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.”

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.

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.

 

Protest For Puerto Rico

Here are some fotos from this Monday's protest to get the Puerto Rican Gorvernor, Ricky Rosello, to resign. His incompetence and corruption have worsened and already difficult situation on the island. There have been massive protests on the island and the hope and expectation is that he will resign and things will change for the better.

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Protesta en Washington DC

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.

Diderot and Thinking

From a review of the book Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely by Andrew Curran at the LATB:

In Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, Andrew Curran has stepped up to the challenge. A French scholar who has written widely on Diderot, Curran offers a clear and compelling account of this magnificent but mercurial thinker. Though hobbled, like earlier biographers, by crucial gaps in the documentation of Diderot’s early years, Curran does an admirable job in fleshing out his subject’s youth. He rightly focuses on the tension between Diderot père and fils. A pillar of the community in their native city of Langres, the father actually had his rebellious son imprisoned at a Carmelite monastery in order to prevent him from marrying a poor laundress he had met while studying for the priesthood in Paris.

Not only did the young Diderot escape Langres, return to Paris, and marry — mostly to his regret — the laundress, but he also escaped the reach of the church. Quitting his ecclesiastical studies, then legal studies (which was the paternal Plan B), Diderot was asked what profession he did want to practice. “My gosh,” he replied: “Nothing, nothing at all. I like to study; I am very happy, very content. I don’t ask for anything else.” Needless to say, Diderot’s declaration — one that today’s parents, unfortunately, do not as often hear as they should — shocked his father, who concluded that his son had gone rogue and cut off his allowance.

In a sense, Diderot not only went rogue — throwing over not just his religious training, but his religious faith as well — but he remained rogue, politically and philosophically, for the rest of his life. He became an atheist while other Enlightenment thinkers, including Voltaire and Rousseau, held fast to their deist faith; he became a philosophical materialist though he never surrendered his faith in free will; he became editor of 18th-century France’s best-known work though he was often forced to edit and write in semi-clandestine fashion; and he wrote some of the most admired works of literature from the same age, though they were not published until long after his death; and he became a herald of republicanism while his peers still clung to enlightened monarchism.

With confidence and care, Curran traces Diderot’s breathtaking intellectual itinerary. He does a fine job in explaining why the Encyclopédie was so revolutionary — think of it as the 18th-century’s internet — and why, without Diderot’s unflagging commitment (he wrote some 5,000 of the entries), courage (he refused to move the operation to more clement climes, even though he lived under the threat of imprisonment), and cleverness (including the ploys used to undermine the orthodox entries he was forced to publish in its pages), the 28-volume work would never have seen the light of day. He also provides cogent and insightful accounts of some of Diderot’s own books, both those that were his and his alone, like D’Alembert’s Dream and The Nun, and those he wrote in collaboration with others, most notably the Abbé Raynal’s History of the Two Indies.

Importantly, Curran also portrays both Diderot’s most attractive and most annoying qualities. He was a loyal friend, though in certain cases — most notoriously, with Rousseau — loyalty curdled into animosity. He was a loving father, though he did need a few years to warm up to his one and only surviving child, Angélique. He was rightly hailed as the Age of Conversation’s greatest talker, which prevented him from being any age’s greatest listener. He was light-years ahead of his peers in grasping the countless obstacles and miserable inequities facing women, but he also was a serial cheater on his wife. Yet these inconsistencies and contradictions, especially in his writings, also make for Diderot’s greatness. His chief legacy, as Curran concludes, is “this cacophony of individual voices and ideas […] and his willingness to give a platform to the unthinkable and the uncomfortable, and to question all received authorities — be they religious, political, or societal.”

More

Ricky Renuncia DC Protest

All fotos by Vallejo Nocturno 2019- DC Protest of Puerto Rico's Corrupt Governor to Implore Him to Resign

The Dream of Unifying Images

Albert Kahn, the French Banker from the turn of last century, decided to photograph the world:

When Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and philanthropist, decided he wanted to commission a photographic “archive of the planet” he wasn’t joking. And though the idea of cataloging the earth seems whimsical in scope today, the pictures he helped create between 1909 and 1931 hold our attention like few others from the era.

They are some of the finest examples of early color pictures made using the Lumière brothers’ innovative Autochrome process. Autochromes employed microscopic grains of dyed potato starch to filter the color spectrum into three additive shades. The results, when viewed through a stereoscope or back-lit by a light box, were among the first natural color images in that their tones were derived from the color spectrum of light and not the artist’s hand.

In all, Kahn’s team of cameramen visited fifty countries to collect 72,000 photographs, some of which are among the first color images ever made in places like Vietnam, Brazil, Norway, and Mongolia. But with its essentialized worldview, Archives of the Planet also laid groundwork for the kind of exotic voyeurism made ubiquitous by publishers like National Geographic.

Nonetheless, the images Kahn was instrumental in producing retain a sense of idealism which is hard to ignore—their unnervingly contemporary feel a projection of a distinct color palette clashing with the unselfconscious postures of another era.

Kahn’s ambitions were cut short in the 1930s when he lost his fortunes to the Great Depression. But for a brief period he had hoped to promote peace and cultural solidarity through photography—a sentiment to which the medium has returned frequently, if unconvincingly, ever since.

Dora Maar's Art and Life

 

From NYRB, on Dora Maar's exhibition in Paris and her life with Picasso:

By the time of the International Exhibition, Maar’s life had taken an unexpected turn. In late 1935, she had been working as a stills photographer on the set of Jean Renoir’s film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, and at the press screening in January 1936, Paul Éluard introduced her to Pablo Picasso. Maar was twenty-eight and Picasso was fifty-four; his marriage to Olga Khokhlova had collapsed, and he was living with the young Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had recently borne his daughter Maya. Picasso later said that this was the most difficult time in his life. Maar revived him, bringing new inspiration: he was fascinated by her love of extremes, her aura of danger, her wit, her elusiveness. She photographed him in her studio and soon they were lovers.  

Along with Éluard, Maar encouraged Picasso to take a stand against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and was intimately involved when he began to work on his response to the German bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937. From May to June that year, Maar recorded every stage of his painting Guernica for the magazine Cahiers d’art, and as the studio light was poor, she touched up the negatives to show every subtle change and nuance. This careful documentation, an invaluable source for art historians, was itself a kind of Surrealist project—recording the gradual morphing and metamorphosis of a painting.

Maar and Picasso were together for eight years, and under his influence Maar began to paint as well as use her camera: several portraits and still lives she made in these years are on show at the Pompidou. At the start of their relationship, Picasso painted her as a bird, a water nymph, a flower, but as time went on, he showed her caught in a mesh, and depicted her again and again as the grief-wracked figure of The Weeping Woman (1937). The designation—which she always hated—was prophetic. Their relationship was marred by physical and mental abuse, with Marie-Thérèse always in the background. As Françoise Gilot described in her memoir, at one point he encouraged the two women to wrestle while he watched; at another he beat Maar into unconsciousness. After 1943, when Picasso met Gilot, their relationship stuttered on for three years, but Maar collapsed with a nervous breakdown, receiving electric shock treatment—banned at the time—and then beginning two years of analysis with Éluard’s friend Jacques Lacan.

More

Joao Gilberto's History

One of the best online sources about Joao Gilberto for English speaking aficionados is Daniella Thompson's Musica Brasiliensis, there she has this compact history of Joao that will elucidate who the man was and his great impact on contemporary music-here is from Plain Joao:

Bossa nova, that most personal and international of Brazilian musical forms, has been blessed with numerous gifted composers. By far the greatest was Antonio Carlos (Tom) Jobim. Alone or in partnership with poet Vinicius de Moraes, fellow composer Newton Mendonça, and other illustrious collaborators, Jobim created some of the most famous and enduring bossa nova standards, such as “Garota de Ipanema,” “Desafinado,” and “Corcovado.”

Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, the seminal bossa nova songwriting team, met in 1956, but the songs they turned out at the time were not particularly innovative. For two years, Jobim/de Moraes tunes sounded like traditional samba-canção (samba-song, a slower and more lyrical version of samba). Nobody got particularly excited over them. Then a certain young singer and guitarist came out of nowhere to give these songs a new vocal interpretation and a new beat. The year was 1958, and the new beat was soon known throughout the world as bossa nova.

That singer and guitarist was João Gilberto.

His seductive vocals caressed the ear as well as the soul, while his guitar set an insouciant swinging rhythm going. The voice pulled in one direction, the beat in another. The combination was mesmerizing and highly addictive, refreshing and modern. It opened a new page in the history of popular music. Yet it all began at the most traditional roots.

Bahia

João Gilberto do Prado Pereira de Oliveira was born on 10 June 1931 in Juazeiro, a small provincial town in the interior of the state of Bahia. His father, a prosperous merchant, was a stickler for education and insisted that each of his seven children obtain a school diploma. He was successful with six of them. The exception was the most intelligent child: Joãozinho, who from an early age was interested in only one thing—music. When João was fourteen, a bohemian godfather gave him a guitar that soon became an extension of his body. By the age of fifteen, he was the leader and arranger of a boys’ musical group that rehearsed under an old tamarind tree in the center of town and performed regularly at social functions.

The music João heard during his childhood in the 1940s emanated from the loudspeaker of a local store. It included U.S. hits like “Caravan” with Duke Ellington, “Song of India” with Tommy Dorsey, “Dream Lover” with Jeanette MacDonald, and “Ménilmontant” with the French singer/composer Charles Trenet. Of course, there was also a host of Brazilian successes of the period, such as Geraldo Pereira’s “Bolinha de Papel” with Anjos do Inferno; Herivelto Martins’ “Ave Maria no Morro” with Trio de Ouro, whose members included the composer and his wife, Dalva de Oliveira; Bide and Marçal’s “A Primeira Vez” with João’s singing idol Orlando Silva; and “Samba da Minha Terra,” composed by the great Bahian songwriter Dorival Caymmi and recorded by Bando da Lua. In later years, many of these old songs would find their way into João Gilberto’s repertoire and recordings, much to the consternation of his modernist fans.

By the time he was eighteen, João had outgrown Juazeiro and moved to Bahia’s capital, Salvador, to try his luck as a radio singer. Many singers of the period derived their sole income from performing on live radio shows. Traditionally, gambling casinos had provided the best employment for musicians, but when gambling was declared illegal in 1946, performers fell upon hard times, and competition for radio contracts became fierce.

João never became a radio success in Salvador, but while he was there, someone heard him sing and liked his voice. That someone was a member of the vocal group Garotos da Lua, who sang daily on Radio Tupi in Rio de Janeiro. Radio Tupi had just hired a new artistic director, Antônio Maria, who was to become a powerful columnist and successful songwriter (he would write the lyrics of “Manhã de Carnaval,” theme of the film Orfeu Negro). Maria took a dislike to the intimate singing style of the group’s lead singer, Jonas Silva. Complaining that Silva was singing baixinho and forcing the whole group to “whisper”—and when it came to singing carnaval songs, they “just didn’t make it”—Maria threatened to cancel the Garotos’ contract unless they replaced their crooner with someone who sounded more like Lúcio Alves, the highly popular founder and leader of the premier vocal group Namorados da Lua.

More