10 FAROLITO

farolito (ˌfærəˈliːtəʊ) (n.)

a paper lantern used by Hispanic people in Christmas processions

(from the free dictionary)

…though google translate doesn’t seem to know that. 

I focus on the lamppost: symbol that it is of urban night, indeed the locationary prop for urban dream. a thousand and one memories spring to life under the particular light of weakly luminous bulbs…

Disinterested, this week, in excavating those corpses, and feeling a certain call of duty to stay relevant to the subject, rather than talking over it through unrelated personal reverie, I take a somewhat more visual historian’s lens: recall the many reiteration of the lampost as urban symbol, often romantic symbol, in popular culture. Immediately what springs to mind is Singin’ in the Rain, but also an Hindi film, (circa the same decade, but sadly the name of which I cannot remember) that all but repeats the same imagery of some star-crossed lover’s unconventional joy in the rainy night, a lamppost to keep him company and render his (so we are supposed to believe) spontaneous movements choreographical. 

From what I’ve read and understand of Agustin Lara, this image of transnationally-exchanged, popularized visualities of the modern and urban, gaining some sort of universal currency facilitated through spreads of popular culture, seems characteristic. For myself, I notice how much more accessible and legible his sound is for me, compared to some of the other music we’ve listened to this semester It is far more familiar; images flow along readily, invoking indeed romantic lamplit streets and the like in some midcentury bourgeois urban class air. Lara, it turns out, indeed was a romantic movie man (as far as musicians go), more interested in the poetry or his aesthetics than the felt reality of living (La Llorona, for instance, seems to deal simultanesouly with personal and historic pains even within the lyricist’s/composer’s personal poetry) and this comes as little surprise. The logical knot is this disinterest in public/collective reality, but the aesthetic appeal to popular taste. But also, what is interesting is fantasy as a role, both for poet and for audience, to engage life…!

13 LAS MEXICANAS : CHAVELA VARGAS

No soy de aqui, ni soy de alla

I like the sun and a woman crying

the swallows and the bad ladies

climbing balconies and opening the windows

and the girls of April

I like the wine as much as the flowers

and the lovers, but not the gentlemen

I love being friend with the rovers

and the songs in French

I'm not from here, nor from there

I have no age, nor future

and being happy is the colour

of my identity

I like to be constantly lolling on the sand

and chasing around Manuela on a bicycle

and to gaze the stars all the time

with Maria in the cornfield

Continuing on the thought of ambivalence: I'm posting this song because those two lines seem to resonate so closely:

I'm not from here, nor from there

I have no age, nor future

Vargas lets her fluidity of identity carry her into such brightness--cavorting and regaling, even. Because when you have no strings, you have few obligations. Meaninglessness allows you to do whatever you want. It hardly matters

The matter of identity: is it set in memomory? In this commitment to things like place and time? 

If Vargas is able to testify to fluidity, I feel that my history has testified rather to series of lacks, erasures, and, more recently, reassertions. I haven't found the promise of happiness in an identity that refuses commitment.

I am writing this retrospectively so I can say more clearly: I confess that this time, my projecto is conflicted in both wanting to reassert my own interests in painting, using paint, and in yielding to a certain desire to some sort of legibility, a desire, perhaps, for the belonging that commitment promises. It was a complicated moment, then, to receive the (nonetheless highly-valued) notes of praise that I did. Presence and identity are not autonomous self-projections: to the extent that they are, they are also self-delusions. But equally so the sense of validation built out of convictions foreign, imposed upon, oneself. Presence and Identity, rather, seem to elicit from a dialogic process within a social sphere. It is something I am still after, my own forays being characterised alternately by compulsive, fear-driven hiding and withdrawal, and sudden anxious attempts at self-disclosure. I don't know where on the spectrum (if there is a spectrum as such) this tiny canvas stands: It seemed to in some way testify to the kind of success that one is left at the mercy of others to validate, but at the same time--I know the mark of my own honest strokes. 

12 CORRIDO (adelita)

It's not that the lyrics from La Adelita particularly evoke a character that I have then tried to paint...

La Adelita, I think, is allegory. The story of Adelita seems to embed and attempt to rejoin the non-militant reality of war to the battlefield. War and Revolution often take shape under (contested) masks of nationalism, and I think one reading of the story can seek alternative, non-nationalist narrative integrated into the story of fighting, despite the overt appeal to sentiment and nationalism together.

Along with all the other readings of La Adelita (one website notes that she often becomes a symbol synthesizing sexuality and patriotism), I am interested in the thought of what remains as comprising a compromised real despite a new, displacing reality of war. Songs abide. Love, feelings abide. The Human, if we believe in Adelita, does not fade.

If any word comes to the fore as a leitmotif over the last four months, it is ambivalence; I hope, then, various ambivalences come through with this piece of cardboard with some paint on it.

11 SIN TI

Aside from the points of the story that we touched in as a group, there are two moments in particular that i want to pause on, (re)consider. 

1. We hear about the red car from Arturo Manzana, another fixture of the city. My mind, when he mentions it, flickers to the main street in Taksim, Istiklal Caddessi, and the “Tram”: A Red Car, appropriated in kitschy keepsake art as symbol of urban Istanbul, at once nostalgic and indicative of the city’s urban-ness. 

When we are still in the beginning of the story—Morales (Morality figment) has just questioned the main Apple—when Arturo takes the A streetcar. 

The experience embeds so much. 

The experience of the urban transcends the flaneur’s distanced observance. Something about public transportation stuffed full of the sounds the noise of people, music. 

As Arturo speaks, the scene flickers back again, the metros, streetcars, Taksim, Şişhane, music. 

We were interested, last week, in how it is possible to love another culture, implicitly, how to know another culture. 

Music is a great mystery, I think: indeed, we have far less sound-specific adjectives for the intangible phenomena of sounds than we do for the visible and the touchable; the description of sound, like taste, tends to borrow adjectives from these two other senses: soft, textural, blue, bright. Or from affect: sweet, sad, angry, harsh, passionate. Arturo describes the Harmon’s as effecting  “elegance and refined melancholy.” 

Music does something fantastic, simultaneously affecting psyche, cognitions, sensorial. 

Arturo sings sin ti, elegant, melancholic, refined, residues of Big Red Cars and Fellow Musicians—jazz Filipino dance halls boogie boys mariachis—and the strange suffocating combination of oppression (curfew, later, we learn, combined resistances) and vivacity still on the palette.

And I flicker backwards again. 

In a café owned by a family of Georgian musicians, with their instruments strung up all on the walls and lying on a table here or there, and Oktay’s brother(-in-law? or cousin? or…?) and his sons or someone else’s sons smoking and playing football outside, and Oktay telling me carefully at first but with growing conviction of the fascism of Erdoḡan, and this one time as I’m sitting there reading about Medieval Turks, the Mother and daughters(in-law?) are singing around a table and playing their instruments, with so much laughter and such beautiful harmony, the two of the kids  join and suddenly they are all up on their feet in that tiny cafe of theirs, laughing and dancing with stomping feet…

how do you fall in love with someone else’s culture?

another night, in Kafka’s Cafe, this time i’m reading about Byzantium. In the over-cushioned room, only two other girls. Their Turkish turns high-pitched and fragmented by their overpowering laughter—tears cascading, sides clutched, they are quite literally rolling around in laughter, as I sit in a purple armchair not reading about Byzantium. 

each time the stones of the pavement rising up before me, ready to catch my face on their creviced crystalline planes. each time, the Red Car. and the soundscape of Istiklal Caddessi throwing a different tune to you from a different street musician every twenty feet. 

how do you fall in love with a place that's not yours?

~~~~~~~~

2. Sin ti. 

The strange ubiquity of pop sentiment. Its strange resonance.

Without you,

what else could I care for?

if that what makes me cry

is far away from here.

Without you,

there is no mercy for my pain,

the hope of my love, at last

you are taking it away.

Without you,

it is useless to live,

as useless it will be

wanting to forget you.

To read this as though I’m reading poetry rather that to hear this within the familiar confines of a musical type is astonishing.

Arturo:
"The poetry is simple, the sentiment is common. But there is the art! Effortless, comfortable, each thought set before the listener like  pearls strung into a necklace by the hands of a beautiful woman, one by one."

how do you fall in love?

6.5 la llorona-los hijas de la malinche bridge (march 13)

i dream of burial:

(imagine) the coolness of red earth pressing up against you

the coolness of red earth, pressing into your face

imagine sleep in that cool, soft suffocation!

and the richness of colour, that iron rich soil.

animation short

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11 SIN TI (Trío Los Panchos)

1. he watches.
usually, you think you watch; the musician's the spectacle.

2. he watches and he responds.
he sings to you, he sings, maybe, what you need to hear, what you've already been hearing without paying attention.

3. There are many 'he's, and they play on a hierarchy.
sometimes they sing behind stars. (Do they sing to stars? Do they sing to stars?)

4. one must not aim too high.
.
.
.
10. Music to get up at 5:00 am

20. She had access to the medicine I needed. Morphine, it was called. 
~music. cinema. medicine/drugs.~ what is life. 
Life could be beautiful.