Maggie in (relatively) more courageous days, living in Madison. 

Authors note: I actually wrote this before Maggie began clearly showing her fatal illness, liver cancer, when she stopped eating for the last two weeks of her life. I now wonder whether her predatory lull, evidenced in the picture below, betrayed her affliction. I still find myself habitually addressing Maggie when I’m at home — and blaming her for things (she was a truly heroic all-purpose scapegoat!) — then realizing she’s gone, a heart pang every time.

By Sir Kevin Edward Lynch a.k.a. Kevernacular

Milwaukee no longer brooded like a Scottish moor. Mists cleared for the city’s too-fleeting zephyrs of summer. A disarmingly intoxicating aura filled the air — lilacs and guttered ephemerals.

Sherlock Holmes lit his pipe and puffed, but without contentment. A question lingered. Had his intrepid feline Maggie reached advanced middle age? The photo composite below may suggest as much. This supposedly tense face-off transpired for nearly five minutes, with the bird on the TV dish gleefully taunting and mocking Holmes’ dear cat, perched six feet away, safely under his lawn chair.

The entire nerve-wracking time, she twitched hardly a muscle except to peer at her master, through the window.

“Mind-boggling,” whispered Watson.

But appearances were deceiving. Maggie is so intelligent that she knew it was a waste of her precious energy and calories to pursue an antagonist she cannot catch. Good thing, Watson, the bird was no Iago, and Maggie shan’t fall prey to weaknesses of the flesh or romance (though she may love Holmes — in her furry way — but details are unnecessary). Perhaps, as Watson theorizes, she’s now completely embodied her desultory impersonation of Marlene Dietrich as “The Laziest Gal in Town.”

Frankly, as a kitten, she survived horrors — being abandoned at a truck stop, and then being hounded by her next owners’ tail-twiddling toddler. Sherlock’s Magpie has also survived his divorce, a trauma for her as if she were his child. She’s a convicted ex-biter but still hopelessly addicted to Cool Whip, not a pretty picture. You, dear reader, may deduce her supplier. Better to see is her as an adorable, near-Siamese attachment to Holmes’ hip in his easy chair.

So, this tale stands to extol and honor her for remarkable valor and heroism, which wears the deft guise of cowardice, to the eyes of pooh-poohers. Yet I know first-hand, Maggie can pooh-pooh with the best of them. (Her prime aliases: Poopface, Super-Duper Pooper) Clumping litter may cramp her style, at times, but we both appreciate it.

I digress.

“Oh yes, yes,” Watson sputtered, removing his finger from an idle orifice.  Holmes worried the man suffers from what they now call ADHD.

To the tale: At the slightest sound, this knowing Margaret perks her ears and — with supercomputer speed — comprehends danger, even if it be a mouse, or me loudly cracking open a can of food that she instantaneously realizes is not for her. She runs like the wind to the nearest, or best, hiding place, in that order.

On a seemingly innocuous day, she reveled noisily amidst her delectable squishy-food meal — when the call for action arose. What had startled her? Holmes quickly theorized that only the Murderers of the Rue Morgue knew, and that they were afoot again. Linger over food? Not our heroine.

She faced the gauntlet. With dazzlingly athletic shake-and-bake jukes, she sidestepped Holmes’ feet, and a suddenly ominous catnip toy or two, and careened past the cat grass – which bent to her swift wind — at the doorway from kitchen to dining room. Newspapers and magazines jumped and fluttered from the parlor rug.

She penetrated her safe haven – a space behind a radiator and bookshelf. Ah, she now had ample time to lick her whiskers clean of precious morsel bits, even if her still-hot path had claimed some droppings. Breathless, she peered out from between the radiator rungs, with a vigilant eye.

Now that’s setting your priorities pragmatically. Safety before savoring. To quote a famous philosopher, I am not making this up.

“Extraordinary, Holmes!” Watson cried.

“Elementary, my dear fellow.”

After her adventure, Maggie inspects the fur-raising gauntlet  — killer cat grass, insidious toys — she had to pass through to reach safety, to Watson’s astonishment.

You see, Maggie the cat educates even Holmes on Safety First. He knows that, in times of threat, that there’s plenty of room for him, too, under the dining room table, or better, deep in the nearby closet, or in her best locale of subterfuge: behind the entertainment center.

This is quite brilliant strategy, because she is nearly hiding in plain view (well, OK, not really). But Holmes can sit looking right in her direction — as can far more threatening TV-watching humanoids — and detect nary a whisker of her,  nor her tell-tale tail.

Holmes sometimes thinks he hears her snickering back there. But he grants Maggie her smugness, because she must sacrifice at times. And during this emergency, he confessed to panic — the sheer existential dread of seeing the cat’s canniest survival instincts under seige. So Holmes unceremoniously squeezed in beside her behind the telly, and she curled her tail out of the way — with a frown and attendant complaint — and he scrunched knees to chin. Thus, they hid in that triangular cavity with reasonable discomfort, amid myriad component cords. Of course, he bravely jettisoned his pipe, to make breathing room.

Then, the famous detective’s infallible nose detected a clue. He’d discovered a missing item back there. But Maggie had already taken a fancy to it — a forgotten but fragrant underthingy. Elastic is chewably animated, at least for a short duration.

“Zounds Holmes! Brilliant deduction, finding the underwear, in such dire conditions! Better than Monk!”

“Who’s this, pray tell man?” Holmes retorted. “Monk? Such an obvious pseudonym!  And holier than thou, no doubt.”

“Yes, he’s a crackerjack detective I’ve seen on the telly.”

“Irrelevancies!” Holmes thundered. “Here’s what I am told: ‘Holmes, you need to get a hound.’”

“It would keep you active,” his well-meaning former sister-in-law recently counseled. “And she advised, I could meet women while walking a canine, ‘as long as the dog is good-looking.'”

“Pure poppycock! She may have certain points, I concede, clients being scarce lately. But to the latter point: Neither Maggie nor I are deceived by pretty outward appearances. She knows well a bloodthirsty wolf in in sheep’s clothing.”

“Indubitably,” Waston huffed.

“Maggie is ‘good looking’ enough for me, even if for years she’s never ventured outside, beyond the balcony,” Holmes muttered. Let your mind not stray to the gutter, dear reader. T’is not a fit place for man nor beast to do anything — smashed together behind the entertainment center — but breathe and glower at each other in increasing disaffection. There they waited, once again, for the inscrutable terror to pass.

Sitting back he had time for reflection. You see, this cat is our hero, especially in dire times. At least mine. Ergo, Margaret, I forgive you for no longer exhibiting brave – indeed, macho — aggression towards threatening, arrogant birds within reach.

Thus, I will soon solicit on her behalf for a document of certification as:

MADAME MARGARET “MAGGIE” HOLMES, PROFESSIONAL SCARDYCAT, PhD.*

“She will then join us, Watson, in private investigation partnership.”

“Um, her? Partnership?” he fretted. “What’s all this?”

“Elementary…” His swagger rekindled, Holmes finally shouted from the cramped depths: “Cobwebs be damned!”

As he began to climbed out, cruel fate intervened. Suddenly somewhere, in the growing mist beyond, rose the sound of a great hound’s horrendous howl! And I’m told I need a hound! he thought, quaking.

“Heart-stopping!” Watson ejaculated, gripping his chest.

Maggie shuddered at the hound’s accursed wail, but she bravely recovered.

“Meow,” she said sagely.

Hers is the last word. The tale’s told. Almost.

“Hark! To the hideaways!” Holmes boldly commanded.

“You’re in there already, old mate.”

“Good man, Watson! You’re on your own.”

“AAAAAAAOOOUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!”

THE  END

*Perpendicular hairs (and run from) Dogs.

Dedicated to the late Maggie Lynch and Sharon J. Lynch, Sherlock Holmes aficionado extraordinaire.

Maggie’s final visit to the balcony, on her last day, August 16, 2013. R.I.P.

Kevernacular’s note:

 I interviewed Bill Monroe — born 98 years ago today — between his sets at Summerfest in 1981 for The Milwaukee Journal (published July, 5, 1981). He is credited for inventing bluegrass in 1939 when his Bluegrass Boys auditioned at the Grand Old Opry and caused a high, lonesome stir that has never quite died down, rather coming and going through American culture like the wandering winds of the Appalachian Mountains.

In 2000, it rose into a singing cyclone. The Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? starring George Clooney — and its soundtrack of authentic hill country music — helped make bluegrass a pop phenom which hasn’t really abated, with the growth in American roots music and its increased popularity. 1

The soundtrack to a popular Coen Brothers film helped spur a bluegrass and roots music movement. Courtesy www.last.film.

Today the British popularizers Mumford & Sons are admittedly influenced by the American groups The Avett Brothers and Old Crow Medicine Show, whose instrumentation and vocal harmonies draw deeply on bluegrass.

The article helps to backdrop the impulses of today’s roots music. It was a close to the dawn of the mid-80s-to-early 90s roots music breakout but it speaks well of Monroe’s sense of cultural truth and inevitability at age 70.

 Monroe was diagnosed with cancer in 1981, the year I interviewed him. I didn’t know it at the time and now wonder how it might have affected him during the interview. Feeling more vulnerable or more mortal? More reflective, accepting?
The interview is very important to me as I mark it as the first important step in my quest to get a foothold into the depths of American root music, before that term was really used.  2

I think the interview is all the more extraordinary because Monroe was legendarily resistant to interviews, even for annotators of his own albums. He had once threatened to break his mandolin over the head of a writer if he ever mentioned Monroe’s name in a book. Me, I guess I just got lucky, and because he’s now dead, his threats are history. 

But Bill was lucky, too. After radiation treatment he survived for years. On April 7, 1990, Monroe performed for Farm Aid IV in Indianapolis, Indiana along with Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and with many other artists. He died September 9, 1996 — after suffering a stroke in April of that year — just short of his 85th birthday, which was September 11, 1911. 

Monroe felt his place in history had been abused and distorted too many times. Now I wonder if perhaps the cancer and his the sense of mortality led him to speak his mind, to set the record straight.

Bill Monroe (second from left) at the 1968 Newport Folk Festival. Newport’s seaside winds may have blown off his trademark Stetson. Courtesy Robert Corwin/PhotoArts. 

Today his legacy is solidifying even if his still-surviving competitor Ralph Stanley is perceived by many as the father of bluegrass. But modern bluegrass singer and mandolin player Ricky Skaggs was one of many influenced by Monroe. Skaggs was only six years old when he first got to perform on stage with Monroe and his band. He stated, “I think Bill Monroe’s importance to American music is as important as someone like Robert Johnson was to blues, or Louis Armstrong. He was so influential: I think he’s probably the only musician that had a whole style of music named after his band.” 3

Bill Monroe and his mandolin. Courtesy www.popmatters.com

The following interview story, slightly edited by me, was headlined “Bluegrass Bill Springs A Surprise,” In the story, he sprung a surprise on singer Tom T. Hall, but the surprise is also that — despite his famously ornery reputation — he opens up the way he does, and shows he cares about the music and about communicating it to people of all ages. 

THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL July 5, 1981   

BIll Monroe Springs a Surprise

Bill Monroe stands centrally within the mythology of bluegrass music. Besides being “The Father of Bluegrass;’ he’s a legendary personality whose famously inpenetrable reticence may have partially reflected the desire of an originator to keep things pure and simple. Monroe harbors a profound distaste of such modern conveniences as a telephone, which his farm home near Nashville still lacks.

Country star Tom T. Hall recounts the shock of even a call from his old friend in response to Hall’s request to record a tune on Monroe’s famous mandolin. His wife answered the phone and whispered, “Good Lord! It’s Bill Monroe on the phone!”

But the sight of Monroe performing on the Summerfest Schlitz Country stage a week ago didn’t detract from the myth. Watching him stand there, workmanlike and stone-faced, I wondered how much he was enjoying himself. His Bluegrass Boys shuffled about and gathered around the almost stationary Monroe for harmony singing.

But there was no mistaking emotional grip of Monroe’s unearthly tenor wail and the propulsive rush of his mandolin. It was a curious thing to see the joyous, hand-clapping crowd reveling in this dour-looking old man. But the power of music works in mysterious ways.

I prudently eschewed such a newfangled contraption as a tape recorder in preparing for a backstage interview.
“He’s an ornery old fella,” Schlitz stage manager Bill Gorman told me, with an assuring smile. He introduced us and, with a trace of trepidation, I shook Monroe’s hand.

“It’s a pleasure to know you, sir,” he said immediately. Monroe was now wearing thick glasses (possibly for cataracts) and they softened his stoic demeanor. He munched on cold cuts and sipped coffee and I hoped refreshment had softened his attitude. We both stood there for several long seconds until I asked, “Uh, shall we sit down?”

“Oh, please have a seat,” he said. I sat down. The white-Stetsoned Monroe towered over me, still chomping silently on the cold cuts. Clearly, he had no intention of taking a seat.

“Just got into town on your bus?” I asked, clutching at the first question that came to mind.
“Yes sir.”
Yes sir. I smiled inside. The grand old man of bluegrass standing in a suit and neat dark tie proffering the term” sir” to a blue-jeaned, tennis-shoed reporter no older than his grandson. What was in your mind when you came up with the idea of bluegrass, I asked him. His answer reflected his notoriously reclusive nature.

“Well, I wanted music of my own to build around myself. I was gonna keep in the things I wanted and keep out the things I didn’t want.”

“Stonewall Jackson plays Bluegrass,” I thought, and tenuously pressed him a bit further.
“I wanted a hard-driving sound,” he said, “Fast work and fast playing keep up the feeling.”

I nodded in agreement and then he seemed to soften. “You know, bluegrass is awful close to gospel music in its sound and tone; you can hear that.”

Do you think your famous high, lonesome sound came out of your life situation at the time?
“There is blues in the music too, that touches a lot of feelings,” Monroe said. He looked away and continued. “I grew up on an old farm in Kentucky and there wasn’t nobody to visit with except the old folks and a few critters.

“I was the youngest one by eight years, the rest were long gone. I was sort of out on my own. It was kind of a sad, hard life. I had to work plenty out in the fields, where I could sing all I wanted…”

He stopped, as if suddenly realizing that he was tipping a hand he normally holds close to his vest. I asked him whether he felt he plays for a particular audience or for anyone who’ll listen.

“I like to play to everyone,” he said. “But I really like to touch good, decent people.” He paused again and the slightly muffled din of Summerfest more than filled the silence as he reflected. “I like to play to people that are sober.”

Bill Monroe (left) on a tour train with Dana Cupp, the last banjo player he ever recruited for The Bluegrass Boys. www. genelowinger.com. Photo courtesy of Gene Lowinger.

Monroe spoke diplomatically about the rise and dissemination of bluegrass music. He indicated a clear preference for the pure form as he created it, but voiced no ill will towards popularizers.

I asked him how a country man dealt with nationwide touring and the ways of city people.
“Well, now, I’ve been in this business a long time,” he said. “Since I invented this music in 1939 I’ve gained the respect of Northern people. They don’t try to outsmart me or put anything over on me. They realize we’ve got to be friends; that’s the only way were going to get together on anything.”

Did he think the rise in popularity of bluegrass and country music indicates any new attitude in Americans about the way they want the world to be?
“Well, the music has changed an awful lot since ‘39 and the world has changed a lot too,” he said. A white-hatted Blue Grass Boy stuck his head in the doorway, beckoning Monroe to come along for the last set.
Bill appeared to want to think about the question a bit longer, but the door was open now, and the buzz of the crowd seemed to draw him like a magnet. The manner quickly turned from reflective to curtly cordial.

“You tell the people here I just want to be their friend and I’ll come any time to play,” he said.” I want you to hear my new album. It’s called Master of Bluegrass, on MCA Records, 4 and it’s talking to the old folks and the young folks. Next time I’m back you tell me what you think of it.”

Monroe warms up with his Bluegrass Boys about the time I interviewed him in Milwaukee at Summerfest. Photo courtesy of Gene Lowinger*

I took the little pitch in stride because I felt that he did care what I thought. He met my eyes once more with a nod, and he struck me as being a shy man far more than a cold, standoffish one.
Heading to the stage, Monroe tucked his glasses in a pocket and his shyness inside the role of “The Father of Bluegrass.” With a strong grip on his mandolin, he can sing all he wants.

__________________

Here’s Monroe in an extraordinary solo performance of the classic “Wayfaring Stranger in 1989, eight years after I interviewed him. Courtesy vintage18lover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI92oDdXazg&list=TLDOvtqk289uU

________

1.By 2000 Monroe was dead, but the T-Bone Burnett-produced soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? includes, among others, Ralph Stanley, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, The Stanley Brothers, John Hartford, James Carter & the Prisoners, The Fairfield Four, Norman Blake and singer-guitarist Dan Tyminski, who dubbed for actor George Clooney, who plays an escaped prisoner and a member of the fictional Soggy Bottom Boys.

2. Thanks to Milwaukee Journal editors Dominique Noth and Steve Byers, who sent me a very laudatory note after the article was published.

3. Du Noyer, Paul (2003). The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music (1st ed.). Fulham, London: Flame Tree Publishing. p. 196. ISBN 1-904041-96-5. via Wikipedia.

4. Master of Bluegrass is available on the Bill Monroe box set My Last Days on Earth 1981-1994 on Bear Family Records.

“Mosa – Mohave” 1903 by Edward Curtis. Courtesy destee.com

I’d like to post two more images of photos from the current show Edward L. Curtis and the Vanishing Race at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend. http://www.wisconsinart.org/exhibitions/current.aspx

These suggest how photographer Curtis, a native of Whitewater, dealt with virtually all aspects of Native American life, not just the Indians we’ve heard of who fought heroic and ultimately doomed battles for their land and tribe. The Indian’s passion for their land was deep and spititual. Black Elk prfoundly express the passion’s wisdom by declaring “The Holyland is everywhere.” The “holyland” begat the verdant and living nature and feed the people and the women and children were the brightest blossoms of the Nature-to-humanity continuum.

Mosa (above) captures the beauty and budding mystery of a Mojave girl fully embracing her native culture. Culture makes us want to understand her choices and values at a time when she is still forming and articulating them for herself. And what lies within her somber aura (disconcerting to see in one so young)? Does the sadness contain age and wisdom beyond her years, gained in hard ways? The stunning image of is also significant because it captivated J.P. Morgan, then perhaps the world’s richest man. Morgan had refused financing of Curtis’ anthropological documentation project The North American Indian — until he saw this photo of lovely Mosa.

“Woman and Child” 1927 by Edward Curtis. Courtesy The Dubuque Museum of Art.

The above photo depicts a woman and child whom Curtis encountered on Nunivak Island in the far north of an Alaskan summer. It also reveals Curtis’ humane and sharp eye for contrasting, layered textures which enhanced the visual storytelling of the man Indians called “The Shadow Catcher.”

Conducted with Curtis’ daughter Beth, this was from the final field trip for The North American Indian. My full review of the exhibit is here:

https://kevernacular.com/?p=2133

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

Touch Each Other (Foothills Publishing) By Antler 

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

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

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

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

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

There are few living poets who write in a straight-shooting vernacular style that can gently grab hold of your mind’s eye and not let go, until he exhales his last beautiful or harsh truth, or until he’s hoisted you onto a high, granite vista to see and feel possibility, as if it were just within reach.

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

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

Antler has been acclaimed by such major and kindred poets as Allen Ginsburg, Gary Synder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Factory in the renowned City Lights series. In 1985, Antler won the Walt Whitman Award, given annually to an author “whose contribution best reveals the continuing presence of Walt Whitman in American poetry.” He won the 1987 Witter Bynner Prize awarded annually “to an outstanding younger poet” by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City.

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

Touch Each Other is available at Woodland Pattern and People’s Books in Milwaukee. For more information, visit www.antlerpoet.net

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

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

September is National Literacy Month. I wanted to relate that, according to the National Center for Family Literacy, more than 30 million Americans have reading skills below basic literacy levels.

One more stat I can’t resist: A Pew research poll from Sept, 28, 2010 found that only 42 per cent of Americans know that Herman Melville is the author of Moby-Dick or, The Whale. The stat emerged as part of a survey of religious and general knowledge.1

To improve that state of affairs, here’s a cool website from MIT that suggests Moby-Dick be offered to young readers because they now typically appropriate information of all kinds from the Internet. Well, that’s what Melville did — appropriate from many sources — in amazing fashion in writing Moby-Dick, which makes it a sort of post-modern book, written in 1851! So the site suggests it may be the right time for web-literate young people to experience this great book. http://cms.mit.edu/news/features/2008/09/project_new_media_literacies_r.php

Generally speaking, one link worth exploring is from the American Library Association site detailing literacy month events and suggestions. http://www.ala.org/conferencesevents/celebrationweeks

I also wanted to share my favorite image of literacy. This photo depicts Lynn Bartoszek, at the time a dedicated ESL teacher in Madison, reading for her three nieces, Katherine, Hillary and Sonya, at a holiday family gathering. All children should have an aunt, or a reading mentor, like Lynn.

_____________________

1.http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey/

Few Milwaukee-born singers – Al Jarreau aside — have had as auspicious a career as Jackie Allen. But what is she? Ostensibly a jazz vocalist, Allen is sophistication and soul, a romancer and a restless stylistic roamer, as she’ll demonstrate at The Jazz Gallery Center For The Arts, 926 E. Center St., at 7 p.m. Saturday, August 31. Allen’s band includes bassist Hans Sturm, guitarist John Moulder, drummer Dane Richeson and pianist Johannes Wallmann, a new UW-Madison music faculty member, playing on the venue’s new baby grand piano. She calls this her “homecoming” concert.

“I remember sitting in at jam sessions and basically cutting my teeth at the original Jazz Gallery,” Allen recalls of the multi-arts center’s previous incarnation. “Then I’d go to hear blues guys because those places stayed open later.”
In the 1980s, she began a four-year gig at the Wyndham Hotel with the late, great Milwaukee pianist-organist Melvin Rhyne.

She went on to tour internationally and has lived in Madison, Chicago and Indiana. She’s also taught jazz voice at several universities and now resides in Lincoln, where Sturm, her husband, is an associate professor at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her last Milwaukee gig was nearly a decade ago at The Pabst Theater, opening for legendary drummer Roy Haynes’ group .

Allen will perform material from her forthcoming CD My Favorite Colors, slated for February 2014 release, which characteristically cherry picks among genres. Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression” is rewired with simmering Miles Davis currents. Allen rides the funky waves of Joe Zawinul’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!” Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now” is spaciously reimagined with probing chord extensions, and a searing blues-rock crescendo from guitarist Monder. Allen delivers the standard “Blame it on my Youth” as spare, naked reverie. The failings of love sound like the slow wither of a dying flower.

Non-jazz material has long provided many of her strongest personal statements. The mysterioso samba “Moon & Sand” betrayed her stylistic wanderlust on her 1994 debut album Never Let Me Go. Songs by Paul Simon, James Taylor, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Sting deepened the complex strains of her 2003 CD The Men in My Life (The rhythmic lofting of Jobim’s “Dindi” is brilliant without betraying the song’s inner melancholy) Her acclaimed 2006 Blue Note album Tangled included Van Morrison’s revelatory “When Will I Ever Learn?” and Donald Fagan’s sassy “Do Wrong Shoes.” All Music Guide labels the CD “adult alternative pop-rock.”

Allen landed the Blue Note contract with that stylistic range and her limpid voice, which drew Norah Jones comparisons. Yes, Allen sings those melting notes that seem to fall backwards into her throat. But she sounded like that long before anyone ever heard of Jones. Allen possesses a former French horn player’s musicality and warmth. Yet she’s a more incisive, blues-informed singer than Jones, commingling womanly resilience and ageless-girl vulnerability.

Despite serving on the jazz nominating committee for the Grammy Awards, Allen persists with material and interpretations that defy facile labels.
“I choose songs that move me; so they will move other people,” she says. “After singing the Great American Songbook for years in Chicago, I got bored out of my mind. I had to find my own voice. So I’ll do songs I grew up listening to, music of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Some have become new standards. I’m not afraid to look at anything if it speaks to me, even a doing a classical piece.”

Her last recording, Starry Night, was a night-themed album recorded live with the Muncie Symphony Orchestra, adorned with work from leading arrangers like John Clayton and Bill Cunliffe. It recalls Joni Mitchell’s orchestral album Both Sides Now, and its superb arrangements by Vince Mendoza, though there’s more swinging on Allen’s CD. She also has an album in the can, Moon on the Rise, of originals by the extraordinarily gifted and accomplished Sturm.

My partial hearing of Allen’s upcoming My Favorite Colors reveals an artist whose musical pallet will remain fresh, fluid and myriad.

________________________________

This is an expanded version of an article published in The Shepherd Express

Because it’s important to see and appreciate the Edward L. Curtis photos of Native Americans and their milieu and environment, I’ve added three more images, to complement my previous CC blog review of the Curtis exhibit at the Museum of Wisconsin Art In West Bend, on display through January 5.

“The Blanket Weaver” by Edward Curtis. Courtesty onpoint.wbur.org

“Sun Dance Encampment” by Edward Curtis. Courtesy www.valleyfineart.com

 “Geronimo, Apache” 1905 by Edward Curtis. Courtesy onlinebrowsing.blogspot.com

As Curtis Biographer Timothy Egan describes this photograph (above): “A few days before (President Teddy) Roosevelt was inaugurated, Curtis caught the hard glare of the 76-year-old Apache leader, who had been invited to the White House for the grand ceremony launching T.R.’s second term”

Though these are from different sources, prints of these images are in the WOMA show. – Kevin Lynch

Edward S. Curtis and the Vanishing Race, through January 5. Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Ave., West Bend. 262-334-9638 wisconsinart.org

Edward S. Curtis began his rough-and-tumble, continent and mountain-traversing cultural odyssey by severely injuring himself. He nearly broke his back falling from a log while trying to pluck oysters from the mud to feed his fatherless family.  Following the horrible winter of 1886-87, his father had moved them from Whitewater, Wisconsin to the Puget Sound area, but it was a failed man’s desperate act and he died soon afterwards.

While convalescing, 22-year-old Edward built his first crude camera with a lens his father left behind. His healing began a historic process of artistic and ethnographic importance. The transformational results, as this powerful exhibit demonstrates, would do extraordinary justice to the Native American race and helped initiate a cultural healing process that continues fitfully to this day.

The Museum of Wisconsin Art’s Edward S. Curtis and the Vanishing Race presents a magisterial sampling of the man’s unprecedented and unequaled 20-volume work of more than 2,000 photos and narrative, The North American Indian. As indigenous tribes disappeared into the ether, Curtis’ camera and growing obsession kept pace with the tragic decline — so that America might understand the meaning and value of the nation’s original people and culture, now displaced, eroded and often outlawed.

His sepia, noirish images radiate eloquent beauty that earned him the nickname “Shadow Catcher” from the Indians. Epic, brawny landscapes, such as Canon de Chelly—Navajo 1904 (above), influenced film director John Ford’s classic Westerns. Curtis’ shadows caught proud, suffering visages like Princess Angeline, (below) the last surviving child of Chief Seattle — in 1896 when Indians couldn’t legally live in the city named for her father. Her huddling scarf cradles the creased roadmap of a long, hard life. The photo brought Curtis fame he would parlay into the grand anthropological idea that would consume his life, family and marriage over the next 30 years.

While trekking up frigid Mount Rainier, the photographer saved the lives of two lost men. One was George Bird Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society, and the foremost expert on Plains Indians. The grateful scholar would provide Curtis with access that would inflame the photographer’s imagination, insight and vision. Grinnell was impressed by the young man’s amateur anthropology, as Curtis collected bits of mythology and tribal narrative while taking pictures.

Grinnell had known General George Custer and he knew President Teddy Roosevelt. The scholarly man Indians had nicknamed “Bird” opened a wide aperture.  Opportunity flooded in like a door thrown wide open. The Shadow Catcher walked right into the light. It helped that he was tall, handsome and charismatic. He would finance his improbable quest by gaining support and friendship of Roosevelt and art-loving banker J.P. Morgan, and by virtually never paying himself. Grinnell helped Curtis gradually win the native people’s trust, to allow his camera to explore the depths of their fading existence while retaining respect for it, says Graeme Reid, WMA director of collections.

One delicately voyeuristic image reveals a large gathering of tipis for the sacred Piegan sun dance. The US government had outlawed the ritual as “an immoral dance,” an official act at that clearly violated First Amendment religious freedom rights, asserts Timothy Egan* in his fascinating 2012 Curtis biography, Short Nights Of The Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life And Immortal Photographs Of Edward Curtis. The photographer described the five-day dance as “wild, terrifying, elaborately mystifying. I was intensely affected.” 1  The ritual does involve a rather theatrical symbolic act of bloodletting by a participating dancer. *

Canada outlawed the Indian’s most honorable tradition — the potlatch –as “barbaric.” In this ritual, a person would give away his or her earthly possessions to others, paying it forward, in good faith the gift would be returned, with interest. 2

And in fact, Curtis — still struggling to finance his massive book project — would eventually produce what Egan describes as the first full-length documentary film in 1914 (with an audience –hungry title In The Land Of The Headhunters) depicting the life and culture of seafaring Kwakiutl tribe of the Northwest. Curtis and his film crew almost drowned during the project. Despite rave reviews and initial popularity, the film fell into obscurity, due to a dispute over distribution. Eight years later, the silent film Nanook of the North – A Story of Love and Life in the Actual Arctic gained credit as the first feature-length documentary. The film’s director Robert Flaherty had studied the Curtis movie frame by frame, and consulted with him on his methods.

Curtis’ ambitious project also included extensive field recordings on wax cylinders — 10,000 songs and vivid stories of Indian origins, hopes and devastation. One told of how, in the winter of 1883-84, one-fourth of the Piegan people starved to death as white hunters began slaughtering buffalo.

The 1926 religious ritual portrait Bear Bull-Blackfoot (top of post) captures the Indian’s symbiotic, intimate relationship with wildlife. Engulfing his body, the bearskin virtually reincarnates the mighty animal, and feels like a coffin for Bear Bull’s own passing. Look at him. His face and scarred chest, defiant and handsome, is humanity, infused with nature. It a condition virtually never achieved by Western man, since the Age of Reason.

A superbly composed image, Winter – Apsaroke (below) crystallizes the harsh Plains winter of 1908 as a Crow woman, bent under a bundle of kindling, retreats to her tipi — partially encased in creeping, merciless ice. The tipi entrance intimates a fateful black hole. In that era, thousands of Indians, lacking white settlers’ immunities, died of pneumonia in winter and cholera in summer, and from other European-borne diseases like smallpox, scarlet, tuberculosis. 3

Such a trail-blazing and astonishingly ambitious project could hardly avoid controversy or criticism. A number of Curtis’ photographs documented sacred rituals and traditions that were never meant to be seen by the uninitiated.

And his historical research — assisted by Crow scouts who witnessed the battle —  revealed a dramatically revised story of Gen. George Custer and his famous defeat at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The glory-thirsty general reportedly stopped, waited and watched as his colleague General Marcus Reno and his troops battled, while heavily outmanned by the much larger Sioux forces, according to the scouts.

“Curtis estimated (Custer) was close enough ‘that it was almost within hailing distance’ … Custer dismounted and took in the carnage while sitting on the grass, as if being entertained by blood theater, the Indians claimed. White Man Runs Him (an aptly named scout) said he begged Custer intercede, scolding him for letting soldiers die. “No,” the commander replied. “Let them fight. There will be plenty of fighting left for us to do.” 4

Custer and his men paid the ultimate price for his arrogance and vanity. Curtis eventually refrained from publishing his Custer revisionism in The North American Indian, save one muted comment: “Custer made no attack, the whole movement being a retreat,” in Vol. III. Yet after years of keeping a pledge to not address politically and socially troubling issues in his texts, Curtis eventually railed against government agents and missionaries, and the long litany of racial injustices he had uncovered and witnessed.

Curtis has also been accused of romanticizing the Indian. On one occasion, he had an assistant erase an alarm clock from an image of an Indian’s sleeping quarters. He rarely ever tampered with the documentary truth of the camera’s eye, although he became a sophisticated and innovative artist at enhancing his photos in the studio.

Mostly, these photos feel honest, unflinching, and far-reaching. As Egan writes: “Curtis saw a moment from a time before any white man had looked upon these shores. He saw a person in nature, one in the same mind, as they belonged.”

Clara Curtis divorced her husband in 1919, charging adultery and cruelty — to banner headlines in Seattle. Curtis denied any infidelity but she won their home and his studio in the settlement. Clara also began visiting the studio and picking fights with their daughter Beth, who was now running it. Clara accused Beth of funneling money to her father. With his main benefactors dead, Curtis was actually living like a hobo, closer to the sky and to the spirit of  Native Americans – though not by choice. He was still trying to complete his book series.

It’s amazing what he had accomplished; his formal education stopped in the sixth grade. But now he was middle-aged. He took a job doing promotional photos in Hollywood, from shooting Elmo Lincoln for a series of silent Tarzan movies to taking photographs for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, in production. The guy from Whitewater never got a screen credit from DeMille.

“Curtis never thought of Hollywood as anything but a sad, single-business town full of hustlers,” Egan comments. Curtis was one of the great hustlers in American history, but not this kind.

Yet Hollywood would redeem itself in the form of one of its biggest stars, Robert Redford. He had a vision, for which he took the name of the profound Indian religious ritual — The Sundance Institute, which sustains a program to support Native American film makers, begat the independent and quintessentially American Sundance film production company and cable channel, all pursuing environmental integrity and creative experimentation.

Said Redford: “This place in the mountains, amid nature’s casualness toward death and birth, is the perfect host for the inspiration of ideas: harsh at times, life threatening in its winters of destruction, but tender in attention to the details of every petal of every wildflower resurrected in the spring. Nature and creativity obey the same laws, to the same end: life.” 5

That sounds like something Curtis might’ve said. Culture currents can run deep and far.

Edward Curtis died in 1952. He remains relatively neglected by art historians, even those who specialize in American art. The North American Indian also languished in obscurity for decades, until it was rediscovered in the 1970s.

This is the first exhibit of Curtis’ work in his home state in a decade. The impressive, stylish and completely new art museum, dedicated to Wisconsin art and artists, is doing a special service with this show and a concurrent exhibit by Madison-based Ho-chunk artist Tom Jones.

“With the opening of our new building this spring, we made a commitment to feature on a more regular basis, some of Wisconsin’s oldest art—that of Native American tribes,” says Laurie Winters, MOWA Executive Director/CEO. “In our inaugural year at the new location, visitors will actually be able to see this promise carry through.”

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All photographs by Edward L. Curtis, courtesy of ­Collection of Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, Iowa. Gift of Dubuque Cultural Preservation Committee, an Iowa general partnership consisting of Dr. Darryl K. Mozena, Jeffrey P. Mozena, Mark Falb, Timothy J. Conlon, and Dr. Randy Lengeling.

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*Egan won the Chautauqua Prize for his Curtis biography. He also won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for National Reporting for contributing to The  New York Times series, How Race Is Lived In America . In 2006, he won The National Book Award For The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived The Great American Dustbowl.

1 Timothy Egan, Short Nights Of The Shadow Catcher The Epic Life And Immortal Photographs Of Edward Curtis. Mariner Books, 2013, 49

2. Ibid. 32

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics

4. Egan, 165

5.http://www.sundanceresort.com/about/story.html

Related events:

• Madison-based Ho-Chunk artist and photographer Tom Jones will be featured in MOWA’s State Gallery in I am an Indian First and an Artist Second. The show includes two bodies of work. The first uses plastic Indian figurines abstractly as a metaphor for what Jones perceives as a form of identity genocide. The second body of work, The North American Landscape, is a contemporary response to the photogravures of Curtis. The Jones show will open September 6 and run through December 1, with an opening reception 5 to 8 p.m. on Friday, September 6.
• Kelly Kirshtner, PhD. University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee, will give a talk on Edward Curtis and his influences on cinema at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, September 26 at MOWA.

All programs and events are free for MOWA members (the $12 museum entry fee includes membership) and no pre-registration is required.

A version of this article was originally published in the Aug. 21, 2013 edition of The Shepherd Express. 

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Courtesy blacksteve.wordpress.com

The other day I had lunch with a handful of former colleagues from The Capital Times in Madison. Inevitably the sorry state of journalism’s health as a profession came up. We kicked the poor dog around a bit but I don’t think we felt too sorry for ourselves, or too self-lacerating.

But we did shudder collectively at the prospect of the Koch Brothers’ insidious bid to buy The Tribune Newspapers. The following statement by David Simon, producer of the profusely acclaimed HBO drama series The Wire and a former newspaper reporter, states the case regarding journalism cogently and eloquently:

http://bit.ly/SimonSaysNoKochBros

(Full disclosure, the Simon statement includes a petition solicitation but not a request for money.)

But what troubles me especially amid retrogressing cultural tendencies — like the George Zimmerman acquittal and the “stand your ground” laws — is how a  paranoid and self-serving individualism has reasserting itself as one of America’s ugliest characteristics. Let’s consider how this has played out in a historical context.

As the Daily Koz blog points out, “The 2012 Republican Party is barely distinguishable from the John Birch Society.  It is funded in large part by the Koch brothers, the heirs of Fred Koch, one of the Birch Society’s founding members.  The Kochs may not be members of the Society, but their ideas — extreme laissez-faire capitalism with communism lurking in any regulation, unions, health care and even Civil Rights laws — are virtually the same. (One of the current right’s few attempts to avoid looking like Birchers is morphing communism into ‘socialism.’ No need to explain to the faithful that they’re really the same.)” 1

One of the Birchers looniest conspiracy theories — about water fluoridation being a communist brain-hatch — was brilliantly lampooned in Stanley Kubrick‘s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which the character General Jack D. Ripper initiates a nuclear war in the hope of thwarting a communist plot to “sap and impurify” the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people with fluoridated water.

(It agonizes me to know that the Birch society is still alive and that and its current headquarters is in Grand Chute WI, with local the chapters in all 50 states. This underscores how politically and morally conflicted my home state is. We’re also known for Fightin’ Robert LaFollette and the birthplace of “The Wisconsin Idea” and Progressivism and yes, socialist mayors in Milwaukee.)

You may recall that the Birchers also accused Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. of being a communist. At a certain instinctual level, the notion probably arose because he embodied the fearsome black “other” who will do horrible things to “us” if only given a chance, especially if he’s a slender teenager wielding a bag of Skittles candy in the dark, in the rain, alone, minding his own business.

It’s time for many more people than Trayvon Martin’s father (right) to speak out about injustice. Contact your congressional representative. Courtesy thestartingfive.com.

And before you fade into doubts about Zimmerman being the violent perpetrator of a lethal crime, consider: He was fired from a 2005 job as a security guard for excessive aggression, a former co-worker told the New York Daily News Thursday. The paper reports that Zimmerman had worked on and off for several firms that “provided security to illegal house parties.”

“Usually he was just a cool guy. He liked to drink and hang with the women like the rest of us,” the paper’s source said. “But it was like Jekyll and Hyde. When the dude snapped, he snapped.”

Uncontested facts that show a lethal progression: Zimmerman was the police-disobeyer, the aggressor, the provocateur and the killer — of an unarmed youth. Where does “Self Defense” come into this scenario?

Many articulate comments have arisen in response to the Martin/Zimmerman verdict. But The Nation provided a few excellent points in the August 5/12 issue.

The lead editorial notes that the outspoken, book-hustling Juror B37  “reminds us that all jurors — like police, prosecutors and judges — are beholden to their own fears and prejudices, no matter how objective they believe themselves to be carrying out the law. Laws can never be separated from their cultural context — and the fear of black men driven criminal justice policy in this country.”

Then Micah Denzel Smith proposes what real justice would be in this case. “Zimmerman sitting behind bars for 25 years isn’t justice delivered,” he writes. “Our prison state doesn’t work, and relying on it to bring justice for any of us is a fool’s errand. Instead, justice should be an entire society doing everything we can to ensure that what happened to Trayvon never happens again. This a commitment to recognizing the humanity in black and boys. It means divesting the racist belief that black men are preternaturally violent, creatures, inherently criminal. Justice is black boys not having to grow up with that hanging over their heads.”

Courtesy Americanurban.com

That’s why this case can’t just be the cause of the week. Trayvon Martin may fade in memory but only to our eternal shame, if changes are not made to wrong-headed laws that serve revenge-besotted vigilantes, not truth and justice. Do we want a racial profile and paranoia-enabling, shoot-if-they’re-black judicial system? Is that what America is about in 2013?

Smith then recalls the great jazz singer Nina Simone’s initial response to the 1964 racist bombing of a church in Alabama, which killed four little black girls. At first Simone went to her garage and actually tried to make a gun itself. She told her husband she “wanted to kill someone.” He replied, “Nina, you don’t know anything about killing. The only thing you got is music.” So, she wrote ”Mississippi Goddam.”  2

I want to share her powerful response to that tragedy in song.

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

There’s also the most eloquent purely music response I know of, John Coltrane’s elegiac “Alabama.” This video beautifully ties Coltrane’s piece to a Rev. King speech about the tragedy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiJ_0gp-T9A

Please listen to these two pieces. Then we might begin working anew – using each of our best skills and talents – for justice for all the Trayvon Martins and for the despoiled ideals of a nation built on the foundation that all men and women are created equal and must be treated that way, in our flawed and broken hearts, and in our morally floundering legal system.

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Thanks to my friend Richard Meyer of Madison for alerting me to Simon’s statement.

1 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/08/1098463/-Doesn-t-Anyone-Remember-the-John-Birch-Society

2 The Nation, August 5 /12 2013, pp. 3, 6-7

(Below) Young lions seem especially fascinated by their peer’s physical selves.

A Westerly Cultural Travel Journal Vol. 4

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When the stars threw down their spears,

and water’d heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger! Burning bright

in the forests of the night,

what immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

– from “The  Tyger” by William Blake, Songs of Experience

Keenburg, CO —  The tiger’s nine-foot-long body pulses and twitches with power, sinew and ferocity. It turns and strides stealthily back, and then turns to pace, again and again. I see many large carnivorous creatures on this day. But the tiger alone makes me shudder. Almost any of the nearly 300 animals viewable at The Wild Animal Sanctuary could kill me, if they were hungry enough and I vulnerable enough.

The huge, relentless tigers are unmistakably the most lethal athletes among the wild creatures. On this 90-ish degree day most of the other animals lie under shade spots. But the new tigers pace and pace. My witness to this extraordinary facility is not to evoke fear — rather respect for these astonishing creatures. And the tiger in its lithe grandiosity and gold-orange and black stripes coat is as beautiful as it intimidating. And here is where Blake’s sense of wonder is so apt.

These mighty cats had recently been rescued and were still in relatively enclosed quarters, until they grow accustomed to the sanctuary environment. Then they will be released into the tiger potion of the facility’s 720-acre refuge, located about 40 miles west of Boulder.

Understand how special this place is. You can view virtually all of those acres thanks to the sanctuary’s design. A mile-long walkway — perhaps 35 feet above the wildlife terrain — traverses the vast facility.

Here’s a portion of the 1 mile-long walk way over the wild animal sanctuary.

Perhaps you’ll get somewhat closer to such species in a conventional zoo. But here they are given a free, natural reign, perhaps as well as humans have devised to date. In a sense, you have the safe, voyeuristic ability of a bird hovering over the African Serengeti, or the great North Woods inhabited by wolves or Grizzlies. Or in the wilds of Alaska, where suddenly you look down and spy a massive Klondike bear lolling contentedly or roaming through easily crushed forest thickets for a meal.

This organization does not capture wild animals. All the creatures are rescued or legally confiscated from situations and entrapments where misguided or abusive humans had the animals. Or from circuses that have poorly-cared-for animals including from Bolivia, whose circuses were outlawed from using live animals.

And after seeing the unnerving new tigers, the sight of the lions was stunning — they appeared still as if carved granite. They rested in their prairie, one completely alone, its magisterial shape and mane declaring his rule of the domain. But as I peer more closely I notice an unmistakably rich tawniness in their massive necklaces of fur.

Like the tiger, the lion has a severe degree of beauty that rivals its fearsomeness.

I begin to realize some of the psychological effect of seeing large wild animals that could tear me to Kevin tenders. Here’s one startling difference between a wild animal sanctuary and a conventional zoo.

The zoo allows the viewer to scrutinize the animal in a dispassionate and objective manner, as a scientist might. That can be valuable within the limits of that viewpoint, for the human at least. It’s because you presume a posture of existential imperviousness and do not experience it as a truly wild animal. It is in captivity and relatively safe.

But the safeness here is merely you from it — physically. The human design providing safety does not entrap the acclimated inhabitants which, I then realized, was surely part of the encaged new tiger’s restlessness.

But those new tigers are promised a provisional freedom to roam and behave as they would in their natural home except without other large living animals to prey upon, thanks to the fencing layout.

You gaze in a sort of literal suspended animation. It’s as if you are in a different time and space from the animal, and you are. They can’t touch you despite your relative proximity. And though you experientially share the animal’s time in its presence, which is rendered irrelevant for avoiding the “nasty, brutish and short” time it would take the carnivore to track you down and pounce on your neck. One supposes philosopher Thomas Hobbes might have come up with his famous adjectives regarding the survival of the fittest, in precisely a place like this.

On the other hand, if it seems peculiar contemplating philosophy of life and death amid wild meat-eaters rather than with Homo sapiens, it may be because philosophy tends to be — like so many other of our activities – human-centric, unless you’re a bioethicist or a staff member of a place like this.

The regal resident tigers love to loll and Lord over the sanctuary.

So I stand there with a fresh appreciation of the experience as I watch the acclimated tigers lounging on wooden stands that provide shade and high points from which to lord over — not unlike your adorable house cat perched atop your dining room armoire. These tigers look utterly relaxed, so it follows that they’re mentally and psychologically healthier than the nearby new tigers.

Two arctic wolves loll seeming dead to the world, as if they’d just consumed a polar bear.

One lies on its back, its limbs sprawling in space like a furry astronaut in free fall. Then his head swivels and he sees me (left, above). I wonder what’s going through his brain because his eyes fix on mine, or perhaps on me. I gulp like a cartoon character. In the same moment, I feel certain affection for him. As with the others, I see the unfettered beauty of this creature — in the depth of his glimmering eyes and wondrous shades of grey in his fur.  A short walk further brings me above two timber wolves. I focus my binoculars and my eyes plunge into the wonder of their deeply textured presence. The wind rustles the charcoal and sienna fur, changing its colors as a painter waving an invisible brush over them.

They are alive and at peace, and so am I.

Another creature is not so comfortable; or rather he’s getting there, slowly.

An attendant tells me this is a new Kodiak bear, named Max. He weighs 1,700 pounds. The sun is merciless. But he’s partially submerged in a tub of water with a stream flying over his landscape of a torso.

Max, the new Klondike bear at the sanctuary, cooling his jets.

You have to wonder what doofus captor allowed Max to gorge on what mountains of junk to reach this grotesque weight. He probably thought it was cute. The world’s largest teddy bear.

The poor guy heaves ponderously with each breath and admittedly has an almost doll-like circular face despite his ungainly girth. Max looks up at me and now I feel more pity than fear. I sense that if he’s released to the wild he probably becomes easy prey, because of his obesity. So he seems to inhabit the best of all possible worlds, right now.

A red tree fox here was born blind, and was unable to survive in the wild, but he now uses his senses of smell, touch and hearing, and can run and play with other animals, the attendant says.

Some of the wild animals at the sanctuary in Colorado a very acclimated to the sanctuaries environment. Of course she (above) can go virtually anywhere she wants to, like under the cool concession-area canopy.

— All photos by Kevin Lynch

Signs along the way explain circumstances of rescue. One woman bought a wolf and tried to breed it with a dog to tame it, then gave it to someone as a gift. The experiment failed. In another instance, African lions were kept in tiny circus cages for years. They kept having stillborn offspring due to no contraceptives and a lack of proper nutrition. Another woman kept two large wild cats in the small basement of her New York apartment building.

It is always a question of honoring the animals’ well-being as we always presume to prioritize our own, often at the expense of other living beings.

One rule here is: No dogs allowed. One can imagine what chaos a bark-happy dog might create in this fully open air environment.

As I walk back to the entrance, a water truck pumps hydration into the new tiger cages. Two new black leopards lie suspended above them – only a few feet below me – but secure in a small cage. Hues of red in their exquisite coats glisten in the sun. I hope to return when they too feel at home here.

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