Pic by Diana Vargas Trent

Very moving it is to be in an audience, where it is the custom to sing with the master.

Silvio Rodriguez Is the Walt Whitman of the Cuban revolution. His songs are deeply rooted in the humanism which was described by Che Guevara in El Socialismo Y El Hombre En Cuba
Our utopia is still very far away, but its music has always been with us.
It is better to be Brechtian than Manichean.

This recording is first published here; Enjoy!

Cuban Pasteles and Croquetas by Havana On The Hudson Caterers

Maria Victoria de Bernard provided a feast for the palate, with her Cuban delicacies.

In this picture: Mary Ann Schmidt, Julio Hernandez-Miyares, and Maria Victoria de Bernard

The Boogey Man Under Your Bed Is Your Daddy

i will meditate here for a moment:

Pic By Maria Victoria de Bernard

This past weekend i visited Cuban artist Maria Victoria de Bernard at her home and studio in Gallatin New York, which has a population of about 1,300 scattered over 36 square miles (almost twice as big in area as
Manhattan). She shares the house with my brother Julio, who is a programmer, and a master of the internet universe.

This is a link to Maria’s work on Flickr

20 minutes from Gallatin is the quaint city of Hudson, which like Havana (Maria’s city of origin) contains the elegant, and weathered buildings of an ancien regime; They now endure, because of the influx of artists, and art dealers, who have turned Hudson into a mecca for the arts.

Maria Victoria de Bernard, uses folk art aesthetics to create her depictions of life in Cuba, which revel in the quotidian. Her paintings contain details that reveal the mysticism of the ordinary.

More photostream of the art of Maria Victoria de Bernard

Pic By JHM Of Emergency Exit Slide By Jose Camejo

Emergency Exit Installation by Jose Camejo with music by Javier Hernandez-Miyares. This fragment is from an event that took place at the INTAR in New York City in March 2000. The following is an example of how to musicalise a poem.

The following is another poem from the exhibit:

The following segment of music includes the voice of John Cage:

Composing music for an art installation is a challenge, because the expectation is that the audience will be drifting in and out of the proscenium. Therefore, i utilized a theme and revelation compositional style, so that at every moment there is a repetition of a musical figure that later appears in a new context. Jose Camejo described this as Psycho-Symphonic Music.

Postscript:

i did not know at the time that jose camejo had cancer, and he died a few years after this. the first bit that i wrote was an offertorium for sonya’s poem, and i appropriated a segment of audio from a polish mass, which appears throughout the composition. in this segment, i was alluding to mankinds first escape hatch, which is through the birth canal. In the Catholic Mass the offertory is the experience of god inhabiting the inanimate; this is known as transubstantiation. after Jose died i realized that he was contemplating the emergency exit that is beyond the reach of our mortality.

i just happened to record jose laughing, while we were recording a poem, and i used it as a motif, which appears throughout the sonic landscape.

This is a fragment of music that i composed for the installation: Sindrome de Angola by Barbaro Martinez Ruiz. The exhibition was presented at the Birmingham Museum of Art in 1999.

Biografía visual de Ho Chi Minh que refleja la lucha del heroico pueblo vietnamita, del director cubano Santiago Álvarez.

Observations by WTPF:

Director Santiago Alvarez developed his “nervous montage” technique of using “found materials,” such as Hollywood movie clips, cartoons, and photographs, and his style is considered a precursor to the modern video clip.

“Inna Gadda Da Vida”, by Iron Butterfly is mashed up into the soundtrack of this film. This is an early example of sampling, the use of previously recorded music, to create a new hybrid composition.

Footage from this film, and others that Santiago Alvarez shot or acquired in Vietnam, have rarely been broadcast in the U.S. mainstream media.

Mr. Tamale is audiovisual terrorism, and not for the faint of heart!

Click here for Idiot Robot: Mr. Tamale