A Westerly Cultural Travel Journal, Vol. 2

MORRISON, CO. —The scenery on my drive to Colorado diminished as I headed west: the farmland of Northern Illinois and Iowa are verdant but without the rolling sumptuousness of “God’s country” in Southwest Wisconsin, which I forsook for a quicker route. Nebraska unfolds as increasingly flat. I didn’t find it boring though, as it put me into an expansive Zen-like mode wherein I tune into the sky more with land as backdrop. And with four largely sunny days there and back, I traveled beneath myriad lovely cloud variations, from full-figured cumuli promenades to wispy flourishes by the atmospheric cloud painter. Have I looked at life from both sides now?

Still, I was stunned as many surely are, by the experience of crossing the border to Colorado. Almost immediately you encounter an extremely arid landscape dominated by slightly undulating plains and scuffling flora, mainly small bushes waiting to be liberated as tumbleweeds. A few scattered trees seemed to hang on for dear life, some slightly bowed in thirst, or as if praying for rain (Colorado’s devastating Black Forest wildfires raged while I was out there.)

Things finally perked up as a got closer to my destination, Boulder, Colorado. The purpose of the trip was to hear the mighty Tedeschi Trucks Band at perhaps the most beautiful concert venue in America, the Red Rocks Amphitheater in nearby Morrison. Rolling Stone recently voted this “The Best Amphitheater in the US,” in a vote of musicians and music industry pros. “Red Rocks is the most spiritual place on earth,” raved Dale Dawson in a discussion comment on the Rolling Stone site. “I’m proud to say I have a guitar made from the redwood of row 1, seat 1. They replaced the 50-year-old benches five years ago.” (The guitar is displayed in the visitors’ center at the top of the RR venue.)

Indeed, listeners gather inside a majestic mountainside cavern, between two massive sandstone wings, as if a prehistorically giant Icarus and his magical appendages had crashed into the earth after flying too close to the sun. Dinosaurs once roamed here. More importantly, the wings — twin leaning rock towers — provide a perfect acoustic setting, the park proclaims. For sure, it’s a musicians’ Mecca. 1

Approaching Red Rocks: The first glimpse of an amphitheater crowd in The Hall of the Mountain King. Photo by Kevin Lynch

In this exalted setting, TTB proved they’re working hard to raise the high bar they’ve already set for themselves. For example, Derek Trucks seems to be perfecting a superb sense of architecture and drama in his guitar solos. His finger style-cum-bottleneck playing remains indebted to Duane Allman. But Trucks is evolving unprecedented technique and conception. He’s refining the inherent bottleneck fluidity and at times it seems like his very breath informs the articulation. He consistently folded in softly nuanced notions while retaining the Southern rock-blues edge. We hear that growth in his sitar-like aspect, what he calls “swamp raga.” Here’s where micro-tonal modes meet the blues down at the crossroads.

Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi rock at Red Rocks. Courtesy CBS Denver

On the clear-eyed, low-flying ode to personal loss and urban suffering “Midnight in Harlem,” Trucks’ solo peaked with a stunningly long line — traveling the guitar neck’s whole length — like an aural infinity sign, which revealed the limpid outer limits of musicality in one crystalline moment. Only Jeff Beck remains Trucks’ superior among electric finger stylists, but Derek is closing fast.

Susan Tedeschi remains virtually supreme in her blues-soul-gospel idiom. On one new rollicking swinger from their forthcoming CD Made up Mind, she engaged the melody as if grappling with her soul like it was an alligator. She climaxed with a spring water-clear extended note that sounded like a river racer plunging over a waterfall, death be damned. So I chuckled to hear Tedeschi’s little-girl speaking voice after her gusty-mama belting. It sounded like she was inviting the teeming throng down for a cup of tea. Susan Tedeschi at Red Rocks. Photos courtesy CBS Denver

“Bound for Glory” rode its heaving waves of radiant spirit to lift any listener to a palpable light, regardless of one’s belief or lack thereof. Organist Kofi Burbridge unleashed a deep-pocket solo worthy of the late, great Charles Earland. When was the last time a gospel song was a crossover hit? “Can you feel it?” Here’s a video of “Bound for Glory” http://www.axs.com/events/248204/tedeschi-trucks-band-tickets?src=AEGLIVE_PTEDEDEN072514AEG001&em=AEGLIVE_PTEDEDEN072514AEG001&skin=redrocks

All the new material also rang strong. Though I could only make out the title phrase of “It’s So Heavy,” I felt the weight of a down-in-the-bones sentiment. And the band unveiled a fresh talent, the solo singing voice of trombonist Saunders Sermons, faintly recalling the late Marvin Gaye and his tender, lovelorn falsetto. The horn players proved more self-disciplined in their solos yet as resourceful and daring as ever. The free-jazz sorties on “Nobody’s Free” asserted their ironic sense of defiance.

Quibbles: I would’ve gladly heard one of Tedeschi’s two best covers (both on their live album) Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” and John Sebastian’s “Darlin’ Be Home Soon.” Both songs seem incongruous, given their style, but demonstrate their knack for fleshing out lyrical material without overloading it. You can’t have everything, especially when a band is presenting new material. Among the new songs, “Part of Me” has a shimmy-shake groove so infectious as to transport the listener to Motown 1968.

The crowd danced jubilantly to the latter part of the set, and when they called the band back for an encore Tedeschi proved her generosity by bringing out Grace Potter to join her in a simpatico cover of John Prine’s quietly magnificent “Angel from Montgomery.” It was actually Potter’s moment of musical redemption.

I missed the actual opening act, swamp-rock bluesman JJ Grey & Mofro, honoring the time considerations of my gracious hosts and concert mates, Jim and Kris Verdin. As for Potter and the Nocturnals, I’ve seen her in a convincing blues-drenched mode on You Tube. Perhaps because of this expansive destination-venue, she felt compelled to amp up the sound and theatrics. So we got plenty of posturing, glitzy costume flourishes and big-hair shakes from Potter, who seemed lost in a vast private fantasy more akin to Harry Potter, but without J. K. Rowling to translate her phantasmagoria.

There was little Grace in her performance. Rather than sticking to the Hammond B-3 organ, which she plays with reasonable competence, she spent more time out front dancing and pretending guitar. She slung on a flying wedge and played what amounted to air guitar with a real one. Perhaps in a nod to Derek Trucks, she pulled out a bottleneck, but the effect was a swift slide into screech, which lacerated our eardrums, even in the 60th row.

But it’s TTB that amazed, because they’re still just getting started. Trucks is the youngest guitarist on the Rolling Stone Top 100 Guitarists of All Time (ranked 16th). Their stylistic range is staggering because nothing sounds contrived and they demonstrate how related the various American roots musics are. At an execution level, it’s all about chemistry, as bassist Otiel Burbridge says on the TTB website. 2 and what Tedeschi calls a commitment to an inclusive family-like environment in the band’s collective lifestyle.

This must have plenty to do with the band’s discrete yet integral inner units: husband-wife leaders with backup singer-songwriter Mike Mattison as a third lead mentality; the Burbridge brothers on keyboards, flute and bass; two drummers playing as a one eight-limbed rhythm sorcerer and the three loosey-goosey horn virtuosos. Forsooth, it’s become Shakespearean — “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” — a phrase methinks sister Susan doth not protest. After snagging a Grammy for their debut album Revelator, this band was recently nominated for Australia’s Helpmann Award for Best International Contemporary Concert.

They’re worth a long drive anywhere.

___________________________________

Photos of Red Rocks Amphitheater courtesy redrocks.com

1 The area of Red Rocks, originally known as the Garden of Angels, has attracted the attention of musical performers since before the turn of the century. The majestic setting of the Amphitheatre, along with the panoramic view of Denver, makes for a breathtaking scene. In the early 1900’s, John Brisben Walker had a vision of artists performing on a stage nestled into the perfectly acoustic surroundings of Red Rocks. Walker produced a number of concerts between 1906 and 1910 on a temporary platform; and from his dream, the history of Red Rocks as an entertainment venue began. In 1927, George Cranmer, Manager of Denver Parks, convinced the City of Denver to purchase the area of Red Rocks from Walker for the price of $54,133. Cranmer convinced the Mayor of Denver, Ben Stapleton, to build on the foundation laid by Walker. By enlisting the help of the federally sponsored Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Work Projects Administration (WPA), labor and materials were provided for the venture. Denver architect Burnham Hoyt designed the Amphitheatre with an emphasis on preserving the natural beauty of the area. The plans were completed in 1936, and the Amphitheatre was dedicated on June 15, 1941, though the actual construction spanned over 12 years. In 1947, the first annual Easter Sunrise Service took place. Since then, Red Rocks Amphitheatre has attracted the best performers to its stage. From: http://www.redrocksonline.com/ABOUTUS/HistoryGeology.aspx

2 http://www.tedeschitrucksband.com/video/the-burbridge-brothers

A Southerly Cultural Travel Journal,  Vol. 1

 “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. “ — Frederick Douglass 

(NOTE: I decided to re-post this slightly revised blog column from April 29, 2012, because it seems even more pertinent than ever with the current convolutions of the George Zimmerman second -degree murder case.)

This first posting documents an incident that occurred on my train ride back north to Milwaukee from Carbondale. However its timeliness and troubling nature allowed it to rise to the surface). 

The black youth settled in beside me on the train and within minutes pulled his hood up and seemed to doze off to the gently numbing rhythms of Amtrak. Glancing at him, I figured he was in his mid-to-late teens and, of course, I thought of the late Trayvon Martin. Sadly, this boyish male was risking profiling and even racist threat by wearing a hood in southern Illinois, not long after Martin had been gunned down in Florida for doing barely more than this tender-faced young man was. Sitting beside him, I could sense his slenderness; his frame virtually swallowed up the loose-hanging top and threadbare jeans.

Nothing about him threatened me, even though I’m aware that some people use hoods to hide their identity, while up to no good.

Yet sure enough, within ten minutes a porter arrived, roused the youth from his slumber and addressed him. By then I was reading and enveloped in the voice-muting hum that makes train transportation comfortingly attractive. The porter said something to him about “this section.” The youth — likely flashing on the sudden demise of his peer Martin — promptly stood up and headed for the rear. All I know is that it was the coach section of the train, which ostensibly has no limitations on passenger access. And yet here was a young black being deported from it. Was it merely the “threat” of his beardless brown face in his hood, and perhaps his jeans, which might’ve been low-slung?

A young woman, who soon replaced the young black man in the seat beside me, was just a scruffily dressed — wearing a faded peace symbol T-shirt and tattered, low-slung jeans– but she was white and female, and nobody disturbed her. So I ended up in pleasant conversation with her, which I might just as well had with young black man.

Melissa Harris-Perry points out in the April 16 issue of The Nation that “sagging pants laws” in Louisiana, Georgia, Florida and Arkansas now attempt “to legislate the public performance of black bodies by making it illegal to enact particular versions of youth fashion associated with blackness.”

I confess that pants hanging so low that the wearer must shamble along with one hand holding his pants up strike me as somewhat absurd fashion. But is it any more ridiculous than women wobbling around on five-inch spike heels — an extreme fashion that never goes out of style? Both fashions virtually disable their wearer’s mobility as a pedestrian. Both the black youth and the high-heeled woman make easy prey for real muggers of any color or even a hole in the sidewalk that slightly trips them up.

Of course, no one — except a few graying, bushy arm-pitted bra burners — seems to object to high heels, a convention codified and sustained by the patriarchal approval of the sexual allure such contrivances provide, even as they’re demonstrably harmful to women’s feet and body, over time. Not to get too self-righteous: My own libido and conscience struggle with the dichotomy.

But what if every Sex in the City babe strutting in spike heels was forced to wear instead clunky Air Jordans and barely upheld jeans? Would we outlaw the jeans? Unthinkable. Leering patriarchs would tacitly approve of the potential peek at plush tush cleavage. So the sagging pants laws present another one of our cultural hypocrisies.

I mean, anyone of any color can put on a hooded sweatshirt and be a devil or a saint, or more likely just another person passing through a chilly day.

I’m embarrassed to be an American again, underneath the great sense of tragedy that I feel for Martin’s family, for all black people and for all Americans. And before indignant flag wavers respond, know that for decades I’ve written about American culture by striving for a strong sense of inquisitive pride in all things the people of this nation produce to justifiably call it great, in ways that have enriched the world in every sense of the word.

But I’m also honest enough to admit my shame when our gun-toting, might-makes-right, testosterone-loaded adolescent mentality raises its ugly head again. This mentality — that gunned down an utterly innocent young boy — demonstrates the immaturity of our culture: that a man like George Zimmerman can build up an obsession that leads to a supposedly “self defense” killing of a teenager toting nothing but candy on a street. Then the laws ostensibly allowed the killer to go free until a national protest arises and we begin to think about how we behave toward black males as The Other in our society. Martin is akin to the Ishmael outcast Melville identified 160 years ago as an American kind of outsider, typically an immigrant, who felt compelled to go to the sea to escape “the damp, drizzly November in my soul.”

Ishmael saw the sea as a means of flight from society and also from what in himself he understood to be Narcissus, because he could not “grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain,” and consequently “plunged into it and was drowned.”

But that same self-image “is the ungraspable phantom of life,” Ishmael concludes, with his redemptive gift for philosophically grappling with the mysteries of existence. He would have us understand that the phantom is a mystery we all share, in our condition of narcissistic self-love, with which the American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights give us full rein to pursue — individual freedom and self-assertion and self-betterment. Peoples and nations all over the world have since grown to emulate that American freedom of self-regard and self-assertion.

And yet Ishmael sensed the contradictions in the society that proclaimed freedom for everyone, while not according it to many, so he had to flee to the sea. That’s not so easy for anyone. Ishmael’s story in Moby-Dick shows that whaling was a dangerous, often fatal alternative life. And by the turn-of-the-century, W.E.B. Du Bois identified all blacks as Ishmaels — pointedly seen as societal problems because of their skin color. I suspect DuBois might not be shocked, but he would be profoundly chagrined to know how his racial descendants fare in contemporary America.

Oddly enough, when I began this post by trying to first dictate Trayvon Martin’s name on my Dragon dictation system, the computer wrote “unmarked grave.” It’s as if somehow this young dead man is computed as unworthy of a headstone with his name, or of acknowledgement of his premature death. (For me, reading signals of all types is part of the cultural process). How far have we come since the horrendous murder of young black Emmett Till in 1955, which spurred the modern Civil Rights Movement?

In a way we’ve regressed because Till supposedly “provoked” by talking to a Southern white woman. Zimmerman’s deadly response was codified by our recent laws. We certainly won’t fight another Civil War over the abuse or exploitation of African Americans. Reactionary race-based laws or culture will never again face such heroic and tragic resistance. So our national psyche continues with its long, ingrained racial responses to physical presence, style and imagery.

Each of us needs to deal with this racial response within him or herself. As New York Times columnist Brent Staples commented, “Gun laws that allow a community watch volunteer to run around armed are hardly responsible. But Trayvon Martin was killed by a very old idea that will likely take generations of enormous cultural transformation to dislodge.” 1

(Thar he blows! Another damn Moby-Dick sighting again, straight ahead, port side. Abandon ship or proceed.)

I think back to the two main black characters in Moby-Dick. Pip is an African-American cabin boy and Daggoo is a large African harpooner. Pip signifies the vulnerability of a youth like Martin, when he falls out of a whaling boat and is almost abandoned in a shark-infested sea. A cruel sailor had warned the unsteady Pip he’s not worth losing a whale. The experience leaves poor Pip with what we’d probably call now a post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet even monomaniacal Ahab realizes what this young man has endured and takes him under his wing, with surprising paternal tenderness for the remainder of the fateful voyage.

And the mighty Daggoo is framed as the heroic presence his great physical stature and abilities should command. In a famous scene, the ebony harpooner hoists the diminutive third mate Flask on top of his six foot five-inch frame to allow the mate a better view of whales yonder. Melville (as Ishmael) writes:

“But the sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, noble Negro to every role of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen haired Flask seemed a snowflake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly, vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to the Negro’s lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.” *

Why could an observer like Melville so aptly understand, in turn, the human vulnerability and the human majesty of black males in 1851 — yet in 2012, we flounder in according them their due as members of our same democratic country? If the earth does not “alter her times and her seasons” for any man, why should we?

Apparently we do alter our laws because a young man like Martin is not innocent, as Harris-Perry notes with dripping irony. He is guilty of being a “problem,” that is of “being black in presumably restricted public spaces.”

So Martin’s very public being is indicted, as I suspected my seat partner was, rather than anything they actually did.

This existential travesty, of course, flies in the face of our whole judicial philosophy, that a person is innocent until proven guilty. The black man’s being is inherently guilty; how can he ever claim the right of innocence. we have bounty values on their heads in several different ways. Witness the millions spent on incarcerating blacks often for mere marijuana possession.

Conservative commentators noted that Martin had previously been caught with an empty bag containing traces of pot, among other trivial offenses. Here is another cultural hypocrisy: The drug he may have possessed is one that renders a person mellow and even compliant, unlike the belligerence and dangerous aggressiveness of many people intoxicated by alcohol — the drug our culture embraces with unabashed passion.

Where do we go from here? Surely we seek justice for Trayvon Martin’s needless death. And with justice we find hopefully some clarity about the cruel absurdity of recent sweeping self-defense legislation – like Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, or my own state of Wisconsin’s newly imposed “Castle Doctrine” (which recently allowed a man to kill another innocent black youth) — and threaten to shuttle us back to the era of lynching Jim Crow horror.

As Tony Judt has recently noted, echoing Tocqueville from Melville’s era: “The US is more vulnerable to the exploitation of fear for political ends than any other democracy I know.” 2  Judt (a British-born historian) provocatively calls this political demagoguery a “native American fascism.”

Perhaps. Ahab, at his worst, was the archetypal American demagogue in our literature. Yet even he “has his humanities,” as we see above.

Judt sees today’s American “fascism” in right-wing talk show hosts and unapologetic warmongers like Dick Cheney.

Or is it more likely we face our own version of the institutionalized “banality of evil,” which Hannah Arendt warned smug Western society of, during the darkest days of the Third Reich? Surely it is the numbing application of poorly justified laws, as much as fascist fanaticism, that can insidiously infect a democracy that lives in uneasy tension with its legal order.

Today, as vast tides of easily infected electronic info-tainment lull us, true citizens must remain on the lookout for  “evil” springing leaks in the American ship (or train?).  Otherwise we continue to sink into a democracy waterlogged and infected with cold-blooded, every-man-for-himself survivalism. Black males remain the perennial Other to fear.

Like Melville and Frederick Douglass, I still think we’re better than that.

— Kevin Lynch

*Moby-Dick Chapter 48 The First Lowering

1. New York Times, op-ed page, April 15, 2012

2. Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, Penguin, 2012, 324.

A friend of mine pointed out I used the term “murder” twice in my posting about Trayvon Martin when the more precise term should be “alleged murder.” I’ve erred on the side of caution and changed my terminology in that posting to “killing.” (Linked here:)

https://kevernacular.com/?p=214

However the issue of self-defense in this case is as compelling as it is debatable. The photos of a slightly bloodied Zimmerman suggest he was injured in a scuffle when, as he claims, Martin attacked him after Zimmerman confronted him with his gun.

Zimmerman’s back-head injuries the day of the Martin killing. Courtesy Florida state attorney’s office/AP

However the Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump questions whether these wounds were self-inflicted as a self-defense strategy.  He comments: “If he had these injuries, why didn’t they take him to the hospital?” he said to to the Miami Herald.

“This happened at about 7:30. In the police surveillance video taken 30  minutes later, you can see with your own eyes that the fire rescue people didn’t  so much as put a Band-Aid on his head.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trayvon-martin-marijuana-system-night-gunned-article-1.1080182#ixzz1vdcEthPz

Reports that Martin had traces of marijuana in his system the night of his death would, if anything, undercut Zimmerman’s story that the youth attacked. It is common knowledge that marijuana —  unlike alcohol — is an inhibitor to aggressive behavior. There are virtually no cases of murder committed under the exclusive influence of pot. Compare that to the staggering statistics of alcohol-related homicides.

The point of my original post column was that Zimmerman was an overly aggressive and overly suspicious provoker with a sense of moral purpose and justice that was self-delegated as a vigilante neighborhood protector with no legal authority. These circumstances allow an observer to easily imagine that he had anticipated and premeditated such a situation.

The thinking might go something like this: If I kill someone I think is dangerous to someone or myself, how precisely do I defend my actions legally?

Zimmerman is a premeditated actor in this scenario margin, even if Martin did assault him, reacting to the provocation. So for all its possible nuances of circumstance, the case still gets back to the premeditated provoker and his motivations to confront a person whose mere appearance and presence were presumed to justify his motive and subsequent deadly actions.

So What do we make of his judgement of Martin’s appearance and presence? This gets back to the startling act of apparent racial profiling by an Amtrak conductor I witnessed on a train, of a hooded black youth comparable to Martin.

Once a person is accosted in such a prejudicial manner the subject’s rights, and even his very life, are ripe for abuse by a person presuming in some manner of self-generated moral authority.*

So let’s not take our eyes off the ball in this case. Justice is so easily obscured by  prejudice, whether the prejudice lies in the heart and mind of the defendant, the lawyers, the judge, the jury or Joe blow blogger.

That’s why I’ve taken a little more time here to sort through this, using “cool” legalistic language that, I hope, would less likely stir prejudice in my rhetoric and thinking.

Milwaukee Riverwest crimewatch hero The Watchman. Photo by Mike De Sisti/ Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

*Citizen vigilance is hardly a crime in itself. Consider where I live, in Milwaukee’s racially diverse Riverwest neighborhood. The closest thing to a crime-watching vigilante is an admittedly eccentric guy called The Watchman. The 6-foot, 200-pound, 30-something crime fighter patrols Riverwest in a fire-engine-red-masked superhero costume, with a flashlight and pepper spray on hand – and a black Motorola cell phone as his weapon of choice. He uses no guns, despite the fact that Milwaukee recently passed an ordinance legalizing concealed weapons, which could put The Watchman at increased risk if he confronts a thief or mugger. That’s a hero, in my book.

“It’s about reporting it,” he told The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “Contacting police, or getting an ambulance out here if it’s a medical situation.”

As for super powers? None, he says. “I’m just a guy. I may look a little funny, but I’m just a guy. And I’m out here to let everybody know that they can do their part.”

He’s not the only guy. The Watchman belongs to the Great Lakes Heroes Guild. “We combine resources, work together and share information,” he says.

What do you think about all this?

BTW consider the latest “trending story”: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/trayvon-martin-shooting-witnesses-change-stories-ahead-zimmerman-133743219.html?fb_action_ids=4025302879400&fb_action_types=news.reads&fb_ref=type%3Aread%2Cuser%3AUyMrKlzXtsm0wSl5hn1dnOEgjOU&fb_source=other_multiline&code=AQDGedKmiKYi8PtLfS8Xdx_qYD_aCiYiFFgUgNKJUoTdSKAsj_WyYDLVdPlQ5eHk_feuK3jyEvo4J6XAt0CTzn-IwAzCVMCh2SYI_eGq24dPvVkua5XS3alJ0LiYDXgiY1NX3XB4HmFI2YlG721nRFE_WlaEbrDRCZg5tOusKhGBHfP7CM-F-dHnl8AOKuA6wYU#_=_

 This painting depicts the Civil War’s fiery and crucial Mississippi River battle for Vicksburg. courtesy of ashvilleoralhistoryproject.com

Happy Independence Day. Today means many things to Americans and to people around the globe for sure. I think of the phenomenal military and political feat of liberation that the colonists and the founding fathers pulled off,  against a massively better-armed foe. How many of them could’ve imagined what stands today, the greatest country in the world, despite its deep and troubling flaws.

I suspect the biggest thinkers among them, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Washington, dreamed of something like this. But what counted was their freedom, opening the door to a redefinition of living democracy for modern times.

And yet, this July 4 is worthy of remembering the other great war fought on our own land. It is the 150th anniversary week of the two Civil War battles, Gettysburg and Vicksburg, that turned the heartbreaking stench of defeat into the first glimmers of victory for the Union and for the emancipation of slaves.

The Gettysburg battle unfolding around a soon-to-be finished railroad track, which the North fought for control of.courtesy adventresults.com.

My story, published in the latest edition of the Shepherd Express, delves into Kenosha’s Civil War Museum exhibit concerning this historic turning point, with a strong Wisconsin storyline. I hope you enjoy it:

https://expressmilwaukee.com/article-21384-civil-war-wisconsin.html

(By the way, you can make a day of it in Kenosha by also visiting the dazzling Dinosaur Discovery Museum and other attractions, highlighted in a separate SE feature.)

What we should never forget is the human cost of war, and that war’s death and suffering was as a terrible as any this nation ever fought, as evidenced by the this photo, taken after the hellish three-day Gettysburg struggle.

Courtesy paranormal.about.com

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

A Westerly Cultural Travel Journal, Vol. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special exhibit-related events:

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

________________________________________

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

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

Sand County Songs Tim Southwick Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy wdigicollec.blog.spot

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

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

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

_________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CD cover courtesy mariaschneider.com

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

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

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

________________

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

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

2 Ibid p. 20

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

Dear moms,

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Mother’s Day,

Love,

Kevin

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

Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arshile Gorky Courtesy fashionablyla.blogspot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Ibid, 99

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gustav Mahler Courtesy www.bach.cantatas.com 

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

Michael Link/Harvey Taylor – Sittin’ In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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