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Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak)

In memory of Chloe, a precious, sassy calico

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I guess this is my favorite photo of Chloe (my longtime blog portrait photo) because it’s of us together in good times, and she flirts with the camera with that white-tipped tail of hers.

Once she’s gone, through the tears, your mind rewinds right back to the beginning.

It was almost love at first sight. I had been doing some online match.com searching for some time, but I had never picked a female out of an online lineup before. I saw her face on a small picture and wasn’t totally sure. It was mostly black, so when I picked her I whimsically dubbed her my “soul sista.”

But there was also a large white spot on her right side next to her nose, what I came to think of as her beauty mark. It helped to tip me off she was a calico, with plenty of golden-orange and brown, some delightful white highlights and a big white breast.

I had buried my last cat Maggie, who died in my home, not a long time previously. So, across the whole Milwaukee-area Human Society website this one had grabbed me. I got right into my car and drove from my Riverwest home up to the Ozaukee Couty Humane Society on Highway 33.

When I got there, I called Chloe’s name and she immediately emerged from her little hovel and came up and peered at me through the glass. Yep, the black face and the white spot and she was a wonderfully colored girl.

Calico Chloe transfixed by a butterfly.

She had just turned six and was spayed and microchipped, so she seemed healthy though I knew no more about her background. She was friendly and social right away, and when I got her home she took to her new digs without much adjustment. Behavior patterns emerged quickly. She relished sitting on my lap and loved to sit or sprawl on my desk under my lamp showing off her plush white belly as I wrote, and even added her two-cents worth to my text with a few choice paw taps here and there.

Chloe the adorable literary lap cat

And right around four each afternoon Chloe appeared and vocally reminded me it was time for her dinner.

She very quickly became queen of my humble upper flat castle, and as it was summer she also loved leading me out to the small front balcony. She was soon jumping atop the railing and haughtily tip-toeing along it, which didn’t unnerve me too much — if she fell forward there were still two feet of roof and a gutter for her to land on. But such latitude only emboldened Miss Chloe.

The way the balcony was cut into the roof, before too long she decided to hop up onto the roof and next thing you know she had disappeared around the living room gable corner. I was a bit concerned and expected her to come back after a little snooping round.

Well, I didn’t see her again until she emerged from the other corner. Sure enough she had found her way up and around the back of the gable which really reached to about two feet below the apex of the roof.

At first, I had wired off, a bit absurdly, the two cat-sized openings at the bottom corners of the front balcony railing. But it was such easy access for her and I was hardly going to ban this roof-romper from the balcony I sat on, so I just prayed for the best and learned to trust the fates a bit with this intrepid young lady.

I thought I’d try to follow her up one day, so I crawled out over the railing and peered around the corner. I’m a former amateur mountaineer from many years ago and have done guided climbs in The Tetons. But now my left hand was lamed by a permanent auto immune neuropathy -– I’m now a one-handed typist — so grabbing the gable roof for security with that hand felt dicey so I ventured no further.

Pretty soon I was getting reports from neighbors who’d spotted that calico parading around the roof, sitting and licking herself when the wind ruffled her and tight-roping a bit on the roof apex and around the heater chimney.

Ah, life was good for this sun-bathing dame.

In time she aged and retired from her high-wire attic antics, as if nothing had ever happened.

Chloe the lovely queen of the abode

Life remained good for the dame for some years, she greeted human visitors with graceful amiability, was never tempted to stray outside downstairs, though ventures into the basement always proved evident when she sauntered up with dust balls in her whiskers.

Yeah, things were quite good until the fateful day when my gal pal Ann moved in with me, when my landlords offered their own more spacious upper flat next door, as they were moving to Mukwanago. It included a roomy space for my book and CD-lined office and a third bedroom that offered Ann some office space but mainly became a cat feeding and litter room.

The catch for Chloe was that Ann’s two male cat were moving in, too. I had always had a female cat living as my sole feline resident. Ann anticipated trouble having dealt with various cats living together.

Dog and cat owners often compare notes and, yes, dogs behave reliably for always needing to ingratiate their owners/feeders. With a cat, he may rub against your leg seductively at chow time, but you just never know what’s in that box-of-chocolate brain and when or how it might pop open.

Big black Taj was a handful, an always rambunctious and sometimes outrageous escape artist we had to constantly guard against when closing the kitchen door which led to the basement.

Now that Taj was moving in, along with a far more meek “brother” named Ravi, all bets were off for the new furry threesome. Chloe soon had hackles and hair raised by Taj’s oafish efforts at playful interaction. He’d didn’t really know how to deal with a female.

Actually he got sick not too long later and passed away, very sadly for Ann and Ravi who’d grown up with him and soon missed his old play pal.

Now rather lost was Ravi — a bit of a Whimpey in a Popeye cartoon…He’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger bit today, but only if you gave it to him the quietly enough to not send him running away.

So life simplified for the feline who’d always been the imperious queen of the household with only imaginary subjects. Cat politics hanged drastically. The queen would mess with Ravi, hissing and pawing at him. She was declawed up front when I got her, so she was mostly hot air but the dumb guy cats never seemed to think so.

Then came the Great Ambush in the Tunnel Trick. Ann had brought into the house a long soft cloth tunnel for cats to walk through and play in, as it had a fuzzy ball dangling in the middle of it. It was situated in the dining room pointing towards the center hallway to the kitchen, bedrooms and bath. Chloe got a bright idea, knowing Ravi was just enough of a doofus.

So, she positioned herself at the back end of the tunnel when Ravi was wandering innocently in the center hallway. If he paused the too long, he was dead meat for her.

She spied him through the tunnel, raised her butt up in the air and wiggled it, then shot through like a bullet and in a blink of an eye was on top of poor unsuspecting Ravi, like a vulture on fresh carrion.

Ravi had actually a fair amount of wrestling experience with Taj, so he held his own for the few seconds of Chloe terror.

Cat politics changed yet again when Ann got the bright idea to find a new male buddy for beleaguered Ravi. Problem was, Eddie was a cat kitten who quickly grew into a bit type A-ish personality. “Ish” because he was basically a fraidy cat who spent hours under the bed in fear of any potential visitors or sudden sounds and even me when she was gone — to where I nicknamed his black butt Dracula. That’s just like a bully, really a coward. He would harangue the other two cats plenty as he ballooned into a 14-pound fatso monstrosity and they began to shrink in old age, and Chloe drastically in her last couple of years.

So, I could tell more stories and comedy did abound at times. But this coincided with Chloe’s gradual and finally precipitous decline, mainly from a hyperthyroid condition. As this reflection is really for her, it’s not right to linger long on this era. She loved to chase her tail in the bathtub.

She loved to play with a ball-in-a-circle game and got quite ambidextrous with it before things went bad. As she grew more skeletal she was also ravenously hungry — a Holocaust survivor in her first hours of freedom. Alas, because of that her upchucking gained in frequency and volume and finally her other bodily expressions grew more outside-the-box, but not in any hip way.

I religiously applied transdermal medicine to her ear daily but things grew inevitable for my quite cleanly housemate, increasingly put upon by the messes. Yet Chloe still enjoyed sitting and purring in my lap, to the very last day. I cancelled two euthanasia appointments but a few months later, not the third one.

Chloe’s very last portrait, from my lap.

I’m still lonely and heart aching a couple of weeks later. She also signifies plenty to me, as an aging, childless man. I even miss Chloe bugging me for food, jumping up on me at the crack of dawn to tell me to get my rear in gear. In the semi-darkness, the big white beauty mark on her black face seemed to glow in the dark. Even Ann commented on this.

But it’s May and hope does still spring. Big-fat Eddie has plopped down on my lap a couple times since. And I always have really liked Ravi and even relate to him a bit. After all, we both snore.

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Acclaimed documentary on Chet Baker plays Thursday at Jazz Gallery CFA

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poster for Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s Academy Award-nominated documentary film about Chet Baker

 

“Let’s Get Lost,” Bruce Weber’s Academy Award-nominated documentary film about Chet Baker

6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 21st, Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 936 E. Center St. Milwaukee.

The Chuck LaPaglia Jazz Film Series

Trumpeter Joel Lehman quintet will perform music of Baker after the film.

Suggested donation $15 ($10, students)

https://jazzgallerycenterforarts.org/

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Chet Baker was often compared stylistically to Miles Davis as trumpeters who helped define the cool school of jazz. That’s worth revisiting: Each plied us with the limpid beaty and sly tenderness of their horn. As the lead performer on the iconic recording The Birth of the Cool, Miles probably correctly gets credit as initiator of the style.

A big difference in persona can affect interpretation. As a romantic, Miles was always a tough customer, an amateur boxer, who once recorded an album dedicated to the pioneering black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson (However, his whispery voice resulted from an improperly healed throat operation, not a street fight).

By contrast, Baker almost always conveyed degrees of vulnerability and wistfulness, rather than toughness. He was a lyrically inventive trumpeter but what stood out was his singing, rare among musicians known first as instrumentalists.

His tenor voice sounded like an injured dove inhabiting a man’s frame. In his youth, he also had lean square-jawed good looks comparable to James Dean. In his last years, after a life ravaged by drugs, he was the proverbial picture of Dorian Grey, but without the demonic aura.

In August of 1981, Baker played at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, and now that venue’s current incarnation, The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, will present Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s 1988 Academy Award-nominated documentary film about the unforgettable jazz trumpeter and singer, at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 21.

Immediately following, trumpeter Joel Lehman’s quartet will perform music by and associated with Baker.

Soundtrack to Burce Weber’s film on Chet Baker, “Let’s Get Lost.”

A Wikipedia listing includes this on the film: “By juxtaposing these two decades, Weber presents a sharp contrast between the younger, handsome Baker — the statuesque idol who resembled a mix of James Dean and Jack Kerouac — to what he became, “a seamy looking drugstore cowboy-cum-derelict”, as J. Hoberman put it in his Village Voice review.” 1

The Icelandic singer-songwriter and actor Bjork, is unstinting in her praise of Baker: “He’s the only singer I’ve ever been able to identify with. I love the fact he’s so expressive, so overemotional. It’s classic stuff; it makes me soft in my knees… He was so into it: like, ‘Fuck those notes I’m singing, and fuck those songs I’m singing – what I want is the emotion.’ That’s how I feel about it too.”

Let’s Get Lost also received a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

I was fortunate to document Baker’s 1981 performance here for The Milwaukee Journal. My phone interview feature with Baker (August 7) and review of his Jazz Gallery concert (August 12) are included chronologically in The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984 anthology, reprinted in 2016, but now hard to find, possibily at the JGCA. The Milwaukee Public Library owns a copy. 3

So, I include scanned copies of both documents here.

This event continues the valuable film and performance series named for the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery founder Chuck LaPaglia and expertly curated by a JGCA board member Ron Aplin.

This writer’s 1981 phone interview with Chet Baker for The Milwaukee Journal:

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This writer’s 1981 review of Chet Baker at The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery:

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  1.  Hoberman, J (April 25, 1989). “Self-Destructive Beauties”. The Village Voice.
  2.  Aston, Martin (October 1993). “Björk Guðmundsdóttir’s Record Collection”. Q.
  1. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/32682861-milwaukee-jazz-gallery-1978-1984

Time to save New Deal public art threatened by Trump’s wrecking ball

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The Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building was completed between the years 1939-1940, by architect Charles Z. Klauder. Architectural style is Stripped Classicism. Originally constructed as and called the Social Security Building, it was renamed in 1988 for Wilbur Joseph Cohen (1913-1987), a government official and public affairs educator. Art.

As an art major undergrad, my aesthetics were shaped by modernist values, leaning towards degrees of surrealist abstraction (read Joan Miro, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock). But as readers of my blog know, my full inclinations (“common and uncommon culture”) are hardly exclusionary or purely abstract.

So, Judith Shulevitz’s essay in The Atlantic’s May 2026 issue struck a chord and blows against the ever-gilding empire of Donald Trump. She focusses on the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, the current home of the Social Security Board, and other already hollowed-out agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services, and
The Voice of America. The massive Art Deco and Egyptian Revival building in DC is on the administration’s “accelerated disposition” list, a euphemism for demolition. Whither Social Security? Probably nowhere but severely damaged, but God only knows.

The mural artwork still visible there — commissioned by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to help shepherd Americans out of the Great Depression — spoke in proletarian terms but hardly lumpen, nor was it nostalgic “make America great again” gloss.

It proved that artful imagery could speak to people as powerfully as any words or verbal rhetoric — it transcended the limits of literacy. One can see how new immigrants might seize the day and become workers toward citizenship. The vision was big-shouldered forward-ho, even as it showed how hard that road could be. This remained the land of individual freedom but governed society now had a big role to play. And this was no racist lily-white wash, as persons of many colors inhabit the murals by Ben Shahn, Seymour Fogel and Phillip Guston. Nor were these smiling or overly proud faces.

Shulevitz writes: “Perhaps the air of gravitas evident in all the building’s murals, and the ambivalence hinted at in Guston’s and Fogel’s, reflects the anxieties of the time. While Shahn was working (during World War II), people came up to him and said that what he was painting was what they were fighting for.”

She also notes this art drew from Soviet-style Socialist Realism but also from the more expansive imagery of “Regionalism — think Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton – which leaned toward heartland nativism.” Again, this aesthetic and value system was inherently American, suggesting how socialist programs could adapt to and enhance capitalist progress.

Socialist Milwaukee Mayor Daniel Hoan on the cover of TIME, April 6, 1936. TIME USA LLC

This also coincided with Milwaukee mayors demonstrating how their so-called “sewer socialism” could work at local metropolitan levels. Mayor Daniel Hoan made the cover of TIME magazine by 1936. The word socialism had so much more applied meaning to real life than the reflexive recoiling from it typical of so many misinformed people in this era of facile online fearmongering and contagious xenophobia.

Some derided such art as propaganda and kitsch for the masses. But, as Shahn wrote in a 1968 oral history, “Propoganda is a noble word. It means you believe something very strongly and you want other people to believe it, to propagate your faith.”

Idealistic for sure, but apt to the moment and the place. His most notable narrative murals in the Cohen building, titled “The Meaning of Social Security,” (see detail of Shahn mural at top) are two-part — one depicting the plight of people without such security, from huddled children and mothers, to thread-bare fathers and sons facing a curving railroad track into an uncertain future. The second part, post-Social Security Act of 1935, shows men constructing new skyscrapers with blazing welding guns and muscular youths leaping for a basketball.

Philip Guston’s Social Security Building mural “Reconstruction and the Well-Being of the Family,” handmadepiece.com

The chiaroscuro, textures and architecture of these works — note Guston’s triptych, “Reconstruction and the Well-Being of the Family,” evoking the Last Supper and Madonna and Child, — “has the aura of an altarpiece,” also lending a storytelling atmosphere, challenging and charging the imagination.

Perhaps this signifies something to hold sacred in the American ethos, “to remind future generations of what patriotism looked like.”

Wrecking balls, by contrast, can reduce history to rubble with a single, imperious order, for the sake of the powerful and narcissistic.

Here is Shulevitz’s essay:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/new-deal-art-wilbur-cohen-building-murals/686581/ 

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Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch outdoes himself

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Torch Bearers, by Brian Lynch

The trumpeter-composer forged his own route up with his conceptually and musically loaded big band album The Omni-American Book Club which earned him his second Grammy Award. His first came from improvising a climb from the Latin side of the mountain, in collaboration with the great pianist Eddie Palmieri. Such efforts take courage and imagination, I know, as a now-disabled piano player and former mountain climber.

His third Grammy, last year, was as co-producer, helping loft the sultry, soaring wings of Samara Joy, perhaps the hottest jazz singer alive today. 1

Knowing a good thing, Lynch features Joy here on two original songs which speak aplenty about this recording’s radiance. It might be the most beguilingly beautiful album Lynch has ever made, and as good any of his, and that makes 26 as a leader! Annotator Ted Panken claims Torch “an inflection point – a manifesto affirming the vitality of hard-core jazz…”

 Lynch and mates bear the torch for many bop giants including the one present, alto sax “guru” Charles McPherson, who is what Lynch would call an “unsung hero,” despite a quietly auspicious career, including 12 years with the titanic Charles Mingus.
Brian Lynch - Charles McPherson - Samara Joy Kickstarter Campaign ...

Charles McPherson (left, foreground) and Brian Lynch. YouTube.com

The trumpeter has always possessed an uncommon gift for constructing melodious improv but outdoes himself on Torch Bearers. Time and again, his solos unfurl like bounteous wreaths of lyricism, strung with the enchanting logic of vintage storytelling. This is partly due to the winning material, mostly written by himself, and largely medium tempos. For example, on the snappy Jazz Messengers-like opener “Luck of the Draw,” his solo’s relaxed swinging effortlessly transcends the title’s risky implications, a rightness of shapely chord changing. McPherson displays similar gifts throughout, if a bit edgier style.

Even on the harder-swinging boppers “Luminescence,” “The Juggler” and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Blue N’ Boogie,” the two hornists remain Birds in frolicsome mid-air play, always amazing to see. Finally, the pair alternates several solos each on the gorgeous extended reading of the one standard, “But Beautiful,” the album’s climax, which sounds like a slow sunset of many shadows, from a mountaintop.

On her two songs (“Pursuit of a Dream” and “The Joy of Love”) Joy endows the latter’s bittersweet lyric with chocolatey suppleness recalling the magisterial Sarah Vaughan, by melting big intervals into pure azure. She thrills as few but Sassy could, though in a somewhat higher register.

Though their first recording together, Lynch has known his sax compadre (and sterling pianist Rob Schneiderman) since 1980, when he moved from Milwaukee to San Diego. Thus, the album’s sly, genial sagacity, as if these torch bearers light the way on an upward-bound mystery tour for you to solve in time, by listening.

Get Torch Bearers on Amazon here.

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This review was originally published in Shepherd Express: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/torch-bearers-by-brian-lynch/

  1. For my money, Lynch should have been a serious contender for his second Grammy for his 2016 two-album set, Madera Latino: a Latin Jazz Perspective on the Music of Woody Shaw. With it’s dazzling multiple trumpet arrangements of the music of the prematurely lost trumpet great, “my musical hero,” Lynch shed innovative Afro-Caribbean light on this still-underappreciated body of music. His collaborators included trumpeters Dave Douglas, Sean Jones and Philip Dizack, and drummer Obed Calvaire.

 

 

 

 

The Israel/Palestine quagmire of tragedy comes home in essay by Jodi Melamed

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Salah Sarsour.  OIP.webp

The genocide that resulted from the horrid tragedy of the Israel/Palestine conflict remains the greatest moral dilemma extant, despite the current madness of King Donald’s war on Iran. And the dilemma came home to Milwaukee when — in an opinion piece by Jodi Melamed in the Sunday May 3rd Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Ideas Lab section — she reiterated the situation of Salah Sarsour, president of The Islamic Society of Milwaukee.

Sarsour was recently targeted and kidnapped by ICE for his advocacy of the Palestinian people, according to a resolution passed April 21 by the Common Council to demand his immediate release.

“As Jews who know our history, we have seen the playbook before,” Melamed writes. “Disappearing the most beloved member of our community to terrorize us and fragment us is familiar to us. It was the strategy of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany and by the Russian Tzar in the Eastern European Pale of Settlement. No one should fear the knock on the door, the unconstitutional detention.”

Jodi Melamed, "The Open Secret of Racial Capitalist Violence" | Fall ...

Marquette Professor Jodi Melamed is a passionate lecturer and social activist. You Tube

I’ll let Melamed detail Sarsour’s importance to the community in her piece linked below. She co-founded the Milwaukee Chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace in 2014, and remains a member-leader.

Melamed and Sarsour have worked together on the Palestinian cause, she says. They exemplify the wisdom and courage of our local Jewish leaders in solidarity with Islamic fellows to fight the tragedy of Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminally grotesque overkill of 70,000-plus Palestinian people in response to the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, and to counter the sinister misinformation that feeds Trump’s current “anti-semitism” campaign. History already casts a shadow of profound shame and criminal accountability on contemporary Israeli leadership. As for the Israeli people, considering the history of The Holocaust…

Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee. OIP

Her piece initially jumped out at me because I happen to know her personally. I took a 20th Century American Literature course from her at Marquette University while doing work towards a PhD (which I did not complete).

Melamed was perhaps my favorite of the professors I encountered in a year and a half at MU. I was deeply impressed by her passion for ideas and writing that contribute to social justice and an empowered sense of international pluralism and community.

I had no idea of her activism and leadership at the time. But it all makes sense now. Dr. Melamed got us students up to speed on the work of important recent writers like Judith Butler and Gloria Anzaldua, and contemporary feminism’s role in today’s society and politics. I always left her class slightly buzzing. She was also a fair and rigorous critic of my own essays for her class, yet always in a supportive spirit.

Hers is also the kind of quality university education under attack by the Trump administration. Melamed’s essay here also underscores the very real personal fear she feels as a prominent figure in the Palestinian cause with the fate of Sarsour still in limbo.

I’m proud to report my congressional Rep. Gwen Moore visited Sarsour in the Clay County Detention Center in Indiana on April 24. Melamed urges other leaders supporting him to do the same.

This is about an important and beloved Milwaukee community leader languishing as a prisoner of unconstitutional state-sponsored terrorism. What has our nation become?

Here’s a link to Melamed’s essay:

https://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/contributors/2026/04/25/ice-arrest-milwaukee-muslim-leader-palestine-antisemitism/89720092007/

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Wes Montgomery “Genius of the Guitar” plays film tonight

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Wes Montgomery, center. Courtesty Jazz da Gamma 

Location: Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts,

926 Center St.

Milwaukee WI 53212

Donation: $15

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Hey folks, now’s the time to see a film about a rarely filmed artist: Wes Montgomery.

It’s titled Wes Bound:The Genius of Wes Montgomery.

Given his influences as a guitarist you’ll know a handful of his style when he grabs a chord and churns up siome momentum. The harmonies may drive you to a rhyhmic frenzy of good feeling, if you let them. It’s partly because the chords are wapped in alluring melody. Milwaukee’s own Manty Ellis is one player who absorbed Wes like a sponge.

Same is true of Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Larry Coryell, and Pat Martino, among others.

Wes Bound producer/director Kevin Finch and Robert Montgomery interviewed dozens of musicians, family members, and friends for the documentary, including platinum record-selling artist George Benson, rock and roll guitar icon Slash, 20-time Grammy winner Pat Metheny, Russell Malone, Mimi Fox, Grammy winner Lee Ritenour, Steely Dan co-founder Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Grammy-winning rock guitarist Eric Johnson, second-generation Hampton family musician Pharez Whitted, bassist Larry Ridley (formerly of Indianapolis), Wes’s touring drummer Billy Hart, and others.

In addition to the interviews, the film also features the music of Wes and his famed brothers, bassist Monk Montgomery and pianist and vibraphone player Buddy Montgomery, who spent many years in Milwaukee.

Methey expressed well the ineffabe but palpable qualities of Wes’s playing:

“The whole idea of being an improvising musician for me sometimes gets a little clouded up with the nuts and bolts of it. But at its core it’s about storytelling and Wes for me, above everything else, you could always follow it – he had this this amazing ability to describe very complex ideas in ways that were so clear and so well backed up with spirit and soul. But also if you just look at it in a linear way, he almost never played any idea that didn’t have two or three – sometimes more – responses to what the idea was.”

Following the film you’ll hear a live performance from the UWM Jazz Ensemble Repertoire Combo, doing Montomery material, and directed by drummer Dave Bayles.

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Elaine Pagels illuminates America’s historical moment

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Blogger’s note: When I do direct readers to other published material, I strive for that which is available to the general public. But this article is so important in my view that I urge Culture Currents patrons to read it, despite the fact that, to do so one needs to sign in as a subscriber to The Atlantic, start a free trial, or subscribe. Also, the November print edition of the magazine should be available at most public libraries. 

The article is titled “The Moral Foundation of America” by Elaine Pagels. I caught up with it recently when I returned to the remarkable November issue of The Atlantic magazine, which honors the nation’s 250th anniversary with a series of substantial essays on the topic of America. Pagels is ostensibly a historian emeritus of religion from Princeton University.

But she is widely esteemed as a historian more generally, as this essay underscores. It is quite brief and concise, but it boils down the revolutionary history of the American Experiment in Democracy, and the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights as running counter to most of the recorded history of humankind, in which kings and rulers accorded moral authority upon all whom they preside.

Historian Elaine Pagels. Courtesy radiowest.keur.org

Pagels explains Thomas Jefferson’s declaration principles of human equality and freedom as “intrinsic rights” of all and based on the Enlightenment and the Book of Genesis in the Bible, as well as the teachings of Jesus (She notes Jefferson’s own personal failure to live up to those principles as a slaveowner, something he long struggled with.).

So, you see how the Founders culled and synthesized sterling ideas of both secular and religious traditions to create something unprecedented in human history, and the beacon of guidance for democracy to the world ever since.

Her conclusion, however, is pointed — that perhaps the Founders’ greatest fear was a kind of reversion in America to monarchial rule: “power maintained by means of fear, autocracy and military force.”  That is just what we are seeing now in the current administration, she says, which seems morally unmoored from America’s fundamental values.

I don’t believe I’ve read anything since the start of the devastating second Trump administration that provides insight better into the ideals that America, with all its flaws, stands for and, thus, what is at stake.

Here is a link to the Pagels article: .https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/11/america-founding-morals-rights-life-liberty/684327/: 

 

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Elaine Pagels’ most recent book is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.

The great Milwaukee poet Antler touches 80, and still touches “each other”

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Cover of Antler’s “Touch Each Other.” Courtesy FootHills Publishing.

In honor of Antler’s 80th birthday, I have added to my commentary (in boldface) on his poetry collection “Touch Each Other” from 2013.

I have also added to Antler’s Wikipedia page, including multiple new citations, under the heading of “Antler’s style.”

Touch Each Other (Foothills Publishing) By Antler 

Remember Antler’s celebrated and acerbic protest poem “Factory”? He no longer rails, but his middle age still emits an eagle’s cry for vivid dreams and hope.

The former Milwaukee poet laureate’s often-stunning statistical research skirls into billowing “what ifs.” Then, “The Come Cries of the Unborn Come” brilliantly marries birth to last days, and life’s continuum — disarming tired left-right dualisms.

In another: “The existence of money and having to earn it was made up. No longer where floundering when no wonder is why we’re floundering!”

Antler also can be effortlessly pertinent to the moment as in “Threat to our Community,” where spy satellites orbiting the earth take covert photos of “an amoeba in a drop of rain,” of a 13-year-old boy gaping at his sperm through a microscope and of a virtually penniless poet, “while extraterrestrials in a spaceship/ between Uranus and Neptune/train their telescope/on a bum reading the want ads/on a park bench in Golden Gate Park/to see if there are any jobs/ they can apply for/ when they come to San Francisco incognito/ on a reconnaissance mission…”

A generous 40-page chapbook, Touch Each Other‘s title reverberates softly, sensually and spiritually. The latter quality infuses it with spirit for anyone who appreciates great art. Regardless of your opinion of this work you must concede he has spoken to countless people and been celebrated among the greatest of the Beat generation of poet, his prime influence, along with Walt Whitman.

For those, The cover image. a detail of God’s hand reaching to give holy life to Adam, from Michelangelo immortal Sistine Chapel, might strike some as pretentious.

Be prepared for unabashed, hilarious erotica. But please don’t grouse over such outrageous love of life — Whitman’s sacred embrace reborn.

If you think of Milwaukee as basically a blue-collar working-class town that could never abide, say, same-sex marriage, think again.

But first appreciate that as a tired, old classist stereotype, that even as it acknowledges all that Milwaukee has provided the world, working class and engineering masterpieces like the revered Harley Davidson motorcycle, American Motors cars, Allis Chalmers’ pioneering heavy equipment, A.O. Smith, once was the world’s leading producer of car and truck frames. And much more.

Antler, though ostensibly bohemian has done working class labor and addresses that life as honestly and passionately as any poet I know. His early epic masterpiece “Factory,” is based his own experience on the assembly lines at Continental Can Company in Milwaukee.

Unlike most of us, including myself, who also have worked in factories, he happened to have the insight, wit, artistry, eloquence, empathy and passion to transmute the experience into great art.

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The poet and wilderness explorer Antler is a former Milwaukee poet laureate and winner of the Walt Whitman Award. Courtesy www.antlerpoet.net

Besides direct literary influences, much of Antler does grow like a grand rack of horns, from his vast dedicated experiences in wildernesses. Imagine him standing over you with craggy horns rising upward, nearly piercing the sky. He is a humanist who envisions humanity entwined with nature in the sort of intimate way he envisions himself, humbly but capaciously, full of wonder.

His best big works, and some smaller ones, have the kind of capaciousness that Whitman was celebrated for as an unprecedented American poet.

So, it’s no surprise that Antler won the Walt Whitman Association’s Walt Whitman Award in 1985, for author “whose contribution best reveals the continuing presence of Walt Whitman in American poetry.”

What do I mean by capacious? There are few living poets who write in a straight-shooting vernacular style that can gently grab hold of your mind’s eye and not let go, until he exhales his last beautiful or harsh truth, or until he’s hoisted you onto a high, breath-taking granite vista to see and feel pain and possibility, as if it were just within reach.  in other words, he embodies this blog’s subtitle (Vernaculars Speak) as powerfully as any Wisconsin poet,

So yes, he’s the state’s “greatest gay poet,” as Paul Masterson of Shepherd Express has proclaimed. The critic aptly wrote in 2017, “Exploring the emotional arch of male-male love most would find too intimate to express, his gay-themed poems are among his most moving for their raw candor.”

Not to diminish that, but he’s more, in my book, a former Milwaukee poet laureate well worth such honor whose voice reaches to this state’s greatest borders, like all the lakes and riverways that feed the wonder of wilderness that Antler lives and thrives from. 

His poem “Feral” helps convey his imaginative vision: 

Boy raised by wolves, raised by panthers, boy raised by dolphins, raised by sequoias,/

Boy raised by spirits of plant-eating dinosaurs/

Boy raised by the cave behind the waterfall…”

Wolves, panthers, dolphins, sequoias, spirits, dinosaurs, waterfalls. This sort of beautiful thinking can astonish a reader the more one considers its sense of glorious possibility. 

So, you think, if only his “what ifs” in Touch Each Other became “why nots,” and then…

By the way, If you ever have a chance, go to hear Antler read his poetry. He declaims with exuberant verve, a sly wit, and a fine feel for the nuances of irony and tenderness in his verse.

Antler has been acclaimed by such major and kindred poets as Allen Ginsburg, Gary Synder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Factory in the renowned City Lights series.Aside from his Walt Whitman Award, he won the 1987 Witter Bynner Prize awarded annually “to an outstanding younger poet” by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City.

Antler was been invited to read at Walt Whitman’s birthplace on Long Island in 2014.

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Touch Each Other is available at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. For more information, visit www.antlerpoet.net.

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“Prove to Me” from the new chapbook Touch Each Other by Antler 

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A short version of this post was published in The Shepherd Express, Sept. 4, 2013  

Your blogger Kevernacular visits City Light Books in San Francisco, which published Antler’s masterpiece “Factory.” Photo by Ann K. Peterson

3 thoughts on “Antler reaches for sky-born ideas and touches people down here”

  1. I was at the creative wrting festival and i go to wawautosa east i was in one of your seassions and i realy like your poem form the book touch each other i was woundering of you can send me
    the poem? It was the last one you read that had us sent into a fit of giggles. it what mean a lot

    Reply ↓

  2. “Prove to Me” speaks volumes about the sanctity of nature over the war of money. After I read this poem, I immediate bought the book! I have three other books by Antler.

    Reply ↓

    • Tom,
      You couldn’t have put it more succinctly, about Antler’s newest book. But he’s been speaking powerfully for decades, as you indicate.
      Best,
      Kevin

      Reply ↓

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Milwaukee River Greenway: Beauty lies even in winter’s depths

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All photos by Kevin Lynch

Just to get into the spirit of a season as a way to cope with the bitter cold: At bottom of this note, I offer a link to a short blog photo essay with commentary I did a couple years back about a much more benignly amenable winter day.

These were shot on my favorite Riverwest walk, The Milwaukee River Greenway.

Esteemed Milwaukee historian John Gurda has described it this way: “a narrow fringe of green protected from development by flood hazard, topography, and sometimes public policy.

“What’s remarkable is the width of that fringe close to downtown. Between Port Washington Road and North Avenue, the river pitches downward toward the lake, creating fast water and a valley so deep that it’s entirely wooded. That valley is now protected as The Milwaukee River Greenway, an urban wilderness less that two miles from City Hall. If the Greenway isn’t unique in urban America, it’s certainly close.” 1

It feels that way every time I walk it. The river teems with wildlife, fish, including salmon feeding in surging splashes, ducks and Canada geese, and trout fishermen standing in the river that runs through Milwaukee. Slow down and melt into the hillside a bit. You may encounter deer, even though the greenery is never very deep or remote.

But it is hoary and dense, and the winding path can narrow at places to where you feel you’re wandering deep into the heart of nowhere. Or somewhere, long gone. It often feels ancient, with many massive trees fallen, from wind, winter and gravity over decades, and the steep bluff angles, with foliage and deep moss growing from those fallen limbs…some great trunks eroding into mysterious, yawning caverns, evocative at times of long-dead dinosaurs, to me.

Yet in a certain mood you might sense the leaning bluff earth softly shuddering, the craggy limbs slowly stirring, groaning to life.

I hope you enjoy this wintry interlude:  https://kevernacular.com/?p=15369

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1 John Gurda, “Paddling through History, A Memorable Day on the Milwaukee River” from Brewtown Tales, More Stories frim Milwaukee and Beyond, Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2022, 173

Trumpet legend Lee Morgan is remembered as Jazz Gallery film series continues Thursday

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'I Called Him Morgan' (2016) promotional imageThe trumpeter Lee Morgan was a modern jazz legend, the sort who seemed destined to play in a place like The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery. But he died too soon, in 1972. Six years later, the long-celebrated nightclub and community center opened.

All is not lost. Those who remember Lee—and those who might discover his rip-roaring genius can finally experience him—in the virtual flesh, in the Jazz Gallery’s current incarnation.

The Chuck LaPaglia Jazz Film/Live Music Series continues on Thursday, Jan. 15, with a 6:30 p.m. screening of I Called Him Morgan at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 926 E. Center St. The award-winning 2016 Swedish documentary directed by Kasper Collin features clips of Lee and Helen Morgan, Wayne Shorter and many others.

Here’s IMDB’s estimable storyline for the film: “On a snowy night in February 1972, celebrated jazz musician Lee Morgan was shot dead by his common-law wife Helen during a gig at a club in New York City. The murder sent shockwaves through the jazz community, and the memory of the event still haunts those who knew the Morgans.”

Love Letter

This feature documentary by filmmaker Kasper Collin is a love letter to two unique personalities and the music that brought them together. A film about love, jazz and America.”

Official trailer may be seen here:

Tickets will not be sold to the event, but a charitable donation of $15 for the general public and $10 for students is recommended. Seating is limited.

The film screening will be followed by a presentation on innovations in sound engineering and the performance of the Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers standard, “Moanin’ ” by pianist Trace Ellington of Mood Indigo Recordings in Milwaukee. “Moanin’ ” features Morgan on trumpet on the original recording that Ellington will accompany. By the way, Milwaukee-based Ellington is a direct descendant of Duke Ellington.

After viewing many jazz films, series director and JGCA board member Ron Aplin “found that learning about an artist in this way provided context for and greater appreciation of their music. It occurred to me that a program featuring a film screening and the live performance of jazz pieces related to the film would be both educational and entertaining for our Milwaukee jazz community.”

Aplin also wants to give younger area jazz musicians “opportunities to perform on our historic stage and to expand their jazz repertoires. We want to preserve and add to Milwaukee’s proud jazz history; and honor Chuck LaPaglia, who staged so many great performances by jazz legends when he owned the Jazz Gallery back in the ‘70s and ‘80s.”

Revelatory Music Films

The Jazz Gallery’s recent sceening of Chasin’ the Trane was a revelation for me a veteran jazz fan and critic, both stylistically and for the musical film clips of saxophone giant John Coltrane—both classic and rare—and for the insights by interviewees.

That show included a brief talk and Q&A with the film’s director John Scheinfeld and a performance by members of a Milwaukee Jazz Institute student ensemble.

The series has previously presented the Miles Davis documentary Birth of the Cool, Clint Eastwood’s brilliant, harrowing Charlie Parker bio-pic Bird and Lady Sings the Blues with Diana Ross as Billie Holiday.

The Guardian’ s Ammar Kalia commented in 2022 on the forthcoming Morgan film: “A masterful and much-needed act of remembrance, bringing Morgan’s genius back to life, as well as examining his downfall with a compassion that avoids reducing its tragedy into a true crime saga.”

Frankly, the film’s noirish promotional photo haunts like the greatest murders do: The trumpeter is all dapper and elusive arrogance. Beside him stands the woman who would murder him—mysterioso in shades, and a big stylish hat, and pursed lips of haughty ambivalence about the man gripping her perhaps a bit too tightly. Actually, Morgan betrays more, a sort of punkish insecurity, a curiosity about his fate, artistic or otherwise.

Impressions aside, this was a guy who transformed when the mouthpiece hit his lips. Then the brashness leapt out like a hidden panther going for the kill. Yet Morgan could also play as pretty as a morning sunrise. He emerged in the 1950s as the leading trumpeter of the still-influential hard bop style.

He’s best known for his huge crossover hit “The Sidewinder.” He was also crucial part of an early 1960s edition of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. His popular albums for Blue Note records also included Cornbread, The Rumproller, The Gigolo and Live at the Lighthouse. Among his more ambitious albums was Search for the New Land.

I once wrote a short story, “The L.A. to Atlanta How-Long Bues,” about an itinerant jazz sideman trumpeter named Stan. At one point, a desolate Stan says to his girlfriend, “Sometimes all I want to do is listen to Lee Morgan play trumpet.” When I wrote the story that was very much my sentiment. It’s still holds true.

Here’s the rest of the scheduled film series. Each film is followed by a brief live jazz performance:

February 19: Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

March 19: The Cotton Club (1984)

April 16: ‘Round Midnight (1986)

May 21: Born to Be Blue (2015)

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This article was first published in The Shepherd Express, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/film/reviews/jazzman-lee-morgan-documentary-screening-at-jazz-gallery/