Detail of “Geisha Bath,” a collage by Jeff Raphael from “Cut & Paste” at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Courtesy bmoca.com

A Westerly Cultural Travel Journal, Vol. 1

“Experimenting with your own life is the most fundamental medium we have” — environmentalist artist Natalie Jeremijenko, The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, June 30, 2013

“Kevin, why don’t you pick up some of your snips and heaps.” — Kathleen Naab Lynch

Cut & Paste: Contemporary Collage Art by eight artists.  Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th St., Boulder, Colorado. Show runs through September 15, 2013. link

Boulder, CO. — An image in print catches your eye and imagination. Out come the scissors. Cut and save — or paste. The idea has ancient wellsprings as a cultural act. Making a collage can be the stuff of child’s play or a sophisticated artistic strategy. If only I still had my big old collage constructed around Archibald MacLeish’ s Cold War-era poem “The End of the World,” which is itself a small verbal collage *

The early 20^th century, the Cubists, Surrealists and especially the Dadaists brought collage into modern art. Such movements captured the chaos, absurdity and dislocation of modern existence — of industrialization, immigration, genocide and war. Collage could manipulate and recast heavy subjects with ingenuity, illumination and surprising wit.

Even Picasso’s vast 1937 masterwork of war protest, Guernica, though an oil painting, is influenced by the peculiar tension of imaginative fragment-building that the collage contains.

How different are things today regarding the collage? Cut & Paste, a delightful and fascinating show, begins to answer that question. These collage artists may not have some of the radical agendas and pretenses of, say, the Dadaists. Contemporary art today is a sprawling postmodern collage of directions and trends, of genius and triteness and many eccentric bursts of unpredictable assertions — and associations. That’s partly why collage seems very apt and up-to-date, even timeless.  The medium’s seemingly endless mutability suggests why these artists can entertain, sometimes enlighten and even challenge the viewer.

Most computer users know “cut and paste” as the virtual-reality power to relocate texts and images as we see fit, for creative, editing or even expedient purposes. Increasingly artists exploit the potential of digitally manipulated imagery, which promises to keep the collage mentality alive in the appreciable future, for tech-savvy millennial artists and beyond.

However, one of the most accessible and technically accomplished works in the show is as old-school as a yellowing pulp Superman comic book. Adam Parker Smith’s large six- panel collage “Super Flight”   contains scads of images of Superman lovingly and precisely hand cut by the artist from comic books and assembled brilliantly and ambitiously into a massive composite image. It looks like The Big Bang of Superman, which “mild-mannered reporter” Clark Kent experiences in a sweaty dream he wakes from, forever changed and empowered.

Adam Parker Smith’s “Super Flight” blows away a lot of Supermen, but is it really just a sweaty Clark Kent dream? The super dudes go out with a POW!

“Super Flight” is an astonishing welter of flying muscles, windswept capes, S-emblazoned chests and sound effects: ZAAAAAP! YEAAAGH!, and our hero’s mighty punch – CHROKK! You sense myriad dramatic and dynamic moments in the history of perhaps the greatest comic book superhero. It’s also a testament to Smith’s snip-snip-snip obsessiveness, captured perfectly beneath clear resin. The director of the latest Superman flick Man of Steel should’ve somehow included this powerhouse image in his movie.

Brooklyn-based Smith is one of today’s more provocative contemporary artists. A second untitled work from 2013 is a kitschy, mock-decorative installation on two adjacent corner walls, which includes a miscellany of items arranged on the walls, including cookies, penny candy (Bit o’ Honey!), tiny toy high heels, fake flowers and enough jellybeans to stir Ronald Reagan from the grave to croak, “Mister Smith, tear down that wall. I want to eat it.” I’m not implying questionable provenance of any of these items but The New York Times recently wrote about Smith’s ongoing projects of “collected” art works and various objects that he admits he’s stolen from others, often artists.

“The project has this gimmick, that I’m stealing from everybody, but it’s really about community,” Smith told The Times. “ ‘Appropriation and theft are part of that.’ Scoff if you like. “I feel like so many of my ideas start out as jokes,’ he said, ‘for better or worse.’” For sure, he’s experimenting with his life, and others’ though his “ideals” stray somewhat closer to Robin Hood’s than Superman’s, or Natalie Jeremijenko’s  1

Stas Orlovski’s two multi-media collage evocations are just as engaging but celebrate not super-macho fantasy but a gentle, almost Zen-like wit, akin to visual haiku or koans.

Stab Orlovsky’ s multi-media collages, such as “Nocturne 2,” beguile the viewer as they change over the course of several Zen-like minutes.

These are also like dreams, that you experience while standing there. Both works slyly cajole you to spend at least five minutes because they literally mutate over that time, thanks to projected animation combined with drawing and collage. “Nocturne 1” presents a lyrical, Rousseau-like landscape with back-lit creatures and personages appearing and disappearing. A central image is a mysterious, archetypal woman who seems to oversee the scene like a motherly goddess. Up above, a bird suddenly flutters across the sky. Finally another bird appears, lands, and perpetrates a natural function that, um, shows that even the most mystical of expression emits from creatures trapped in their physical organisms.

Mario Zoots — who bears the best artist’s name I’ve encountered in a long time – has a knack for reaching playing with images of womanhood as black and white evocations of another era. Each of his extended series focuses on a beautiful or alluring woman, some 1950s erotica but many movie star promo shots, like Jane Russell’s Southward-straining dress from her iconic role in The Outlaw or Theda Bara the silent film vamp.

Bara’s famous image shows her hexing the viewer with a transfixing stare, arms akimbo provocatively and flaunting a bra that is a pair of serpents — spiraling around each breast. It’s slightly disturbing, slightly entrancing and slightly camp.  My adverbial modifier is part of Zoots’ doing, because he reworks the original b&w image and often strategically obscures bodily parts. He calls the works “depersonalized” and “desymbolized.” I’m not sure if they work to that peculiar degree of abstraction. But they are clever plays upon erotic fantasy seemingly frozen in an increasingly distant pop culture era that nevertheless opened the door to modern liberated sexual expression.

In terms of sheer aesthetic accomplishment Judy Pfaff takes top honors. She’s been an innovative, prolific, brilliant and acclaimed print maker for many years. The show’s most beautiful work is Pfaff’s “Year of the Dog #7” which combines woodblock print, collage and hand painting. I gather the title references the Chinese Zodiac system, and I’ll tread lightly with such semiology but the year of the dog, like other such zodiac years, signifies both human strengths and weakness. Yet the dog seems to signify good luck, they say.

So Pfaff presents a complex image with Eastern influences in its refined articulation and layered deftness. What might seem ornamental in a lesser artist’s hands is here a stunning matter of artful accomplishment.  Pfaff conjures an almost living and breathing skein of lyrical abstraction, a flying web of unpredictable entwining and airy arabesques. The piece also intimates visual depth that recalls one of Jackson Pollock’s most ingenious and spatially evocative paintings, “The Deep.”

Jeff Raphael’s 30-plus framed collages crammed on one wall boggles a bit, given the concentrated fragmentation of each image. Yet, you discover he’s an old-fashioned visual storyteller. Like one of his maximalist influences, Hieronymus Bosch, this former punk-rock drummer fearlessly rips away the curtain to expose humanity’s strange, silly and craven behavior.

Jeff Raphael’s maximalist, storytelling collage style can engage an initially boggled mind. Unless otherwise indicated, all photos courtesy Julia Vandenoever.

I hope you sense how this relatively small but memorable exhibit takes us near and far in perceptual and conceptual play. Creative collage allows us to follow some artists  in the proverbial leap of imagination that lands on the shifting ice floes of life in an uncertain, ever-changing, terrifying and beautiful world.

The technique might help us piece our own lives together. We have iconic role models for dealing with uncertainty, like thousands of Supermen — in our dreams. More realistically we face life’s fragmented certainties by summoning courage like the slave Eliza’s famous flight, with infant, to freedom across that deadly collage of ice floes, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Other artists in Cut & Paste include Jesse Ash, Tyler Beard and Alicia Ordal.

Special exhibit-related events:

• “Expert talk” with Cut & Paste-featured artist Mario Zoots with photographer Mark Sink, Tuesday, August 1 at Art Students League of Denver, 200 Grand St., Denver , Co 80203
  • “Cosmos & Collage” – art-inspired cosmopolitans and live collage demonstration with artists featured in Cut & Paste. 7 PM, Thursday, August 22. $15/$12 members/free for Friends with Benefits
  • BMoCA also sponsors “Young Artists at Work” of variety of summer activity workshops and programs for young people, including collage-making and much more. For information visit: http://www.bmoca.org/2013/05/yaw-summer-2012/

________________________________________

* MacLeish’s “The End of the World” begins: “Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
the armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe…”

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/arts/design/adam-parker-smiths-thanks-at-lu-magnus-gallery.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Sand County Songs Tim Southwick Johnson

Tim Southwick Johnson and his axes hangin’ at Aldo Leopold’s famous Shack. Photo by Jennifer Johnson 

A few years ago I was in Sturgeon Bay for the Iron Bridge Songwriting Festival. I strolled up to the picnic table outside the motel where the artists stay and collaborate and found Tim Southwick Johnson picking out chords on his guitar and concocting lyrics to them in a notebook. He told me about his Leopold project, played me the delightful song he was just creating and we connected immediately. I was hooked (harpooned?) when he happened to tell about his personal experience with St. Elmo’s Fire, an electronic phenomenon described by Melville in “The Candles,” Ch. 119 of Moby-Dick. * This article is the overdue result of our meeting.

The following link should speak for itself, 1 but thanks to Natasha Kassulke for  shepherding this to press in Wisconsin Natural Resources, the fine publication she edits:

http://dnr.wi.gov/wnrmag/2013/06/songs.htm

The great Wisconsin naturalist and author Aldo Leopold abiding in big sky beauty. Courtesy azstateparks.com

Leopold outside his humble Thoreau-esque Shack, a converted chicken coop, which is today a National Historic Landmark.

Courtesy wdigicollec.blog.spot

Finally, do yourself a favor and head up to The Iron Bridge Songfest, June 13-16 in Sturgeon Bay, headlined by the return of Jackson Browne, who helped create and sustain the fest.

Tim Johnson will perform there again. It may be my favorite Wisconsin music festival and that’s saying something: http://www.sbsf5.com/fr_home.cfm

For more info on Johnson, his CD and performance schedule visit: http://www.timsouthwickjohnson.com/http%3A__www.timsouthwickjohnson.com/home.html

_________________

* Tim’s experience was more precisely of “ball lightning,” a similar bizarre phenomenon, which he says actually penetrated his living room window and fired up his house for a while. Now that I’ve undermined his reputation for sanity you might ask him about this sometime. All I know for sure is that he’s a damn fine musician.

1 The drawing of Johnson at the Leopold Shack on the CD cover shown in the link article is by Scott Halweg.

Composer Maria Schneider conducts a concert performance from her new album of chamber orchestra music, Winter Morning Walks. Courtesy leelowenfishbooktrib.com

Winter Morning Walks Maria Schneider/Dawn Upshaw/ The Australian Chamber Orchestra/ The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (ArtistShare)

The most beautiful sound in all the world…Maria’s. So Leonard Bernstein might’ve commented on how our finest jazz orchestra composer attains comparable artistry with a chamber orchestra. Setting two groups of poems, Schneider catches the wings of soprano Dawn Upshaw, whose singing swells and soars with a deep-hearted glow. Ted Kooser’s winter poems tip-toe with Frost-like reflection, which Schneider wraps exquisitely in crystalline yet wind-supple gestures. It’s gorgeous stuff, yet Schneider fragments her flow when needed, and smartly contrasts Kooser’s wide-eyed wonder with Carlos Drummond’s knowingly droll verse, including “Quadrille,” a wry meditation on unrequited love’s cruel turns.

Despite the CD’s titular theme which evokes the “bone-cracking cold” of a perfect solstice morning, Schneider again displays a melting lyricism. That quality distinguishes her from most of her jazz orchestra contemporaries and may be rooted in her classical training at the University of Minnesota, which predated her jazz schooling at Eastman School of Music. For example, there’s the stylistic manner of periodically repeating the poet’s line in the score for the singer to double up on. This commonplace of art song helps honor inspirations and allows felicitous variations of phrasing.

Schneider has long mastered a floating rubato pace rare among jazz composers typically dependent on a measure of rhythmic matrix or pulse. This allows her to daub and dash her orchestral palette with a vivid array of colors which often evoke mentor Gil Evans as much as any contemporary classic composer. A recent New York Times article recounts her trying to re-orchestrate an Evans piece at the request of the great arranger-composer, who is best known for his triumphs with Miles Davis.

“I was in my 20s and felt completely out of my league,” Schneider recalled. “One day I came in with what I wrote and (Evans) was horrified. He said: ‘No, no, no. I want those low instruments at the top of the range so they’re uncomfortable. And these high instruments at the bottom of their range.’ He wanted people playing completely at the opposite range at struggling points in the music. And then it was just, My God, that’s the stuff you can’t learn.” 1

But you hear Evans-esque sorcery in her new music. Schneider inserts atonal passages with prudence and purpose, as in “Our Finch Feeder” which sonically mimics the hustle-bustle of hungry birds.

Her die-hard jazz fans may miss the improvised solos she garlands her more familiar works with. The new key here is soprano Upshaw, a master of contemporary classical music but not a jazz singer. Like much of Schneider’s recent jazz music, this is virtually all through-composed, even though three of her jazz mates (pianist Frank Kimbrough, bassist Jay Anderson and clarinetist/bass clarinetist Scott Robinson) play in portions.

Soprano Dawn Upshaw (left) with composer-conductor Maria Schneider. Courtesy minnesota.publicradio.org.

And yet a vocal passage like the prologue for Drummond’s De Anrade Stories has a lilting air reminiscent of passages she’s concocted for jazz singer Luciana Souza, as on Schneider’s Emmy-winning “Cerulean Skies” from Sky Blue. Unsurprisingly, Upshaw handles this textually abstract passage with aviary splendor. She’s one of the best reasons for people to hear the new CD, having become a sort of crossover star due to the deep, accessible humanity of her singing and the catholicity of her tastes. She had become a Schneider fan and approached the composer about this project.

It’s a chance for such listeners to expand their horizon just as it is for classical fans who’ve never heard the likes Schneider. This recording is recommended to anyone who loves good music regardless of categorical appendage.

Ms. Schneider’s personal point of view is worth considering. I read about the new CD in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. 2 As Zachary Woolfe wrote, “Schneider still lives in the same cozy one-bedroom on the Upper West Side that she hauled music stands to and from all those years ago.”

CD cover courtesy mariaschneider.com

I’m hardly a high-profile music critic. Yet I received a copy of Ms. Schneider’s CD (via ace publicist Ann Braithwaite) within a week of the article, directly from the composer in the mail. Woolf characterizes Schneider as “prone to insecurity.” If so, this is complemented by remarkable courage. As a woman, she’s forged a currently unparalleled career in a still male-dominated jazz field. Her label ArtistShare, which she co-founded, pioneered the ambitious DIY concept of fan-financed recordings. But I wonder if her “insecurities” also reflect a gender difference, having to do with ego and humility. Schneider defers to Upshaw for top billing on the CD cover. Though many jazz bandleaders (including Evans) have performed technically limited “arranger’s piano,” Schneider never plays piano in public. Her sensibility also suggests a consistently humble Midwesterner’s experience of nature.

There’s also a celebratory rapture in this pastoral music that is characteristic Schneider and, it seems to me, an always-precious commodity in such spirit-deflating times as ours.

If she’s risking a wintry tightrope walk over her jazz success, her skills are as surefooted as a hardy north woodsman’s.

________________

A shorter version of this article was published in The Shepherd Express.

1 The New York Times Sunday Magazine, April 13, p. 22

2 Ibid p. 20

The Artist and his Mother Arshile Gorky, oil, 1926–36 Courtesy calitrev.com

Dear moms,

Motherhood is as universal a human experience as it is distinctively personal and intimate, and a measure of a woman’s intelligence, soul and character.

That’s why I have great respect and admiration for all you — my sisters, relatives and friends — who’ve had to answer to “mother” or “mom” or even to “hey, ma” or “gimme the ketchup” or “Can I have the car keys?”

Or to even greater challenges to your will and wisdom like “Did I really come from a baby seed catalog?” or “I’m almost six and all the other kids have smart phones.”

Try to remember you can only do so much, and know when to let them go, so they flourish in ways that will surprise and even astonish, and inspire pride you never imagined.

Because from your womb, love and nurturing they find their own special genius as whole persons. At that point, a son or daughter completes the evolution of universal growth to the unforgettable human, with your beautiful imprint, who belongs to the world.

Happy Mother’s Day,

Love,

Kevin

Lady Shushanik (The Artist’s Mother), Arshile Gorky, charcoal 1938 

Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago

The above message and images were sent earlier today to a group of sisters, relatives and friends whom I felt were richly deserving of my personal sentiment.

I tried to avoid mawkishness for considered sincerity. And when I quickly thought of these two images to accompany it, I realized how much my sensibility has been influenced by the great Armenian-American artist, Arshile Gorky.

That’s when I decided to extend this personal Mother’s Day greeting to everyone online, because, as I say, the experience of motherhood is universal for all children, as well as mothers.

And yet, as I made my e-mail list, I realized I didn’t know as many mothers well as I would’ve thought I did at this point in my life. I won’t go into personal reasons why that might be, aside from being of a childless single person. But for Culture Currents I also wanted to share some thoughts about Gorky’s extraordinary portraits, which lack any trace of conventional sentimentality, and yet are profoundly imbued with love and feeling, and with a sense of history that traces the importance of motherhood as, not inconsiderably, a sort of spiritual talisman.

Notice that Gorky spent a full decade working and reworking the portrait of himself and his mother. I think he was grappling somewhat with how to resolve his visual representation of his relationship to her. Part of that comes from his modernist painterly approach which delved into rough-hewn textures and colors that opened up the inquiry into modern being, in a manner that classical portraiture handling could not.

As Gorky wrote to his sister Vartoosh on November 24, 1940: “Aesthetic or highest art is that which responds sensitively to complexity and thereby enables man to better understand the complexity.” 1

The fact that he left the work unfinished also perhaps reflects his unresolved and complex feelings about his relationship with his mother. There’s also a testament, in those almost wind-blown branch-like strokes at the end of her apron, which might signify children fallen from the maternal tree, and thus witness to the full cycle of maternal experience.

And while Gorky broke away from classical portraiture he also grew out of it and understood its distinctive strength qualities. So he composed a rather formal posture of the two figures, which saves the work from any sentimentality or undue romanticism.

And of course his deeply accomplished charcoal portrait of his mother reveals his underlying mastery of classical technique. Here you see something that’s intensely evident in all three faces in these two works. What I see in that portrait is the indomitable strength, courage and love of a beautiful mother who has endured a racist genocide and exile during the Ottoman occupation of Armenia.

“She was the most aesthetically appreciative, the most politically incisive master I have encountered in all my life… Mother was Queen of the aesthetic domain,” Gorky wrote.

“Lady Shushanik (‘Lovely Lily’ in Armenian), established his artistic formation, engulfing him in art and assuring he not abandon the calling thus forged,” wrote his nephew and biographer Karlen Mooradian. 2

Young Arshile, whose given name was Vosdanik Adoian, and his sister Vartoosh, fled from Armenia to America.

Arshile Gorky Courtesy fashionablyla.blogspot

After I visited the great Gorky retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1981, I had the opportunity to visit Vartoosh and Karlen Mooradian, her son and Gorky’s nephew, who wrote a Gorky biography and a “documentary montage” of recollections and Gorky letters.

They both lived in Chicago at the time. They seemed to appreciate the Gorky retrospective review I had written, and that I was an artist as well as a critic. I regret that I was never able to do much with that interview. I do recall them as two people of serious, kind and sincere feeling.

But Vartoosh had previously recalled the hellish time when the Turks massacred 50,000 Armenians: “We walked day and night with little rest. We had no food to speak up. If mother found anything she would give it to Gorky because you take more care of boys than girls and he was the only boy and he was very thin.”

The family’s father had emigrated in 1908 to the United States to avoid conscription into the Turkish army. Conditions worsened for the fatherless Adoians and on March 20, 1919, the mother died of starvation at the age of 39. Gorky, 15, and Vatroosh, 13, became virtual orphans until a family friend helped guide them to Athens and the liner SS Presidente Wilson. The siblings arrived at Ellis Island on February 26, 1920. 3

And yet it’s clear in Gorky’s soul-piercing charcoal portrait of his mother that her flame still burned brightly within him.

Vartoosh was the person closest to Gorky throughout his life. So I offer this photograph of her and her own son, which Karlen gave to me, as a portrait of two of Lady Shushanik’s offspring.

Vartoosh Mooradian (Gorky’s sister) and her son Karlen Mooradian, ca. 1981. Courtesy Karlen Mooradian.

I think it provides symmetry to the Gorky painting. Lady S’s descendants — another mother and son — somewhat echo the Gorky portrait of himself and his mother. Here they sit comfortably and warmly together, without any evidence of direct existential suffering (except perhaps in Vartoosh’s eyes) which surely affected Gorky and his mother, who curiously avoided contact with each other (the painting was based on a similarly composed photograph portrait).

Those two painted figures still haunt me. Because, without Gorky’s courageous and tragic Lady Mother, the world would have been robbed of one of the great artists of the 20th century.

1Arshile Gorky Adoian, Karlen Mooradian, Gilgamesh, 1978,  265

2. Ibid, 99

3. Arshile Gorky: 1904 – 1948 A Retrospective, Diane Waldman,  Guggenheim Museum/Abrams 1981, 14

Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 1 Edo De Waart, Royal Flemish Philharmonic (A- List)

Though it can be pedantic, there’s also a genius of insight to artistic fidelity. Edo Du Waart demonstrates that gift with sure-handed clarity and purpose in his new recording of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 with the Royal Flemish Philharmonic.

This sounds like the purest transmission of what Mahler penned on to the page that I’ve heard. A late romantic like Mahler is readily vulnerable to idiosyncratic interpretations by conductors. Sometimes, with Leonard Bernstein and a few others, this works well because the shadows of perception cast upon Mahler’s music frequently reflect back in startling and emotionally enveloping ways that seem to invite a psychological embodiment by the interpreter. (Or more simply, the wayward theatricality inherent in Mahler’s big designs works a certain way for the Bernsteins, or to a slightly lesser degree to Bernstein protégé John DeMain, a celebrated opera conductor whose Mahler cycle I witnessed in Madison.)

But one must tread with caution in the grotesqueries of theatrical effect, even if Mahler has his grotesques. This CD annotator somewhat overstates in saying “the strident brass provides a disorienting rancidity” in the second movement’s famous funeral march. It’s too beautiful a total effect to ever be “rancid,” as much as the tonalities may clash at times. And Du Waart always makes sure we know that experientially.

Du Waart — also music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra — will suffer none of this. So if you’re entertained by provocative personality postures this interpretation might seem a little dry. But I turned it on and it pulled me through to its thrilling end via the profundity of transparency, when you consider the depths revealed.

This First is as boffo and eloquent as anyone’s because it’s real, not dressed-up-like, Mahler.

Yet if it’s relatively unadorned Mahler, what is that Mahler?

It’s good to recall the composer’s powerful yet unsettling place in music history. His symphonies find their indelible place with what Theodor Adorno calls their “thoroughgoing discontinuity.” Those who feel comfortable in sonata-allegro form can be unnerved, to say the least. Rather than a top-down overriding structural continuity we follow Mahler through many odd and often enchanting incidents which, in ways, are the essence of his music, rather than the grandness of form that seems presumed by the scale of his most gargantuan symphonies.

As Adorno has said, the discontinuities and even his banalities are “allegories of the so-called ‘lower depths’ of the “insulted in the socially injured”, a byproduct of “a passionate reader of Dostoevsky” 1 and, perhaps at a more personal level, “the genuine fears of a downtrodden Jew,” as Adorno puts it. 2 Since the music has been composed from bottom up, “the listener must abandon himself (herself) to the flow of work, as the story when you do not know where it is going to end.” 3

Gustav Mahler Courtesy www.bach.cantatas.com 

The cues to stepping into this liberating aura arrive with each moment that you seem to become lost, or probably closer to be found, in Mahler’s reality. In the first symphony, one encounters the swirling and mightily off-kilter strides that climax the first movement in which, again Adorno says, it is something like “the soul thrown back on itself (which) no longer feels home in its traditional idiom.” Or more grandly, aims to “transform art in to an arena for the invasion of an absolute,” which might be the titanic throes in the great finale of the First. 4

And here, this sense of vertigo-like imbalance is akin to Mahler’s fellow countryman Franz Kafka.  As with Kafka’s absurd quasi-reality, we’re stricken with an anxiety that feeds alienation on the very doorstep of what we think of as ourself, our home, our country. Indeed, the finale’s combo of a primal anxiety with a cathartic song of thunder remains – in such pure Mahler – a thrilling experience.

Here’s another bottom line. A powerful recording statement like this should compel the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra to get De Waart into a recording studio with their band, maybe doing one of the Mahler symphonies they have performed recently in Milwaukee.

After all, you never know when an international talent might be gone forever. We’ve lost many lesser lights all too soon.

_____________________

1. Theodor Adorno Quasi-Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music  Verso 1992 86
2. Ibid 88
3. Ibid 87
4. 4 Ibid 84-85

Michael Link/Harvey Taylor – Sittin’ In

As per the title, this album feels quite informal which reflects one of its most redeeming qualities: likability. It won’t deeply move you, except perhaps onto the dance floor, as a sort of ambient, trance-dance disc. Michael Link imaginatively manipulates electronic rhythmic patterns and textures, especially on the “Vajra and the Whale” which evokes the humpback whale’s song, and the funky mad-inventor aura, provided by guitarist Michael Sullivan, on “Smoke and Mirrors.”

Trumpeter Taylor recalls Miles Davis’ tiptoe-through-the-pop-song-tulips period. He unfurls melodic and faintly mournful phrases, although at times Link’s strong rhythmic pulses call for the trumpeter to take off and fly. Earthbound he remains, radiating amiable warmth; so the music teases your interest, soothes. You feel its quirky underlying pulses and maybe a spring in your step into the day.

For a more full realized imaginative investigation of these musicians’ creative and conceptual potential, listen to the CD A Story for Scheherazade, released under Taylor’s name two years ago.

It’s a colorful and daring reimagining of the great Middle Eastern myth of Scheherazade. Inspired by a trip he took to the Middle East , Taylor aptly feels it has something to teach us “about the possibilities of art to heal, inspired and enlighten” especially in times  “of dreadful misunderstanding and conflict” between the West and the Middle East.

I’ve long felt that our ignorance of Middle Eastern culture is a large contributor to the ongoing geopolitical conflict that’s become an almost intractable quagmire. (Taylor CDs are  available at www.harveytaylor.net).

Pioneering skiier, climber and banjoist Bill Briggs in 1976. Photo by Kevin Lynch

For those of you who’ve read my previous story of the remarkable Bill Briggs, extreme-sport pioneer and Bob Dylan collaborator, here’s a photo of a scene I allude to in the posting.

Briggs is rowing toward Mount Moran in the background. I think it captures some of the intensity and determination of the only person to have ever skied down from the summit of The Grand Teton.

And I think he really does look like singer-songwriter Malcolm Holcombe. Their personalities are somewhat similar as well — intense, a bit eccentric, but essentially sweet fellows.

Also, I incorrectly stated that our Moran climb was in 1973. The correct year was 1976.

Trumpeter, flugelhornist and composer Jamie Breiwick is one of the most talented and inspiring musicians I’ve met in quite a while. He’s a major force in Milwaukee’s surprisingly strong new generation of jazz musicians and educators.

So I’d like to alert all of this blog’s readers to his brand-new album Spirits, recorded at the Jazz Estate in November and released on the Chicago-based Blujazz label.(blujazz.com). Jamie’s quartet will perform at a CD release party for Spirits at 9:30 p.m. Saturday at the scene of the recording, The Jazz Estate, 2423 N. Murray, on Milwaukee’s eastside.

Full disclosure compels me to inform you that I wrote the liner notes for this album, but I did so with serious enthusiasm. So I’ll leave you with those liner notes, for Spirits:

Open the door on the album cover and you enter the Jazz Estate, a Milwaukee club that exemplifies a venue that nurtures modern straight-ahead jazz and makes money at it. This recording was made there one night, even if the program has the well-considered sense of purpose of a studio recording.

The melody of the opening “Gig Shirt” has a slightly skewed trumpet-saxophone harmony, recalling Ornette Coleman’s classic/radical quartet, which certainly influenced the album’s piano-less instrumentation. The theme bodes well for a musical departure, especially in its expansive rising last notes.

This journey’s departure mean’s arrival at many musical ports, including some adapted pop-rock. “I Will Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie front man Ben Gibbard, is a mournful yet oddly resolute melody. Breiwick’s muted trumpet sounds playful, as if he’s wooing a young woman with a joke. The rhythm players burble along in the same coy spirit, lifting the interpretation’s insouciance and the band ends with an exquisite exhalation.

“Safe and Sound,” by country-pop artist Taylor Swift, is another strong and pliable melody that tenor saxophonist Tony Barba builds from close, pinprick-sharp variations until he unfurls some Joe Henderson-like flag-waving. Breiwick’s own “Little Bill” is a funky, amiable tune that honors the memory of his Grandfather Bill and also refers to The Bill Cosby produced cartoon of the same name, which Breiwick’s children love to watch. “Dad” adopts a slightly gruff tone and Barba is almost flippantly offhanded, befitting the sit-com mood.

This band has a svelte-but-sure grip on the harmonic and rhythmic tension of “Capricorn,” a Wayne Shorter theme that seems to move in two directions at once while flowing as a seamless melody — characteristic of Shorter’s ineffable compositional genius. If that sounds like a chops-busting practice-room etude, “Capricorn” rises like an indelibly hummable melody. The band swings hard out of the gate, as Barba plunges in with pithy Shorterisms — slanting shards, open-throated exhortations and quotes of the sorcerer-like theme. Breiwick shifts gears    with mute in bell, then creeps into a softly growling, splattered tone that recalls Don Cherry. He’s clearly finding his own forward-pushing place in the trumpet tradition. Bassist Tim Ipsen steps in like a heady middleweight contender, with a sly combination of punchy harmonic intervals.

The aphoristically titled “Walk through Daydreams, Sleep through Nightmares” reflects Breiwick’s magnanimous depth as a member of the jazz community. He leads two jazz bands, including a more pop rock-oriented one called Choir Fight. He’s also an educator, organizer and all-around go-getter, having co-founded Milwaukee Jazz Visions, a musician-run organization that promotes the local jazz scene, especially with an excellent website: milwaukeejazzvision.org. This tune is by one of Breiwick’s own former students, Philip Dizack, a fast-rising young trumpeter of uncommon lyrical strength and compositional maturity. Breiwick acknowledges that crafting a songfully expressive melodic line is a primary concern of his. “I believe the album’s aesthetic intent points to a depth of feeling in the music,” he says. “Beyond technique, which is obviously hugely important, emotional communication is a priority.”

“Walk” opens with swelling mallet rolls and cymbals. The two horns resound like one voice, or mind, experiencing a revelation. Then everyone pulls back, as if in a slight state of awe, to contemplate the implications of the “Eureka” moment. One imagines a lightning bolt having struck the narrative consciousness right at its precipitous leap from daydream to nightmare. It recalls John Coltrane’s more pensive lyrical moments in his late years, when he pushed the spiritual-empowerment envelope like the shaman Dr. King might have met on that windswept mountain top.

The program follows appropriately with Barba’s title tune “Spirits.” A simple rising interval, extrapolated and harmonized, seems like a wisp of a theme, yet these men plumb its modality as if climbing the branches of a majestic tree. It stands like a spirit, inviting as it is inherently challenging for the earthbound.

Consequently the closing tune, “Sunset and the Mockingbird,” is also apt, from the pen of Duke Ellington, a timeless jazz presence. This is Duke’s indigo mood, and Barba proves he can fabricate a short story whole cloth from textured whole notes, while Breiwick is a mockingbird with genuine feelings. He evokes Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams’ muted sorrow, as an elegy to whatever the sunset bade farewell, something to cherish, and live up to.

Spirits demonstrates extraordinary range and vision from this new jazz generation, and delivers on promise as if tapped into a musical wellspring flowing through their veins.  — Kevin Lynch

I hope to see you at the Estate Saturday night.

Notice mountaineer Bills Briggs’ ski tracks zig-zagging down from the summit of The Grand Teton, an unprecedented feat he accomplished on June 15, 1971, a few years before I climbed with him. Photo courtesy of Virginia Huidekoper.

Do I start by saying that Bob Dylan once backed up Bill Briggs on mandolin — at a wedding reception performance — while Bill sang and played banjo? Ah, that’s a story for the other side of the summit.

Bill Briggs seemed like pretty much a regular guy, at first glance. But he held a coiled, panther-like tension in him, ready to spring. I picked up on this gradually as he gathered the party of climbers he would lead up Mount Moran in the Tetons in late August of 1976. He was the oldest guide I’ve ever climbed with in the Tetons but none of them ever had this type of veiled energy.

I mean what other dude was crazy enough to do what he did on The Grand Teton, which serious climbers considered the American Eiger back in the ’70s. 1 Aside from the great mountain faces in Yosemite, it remains perhaps the most iconic mountain in the continental US, among climbing challenges.

Go ahead, climb The Grand — I mean with skis on you back. When you reached the summit put the skis on….

Nobody had ever come close to flirting with that as a dream that I know of. It took slightly geeky, bespectacled but sinewy Briggs. But wait, there he stood with a physical disability, of sorts.

As Louis Dawson wrote, in his excellent Briggs profile: “Briggs entered the world without a hip joint, and at two-years-old surgeons chiseled out a socket in his pelvic bone. Hinting at his deep and unorthodox spirituality (he practices the controversial religious philosophy of Scientology), Briggs recalls, ‘It was during the hip operation that I took this body. Whoever was there before me was pretty bright, he already knew the alphabet and he could count — so I took the body and suddenly I couldn’t do the numbers or abc’s. Since I was expected to already do those things,’ he continues with laughter, ‘I had to learn quickly.'” 2

But that’s as far as I take the “crazy” talk because he proved this seemingly unimaginable feat wasn’t impossible. I saw no trace of craziness in the man, just a barely contained creative energy. In retrospect I see this manifests itself in how a person finds an outlet, because creativity is a strange force when you think about it, like a slightly untamed spirit within that prods, fires and even directs the imagination. It whispers in the ear and the sound is surprising but oddly familiar.

The first thing is to understand the improbable things he accomplished before we or anyone else imagined anyone possibly could.

In that sense, he may be a role model I hadn’t thought about for a while until a few summers ago, for some reason. I didn’t realize until recently that 2010 marked the 40th anniversary of his devil may care plunge down the Grand.

When I failed to track Bill down I despaired of ever seeing that image again so it wouldn’t be me making up a tall one.

Of course Googling him never occurred then — cuz I was caught in a 1976 time warp,  and snail mail seemed the only way.

I contacted his former employer, Exum Guide Service in Jackson. No dice….

I knew he’d been the first and only man to have skied down the precipitous peak of the mighty Grand Teton, and here he was leading me on a climbing excursion.

So as we set out toward the lake we needed to cross to get to the foot of Mount Moran, he was friendly and affable, but mainly focused on the daily business of earning his keep as a professional mountaineering guide with the Exum at America’s most picturesque mountain range. We had a nice group of people including Sharon Salveter, a red-tressed climber as smart as she was fetching.*

Sharon Salveter smiles down encouragingly as I struggle up a pitch on Mount Moran

And it was partly a certain awe with the idea of climbing with this guy, who amounts to a pioneer in mountaineering and what today is called extreme sports.

Despite his focused professionalism, Briggs relaxed when we made bivouac the first night of the climb. As we had our dinner meal, he was hardly shy about sharing his knowledge and wisdom, as is evident in the photograph of him holding court at that bivouac with Sharon and me listening raptly.

I don’t remember a lot of specifics about what he said, because it was so long ago. I felt intrigued but I had not yet developed the reporter skills I would later in the decade that would lead me to a career in journalism. So I took no notes and did not press him about his most famous feat which I figured he was tired of repeating.

I really don’t think I realized at that time that he had pulled off that remarkable accomplishment just a few years earlier in June 1971. But I have vague recollections of him speaking about various climbing exploits and about the challenge ahead of climbing Moran. I think I would’ve remembered if he had talked about his love for music and playing the banjo. Despite being by far the oldest person in the in the party, he did most of the rowing across the large lake most of the rolling cross the lake though Sharon pitched in too (No I didn’t feel like a Sultan, perhaps I should’ve.) .

As Briggs rowed a long, dank lock of dark hair kept falling over his face and I also noticed a faintly maniacal gleam in his eye. Just his way of concentrating, I thought to myself. And yet now recalling him sustain that demeanor — and now knowing that he is a sort of Americana type singer and string player — he strikingly resembles the brilliant and certifiably eccentric North Carolina singer-songwriter guitarist Malcolm Holcombe, who has the same type of wandering hair lock.

Jackson Lake is the largest glacial Lake in the Teton Range and the second-largest natural lake in Wyoming. Once traversed we also had to cross the immense Moran Canyon to reach the foot of our destined climb. Briggs had explained to us the length of this long approach and we understood that he knew the importance of timing the climb. So we didn’t want to distract him from keeping the proper pace.

He explains in his interview with — that more difficult than his spectacularly daring downhill ski of the Grand Teton was getting the timing right — so that the conditions were perfect to make a survivable ski attempt. That same sense of precise purpose was at work as we approached Moran. After all he had our lives in his hands. Moran is a moderately difficult climb I had progressed to that level of difficulty in this my fourth summer  of climbing in the Tetons, and third as an Exum-trained climber. Nevertheless, Morton Moran (12,594 feet) has no easy route to its summit, according to the Bonney guide.

As we scrambled up Mount Moran’s foothills, we encountered this view of the site of our guide’s extraordinary skiing feat, a few years earlier. The Grand Teton is the highest peak in the photo. Teewinot Mountain is the broad-faced peak hugging up against The Grand (and often confused for it).

The end of the boat trip was in Moran Bay once called spirit they named for the cry of “Old Joe!” — one of the first party of climbers — which remarkably repeated at intervals of 30 seconds court and these sounds echoed It “re-echoed a thousand times reaching higher and higher along the mighty wall, till faint goblin whispers from the cold icy shafts and spectral hollows answered back clicking notes and hisses, but distinctly always the words ‘Oh Joe!’” ?Bonney recounts. 3

Perhaps the spirits of thousands of long gone prehistoric hunters have something to do with that haunting echo.

And had we heard it ourselves perhaps it would’ve had something to do with the him and the crash of a DC three plane off course with 24 missionaries which hit the Northeast Ridge of Moran at 11,000 feet (“about level with the lower end of skillet glacier handle on November 21 of 1950 all aboard were killed. Impossible to remove the bodies or wreckage, this regular climbing route was closed for five years until the remains had weathered away. Even today remnant remnants of the plane startle climbers unaware of the accident.” 4

Briggs, perhaps by training, steered us clear of the macabre site. Another part of the aura of the Tetons is an extraordinary weather changes, In the picture below, notice how Briggs (left) and I lunched in stripped-down garb.  At the bivouac that evening  (see first color picture, above) we huddle in our down jackets.

The biggest drama of the climb is the sheer exposure of a long pitch shortly after the descent from the summit. it’s in the negative 90° realm with some distinct overhang drops.

As the light begins to fade over the Teton range, we got a view of how threatening Mount Moran can be, especially for a failing airplane, like the one that crashed here in 1950.

But we were all securely belayed so it was just what I call a phenomenological thrill because once we got full awareness of her situation the new we were safe.

You can also judge the pitch from my photo of Richard rappelling.

Bill’s other brush with true greatness involved no vertigo, only a hobo (or, in a more sardonic argot, a rolling stone 5) named Bob Dylan. Here’s how Briggs described is unlikely gig with Bob, in an interview with Griffin Post for Powder.com, an online skiing publication:

“He played with me [laughs]. No, I don’t know Bob. The situation was it was a wedding reception and he was obviously not enjoying it. You get the feeling, (Bob was thinking) I have to be here but this is not what I want to do, type of thing. (A friend) knew Bob and talked to him and said, ‘Would you like to play?’ I think what he replied was, ‘Yeah, as long as I don’t have to sing.’ It gave him a chance to get out of the social scene and all he had to do is play mandolin behind the pick-up country band. You get the impression that he enjoyed doing it. I got the impression that he really did appreciate having the chance to play and not have to perform. It made it a good night with him.”

Banjoist, singer and mountaineer Bill Briggs accompanied by a hobo from Hibbing, Minnesota on mandolin. Courtesy of David J. Swift.

I’d struck up enough of an acquaintanceship with Sharon Salveter that she invited me to (chastely) share a cabin she had rented for the night after climb. We recollected our experience of Moran and Briggs. We perused the poster size photograph of Briggs’ remarkable skiing feat, which he had autographed for me. Then Sharon settled in for a sound and well-earned night’s rest. As for me, I struggled to sleep, despite the rigors of the climb.

Years later, I carelessly lost the precious poster during one of my residence moves.

But the image remained etched in my memory until I happily came across it on the Web, as you see above. Crane your neck and imagine being local newspaper reporter Virginia Huidekoper  when she took that shot of Bill’s ski tracks.

That wedding gig was one of Dylan’s brushes with greatness.

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* Salveter would go on to earn a PhD. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin — Madison. She is now a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Chicago.

1. See Climbing in North America Chris Jones, University of California Press, 1976, 314. Briggs musician anecdote (special thanks to my sister Nancy Aldrich, who gifted me the Jones book for Christmas 1976).

2.  http://www.wildsnow.com/articles/bill-briggs/bill-briggs-william-biography.html

3. Bonney’s Guide: Grand Teton National Park and Jackson’s Hole Orin and Lorraine Bonney, 1966, 52

4. ibid Bonney’s Guide, 62

5 I’m intrigued by changing rhetorical usage in songwriting, here about the peripatetic downtrodden. (Pre-sexy) Rod  Stewart once sang Dylan’s 1963 “Only a Hobo”: “To wait for your future like a horse that’s gone lame/ To lie in the gutter and die with no name.” By contrast, Dylan in 1965 sang, “How does it feel, to be on your own, with no direction home, like a rolling stone?”

Both use unforgettable similes. One paints a somber picture of social realism, the other a more abstract, acidic challenge to a complicated and conflicted middle class. Placed together, they form a clearer picture of their times, and when unassuming troubadours like Briggs made a precarious living guiding middle-class guys like me up mountains. What of less-gifted hobos? What changed between 1963 and ’65?

How does it feel, today? Does anybody sing a hobo’s song?

All photos of the Mount Moran climb are by Kevin Lynch. I believe the photos which include me are by Sharon Salveter, but your blogger’s failing, middle-aged memory can’t be sure.

Some paranoid Republicans imagine housewives protecting themselves against “jack-booted government thugs” as the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre said, but all they had were muskets back in the day the Second Amendment was written. Courtesy yahoo.com

While Senate majority leader Harry Reid is beginning to exhibit a sliver of backbone on the issue of legislation to control gun violence, the gang of opponents to any organized safety against further tragedy is bending over backwards with agonizingly contorted rhetorical arguments.

“We have a responsibility to safeguard these little kids,” said Reid, D-Nev. “And unless we do something more than what’s the law today, we have failed.”

Reid hardly matches President Obama’s leadership and eloquence on the subject. But he gets to the procedural crux.

In response, one of the conservatives threatening to block even debate on the issue, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said the Democratic effort would violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms, citing “history’s lesson that “government cannot be in all places at all times, and history’s warning about the oppression of a government that tries.”

Does Lee realize that he contradicts himself and his position with this broad, abstract fantasy argument, which completely ignores the cruel, heart-breaking reality of little kids getting massacred with military-style assault weapons that have no use in society except to kill people? Plus the Democrats have given up on banning such weapons already, and are only going for a universal background check on gun purchases.

But to Lee’s tautological argument: if a government cannot be “in all places at all times,” how could it physically oppress its citizenry throughout 50 states, to where the people need to take up arms to fight for their freedom?

And how likely is it that legislators elected by the people would ever condone a dictatorial, genocide-threatening oppression of their constituents? I suppose the paranoia fantasy would imagine a government coup of itself, but such anti-democratic contortions are unimaginable in any Democratic, or even Republican, administration. Both parties are just too bound by cozily self-serving convention and the status quo to do anything so radical.

Even if we humor Lee’s improbable horror scenario, how long would it take before a group of miscellaneously armed homeowners are subdued by a battalion of highly trained Marines?

Back in the real world, how many deadly rapid-fire killing guns does Lee want in the hands of criminals and mentally unstable people, which background checks would safeguard us against, and which virtually all law enforcement officials support?

Rarely have elected officials, such as the filibuster-threatening senators, ever exhibited more pathetic and cowardly antidemocratic behavior. They’re afraid of even a debate on this urgent issue, perhaps because they know they will lose it. Because it is what the people (or 91% at last count) want, the same people he pretends to protect with the Second Amendment, which seems increasingly as antiquated as the muskets used by the colonists who wrote it.

The single fire-and-reload musket (above) is all that colonists had when the “right to bear arms” amendment against theoretical government oppression and genocide was written. The insert photo shows a modern assault weapon today used in mass murders like Newtown. Courtesy ensuremekevin.com

As my friend Anna Hahm recently commented, if we restricted ourselves to ancient, rusty muskets, allowing the NRA its slobbering gun-lust might not be too scary.

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Read more: http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Newtown-families-lobby-on-gun-bill-4420792.php#ixzz2Qdrn13WE

Family members of Newtown massacre victims are in lobbying Congress tonight. Courtesy ctpost.com

It’s as if the ghosts of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall had emerged and began testifying with the simple eloquence of each of their names, spoken one after another.

But this is the freshly dead — to put the cold, hard and slightly grisly truth on it. Although the horrific Sandy Town massacre is the soul and the basis of this recent movement t for legislation and accountability in gun safety — these voices will be reviving the names of the 3,000 people who have already been killed by guns in America since time massacre.

For as long as Republicans filibuster against a vote on the new gun laws, the Newtown families plan to recite outside of Congress the names of Americans dead since then.

It looks like an irrefutable trump card of unblinking truth and collective honesty.This will be for the profound, tragic and harrowing way pointed drama that we are almost turning our blind eye by not knowing how many people are dying after week after week to God because we have such lax gun laws as if we don’t care about all those people, dying and dying. And families and loved ones are grieving and grieving. Are we grieving with them?

Do we care enough to do something about it?

An Episcopalian priest named Malcolm Boyd was bold enough in the “do-your-thing” 60s to rhetorically asked the question, ‘”Are you running with me, Jesus?” * He became for a while what we would be now call a rock star of down to earth theology, or more precisely “Jesusology” because he never prayed directly to God personally.

He admitted that like all of us he was a sinner and self-centered. He explained his title by saying it was the best way he had to understand the potential power that Jesus had to offer.

He even intimated at times struggling with faith. Any doubter or nonbeliever in Jesus as a spiritual leader could ask this same question. Call Jesus’s bluff. Where would Christ stand on gun violence today? I think we have our answer already assuming Americans are fundamentally good people in the sense of justice and fairness. There’s one only answer to a just, fair response to what families of Sandy Hook are looking for as proper action. It is a call for responsibility over the vindication of their deaths appropriately and legally, and the assurance that an incident like Sandy Hook will never ever happen again.

It’s as simple as that, isn’t it?

You can be sure that Boyd would be on the side of human life, would be on the side acting about of human life being wasted in the backdrop of an almost complicit negligence in our gun regulations or lack thereof. Boyd’s remarkable 1965 book Are You Running with Me, Jesus? was actually a bestseller because of his ingenious and forthright way of presenting prayers as often quite personal anecdotes, that addressed important issues of the day — human freedom, freedom from censorship, prayers for sexual freedom (you get that he was a liberal), “meditations on the cross” etc. The book came down inevitably to the final prayer act, which now implicitly calls for a new first act. That was his final prayer about dying. He pointed that prayers can be found in such unlikely writing as that of Samuel Beckett, Ingmar Bergman, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Tennessee Williams, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Genet, John Updike and (pre “Saved”) Bob Dylan.

Boyd never expressed  belief in “God the father.” He did believe in Jesus as somebody very worth praying to. Just as people like to pray a favorite saints. The very act, the ritual is a cleansing action in part of the process of relieving grief. And by it’s very nature it gives us hope of being answered because we never know how it might be answered.

When something good happens, prayers with no vindictive intent or lobby don’t hurt. They might help if for no and the reason than by virtue of the demonstrable philosophical and moral excellence of the very act of such a prayer, and these families’ spiritual presence as the embodiment of spirits who, in some sense, can be brought back to life.

Here’s what Malcolm Boyd wrote about dying:

I heard today about Larry’s death, Jesus are for first reaction was sentenced because such an honest man and good friend was gone from the scene, Lord. I’ll miss. It seemed to be yours when out of his way to do the best he could about people and things.

He made an effort to find out the truth and in spare himself in the process. He took an unpopular stand police called for at and never seem to court and easy sham popularity. It was a loyal friend but also an honest one in offering direct criticism, even when it hurt to give and receive it.

I know how lonely his wife will be now and how much you will miss him. Bless his death and resurrection. Bless his wife’s sorrow and stirring of new life – 1

The families of the Newtown massacre will be in Washington outside the Congress being the names of those died since their families and loved ones had.

They are here at the invitation of Pres. Obama who, after making his speech in Connecticutt, invited them back on Air Force One jet to directly and simply lobby the Congress in their upcoming vote which the repose for public filibuster threatens to stop from every been happening. And note the names added at the bottom of Republicans who are signed up to be part of this filibuster effort it in C timelessness because it has no intellectual argument of substance against Internet universal background checks.

Parents of Newtown massacre victims. Representatives of 11 victimized families are in Washington to meet  legislators voting on gun laws, Courtesy ctpost.com

They will be doing what they did a week ago in Connecticut simply reading the arriving legislators and handing them a letter and pictures of their dead loved ones in meeting face-to-face. The strategy was so powerful and effective that Connecticut passed all of its gun regulation loss the first big step in this new effort certainly in terms of mirroring the steps that are being asked for at the national level.

As Republicans filibuster, the wall of grieving and their beloveds spirits may come to life

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Tennessee (foreground) figures to lead the Republican filibuster against gun law voting. courtesy and why daily news.com

So they are the defying he values of the people and our current civil culture which increasingly senses that people like the NRA leaders hide behind aspects of the second amendment that are matters of historical obsolescence.

It strikes me that passing his gun laws may feel like a great cathartic collective prayer for humanity. Who can argue against that is a spiritual gesture?

Are you running with us, are you running with America, representatives and senators?

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1 The New York Times Sunday Review, Sunday, April 7, 2013

2 Malcolm Boyd, “On Dying” from Are You Running with Me, Jesus? Prayers by  Malcolm Boyd, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1965, 117.