http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-noriega/alianza-ecuatoriana-internacional_b_839842.html?ref=fb&src=sp#sb=1536004,b=facebook

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-noriega/all-eyes-on-new-york-stat_b_837982.html

This is all very old news by now, but for the sake of archiving:

Two translations of mine came out last year in issue 9 of n+1. They are part of a larger and very exciting project called MOTA, or Magazines of the Americas, about which you can read more here.

Both pieces are essays about narco-violence in Mexico. The first is, once again, by Juan Villoro. It is entitled “The Red Carpet,” and n+1 has reproduced the translation in its entirety here. It was originally published in the Colombian magazine El Malpensante.

The second was originally published anonymously in the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra. You can read an excerpt here. This translation was also reprinted in the September, 2010 issue of Harper’s.

Hello,

I translated “Among Friends,” a story by Juan Villoro, for Issue 8 of n+1. It’s an excellent story by an excellent (& egregiously untranslated) author, accompanied by stills from a beautiful, vertiginous video by Melanie Smith and Rafael Ortega.

The rest of the issue is also great, so please go buy and read it.

Thanks!

David

http://www.afterall.org/onlinecurrent.html?online_id=66

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell
David Noriega
6th January 2009

Wild Combination is director Matt Wolf’s self-described filmic “portrait” of Arthur Russell, the cellist, composer and songwriter whose music – which traversed the spectrum from minimalist avant-garde to disco – has recently provoked a frenzy of interest and praise after a lifetime of obscurity. The film lands somewhere in between biographical documentary and expressionistic rendition of Russell’s music; talking-head testimonials from friends, family and collaborators are interspersed with evocative landscape shots and archival footage. The end result is engrossing and, on occasion, poignant.

Russell grew up in Oskaloosa, Iowa, before running away from home in his teens. In San Francisco, he changed his name from Charles to Arthur and joined a Buddhist commune. In 1973 he moved to New York, where he became deeply embedded in the legendary downtown art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. There he obsessively proceeded to create a large, inchoate and dizzyingly variegated body of work until his death from AIDS in 1992. Such a life is well stocked with the stuff of narrative pleasure and pathos, and Wild Combination indulges the viewer with just the right amount of these things. Russell’s father, verging on tears, describes hitting his son after finding weed paraphernalia in his room; Allen Ginsberg, a good friend and collaborator, tells us (by way of archival footage) that Arthur ignored his duties at the San Francisco commune because he was perpetually holed up in the seminary playing his cello. When the setting shifts to downtown Manhattan, the film pauses long enough to give a detailed panorama of a thrilling cultural moment rife with down and out bohos, cheap rent, heady performance art and bacchanalian dance parties. Here Russell was, for a time, artistic director of the vanguard performance space The Kitchen, and communed with the likes of Rhys Chatham and Philip Glass (who appears as one of the film’s most entertaining and informative interviewees). Finally, we are confronted with the tragedy of Russell’s illness and death, made especially poignant by the intimate, honest testimony of Tom Lee, his longtime lover and confidante.

Wild Combination‘s overall success lies in its ability to retain Russell’s music at the heart of his biography. Wolf thoroughly canvasses Russell’s extensive and mind-bogglingly diverse catalogue, which includes, among other things, avant-garde orchestral compositions, underground disco hits (songs like “Is It All Over My Face” and “Go Bang,” which earned the artist his few moments of commercial success), and a number of solo cello and voice recordings that evade categorization. Throughout the film Wolf deploys the simple but satisfying tactic of matching the music with some cleverly chosen visual component. To wit, a selection from Instrumentals– a series of playful and pop-sensible, yet unconventional, compositions from early in Russell’s New York career – is accompanied by old black and white cartoon footage of eerily anthropomorphized flowers and trees prancing hypnotically across the screen.

Indeed, one of the film’s greatest joys is that it compounds the synaesthetic impressions already facilitated by Russell’s songs, which, in a natural reversal of Goethe’s famous definition of architecture as frozen music, encourage a perception of sound as fluid space. This is particularly true of Russell’s solo recordings, which reached their zenith with the 1986 album World of Echo, and which the film makes clear were the products of Russell’s most solitary and impassioned work. They also give Wolf the opportunity to delve into Russell’s most charming idiosyncrasies, such as composing all day long with the blender on.

These are beautifully fragile songs, interweaving plangent vocal melodies with spare cello parts played through delicately applied electronic filters. It’s not hard to imagine the cello’s deep bass notes as the gentle tectonic movements of a soft but sturdy ground, its scraping treble notes and shards of feedback as jet streams in an enormous Midwestern sky. Russell’s unaffected singing hovers tenuously between the two realms, an interplay of echo and silence that suggests fragmented enclosures – the skeletal silhouettes of farm machinery, perhaps. Russell’s music is the boundlessness of an Iowa cornfield paradoxically contained within the reverberating space of a New York City loft. Thanks to Wolf’s visual overtures (which include numerous shots of cornfields), it is also a smattering of city lights as seen across a river, or an unraveling cassette tape floating underwater, or simply colors shimmering in an empty space.

In many ways Wild Combination cannot help but be deeply nostalgic. On the simplest level, as expressed by Russell’s loved ones, it is nostalgic for a time when the man was still alive and making music. But the film also yearns for a time when downtown Manhattan was a haven for authentically bohemian and adventurous artists, poets and musicians; and even for a time when hearing a piece of recorded music meant knowing that, somewhere in the room, part of a simple machine was reassuringly spinning. (Abstract close-ups of rotating records and tapes are, indeed, one of Wolf’s favorite visual motifs.) There is a question implicit in the film’s wistful approach: Why did it take so long for Arthur Russell’s music to reach a larger audience? In other words, why now and not then?

Typically, narratives of under-appreciated genius hinge on a volatile or reclusive artist whose nature alienates him from the practices and institutions of his field – one who has, say, a profound aversion to live performance or an intense dislike for the gregarious schmoozing and self-promotion that so often drives success. Wild Combination makes clear that Russell, though certainly spacey and eccentric, was no maladjust working in self-imposed isolation. He collaborated with important artists of his time, had a natural gift for leadership and mediation, and relished his active position within a defined artistic community. What’s more, this community was the birthplace for much of the music that, by the end of the 20th century, had been either explosively commodified in popular culture (punk rock, hip-hop) or canonized in the avant-garde (minimalism).

Wild Combination offers a few possible answers to this question. There is Russell’s obsessive perfectionism, which kept him from completing most of his projects. There is also the dogged multiplicity pointed out by the musician and critic David Toop: Whereas most members of the downtown music scene had well-defined signature styles, Russell hopped from genre to genre, unwilling to settle for either cerebral experimentalism or pop accessibility. Most artists who succeed, commercially or critically, in combining the experimental with the conventional do so by situating themselves solidly on either end of the spectrum and picking, gingerly and methodically, from the other, thus slightly expanding the common conception of what constitutes “pop” or “avant-garde.” The Talking Heads (with whom Russell played on several occasions) were a pop band that took cues from the avant-garde; Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca were avant-garde composers that borrowed elements (i.e., electric guitars) from rock music. Russell was incapable of such selective and repetitive appropriation for the simple reason that he could not sit still. I imagine him continually subsumed in what Brian Eno called “idiot glee,”[1] an almost trancelike state of passionate playfulness, writing an album of country songs, then arranging a piece for chamber ensemble, then seeing if he could tap the mass market by making people dance (a ritual in which he himself never partook). In all of these endeavors Russell was too liberal with his blending. More than arranging casual encounters between genres, he thoroughly crossbred them: His pop songs were too weird and his weird pieces were too poppy.

At one point in Wild Combination, Philip Glass pays Russell a great musical compliment: “People who become an artist on an instrument – the instrument becomes bent to their needs and their expression. And that’s what he did.” What follows is footage of Russell playing live, alone with his cello. In seeing this performance it’s not hard to imagine that, had we been there, we wouldn’t have known quite what to make of it. First of all, Russell looks different – bearded and longhaired, not the clean-cut Iowan people knew. Then there’s the song. It starts out as a mildly discordant drone, Russell chanting “Eli” over a sustained chord. But soon a plaintive, folk-like melody emerges. “Eli,” as it turns out, is the name of a dog that nobody likes.

Here is Russell in all his contradictions: An earnest Midwesterner, a West Coast Buddhist, a natural New Yorker; a restless experimenter who explored the natural boundaries of his voice and instrument, but also a songwriter of great and moving simplicity. Wild Combination leaves us with the feeling that Russell was a tricky figure to pin down. Each of the film’s interviewees understands him differently. To his parents he is Chucky, a troubled adolescent with overambitious reading habits; to Ginsberg he is a Buddhist bubblegum poet; to Lee he is “the guy I wanted to be sitting on the couch with.” Somehow he even manages to be, in the words of disco diva Lola Love, “the funkiest white boy I ever met.” It is in this sense that Wild Combination succeeds as a portrait rather than a simple biography. Like any good portrait it casts its light with affectionate restraint, enough to reveal its subject’s complexity, but not enough to rob it of its mystery.

http://nplusonemag.com/wrongthinkingillfeeling

Reminiscences for This Recording.

http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=1150

Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness

The Stop Smiling Review

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Senselessness
By Horacio Castellanos Moya
Translated by Katherine Silver
(New Directions)

Reviewed by David Noriega

The late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño once wrote that Horacio Castellanos Moya’s work is “insufferable to nationalists,” that it “threatens the hormonal stability of imbeciles.” Though Bolaño died before he could read Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez, recently published in English by New Directions as Senselessness, he would doubtless have found in this little novel the most substantive and astounding manifestations of the Salvadoran novelist’s dogged and graceful hostility toward any and all dogma, be it nationalist, liberal, Marxist or anything in between.

Senselessness depicts a landscape dominated by the collapse of such ideologies and the concurrent dissolution of the individual. The novel is a rambling first-person account of a writer who has been exiled to an unnamed Central American country — there are reasons to believe it is Guatemala — and is working for a human rights project run by the Catholic Church. His job is to proofread a massive report detailing the massacring of thousands of indigenous people by the military. In between hours spent in his office in the “archbishop’s palace,” the walls decorated with only a crucifix, he encounters emblems of the country’s various factions: clergymen, watered-down left-wingers, military men and ex–urban guerrilla commandos. He regards them all with scorn, skepticism or (in the case of those with both power and guns) fear. Moya devotes much of his ceaseless internal monologue to cataloguing their hypocrisies and shortcomings.

Senselessness is perhaps best described a manic study in violence, not as a simple denunciation or dissection but as a sort of experiment in ambiguity and collapse. The novel submerges its cynical, exiled narrator in a place — geographically, mentally, physically — where everything is guided by violence, in various stages between mediation and immediacy: violence remembered and recounted, violence suspected and imagined, violence witnessed firsthand. The report on the massacres, which consists largely of testimony from surviving Cakchiquel Indians, provides a steady and haunting backdrop for the narrator’s misadventures and meditations. He regularly punctuates his narrative with loose phrases copied into his notebook: eerie, pained sentences in a rhythmic, broken syntax captured deftly in English by Katherine Silver. The narrator’s relationship with the report’s prose begins as mere perverse literary fascination — the Indians’ words remind him of the verses of seminal Peruvian poet César Vallejo — but ultimately becomes something of a crazed obsession, providing the visual fodder for the worst of his hallucinatory fits.

While the narrator is not reading graphic descriptions of state-sanctioned murders, he is almost wishfully finding evidence of plots against him (for his participation in a project unveiling crimes of the state), or he is simply in his apartment hearing gunshots fired in the street below—five shots or six, nobody seems to remember or care. To him, all this violence is, well, senseless, or rather pointless: he derides the lefties that call themselves human rights activists as much as he derides the military and the Church, so why should he put his neck in the guillotine for a project run by priests and vegetarians? He claims to care about little more than getting paid and laid, and he engages in the banal rituals of quotidian existence with a special loathing surpassed only by his disgust at his inability to escape them. He goes on reading and ranting and fucking — or failing to do so — but gradually his constitution proves brittle under the pressures of violence and vanity.

The narrator’s vanity is integral to the story, defining his character and providing the framework for his collapse. He is intelligent and hilarious, and he has come to think of himself as one of very few human beings who knows to distrust and mock in every direction with a sort of indiscriminate desperation. The novel consists, mainly, of the relation between this vain misanthropy and the world that surrounds it, often taking the form of various frustrations and humiliations: the scene is set with the free-thinking cynic having to swallow a tedious and cheap gig in the bowels of the Church to keep body and soul intact. And here, in the language of those who have lived through horror, he encounters, buried and bitter, rare instances of beauty: Allá en el izote estaban los sesos tirados, como a puro leño se los sacáron. (In English, with a little more poetic flair courtesy of the translator: “There in Izote the brains they were thrown about, smashed with firewood they spilled them.”) Violence begets beauty, given a series of circumstantial distortions: a new context, the right audience, time and chance affording distance and strangeness.

Mostly, though, Castellanos Moya’s narrator faces his inability to beat back an oppressively encroaching reality: the titular senselessness, which automatically rejects all modes of thinking available to make sense of a world at once violent and banal, engulfing an intellect hostile toward every placid worldview it encounters. Gradually, under such strain, the foundations of reason and sanity erode. In uncontrollable fits of imagination —“imagination,” he says, “is a bitch in heat” — he finds himself identifying with the Indian-killers, swinging invisible Cakchiquel babies up high and bashing their heads against roof beams. By the end of the novel, having concluded that “hell is the mind not the flesh,” he is reduced to frantic spasms of paranoia suspended in an ether of muted but penetrating uncertainty. His paranoia, though inaccurate (he grossly overestimates his importance to the project), is not entirely unfounded — violence, for all its guises and deceptions, is after all very real and very near. In the end, the reader still doesn’t quite know whether to think him pitiful for his arrogance and weakness or heroic for his constancy in cynicism, though perhaps one simply ought to think him both.

Silver’s agile translation treats American readers to a stunning specimen of contemporary Latin American literature: brimming with humor that is both vulgar and sophisticated, steadfastly cynical yet never quite resigned and always trembling with restless energy. Though Bolaño was this literature’s godfather and ardent spokesman, few other writers have benefited from his recent international popularity. There is, however, no dearth of recent works from Central and South American writers that deserve to be read elsewhere, and Senselessness is a testament to this fact. One can only hope its publication in English presages a larger wave of Latin American literature in translation, so that stateside readers will not remain benighted for long.