Author Archives: Kevin Lynch

About Kevin Lynch

Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch) is a veteran, award-winning arts journalist, educator and visual artist. He is the author of "Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy." He won The Milwaukee Press Club’s 2017 gold award for “Best Critical Review of the Arts” for the Culture Currents blog “Adolph Rosenblatt: A Great Eye, Gifted Hands, and a Huge Heart," an art retrospective exhibit at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee. He also won the gold award for the 2013 Culture Currents review, "Edward Curtis Preserved America’s Vanishing Race for Posterity.” Lynch was a long-time staff arts writer for The Capital Times in Madison and The Milwaukee Journal, where he was lead writer of a Pulitzer-nominated Newspapers in Education project called “That’s Jazz,” which was used in Milwaukee Public Schools and The Milwaukee Jazz Experience. Among other publications, he’s written for Down Beat, No Depression Quarterly of Roots Music, and NoDepression.com, The Village Voice, The Chicago Tribune, New Art Examiner, Rain Taxi, American Record Guide, CODA (The Canadian jazz magazine), Wisconsin Natural Resources Magazine, Graven Images: A Journal of Culture, Law and the Sacred; The Shepherd Express, OnMilwaukee.com. Lynch has taught cultural journalism, English rhetoric and composition (while earning half of the credits for a PhD. in American Literature), and film studies. He’s been a music program host for WLUM-FM and WMSE-FM in Milwaukee. Lynch is working on a novel, "Melville’s Trace or, The Jackal." He’s also a visual artist and studied jazz piano and theory at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. He lives in Milwaukee.

“The Ashcan School” reveals America’s underbelly and many shades of character

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A prize possession of The Milwaukee Art Museum’s “Ashcan School” collection is the large painting “The Sawdust Trail,” from 1916 by George Bellows. Milwaukee Art Museum

Happy New Year Culture Currents readers!

Notice: I’m reposting this review because I chose a favorite John Sloan painting for my new Culture Currents blog theme, the night-time image (at top). This painting “Six-O’Clock, Winter,” (1912) is not in the Milwaukee show but there’s more than enough that’s well worth seeing.

Also, it’s easy to let an art show run slip by: THIS EXHIBIT RUNS THROUGH FERUARY 19. It’s a great tribute to the artwork in the MAM’s permanent collection. Speaking of visual art, The Ashcan School was “the first American art form.”

Art Review:

The Ashcan School and The Eight: Creating a National Art. The Milwaukee Art Museum, through February 19, 2023. Bradley Family Gallery

For information and tickets: https://mam.org/exhibitions/details/ashcan-and-the-eight.php

To see a world in a grain of sand” poet William Blake once put it. Later, American poet Walt Whitman would see “a grain of sand” as no less perfect than a leaf of grass.”

These great modernist poets saw things profoundly magnified in the humblest of earthly entities, light years from most of the art and music that for centuries courted royalty. So perhaps it was inevitable that the nation built on the anti-regal and messy moorings of democracy foster an art movement antithetical to royalty-schmoozing. Rather, one of the commonfolk, at least in its ideals. This American motherlode would bear the nation’s first “national art.”

Known as The Ashcan School, its name derived from a pejorative critical comment that the art was as good as “a can of ashes.” But in that comment’s snoot the artists saw soot, as in a poetical paradox. The ashes contained dirt, enough to allow seedlings to grow and tilt toward social justice, found in artistic truth.  That is, a great, if profoundly flawed nation’s life and essence might be extrapolated from something as slight as a cigarette butt’s droppings.

The Milwaukee Art Museum’s The Ashcan School and The Eight: Creating a National Art allows Americans to see themselves in the early 20th century, a time of great cultural upheaval, a nation shapeshifting in its peculiar genius — troubled, compulsively creative, proud, and quotidian. It was also struggling through the first World War with the Great Depression around the corner. Yet immigrants poured in, adding diversity, labor energy, and societal tension.  Perhaps more than anything, modernism’s post-industrial revolution had shackled and driven America.

How did the Ashcan School capture all this? First, they objected to exhibition practices that they considered restrictive and conservative. They often employed an expressionistic, painterly style to portray gritty and downtrodden subjects previously deemed inappropriate for high art and museums, the stuff of “ashcans.”

Accordingly, the museum’s curators and guest show catalog essayists draw parallels to cultural and social issues still relevant today.

The Art Museum owns one of the nation’s largest collections of works by the Ashcan School, and this is the first exhibit to include nearly the entire 150-object collection, says curator Brandon Ruud. Prints, drawings, paintings, and pastels represent artists of the so-called “The Eight,” who largely produced the Ashcan style and sensibility: Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, George Bellows, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, Arthur Bowen Davies, Maurice Prendergast. Several affiliated artists like Stuart Davis reveal the full range of the group’s subjects and artistic practices.

One’s eye might easily gravitate to a large painting in the show, Bellows’ “The Sawdust Trail,” by traditional measures of scale and complexity a “masterpiece,” even though the group’s aesthetics strove to burrow beneath grand art conventions that may obscure the truth as they saw it. The painting earns its renown, an epic canvas with a cinematic view of a religious revival meeting.

It tells a rich and sardonic story of post-Puritan American impulses that continue to this day in evangelic churches. The charismatic preacher, named for a real historical figure, Billy Sunday, would solicit salvation while typically delivering a thunder-and-lightning sermon to spook believers out of their savings. The air above his big tent virtually billows with a dense cloud of sun-lit smoke that might easily exalt the illusion of the divine.

Billy Sunday himself glad-hands one convert. Is he still a man of the people or is this just the old quotidian poseur, compulsively pressing flesh, greasing it to open the wallet? Meanwhile, several women faint (from the fumes of divine inspiration?) amid the dense, motley crowd. Exaltation, or delusion, or some other strange strain of behavior is distinctly American as it is universal, to see the “MAGA” power deluding today, and the global trend to political authoritarianism.

A man with that kind of power might be a Republican presidential candidate — if he can beat out Donald Trump who, heathen though he may be, knows most of the preacher’s hidden gifts for dark persuasion and personality-cult politics.

An even more insidious example of how compromised holiness undermines the truth is Mike Pence, who has said he will not testify to Congress about the January 6 insurrection, even though he was a primary execution target. He’s played it politically all the way, claiming a dubious “separation of powers” privilege — only because he survived.

So, these Ashcan diggers uncovered America haunted by cycles of power as old and foreshadowing as the first conquests of Native Americans and slavery.

Yet one might better experience this exhibit on a smaller scale, as a kind of forensic mystery, investigating the human figures that tell personal stories of lives possibly forsaken or transgressed.

John Sloan The Barbershop, etching and aquatint, 1915, MutualArt.com

Zoom down from, say, the atmospheric expanse of “The Sawdust Trail” to individual figures in intimately revealing scenes. No one surpassed painter-printmaker John Sloan at carving out these small-window revelations of what would become known as Americana, in a land still grappling with its identity.

The class-laden print The Barbershop animates to the point of satirical comedy. A crowded barbershop is recast as a tableau of sublimated class-warfare. The two men being serviced clearly reign. One seems to eye, with lust or disdain, a young lower-class woman manicuring him. Seated in waiting, a middle-class man reads the satirical Puck magazine, and beside him lies a subversive Marxist magazine called The Masses, for which Sloan served as art editor. The complex, beautiful composition (less than 10 by 12 inches) is riddled with America’s contradictions of social indulgence and defiance.

Among Sloan’s numerously displayed gritty parables of the underclass is Night Windows. A Peeping Tom husband spies on a bathing neighbor in a nearby window, while his wife hangs out his family’s laundry amid squalling children. In Sloan’s world, God may or may not have been invited for dinner. They are too busy trying to put bread on the table for the brood.

Robert Henri, Dutch Joe, (or Jopi van Slooten), oil (24 by 20 inches), 1910, Pinterest 

Robert Henri, who was the movement’s leader, had the portraiture skill to humanize the mother, the man, or boy, in the brood.

Witness his marvelous portrait of a street urchin named Dutch Joe, (or Jopi van Slooten), from 1910. In this bundle of mischief, you sense potential, yet risk. “The disparity between the innocence of the hero and the destructive character of his experience defines his concrete, or existential, situation.” That’s how American literary critic Ihab Hassan characterized what he called America’s “radical innocence.” 2 It entailed the possibility that, in his scruffy vigor, brash will and ingenuity, Joe might get ahead in the world, or be swallowed up in it.

This show is populated with a fascinating array of colorful actors, many of problematic agency.

John Sloan, Reading in a Subway, etching, 1926. Pinterest

Everett Shinn, The Nightclub Scene, oil, (36 by 34 inches) 1934

From Shinn’s iridescent Nightclub Scene to Sloan’s bundled-from-the-cold flapper in Reading in a Subway, or the vibrant gaggle of 9-to-5 women in Return from the Toil, these artists encounter a diverse populous and gives lie to the contemporary criticism (on an exhibit wall commentary) that these artists diminished women and minorities in the class-struggle tableaux. They were doubtless men of their time, subject to certain biases, but by this evidence they strove for greater understanding and truth of how we live together, and in isolation, in America, to envision a real yet better way, one quotidian day at a time.

In other words, they often told a small “d” democratic story, creating heroes among quietly courageous women and other folks hidden in the cracks of society.

And the men depicted are often satirical subjects of classism and sexism, as in preacher Billy Sunday and Sloan’s “Barbershop” scene.

George Bellows, Dempsey and Firpo, lithograph, 1923-24, (18 by 22 1/4 inches), Pinterest 

Perhaps the most famous image in the show is Dempsey and Firpo, the lithograph print that led to George Bellows’ explosive painting of a big-time heavyweight boxing match, a literal witnessing of the brutal sport that came of age in this era. “When Dempsey was knocked through the ropes he fell in my lap,” Bellows explained to Henri. “I cursed him a bit and placed him carefully back in the ring.” So, Bellows justifiably includes himself in the painting’s corner, a bit like director Alfred Hitchcock’s impish cameo appearances.

Bellows had studied art under Henri. John Fagg’s superb catalog essay describes how “Henri encouraged his students both to scour city streets for inspiration and to read widely and embrace culture in all its forms.” This sounds like the best kind of voraciousness that would exemplify the American striving these artists documented and interpreted, warts and all.

“Henri talked not only about the students’ paintings but also about music, literature, and life in general, and in a very stimulating manner, and his lectures constituted a liberal education,” recalled Stuart Davis. 3

This exhibit constitutes such an education, as rare as it is valuable, at a time when it feels sorely needed. If you want to learn about confounding America, of both yesterday and today, in the Faulknerian sense that the past is never dead, this Ashcan art provides you, in immersive depth, yet free of academic pretenses, though the catalogue essays are welcome. It is an experience of vast pleasures amid what Duke Ellington called murmuring “Harlem airshafts,” and Hitchcock’s rear windows, and pregnant, grimy shadows of night. 4

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This review was originally published in a slightly shorter form in The Shepherd Express: here: https://shepherdexpress.com/culture/visual-art/america-unvarnished-in-mams-ash-can-school-exhibit/

1 The exhibit also includes a lithograph version of The Sawdust Trail, which shows more of the fine details in the dense composition.

2 Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel, Princeton, 1961, 7

3 John Fagg, “The Unseen City: The Ashcan School’s New York,” The Ashcan School and The Eight: Creating a National Art, show catalog, The Milwaukee Art Museum 2022, 78

4 A reflection of this collection’s ongoing contemporary relevance and vitality is that it is still growing even after decades. A primary curator of the show, Brandon Rudd explained to me: “One of the truly amazing things about the Ashcan School collection is that it is both such an integral part of the Museum’s rich history and is also active and growing: This exhibition features new acquisitions and never-before-seen donations, as well as loans from private collections in the Milwaukee community and works rarely displayed or seen by the public because of their fragility.”

 

Dennis Mitcheltree: A long-lost Milwaukee jazz saxophonist returns home with a “Golden” new album

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ALBUM REVIEW: Dennis Mitcheltree – Golden Rule (Dengor)

Add Los Angleian Dennis Mitcheltree to an impressive list of intelligently creative Wisconsin jazz musicians with strong roots, or still residing here. His prime collaborator of 25 years, Madison-based piano virtuoso Johannes Wallmann, dazzles throughout with power, deftness, and artful ingenuity. Mitcheltree’s sixth album Golden Rule, is titled not for Jesus Christ’s famous dictum, but philosopher Immanuel Kant’s version, extolling equitable human relations, which he called “the categorical imperative.”

 That’s not to suggest the saxophonist-composer’s music is didactic or stern, only to underscore depth of thought behind it. As his quartet recently demonstrated at Riverwest’s Bar Centro, his music delights and amuses while keeping the mind fueled and geared up.

Saxophonist Dennis Mitcheltree recently led a quartet in a live date at Bar Centro, not unlike this live date from Europe. Photo Courtesy Jazz in Europe

On “Genghis Kant” Mitcheltree’s hard swing heartily honors the great philosopher’s fearless blend of empiricism and transcendentalism. The musician’s penchant for heady wordplay translates into a musical wit by turns pithy and intricate. Try on “Pacifisticuffs,” for example. “Bling Tone,” is a ring-a-ding echo of an early Miles Davis trademark, “If I Were a Bell,” (slyly implied in the title). “Gingerfoot” is a sharp, snappy theme with slightly Monkish angularity.

Mitcheltree’s tenor sax tone is warm, rounded and Sonny Rollins-like, but adorning a slightly trickier mind.

We need music like this, as diverting philosophical salve in dire times.

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This review was originally published in The Shepherd Express, here: 

Golden Rule by Dennis Mitcheltree – Shepherd Express

Eric Jacobson grows as an artist in his new album “Discover.”

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Album review: Eric Jacobson: Discover (Origin Records)

Eric Jacobson will hold an album release party at the Jazz Estate, p.m. Saturday, Nov. 19.   

Eric Jacobson blazes. In person, the naturally powerful Milwaukee trumpeter has long conveyed the impression: “I’m gonna cut anybody here, and all comers.” That’s fueled some willfully dynamic solos. With trumpet poised, his muscular angularity recalls an Italian Futurist sculpture. So, Discover comes as a surprise, perhaps as a self-discovery, trading competitiveness for musical and artistic maturity.

The tune “Discover” arose from the experience of his father’s death, prompting a “search for meaning and personal identity,” writes annotator Rick Krause. The album opener “New Combinations,” has a Jazz Messengers ensemble feel, amiable yet muscular. “Discover” follows immediately: with a pensive, nostalgic tone and a forward-looking sense of form, Jacobson’s solo toggles between tender memory and rising resolution, akin to Freddie Hubbard’s gift for colorful storytelling. But not derivatively; he’s expanding post-bop’s wheelhouse of modernity.

Tenor saxophonist Geof Bradfield complements coolly, spinning webs of finely suspended arabesques, recalling Warne Marsh, but with a warmer tone. Pianist Bruce Barth emerges inventive and versatile, capable of delicate touches, a la Hank Jones. The album’s hot/cool dynamic still accents the lyrical, with Blue Mitchell’s bluesy “Sir John” as the ballsy ballast. The Dizzy Gillespie tune is not bop pyrotechnics but one of Dizzy’s soberest ballads, “Con Alma.” Jacobson pointedly closes with one of the repertoire’s most poignant and socially-aware odes, about a man nicknamed “Old Folks,” crying out for Deedette Hill’s lyrics.

One thing we don’t know about “Old Folks”

Did he fight for the blue or the gray?

But he’s so democratic and so diplomatic

We always let him have his way

In the evenings after supper

What stories he tells

How he held his speech at Gettysburg for Lincoln that day

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This review was originally published in The Shepherd Express, here:

Discover (Origin) by Eric Jacobson – Shepherd Express

In “Till,” Danielle Deadwyler embodies a martyr’s mother as a pioneering Civil Right hero

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In a crucial scene from “Till,” Emmett Till’s mother gives him a ring worn by his dead father, which will help identify his body. readthespirit.com

MOVIE REVIEW:

Till (PG) is at The Oriental Theatre, Marcus Southgate Cinema, and AMC Mayfair Mall 18, in Milwaukee, through Wednesday. Nov. 9.

 

Emmett Till rises, as does his astonishingly resilient mother. All of 14 years old, he became, in death, the first icon of Civil Rights martyrdom. Mamie Till-Mobley transformed into the first luminous hero of the movement. In Chinonye Chukwu’s new film drama Till, we now finally see, hear, and feel what Mamie endured, how she persevered, and redeemed her son’s horrendous lynching in the summer of 1955. Because Emmett dies so early in the story, it’s up to Mamie to carry through this trail of tears, also a matter of history. Danielle Deadwyler’s Sisyphean performance feels indelibly resonant — as we see her push her spiritual rock up the mountain the Rev. King would invoke, she exposes and agitates the movement’s original embers, because her son’s is a death that will never die.

I wondered why it took this long for a major dramatization of this story. Perhaps the subject matter was too charged, too raw an indictment of American racism for even a Black American director to feel comfortable, as courageous as someone like Spike Lee has been over the years.

Chuckwu is Nigerian-American, so she has an innate sense of slavery’s historical lineage reaching back to The Middle Passage and simultaneously stands a half-step removed from the inherent American guilt over the nation’s Original Sins (along with the homeland-steal and genocide of Native Americans). Given the depicted event’s dagger-like historical inflection point, the behavior of virtually all the whites in the film can make a Caucasian’s skin crawl. And a black American director may risk vulnerability to, in our current polarization, unfair charges of overplaying the victim card. Such is the potency Till successfully traffics in.

Plus, released now, the film evinces superb timing in that the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was finally passed in March 2022, making lynching a federal hate crime, punishable by up to 30 years in prison. This is popular culture’s dramatic articulation of that legislation’s gravitas, a historical bookend to the Till family legacy first formalized with the enactment of the precipitous Civil Rights Act in 1957. That’s not to suggest a closed case, rather the foundation of resolve, as the Civil Rights struggle continues with newfound urgency today.

As I watched, I grew also in wonderment over where Deadwyler came from. You’d hope for a performance of this range, nuance, intensity, and stamina from very few contemporary African American actresses. Viola Davis perhaps, but she’s not young enough to play a 34-year-woman. So, this must be the Casting Coup of the Year, at the least. More, the burning fear and desperate fire in Deadwyler’s eyes, the wails from her primal depths, and finally her steely determination make this the finest acting performance I’ve seen this year, or perhaps in several, regardless of gender. Alert Oscars.

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Danielle Deadwyler’s elegantly power-packed performance as Mamie Till-Mobley carries the magnetic force of love and resolve in “Till.” CBSnews.com

Deadwyler’s biggest credits to date include the 2021 western The Harder They Fall and the Oprah Winfrey TV soap-opera, The Haves and Have Nots. Talk about a starburst.

The film also marks the full emergence of screenwriter-director Chukwu, whose previous biggest credit was Clemency, the 2019 death-row drama starring Alfre Woodard as a prison warden dealing with an inmate’s imminent execution. That film was also based on a historical case, of Troy Davis, a prisoner executed in 2011. Chukwu received the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, the first Black woman to do so.

Till focuses on Mamie even as we see her high-spirited son’s social vibrancy amid burgeoning teen hormones, even spontaneously dancing with his mother, a joyous moment oddly fraught with foreshadowing. When he accepts an invitation to visit his cousins in Mississippi, his future is vaguely prophesized by Mamie’s mother (played by a frowzy Whoopie Goldberg) who fled North from that state long ago. The first emotional tripping point comes when Emmett (played with apple-cheeked good-naturedness by Jaylyn Hall) says goodbye at the waiting Southbound train, against his mother’s wishes. She intuits she may not see her only child alive again. 

As the title character, 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jaylyn Hall) pauses moments before he makes a fatal mistake in a Mississippi grocery store. movieinsider.com

Soon, in a small Mississippi hamlet, Emmett is struck by the looks of a brunette white cashier, and gushes, “You look like a movie star!” He pulls out his wallet to show the photo of his fantasy lady, Hedy Lammar.

Then, as Carolyn Bryant indignantly follows him out the door (why?), he turns and foolishly wolf-whistles at her. His stunned cousins shudder, sensing their naïve Northern kin’s fate is threatened. The director exercises fine but properly noirish restraint in depicting Emmett’s abduction, torture and murder, by the woman’s husband and a friend.

The ruins of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in 2009. Wikipedia.com

Dire dread and drama catapult the story – when Mamie hears the news her deeply-pooled brown eyes absorb the shock until she faints, her only moment of weakness. Another stunning moment of emotional nakedness arrives at the murder trial when Mamie must explain that the bloated, mutilated body was in fact her son. In a few agonizing moments, you see and feel her take a rollercoaster dive to hell and back, while maintaining a semblance of dignity. She then steels herself for her remarkably tender and convincing answer.

In that moment, she’s managing a stage of grief with uncanny courage and fortitude. By now the actress is forging the embodiment of this mother’s legacy, evolving into a Civil Rights pioneer, an arc of transformation that inspires awe. Her decision to show her son in an open casket galvanizes America’s horror of racial crimes.

See the source image

Mamie Till-Mobley (Daneille Deadwyler) tells an NAACP-sponsored gathering that “we can never forget” her son’s murder. NBC News

The real Mamie Till addresses an audience in her newfound role as activist. Vox.com

The film’s informational coda underscores the point of the new federal hate crime legislation. Till’s murderers were found not guilty, by an all-white Mississippi jury. Later, in a paid magazine interview, the men admitted to the crimes, but could no longer be tried for it. Carolyn Bryant would admit she had lied under oath by saying Till propositioned and physically accosted her.

Mamie died in 2003. Yet, in the film’s closing scene, this mother’s love abides. We sense the arduousness of her journey feeds the light shining from within, towards the mountaintop.

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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.”

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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.

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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 Fall Art Tour: Immersed in Wisconsin art in-the-making, and the gorgeous splendor of the Driftless region

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Traveling companion Ann Peterson takes in the gloriously expansive vista from the property of Dodgeville artist Lauren Thuli. All Photos by Kevin Lynch, except as noted.

MINERAL POINT — Our car wended over and under the undulating curves of the Driftless region of Southwestern Wisconsin as we began the adventure of searching out artists studios nestled in picturesque nooks of the landscape. The term “driftless” murmurs ancient mystery and geological fact: a region virtually untouched by flattening glaciers during The Ice Age. The region also lacks the characteristic glacial deposits known as drift.

Ann Peterson and I had embarked on this season’s Fall Art Tour, the first time I had partaken in this since moving from Madison back to Wisconsin’s East Coast over a decade ago. 1

SATURDAY, AROUND DODGEVILLE AND IN MINERAL POINT

What a rewarding choice. Our very first stop reaffirmed the hoary adage that the greatest artist of all is Mother Nature. Not yet having my camera cued up, I can’t do justice to the two artists sharing the studio space of this first stop, Lauren Thuli and her brother James Koconis, two friendly artists adept at degrees of abstraction in oil painting. Lauren was especially accommodating, demonstrating to us how she blends beeswax and oil paint to get the particular tonal and textural effects that distinguish her abstract impressionist style.

But the key to this visit’s experiential climax was a sign outside their rural Dodgeville studio, shaped in an arrow, adorned with the words “spectacular view.” Down a slight slope several Adirondack chairs stand near the edge of an outcrop. When we walk to that edge, half of this part of the world seems to unfold expansively before our eyes, a stereo-visual effect, like the Biblical Red Sea parting before us. The land flows across our eyes in breathtakingly sumptuous waves, bursting with greenery turning golden. It allows us to feast on the magnitude of autumn glory in a full 180° spectrum. These first three photos (above and below) attempt to capture that in (left to right) sequence.


This seemingly ageless tree on the property near the previous vista location, typifies the abundance of amazingly mature, sometimes gigantic, old trees in the Driftless region. Note the width of this trunk by seeing the people standing beside it.

We were struck by the maturity of the trees in the region, and the buildings, for that matter. The Art Tour is a bit like taking a Time Machine travel back to the 19th century, when so many of Mineral Point buildings were erected. The town was was settled in 1822 by Cornish miners, a couple decades before Wisconsin achieved statehood. It’s among the oldest towns in the state.

Yet the time machine analogy only goes so far, as most of the artists are clearly 20th- and 21st century-style and beyond. 2 The most vivid example of the latter, among those we visited, is John Walte, in Dodgeville.

Entering his studio I spied a realistic image across the room and said, “Is that Edgar Allan Poe?”

“Yes, that’s Poe but that’s NOT my artwork!” a disembodied voice called out. The image was a reproduction poster which The Voice seemingly likes for the tragic drama of Poe’s life and the spectral magic of his writing. The Voice wasn’t the Wizard of Oz, it was somebody a bit wizardly but much smarter than that lovable but bumbling movie character. He was digital artist John Walte, hidden in an alcove created largely by computer towers and terminals.

When I found him and expressed interest in his digital art, Walte’s eyes lit up like a wired video-game demon, and he launched into a mind-bending discussion of how such artwork plays out as an inquiry into perception, cognition, illusion and physics. That hardly does justice to Walte’s heady soliloquy (with a few nudges from me) but I wasn’t taking any notes on this trip, nor recording anything aside from photos, for this photo essay.

His partner, painter Pamela Callahan, has un upstairs studio that I enjoyed in slightly different terms. Some of her work reminded me of a more lyrical, colorful, gestural abstraction of Philip Guston’s primitivist late style. But this is a photo essay so I’m minimizing my commentary…

John F. Walte is a brilliant, scientifically-gifted artist who specializes in cutting-edge digital art. And at a drop of a hat, he’ll tell you all about the abstruse theories and realities underlying his creative exploration.

Apologies for this crooked photo of a John Walte digital artwork. But that angle sort of accentuates the mind-bending, trippiness of his digital dreamscapes and futuristic auras. This piece is titled “Pseudo Kleinian Mod 2  v 4.0.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it. 

Pamela Callahan in her studio with her 360-degree painting column.

Three motifs of a new Pamela Callahan painting in genesis.

Classic fall harvest scene outside the Walde/Callahan art studios, in Dodgeville, located along Otter Creek, at ottercreekarts.com.

A hint of Stonehenge in the ruins of an ancient stone granary built in 1876 on the property of ceramicist Carol Naughton in Dodgeville.

Ceramic artist Carol Naughton in her studio display area. I purchased the fourth plate from the right, on the table beside Carol (see also below).

The sun sets on our first day of the Fall Arts Tour, outside the Carol Naughton studio, near Dodgeville.

The barn ruins at the Naughton Studio set the clock backwards again and having returned to Mineral Point for the evening, time seemed to reverse itself again. Among many buildings in Mineral Point that have survived generations since the 19th century is the repurposed Mineral Point Hotel, where we stayed. The hotel owners have transformed it into a wonderfully eclectic blend of Victorian, art-deco and French decor. Ann called it her favorite hotel, ever. (See photos below) Then walking back to the hotel, from our Italian dinner at Popolo, a nearby restaurant, she declared this “the most romantic trip we’ve ever taken.” OK, we’ve never been to Europe. But no doubt, there’s something magical about the Fall Art Tour in Southwest Wisconsin.

The Mineral Point Hotel where we stayed, is utterly charming, even transporting.

A view of dusk through a window in our room at The Mineral Point Hotel.

A feature of our Mineral Point Hotel room was this small attached balcony, elegantly overlooking the street and the staircase inside. I spent some sleepless time reading in the balcony Saturday night. Among the balcony’s details were four oversize black ceramic chess pieces on the deep window ledge.

SUNDAY MORNING IN MINERAL POINT 

 

Artist Diana Johnston throws the umpteenth clay bowl of her long career, at Brewery Pottery, a limestone former brewery building in Mineral Point, now an artists studio and retail art and gift shop.
Comical pewter pet refrigerator magnets in the Brewery Pottery gift shop.
Brewery Pottery’s large kiln (at left) for firing ceramics.

Built in 1850, the original Mineral Point brewery building was hit by a tornado in 1878. That may account for this exposed brickwork in the back of Brewery Pottery’s current kiln and firing room, in background (reverse view of previous photo).  

Tucked away in a quiet Mineral Point neighborhood is humble, affable but gifted artist Clyde Paton. Here he displays his India ink rendering of the studio of the noted Mineral Point ceramic sculptor Bruce Howdle, who died a few years ago.
Clyde Paton prompted a brief search on Howdle’s online legacy. His work often grew to epic scale relief murals.
I recall him from my last Fall Art Tour trip here, too long ago, so I end with another quick “Time Machine” reverse gear to honor that artist.
Though his Bruce Howdle Studios Facebook page still lists 1K followers, I’m uncertain if Howdle’s studios are still open in any capacity.
The late Bruce Howdle working on one of his ceramic murals. His Mineral Point studios also offered pottery throwing classes (with part of a Howdle mural visible in upper part of that photo.(above). Photos courtesy Bruce Howdle Studios.
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1 The annual October art tour encompasses four nearby towns — Mineral Point, Dodgeville, Baraboo, and Spring Green, allowing a tour of the stunning autumn landscape as you search for artists studios throughout the region. The tour brochure has a detailed map. We relied mostly on virtual navigator “Siri.”
For more information on the 2022 Fall Art Tour visit their site, and plan ahead for next fall: https://fallarttour.com/
It’s a romantic, adventurous gift with a special someone, or for anyone wanting to enjoy Wisconsin’s natural and artistic bounty.
2 We sampled a only small portion of the tour’s studios. Among the four towns, there were 49 studios open for visitors.

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.

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Milwaukee trumpeter Eric Jacobson’s quintet celebrates the album release of “Discover” this weekend, at Blu

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May be an image of 6 people, people playing musical instruments and text that says 'CLĄY SCHAUB Blu REGGIE THOMAS DAVE BAYLES 7PM OCT. 21 & 22 Eric Jacobson Quintet GEOF BRADFIELD CD release party "DISCOVER" BRUCE BARTH RIC JACOBSO ERIC JACOBSON ORIGIN RECORDS'

CD release party: for Discover by The Eric Jacobson Quintet, 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14 and Saturday, Oct 15, Blu nightclub, Pfister Hotel, 424 E. Wisconsin Ave. Milwaukee. Admission is free. 

Eric Jacobson is as accomplished and striking as any trumpeter in the upper Midwest. He has the brash, forceful power of a hard-bopper like Lee Morgan and the harmonic sophistication of a Freddie Hubbard or Woody Shaw.

That’s the leading edge of why attention must be paid by modern jazz fans of most any persuasion to his new Origin records CD release Discover, and his two-night CD-release performance at Blu nightclub, in Milwaukee, on Friday and Saturday.

Blu regularly has top-notch local and touring jazz artists, but the venue is also notable for the most spectacular view of any music venue in the city, situated at the top floor of the 23-story Pfister Hotel tower, overlooking downtown Milwaukee, the Hoan Bridge, and the lakefront, with the Calatrava Windhover Hall of the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the War Memorial Center, all visible from Blu’s sky view windows. In the evening, the view becomes noirishly glamorous.

Eric Jacobson has performed with Grammy© Award Winners Phil Woods, Benny Golson, Brian Lynch, Tito Puente Jr., and Eric Benet. He is a top-call trumpeter for high-profile gigs in Milwaukee, Madison, and Chicago. Jaconson performs in the windy city at the Green Mill, Jazz Showcase, Winter’s Jazz Club, and Andy’s Jazz Club with some of the top Chicago groups including The Chicago Jazz Orchestra, Chicago Yestet, Bakerzmillion, and Mark Colby’s Quintet.

He’s also Jazz Education Director of the Milwaukee Jazz Institute, after having spent many years on the faculty of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. (continued below)

Eric Jacobson

The CD release party will feature Chicago saxophonist Geof Bradfield, bassist Clay Schaub, and drummer Dave Bayles, Milwaukee’s premier straight-ahead jazz drummer.

Bradfield, who played on Discover, has recorded on more than 50 albums, including eight as a leader. The DownBeat Critics Poll has named Bradfield a Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist and Arranger multiple years.

Quite notably the gig will also include two pianists, Bruce Barth, who also played on Discover, on Friday; and Reggie Thomas, on Saturday, both acclaimed players from from the East Coast. The bandstand should be burning and swinging, among other luminous qualities. And admission is free.

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Peter Mulvey and SistaStrings imagine a promised land right on our own soil

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Singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey (center) is touring with SistaStrings (Monique Ross, cello, and Chauntee Ross, violin) and drummer Nathan Kilen. Courtesy The Bluegrass Situation

Peter Mulvey & SistaStrings will present album release performances at 7 p.m. Saturday, October 8 at The Bur Oak in Madison, and at 8 p.m. Sunday, October 9 at Colectivo Coffee Backroom, 2211 N. Prospect Avenue in Milwaukee. 

For tickets and the full tour schedule, visit: https://www.petermulvey.com/

ALBUM REVIEW: Peter Mulvey & SistaStrings Love is the Only Thing (Righteous Babe Records)

If only we had more people of power and influence with the spiritual wiles and wisdom of singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey. We’d be doing much better than barely muddling through as a society, even risking our democracy. Mulvey’s new album, with the marvelous Milwaukee string-playing duo SistaStrings, delivers a variety of truths and revelations and invokes extraordinarily capacious compassion.

Album cover courtesy americanahighway.com

First comes exquisite overtones on his acoustic guitar, introducing the traditional “Shenandoah,” yearningly lovely, feeling like a ritual blessing.  “Soft Animal” ensues, with an idea from poet Mary Oliver, which evokes the “soft animal” within each of us, slightly Emersonian in its sense of inner sacredness, even as a breathing creature. Mulvey brings that animal vividly to life, with the Ross sisters’ violin and cello boosting it with warmly vibrant utterances, here and consistently throughout.

“Oh My Dear (The Demagogue)” pulls back the curtain of illusion but doesn’t simply point fingers: “What kind of storm blew through?/ The demagogue, the general, the priest/ who needed you most but loved you the least.” Then it shifts from rhetorical second to first person: “I couldn’t hear you while I was out in the wind/ I traded your life for my original sin.”

“Old Men Drinking Seagram’s” candidly scrutinizes the facile discriminations, bred of cultural isolation (or misinformation?), of the haves towards the have-nots. Why is it, the more people have, the more they resist, with a hollow righteousness, sharing it?

Then, funky and caffeinated, “You and (Everybody Else)” eloquently bemoans another current reality, people addicted to “staring at a screen”: “They gave you everything that you could want/ now you’re sitting there hungry like a ghost…full of nothing that you want/ you and everybody else.”

“Pray for Rain,” epigraphed with a James Baldwin quote, is the most pointedly political song: “Now the better angels have fled this field/ and the people sway to a devil’s song/ every bittersweet seed has come to fruit/ common mercy deserts the throng…” But notice how often Mulvey traffics in mythically terms rather than gratuitously naming names. This allows us to consider the historical roles of all humanity in our great failings.

Mulvey switches gears to the profoundly personal on “See You on the Other Side,” which grapples, finally affirmatively, with the murky metaphysics of death. Yet that ties in with poignant power to the album’s most moving piece, “Song for Michael Brown,” the young black man infamously shot and left dead in a trail of blood on a Missouri street, which inspired the Black Lives Matter movement. Here, Mulvey and his extraordinarily simpatico accompanists plea for compassion for everyone involved, of all colors and persuasions, “and most especially for the next child we know will fall.” And then, as if imploring a wailing wall: “I know God loves us. I know God loves us. I know God loves us. I don’t know how,” sung with raw passion.

Its gravitas buoyed by hope, this amounts to one of the most humanely open-hearted songs I’ve heard in recent years. As elsewhere, the song conveys the intimacy of deep feeling in its textures of fine engineering, recorded live at Cafe Carpe, the almost-famous little Midwestern engine of singer-songwriting that always could.

Peter Mulvey. Courtesy The Bur Oak

The album ends with the title song (written by Chuck Prophet) with the refrain, “Love is a hurting thing. Ah, but love is the only thing!” Throughout the album’s fetchingly hilly melodies, the tender textures of Mulvey’s scarred soul seem palpable in his voice. Sage-like, he poetically renders ideas revealing that compassion has many colors and many coats, and surely there’s at least one to fit any listener, to make their heart grow stronger, and warmer. Mulvey, long an iconoclastic activist, embodies such broad possibilities.

Canny and knowing of darkness and hatred, he remains persuasive, with extraordinary grace and street-smart artistry, which leaves no one left behind because, in the world he still envisions, love has long coattails. This is song-making of a high, healing order, just for these times.

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Growing Hope for America: An anniversary revisit to the 25th Farm Aid in Milwaukee

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It’s one day removed from the date but I am honoring the anniversary of a great concert in Milwaukee history by posting my review of Farm Aim 25,  at Miller Park on October 2, 2010.

October 2, 2010 

Farm Aid 25 Does Heavy Hauling for America’s Family Farmers

MILWAUKEE — It took a quarter of a century for the players in this farm system to make it to the majors.

But Farm Aid 25 proved it ain’t no game though, heck, it was at least as fun as any Brewers outing, to judge from the 35,000 who rocked Miller Park Saturday, along with the many dedicated musicians who filled the ten-hour event.

Farm Aid 25 at Miller Park. Courtesy Onmilwaukee.com

The first Farm Aid drew 78,000 in Champaign, Illinois in 1985. Today it’s the longest-running concert benefit in the U.S, having raised $37 million over those years. And co-founders Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp – who all performed Saturday with style and passion – have been stars for decades. So the event’s 25th anniversary in its first major league stadium only served to remind people of a team effort as heroic as a two-outs, walk-off grand slam in the bottom of the ninth.

The hero’s stance is somewhat different now. Farm Aid now does heavy work on the promotional tractor hauling the local sustainable food movement to public awareness. They’re helping push for organized family farming and healthy food choices as refurbished tools for economic revitalization of America through “family farm food systems” based on alliances, economic stewardship and well being of community and public health (see farmaid.org for more information on this)

They still proselytize for the ongoing plight of America’s family farmers in the face of corporate farming’s razing of the small farm business model. In the pre-concert press conference, Neil Young, Farm Aids’ resident corporate gadfly, asserted that big-business farms “create and spread disease and are inhumane to animals” and ravage the ecosystem.

Yet, as perennial good guy Nelson says, “We started out trying to save the family farmer and now it looks like the family farmer is going to save us.”

Farm Aid to mark 25th anniversary at Miller Park

Farm Aid co-founder Willie Nelson at Farm Aid 25 in Milwaukee OnMilwaukee.com

With a majority of this huge throng appearing to be under 30, the message seemed to connect with the generation that must take up the mantle of leadership.

Many of them sang along from memory to lyrics of musicians old enough to be pa or grandpa. While Mellencamp did his harrowing farm tragedy saga, “Rain on the Scarecrow,” even a young stadium security guard sang along, with his back to the stage and eyes diligently scanning the crowd.

Yes, there’d been plenty of tailgating beforehand, which kept attendance at a slow trickle-in though the early afternoon acts like Randy Rogers, Robert Francis, Jamey Johnson and the Blackwood Quartet. Among those, the act too many missed was Johnson, whose Moses beard and hair hang as long as his foghorn voice resounds deep, seeping into the darkest caverns of the heart, with deftly self-deprecating storytelling. His Depression-survivor song “In Color” deserves to be a widely-covered classic, though I doubt anyone could deliver such craggy authenticity as does Johnson.

Though now middle-aged thick and lovable-attire slob, Mellencamp can still ignite and work a crowd – into what Quakers call (not so) gentle persuasion: At one point he asked all of the cell-phone toting fans to immediately call a friend to “thank them for supporting Farm Aid.”

He even grabbed one fan’s phone and thanked a doubtlessly startled “Steve,” on the call’s receiving end.

Farm Aid co-founder John Mellencamp at Farm Aid 25. Courtesy milwaukeejournal-sentinel.com

By then, the crowd seemed primed to attack the back forty, after a bracing but short set from Milwaukee’s own seminal roots rockers The Bo Deans, and a beguiling one from Philadelphia folk-soul troubadour Amos Lee, and another by the appealingly high-energy alt-roots rock Band of Horses, who are galloping up record charts these days.

Milwaukee’s own, The Bodeans, at Farm Aid 25. milwaukeejournal-sentinel.com

Yet the crowd perked up for the almost effortless charm of two young pop music phenoms, Norah Jones and Jason Mraz. The line-up’s only female act, Texas-raised singer-songwriter-pianist-guitarist Jones recently relocated to New York. She captivated with her sophisticated new look – punky page boy and fishnet stockings — and fluent eclectic flair, shifting from her sultry sweetheart mega hit “Come Away With Me” to Johnny Cash’s honk-tony beer lament “Cry, Cry, Cry” to her own increasingly dark and thoughtful originals.

Norah Jones at Farm Aid 25. milwaukeejournal-sentinel

By contrast, Mraz seems like his own brand of endless sunshine with a voice as boyish as Paul Simon’s but stadium-impact strong and with songs carrying a high melodic calorie count. He woos the listener like the boy Romeo next door, or the strapping young farmer down the road. He actually runs an avocado farm in California when not doing music or surfing. Too cool.

Between the Jones and Mraz sets, Jeff Tweedy — leader of the immensely popular and arty roots-rock band Wilco – delivered a curiously tepid solo set that suggested his true gifts are as a musical conceptualist/bandleader/songwriter.

You get the stylistic gist here — Farm Aid welcomes virtually all American music genres under its big farmer’s market tent. And to wit, many fans also partook of the outdoor Homegrown Market and chatted with farmers about their issues and tasty wares even through cold wind and some rain. That interaction is part of the important underlying purposes of this musical harvest.

Back inside, time-conscious bandleaders too infrequently introduced their faithful band members. But the show rarely dragged with Willie Nelson stepping in to add his “Texas herb” aroma to the sets of Jones and Lee, and with contemporary country star Kenny Chesney showing gleaming vocal pipes and sporting a New Orleans Saints cap instead of the expected ten-gallon hat.

And few complained about nepotism when Willie’s son Lukas Nelson scored a set, because he’s inherited the old man’s showmanship. No knockoff though, the younger Nelson’s style strives to virtually channel the ghost of short-lived blues rock guitar legend Stevie Ray Vaughan. His guitar-string biting impressed some, but made you wonder if Willie feeds the kid enough.

Dave Matthews, the Gen-X rock star who joined the Farm Aid board of directors in 2001 and is the fourth perennial headliner, started his duo set with guitar ace Tim Reynolds by unleashing Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which felt like a man reliving the song’s wild tale as a primal-scream dream. His intensity cranked the crowd up to a level that Mellencamp rode masterfully.

Yet, for this baby boomer, and surely many others, this all climaxed with Young’s set. He remains an uncanny blend of wizardly yet unpretentious song-storyteller/melody-spinner prone to deft feedback theatrics and spontaneous speeches. Few seem to care about farmers as much as he does. But an eloquent riff on being an aware consumer for small farm support –“read the label” is his mantra – immediately lost any hint of browbeating when Young launched into “Long May Young Run.” This is a gloriously warm-hearted salutation to a friend he last saw alive “in Blind River in 1962.” The winsome melody and sentiment seem to suggest – with a new line crucially added to the original lyrics – that the never-forgotten friend was a farmer.

Farm Aid co-founder Neil Young at Farm Aid 25. milwaukeejournal-sentinel 

Young’s always had a quirky a genius for balancing his fiery social consciousness with mournful, humane soul. Accompanied only by his own scruffy-scarecrow presence and solitary electric guitar, Young’s “Ohio” still seared into memories of the Vietnam war-era killing of four Kent State University student protesters by National Guard members.

Of course, Farm Aid always provides the salve of Willie Nelson to top off even reopened psychic wounds, and to send everyone home buzzed on musical vibe. That’s from toking up on ol’ Willie, twirling his smoky, behind-the-beat phrasing around another blessedly-crafted song. His concert-closing set ranged from tough blues-rock led by son Lukas, to reggae rhythms, to “one for Waylon.” On cue, all the headliners joined onstage to sing “Good-Hearted Woman,” a comfortable-as-worn-blue-jeans song by Nelson’s fellow progressive-country “outlaw,” the late, great Waylon Jennings.

Concert epics like this don’t get much more golden.

It was well after 11 p.m. and co-sponsor Direct TV had been telecasting the concert since Mraz’s set at 5, so one hoped the ideals and passion of this extraordinarily well-conceived and executed effort may spread like the winds of change, rather than like locusts or chemical farming-borne disease.

Time will tell. Meanwhile, long may Farm Aid run.

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This review was originally published in YourNews.com, Madison edition

For videos about the Milwaukee event, go to www.farmaid.org.)