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

Some Recent Photo Activity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

C-Vallejo Nocturno 2024

Ayler Lives!!!

Best Music of 2024 - Water Damage

 

Another recent find though this group has been out there making an intriguing type of music based on repetition and simultaneous soloing. Sounds chaotic but there's a hell of a lot of form that arises and passion. This is the type of drone "electronic" music that I can see opening some pathways to interesting sounds especially when they have a couple of drums. As crazy as it is, this group played at one of the places I always go hear new and adventurous music, RhizomeDC earlier this year and it was captured on video in a way that presents it acoustically and visually in a way that seems direct and honest. Here it is:

 

 

From Pitchfork:

Forget music that makes you feel no pain. What about music that makes you feel like nothing at all, that pushes and pulverizes you until every woe, hope, and worry disappears like dust? That is the marvelous strength of Water Damage, an amorphous collective of about a dozen Austin underground heads whose high-volume indulgence in repetition is a force both obliterative and purifying. They ride the divide between noise and rock, pounding out rhythms like a power trio caught on an eternal trip to nowhere, all beneath feedback streaks and microtonal bleats. In New York in the late ’70s, the Ramones at CBGB inspired young composer and avant-impresario Rhys Chatham to repeat an electrified E above drums until the overtones turned into a fever dream, the vision fulfilled by his Guitar Trio. Nearly half a century later, Water Damage have turned that challenge into an obstacle course with In E, their third and best album and a reaffirming testament to just how ecstatic and mighty minimalism can be.

In E arrives as four side-long tracks, each charging down a single alleyway without ever wavering, glancing back, or bothering to do anything more than shift in barely perceptible ways. “Nice!” someone seems to yell 15 seconds into “Reel E,” the phosphorescent violin and colossal rhythm section presumably pausing just long enough to check the levels.

And then, their marathon begins, blown-out bass and brain-fried guitar unfolding like an imagined ocean. The drums fall in line like a marching band, at least two kits shaping an ironclad pocket. But the bristled violin of Mari Maurice Rubio—who records as the great more eaze—slices through the sides of the beat like she’s trying to make an escape. And that’s mostly where the piece hangs until the band breaks down and Maurice outlasts the rhythm long enough to sail into this open void. Loud, relentless, unrepentant: Lock into that tug of war, and you may forget where you are, how you are, who you are. It feels fantastic, a rare mind eraser for our increasingly plugged-in times.

Water Damage unlock the same effect on “Reel EE” and “Reel EEE” with very different approaches. For the former, the rhythm section summons a rock band that’s about to count in to their greatest hit, but they simply sit there, repeating the meter and doubling the bass until it all blurs into a trance. Don’t expect it to change when the guitars finally arrive, either, their slow wave of serrated tones washing over everything like insoluble oil. It is a web of interwoven drones, with feedback, distortion, and fragmented chords cohering into sustained chaos. “Can textures alone make a riff?” Water Damage seem to ask. The Motorik march compels you to nod along whether or not you agree.

 

Best Music of 2024- Wojtek Mazolewzki Quintet

 

If you had not noticed I typically start rounding up my best music candidates around October but this year I decided to listen more before I started laying the sounds that caught my attention-I also plan to go until late January to ensure I don't miss much.One that I recently encountered and that strikes a chord is Wojtek Mazolewzki Quintet that combines the headier jazz music from the later 60's with eliptical solos and mysterious transitions but always grounded in that attractive Polish modal jazz of Stanko. Extremely contagious sounds. Mazolewzki is the bassist for the group and provides lots of freedom for his talented colleagues to tell their stories. It always amazes me how I can find a musician who has been around for years but only now in 2024 I'm getting finally familiar. Oh, yes the music is super well recorded.

Access to their Music 

“Mazolewski has redefined the jazz form, given it a modern shape and introduced the listener to more established forms of jazz music. He has tamed jazz and made it accessible to the charts, television screens and to the opinions of the popular press. ”
– Gazeta Wyborcza

 

 

NotebookLM Seems Pretty Crazy

This type of stuff can really change the way you learn and expose yourself to new or old information!

 

Transpires

I've recently been posting less and less even in this 20th year of this online journal/document/place to refer to things. Partly it's because of the sorrowful situation in this country, USA, and its choice, supposedly, for a known criminal and narcissist, and someone who has shown who he is aligned with, is elected to steer this country to an autocratic state. Knowing what transpired in Latin America with the help of the US in the 50's-80's it is easier to see what will become of a country founded on ethnic cleansing and slavery. Let's hope I'm delusional but I see and hear what the other side is saying and it's similar to what Franco's people said and did. I will try and focus on positive things to keep my mind balanced.

 

On the other side, this month has been good for my photography and also reading. I will focus on that.

Some recent tour photos from Todd Marcus' Quintets run through two states and the District.

From Black Cherry Puppet Theatre Jam with Sami Arefin and Sam Farthing.

James Hamilton Documentary!

A documentary on Village Voice's photographer James Hamilton-a real influence.

Real Clear Language

From Megan Garber writing in The Atlantic:

ne October surprise of 2024 took an aptly Orwellian turn: The scandal, this time around, was a matter of language. Earlier this month, John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, escalated his warnings that his former boss is unfit for office. Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump had expressed a desire for generals like the ones “that Hitler had.” Then, in an interview published by The New York Times, Kelly described Trump’s dictatorial approach to leadership, his drive to suppress opposition, his insatiable appetite for power. He concluded that Trump fits the definition of fascist.

Kelly’s claim was echoed, more mildly, by Trump’s former secretary of defense—he “certainly has those inclinations,” Mark Esper said—and, less mildly, by Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump is “the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley warned in Bob Woodward’s latest book, its publication timed to coincide with the election. He is also, Milley added, “fascist to the core.” (Trump denied the men’s claims: “I am the opposite of a Nazi,” he said.) Late last week, 13 others who had served in high-level positions in the Trump administration signed an open letter: “Everyone,” they wrote, “should heed General Kelly’s warning.”

The comments made headlines because of the people who expressed them: Each had worked directly with Trump. The former officials made history, though, because of the word they deployed in their warnings. Fascist is a claim of last resort. It is a term of emergency. Because of that, its validity, as a description for Trump’s seething strain of populism, has been the subject of a long-standing debate among scholars, journalists, and members of the public—one made even more complicated by the fact that, as the historian Ian Kershaw has observed, “Trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

But one need not be a scholar of fascism to see the plain reality. Trump lost an election. He refused to accept the result. In a second term, he has suggested, he will “terminate” the Constitution; use the American judicial system to take revenge on those who have angered him; and perform sweeping immigration raids, expelling millions of people from the country. Trump, in addition to praising Hitler’s generals, regularly uses language that echoes Hitler’s hatreds. He has described immigrants, whatever their legal status, as a formless “invasion,” and the press as “the enemy of the people.” He has dismissed those who are insufficiently loyal to him as “human scum” and “vermin.”

Fascism—that call to history, that careful description, that five-alarm piece of language—is the right word. But it may turn out, at the same time, to be the wrong one. It might, in our cynical moment, provoke exhaustion rather than alarm.

In “Politics,” Orwell reserves particular vitriol for political language that hides its intentions in euphemism and wan metaphor. Wording that resorts to ambiguity can disguise atrocities (as when, in one of the examples Orwell offers, the bombing of villages and their defenseless people is referred to merely as “pacification”). Orwell’s problem was language that gives writers permission not to think. Ours, however, is language that gives readers permission not to care. Even the clearest, most precise language can come to read, in our restless age, as cliché. “The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet,” the old line goes; “the second, an imbecile.” On the internet, anyone can become that imbecile. For language in general, this is not an issue: When on fleek goes off in an instant or cheugy plummets from coinage to cringe, more words will arrive in their place.

When the restlessness comes for political language, though—for the words we rely on to do the shared work of self-government—the impatience itself becomes Orwellian. Urgent words can feel tired. Crises can come, but no words suffice to rouse us. Americans face an election that our democracy—hard-fought, hard-won, ever fragile—may not survive; “defend democracy,” though, can read less as a call to arms than as a call to yawn. Trump himself is insulated by all the ennui. Nearly every word you might apply to him fits the picture that was already there. His depravity has become tautological: It’s just Trump being Trump. It’s shocking, not surprising.

The word fascism can fail that way, too. And it can be further defanged by the biggest cliché of all: thoughtlessly partisan politics. Some audiences, seeing the word deployed as a description, will dismiss it as simply more evidence of the media’s (or John Kelly’s) alleged bias against Trump. Others, assuming that fascism and Nazism are the same thing—assuming that fascism cannot be present until troops are goose-stepping in the streets—will see the term as evidence of hysteria.

But fascism can come whether the language acknowledges it or not. It marches toward us, restricted right by restricted right, book ban by book ban. It can happen here. The question is whether we’ll be able to talk about it—and whether people will care. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week asked registered voters across the country whether Trump was a “fascist” (defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents”). Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, said he was—roughly the same percentage of people who, in recent national polls, say that they plan to vote for him.

The philosopher Emilio Uranga observed, in Mexican political life of the mid-20th century, a gnawing sense of uncertainty—a “mode of being,” he wrote, “that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on.” The unsteadiness, he suggested, amounts to pain. In it, “the soul suffers.” It “feels torn and wounded.” Uranga gave the condition a name: zozobra.

The wound he describes, that plague of doubleness, has settled into American political language. In her 2023 book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the “mirror world” in right-wing politics—a place where every reality has a rhetorical double. She focuses on the rhetoric of Steve Bannon, the former Trump-administration strategist. As Democrats and journalists discussed the Big Lie—Donald Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election—Bannon began discussing the Big Steal: the idea that Joe Biden, against all evidence, stole the presidency.

The tactic is common. Trump regularly fantasizes before his cheering crowds about the violence that might befall his opponents. Journalists describe him as engaging in “extreme” and “inflammatory” rhetoric. Republicans in Trump’s camp, soon enough, began accusing Democrats of, as one of his surrogates put it, “irresponsible rhetoric” that “is causing people to get hurt.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s response to the former military leaders’ warnings about Trump took a similar tack: Their rhetoric is “dangerous,” he said this weekend. On Monday, Trump gave John Kelly’s comments about him a predictably zozobric twist. Kamala Harris, he said, is a fascist.

“In the mirror world,” Klein writes, “there is a copycat story, and an answer for everything, often with very similar key words.” The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has commonly been described as an insurrection; Republican power brokers have begun describing peaceful political protests as “insurrections.” We must save American democracy, the stark slogan that gained new currency in response to the Big Lie, is now a common refrain on the right. (Elon Musk, at a recent Trump rally, argued that the former president “must win to preserve democracy in America.”)

Mirroring, as propaganda, is extremely effective. It addles the mind. It applies a choose-your-own-adventure approach to meaning itself. Mirroring does, in that way, precisely what Orwell feared: It gives up on the very possibility of common language. It robs political terms of their ability to clarify, to unite, to warn. In a world that is endlessly doubling itself, 2 + 2 = 4 may be a liberating truth. Or it may be a narrative imposed on you by a smug and elitist regime. Freedom, soon enough, becomes the ability to say that the sum of 2 + 2 is whatever you want it to be.

More

Happy Holloween Baltimore Style

A home in the Roland Park Water Tower area.

A Fake Working Man

From The Atlantic on Trump frying fries:

The images of Trump’s McDonald’s stunt—in which he jiggled the fryer and handed burgers out of a window yesterday—are uncanny. There’s Trump, face contorted in the appearance of deep concentration, tilting a fry basket to the heavens; Trump hanging two-thirds of the way out a drive-through window, waving like a beleaguered Norman Rockwell character; Trump, mouth agape, appearing to yell into the middle distance of a fast-food parking lot. The shadows of the McDonald’s kitchen, the interplay between the sheen of the stainless steel and the cast of the nugget-warming lights, give the very real photos a distinct Midjourney aesthetic. These pictures immediately reminded me of the viral, glossy AI-generated images of Trump being arrested and thrown in jail that started circulating in the spring of 2023.

Perhaps it’s because my feeds have been simultaneously clogged with election-season garbage and AI-generated slop, but the McDonald’s photoshoot struck me as a moment of strange synthesis, where reality and tech-enabled fiction felt somehow mashed together by the internet’s cultural particle accelerator. Trump proffering Dollar Menu items isn’t AI, but it is still slop in all the ways that matter: a hastily staged depiction of a fairly stupid, though entertaining fantasy, meant to delight, troll, and, most important, emphasize a false impression of the candidate.

This is clarifying, insofar that it demonstrates that Trump’s primary output is always a kind of slop. Slop, as it relates to AI, is loosely defined as spammy, cheap blocks of text, video, or images, quickly generated by computer programs for mass distribution. But nonsynthetic slop is everywhere too. What is a Trump rally but a teleprompter reading of stump-speech slop, interspersed with inexplicable lorem ipsum about Hannibal Lecter and wind turbines spun up by the unknowable language model in Trump’s own head? What are Trump’s tweets and Truth Social shitposts if not slop morsels, hurled into the internet’s ether for the rest of us to react to? And what is the Trump campaign producing if not fantastical propaganda intended to conjure a false image of Joe Biden’s America as a dark, dangerous place on the verge of destruction, besieged by immigrants, and savable only by one heroic man? (For instance, earlier today, Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself as a buff Pittsburgh Steelers lineman.) The McDonald’s photo op was barely real: The restaurant was closed to the public during Trump’s visit. He ignored a question about the minimum wage. Only prescreened customers were allowed in the drive-through, and those customers were not able to place orders—they just took whatever Trump handed to them. Like any good AI slop, the op illustrated a fantasy—in this case, that Trump, a man who has long lived in a gilded penthouse, is a working-class man.