Multi-talented Ben Sidran returns to Milwaukee for the first time in years

Ben Sidran. All photos via BenSidran/bensidran.com, unless otherwise credited.

Ben Sidran is a hydra? After many years of observing the multitalented pianist-singer-producer-author-interviewer-broadcaster, I strive to characterize him. “Renaissance man” is a cliché nearly as old as its historical genesis. More remote yet apt, hydra, the nine-headed snake from Greek mythology, seems only a slight rhetorical exaggeration. Grappling to encompass his myriad accomplishments, I hope you get a sense of the jazz man’s vast resonance.

And yet, despite his intellectual bona fides, literary as well as musical, as a performer he’s always projected a relaxed, unassuming aura which was no less evident in a recent interview.

The occasion is Sidran’s performing with his trio in Milwaukee for the first time in many years, at Bar Centro at 8 p.m. on Thursday, September 7, even as the Madison-based Chicago native has lived virtually his whole life in the state of Wisconsin.

First, I’ll try to highlight the range of his accomplishments. He first arrived as a member of a rock band, led by Milwaukee native Steve Miller in 1968, and wrote one of Miller’s most iconic songs, “Space Cowboy.” Sidran really emerged in 1971, the year of his first album under his own name and of the important book of “jazz/sociology”: Black Talk: How the Music of Black America Created a Radical Alternative to the Values of Western Literary Tradition. That loaded subtitle says plenty about the book, which includes a forward by iconic jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp. Another scholarly Sidran work, There Was A Fire, traces the Jewish contribution to American music and The American Dream. He has also published a book of remarkably simpatico interviews with jazz musicians, and a superb autobiography, A Life in the Music.

Sidran’s album “The Concert for Garcia Lorca” was nominated for a Grammy Award. ebay.com

Among his notable recording projects over the years have included any number of albums highlighting his self-accompanied singing, an offhanded yet often pointed style. Those have ranged to a brilliantly unpredictable album recording poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, another adapting writings of existentialist Albert Camus to song, an all-star recording adapting Hebrew wisdoms, and an album of Bob Dylan songs.

Also, he hosted a Peabody Award-winning interview program Jazz Alive on National Public Radio, and presented a Tedx Talk, “Embrace your Inner Hipster.” The hipster is a person searching for “authenticity in an age of technology,” he explained.

For all that, one thing he’d never done is record an album of piano trio music until now, with Swing State, with bassist Billy Peterson and his son Leo Sidran on drums. 1 and 2

What prompted this after all these years of jazz-related singing?

“Just what you said, never having done it, trying to keep it fresh,” Sidran replies in a phone interview. “Piano trio playing is very much part of the tradition I like, and it was a good time to make it.”

The piano trio’s seemingly stripped-down format helps prompt the question of why and how he has worked so incessantly over the years in such a vast range of expressive, conversational, and analytical modalities.

“It may sound strange but in doing all of that to me they’re not different things. Playing piano, writing, working on a book, or the radio, they were similar: they take a certain amount of focus, experience, and technique. It all basically revolves around music, it’s music-centric. So, it’s focusing on the music of people. More than the actual notes — the things that music critics get into — that means less to me than the people in the culture.”

Why did he reach so far back into the 1930s for most of the material on Swing State?

“That’s when I first started playing piano, back in the ‘50s. That’s also what I listened to. Music in the ‘30s is a lot like today playing music from the ‘90s. It seems like a long time ago now but at the time it was contemporary.”

But why play it now? “It’s just comfortable to play and I don’t have any problems playing songs that are part of the tradition. That makes sense to me, that’s what we do really.”

So, in a sense Sidran has taken a deep breath after years of artistic striving to let his fingers, instead of his voice, do the talking. He sounds both relaxed and invigorated by vintage romantic standards.

One of the most distinctive renditions is “Laura,” typically a limpid, wistful love song to a dead woman. But Sidran cuts the pathos way back, and turns it into a taut, mid-tempo exploration of almost mysterioso effect. I told him “Laura” sounded like how the late jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal might approach it. Sidran gracefully accepted the compliment, then explained that in fact Jamal had been “the guide for that arrangement.”

By contrast, the title tune is finger-popping hard bop, and that funky jazz style seems to be the dominant aspect of Sidran’s own piano style. How does hard-bop of the 1950s fit into his musical world?

“Well, it’s the style of piano playing of Bud Powell, Horace Silver, Wynton Kelly, a lot of piano players from the ‘50s and ‘60s that I grew up listening to. That’s my favorite kind of harmonic and rhythmic approach. Certainly Horace Silver categorizes as hard bop but it’s the language of the idiom of bebop.”

He’s too modest to think he’s a hydra, or plays as well as any of his favorite hard-bop pianists. But Sidran’s hydra head that actually thinks like a critic analyzed a piece by one of his favorites pianists, Sonny Clark, in these 1984 liner notes to Clark’s album My Conception. After a deft comment on the 32-bar structure of “Minor Meeting,” Sidran unfurls this lyrical description: “Sonny’s relaxed, casual attitude during his solo belies the precision of his lines and the almost literary construction of his musical ideas. It’s as if his playing is a non-verbal narrative that describes, in equal detail, both the ultimate destination of the journey and the little flowers along the way.”

But he’s a communicator in many senses so, despite Swing State, it would be a disservice to ignore his contributions as a jazz singer and producer, greatly influenced by another hipster singer-pianist, Mose Allison. He’s produced albums by Allison, Van Morrison, Rickie Lee Jones and Diana Ross. Sidran’s own most notable recent vocal recording is probably Dylan Different. How good is it? The album offers “covers that uncover a near symbiotic connection to his source’s material,” raves All-Music Guide’s knowledgeable critic Thom Jurek.

“I did the Dylan songs I grew up with in the ‘60s, the songs that I liked to listen to. I wasn’t so much making a statement about Dylan as I was reinterpreting his songs because I grew up with them and they were fun to play. Dylan has had such a long career that he’s had four or five different periods. It’s hard to summarize. So, this was a tribute to the way he approaches lyrics and putting a Ben Sidran spin on the arrangements.”

But like Dylan, Sidran can’t help making some sort of statement, and one is embedded in the title of the latest instrumental album. He’s lived most of his life in one of the most critical swing states in politics and, in that sense, beyond the uncanny rhythmic state that jazz swing evokes, political implications were intended.

“Of course, here in Wisconsin the majority of voters are Democratic but the Republicans have got the state (electoral map) so gerrymandered that they take over the (legislative) offices,” Sidran explains. “I want people to be aware that this is a swing state electorally, and it’s important to get this right, and not let one party co-opt the other.”

Sidran’s album communicates this in a subtle way, almost like subliminal messaging, as if the romance in this wordless music beckons us to not forget Martin Luther King’s dream, of human equality and opportunity for all.

This prompted me to ask him about the political implications in his first book Black Talk. He didn’t want to paraphrase a book written so long ago, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t retain relevance.

And yet he feels that something in the book’s subject, black culture, has been lost, or perhaps needs reclaiming.

“I can tell you that the music and culture that I wrote about, the black music and culture of the ‘60s has almost no references in today’s black culture. So, I can’t really speak to the music that’s current because it doesn’t reflect what was going on 50 or 60 years ago. I don’t listen, and I haven’t listened, to very much rap music, and of course that’s been the leading form of black music since the ‘90s. So, I haven’t paid attention to a lot of this stuff. I go back to rhythm and blues and bebop; it’s very hard for me to contextualize this other music which I don’t listen to.

“Maybe it needs a different labeling for me to understand discussion of what people call contemporary. I don’t recognize it in the greater subject of my book.

“The music of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s was a great flowering, a cultural explosion of tradition. I mean there hasn’t been a greater musician than John Coltrane in 60 years. Today, there’s a lot of good young players out there. But it’s not as interesting to me as listening to Jackie McLean or, I love Eddie Harris.”

“The music I’m talking about, bebop, is still the most elegant improvisational music that has come out of America and really all around the world. It is not a particularly commercial format compared to a lot of others that have come along. It is difficult to play and difficult to listen to, in some cases.

“So, it’s not for everybody. The music that interested me made me understand American society from the inside out, to understand various aspects of what America is.”

Still swinging, Sidran stands strong by the bastions of American music history, by what we can still draw inspiration and insight, by honoring.

___________

This article was originally published in The Shepherd Express, in slightly different form, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/music-feature/ben-sidran-in-milwaukee-for-first-time-in-years/

  1.  Leo Sidran also reaps a bounty of diverse musical talents: drummer-multi-instrumentalist-singer-songwriter. He also hosts an acclaimed interview podcast, The Third Story with Leo Sidran.
  2. A reliable source reports that Racine-based trumpeter Jamie Breiwick will be at least sitting in with Ben Sidran’s trio at Bar Centro. The following night, at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 8, Breiwick’s jazz-hip-hop group KASE will be recording a live album at Bar Centro with the jazz-folk group Father Sky, a.k.a. pianist-singer Anthony Deutsch.

 

“Heat 2”: Michael Mann’s 1995 film masterpiece inspires a rarity – a sequel novel – and a forthcoming sequel film

The 2022 novel “Heat 2,” adapted from the 1995 film “Heat,” reached No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list, encouraging writer-director Michael Mann to begin a new movie version of the novel. 

The 1995 film Heat always simmered and glowed, a dangerous film-noir masterwork that cast a long net over contemporary Los Angeles, the megapolis of diamonds, set in an ocean of blackness. It also caught fire and exploded midway, in a dazzling street shoot-out between contemporary cops and robbers.  But mostly it felt like a brooding character study of an ostensible “antagonist,” a career criminal, more as the protagonist, with the hyper cop on his trail more as antagonist.

Director screenwriter Michael Mann also plied a plot trope, the now prison-averse bank-hit virtuoso Neil McCauley compelled for one last big score so he can retire securely, out of country.  Mann first made a name as executive producer of the hugely influential TV series “Miami Vice” (and later a short-lived cop series, the superior “Crime Story”).

The Chicago native and UW-Madison English lit major who had his life changed by a movie rather than a book when he saw Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical masterwork Dr. Strangelove.

In an LA Weekly interview, he described the film’s impact on him:

It said to my whole generation of filmmakers that you could make an individual statement of high integrity and have that film be successfully seen by a mass audience all at the same time. In other words, you didn’t have to be making Seven Brides for Seven Brothers if you wanted to work in the mainstream film industry, or be reduced to niche filmmaking if you wanted to be serious about cinema. So that’s what Kubrick meant, aside from the fact that Strangelove was a revelation.[10]

Mann graduated from Wisconsin with a B.A. in 1965. He earned an M.A. at the London School of Film in 1967.

Starkly Beautiful, High Tech

Kubrick’s austere high-tech visual spaciousness is evident in Mann’s style, and over the years Mann has revealed a predilection for somewhat unconventional heroes, or antiheroes, back in his first successful film 1981’s Thief, an immersive portrait of a criminal played by the always-interesting James Caan. Mann used actual former professional burglars to keep the technical scenes as genuine as possible. In 1986 he did Manhunter, the noirish police procedural that introduced genius-criminal Hannibal Lector (played by Brian Cox) to the movie world (and opened the door to Anthony Hopkins much broader version of Lector in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs). And in 2004, Mann cast good guy-hero Tom Cruise against type as a hit man in Collateral. (I haven’t seen his new film Ferrari, but the titular real-life race-car driver and designer seems to fit the pattern.)

Insightful film critic/historian David Thomson writes: “No one has done more to uphold, extend and enrich the film noir genre than Michael Mann.”

Mann has also delivered brilliant portraits of tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider and of arguably the most famous, extroverted and unconventional athlete, of his era in Ali.

By contrast, McCauley wants to be as invisible as possible. Much of his success as a high-end bank robber has to do with his mental discipline and strategies, developed as a Marine. He’s capable of killing, but only of necessity.

In a pivotal scene, unbeknownst to Robert De Niro’s McCauley, Al Pacino’s LAPD Detective Vincent Hanna and officers wait inside a shipping container watching the events from a live infrared surveillance feed. Then, a police officer decides to sit down in the corner, his equipment making a thump as it meets the container’s edge. McCauley stares at the container, knowing something isn’t right, and aborts the lucrative job.

It’s parallel to a similar situation in which the real-life Neil McCauley aborted a job which led to the real-life cop after him (Chicago PD detective Chuck Adamson, a consultant to Heat) to grow to admire him for his professionalism.

Cat and Mouse

Amid a lot of brain-bending cat-and-mouse, Hanna thinks he’s getting to know McCauley and chases him down in a car, without probable cause at that point, only to walk up and invite him for coffee.

Ever-cool, McCauley agrees (coffee is a small weakness of his), and the ensuing scene between two indelible actors includes both sharing symbolic recurring dreams, each revealing vulnerabilities. Then McCauley steels himself again, lays out his tough-minded situational philosophy, delivered with DeNiro’s clipped yet soft-spoken rectitude: “I guy told me one time, ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you’re not willing walk out on in 30 seconds flat, if you feel the heat around the corner.’”

Verbally jousting again, both men make it clear they will not hesitate to kill the other, if they encounter each other in a do-or-die situation (Hanna’s motive more ostensibly high-minded).

The iconic coffee house scene from Michael Mann’s “Heat” was based on an actual meeting between the real-life Neil McCauley and Chicago police officer Chuck Adamson. Courtesy Warner Brothers

A coffee chat between the real-life McCauley and  Adamson, “the heat,” inspired Mann’s interest in the historical story, and the movie idea. In 1962, McCauley had already spent 25 years behind bars — more than half his life. He had spent eight years in Alcatraz, with four years in solitary confinement.

The film version of McCauley’s self-discipline is tested when he falls into a personal relationship he hopes to cultivate once he’s retired. He meets the young woman named Eady, played poignantly by Amy Brenneman, in a coffee shop, where the lonely woman unsuspectingly makes the first move on the dark, sharply-dressed stranger. He will keep his real work secret from her.

Though Eady (Amy Brenneman), makes the first move, career criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) offers a hand in friendship after the ice is broken. theatretimes,org

The film plot builds to McCauley’s crew attempting a $12 million bank robbery. The final climactic one-on-one chase scene between the two star actors is austerely beautiful in its suspense, its editing, noir cinematography and music, almost balletic in its physical dynamics.

I revisit the film, to refresh memories, or to urge those who haven’t to discover it, “one of the best-made films of the decade” which rewards repeated viewing, Thomson asserts. It’s also to note the unusual novel Heat 2, written by Mann years after his film, which clearly haunted him, and co-written by accomplished thriller author Meg Gardiner. Nor did the “sequel” come ASAP after the original to capitalize on the first film’s success. And Mann reversed the typical pattern of book-to-film. This is clearly a mature artist, allowing a story concept, a saga, to gestate over years and indeed the novel story line is more ambitious than Heat.

Best Seller List

Published last August, Heat 2 rose to the top of The New York Times best seller list, reflecting the film’s power and prestige, and the book’s superbly vivid yet hard-boiled narrative. Mann is in negotiation with Warner Brothers for the film version, with Adam Driver potentially set to play the younger McCauley circa 1988, Ana de Armas as his love interest, and Austin Butler in the expanded role as McCauley’s right-hand man Chris Shiherlis who, unlike his boss, barely survives the original Heat.

Reading the book, I wondered whether Mann would attempt to film it. This story arc ranges from 1988, a decade before the events in Heat — Hanna is cutting his teeth as a rising star in the Chicago police department chasing an ultraviolent gang of home invaders.

The sequel section, in 2000, sprawls a bit with a sub-plot on the Mexican/U.S. border and into Paraguay in Chris’s growing involvement with high-end weapons technology bidding between two Asian crime families.

How well might this work as a movie? Mann has proven adept at longer storylines, as in Ali, The Insider, The Last of the Mohicans and Manhunter. The characters dimensions lay in the weeds, as he’d already sketched them out deeply for the Heat actors to absorb in the original screenplay. But when I got to this book’s climax, I sensed its magnetic pull on the director: to become perhaps his most ambitious stab at virtuoso action-film scene orchestration.

The extended scene is brilliantly written in the book, so I’m optimistic. Which brings me to the question of how two people write a novel together. I would imagine that Gardiner wrote most of the actual narration and dialog, while Mann probably developed the storyline, attempting to flesh out his main characters’ prequels and sequels to Heat. Besides learning plenty about fictionalized pre-Heat McCauley, who clearly is the central figure, we get plenty more about Chris Shiherlis (played vividly by Val Kilmer in Heat), who considered McCauley his “brother from another mother.” Though now involved, partly by professional necessity, with a female Asian crime family boss, Chris still carries a torch for his ex-wife Charlene (played by Ashley Judd in the film).

Neil McCauley Robert De Niro) helps his injured partner Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) to safety in the big shootout scene in “Heat.” 1movies.life

Complex, Clean Aesthetics

Chris doubtless admired McCauley’s moral code, loyalty to his men who don’t screw up, and a theft style of complex yet almost clean aesthetics, which arises when he addresses the people trapped in the bank: “We want to hurt no one. We are here for the bank’s money, not your money. Your money is insured by the federal government. Think of your families. Don’t risk your life. Don’t try and be a hero.”

Here we see what the younger McCauley may have learned the hard way.  In the prequel section of the novel Heat 2, McCauley himself is compelled to try to be the hero, to save his girlfriend Elisa — in the grip of the serial house burglar-killer-rapist Otis Wardell, and three others of his crew. McCauley has the comparative advantage of surprise but is outnumbered. Wardell survives McCauley’s sniper-pick-off of his three men.

In the sequel section, when Wardell catches up with Elisa’s daughter Gabriela, the only witness to her mother’s murder, Detective Hannah is now hot on Wardell’s trail, but a few steps behind directly protecting the young woman. Meanwhile, someone is also murderously closing in on Hannah…This leads to the rather breathtaking – even to read and imagine it – climactic scene.

I am really looking forward to Mann and his ace film team’s open-field running through the scene’s swarming, chaotic danger.

In his career-long inquiry into the noir genre’s implications, Mann seems to be creeping towards capture – of pure tragedy as identified by Camus, in which both purveyors of good and evil appear justified to cross the line into the other’s moral realm. Then, only a Greek chorus-like spiritual imploring to eternal mysteries remains to console our bereft souls. Ever-doomed McCauley here seems a full-fledged tragic figure. Hanna’s compulsions, meanwhile, put him at risk of betraying both true righteousness with the self-righteousness of hubris, and “the greater good.”

The novel seems to extend a dominant theme in Mann’s work “the ferocity and absurdity of the attempt to find redemption in hell,” as Thomson darkly puts it. 1

Still, if dedicated, chase-addicted cops like Lt. Hanna (from “The City of Angels”) stay in the hunt, some cops may still be gaining on, and outrunning, the devil.

_______________

This article was previously published in a slightly different form in The Shepherd Express, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/film/reviews/firing-up-the-heat-with-director-michael-mann/

  1. Wikipedia: Scott Foundas, (July 26, 2006). “A Mann’s Man’s World”LA Weekly. Retrieved May 17, 2020.
  2. David Thomson quotes from The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, Knopf, 2002, 560-561

 

 

Letter (from a Milwaukee jail of my mind), to Louisa Loveridge-Gallas, on the state of our nation and her own psyche

The Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, Washington, DC. Courtesy The Travel Channel
E-mail from Louisa-Loveridge Gallas on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Jan. 17, 2021:
Dear friends.
I’m sending on a link to this famous Vietnam speech by MLK I go back to on MLK day, so pivotal in his career. Stunning that he was assassinated a year to the day after. And so brave as he found that he angered and disappointed a number of activists and allies for his stance against the war who felt he should stick to civil rights in the approach and focus he had been taking.
Also I’d like think out loud with you. In a very different way and historical context, I just want to add I am beginning to experience that Biden is being attacked at times, in ways I find irresponsible, for speaking out eloquently and clearly for the moral high road of history in his Georgia speech. I refer not only by Republicans but to comments by prominent Democrats like David Axelrod, Obama’s consultant, on CNN; NYT commentators like Maureen Dowd, and even top legislators like Nancy Pelosi. To name a few. Cheap shots, reaching for a way to insult on minor points, calling out strong opinions disagreed with as unbridled ‘rhetoric’ to name a few.
Of course reasonable, fact-based analysis has to go forward. May everyone be generous and informed as we precede with our critiques even in informal conversation. I know I’m not alone in witnessing that these are perilous times where a compassionate approach to each other and in the political realm is at risk in the zeitgeist of the need to one up, demean too easily and thoughtlessly These are such times of anxiety that inflame disagreements and difference; or enhance compassion fatigue.
I certainly don’t count myself out. I’ve been writing some pretty snarky op Ed comments. And make an occasional fevered phone call, as I did to Axelrod’s office. My fur can rise along with a hiss if a friend or relative isn’t on the same page with my take on all the complexities we are living within. I fail. I’m working on myself. I welcome any thoughts you may have to help me along and no pressure to respond, of course, as so many influences and responsibilities call upon us.
So them’s my thoughts and a link to his speech.
Take care. Be safe.
Sincerely,
Louisa *

Full speech text:  King speech

***

 

Dear Louisa,

How I love your caring, your awareness, your intelligence, your passion, and activist voice. And your brave, insightful analogue between Rev. King and President Biden.
Holy moly (forgive my dated boomer utterance), we all need some empathy and psychological guidance and salve, these days. Perhaps, take some deep, slow breaths, dear friend. Take a long walk beside the empowering tide of our Great Lake, or deep into the woods. Listen to the “conference of the birds,” the way they sing to, and advise, each other. Of danger, yes. They live stressed lives, as vulnerable creatures. And yet, they sing.
If only we could truly fly. Yet we can, in our mind, and drag our lagging, embittered, mudbound spirit aloft, which brings to mind a magnificent Herman Melville quote, from the last paragraph of  Moby-Dick, Chapter 96 “The Try-Works”
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
flickr.com 
Only slightly less poetic is Robert F. Kennedy‘s speech in Indianapolis, after annoucing the assassination of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the day after the tragic event. This video is a part of the speech but very worthy. Robert Kennedy is one of my heroes, more so than JFK.
I read the speech (2 pages) during a troubled, virtually sleepless last night, in Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited and introduced by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy. 1 This is a priceless paperback, to me.
Kennedy quotes his favorite poet Aeschylus, from memory: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Kennedy continues: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be whites or they be black.”
I ponder and treasure those thoughts, and rededicate myself to living up to them, to the degree I am able.
(BTW, Bobby Kennedy also had a wit comparable to brother Jack, with fine comic timing — hear his Ball State U speech, following this one on youtube.)
 

Then there’s those who would score “cheap political points” against President Biden, as you protest, Louisa — be they leftist, liberal, centrist, never-Trumpers or far-right Trumpsters.
Biden has only been any office one year, and has laid out perhaps the most ambitious vision and agenda since Lyndon Johnson‘s The Great Society. Yes, he needs to show — and effect — more fight and passion, but he’s getting there, I think. DINO Sens. Manchin and Sinema still sit on the fence like a couple of owls, saying “Who me?” as the 60-vote filibuster looms like the Sword of Damocles, over vastly important social initiatives that are very popular with Americans.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are slithering around from state to state, contriving new voter suppression laws. We need a federal oversight law on voting rights, especially to protect the rights and access of people of color and other disenfrachised citizens.
I am, for the moment, disheartened by all the clamoring special-interest factions of the Democratic Party, each of whom has profoundly legitimate concerns, perhaps most presently voting rights, and a woman’s right to determine her own body. But also the looming apocalypse of climate change… and more, of course.
But a lot of things can happen between now and November’s mid-term elections.

Dear Louisa, as Rev. King says, concluding the sacred but tough-minded speech you quote (echoing Frederick Douglass‘s famous thoughts about “struggle”):

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. The choice is ours. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I believe many tears, sweat and, yes, blood, will commingle with that mighty stream. We are psychically stained by John Kennedy’s blood, from 1963, and by Robert Kennedy’s and Martin’s blood, in 1968, and so many since.

No more, I pray and cry. May America’s profusion of inward-pointed guns desist!

But justice is a hardy soul, I believe. She can swim like a sleek yet powerful fish, or trudge, like a woman or man, long distances, in protest and dissent, which many politicans hear, if loud and pointed enough.

Robert Kennedy quotes Algerian-French author-philosopher Albert Camus as much as anyone in this Make Gentle the Life of This World collection. Camus, I believe, was then addressing the people of Germany, under the Third Reich.

Yet how his words ring on today — when Fascist demagogury and governments sprout weedlike over Mother Earth and here at home — like a great thunderous bell, clanged by mythical Quasimodo in Camus’s Paris, or his very real fellow ringer in Philadelphia, so that the big-shouldered Liberty Bill cracked. 2

Camus wrote:

“This is what separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth.”

Ringing for truth, justice and love,

Kevin

_____
Louisa Loveridge-Gallas is an acclaimed poet, body-mind counseler, op-Ed writer, music lover, and activist. She’s working on a new chapbook of socially-motivated poems, and on a “jazz novel,” set in Madison, Wisonsin. She’s a former long-time resident of Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, and now resides in Michigan. 
Louisa Loveridge-Gallas. Courtesy Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets
1 Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited and introduced by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, 1998, Broadway Books, 42-43
2 The crack ocurred on the Philadelphia bell’s very first test ring in 1752, shipped from a French foundry (those French!), and it was clearly a flawed casting — like the great nation it signifies.
To me, now, the crack now resembles King’s waters of justice rolling down, the mighy stream. 
.