Tag Archives: “Moby-Dick”

The film “The Whale” washes ashore a story of quiet desperation

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Brendan Fraser in “The Whale.” A24

After seeing the film The Whale, out newly on video (and various streaming services), it has lodged in my memory and psyche as powerfully as any recent film, including the much bigger and more commanding theater films like Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, as excellent as those are.

This is the sort of small film that’s perfect for video viewing. It has to do with humanity on an intimate yet highly charged scale. And it deals with one of the least-acknowledged and discriminated-against minorities in our gradually and fitfully enlightened society.

That is, obese people, even morbidly obese, which is especially relevant in a state like Wisconsin, with its high percentage of overweight citizens. Beyond that, the central character is gay. I think you’ll understand, by the end, why Brendan Fraser won the best actor Oscar for 2022. Yes, he had to put on a lot of weight for the role, which can sometimes seem to beg to Academy Awards voters, and he’s courageously traveled 180 degrees from his early, ripped George of the Jungle image.

But it truly was the depths and the bubbling-right-on-the-surface humanity of his acting which made this performance special, courting greatness. He plays a huge man who never leaves his apartment and could likely never get down the flight of stairs to the parking lot. Fraser’s large blue eyes form welling pools of suffering; giving and yearning, deepened by the mass beneath them. As an obese Caucasian, he might suffer from a comparable discriminatory disdain by people who presume a person’s societal position is largely their fault, just as do so, most pointedly, many African-Americans.

So, Fraser, as Charlie, deals with his shame in various ways, including relying on a friend, Liz (Hong Chau, an Oscar nominee for the role), who is the sister of his deceased partner. She is an advisor, sounding board and enabler of his compulsive eating. You get a sense in this role of the complexity of her character, and in fact all four of the main characters in the story are richly layered.

Hong Chau as Liz in “The Whale”

Charlie teaches English online and blacks out his own video-chat window during lessons so his students can never see him. He’s significantly estranged from his teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) because he left his marriage for a lover, upon admitting his gayness, when she was eight years old. For all his fights against gravity, reaching her might be his most uphill and wrenching battle. The daughter shows up and is intensely passive-aggressive in challenging and probing her father.

Sadie Sink as Ellie in “The Whale.”

Like all-too-many-suffering minorities, Charlie struggles with low self-esteem, perhaps even strains of self-hatred. What is extraordinary about him is his capacity to see the value in others, even at the most elemental level. This makes him a wonderful teacher who is striving for the greatest possible honesty in his students, even valuing it more than conventional proprieties of English writing or exposition.

I didn’t expect Melville’s Moby-Dick to be a key motif in the story, given that I am a Melvillian of sorts. But it turns out that an essay that daughter Ellie wrote about Moby-Dick, when she was in eighth grade, is something Charlie hangs onto, for her sake as much as his own. As much as I’ve read and studied the great novel, I gained a fresh interpretive insight from Ellie’s intuition into the story, which actually befits the biography of Melville. And Charlie values the essay personally as a kind of symbolic reflection upon him, something he anguishes over and yet draws a somber sustenance from. That is partly because his daughter wrote it, and accordingly he seems to sense that each of his remote English students is a child of his. And just maybe those words will be a lifeline for Charlie from drowning in his own abyss of pathos.

A fourth key character is a quiet wildcard, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young man who visits Charlie and appears to be a door-to-door missionary who might (or might not) help the profoundly isolated man toward a spiritual path of redemption and self-worth. The superb Samantha Morton also plays Charlie’s ex-wife, in an intense yet briefer role.

I, for one, disagree with some critics who glibly dismiss the film as “a landmark exercise in trolling” or “misery porn” — and notice the use of the fashionable slang terms to posture the critics’ “hipness.” It now seems increasingly that every perceived experience now has a “porn” underbelly to it, often as a droll punchline. We need to accept now that film is an inherently voyeuristic art form.

Another critic “hates” the film which, she notes, received a six-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. Her big knockout zinger seems to be declaring unpersuasively that Charlie “peddles in toxic positivity,” a contrarian’s absurdly tortured phrase and notion. Rather, his “positivity” seems perhaps over the top, at times, but it is desperate, not unlike Ahab’s poor, nearly-drowned black cabin boy Pip, who at his direst moment, sees “God’s foot on the treadle of the loom.”

One promotional poster for “The Whale.” IMP Awards

At times, the film’s source as a play, by screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, shows up in small, melodramatic staginess. But no, you won’t find a strong element of modernist irony in The Whale, yet I’m thankful for that. Let’s not forget Moby-Dick’s subtitle, or, The Whale. It shouldn’t be too hard to discern the elusive, great white whale as the richer signifier of this film’s title than an obvious pejorative insult. In fact, this is a courageous film in this era of both unfettered, cruel bigotry and sometimes-stifling political correctness, America’s sad polarities. Another title variation might’ve been Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but to revive that would be simply saccharine.

Brendan Fraser in a critical moment in “The Whale.”

As a title and a symbol, The Whale rides the waves of a difficult life much better, from its unfathomable depths to its improbable breach at the end, which perhaps breaches “suspension of disbelief” reality, but so be it. This is where the story was striving towards, rather than a “happy” temporal ending.

***

As a video bonus, all the lead actors, Hunter and director Darren Aronofsky, provide more-insightful-than-normal reflections, in a “making of” side feature.

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Ukraine poem by Kevernacular, may we light the world with hope and action

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My well-used Ukraine candle from Door County Candle Co. Photo by Kevin Lynch

Ukraine Fire (in the Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart)

In this moment something calls,
So, I listen, mute receptacle, past the painful loss of another younger sister,
realizing thousands of Ukrainians have lost how many family members.
I’ve been reading about war as contemplated in the marvelous anthology,
Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men 1

So, the hell-on-earth of the Ukraine War rises acrid from my gut,
yet what have I suffered of horridly, brutally, inhumanely genocidal devastation?
I reflect, yes, we have more of the hoary old West versus East,
and the festering of poisoned power, delusion of hate-bile wallowing in past glory.

So, I sit glumly and light my Ukraine candle from Door County,
with its blue and yellow colors, summoned to fire
on days that seem apt to the moment and sentiment
of accumulating lost innocent lives, souls stripped from mangled bodies.
“Parents very old that had one son,” President Zelenskyy described a typical loss,
adding, Russians have abducted and “weaponized” tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.

Is this inflamed point in history imploring madly upon that fiery candle tip?

***

For perspective, America’s war of North and South never fades as a barometer
of bloody border tragedy at a local level, of fraternal countrymen dying
for a perversion of The Declaration’s ideals of liberty for all.

“Gettysburg – a town of only 250,000 inhabitants – was one makeshift burial ground, fetid and steaming” is how Garry Wills pointedly describes it.2
Somehow, Lincoln transcended and, yes, abstracted, the tragedy, but with rhetorical genius
embraced, emancipated, and let the healing begin, North and South, a horribly wounded nation.

“Lincoln sensed, from his own developed artistry,
the demands that bring forth classic art –
compression, grasp of the essential, balance, ideality,
an awareness of the deepest polarities in the situation
(life in the city coming from the death of its citizens).” 3

 

Might someday, sooner than later, Ukraine hear its version of the Gettysburg address?
Until then, so much remains to mourn and yes, fight for.
We have witnessed from afar war crimes to begin rivalling Hitler and Stalin.

Each a mad Ahab in his time, even somebody’s hero! 4
(“The blackness of darkness,” Melville called it, he the writer who, upon meeting — at a dinner of unfathomable spiritual trembling — Hawthorne, our great chronicler of dark American Puritan spirit. Melville, himself from stern Calvinist stock, then transformed his drifting whale yarn into a looming, cascading, doomed nation-ship, bursting at its blackest seams
amid the ocean’s rhythms, engulfing all, to roll,
“as it rolled five thousand years ago…”
into the great American novel,
having swallowed and subsumed
the rainbow-hued crew, Ahab’s blood and the harpoon-pierced White Whale’s,
two bloods perhaps commingling in dark destiny.)

 

So, now a wider question, “What Can We Hope For?”
Yes, another voice rises from the grave,
or in the wind of ashes aloft in air,
circling into small silos of sound,
the song whispering, now sonorous
of the speaker (who asked thusly),

Richard Rorty, Richard Rorty…
the name itself rings in alliterative echoes,
like an old folk hero.
He, recently deceased American pragmatic philosopher,
posthumously urges us past philosophy and ideology,
to effective action,
to something to reasonably hope for, as a whole nation. 5

 

Could this Ukraine tragedy, as Wills says happened in the Civil War,
bring an emergent form of victory –
blood welling ‘round new roots,
rising rose-red with thorny shoots,
new blood from shed blood,
spirit anew in the proud, billowing, blood-streaked blue and yellow banner –
of this European democracy,
when it wins, finally wins, its sovereignty, again?

How sure is the West, to assist in agonizing fits, what might’ve been won and spared by now?

Beyond the Civil War, America’s politics provide further dragging baggage,
a sordid history of Empire building, often tragically partial, in the name of “democracy.”
And even today, in America, remain those who perversely idolize Putin,
And his demagogic types, with strong-manly ways,
which Richard Rorty once warned us of. 5.
Whither American Christianity which heeds Jesus?
Can a Godless, sociopathic man be “our savior”? 6

Perhaps the Ukraine candle evokes my Catholic upbringing,
the flaming sentinel of vigil, of faith in righteousness holy spirit.
So, the spirit takes the deepest of inhalations and sighs
like a great buffalo of the plains,
yet don’t let the candle go out!
It shudders from the hot-breath wind.
Flame rises again, its small, defiant fire.
Hard to believe but, hear this:
This Door County Candle Company has delivered
one million dollars of direct aid to Ukraine
from its army of blue-and-yellow sixteen-ounce candles!

If that is not one — bigger than who’d imagine –
answer to Richard Rorty’s plaintive question,
I don’t know what is!

Soon I’ll buy and light another candle.
The spirit flickers again,
Light amid the Blackness of this Darkness, spreading around the globe,
as surely as changing climes, enshrouding Mother Earth.
Can we ever feel their unfathomable pain?
That which is the world’s is Ukraine, Ukraine!

— Kevin Lynch, September 20, 2023

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Here is the link to the Door County Candle Company’s Ukraine candle. All proceeds go to Ukraine: https://doorcountycandle.com/products/ukraine-16oz-candle

  1. Robert Bly, James Hilman, Michael Neade, ed., Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men, Harper Collins, 1992
  2. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, Simon and Schuster, 1992, 21
  3. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 52
  4. For a book-length discourse on the relation between Moby-Dick and totalitarianism, see C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In, Dartmouth, 1978
  5. Richard Rorty, What Can We Hope for? Essays on Politics, Princeton, 2022
  6. From whence come the political rationalizations of Christian Evangelicals, “speaking with God?” “(The mind is its own place, the mind has a mind of its own) This is a domain that, without ever having to name it, the right has always best known how to manipulate.” Jacqueline Rose, in “The Analyst,” a review of Jamaican-British writer/activist Stuart Hall’s memoir Familiar Stranger, The New York Review of Books, Sept. 21, 2023, 50.

 

 

Novelist Russell Banks strove to write smarter than himself. He succeeded, humbly, wisely and heart-wrenchingly.

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Russell Banks. Pinterest

In a nearly post-literary world it’s important, for the sake of our culture and society, to grab onto a great literary talent like a lifeline, like Queequeg’s wooden coffin rising from the whirlpool of death to save Ishmael. To ride the waves that “rolled for five thousand years,” to roll ever still, open to such wisdom and truth as Moby-Dick bequeathed us during the height of the American Renaissance in literature in the mid-1800s.

I’m writing with a certain urgency of spirit because Russell Banks died on January 3rd. He was, in my opinion and that of many others, arguably America’s greatest living fiction writer. Greatest living creative writer, period. Of course, such things are always arguable. But Banks is right at the crest of the mountaintop. Consider esteemed opinions:

“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.” – Cornel West

“if the United States were to adopt Japan’s admirable policy designating a few extraordinary individuals as living national treasures, Russell Banks would be my first nomination.” – Michael Cunningham

“Russell Banks is a writer in the grand tradition.” – Joyce Carol Oates

“Russell Banks as a novelist has always geared to illuminate the larger issues of human interaction society that too often dishonors human rights… Like John Brown, the protagonist of one of his novels, he rages against the curse of our time, not slavery now, but a violent nationalism which diminishes our humanity. He should be heeded, or whatever noble dream we had will be lost forever.” – Howard Zinn

Note the urgency of American historian Howard Zinn’s comment, how he speaks to Banks as a prophet and truth-teller for our times and the way we live, or ought to. But Banks is not a preacher. He allows us to see ourselves and our nation in all its complexity so we many judge for ourselves in the light of creative illumination, the kind that shows a way forward through the self-made brambles of our times.

That’s why it’s important to understand as Dr. West, the literary and social critic, commented again, that Banks is “not only one of our great novelists, but also a courageous and visionary citizen.” 1

I’d like to consider him both as a writer and an exemplary citizen and to first allow him to speak forthrightly. In his underappreciated nonfiction book-length essay Dreaming Up America. Banks proved deeply aware of how to “achieve our country,” as philosopher Richard Rorty put it, within reach of the ideals of our dream, such as it may be. But Banks is unflinching in his honest dissent, he hearkens to the provocative idea he once stated: “We became a nation of homicidal dreamers, murderous dreamers.”

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He continues: “I was trying to point indirectly to that age-old conflict between our material goals and the spiritual justifications that lie at the heart of the American dream, and also now at the heart of American history. That conflict has made us murderers, over and over again. Thus, the true American is a killer. The true American is a cynical, materialistic grabber on the one hand reaching for gold, yet he has an idealistic, even religious, sense of mission. When you tell yourself that big a lie, and you call it a dream, you’re going to end up committing acts of violence. It’s the nature of human psychology… And we have historically done exactly that, beginning in the 16th century when the Europeans first arrived off the coast of Florida…we were killing people and saying that we were doing it for some higher good. Not only that we also said we were doing it for their own good!” 2

He then speaks of nationalism as a kind of “secular religion, a substitute religion.”

“One of the healthiest and most important aspects of our American system of government is the separation of religion and state, the sharp distinction between our legal and political system on the one hand and her religious ideas and institutions on the other. One of the things this allows is great religious tolerance; but another thing it does is demystify national identity, to secularize it. This is a very good idea, something much to be desired, that the framers thoughtfully included international idea from the beginning.” 3

Then he addresses the nature and makeup of our beginning: “We began as an invention. We began as emerging, as emerged people. We’re essentially a Creole nation, a mixture, we have been that way since our very conception.” 4 Our democracy has continued by “embodying a conflict that is so destructive – and it is truly destructive – and also so creative.”

The creativity drove “the search for gold, the materialist impulse, and the search for freedom of religion.”  5

But it is our native inhabitants and our most forsaken inhabitants who have shown us the way, and suffered our folly. “The Native Americans were here before us…greeted us and taught us necessary skills for living in this new world.

“And the Africans, who were brought into this new world as the first immigrants that came after, but of the very seed of us that was and has always been in the mixture.” Without both groups we would be more like the Europeans, he says. Both groups give us much of the heft and texture of authentic identity that distinguishes America from the oppressive Old World it fled from.

“But ours has always been a racial obsession, since in my view the seed inside us has always been closer to the complex brew than it ever was to the picture we had of ourselves as white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant northern Europeans…” 6

“I recognize that the way this country had was formed, and the way is still coming into being, is a powerful, combustible combination of energies. We would do well to recognize that we haven’t yet finished making ourselves, and that we can still take mindful control of that process. Our American history is taking us somewhere. We just don’t know where yet.” 7

This is a kind of thoughtful, tough-minded exhortation, but hardly leftist fire and brimstone. It points us toward hope, the refurbishing of our somewhat-tattered but rippling dream.

I first became aware of Banks somewhat belatedly as a graduate student in English, some years into my journalism career. So he struck me as not just a firebrand of my youthful ardor, but as a writer of innate and deeply honed wisdom regarding the human condition. The first book of his I read was Continental Drift, an exemplary story of the complexities of American immigration and identity. It proves to me today how timely his vision has always been, capturing the humanity behind our most vexing domestic policy today, besides gun control. Then came Affliction, a story of an ordinary American, a working-class man who seems to be losing his way, blighted by alcohol, almost shattering his existence, and yet who may have the dogged persistence of character that has helped define the best of America. Except this man slip-slides away, being too afflicted by the stuff that freedom-loving America enables. Your heart may bleed for Wade Whitehouse, with the pain of shared societal shame.

James Coburn (left) won an Academy award for best supporting actor as the tortured, abusive father of Nick Nolte in the film version of Russell Banks’s “Affliction.” Scribed

Then, though heart-breaking, came perhaps the book easiest to swallow because of its tender spiritual affirmation, as embodied in its title, The Sweet Hereafter. It universalized the individual American character, in the deeply symbolic children and in the suffering bus driver.

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Rule of the Bone followed, updating in the grand picaresque tradition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, with a brash youth as an American scalawag, yet intuitively connected to honesty and goodness, seemingly rare commodities in his defiant view, and utterly truth-dealing as Banks’s story reveals.

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What ensued was Cloudsplitter, most likely his greatest and most provocative reach for the bending arc of justice, which Martin Luther King articulated as a vision we aspire to but reach all too infrequently.

This was a profound, historically-informed reimagining of the legacy of radical abolitionist John Brown, perhaps the most controversial American patriot in our history. If you want to begin to understand the subject’s craggy mountaintop of complexity, I recommend this book (along with the biography of Brown that ensued some years later, John Brown, Abolitionist, by David S. Reynolds).

Written imaginatively from the point of view of Brown’s sympathetic but spiritually torn son Owen, Cloudsplitter allows us to follow the raging and curving depths of Brown’s river-running compulsion – visionary, deeply humane, yet just zealous enough for some to call him crazy and criminal, certainly in the times he lived and died. Not so coincidentally, Banks lived for decades just down the road from John Brown’s grave, in upper New York, along with those of 13 of the other men who were killed at the Harpers Ferry raid or executed afterwards.

Yes, Brown can be called a terrorist, and a “postmodern” writer, Bruce Olds, perhaps captured that aura more melodramatically than Banks. Alas, even most of the Black slaves Brown tried to liberate and marshal to his cause slunk away in fear of the nation’s mounting racial acrimony and desecration. But Brown was perhaps the most high-minded radical this country has ever known. Even in our day, it took Banks, a writer of uncommon courage and wisdom, to grapple this deeply with Brown’s bloody and sacred legacy.

As I commented in a review of the book: “One arrives as if waking from a long dream of America, risen from the nation’s subconscious. Owen and John Brown are archetypal men one may grow to love and perhaps fear, as does a son for a great, dominant father. As one grows to love and perhaps fear America itself, with its astonishing freedoms, its shifting moral ground and this devastating power.” 8

As Herman Melville wrote of Brown at the gallows, in the opening poem of his book of Civil War poems, he was “the meteor of the war… Hidden in the cap/ Is the anguish none can draw; So your future veils its face, Shenandoah!”

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Banks followed by bringing the American concept of radicalism up to date in The Darling, to that of one defying the nation’s great moral quandary of the 1960s, The Vietnam War. And he did so with a brilliant stroke, with a woman as heroine, giving us a new way for America to see itself, a forsaken Joan of Arc leading us not to victory but to shadowed righteousness, in a manner of character perhaps akin to Ralph Ellison’s social era-defining book Invisible Man.

Among Banks’s other daring and remarkable books was Lost Memory of Skin, about another kind of outcast, a young homeless man who’s an ex-convict, but may or may not be a guilty sex offender.

In his latest and apparently last novel, The Magic Kingdom from 2022, Banks explores the idealism of American society through a son-like observer not too unlike Owen Brown. Based on a much more obscure historical figure living in an early 20th century Shaker community, it probes the fraught ways that even our most self-exalted traditional communities deal with human power, frailty, mendacity, and love. Margaret Atwood aptly characterized it as confronting “our longings for Paradise; also the inner serpents that are to be found in all such enchanted gardens.”

So, with Banks dead of cancer at 82, I yearn to hear from him, on his art form. Such a novelist of stature has come to understand the personal and human value of his preferred form, as Banks articulates in an insightful and humbled interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, in 2011:

“Novels seem to create, for me—or allow the possibility of creating for me—an alternative universe that’s comprehensive and large enough to let me think in ways I can’t think otherwise. The tradition of the novel and, I think, the rigor and the discipline of the art force me to be smarter than I am any other time and force me to be more honest than I am at any other time and force me to be more attentive than I am at any other time. So in some ways, a novel allows me to be better than I am the rest of the time in my life, and I think that’s why I prefer to work in that large fictional form.” 8

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And yet, even in his short stories, continuing throughout his career, one senses how Banks’s fiction might transcend its teller, by distilling his characters’ lives through their incongruous acts, often of a person on the edge. The stories are “very telling of humanity’s crooked path, following perhaps the instinct to find succor or salvation in the past,” I wrote in reviewing his last collection A Permanent Member of the Family.

This instinct arose in “their yearning and risk, suffering and loss,” and the author’s “sage understanding of the deep corners of human nature.” 9

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1 Among Mr. Banks’s literary honors and awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship, The John Dos Passo Award, O’Henry and Best American Short Story Awards; the inaugural Thornton Wilder Prize, The American Book Award; and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also a Pulitzer-finalist twice, for Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift.  He was President of the International Parliament of Writers, and the founding past-President of Cities of Refuge North America.

2 Russell Banks, Dreaming Up America, Seven Stories Press, 2008, 116

3 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 116-117

4 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 121

5 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 126

6 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 126

7 Banks, Dreaming Up America, 127

8 Kevin Lynch “Abolitionist’s Story is as Dangerous as America,” The Capital Times. May 1, 1998, 13

9 Kevin Lynch, The Shepherd Express, Feb. 2, 2014, https://shepherdexpress.com/culture/books/family-stories/

 

Bid bon voyage to the good ship Denis Sullivan. Will she ever return to her birthplace, Milwaukee?

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Our September 2016 departure from the Denis Sullivan’s dock, outside Discovery World on the Lake Michigan shore of Milwaukee. All photos by Kevin Lynch

We can absorb history in many ways, but it’s usually in a second-hand or secondary source way, like reading a book, or watching a documentary. Historically-attuned scholars and artists can surely illuminate the past with immeasurable brilliance and depth. The work of documentary-filmmaker supreme Ken Burns comes to mind, as do historians like Eric Foner, John Meacham, Shelby Foote, David S. Reynolds, Joseph Ellis, Sean Wilentz, David McCullough and others.

Yet for years, Milwaukee has been blessed with something even more vivid and experientially historical than those gifted people’s best efforts, even when they are talking as guest pundits on TV. I’m talking about a mainline to history as real as stepping aboard a tall sailing ship transporting you to the glory days of such vessels in the mid-1800s, the era of Moby-Dick, Two Years Before the Mast, and Typhoon. 1

In September of 2016, I was fortunate enough to take that step, off the Milwaukee harbor onto the city’s majestic flagship schooner S/V Denis Sullivan, for a Lake Michigan tour, which helped inspire this blog. It was motivated to do research for my novel about Herman Melville. I had visited an actual docked whaleship from the era, The Charles W. Morgan, in Mystic, Connecticut.

But I’d never actually sailed on a tall mast ship from that era, even if this one was a hybrid replica, built by volunteer Milwaukeeans – the world’s only re-creation of a 19th-century three-masted Great Lakes schooner. She was the flagship of both the state of Wisconsin and of the United Nations Environment Programme . .

And here you begin to get an inkling of our state’s loss, when the ship – stripped of it’s tall masts — departed on October 8 for Boston, and it’s ultimate destination, St. Croix, now sold to a company in the Virgin Islands – as reported superbly by Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Reporter Chelsey Lewis, in the in-depth article linked to below.

Noted Milwaukee folksinger David HB Drake, a vocal opponent of the sale, had a suggestion, as he posted on his Facebook page: “OMG– The Denis Sullivan has been sold to Boston.

This for me is like the Braves being sold to Atlanta…unthinkable!
There was no warning or opportunity given to the very people who built her and volunteered these 30 years to keep her afloat in Milwaukee. Had there been, perhaps a citizens groups could have bought her and kept her here or at least formed a partnership with the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc to keep her in Wisconsin.”

However, that museum is currently in the midst of its own campaign to raise $1.5 million to put the USS Cobia, its World War II submarine, in dry dock, Lewis reports. The Manitowoc museum considered possibly serving as a home port for the ship, but not the home port.

Other organizations, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “were considering partnering with Discovery World to use the ship for programming around the newly designated Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary, but they, too, could not take primary ownership of the boat.”

Lewis reported on a former crewmember, Michael Gaithier, who expressed bitterness:

The boat was treated like an unwanted stepchild … it was neglected and not taken care of in the way that most tall ships with most healthy organizations behind them in this country have been taken care of

Back in September 2016, sail boats breeze by the port side rigging of the Denis Sullivan with the Milwaukee skyline in the background.

For my part, as an appreciative memory, I’ll convey some of our experience on the schooner. In September of 2016, there we were, riding the waves with the huge sails billowing to and fro, as the wind took us.

Ann Peterson in the deck of the schooner Denis Sullivan in September of 2016.

The historical schooner cruise was a birthday gift to me from my companion, Ann Peterson. And it was the palpable, wind-in-your-face, and even intoxicatingly moving experience I’d hoped for, even it proved too much for the steadiness of Ann, who started out gamely, as the picture above shows. Yet as the good ship dipped and swayed in the slightly feisty waters just beyond the Milwaukee harbor breakwaters, she grew a little green in the gills, and her chipper smile faded.

That’s part of the physical reality of being on open waters on such a vessel, but there’s so much more. You begin to get a sense of how a person can release oneself from the  confining and aggravating patterns of workaday and quotidian problems and pitfalls, and from the looming shadows of psychological malaise that life’s tensions and burdens can impose.

This sort of voyage lacks the tony creature-comforts and luxuries of an expensive cruise. Rather it does transport you back to a much heartier distant time, when brave people traveled and worked much closer to the elements of water, sun and wind. In reflection, one may draw from this elemental immediacy some sense of the holistic importance of water, covering the vast majority of the globe, and the ecosystems it sustains on water and land.

These are things that a writer like Melville, despite (and because of) being a whaler in his early adulthood, proved quite aware of, for a man of his time. His masterpiece novel  reveals that he had profound regard and respect for the whale and its place in “the watery part of the world,” as narrator Ishmael pointedly calls it, in his very first reference to the oceans, in “Loomings,” Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick. Or consider his gloriously attuned description of a great herd of nursing female whales in Chapter 87, “The Grand Armada.”  Such are some the educational aspects this vessel can pursue, though I’ve never taken an educational cruise on it, per se.

How resonant is the ship’s presence culturally? Well, for one example, renowned folk singer Pete Seeger recorded a song called “The Schooner Denis Sullivan” in 2001. 2

Here, Seeger sings his story-telling song a cappella:

Our 2016 cruise also allowed us to soak up the skyline of our modestly handsome city’s downtown, in ever-shifting contours, especially as the urban silhouette cuts itself against the increasing brilliance, then the warming glow of the setting sun in the West. (see photo sequence below). Looking upward, the towering, majestic sails overhead elicited a sort of poetry of rhythmic motion – sweeping, rippling, billowing and whispering.

The Milwaukee skyline from port side of the Denis Sullivan.

Back on the deck, one of the crew members pulled out a fiddle, as did one of the guests and the pair parlayed out a lively Irish-style reel. (Blog story with link to Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article continued, below photo sequence)

A crew member of the Denis Sullivan pulls out his fiddle to engage in a couple of Irish-style reels with a fiddle-playing passenger (not pictured).

 

Denis Sullivan Captain Carlos Canario at the schooner’s helm (gripping the steering wheel behind him) along Lake Michigan during our tour on the ship in 2016. Canario was the Relief Captain for Senior Captain Tiffany Krihwan, who has now departed and is now based in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the historically famous whaling town. t

In the tradition of Impressionist painters, see three views (above and below) of Milwaukee’s harbor and Hoan Bridge from the schooner Denis Sullivan, as the sun sets in the West.

An example of the sort of strange phenomenon one can experience out in the incalculable and evocative atmospheres of a Great Lake was this photo I took, from the Denis Sullivan. The ghostly spherical presence or optical effect hovers above the top of Summerfest’s Marcus Amphitheatre. I fancifully dub it “Sphere of sea god.”

***

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Reporter Chelsey Lewis admirably functions as a nautical and cultural historian in her comprehensive report on Milwaukee’s recent loss of the Denis Sullivan in the newspaper’s Sunday Life section. She provides an in-depth sounding, a voyage into the good ship’s past, present and future:

https://www.jsonline.com/story/travel/wisconsin/2022/10/27/how-milwaukee-built-and-lost-wisconsins-flagship-the-denis-sullivan/8198403001/.

The seeming tragedy is the story Ms. Lewis tells of the decision to sell, reportedly precipitated by the pandemic and the apparent failure to hire a new captain and first mate, after longtime ship Captain Tiffany Krihwan and her first mate were forced to leave by economic circumstances. Those included the shutting down of the ship for well over a year, along with Discovery World, to which it belonged. The reasons for the Denis Sullivan to be sold to another operation, World Ocean School, in, St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, remain questionable, especially given that there was a potential buyer in Chicago who would’ve kept the ship based in Milwaukee. The Chicago outfit, Tall Ship Windy, was prepared to make an offer close to the market value, about $1 million, Lewis reports.

By contrast, it is also troubling that Discovery World’s representatives refused to divulge the actual price of the ship’s sale. However, the successful sale should also underscore how distinguished and rare the Milwaukee-built schooner is for historical value, among other things, and the cultural loss Milwaukee is incurring. The sale rationale came down to a decision as to what is “best for the boat,” including maintaining one of its primary purposes as an educational entity. Why such a function could not continue to be maintained in Milwaukee remains unclear, aside from financial woes the operation is still apparently recovering from, post-pandemic.

The schooner’s powerful presence had also helped attract cultural events to its Discovery World dock, such as the evening concert by the popular Milwaukee jazz group VIVO, which was going on when we returned to dock in 2016.

Saxophonist-flutist Warren Wiegratz performs with VIVO, in a dockside concert going on as the Denis Sullivan, in background, moored after our September 2016 voyage on the 19th-century style schooner.

But read the Journal-Sentinel article to judge for yourself on the whole story of the city’s loss of the ship.

Lewis’s story does finally latch on strong rays of hope. The World Ocean School purchased the Milwaukee ship to replace it’s own flagship, which is now docked up for a few years for refurbishing. There’s a possibility they could be open to selling the Denis Sullivan back to Milwaukee when their own ship is ready to sail again. It is after all, a Great Lakes-style schooner. Still, one must consider such circumstances could change as drastically as the ever-roaming tides of the oceans and those Great Lakes, in all their magnificent and mystifying vagaries.

This two-sequence photo of Madison photographer Katrin Talbot (taken a few years before my trip on the ship) in collaborative research work for this writer’s Melville’s novel, shows some of the scale of the schooner Denis Sullivan. Retrospectively, Katrin seems to bid the ship farewell.

____________

1 In the afore-mentioned titles, authors Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Two Years Before the Mast), and Joseph Conrad (Typhoon) gave us first-hand accounts, or concocted creative ships of transport themselves, in often-poetic prose. These were all based on their actual nautical experiences.

The mid-1800s were haunted by captains courageous and crazed, mighty sea creatures, countless sailors and whalers (drowned and survived), “widow’s walk” wives, and others who directly engaged in, or experienced, the drama and danger of 19th-century sea commerce, romance, and warfare (see Melville’s White-Jacket and Billy Budd, both set on warships).

2. Denis Sullivan Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Sullivan_(schooner))

 

 

The Atlantic’s own editor-in-chief explains why it is my favorite magazine

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The cover of the print edition of the November 2022 The Atlantic. Courtesy The Atlantic

Not long ago, I said to a friend who, like most people today, does most of his reading online, that The Atlantic is the last magazine I would still subscribe to, if all others fell to the wayside by choice or circumstance.

I don’t normally tout publications per se in this blog, but The Atlantic has been my favorite for quite a long time, and now it’s editor has written a piece in the November issue that helps to explain why it is worthy of being a person’s favorite.

Much of this has to do with the publication’s storied history, having been born as an abolitionist magazine shortly before the Civil War. But current editor Jeffrey Goldberg opens his piece called “The American Idea” with an 1861 letter from Julia Ward Howe, expressing her melancholy and insecurities to the editor at the time. The editor, James T. Fields, was wise enough not to touch the copy of the poem she submitted with her letter. He gave it a title and published “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the first page of the February 1862 edition. “(Howe received, in return, a $5 freelance fee and immortality.)”, Goldberg adds drolly.

He goes on to point out that The Atlantic, in its 166th year of continuous publication, also published for the first time, “Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and the first chapters of W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, and Rachel Carson’s meditations on the oceans, and Einstein’s denunciation of atomic weapons, and so on, ad infinitum.”

Further, The Atlantic‘s founding mission statement (reproduced in Goldberg’s article) was signed by various luminaries including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who appeared in the first issue; Oliver Wendell Holmes, who came up with The Atlantic‘s name; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would become the magazine’s Civil War correspondent; Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), America’s most popular author at the time.

Goldberg’s only expressed regret about that time is that, given that Moby-Dick is his favorite American novel, that  Melville never found a way to contribute. That would be my sentiment exactly regarding Melville, who ended up publishing short pieces for Harpers, another long-time American magazine.

I have many reasons why the current magazine is my favorite, partly for it’s intelligence, it’s allegiance to no group, party or clique, and its cultural and political range. “We always try very hard to be interesting. That is a prerequisite,” Goldberg explains.

They succeed, too, which is why, even though some stories are long “thumbsuckers,” they almost invariably hold my interest and, if I don’t finish them, it’s my failing.

Here is Goldberg’s introductory article in the latest issue in full: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/11/165th-anniversary-atlantic-magazine-founding/671523/

p.s. As for your blogger, I submitted an article once — about Wisconsin guitar innovator Les Paul, Bob Dylan and Michael Bloomfield — to The Atlantic and, though chagrined, I was honored to receive a personalized, hand-written “no thank you” note from an editor from the magazine. The article was eventually published in NoDepression.com. Here’s the note. which I valued enough to frame.

________________

 

The wonders and wiles of animals running wild in the artist’s imagination

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Nova Czarnecki, “Return to Me, ” oil painting,  $4500

Heretofore, I’ve refrained from reviewing an art show that I am participating in. However, I’ll simply announce, with a bit of comment, this is the last week to see Feather, Fur, Scale and Tail at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 926 E. Center St. Milwaukee. The show runs through Saturday, June 18. This delightful celebration and exploration of animals is ingenious, diverse, colorful and textural, and rich in symbolism and beauty. Yet it is not without acknowledging the darkness that shadows the animal world from within, and from without, the perpetual threat of humans. 

It includes one of a series of pastel and ink drawings I have made, inspired by Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick. The one on exhibit depicts a scene in the first of the novel’s three climactic chapters, “The Chase-The First Day.” The image is titled “Ishmael Intuits the End from the Crows Nest.” The book’s narrator Ishmael is visible in the far background, at the top of the ship, as the whaling boat with Captain Ahab and Ishmael’s friend, first harpoonist Queequeg, approach The White Whale in the foreground. 

Kevin Lynch, “Ishmael Intuits the End from the Crow’s Nest.” pastel and ink. Not for Sale 

But the show is filled with excellent work: from the lovely gestural simplicity of a blackbird sitting on a branch in Carol Rode-Curley’s watercolor-like pastel, “Resting Raven,” to John-Mark Klapperich’s complex visual jokes — wall assemblages of metal objects transformed into animals. Among the most vivid actual encounters with an animal is “Sweet Pea,” Mary Lee Agnew’s photo capturing the ever-elusive fox, with ears so large you imagine him a winged mythical creature, caught for a fleeting moment, amid wind-blown leaps of prairie grass. (All pictured below)

More myth (as in artful truth-telling) seems to reside in, for me, a true highlight — Nova Czarnecki’s large (48” x 60”) oil painting “Return to Me” (at top). This seems a  (self?) portrait of an earth mother dwelling in watery depths and attracting creatures from the air, the land and the very currents wherein she sits with a mystical regality.

Most works are for sale, and are visible online. or in the gallery. Here’s a link to the online viewing, with gallery hours and information: https://jazzgallerycenterforarts.org/gallery-exhibits/2022/5/14/feather-fur-scale-and-tail

Carol Rode-Curley, “Resting Raven,” pastel, $300

John-Mark Klapperich, “Patina Sprockets,” assemblage sculpture, Not for Sale

Mary Lee Agnew, “Sweet Pea,” photography, $150

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Kevernacular will exhibit a “Moby-Dick”-themed pastel at a new art exhibit at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, opening reception Saturday 5 to 7 p.m.

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“Thar she blows!” the cry comes from high up in the crow’s nest. “Thar she blows, a hump like a snow hill! It is Moby Dick!”

Feminizing all whales is part of the romance of the high seas. This she is really a he, the great White Whale who’s hunted monomaniacally by Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s profoundly precient and symbolically pregnant masterpiece, Moby-Dick or, The Whale.

Those who’ve read this blog over the years may be aware of the precipitous esteem I hold for this extraordinary book. It has inspired me to write a novel about its author, somewhat forestalled by a myriad of circumstances, but forthcoming in due time.
This is a book that an artist of some repute whom I know aptly characterized as “the first postmodern novel” — published in 1851! It might also be the most critically commented-upon work of fiction in modern history, and the most widely referenced in popular culture, certainly among books that are not often actually read.

It has also inspired the visual artist in me.

So I’ve undertaken a series of pastel drawings with Moby Dick as my motif. And one of the perhaps more successful of these will soon be on display in an art exhibit at the Jazz Gallery Center for the arts.
The exhibit is announced in this poster, though one correction the opening reception’s time has een changed to 5 to 7 p.m. Saturday:

The exhibit will include Linocut Print | Sculpture | Comic-Book Illustration | Photography | Assemblage Box-Making | Encaustic | Pastels | Screen Print | Painting | Digital Drawing 

This event has brought me to the realization I should have a digital copy of this pastel professionally made. My apologies for the poorly depicted image at top. But you get the idea from my hand-held photo. I hope it strikes your fancy or interest enough to visit the opening or ensuing gallery days of this promising show.

Here’s an image of another artwork in the show, a block print by Jay Arpin.

Thank you,

Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch)

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Letter (from a Milwaukee jail of my mind), to Louisa Loveridge-Gallas, on the state of our nation and her own psyche

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The Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, Washington, DC. Courtesy The Travel Channel
E-mail from Louisa-Loveridge Gallas on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Jan. 17, 2021:
Dear friends.
I’m sending on a link to this famous Vietnam speech by MLK I go back to on MLK day, so pivotal in his career. Stunning that he was assassinated a year to the day after. And so brave as he found that he angered and disappointed a number of activists and allies for his stance against the war who felt he should stick to civil rights in the approach and focus he had been taking.
Also I’d like think out loud with you. In a very different way and historical context, I just want to add I am beginning to experience that Biden is being attacked at times, in ways I find irresponsible, for speaking out eloquently and clearly for the moral high road of history in his Georgia speech. I refer not only by Republicans but to comments by prominent Democrats like David Axelrod, Obama’s consultant, on CNN; NYT commentators like Maureen Dowd, and even top legislators like Nancy Pelosi. To name a few. Cheap shots, reaching for a way to insult on minor points, calling out strong opinions disagreed with as unbridled ‘rhetoric’ to name a few.
Of course reasonable, fact-based analysis has to go forward. May everyone be generous and informed as we precede with our critiques even in informal conversation. I know I’m not alone in witnessing that these are perilous times where a compassionate approach to each other and in the political realm is at risk in the zeitgeist of the need to one up, demean too easily and thoughtlessly These are such times of anxiety that inflame disagreements and difference; or enhance compassion fatigue.
I certainly don’t count myself out. I’ve been writing some pretty snarky op Ed comments. And make an occasional fevered phone call, as I did to Axelrod’s office. My fur can rise along with a hiss if a friend or relative isn’t on the same page with my take on all the complexities we are living within. I fail. I’m working on myself. I welcome any thoughts you may have to help me along and no pressure to respond, of course, as so many influences and responsibilities call upon us.
So them’s my thoughts and a link to his speech.
Take care. Be safe.
Sincerely,
Louisa *

Full speech text:  King speech

***

 

Dear Louisa,

How I love your caring, your awareness, your intelligence, your passion, and activist voice. And your brave, insightful analogue between Rev. King and President Biden.
Holy moly (forgive my dated boomer utterance), we all need some empathy and psychological guidance and salve, these days. Perhaps, take some deep, slow breaths, dear friend. Take a long walk beside the empowering tide of our Great Lake, or deep into the woods. Listen to the “conference of the birds,” the way they sing to, and advise, each other. Of danger, yes. They live stressed lives, as vulnerable creatures. And yet, they sing.
If only we could truly fly. Yet we can, in our mind, and drag our lagging, embittered, mudbound spirit aloft, which brings to mind a magnificent Herman Melville quote, from the last paragraph of  Moby-Dick, Chapter 96 “The Try-Works”
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
flickr.com 
Only slightly less poetic is Robert F. Kennedy‘s speech in Indianapolis, after annoucing the assassination of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the day after the tragic event. This video is a part of the speech but very worthy. Robert Kennedy is one of my heroes, more so than JFK.
I read the speech (2 pages) during a troubled, virtually sleepless last night, in Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited and introduced by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy. 1 This is a priceless paperback, to me.
Kennedy quotes his favorite poet Aeschylus, from memory: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Kennedy continues: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be whites or they be black.”
I ponder and treasure those thoughts, and rededicate myself to living up to them, to the degree I am able.
(BTW, Bobby Kennedy also had a wit comparable to brother Jack, with fine comic timing — hear his Ball State U speech, following this one on youtube.)
 

Then there’s those who would score “cheap political points” against President Biden, as you protest, Louisa — be they leftist, liberal, centrist, never-Trumpers or far-right Trumpsters.
Biden has only been any office one year, and has laid out perhaps the most ambitious vision and agenda since Lyndon Johnson‘s The Great Society. Yes, he needs to show — and effect — more fight and passion, but he’s getting there, I think. DINO Sens. Manchin and Sinema still sit on the fence like a couple of owls, saying “Who me?” as the 60-vote filibuster looms like the Sword of Damocles, over vastly important social initiatives that are very popular with Americans.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are slithering around from state to state, contriving new voter suppression laws. We need a federal oversight law on voting rights, especially to protect the rights and access of people of color and other disenfrachised citizens.
I am, for the moment, disheartened by all the clamoring special-interest factions of the Democratic Party, each of whom has profoundly legitimate concerns, perhaps most presently voting rights, and a woman’s right to determine her own body. But also the looming apocalypse of climate change… and more, of course.
But a lot of things can happen between now and November’s mid-term elections.

Dear Louisa, as Rev. King says, concluding the sacred but tough-minded speech you quote (echoing Frederick Douglass‘s famous thoughts about “struggle”):

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. The choice is ours. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I believe many tears, sweat and, yes, blood, will commingle with that mighty stream. We are psychically stained by John Kennedy’s blood, from 1963, and by Robert Kennedy’s and Martin’s blood, in 1968, and so many since.

No more, I pray and cry. May America’s profusion of inward-pointed guns desist!

But justice is a hardy soul, I believe. She can swim like a sleek yet powerful fish, or trudge, like a woman or man, long distances, in protest and dissent, which many politicans hear, if loud and pointed enough.

Robert Kennedy quotes Algerian-French author-philosopher Albert Camus as much as anyone in this Make Gentle the Life of This World collection. Camus, I believe, was then addressing the people of Germany, under the Third Reich.

Yet how his words ring on today — when Fascist demagogury and governments sprout weedlike over Mother Earth and here at home — like a great thunderous bell, clanged by mythical Quasimodo in Camus’s Paris, or his very real fellow ringer in Philadelphia, so that the big-shouldered Liberty Bill cracked. 2

Camus wrote:

“This is what separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth.”

Ringing for truth, justice and love,

Kevin

_____
* Louisa Loveridge-Gallas is an acclaimed poet, body-mind counseler, op-Ed writer, music lover, and activist. She’s working on a new chapbook of socially-motivated poems, and on a “jazz novel,” set in Madison, Wisonsin. She’s a former long-time resident of Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, and now resides in Michigan. 
Louisa Loveridge-Gallas. Courtesy Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets
1 Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited and introduced by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, 1998, Broadway Books, 42-43
2 The crack ocurred on the Philadelphia bell’s very first test ring in 1752, shipped from a French foundry (those French!), and it was clearly a flawed casting — like the great nation it signifies.
To me, now, the crack now resembles King’s waters of justice rolling down, the mighy stream. 
.

Never dove into “Moby-Dick?” Or contemplate a revisit? The annual New Year’s marathon reading will quench the thirst

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Courtesy berkshirehistory.org

The 270th Anniversary Year of the publishing of Moby-Dick has just passed. But it’s never too late to take the deep dive. Here’s how to truly embrace the New Year. Let our august “Law and Order” thespian Sam Waterston offer us up Chapter 1, “Loomings,” of The Great American Novel (or epic prose poem, or whatever it is), with its epic opening line, “Call me Ishmael.” For the first time, I believe, the annual marathon reading of Melville’s masterwork, presented by The New Bedford Whaling Museum, is now a video. You can follow along at your own speed and pleasure.

Crusty Sam is a fine, resonant reader, as if recalling the greatest story of his restless youth. There’s also rhythmic pace afoot. After Waterson’s eloquently-paced pauses,  Chapter 2 reader, Gail Fortes, picks up the pace with alacrity. Among the other readers is Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey; Ashley Bendicksen, Miss Rhode Island for America Strong 20221; a handful of Massachusetts state senators; and, eccentrically, a member of the Flat Earth Society!

Orson Welles as Father Mapple reading the story of Jonah and the whale in John Huston’s 1957 film adaptation of “Moby-Dick,” Courtesy Alchetron 

I’ll say no more, except to urge you give Ishmael’s splendid opening meditation on the sea, your ears, and you may feel a bit of Atlantic brine wisp across your face. Among the cool stuff, and polar degrees of high and low-mindedness, there’s a lecture by noted Melville scholar Christopher Benfry and a Moby-Dick trivia quiz, plus a reader roster and a timetable for each chapter (averaging around a half hour, a piece, though some chapters are quite brief).

“It is time to get to the sea!”

Moby-Dick Marathon 2022

 

 

 

Happy new year to all CC readers in 2021, with a huge assist from Mike Neumeyer, one of my favorite musicians of the year

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Culture Currents Holiday Greetings for 2022! First, a miscellany of memories of 2021, photo-essay style, of this blog’s year, and of friends, especially some dearly departed ones (Don’t worry, there’s a musical New Year’s pay-off below).

Your blogger refurbishes an old sculpture of his titled, “Tricycle Nightmare.” Photo by John Klett

CC’s Kevernacular out for some CC-style skiing, shot from Lincoln Park’s highest point, the windswept tee box of Hole No. 6.

Who can forget The Milwaukee Bucks making history by defeating the Miami Heat, the New Jersey Nets and the Phoenix Suns, to win their first NBA championship…in half a century? The crazed crowds at Fiserv’s Forum’s Deer District (above) played their part in the fever that stoked the team. 

Don’t forget, in 2020 the Bucks also began a brief strike that led all of professional sports in bringing attention to police violence against unarmed black people and systemic racism in America.

Successful businessman, publisher and business-success author Jack Covert, who passed in 2021, once had a slightly more unseemly identity, as owner of Dirty Jack’s Record Rack, a small mecca for Milwaukee music fans in the 1960s and ’70s. 

An NPR “American Masters” poll this fall posed the question “What work of art changed your life?” I could not answer with a simple response. One such transforming event was the exhibit of the late Arshile Gorky’s brilliant blend of surrealism and abstract expressionism, at the Guggenheim Museum, in the early 1980s. Above is Gorky’s “The Plow and the Song” from 1946.

Another life-changing work for me was seeing Picasso’s “Guernica,” though I never saw the whole painting, an odd circumstance described in my NRP poll post, regarding the epic anti-Fascist work(s).

The ultimate life-changing work for me — my first encounter with Melville’s “Moby-Dick” obtaining a copy of the 1930 edition, sumptuously illustrated with woodcuts by Rockwell Kent, including this magnificent rendition of the great white whale. 

I also honored a great friend, musician, and culture vulture, Jim Glynn (at right) on the anniversary of his death. Jim also served as the best man at my wedding in 1997 (above).

Some of my happiest reporting of the year was interviewing Kai Simone (above), the first-ever executive director of Milwaukee’s Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts. She signifies a fresh new direction, while extending the tradition of the venue’s namesake, The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, whose heyday in the 1980s contributed greatly to the city’s community and culture.

Speaking of the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, my favorite single piece of art this year was in an exibit there. Jessica Schubkegel’s evocative and eloquent sculpture “Chrysallis” (above). made of medical textbook paper and wire, graced a group exhibit, ReBegin: New Works for New Beginnings, in response to the COVID epidemic.

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Perhaps my most personally meaningful trip was a visit to Two Rivers, Wisconsin (above), on the shore of Lake Michigan, which included a fine nature-preserve walk and visiting the field where my father, Norm Lynch (with the ball, below) quarterbacked a great high school football team (three straight seasons undefeated) in the 1940s .

That Washington High football field in Two Rivers remains (below), but is now the domain of geese, who keep it well-fertilized with au natural “yard-markers.”

 

As COVID threats eased, for a while, Kevin and Ann finally dined out, at Tenuta’s Restaurant, in Bay View, a glorious meal gifted by Ann’s colleagues.

 

Another fine 2021 memory was of my old friend, composer/jazz pianist Frank Stemper (above), here receiving applause in Austria, where his new work, Symphony No. 4 “Protest,” was premiered. While in Europe, Frank and his spouse Nancy visited Omaha Beach, site of the D-Day landing of allied troops who turned the tide of WWII (below).

 

“Enter” by Marvin Hill 

Two linoleum-cut prints (above) by the late artist Marvin Hill, whom I memorialized in 2021 on the anniversary of his passing in 2003.

***.

OK, so much for that little montage of 2021 moments for Kevernacular.

Your reasonably dedicated and unreasonably beleaguered blogger wants to pause at this late point in the day (into evening) to wish all of my Culture Currents readers from 2021, and times fore and aft, a very happy new year (!). If some of the year’s blogs “spoke to you” in any way, it goes to bolster my notion that, indeed, Vernaculars Speak!

I am deeply grateful for your interest in this sometimes waywardly-searching blog. Today I’ve been struggling to meet a deadline for The 14th annual International Critics Poll for El Intruso, a Spanish publication for people interested in creative and experimental music. That’s involved plenty of H-Hour auditioning of review CDs that I purchase or receive.

Believe me, it’s been very pleasurable labor, discovering, savoring — and having my mind slightly bent at times by — the new music that comes my way, as a veterans music and arts journalist.

Throat-clearing aside (no, I don’t have COVID!) I can think of no better way of musically wishing you all a happy new year by sharing two brief but delicious videos by one of my favorite Milwaukee musicians of 2021. I’m talking about vibraphonist and marimba player Mike Neumeyer.

He is one of the most irrepressibly vibrant (please pardon the pun, which simply popped out in my comparative state of mental fatigue) musicians I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting (at a free-jazz workshop he led at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, in 2020, shortly before the pandemic struck), and of sharing time with, although ever since it’s been all virtual.

At least we humbly enjoyed ourselves on New Year’s Eve with a bottle of sparkling Proscutto rose, and some scrumptious curry and Nam Khao (deep-fried rice ball, cured pork sausages, peanuts, scallions, cilantro, shredded coconut) from Riverwest’s Sticky Rice Thai Carry Out, on Locust and Weil Streets. Yep, the foodie details are making me hungry too, so I better get to the felicitous point here. 1

I have extolled the talents and spirit of Mike Neumeyer several times this year in this blog (which are obtainable in a simple search with his name at  the top of the Culture Currents page, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed).

So I don’t have much energy for further glowing, or even moderately striking, praise for vibist Neumeyer, although I will point out that his positive energy is a great antidote to the stresses and strains of another year of enduring COVID, and much of the madness and travesty that passes for politics in America today. Mike is not above clowning it up a bit but, Lord knows, we need every scrap of comic relief we can get these days.

So, skipping further ado, I will simply direct you to his two versions of “Auld Lang Syne,” One version is short and sweet. The other, also brief, allows for a few grace notes of reflection and perhaps even resolution, for the listener.

Thanks again Mike, for a great year of music and memories  And keep up the (ahem)

good vibes. Two (maybe three) increasingly horrid “vibes” puns, and I’m out!

“Auld Lang Syne” played by Mike Neumeyer:

 

And now, to extend the holiday celebrate a tad more, sample a slightly slower draft of the grand old song, with a little aftertaste of the old year, now bygone forever, save memories:

 

Surprise! As an extra treat, especially for all you boys and girls who’ve been not too naughty this year, let’s rewind to the spirit of December 25th, and Mike’s rendering of one of the most timeless holiday songs ever born.

_______

1 We also watched a wonderful film on video on New Year’s Eve. It’s the multi-Academy award-nominated The Father, starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman, and written and directed by Florian Zeller. If you haven’t seen it, The Father is uncannily disarming and disorienting in evoking, for the viewer, the point of view of a family patriarch – played with dazzling power and poignance by Hopkins – whose mental powers and pride are rapidly dissembling amid Alzheimer’s.

In watching it, you might begin to doubt either the movie or yourself, but by the end, in reflection, it all makes brilliant sense, in the saddest and most moving of ways. The full-movie video follows immediately with insightful comments from the principals.

Here’s the trailer: