Juliana Soltis

En mi presente obsesión con mi lectura de Rayuela de Julio Cortázar quise combinar mi fotografía de la cellista norteamericana Juliana Soltis con algo que posiblemente Cortázar hubiese escrito sobre el instrumento. Lo que encontré es una composición para violoncello y medios electrónicos de Patricio Villarejo.

El Absurdo Infinito - Homenaje a Julio Cortázar - Patricio Villarejo YouTube

PATRICIO VILLAREJO

Proyecto sobre la estética de Rayuela y la música cortazariana en violoncello y medios electrónicos

“Acaso sólo viviendo absurdamente se podrí­a romper alguna vez este absurdo infinito” (Rayuela, Capí­tulo 23).

Composición, programación, violoncello y referencias visuales

Invitada : Liza Rule Larrea en danza

Pre-estreno fue el 06 de Noviembre de 2014 en AL ESCENARIO

La novela propone, al menos, dos lecturas de si misma. La normal, que ya de por sí avanza y retrocede de manera confusa, y la segunda absolutamente laberíntica. Incluso, desde el capítulo 131 se va al 58 y se vuelve de allí al 131, con lo que se transforma en una trampa, típica del humor cortazariano.

El caos narrativo refleja el caos existencial de los personajes. Caos que, no está amarrado a una época ni a un lugar, es inherente a cualquier ser pensante que vive en la actualidad.

La rayuela, como imagen, se transforma en un mandala, que invita a entrar a un cielo que se sabe inalcanzable. Como lector, uno ingresa en la novela y se transforma en parte de ella.

A través de la música, lo que intento es entrar en ese universo, saltar de casa en casa en un tablero imposible a través de un caos insoslayable y necesario, para seguir buscando dentro de mí mismo a ese personaje que se escapó de aquella novela, simplemente por el hecho de haberla leído.

Así de atrapante es ese universo, así de intangible y errático.

“Sólo viviendo absurdamente se podría romper alguna vez este absurdo infinito” (Capítulo 23).

Mi música intenta reflejarlo, comentarlo y hasta complementarlo desde una cierta aleatoriedad. Así como el lector no sólo se ve atrapado en la obra y debe regresar sobre sus pasos para entender, así en la música se debe volver a veces a buscar un sonido perdido y que se sabe imposible.

“Música, melancólico alimento para los que vivimos de amor” (capítulo 44).

September 10 , 2020

In this last year I have had a difficulty driving at night because my right eye cataract got worse and incoming headlights, particularly on rainy evenings, formed distracting halos on my windshield. Besides the fact that my right eye was always a poor one (probably because as a boy I liked to read in bed while leaning and covering on that eye) of late I could not really read street signs very well.

So on September 10^th Doctor Simon Warner removed my cataract and installed a corrective transplant cornea.

It has been a revelation to this obsolete, retired, redundant and inconsequential photographer.

It was my Portland bassist friend, Curtis Daily who quite a few months ago told me that a cataract modified how I saw colours. I did not believe him until one day I looked at puffy white clouds. I closed my good eye (it has the beginnings of a cataract) and suddenly the white cloud had a yellow cast. Using my old Kodak filters (in my mind’s memory)for printing colour negatives I calculated that the right eye was adding a 10 yellow and 5 red to the mix. Those of you who are photographers might know that the addition of yellow makes blues turn into a beginning of green. Puffy white clouds with all that UV in the sky become less “blue” cast.

Suddenly as my vision became better with my fixed eye the white doors and closet mouldings of our room were no longer cream. They were a startling bluish white, particularly when I closed my left eye. And if I closed my right eye I could discern a yellow warming of those doors.

On Thursday as I walked out of my oficina I noticed that one particular blue hosta was really blue. This past year and perhaps even on the other my built in yellow filter had greened the blue of that hosta and others.

On November 28 of last year my fantastic and slim model and friend Olena came to pose for me in our piano room. My goal was to achieve a correct skin colour that would show of her pale whiteness. I used the light coming in from outside and I adjusted at various settings my Fuji X-E3’s colour balance (in Degrees Kelvin). I was very happy with the results. These results would have been almost impossible using either negative colour or slide film. There is that one very big advantage in my books to digital over film. This is the ability to make the colours we see to be accurate when viewed on a print or on a well calibrated monitor.

Or so I thought! I am placing here that original corrected Olena photograph and a second one that I further corrected now that I have a good right eye. The moment I look at this photograph with both eyes open I note a warming of her skin.

 Who would have known? I now know how personal our perception of colour is. 

The colour of skin 

Kodachrome and the nature of light 

How orange is Donald Trump?

Music in one’s brain is always a permanent fixture of memory much like scent.

The word bossa nova will immediately take me to that little sound corner dated sometime in 1962 and I will listen to it silently within me, Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd’s Jazz Samba. 

Mozart’s - Flute and Harp Concerto in C, K. 299 will connect me to my mother who loved this concerto.

Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime I can now listen to with a bit of a rosy nostalgia. In 1970 when the song was released it was played in the dance hall where Rosemary and I were taking dance lessons. I was hopeless! Now I would assert that it is “our song”.

Astor Piazzolla’s Milonga del Angel connects me to one of my first real girlfriends whom I fell in love while listening to it live. She died a few years ago and somehow my youngest daughter Hilary now likes to listen to it when she feel melancholic.

 Frédéric Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 (Marche funèbre) instantly takes me to a few days after the death of Eva Perón on July 26 1952 when radio stations played funeral music with Chopin’s being the most salient.

But it was in the late 70s when I was shooting everything for Vancouver Magazine that I was dispatched to Burnaby for what was then called City Scene, a section of the magazine with small paragraphs of type with large photographs. I was to photograph a fitness class for pregnant women.

How could I possibly forget that the song they jumped up and down to was The Ramones’s I Wanna be sedated?

They say that memory is selective. And yet with me it cannot only be spotty but draw a complete blank.

My first serious camera (I had an Agfa Silette before it) was a Pentacon F which I purchased from Olden Cameras in New York City (from my boarding school St. Ed’s in Austin, Texas) in 1958. I paid 100 dollars. I could not spend more to get the faster lens, an F-2 Biotar, so that the shiny box that came to our school PX contained the camera with an F-2.8 Tessar lens.

About two years ago I noticed that the shutter did not work. I took the camera to Horst Wenzel for repair. He asked why I would want to have the camera repaired if I did not use it anymore. I told him that I would like to leave for posterity equipment that works. For me that is symmetrically satisfying and correct. I bought it when it worked; I should exit this world with it working also.

A couple of day later Wenzel called me that after lubricating the shutter it worked fine and he refused to charge me!

Today while sifting through my files so I can fill blogs in my September black hole (many still missing) I came up to a file called Pentacon F. In it I found negatives that I took with My Mamiya RB and Ilford F-P4 film of the Pentacon and my Canon with the rapid winder. I have no memory of ever having taken the photograph and I have no idea what the 11^th Edition of the McKeown’s Price Guide to Antique Cameras was all about. Worse still the date on the catalogue is for April and the date for my envelope is May.

Whatever the explanation, I feel contented as a gaze at my Pentacon F (the shutter works) and how back in 1958 I could have never foreseen writing about the camera all those many years later.  

I may be an old man now, but in 1958 my choice of the Pentacon F SLR was a good one. There were constant differences of opinion in all of the photo magazines if an SLR  was a good choice over the then reliable rangefinder cameras. History answered that question.