Spy vs. Spy (vs. Spy) vs. Trump?

 

Review: Spy vs. Spy: The Big Blast (Special Collector’s Edition) and The New Yorker, April 21, 2025

 

I rarely take “selfies” but I couldn’t resist this time, given that I have these two current issues of classic magazine fare (hurry, the Spy Vs. Spy collection is only on newsstands until May 23rd!) – and an apt-enough “Spy” get-up.

The one-two punch of these two great publications pretty much  knocked me on the floor (literally, in the above photo).

Allow me to get up, dust myself off, and explain.

I’ve always been a fan of John le Carre, the British master of literary espionage novels, having read most of his books about George Smiley (or George :-), as my goddam voice dictation understands his name), and recently watched the brilliant and harrowing mini-series adaptation of Le Carre’s novel, The Night Clerk, about a callow, mid-30s hotel night clerk who pretty much allows his libido to get him caught up in deadly international intrigue.

Of course, as a youth, my brow drooped quite a bit lower, to the delicious depths of Mad Magazine which featured in every issue, “Spy vs Spy” on the back page, as I recall. 1

Some of the best of these one-page cartoons also involved a third spy (“Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy”), a voluptuous female who would always foil the excessively testosterone-driven male spies.

Here’s the very first appearance of the so-called “Grey Spy” in the series, according to a online fanzine:

Spy vs Spy vs Spy MAD #73

Such triangulation of deceit has actually been a trope of espionage fiction for a long time: Think of James Bond’s famous opening line to any femme fatale he invariably beds (“My name is Bond. James Bond”). He’s sure that line, along with his square-jawed movie-star looks, are all you need (is not love). Of course, she knows that’s about all she needs to get him hooked into her deviousness.

So, yes, I guess they were trafficking in female stereotyping. But triangulation of deceit also brings to mind another male deceiver’s infamous line: “I did not have, sexual relations, with that woman.”

Young readers Google that quote and you will be duly instructed, in some of what power (real and perceived) breeds.

And though Le Carre’s shy and retiring George Smiley was too old and dumpy to fall for a female double agent, that’s a little bit of what happens in that author’s The Night Clerk — even if Le Carre’s dazzling, almost Byzantine, plot easily transcends that cliché.

So, I was struck by the synchronicity of the latest New Yorker magazine, which arrived a couple days after I bought the Spy collection. On that cover, the two hapless spies are tied to a globe-sized bomb which, the mag’s backside reveals, is being lit by, you guessed it, the snickering “grey” woman spy. On The New Yorker cover, in a five-scene sequence, Donald Trump (a satire by Frank Viva, titled “Hot Air”) blows up the whole world like a big balloon, which he proceeds to dance with (we know how well he can dance!), twirl and bounce with his big butt, before the whole thing explodes in his face.

And to think he castigated Ukraine President Zelenskyy for flirting with World War III ! The whole hot-air overheated world is lucky some of Trump’s staffers tugged on his leash enough to temporarily choke-back his globular tar-riffing. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported, and The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells seconded: “The tariffs had been so hastily designed that they imposed duties of 10% on Antarctic islands inhabited only by penguins and seals, and placed a duty of nearly 50% on Cambodia, a producer of cheap textiles that is too poor to plausibly buy much of what we produce.”

We kid you not. Trump’s kidding only one person. Or maybe two others: Harvard grad Vee-Pee J.D. Vance and “genius” Elon Musk.

Wallace-Wells continues, “The markets predictably plunged, wiping out more than $6 trillion in value.”…J.P. Morgan Chase’s CEO predicts the ‘likely outcome’ would be a recession. The labor economist Aridrajit Dube wrote, ‘never in human history has a whimsical decision by a single person destroyed so much wealth.’ ”

So what is the world thinking and feeling right now? How much is Vladmir Putin flexing his greasy, crooked grin?

Now, also imagine what disarray America’s current CIA spycraft may be now, with the chainsaw-weilding Elon Musk gleefully ripping into every government agency he can heedlessly reach.

The third brief article brief in this New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” feature was about cartoonist Robert Crumb, who visits the Whitney Museum with the interviewer while chatting a bit about a brand-new biography by Dan Nadel, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life.

Lo and behold, a copy of the Crumb biography appeared on my front doorstep, Monday.

So I can blame my old high school pal — a publicity-shy guy preferring to be known as “my Crumby friend” — for this painful and delightful distraction. We are both cartoonists, of sorts, ourselves, and friends since plying such dubious artistic skills in The Poster Club at Marquette High School, back in the day.

Speaking of cartooning, here’s my graphite-and-pastel Trump caricature, now a protest poster I hoped I’d never need to use again. But I did at the “Hands Off!” protest of Trump/Musk in downtown Milwaukee on April 5, with 9,000 other people (more on that event in a coming post).

Ah, but the truth is, I had been toying with the idea of the spy get-up selfie since The New Yorker arrived.

To deter me from my seemingly interminable book projects, this meaty tome of “Crumbs” is a very “early birthday gift” from “Crumby,” who was probably afraid I would buy it before he could gift it, a reasonable fear. My birthday is not until July 1.

Plus (really full disclosure), my housemate is not here today to try to shame me out of such semi-foolishness (I did work fairly hard yesterday on my jazz book’s permission requests. The book’s excess of quotes has become a bit of an albatross for a project with, sadly, no publisher’s deadline.)

I feel a bit better about this “confession,” akin to Crumb cooperating with his biographer only  if he didn’t gloss the artist’s flaws and obsessions. We were both raised in Catholic families though his was a considerably harder slog than mine, as the biographer quickly reveals.

The new Spy vs. Spy collection features the strip originator’s Antonio Prohias’s close friend, Sergio Aragone (a fellow MAD cartoonist) drawing a delightful five-page story of Antonio’s life. Many of his original (b&w) cartoons have since been colorized by Carrie Strachan, and this is a 96-page, slick-paper, high-gloss production. Yet what goes around comes around (in such a manner), as MAD, and this collection, now includes the black and white stylings of the current heir to the Spy ‘toon job, Peter Kuper.

Current MAD editor John Ficarra posits that part of the original MAD’s appeal was the cheap paper it was printed on, to make it seem ” ‘underground’ and tacitly forbidden, and therefore more desirable” to young readers.” I’d sort of concur, though my folks were enlightened enough to not forbid me MAD. It ran “proudly” black and white from 1955 to 2000. Toward the end of that “proud” era, another MAD editor quipped “MAD looks like it was printed in Mexico in 1959.”

Such inky grubbiness was likely part of Crumb’s thinking when he self-produced his first “underground” ZAP Comix in the mid-late 1960s. One my favorites of his early surreal drawings, is from another boho rag, The East Village Other, titled “Burned Out,” for which they one-tone colored for its cover, illustrated in the Crumb biography.   The East Village Other Counterculture Newspaper February 1970 Robert Crumb Burned Out Cover - Mark Lawson Antiques

Courtesy Mark Lawson Antiques. 

So, one more synchronicity in the smallish world — it suddenly seems — of cartoon satire: I had finally re-subscribed to The New Yorker again, after decades of refraining, because the cartoons are as good as ever. Of course, the typically excellent, sometimes Pulitzer-winning, thumb-sucker lead articles are still awfully long.

So I need to pick and choose among them, or my authorial name will always be, pre-emptively, Mud.

And here’s my new Crumb book which I’ll surely finish the 400 pages (plus notes) of long before I finish the two doorstops underneath it. 2

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  1. You can still subscribe to MAD, for one year of six issues for $19.99 “CHEAP!”

2. I was almost startled at the mounting synchronicity of this column’s subjects as soon as I turned a few more pages of Crumb. Turns out, MAD magazine would soon hit the adolescent Crumb like a lightnight bolt. Author Dan Nadel describes this even more provactively: “Seeing and then handling the magazine altered Robert’s brain chemistry as surely as LSD would a decade later. He would never normalize…

“MAD” was first a comic book and then a magazine cranked out by artists without pretensions to literature or acceptance; it could tell its audience that the world was a lie and that the only answer was all out cultural anarchy.
“MAD was effective because it was noisy, teeming, coming-out-of-its-skin, yet incredibly sophisticated, sustained by beautifully-crafted cartooning straight from working class Yiddishkeit Brooklyn.”
Crumb himself continues such raving: “I began to use my own free judgment about things. Being cast out, though painful, was a liberating process open bracket [MAD‘s] critique was coming out of a kind of craziness, and they didn’t have a real strong analysis of what they were criticizing, they were just laughing at it all. It was this irreverent nose-thumbing at the straight-backed hypocrisy of these old American values, which were hypocritical and try to brush all the bad stuff under the rug.”

(Crumb,” Scribner, 2025, 32-33)

 

 

 

The stench of Musk grows as he heads for Wisconsin and doles out $2 million to two state voters willing to sign an “anti-activist judge” petition

Note the lock-step brain-lock message on Elon Musk’s cap. This is how authoritarianism works. It typically leads to overt fascism and the death of a democratic government. Photo courtesy Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel 

The smell of musk is an acquired taste, and I don’t mind it alt all. Yet the stench of Elon Musk grows stronger and more wretchedly foul each day, especially as the Wisconsin Supreme Court election nears, on April 1.

Billionaire Musk will hold a rally in Green Bay Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m. at a yet-undisclosed lovcation, less than 48 hours before polls open to give a campaign “talk” for Republican candidate and Trump suck-up Brad Schimel. He’ll also hand out a million dollars to the second preson who commits to having voted agaist “activist judges” by signing a petition of his. He’s already doled to a cool milion to one person. His definition of “activist judges”?

Trump has indicated that would be any who have rued for the illegality and uncontitutionality of any Trump executive action ot destructive acts by his toadie fellows, such as Musk and his DOGE gang.

“Entrance is limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court election,” Musk wrote, though he did not specify how that would be verified.

Musk also wrote that he would present the second of two $1 million checks “in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.”

Stop to think how corrupt and lame that reasoning is. He’ll have thousands willing to sign and vote for Schimel but only two get the big dough, I suppose as a symbolic gesture of his financial power to do all he can to buy this election for the Trump toadie in waiting.

Sure, the two million bucks isn’t lame in itself, it’s pure financial power. But it is morally depraved, in this action. Unless you think it’s cool for one person to date to donate $20 million to influence for the outcome of a state judicial race. Musk is the richest man in the world in a society where a small handful of billionaires have more wealth than the financial bottom half of American citizens, as Sen. Bernie Sanders pointed out recently .

Schimel resurfaces debunked concerns about ballot counting in Milwaukee

Circuit Judge Brad Schimel. Courtesy AP

The race is being closely watched nationally as an early indicator of mid-term election trends. Locally it will determine the ideological balance of the court, which now has a one-seat advantage for liberals.

Musk, a close ally of President Donald Trump, personally and via two groups has poured about $20 million into the race to back conservative candidate Brad Schimel. Finance law allows unlimited donations of they are given to a group other than the canidate, typically the candidate’s political party (Republican) which then passes it “legally” on to the candidate. How corrupt is that? Thanks also to the Supreme Court ruling on “Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission” of 2010.

We should prepare to act swiftly. As soon as word breaks of where Musk appears in Green Bay, we must go there to protest him.

Here’s the report from the Journal-Sentinel:

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/28/musk-coming-to-wisconsin-ahead-of-tuesday-state-supreme-court-election/82702597007/

Liberal Judge Susan Crawford enters race for Wisconsin Supreme Court with majority at stake | AP News

Dane County Judge Susan Crawford. Courtesy AP

On a more positive note we can do all we can to support and elect Judge Susan Crawford, Schmiel’s opponent. She has an admirable track record of humane, common sense rullings in seveal judicial positions she’s held.

Impressive, to me, is this editorial endorsing her. Why? Because it’s not from some flaming lefty, it’s written by three Wisconsin bsiness leaders who explain how Crawford will be much better than Schimel for the state’s economy. Please check out this editorial, also published in the Journal-Sentinel (Ideas section):

https://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/2025/03/11/wisconsin-supreme-court-spring-election-judge-crawford-economy/81179495007/

Thanks for reading, caring and voting.

wisconsin supreme court

State Supreme Court candidates Crawford and Schimel before their debate in March. AP

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The Band, Canada’s greatest musical group, illuminates the profound fallacy of Donald Trump’s intentions toward our northerly neighbor

Editor’s note: I’m reposting this revised version of this article for greater historical accuracy, political urgency, and hopefully reader enhancement, with additional song lyrics. It also reflects my hope that more readers take the time to listen to “Acadian Driftwood,” linked here, even if such hopes stand on the ever-shifting sands of ideals.

All praise The Band!

Acadian driftwood, gypsy tailwind

they call my home the land of snow

canadian cold front moving in

What a way to ride, Oh what a way to go

It’s still hard to understand Donald Trump’s increasingly toxic and nakedly imperialistic attitude towards Canada, America’s closest ally, especially when right-wing talk show host Laura Ingraham can’t even get him to pause to consider his position (See article below).

Because our own American attitudes toward Canada may be ambiguous and somewhat ignorant, I was really struck by the ongoing power, beauty and magnificence of a song composed by The Band’s Robbie Robertson, “Acadian Driftwood,” to convey the humanity of the Canadian experience, without overly romanticizing it.

The current situation with Canada brought it to mind. It is among Robertson’s indelible “history” songs, one of his true specialties.

Set at the end of the French-Indian war, it is probably my favorite song by The Band, which was Bob Dylan’s first regular backup band. The group and songwriter also recorded the legendary The Basement Tapes together. I’m amazed how the song almost always moves me to tears, even though I’m a native Wisconsinite.

The Acadians are a minority of Canada descended from the French who settled in the New France colony of Acadia in the 17th and 18th centuries.

During the French and Indian War (known in Canada as The Seven Years’ War),[10] British colonial officers suspected that Acadians were aligned with France, after finding some Acadians fighting alongside French troops at Fort Beauséjour. Though most Acadians remained neutral during the war, the British, together with New England legislators and militia, carried out the Great Expulsion (Le Grand Dérangement) of the Acadians between 1755 and 1764. They forcefully deported approximately 11,500 Acadians from the maritime region. Approximately one-third perished from disease and drowning.[11] In retrospect, the result has been described as an ethnic cleansing of the Acadians from Maritime Canada. 1

It didn’t help that not even French-speaking Canadians could understand their version of the French language. Those who settled in New Orleans became known as Cajuns, an Americanization of Acadian.

So it’s a song about how that war led to their exile as a group. This parallels, of course, the experience of Native Americans, if not African-Americans, and how such groups profoundly formed and shaped our national culture and identity.

Thus, “Driftwood” eloquently helps to clarify the strong, proud and tragic bi-lingual identity of the nation — if perhaps more modest than America’s, no less deep, with a history older than ours. The illustrated YouTube version of the song shows Canadian cities dating back to the 1700s.

Reams more have been written to help assert the identity of Canada, even as this song carries the great weight of irony, in that it reflects the perhaps universal stain of discrimination against a given group of people.

To me the point is clear: That we might learn from our failures as humans. Canada seems a nation that has learned better than others. Accordingly, the notion that this nation would be receptive to being reduced to “the 51st state” of the U.S. seems laughable. Trump’s current heavy tariffs aginst Canadian imports further strains the national relationship.

About the song, Barney Hoskyns, author of Across the Great Divide: The Band in America, explains: “drawing on Longfellow’s epic Evangeline, which actually mentioned the ‘driftwood’ from wrecked Acadian ships in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, (Robertson) centered his saga around one uprooted family forced to sail down the East Coast in search of a new home. From the opening acoustic guitar chords, immediately reinforced by Garth Hudson’s haunting martial chorus of bagpipes and piccolos, the song carried all the weight of an ancient woe”:

The war was over and the spirit was broken.

The hills were smoking as the men withdrew.

We stood on the cliffs and watched the ships

slowly sink into their rendezvous.

They signed a treaty and our homes were taken,

 Loved ones forsaken, they didn’t give a damn.

Try to raise a family, end up the enemy

Over what went down on the Plains of Abraham…

The Band’s three lead singers, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Levon Helm, take turns narrating the verses, and provide some of their most radiant vocal harmonizing. Then there’s the group’s greatest virtuoso, multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson.

The non-pareil critic Greil Marcus observed:

“Hudson had never played with such imagination, or with deceptive anonymity…What Randy Newman got from the string section on his luminous and tragic ‘Louisiana 1927,’ Hudson gets on his own…with supreme delicacy, he wraps his sound around The Band, with a warmth of spirit that may well prove to be what this album is best remembered for.” 2

Four of the five bandmembers were Canadian. Levon Helm was from Arkansas. Hudson, the last surviving member, died in January of 2025. *

Sadly, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have also urged Canada to consider joining the US. “We are all too dumbfounded to acknowledge it,” but Trump is serious about annexing Canada, wrote Michael A.Cohen in an MSNBC.com column. He believes a punishing trade war will force Canadians to surrender their sovereignty, and reportedly told former prime minister Justin Trudeau that the 1908 treaty finalizing the border between the two countries must be revised.

Trump wants to go down in history as a president who vastly expanded US territory to include Canada and Greenland. Trump’s obsessive threats to annex these nations is “not a negotiated employee.” He wants these countries as trophies to satisfy “his narcissistic needs.”

Americans may or may not understand the profundity of their neighboring country’s sense of identity in all the complexity this song implies. So the emotional undercurrents of such a song should speak volumes — especially to a nation like ours which is formed with a fabric strengthened by many minorities and, despite their great suffering, their commitment to this nation.

In Canada today, Acadians are generally treated with respect and recognition, particularly in French-speaking communities where they have significant cultural and political influence, according to AI overview.

Thus the value of experiencing an authentically Canadian voice such as that of “Acadian Driftwood.” The song’s gently swaying rhythmic melody helps pull the listener into the yearning underlying the Acadians’ long, hard exodus.

I’m also deeply struck by the song’s lovely closing verse, which is sung in French. I never bothered to learn the translation until I wrote this article:

Sais tu, Acadie, j’ai  mal du pays

[You know, Acadia, I long for the country (I am homesick)]

Ta neige, Acadie, fait des larmes au soleil

[your snow Acadia, makes tears in the sun (or for the sun)]

J ‘arrive Acadie, teedle um, teedle um, teedle ohh

[I am arriving Acadia (or I am coming Acadia)]

Thus, in gradual waves, over many years, I’ve come to understand why “Acadian Driftwood” remains haunting. We are blessed to have Robbie Robertson’s poetic lyrics and music, and The Band’s beautifully timeless delivery thereof. “Driftwood” is yet another symbol of the human transience of the experience of the Americas as a continent that strives to sustain democratic wholeness of spirit and community as much as it exploits and lets it bleed. This story has played out across this nation’s checkered past. As long as we allow the imperialistic impulse to reinvigorate itself, pain and loss will follow in its wake.

The song is also the sort of reminder that might rekindle the strength of the liberal arts in our educational structures, as a renewed pathway to the long-delayed ideals of the better angels Abraham Lincoln implored us to champion.

These weary travelers were pushed along their wandering way by a “gypsy tailwind.” Like them, we can still hope, believe, and press forward with our mission.

This YouTube recording of the song includes the full lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=te7KW4K-00E.

Here’s the article about Trump and Canada: https://www.yahoo.com/…/trump-reveals-stunning-reason…

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*thanks to an article by Peter Viney, a scholar and archivist of The Band, for further insight which aided this revised version of this blog post.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadians

2. “Acadian Driftwood” is from the Band’s album Northern Lights, Southern Cross. Greil Marcus reviewed the album in Creem in 1975. The song is also available on The Band’s Greatest Hits though that categorizing is questionable, as it remains an underappreciated song to this day.

 

“First they came for the socialists…” Time to remember and speak up.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
This quote is attributed to the prominent German pastor Martin Niemöller.
The first line is my new regular Facebook profile quote.
America is being profoundly threatened by similar Fascist powers attempting to destroy our democratic government and causing unfathomable harm to immigrants in America! 
The worst perpetrator is Elon Musk, an unelected pseudo-president whom Trump has given outrageous powers of indescriminate destruction in the guise of “efficiency.”
My downstairs neighbor, a long time ROTC recruiter with three children, has already lost his regular job to Trump’s draconian cuts and hopes to get another job out of government.
Trump very easily gives up his powers to appealing “power men,” this one who shamelessly uses his child as a prop, to cover for his moral degradation. Disgusting, and incredibly dangerous. 
For all his demogogue’s charisma to too many common people, Trump lacks the aptitude to actually deal with bureaucratic matters of governing. He now simply follows closely the radical conservative directives of Project 2025, which he had nothing to do with the crafting of.
This situation is similar to Trump’s recent acqueiscence to Putin about Ukraine, which has shocked all of Europe.
Of course, Trump has completely ignored his pledges to the common Americans who elected him. His approval ratings are declining already.  
“First they came for…” has been part of the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since its opening in 1993. Initially, Niemöller’s words were part of a text panel. Today, they are prominently featured on a wall as the final words of the exhibition. They serve as an indictment of passivity and indifference during the Holocaust.
Time to contact an elected leader and organize. The Democrats have been way too passive in the face of the Second Trump Administration. 
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All reactions:

John Ehlers

Reliving Moments in Time with Stan Getz

 

Stan Getz twice revised. For good reason I’d say.

Why now? Why Stan Getz now? I’d meant to post this on his birthday, February 2, but got sidetracked. Still, I post because this remains his birthday month, and because he’s a voice in time and beyond it, a voice within time and forever. Wherever I go, I’ve come to know, I yearn to hear him, and all he has to say.

I also share a warm moment with him, forever.

I understand now, as well as a non-saxophonist can, what John Coltrane meant when he said of Getz, “We’d all sound like that if we could.” Coltrane was, among other things, a supreme master of balladeering, where many saxophonists make their bid for a sound as beautiful as possible.

My own analogue to Coltrane’s indirect superlative: I would carry Getz’s sound with me further than any other instrument’s, if forced to forsake all but one. Maybe it’s a Sophie’s choice between Getz and Miles Davis.

As a relatively young music journalist, I had already reviewed a Getz performance at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery for The Milwaukee Journal, a highlight among many superb artists I heard and reviewed there. Two years later, I interviewed him in his Chicago hotel room, then wrote a feature previewing a Getz performance at a Rainbow Summer concert in Milwaukee. There I met him again afterwards and, though brief, his thanks for the article seemed authentic. Then he surprisingly asked me to accompany him walking to his nearby hotel room, under one small condition.

Would I please carry his saxophone for him? After the performance, he was fatigued, partly the byproduct of years of abuse of his body with drugs and alcohol. He was only 57.

I accepted the task gladly, and the moment soon swelled into a thrill. I gripped and hoisted the case of one of the world’s most revered artistic instruments, beside its owner and artmaker. It inspired a short poem, “Bossa Not So Nova.”

So, I’ve written about Getz in three modes but, mea culpa, it still doesn’t seem enough.

You see, lately I’ve revisited him upon buying a used copy of the Getz musical biography Nobody Else But Me, by Dave Gelly. It discourses across the artist’s career with close readings of numerous Getz recordings, his legacy beyond memories, as he died in 1991.

This excellent book prompted me to dig out an array of Getz recordings. As I write, I’m listening to him essay “Infant Eyes,” an exquisite ballad by another giant of the tenor sax, Wayne Shorter, and each long whole note unfurls with delicious tenderness and knowing delicacy.

Here’s a link to Getz’s version of “Infant Eyes,” from the album Moments in Timehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvr_BrW_xk0

I couldn’t have responded to this recording much earlier than a couple years ago, when I obtained a copy of this album, recorded live by Getz’s Quartet in 1976, but not released until 2016 on Resonance, a label specializing in what I’d call “jazz archeology.”

And there’s more affinity between Getz and Shorter than a few tunes in Getz’s repertoire. The sound of their voices resonates similarly, an exquisitely soft vibration, a singing like a distinctly masculine bird that — warbles and vibratos aside — can hold a note like a distant horizon of destiny. Both saxophonists have lived lives deeply shadowed by tragedy, likely informing their profound sensibilities.

Indeed now, the tune playing is “The Cry of the Wild Goose,” by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and it belies one misplaced reservation I held about Getz in the past.

He disabused me of it when I saw him in 1982 at the Jazz Gallery. But I’m referring to back in the mid-1960s when he broke into public awareness with his lilting bossa nova luminosities. He could hold and caress a note as if it were palpable and breathing which, with him, it truly was. Such audible tenderness enchanted me as much as any other single jazz artist did with one recording, Getz/Gilberto. Created, arranged, and recorded by virtually all Brazilian musicians, the album racked up unprecedented sales for a jazz recording (2 million copies in 1964) and became the first non-American album to win a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, in 1965.

And sure enough, right now with Horace Silver’s “Peace” (also from Moments in Time), Getz is beguiling yet again. But back during the bossa nova craze, for all my admiration, I doubted whether Getz was capable of anything approaching what I call “The Cry.”

I do hear a cry in the “wild goose cry” tune I’d just heard, but I’m referring to a sound often heard among saxophonists in the 1960s, during the same time Getz lulled and seduced with “The Girl from Ipanema.”

The notion of “The Cry” is the expressionism that numerous saxophonists especially began manifesting during that period of social upheaval and raised consciousness over racial injustice. It’s a heavily freighted topic and subtext. So perhaps its unsurprising that a naturally lyrical white saxophonist isn’t easily associated with it. Nevertheless, over the years, the true and extraordinary range of Getz’s expressive power expanded, and his version of “The Cry” arose, as such a striking contrast to his inherently singing style that it carried the weight of striking effects, like a sculptor’s chisel discharging chards and sparks, to convey how life can force us to extremes of feeling and response.

To me, Getz seemed to be universalizing the plight and poignance conveyed in “The Cry,” most often associated with African-American musicians. This is not to minimize the racial suffering those artists endured and expressed, but to find the shared humanity in it. Getz’s suffering might be arguably his own demons’ making more than of a cruel society built on systemic racism. As a Russian Jew, he may have ancestral instincts of suffering and class oppression hounding his psyche. Accordingly, he seems a different sort of expressive animal — “Nobody Else But Me” as the biography’s title seems to borrow from his voice. The simplicity of the declaration also may reflect Getz’s uniqueness, his fingerprint identity, his sonic originality as a pied piper whom, when heard, we still feel compelled to follow, decades after bossa nova first sailed across waves and valleys. Years after his last living breath.

Gelly insightfully notes a great irony, how the drugs and liquor might’ve facilitated an “alpha state” in which, Getz explained, “the less you concentrate the better. The best way to create is to get in the alpha state…what we would call relaxed concentration.”

Such can be the price of art. Does that make it ill-begotten? Illegitimate?

Nay, I say. Thank the music gods for his voice, retrieved and captured.

Stan Getz and Astrid Gilberto in Berline 1966.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVdaFQhS86E

Finally, here is my revised version of “Bossa Not So Nova.”

Bossa Not So Nova

Fattening and fifty-seven, Stan Getz

sweats out a melody, red-faced.

The sax sings effortlessly.

“Hey thanks for the article,
I gotta walk to the Hyatt,
can you carry my horn?” he croaks.
The sax sings light blue.

Young and tan, and tall and lovely
the girl in knee socks walks and sways.
And Stan stops his sax, and walks and goes,
“Ahhhh.”

It ain’t so much man appraising sweet youth.

Or it’s that too, with a clear trace of chagrin.

“I’m beat,” his cigarette breath bellows softly. “Just go slow.
Hey can you find a doctor?
My bass player needs one.”
His bass player?

We walk along the Milwaukee River
at 10 PM Sunday.
Is there a doctor in the river?
They’re all on-call, sleepin’ or smokin’
in a big, green, long-and-cold halllll.

Stan wonders about Mader’s, is it open do I know?
His belly rumbles southern volcanos.
The sax sings effortlessly, but just not really at me,

no, right from its case like the wind,

in her hair, in her long and lust-erous hair .

Tall and tan and young and handsome,
the boyish man from Ipanema is wheezin’

while a woman somewhere dreams…
to the old scratchy side that goes, Ahhh.

The sax singing ever so softly

as in a morning sunrise,

on a tide-swept beach full of guys…

(tenor sax solo to fade-out)

  • Stan Getz’s saxophone case was used to store his ashes after he died of liver cancer in 1991. His ashes were then scattered into the ocean off the coast of Marina del Ray, California.

– Kevin Lynch (Kevernacular), 1988

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I’m hardly the only person to poeticise Getz. I imagine numerous have. One who did it as beautifully as anyone is Jim Hazard, a poet from Milwaukee who served as my primary committee-member when I did my masters in creative writing at UW-Milwaukee.

Here’s my little remembrance of Jim and his Getz poem:

Note: James Hazard was a very gifted writer and a dedicated jazz cornetist who died in 2012. (disclosure: he was a professor of mine in grad school, 22 years ago. He was a warm, funny, soulful and deeply supportive teacher, and continued to champion my career efforts over the years. He loved especially Chet Baker and Stan Getz, among many jazz musicians) 

 

 

Writer and cornetist Jim Hazard with his spouse of 38 years, poet Susan Firer.

Coincidentally or not, Hazard and I both wrote Stan Getz poems. Hazard’s, “A True Biography of Stan Getz,” is great modern poetry, from this 1985 collection New Year’s Eve in Whiting Indiana, a masterful book-length ode to his hometown, shedding light on myriad shards and stories of naked, radiantly quirky humanity obscured by grimy smokestacks.

Jim’s poem suggests how Getz’s inimitable saxophone style channeled the romantic impulse in the young Hazard. My Getz poem is based on an actual encounter with Stan Getz (1927-1991), and quotes from his hit song “The Girl from Ipanema.”

Here are excerpts from:

A True Biography of Stan Getz

By James Hazard

“When you change the modes of music, the society changes.” — Confucius, via Gary Snyder

“Place yourself in the background.”, rule one , “An Approach to Style” — Strunk and White

I. 2013 Davis Ave., Whiting, Indiana

The place of his first grade appearance, 1950 or 1951. I was doing the Forbidden in the bathroom: listening to the radio while I bathed, heedless of electrocution and hoping for a jazz record , on the rhythm-and-blues Gary radio station.

Stan Getz played “Strike Up the Band” and I was heart-struck. I was already a heart-wreck, having seen Gene Tierney, her face hitting the screen as a flash flood in LAURA…

(Hearing for the first time that sound, the long and many noted phrases of it, but the sound itself carrying those long phrases out to the ends of breath as if Stan Getz’s lungs and heart would fall in on themselves, wreckage. And Gene Tierney filled one entire wall of the Hoosier Theater and like the bathroom radio – electric, fatal — could not be touched.)…

__________

 

Jake Heggie’s opera adaptation of “Moby-Dick” is coming to the stage, very soon.

Carmen

Thar she blows!

Aye, he rises. He rises again.

Those who recently attended the visually rapturous film version of “Moby-Dick” by Wu Tsang and superbly accompanied live by Present Music in Milwaukee, take note of this:

Moby Dick does not go away. He haunts us all. The esteemed composer Jake Heggie‘s opera version of “Moby-Dick” will be staged by the Metropolitan Opera, in early March! 1.

Here’s the lowdown:

https://www.metopera.org/season/2024-25-season/mobydick/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIhs_ZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHQutuCSAtTIu7X7A7T0tgOuLbEdbW-MP_JMkIEhvF2vgnJMhUXlR7nX5aw_aem_09aQO04EJx1dnZ1fkfhSig

Moby-Dick

Photos from the World Premiere of Heggie’s Moby-Dick at the The Dallas Opera, 2010

_____________

  1. Jake Heggie is best known for his opera adaptation of the riveting and Academy Award-winning film Dead Man Walking, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

 

Historian Timothy Snyder reveals the moment’s urgency pending a meeting in Munich on the Ukraine-Russian War

Ukranian soldiers disembark from a tank. Kyodo News

Timothy Snyder’s historically-informed essay is easily the most insightful writing I’ve read on the political and World War implications for appeasement of Russia, which Trump is moving heedlessly towards. Appeasement of Germany in Czechoslovakia in 1938 led to World War II. Please read this to gain understanding of where we’re now situated. Then perhaps contact one of your representatives to help send a message, at the very least.

https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/appeasement-at-munich?r=5n8ot&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Russia is not America’s ally. Trump and Putin in Helsinki in 2018. Brookings Institute.

Ahoy! Present Music does “Moby Dick,” as a new silent film, with live music

Moby Dick; or, The Whale

A new silent film by Wu Tsang, accompanied live by Present Music’s ensemble.

Orchestral Music composed by Caroline Shaw, Andrew Yee and Asma Maroof

***

A silent film version of Moby-Dick, accompanied by a crew of live musicians “on the deck” of the theater.

The notion intrigues and evokes…One imagines, in their questing voyage halfway around the globe, the sail-propelled whaling ship Pequod must’ve had vast stretches of yawning silence, though only from human speech.

Yet Herman Melville’s epic fictional trip, based his experience on such ships during the 19th century heyday of whaling, was surely accompanied by a layered array of sounds, musical in various ways and otherwise.

The rhythmic, surging crash and splash of the sea against the creaking wooden hull, echoing through the slats into the forecastle, the forward portion of the ship below deck where the the common crew members lived. In tight quarters with bunks against the inside hull, the rolling music of the ocean surely seeped deeply into many a seaman’s dreams. The rhythms likely reached back to Captain Ahab’s quarters.
Imagine also the ocean wind whistling and howling across the deck, and rippling and slapping powerfully against the mighty sails, causing further sequenced creaking from the wooden masts.

And, of course, sailors themelves were renowned for the sea chanteys they sang and played on fiddles and tambourines. A key character, the Black cabin boy Pip, is a tambourine player.

A silent “Moby-Dick” also recalls the first-ever film adptation of the great novel — the silent “The Sea Beast” from 1926, which starred John Barrymore as Ahab. It was remade into the first talkie version as Moby Dick in 1930, also starring Barrymore. The more definitive film version didn’t arrive until 1956 when the great director John Huston took on the project, casting Gregory Peck as Ahab, and Richard Basehart as Ishmael.

Without any modern special effects, much less digital magic, that film’s dramatic scenes of fighting the massive white sperm whale remain fairly breathtaking.

And though some questioned the casting of “good guy” Peck, he embodied the strange man’s stentorian eloquence and charisma, his stern fixation on the horizon of doomed destiny, an often-raging captain obsessed with revenge against the whale that tore off his leg and virtually demasted his manhood.

“Moby Dick; or, The Whale,’ a 2022 film by Wu Tsang, presented with a live orchestra. Photo by Diana Pfammatter, Courtesy Wu Tsang.

Silent, but not literally, is this new film by Wu Tsang (pictured at top), who is a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship winner. Along with the music, she takes the viewer by the hand in that her film does have a narrator, of sorts, though it’s not Ishmael, Melville’s narrator. Rather, in a twist, it is the book’s “sub-sub-librarian” who adapts a script from the book’s “extracts,” his  eccentrically encyclopedic array of quotations about whaling that prefaces the book’s famous opening line “Call me Ishmael.”

In an interview with Flash Art, Tsang describes this “librarian”: “In our version, he lives inside the belly of the whale, and he’s a kind of a Jonah-like god figure. He can provide these different layers of research and commentary that maybe the characters in the story are not able to reflect upon themselves.” 1

Tsang explained how her interest in the subject arose only a few years ago.

“A friend of ours, a film studies scholar named Laura Harris, was giving a talk about C. L. R. James’s book Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, which is a postcolonial reading of Moby-Dick.” 2

“Laura’s reading of Melville via James was an important opening that got me super excited to think about how something so old and historical can also have a very contemporary feeling to it. The book is also a prism through which to look at the present, even if it’s a very old story.”

Indeed, this writer is working on a novel about Melville, and in my extensive reading on the author and his work, James’ 1953 book remains among the most pertinent. One can argue the current crisis of leadership worldwide, where “strongman” leadership is ascendant, derives from the unregulated overabundance of capitalist economics. James, who identified as a Marxist, addressed this problem in drawing upon the clear significance of the whaling ship Pequod as a symbol for America and democracy under siege by an oppressive, self-interested leader.

Like America, Melville decribes an extremely diverse crew population, 44 men from the U.S. (including Native American), northern and southern Europe, South America, Africa, Polynesia, Iceland, the Azores, China, and India.

Monomaniacal Ahab convinces the crew to forsake its general mission of whaling, for the captain’s sole puropose — pursuing and killing Moby Dick. 3

Publicity for the new film indicates it addresses the issue of capitalism as well as colonialism.

Tsang comments in Flash Art: “Most modern forms of political leadership are not even straightforwardly about world domination or war, although we also experience that as well. It’s the drive to organize society in a capitalistic way, for an abstraction.”

In his book, James draws out the ways in which the Pequod’s crew and captain illustrate the structure of capitalism. The crew, James writes, is “living as the vast majority of human beings live . . . seeking to avoid pain and misery and struggling for happiness.”

Above them all sits Captain Ahab, the chief executive who wields centuries of accumulated knowledge and labor for his own gain, but who — not unlike Donald Trump and his circle — would blindly throw all of it into the abyss.

For James, the novel forces readers to consider whether this kind of civilization can even survive.

***

Tsang continues, “I also was looking at different research around the maritime history of that time period. There’s a book called The Many-Headed Hydra (Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, 2000) that, like C. L. R. James, focuses on the ‘motley crew’ of sailors, and how this social class of people were coming from all over the world. The book talks about how the ship was a place of mixing for cultural exchange, news and information, and even spreading revolution.”

A significant part of the cultural exchange ocurs at intimate and personal levels. Thus the new film will play up a subtext of the book, homosociality and homoeroticism.

It portrays Ishmael, the American novice sailor, and Queequeg, the Polynesian lead harpoonist, as lovers, and the ship’s crew as a community that has partly transcended gender and race. It features queer sex, costumes codesigned by Telfar Clemens and, of course, sailors grasping gelatinous whale blubber.

Melville’s book doesn’t specifically depict gay sex but it’s not difficult to imagine the goings on in a ship of men at sea for many months at a time. And in the book, Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed in a crowded New Bedford inn of necessity, yet “upon waking next daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner,” Ishmael relates. “You had almost thought I had been his wife.” Later in the chapter “A Bosom Friend,” Ishmael continues, “how it is I know not but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often live and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg – a cozy, loving pair.”

And then, “and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we…”

Although long-married and the father of four children, Melville was most likely a man of strong bisexual feelings, most markedly for his fellow contemporary author Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he ardently dedicates “Moby-Dick.”

In her comprehensive Melville: A Biography, Laurie Robertson-Lorant insightfully writes, “His essential bisexuality, more conscious and less guilt-ridden, thanks to his sojourn in the South Seas, than that of the many repressed Victorians, would enable him to envision social organizations that would liberate human personality, not constrain it; yet he, too, was a child of his culture and his time, just as deeply wounded in his maleness as women were in their femaleness by a patriarchal culture that repressed the feminine in man and the masculine in woman…” 4

And the very end of the grand tale — with the ship sunk in a whirlpool by Moby Dick, Ishmael is the lone survivor to tell his astonishing story — carries symbolic weight regarding the profound relationship between the two shipmates, bosom frends, singers of the sea’s engulfing song.

It is a sort of call and response, Queequeg, in his final breath, in effect calls up to his friend to take his air-filled coffin, which he requested built after a near-death experience. Ishmael responds, grabbing and embracing it to his bosom and surviving afloat for several days until another passing ship finds him.

As for the film’s music score performed live, I expect Present Music to execute it with vivid aplomb and style. There are good reasons they maintain an international reputation while remaining loyally-based in the town of their birth in 1982. Their Thanksgiving concert at St. John’s Cathedral was one of the most richly diverse and moving events I’ve experienced in some time.

_____________________

  1. Filmmaker/installation artist Wu Tsang’s full interview with Flash Art: https://flash—art.com/article/wu-tsang/
  2. C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, c. 1953, reissued in 2001, University Press of New England, Dartmouth College (with an introduction by Donald Pease).
  3. In the early 1800s when “Moby-Dick” is set, whales were hunted primarily for their oil, which was used for lighting lamps, the main source of illumination before the invention of electric lights. Whale oil lamps were in use from the 1780s to around the 1860s. Over time many lamps were converted from whale oil to kerosene or camphine and eventually to electricity. Whale oil was extremely popular because it burned cleanly, brightly, and lasted longer than candles or other oil.
  4. Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography, Clarkson Potter, 109                  The “sojourn in the South Seas” the biographer references includes Melville’s time spent among the naturally unrepressed Typee people. That experience led to his first, and highly successful, semi-autobiographical book Typee, which included, for the time, quite sensual descriptions of the islanders, who often spent time in the nude.

The story of Bob Dylan’s “plugged-in” drummer Sam Lay and his flying drumstick

A broken drumstick from the drummer Sam Lay, part of the famous Butterfield Blues Band that helped Bob Dylan “go electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. This was from a concert Lay played in the  early 1970s. Photo by Kevin Lynch

Here’s a postscript story to my blog review of the popular and worthy new Bob Dylan bio-movie, A Complete Unknown. The climax of the film — and a pivotal inflection point in pop music history — is when Dylan plugged in and “went electric.” This happened in the photos depicted below, when he played with the ground-breaking Butterfield Blues Band on Sunday, July 25, 1965. At the evening concert, he played “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Maggie’s Farm” and other now-iconic songs for the first time most had heard them played live.

This loud performance electrified many but shocked as many others, who valued the acoustic nature of traditional folk music. Folk singer and Dylan champion Pete Seeger amost cut the band’s power cord with an axe. The electric style also opened up Dylan’s poetic sensibility to the possibilities of amplified music and the rock and urban blues traditions.

In the second photo below, an animated Dylan, in the polka-dot shirt, rehearses for that evening show with Butterfield Band members, including (from left) guitarist Mike Bloomfield, (whom Dylan declared “the best guitarist he had ever heard”), drummer Sam Lay, bassist Jerome Arnold.The man in white shirt at center is a Newport production person.

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Pictured are (L-R) bassist Jerome Arnold (partially hidden), guitarist Mike Bloomfield, drummer Sam Lay, vocalist and harp-player Butterfield and guitarist Elvin Bishop.

Bob Dylan rehearsing his own set at a sound check for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with members of the Butterfield Blues Band, including (L-R) Mike Bloomfield, Sam Lay and Jerome Arnold, with Dylan at far right. 

Bloomfield and Dylan at the controversial evening concert at Newport in July 1965.

This is a well-recounted historic story which I revisit not because I was there, I wasn’t. How does it feel? as Dylan once asked. Well, sigh, I sure as hell wish I coulda been there. You can’t let others get your kicks for you… Well, yes, but sometimes that’s the best you can do. I was just graduating from elementary school that summer, in Milwaukee.

However, I happen to own a broken drumstuck tip from Sam Lay. At one point in a concert the powerful drummer broke his drumstick and the tip went twirling into the air and landed at my feet, perhaps 40 feet away, near the front of the crowd. It was a concert he played at the UW-Milwaukee, when I was a student there in the early 1970s. 1

It’s the most authentic piece of music memorabilia that I own and something I’ve always treasured for Lay’s place in music history. Besides their playing with Dylan, the Butterfield Band was the first integrated blues band on the scene, and they brought blues and rock to new creative heights. The band was deeply influential on rock, blues and some jazz musicians.

Award-winning writer/broadcaster Tom Reney explains: “Dylan had already ‘gone electric’ in January of ’65 when he jumped down the manhole of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and scored his first chart success. ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ recorded a month before Newport with Bloomfield playing the song’s signature leads and turn-arounds, was all over the radio by the festival weekend.

“In his book-length study, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Greil Marcus hears in Bloomfield’s playing something ‘triumphant, like a hawk in the sky…when, out of instinct, out of desire, out of a smile somewhere in his memory, Bloomfield finds the sound of a great whoosh, and for an instant a rising wind blows right through the rest of the music.’ ” 2

Sam Lay played a six-year stint with Muddy Waters, and also with other blues and rock ‘n’ roll greats including Howin’ Wolf, Magic Sam, Bo Diddley, Junior Wells and Little Walter. Among Lay’s many credits is playing on the Chess album Fathers and Sons, which documented a concert joining blues pioneers Waters and pianist Otis Spann with artistic offspring Paul Butterfield, Bloomfield, Lay, Buddy Miles and Donald “Duck” Dunn.

Bassist Dunn, by the way, was part of the real band in the celebrated comedy film, The Blues Brothers. Coincidentally this writer happened to appear driving my car in the background of a climactic scene in that movie, a story for another day.

____________

1 To clarify, Sam Lay was not with the Butterfield Band when I saw him at UWM. Lay was the bandleader. Unfortunately this event predated my beginnings as a music reporter, so I don’t recall his bandmates.

2 Tom Reney’s extended passage is from his excellent in-depth story on Dylan, Butterfield, and Bloomfield at the historic 1965 Newport Festival (from NPR and New England Public Media): https://www.nepm.org/jazz-world/2022-05-25/paul-butterfield-plugs-in-and-bob-dylan-follows-suit

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Hear Martin Luther King’s great speeches, or read and contemplate them

Decades ago, he had a grand dream for America, high in the sun of a mountaintop, an arc bending toward justice.

But it’s not lost in the ether of faded memory, like most dreams. Here’s one way to celebrate, comtemplate and be inspired to act from the wisdom, courage and vision of Martin Luther King Jr., on his holiday. (Apologies, this is a day late)

Fine new editions of many of his greatest speeches from HarperCollins and the King Library. You can get audio books or the texts.

I Have a Dream includes a foreward by Amanda Gorman, America’s youngest-ever poet laureate. Visit here: https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/mlkjrlibrary