Well, there is the matter of pledging to vote to recall Scott Walker. This is a big opportunity to do something right for Wisconsin. Sign a pledge to vote to recall
(Sign the pledge — below link.)
Show Wisconsin what you think.
Most of all, don’t be a fink.
I promise I’ll get back to culture tomorrow, and no more doggerel! – KL
I’m mightily impressed by how my hometown has grown culturally in the 20 years since I’ve been gone, although the jazz scene really suffers in terms of supportive venues and especially press. But this town still has a long ways to go, politically and socially. A friend of mine, who is a sociologist, alerted me to the urgency of an upcoming election in which Eyon Biddle and Jose Perez are challenging long-time Common Council incumbents. I’m in no position to make an informed endorsement but moveon.org is backing them. I will refer you to this in-depth article on the germane issues, by my former Milwaukee Journal editor Dominique Paul Noth: http://www.milwaukeelabor.org/in_the_news/article.cfm?n_id=00238
If you want a list of more (and related) suggestions for democratic citizen action, check out this column by Walter Mosley. He’s best known as the author of several black detective book series, such as the Easy Rawlins books (“Devil with the Blue Dress”) but he also authored a wonderful series about an ex-con street philosopher named Socrates Fortlow (the first Fortlow book, “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” was also made into an excellent movie starring Laurence Fishburne [Morpheus in “The Matrix.”] ). And those who saw Mosley read in Milwaukee recently know he’s a funny and brilliant guy. He’s been writing political commentary for quite a while. http://www.thenation.com/article/165117/ten-things-you-can-do-sustain-occupy-movement
Also for a little musical inspiration, try this YouTube below of John Coltrane doing his beautiful dirge “Alabama,” in honor of the four young black girls killed in the Alabama fire Mosley alludes to at the top of his column. If you don’t know, that’s McCoy Tyner on piano, and listen to the end to get the whole Martin Luther King Jr.-inspired effect the video caption refers to. Enjoy, remember, and act. — KL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOjxBuwBUEE
If you can’t access these links, try my RESOURCES page.
OK, you’ve read about “Margin Call” (last posting) and hopefully seen the movie. So you understand that the financial catastrophe wasn’t just about a bunch of evil greedy people, though there’s enough of those. But they’re all caught in the same system that we are. You probably saw the OWS sign “The system isn’t broken, it’s fixed.”
Veteran political observer and communications professor Todd Gitlin has some good ideas about how to extend the Occupy movements into areas of life that might make a difference. In the article I link below, he talks about direct action to stop the illicit foreclosures, auctions and evictions. He talks about “occupy student debt,” a way to help students out of their rigged financial holes. He even suggests the savvy strategic move of winning the attention of corporate media. And remember, it all has to be done nonviolently, maintaining the high road. And then he says “support candidates pledge to push money out of politics ,to make taxes far more progressive, to regulate banks are more stringent” than the Dodd-Frank bill did. It’s about America taking back their country, which is a Tea Party phrase, but that idea can be pursued a lot more smartly and without the Tea Partiers’ moral hypocrisy (or at least confusion). Gitlin says what Americans wait for is “plausible hope.” Yes, but why not be one of the Americans creating that hope instead of just waiting for it? — Kevin Lynch http://www.thenation.com/article/166822/more-protest-movement
This posting is about a culture as far removed from roots or vernacular folk culture as one can imagine. But it is an “uncommon” yet ingrained upper-class culture we’ve been forced to come to grips with. Perhaps we can understand our roots culture, and its proper role, by examining its apparent opposite. Yes, I’m talking about Wall Street, the people who represent the reviled 1%. The film, Margin Call, now out on video, dramatizes how one brokerage firm nearly dissembles while grappling with the realization that all their mortgage-sale earnings will evaporate on the verge of the 2008 market catastrophe.
Jeremy Irons plays the cold-blooded CEO of a stock trading firm in “Margin Call”
What’s fascinating about the film is that it is about people more than cold economics. The excellent acting performances reveal how each market analyst, trader, middle-manager and even the CEO is personally affected by the situation. It starts with an analyst, played by Stanley Tucci, being fired as part of the first office purging in anticipation of tighter times. But nobody knows how suddenly bad things will get because Tucci holds the not-quite-understood secret in a flash drive, which he hands-off to his protégé as he is escorted out of the building, warning him, “Do something with this. But be careful.”
The younger analyst, who is the film’s everyman with a heart, soon figures out what Tucci had been groping towards, that the company holdings’ volatility rates will soon render its losses greater than the company’s entire worth. Tension ratchets up as this explosive information is passed up the chain of command, until the CEO — played pitch perfect by elegantly slimy Jeremy Irons — calls an emergency staff meeting in the middle of the night. Here’s where we see where people stand and how they are affected. Kevin Spacey is the office boss who realizes that the CEO is willing to sell off all these mortgage holdings even though he knows they are now essentially worthless — the ruse that destroyed the lives of countless ordinary Americans who put their faith in banks and the market.
But here’s where the movie gets interesting in surprising ways. Irons tell Demi Moore, one of the risk management analysts, that he needs “a head to feed to the traders” the next morning when everything is sold off and someone has to take the blame. He informs her that she is the sacrificial lamb — the only woman among the higher ups — perhaps symbolic of the patriarchal culture of Wall Street. To no avail, she reminds the boss that she had sent him several warning memos based on Tucci’s accumulating information, a while ago. “We all fucked up,” is Irons’ confidential share-the-blame concession to her.
We begin to see how human responses and decisions play out. Though a fictional film, it’s based on the actual experience of former Merrill Lynch trader Jeff Chandor, the father of the film’s writer and director, J.C. Chandor.
Aside from the drama and the stupendous damage such sell-offs produced, the film is compelling because it doesn’t judge the characters, as actor Zachary Quinto — who plays the young do-the-right-thing analyst – comments in the “special features” commentary. I’ve begun to agree with Quinto. We see plenty of cold-heartedness but ultimately it is survivor’s behavior. They know what is at stake for the company. What about all the unsuspecting people will be hurt by this huge selloff? They are wonderfully signified by the cleaning woman who stands impassively with her cart in an elevator between Moore and a middle manager, who tersely discuss the fateful situation.
CEO Irons recites the dates of each of Wall Street’s market crashes and tells Kevin Spacey how American history repeats itself: “They’re just pieces of paper. It’s not wrong. We can’t help ourselves. We just make money and…there’ll always be the same percentage of winners and losers. Maybe there are more of us today but the percentages stay the same.”
Think what you will about this man’s self-serving historical analysis, and a harsh judgment may be in order because, after all, someone has to take some responsibility for all the greed and massive fraud we still suffer from.
But what most resonates in Irons’ speech is that phrase “We can’t help ourselves.” It implies several different things, depending on your interpretation. It may mean compulsive avarice, a craven lack of moral backbone. Certainly none of these people exhibit the sustained caring for vulnerable humanity shown by the lawyer-boss in Herman Melville’s classic story of Wall Street Bartleby the Scrivener. These contemporary Wall Streeters seem deeply acculturated to their abstracted manipulation of numbers, what one of them says “any crack head could do.”
But Irons’ phrase also can mean that these people — just like anyone affected by the market, which is probably all of us – is caught in a system. While brokers have bought into that system and are rewarded handsomely, the reptilian luxuries of free-market capitalism seem to, time and again, hoist us by our own petard, another implication of Irons’ speech.
One broker explains how readily he spends all his annual earnings — including $76,000 in hookers — so we see that, with their profligate lifestyles and the expense of living in New York, these people are paid just enough to keep coming back to work instead of walking away from this heinous high-stakes game.
You really may want to despise how the CEO administers the company ethos. There are three rules in this business, he says: “Be first, be smarter, or cheat.”
But in his own way he takes his responsibility. “No one will ever trust you again,” Spacey warns him. “You let me deal with that,” Irons replies. Even this man agonizes, as he pounds his head against the wall in the company men’s room after Spacey tells him he won’t go along with the fraudulent sale. You sense, amid his growing desperation, that the CEO is suddenly faced with the cavernous hollowness of his position.
Ultimately the film portrays these people in relation to a bigger picture. Recurring scenes show these panicking characters peering down on sprawling Manhattan from high above. These beautifully wrought moments of contemplative vertigo suggest how the individual hangs suspended in a massive system of commerce that we have created and glorify and perpetuate — at least until the Occupy Wall Street movement began. And here’s where our democratic folk culture rises and, one hopes, can make a difference. It has surely gained the attention of the powers that be.
Margin Call ends with Spacey’s character burying his dead dog in his front yard. He says he dug ditches before he became a stockbroker, but here he also symbolically buries his Wall Street life. The film is not bleakly apocalyptic; rather it seems to ask us to question the system that draws all these smart, talented people into it with the lure of lucre.
Whither social democracy? Economists note that many of the most financially secure advanced nations in the world have essentially socialistic systems. It’s hard to imagine “the land of the free” ever becoming socialistic but our under-regulated hyper-capitalism has gotten us into the mess we’re in. You see in these characters’ anguish a human questioning — that there must be a better way that we can learn from, ways to reduce all this built-in risk.
American ingenuity and resourcefulness is based on creativity but also learning. Learning implies open-mindedness to systems that may offer us wisdom, a chance to survive, and perhaps even thrive — as a society, not just as individuals in a Darwinian existence. If we survive only as individuals what are we left with? So what is our responsibility at this point in time? Watch this powerful movie and see what you think. Let me know.
— Kevin Lynch
BY KEVIN LYNCH
Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider carried Milwaukee to the nether edge of pan-cultural, time-tripping music-making in a recent concert at Alverno’s Pittman Theater. Now we know why Pitchfork.com raved about these guys, and nary a guitarist among them.
Let’s start with Brooklyn Rider, which is classy-cool, not overdoing the hipper-than-thou theatrics that Kronos Quartet sometimes indulges. But this quartet band ain’t four-corner square fuddy-duds. Each player (save the cellist, who still romances his instrument in a loin embrace) performs standing up, unlike traditional or even most other “hip” string quartets. They may not subject their axes to Pete Townshend arm wind-milling, but every once in a while you hear a full-throated ensemble power chord from their discretely amplified instruments.
But such a stunning harmonic attack is no brain-and-body crunch. It’s more a genuine heart palpitator, as in the second movement of the latest Philip Glass string quartet which opened the second half of their concert with a mewling, wailing, bird cry effect, a soulful sonic wave in time and space.
Kalhor, by contrast, does sit – but he doesn’t even use a chair. Foregoing bourgeois conveniences is part of the rigor and ritual of Eastern and, in this case, Middle Eastern music. (Check it out: Brooklyn Rider is collaborating with an Iranian master, undercutting stereotypes of Iran as a bunch of jihadist war mongers. The quartet and Kalhor met in cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble tour).
Intensely focused yet collectively attuned, Kalhor is a compact man, a virtuoso of a four-stringed instrument, the kamancheh, with a gourd-like voice box that, despite its smallness, cuts through the Western string ensemble sonority easily as a lead voice. At times it almost keened, but eloquently.
The concert ranged from “Atasgah,” inspired music by BRider violinist Colin Jacobson’s experiences in Iran (like most non-classical groups, they compose some of their own material) to music drawing from the classical tradition, specifically Beethoven. “Seven Steps” reimagined segments of the German romantic master’s genius into a contemporary mélange befitting, say, today’s Web-surfing sensibility.
But these riders were brave musical expedition guides bent on transporting listeners, after intermission. Again they balanced Western and Persian sources. The Glass quartet — music from the film Bent — characteristically doesn’t travel far harmonically but rather envelops the listener in its ardent sonic direction. Brooklyn Rider plays Glass music like second nature, lending all the sharp and supple dynamics that give the minimalist composer his expansively romantic interest and enchantment. And in this ensemble’s harmonies — both power chords and supple aural massages — reminds the listener of the peerlessly quadrupled expressivity of the string quartet form.
It all led up to this unique quintet’s big “hit,” if you can say that of a half-hour long piece, Kalhor’s remarkable “Silent City.” BRider had recently spoken with the great Indian jazz pianist-composer Vijay Iyer (who’ll return to Alverno for a solo concert on March 10), and noted Iyer’s characterization of music as “necessitating an architectural space for things to happen.” That’s “Silent City” to a T, though it began with the T virtually obliterated.
Like the Glass, “City” is essentially but richly modal, rising at first like the meager embers of devastated urban ruins. Here the composer’s instrument creeps out tentatively amid the quartet’s vast, bleak setting of shifting microtonal textures, a slow emergence somewhat reminiscent of, say, Barber’s great “Adagio for Strings,” rescored as a tonally ambiguous soundtrack to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road. The group’s muted but intensifying pitches uncover a furtive, slightly frightening aura, suggesting a lone surviving consciousness — in the tentative voice of Kalhor’s kamancheh, with a memory haunted by spectral echoes. At one point, the piece begins growing almost like a random seed windblown to a fertile spot; a tree grows in scorched Brooklyn? Actually, Kalhor’s small, vertical instrument — with bulbous base, stalk-like neck and large pegs — resembles a growing plant.
The sonic sun gradually spreads, mournfully illuminating a morning of disabused innocence and pensively posing musical questions: What happened? What did we do to our world? Where do we go from here? The light births a new day and a now-insistent rhythmic sense of human industry. At this point, one sensed the concert had gradually achieved a touch of greatness — certainly a heady, breathtaking majesty to match the inextinguishable hope of a new era of life, amid desolation and death.*
The encore piece, bursting with joyously frenetic purpose, is titled “The Bird,” and depicted an intrepid winged creature “trying to fly to the sun,” Kalhor explained afterwards. In a post-technological world, Nature leads The Way.
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*The recorded version of “Silent City” is enhanced by a bassist and a bodhran percussionist. It would be interesting to hear this ambitious work played by an East-meets-West chamber orchestra.
BTW, BRider has one of the coolest artist websites (www.brooklynrider.com) I’ve seen, with homepage site tabs deftly integrated into a gloriously funky ink pen-and-watercolor cityscape portrait of Brooklyn, and an actual online art gallery.
Remember, blog comments are always welcome!
PABST THEATER, MILWAUKEE — So how’s this for folking it up? Shortly after writing the above posting, I saw Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt sitting on a stage with nothing but their two acoustic guitars and a little table between them with some water bottles — like sitting out on your front porch. This was the folk-music mode in essence. At first, Hiatt mumbled his words and Lovett fumbled his first song, stopping after four lines and saying, “Uh, John, maybe I should leave the singing to you.” But he gathered himself and started singing a completely different song.
So it went, each rummaging around for the next song to sing, and audience folks in the Pabst Theater talking to them randomly and they’d always politely respond. That got out of hand late in the concert when about 40 different requests came raining down on them almost simultaneously. That’s what happens when you cram 800 people onto your front porch. But they were both affable, humorous and charming. I think Lovett’s big hair presses down on his brain too much — he’s a little odd but you can almost imagine how he charmed Julia Roberts into marrying him, at least until he got his haircut and the pressure eased and he temporarily lost his quirky powers, like a goofus Sampson.
But he’s very smart and insightful and always has an aw-shucks ballad to sing. Both men did find their grooves and performed superbly — Hiatt especially traveled deep into his blues-infused story-songs, often pulling a menagerie of moods along with him: “I never felt so free, just my dog and me…how many times can one dog pee?”
So after he sang “All The Way Under” (from his marvelous recent alum Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns), Lovett said, “So we want to know, how low have you really gotten?” Hiatt chuckled and said “I’m still working on that.” Lovett is still workin’ on romance, sort of. He mooed out a courting ballad, written after meeting a beautiful lunch-counter waitress who only had eyes for his buddy. The sorry little kicker: “Now I’m stuck with this song/and I’ll never be able to use it.” For a moment you believed either he was never close to lovely Julia’s league, or that or maybe any of us romantic schlubs might just have a shot at the heart’s glory — if our timing were just right.
Throughout the show, Lovett’s singing remained in its usual expressively hovering register, whereas Hiatt’s ditch-diggin’ voice almost struck its own wormy coffin and then soared with ravaged wails that almost pierced the crying sky bluesmen sing about. I felt sorry for the five (!) different people I’d asked to come along who couldn’t make it (Is it my e-odorant? My third eye?) I had won two tickets from WUWM radio. Well, me and my empty red seat, we soaked up a heapin’ helpin’ of folk-country-blues soul. So satisfied.
I’m Kevin Lynch (or keve2109) from Milwaukee, and welcome to Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak), my new blog. I subtitled it Words, Sounds and Images of Common (and uncommon) Culture. But it could also be Rooting around the Subculture. One of my notions is that subculture these days becomes mainstream culture very quickly, through co-opting or larger forces of consumption that bypass commercial or corporate marketing, which seems good.
So yes, it will be basically a culture blog. I’m a veteran, award-winning arts journalist, writer and visual artist who carries a curious little paradox around inside him, which I like to think of as my little shrunken head, a la Queequeg, one of my cultural heroes, fictional as he is. You see, I’m a lifelong Midwesterner with a hankering for the sea that seems to be part of what keeps my spirits restless. So the “sullen white surf” theme photo above suits my inherent discontent to a “T,” as I suspect it did Herman Melville and his contemporary writers in what Lewis Mumford called “The Golden Age” of American letters. That literary generation has fallen into certain disrepute in some academic quarters but that doesn’t change the quality of their writing. I try to reach across the American spectrum of creative writing but for now I remain fascinated by what appears to be its true Genesis in the mid-1800s — especially Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Dickinson.
As for using this e-medium, I’m just beginning to accept James Fallows contention in a recent Atlantic article that the new media is perhaps “transforming” journalistic communications, by giving people what they want rather than what somebody thinks they need. So this blog won’t be good-for-you hard reporting, though politics will inevitably seep in, and links to good, solid journalism. But I will share if I think you’ll benefit from it in any sense of the word. That’s a fundamental motive for any culture writer, it seems to me.
So even if I do reel in some Melville quotes and perspectives from that era, this blog will be plenty contemporary, I promise with, I hope, trenchant and provocative comments on another interest in American culture that grew into a personal obsession of sorts in recent years. It’s a remarkably encompassing phenomenon that nevertheless I try to hornswaggle with a rusty-sounding brand: North American Roots Music. Maybe lassoing this sprawling phenomenon is a bit like trying to catch tumbling tumble weeds, dancing and sweeping across the Great Plains, and into the Heartland and whirling and twisting back down into the Southwest. So I’ll be wandering and chasing, and pausing to savor the voices in those winds.
So I hope you don’t mind following some of my extended metaphors and shambling similes. I’m tracking down a new generation of singer songwriters – a wonderfully motley crew – who are speaking through their lyrics and music with great care for the composed word. Here is why I think our indigenous vernaculars are serving us better than ever and worth paying attention to. So I also feel a sense of the restless, even slightly bedeviled, wanderer because I’ll put a confession right up front: I’ve always been fascinated by North American roots music but my very difficult (for me) divorce in 2007 cast me along the cruel shoals with countless forsaken spouses. There I rediscovered, and truly appreciated for the first time, Townes Van Zandt’s mournfully poetic soul salve. If you must know, “For the Sake of the Song” seems to nail my marriage like a dolorous Grim Reaper.
But I soon realized this man was right up there with Dylan and Young as a songwriter. I was unable to live without Van Zandt’s music daily for three or four months, something I can’t say about any other artist. Enough said about the marriage and “art therapy” though a few “vernacular voyeurs” I’m sure will proceed to poke around in the psyche of my postings if they must.
Truth is, roots music always had a hold on me in a way that I suspect entangles us all as real Americans, whether we’re aware of it or not. That’s okay, but it’s a reason why I write about it now as much as any art form, or at least try to. I’m really fascinated by the youngest generation of rootsy singer-songwriters who seem to embrace their elder’s style and sensibility while making it their own. I suspect they understand it’s their own heritage as much as their parents. The American song lyric as a medium has matured and grown painfully with our vast, often self-deluding but empowering “sense of destiny,” like our country’s whole, hoary democratic experiment. So I’m interested in lyrics that you can (thankfully) hear — as its own literary form, as well as the culture the songs and styles have spawned. Some of the forbearers I may mention include of course the aforementioned Dylan, Van Zandt and Young, and Robbie Robertson, Joni Mitchell, John Prine, Guy Clark, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Leonard Cohen, Jackson Browne,Patti Smith, Lou Reed, John Lennon, Tom Waits, Warrren Zevon, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, Phil Ochs, Paul Simon, Robert Hunter, John Hiatt, Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, the individuals and “super” collectives of The Flatlanders and The Highwaymen, and the Brits Richard Thompson and Nick Drake.
A second-generation, very roughly calculated, includes Rosanne Cash, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Jim Lauderdale, Bill Camplin, Nanci Griffith, Robert Earl Keen, Patty Griffin, Dar Williams, Buddy and Julie Miller, the Jayhawks, Mary Chapin Carpenter.
I’m a fan of virtually all these artists but the ones that really excite me for the future are the youngest ones whom I feel grateful for carrying on and reinvigorating these traditions rather than discarding them. Who do I mean? There are several literal and worthy offspring like Jakob Dylan, Justin Townes Earle, Shooter Jennings and Hank Williams III and Holly Williams and Pieta Brown (the daughter of the great Iowa troubadour Greg Brown and step daughter of the marvelous Iris DeMent, who I hope still writes when she’s so moved). James McMurtry also fits the literary offspring category even if his brilliant father Larry doesn’t write songs. Among those simply gifted young songwriter-performers are the remarkable Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Hayes Carll, Ryan Bingham, Dierks Bentley, Laura Viers, Peter Mulvey, Jeffrey Foucault, Alison Krauss, Diana Jones, The Avett Brothers, the Uncle Tupelo gang, Donna the Buffalo, The Cowboy Junkies, Josh Ritter, The Pines, Slaid Cleaves, The Counting Crows, the Old 97s’ Rhet Miller, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, again, to name only some notables.
You get a sense of this new generation.
I don’t mention deep pioneers of roots music but of course they range from the Carter family to Hazel Dickens, Woody Guthrie and the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, etc. etc.
Then there’s the blues revival — absolutely seminal to roots per se but in terms of songwriting and original performance of good two revival generations include Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, Paul Butterfield, John Hammond Jr., Al Green, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Ted Hawkins, Taj Mahal, Jack Bruce, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, Chris Smither, Paul Germania, Robert Cray, Rory Block, Trucks and Tedeschi, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Chris Whitley, Kelly Joe Phelps, Otis Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Nelson, KoKo Taylor, Magic Sam, Sue Foley, Robert Randolph, Mose Allison, Eric Bibb, Keb Mo, and many more.
Forgive my listing all this musical laundry. I only hope it feels (or will feel) eternally fresh for you. This is something I feel is alive and moving and of course very human and yet as elusive in ways as tumbling tumbleweeds, which is also why I love its unassuming nature as art.
My seemingly belated conspicuous arrival at roots music (I interviewed Bill Monroe in 1982, and covered plenty of all roots music intermittently) stems from my critical faculties (as a long time “fine arts” critic and jazz writer) or perhaps snobbery, some might suspect, concerning “folk music,” which can be the equivalent of karaoke music but without the courage of a little alcohol, and thus can still be insufferable and as self-important as Miss Piggy on a very tall mound of something ripe.
So I will be commenting on whatever mode of cultural expression — the high, low and in between — that seems interesting and timely, or timeless. Yet some of the 20th century’s most compelling and enduring music has emitted from so-called “folk” artists, who almost by definition often freely mine more specific vernaculars like blues, rock ‘n roll, R&B, country and bluegrass. As Louis Armstrong famously said “all music is folk music, horses can’t sing.” Thus, I happily set aside any leftover snootiness and gobble up wonderfully gritty and caloric glories of American art wherever reaches my senses.
Of course, my taste has its limits and I hear on the radio any number of folksy recording “artists” who sound too saccharine, wimpy and precious, as if ingratiating themselves into facile pop marketability. But I see this commercial impulse as a reflection of how roots music as a nominal subculture is starting to become a large part of a musical mainstream.
As you may know, at least popular two movies which are crucial to roots music’s revival such as it is: “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “The Blues Brothers,” the latter which I hold dear to my heart because my old white AMC Hornet putts along, I swear, in the background on an off ramp in the closing chase scene, filmed on Milwaukee’s then-unfinished “freeway to nowhere.”
Cruising slowly on an off ramp seems like a symbolically appropriate vantage point for a cultural blogger.
So please, give me a holler as I try to drive straight and keep my eye on the cultural panorama at the same time. At times “look out!” might be the best response. But at least I’m driving in a rusted-out (but American made) metaphor rather than blabbing on a cell behind a real wheel.
So speak up, anyway you please, as long as you’re civil and clean enough for our friendly sponsors. And if you’re on a Smart phone in your car, be smart. Pull over. If you’re dead already, blame me.
— Kevin Lynch