they combine.

Speaking of his own music, Fauré delivered one of the great self-definitions in artistic history: “J’ai reculé les limites du raffinement”—“I have moved back the limits of refinement.” It’s precisely the refinement of Fauré’s piano music that accounts for its relative unfamiliarity. Where his near-contemporaries Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel were master colorists of a wide palette, Fauré worked in shades of mauve and gray; where Chopin’s intimate miniatures have an assertiveness that transfers (albeit sometimes uneasily) to the concert hall, the crystalline forms of Fauré’s piano music seem too fragile, the perfumes too subtle and delicate, to be cast to the thousands without being damaged or dispersed.

Yet, despite their exquisite surfaces, the works in these two great cycles are no mere decorative strands, but intensely, intellectually concentrated compositions. I’ve always thought, with my amateur’s ear, that Fauré is second only to Beethoven in the power of his decomposition—in his ability to extract, from a melody, a tiny and dense thematic node or phrase that becomes, in turn, the basis for new flights of imagination that kaleidoscopically reveal the musical and emotional essence of the original melody. These are tightly packed, severely constructed works; with their intense intellectualism and their ethereal exquisiteness, these two cycles of colossal miniatures are worthy to stand alongside Chopin’s Nocturnes and Brahms’s intermezzi; yet their lofty virtues of severity and intimacy are among the reasons why they have been largely overlooked in the shuffle of musical history.

I’ve got some favorite recordings; the obvious choices are the ones from the nineteen-fifties by Germaine Thyssens-Valentin, for whom Fauré’s voice was the vernacular and who plays these pieces with wisdom and grace. A recent, daring, impulsive recording of the Barcarolles by a young pianist, Pierre-Alain Volondat, brings some surprisingly intense glints of noonday sun to the aquatic genre (a barcarolle is, after all, a gondolier’s song). My favorite recording of the Nocturnes, by Eric Heidsieck, a pianist of tensile energy and mercurial emotion, is, at the moment, unavailable.

P.S. On a cinematic note, the Requiem is sampled in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1982 “Passion,” a movie that joins music and painting to politics and personal revelation in a modern reclamation of grand-scale melodrama.

Faure's Infernal Nocturnes

I had not focused on these complex set of pieces until recently when the just kind of appeared on my mix one day as i sat reading a novel. Eventually they cornered me and I had to pay attention. Here is a solid assessment in Gramophone on which are the best versions:

For Debussy, Fauré was a ‘master of charms’, his Ballade as erotic as a woman’s loose shoulder strap, while even Liszt – most far-sighted of critics – demurred before music which offered too few instant returns. At a later date Cortot may have written rapturously about Fauré (the First Impromptu’s ‘stylised coquetry and regret’ or the Third Impromptu’s central calm, ‘like an avenue of fans folding and unfolding’) but much to the composer’s chagrin he played little of his music. In a burst more of sadness than of rage, Fauré wrote to him saying, ‘you allow my music to pile up without actually playing it’. This desertion even included music dedicated to Cortot, including the bleak and unaccommodating Ninth Nocturne. Horowitz once told me that he played the entire piano works of Fauré in private but his public offering consisted of only three works, proof for some that he was primarily interested in the externals of music. For French pianist Michel Béroff, Fauré’s music expresses little beyond a ‘vague perfume’, an opinion that should have earned him chastisement from his long-term two-piano partner Jean-Philippe Collard, who has recorded the complete piano works. Joan Chissell, for long a critic for Gramophone, felt that with Fauré, ‘a little goes a long way’, while a German lady ‘professor’ who I had the misfortune to meet as a jury colleague in France told me that if she suggested such music to her students they would walk out. For such people Fauré’s outward convention and inner audacity, together with the move from what they see as salonish origins to obscurity, is hardly worth the effort or challenge.

And that challenge, too, is considerable, The difficulty in performance is a major factor in Fauré’s neglect. Any pianist who has ever studied or attempted to memorise Fauré will tell you of their often desperate fight for fluency in patterns which rarely lie easily under the hand, and for shot-silk modulations and rhythmic ambiguities that can fox even the most skilled player. And all this in music which, as Liszt hinted, is hardly designed to win easy applause. The public has understandably little notion of the intensive work required to bring such an elusive task to vivid and meaningful life. Regrettably, if again understandably, many pianists dip their toes in Fauré (the early, more accessible Fauré with the Second and Third Impromptus for preference) before retreating into less unsettling, commercially more viable territory for a greater sense of musical terra firma.

Again, and at a more basic level, such a plethora of problems is compounded by record companies whose sleeves and illustrations perpetuate a misleading emphasis and impression. Sylvan woods, garlands of flowers and over-familiar portraits of Fauré as an elderly white-haired prelate hardly hint at the whole story. And it is greatly to Paul Crossley’s credit, for example, that he insisted on having reproductions of the often darkly disturbing paintings of Caspar David Friedrich for his covers. These at any rate suggest paradise lost and hardly regained.

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At the Mitrione's

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Botafogo

You find the most peculiar dreams under the elevator. Once underneath their frame there were very little people living a perplexing debacle. But, of course, you can also go up and down to the big breakfast spread and long blue pool to forget it all. Trapped in a kind of deja vu we called it that summer. But in Botafogo these were considered new and inspiring machines with windows to observe the elaborate gardens once inflated and then disappeared.  Then there was a painting of the Virgin Mary that ran up and down the descent giving the private box a culture all its own experience. After those delirious rides to the rooftop we could begin to observe those little people below. Now they were at the beach or then suddenly starting a fire in the underpass. We eventually turned our attention to the cameras and the interviewer who was learning the mysteries of electricity on the local souls as he described the unique scene brought to us from the North.

The Story of Your Death

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Arequipa

How one is remembered can be sad. Or even incorrect. They said he had protested the way the priest was treating the women and girls in the community. He had been brought by the priest to paint religious stories of the others. Once before he had found himself in the square he was thinking about what he would paint Christ and how he would make the colors provide a discourse. But he ended burned piece by piece with candles by the follower of another god. An example that rippled across centuries in that village high above and far away from Spain. I don't want to be remembered by my death.

Cruelty and Sadism in a Political Context

From The Atlantic, Andrew Serwer writes in October 2018 the truth:

Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.

Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant childrenseparated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToomovement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

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Timothy Snyder Quote on Twitter

"A puppet does not collude. It performs."  Historian Timothy Snyder

Monasterio/Convento Santa Catalina en Arequipa

Vallejo Nocturo 2019 -El Monasterio de Santa Catalina en Arequipa en Febrero 2019

From Wikipedia:

The foundress of the monastery was a rich widow, Maria de Guzman. The tradition of the time indicated that the second son or daughter of a family would enter a life of service in the Church, and the monastery accepted only women from upper class Spanish families. Each family paid a dowry at their daughter's admission to the monastery. The dowry expected of a woman who wished to enter as a choir nun--indicated by wearing a black veil—and who thereby accepted the duty of the daily recitation of the Divine Office, was 2,400 silver coins, equivalent to about $150,000 (U.S.) today. The nuns were also required to bring 25 listed items, including a statue, a painting, a lamp and clothes. The wealthiest nuns may have brought fine English china and silk curtains and rugs. Although it was possible for poorer nuns to enter the convent without paying a dowry, it can be seen from the cells that most of the nuns were very wealthy.

In 1871 Sister Josefa Cadena, O.P., a strict Dominican nun, was sent by Pope Pius IX to reform the monastery. She sent the rich dowries back to Europe, and freed all the servants and slaves, giving them the choice of either remaining as nuns or leaving. In addition to the stories of outrageous wealth, there are tales of nuns becoming pregnant, and amazingly of the skeleton of a baby being discovered encased in a wall. This, in fact, did not happen in Santa Catalina, and there are rumors of the same story in the nearby Santa Rosa monastery, as well.

At its height, the monastery housed approximately 450 people (about a third of them nuns and the rest servants) in a cloistered community. In the 1960s, it was struck twice by earthquakes, severely damaging the structures, and forcing the nuns to build new accommodation next door. It was then restored in stages by groups including Promociones Turisticas del Sur S.A. and World Monuments Fund and opened to the public. This also helped pay for the installation of electricity and running water, as required by law.

Lois Weber - Great Silent Film Director

 

At The Point, an article about the great silent film director Lois Weber:

In spring of 2018, the saviors of almost-lost cinema at Milestone Films released Weber’s 1916 production Shoes on DVD. The film had been unseen and practically unknown for nearly a century, but following a revival screening late last year, the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis deemed it “brilliant.” Weber’s inspiration for the film had been a report by Jane Addams about how easily shop girls fell into prostitution. Shoes begins with a subtitle—“She sold herself for a pair of shoes”—and then backtracks through the chain of events that led Eva, the young protagonist, to exchange sex for footwear. It’s a Pretty Woman story turned inside out.

Eva works long hours in a five-and-dime store, and her job is the sole support of her father, mother and three younger sisters. Her wages go straight into a pouch pinned to her mother’s bra. Week after week, her mother promises there’ll be enough money to buy Eva a new pair of shoes, but there never is.

The particulars of Weber’s plot are drawn from the report. At that time, according to Addams, shop girls made about $6,000 a year, barely a living wage, while prostitutes earned more than four times that amount. Activists argued that stores cultivated a desire for luxury goods far beyond the means of working girls, whose ten-hour days behind the counter left them standing prey for would-be pimps. It was apparently easy to slide into lunch-hour prostitution, and Weber was horrified that so many young women did.

Shoes doesn’t stray far from its title; Weber attends almost obsessively to Eva’s disintegrating boots. The camera addresses them as a character, lingering over their poignant creases, and following along as they walk gingerly in the rain, stand on rough wood floors or sit abjectly next to Eva’s chair. Every morning, Eva traces and cuts out inserts from cardboard to protect her soles; in the evening, she shakes out these fragments, now dirty and crumbled, and soaks her feet in steaming water. Her hope for redemption seems to hinge on the state of her footwear; if Weber can convey how tattered the boots and sore the feet, we will forgive Eva her prostitution. At the end of the film, passed over by her mother one more time, Eva finds her own solution. She comes home one day wearing a gleaming pair of boots, and tearfully collapses in her mother’s lap.

Footwear is important in many Weber films, to such a degree that her biographer Anthony Slide puzzles over her “fetish.” Fetish is not the right word, but Weber does treat footwear with special care, as another director might treat a locket, or cigarettes, or a cross. Shoes seemed to have been part of her personal symbology, a shortcut to a feeling of loss. She was furious when censors removed a shot of a dead baby’s shoes from Hop, the Devil’s Brew (1916). The film is about a mother so devastated by the death of her child that she becomes addicted to opium. Her husband, a customs inspector, is responsible for confiscating opium shipments from China; one day, he finds his wife huddled among the addicts in an opium den. The shot of the baby shoes was pivotal, Weber argued, to establishing the mother’s suffering and furnishing an explanation for her addiction, but this was precisely the censor’s problem: Weber was treating addiction not as a failure of self-control, but as a consequence of grief.

The state of the shoes in Shoes seems to refer to the loss of Eva’s virginity, but there’s also a more basic reading: Weber is outraged that a functional necessity has become too expensive for a working girl’s income. Another Weber film juxtaposes the poverty of a theologian’s family with their neighbors’ wealth. Weber treats the neighbors with disdain, taking pains to show the ostentation of their car and the excess of their meals. It’s no surprise when she explains that they got rich by selling shoes, priced, she reports, at “$18 a pair!”

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