Jonathan Klett’s documentary films ride the crest of anti-authoritarian activism

Posted on April 28, 2025 by Kevin Lynch

The Federal Building in Milwaukee. Midwest Wanderer

It was high noon on April 6, as 9,000 protesters jammed Wisconsin Avenue in front of the Milwaukee Federal Building, still a circuit courthouse. This is grand Romanesque architecture, but today its tall central bell-tower brings to mind Notre Dame Cathedral during the post-Revolution era when the restored Bourbon monarchy was toppled in 1830.

So, no, Victor Hugo’s hunchback bellringer Quasimodo doesn’t swing down from the pealing heights. But Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera Milwaukee, ends her fiery and incisive speech indicting the Trump and Musk administration’s fascist infiltration of American democracy with the exhortation, “Si se puede! Si se puede!”

This translates as “Yes, you can!” — the motto of the United Farmworkers since Cesar Chavez uttered it in 1972. The phrase was born during a famous 25-day fast Chavez undertook to inspire farm workers to believe that their fight for better wages and conditions was possible.

Why does Chavez’s cry resonate today? History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it often rhymes, as Mark Twain once said.

That’s why belief in the power of people rising to fight the corrupted powers is a force that echoes across generations. It’s a potent way to keep the idea and energy burning, and political action alive. This so-called “Hands Off!” protest was one of 1,400 in locations across all 50 U.S. states, drawing up to an estimated three to five million participants nationwide, according to the demonstration organizers.

Neumann-Ortiz was captured by rising Milwaukee filmmaker Jonathan Klett, who will have a short film debuted at the Milwaukee Film Festival, May 1 and 3.

Here’s his film of her speech with some reaction shots from the crowd:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIlu3kAumjR/

As Jonathan aptly quotes Christine from her speech: “We know that resistance is our duty, and we will not let history repeat itself. That we will stand united, and we will beat back fascism and we’re gonna come out of this better than when we started!”

Jonathan adds, “Christine and Voces invite you to join them on May Day (May 1) in a national day of protest and strike. All workers unite.”

Voces de la Fronteras leader Christine Neumann-Ortiz speaks to a crowd on May Day Protest in 2022 in front of the Milwaukee Federal Building, where a “Hands-Off!” protest on April 6, 2025 drew 9,000 people. She invited that crowd to another May Day protest this May 1. Photo: Isiah Holmes, The Wisconsin Examiner

Voces de la Fronteras leader Neumann-Ortiz coudn’t have been a more appropriate speaker, given that Latin-American immigrants are the primary focus of Trump’s largely illegal deportation efforts.

Remember his notorious presidential-run announcement speech in 2015: “ When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Lately Trump’s rhetoric has stooped to, “They are emptying out insane asylums into the United States.” Can you believe this blathering fool?

My thanks to Jonathan Klett for filming and sharing this. He has spent the bulk of his still-burgeoning career as a gifted video journalist and filmmaker rising in visibility by searching out important fights for justice and humane truth.

New Milwaukee 3rd District Alderman Alex Brower. Courtesy Milwaukee Leader

At that April protest, Klett also documented the searing speech of Alex Brower, whom I’m proud to say is the new alderman of my own Third Milwaukee district. Brower is also union president of the Milwaukee Substitute Teachers Association, and executive director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans.

He claims to be “the first socialist” in local government since the famously efficient Milwaukee “sewer socialists,” like Mayor Daniel Hoan, of the 1930s. Brower is loaded with ideas, energy and, I think, vision, including plans to replace We Energies with a collectively-owned power organization. He rang my Riverwest doorbell on election day afternoon, still stumping door-to-door several hours after I voted for him.

Klett also captured Brower’s speech: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIzL8f1R1yE/?igsh=MWlxNG9kN3dvNHlheg%3D%3D

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A bit of full disclosure: Jonathan is the oldest son of this writer’s longtime friends, John and Mary Klett, so if you perceive a certain bias here, so be it.

But I’m trying hard to apply my critical powers to his work and comment accordingly.

He’s got the documentary chops, the commitment and drive. He works for noted reporter and pundit Laura Flanders, and he recently traveled with and documented the hugely popular, cross-country “Fight Oligarchy” tour of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Part of his footage was telecast on PBS.

Check out some of this doc work and an interview with Bernie Sanders on Jonathan’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Bob.Ross.Lives

Next up for Klett is the Milwaukee Film Festival. He got a short film placed in the international array of cinema on his first-ever entry. The Thin Blue Wave covers the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last year, and recent labor and community efforts, and will run at 3 p.m. this Thursday, May 1 at The Downer Theater and 1:15 p.m. Saturday, May 3 at the Oriental Theater, in Milwaukee.

On both days Klett’s The Thin Blue Wave will open for WTO/99, “an immersive archival documentary that reanimates the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’ – a clash heard round the world between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the more than 40,000 people who took to the streets of Seattle in protest.” WTO/99 is described as a still-timely “meditation on the environment, human rights and labor 25-plus years on in a new moment for activism.”

Screenshot

A still from the short film “The Thin Blue Wave” by Jonathan Klett. Courtesy Jonathan Klett

Here’s a link to tickets to The Thin Blue Wave and WTO/99: https://mkefilm.org/events/mff25/wto-99

And here’s a link to Klett’s personal website: https://www.jonathanklett.com/

Protest crowd at Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Photo by Mustafa Hussain/ NBC News

These Klett films are all preludes to his first major feature documentary, The Sacred and the Snake, which he’s been working on for some years. The forthcoming film covers the long seige of protest by Native Americans and allies against the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The oil company decides to build right through the reservation, threatening its Missouri River water supply, sacred sites, and the region’s ecological balance. It focuses on a Lakota matriarch, a “Jicarilla Apache/Dine two-spirit person,” and a Cheyenne youth leader who “each discover their power within a movement that echoes worldwide.”

The title image from Klett’s forthcoming full-length documentary “The Sacred and the Snake,” about the two year-long protest against the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Courtesy Jonathan Klett

The protests eventually drew thousands of sympathetic supporters and involved confrontations with law enforcement, security personnel, and construction crews, with protesters facing violence and intimidation. In response to the campaign, President Barack Obama’s administration stopped the pipeline’s construction, but this decision was reversed after President Donald Trump took office, and construction was finished in 2017.

Dakota Access Pipeline protesters on their knees before police guard. The protest spurred considerable police bruality, including extensive spraying of mace. Photo by Jonathan Klett from “The Sacred and The Snake.”

However, the Standing Rock protests raised significant awareness about Indigenous land rights, environmental concerns, and the impact of fossil fuel infrastructure on communities.

Klett’s film carries on that consciousness-raising and uplifting of activism. It tells a heroic story, as gritty and soulful as it is cinematic and dramatic.

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

Posted on April 23, 2025 by Kevin Lynch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy Mark Lawson Antiques.

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

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

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

__________________

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

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

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

(Crumb,” Scribner, 2025, 32-33)

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

Posted on March 29, 2025 by Kevin Lynch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schimel resurfaces debunked concerns about ballot counting in Milwaukee

Circuit Judge Brad Schimel. Courtesy AP

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

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

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

Here’s the report from the Journal-Sentinel:

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

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

Dane County Judge Susan Crawford. Courtesy AP

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

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

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

Thanks for reading, caring and voting.

wisconsin supreme court

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

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

Posted on March 19, 2025 by Kevin Lynch

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

All praise The Band!

Acadian driftwood, gypsy tailwind

they call my home the land of snow

canadian cold front moving in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The war was over and the spirit was broken.

The hills were smoking as the men withdrew.

We stood on the cliffs and watched the ships

slowly sink into their rendezvous.

They signed a treaty and our homes were taken,

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

Try to raise a family, end up the enemy

Over what went down on the Plains of Abraham…

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

The non-pareil critic Greil Marcus observed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sais tu, Acadie, j’ai mal du pays

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

Ta neige, Acadie, fait des larmes au soleil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

v=te7KW4K-00E.

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on February 26, 2025 by Kevin Lynch

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

This quote is attributed to the prominent German pastor Martin Niemöller.

The first line is my new regular Facebook profile quote.

America is being profoundly threatened by similar Fascist powers attempting to destroy our democratic government and causing unfathomable harm to immigrants in America!

The worst perpetrator is Elon Musk, an unelected pseudo-president whom Trump has given outrageous powers of indescriminate destruction in the guise of “efficiency.”

My downstairs neighbor, a long time ROTC recruiter with three children, has already lost his regular job to Trump’s draconian cuts and hopes to get another job out of government.

Trump very easily gives up his powers to appealing “power men,” this one who shamelessly uses his child as a prop, to cover for his moral degradation. Disgusting, and incredibly dangerous.

For all his demogogue’s charisma to too many common people, Trump lacks the aptitude to actually deal with bureaucratic matters of governing. He now simply follows closely the radical conservative directives of Project 2025, which he had nothing to do with the crafting of.

This situation is similar to Trump’s recent acqueiscence to Putin about Ukraine, which has shocked all of Europe.

Of course, Trump has completely ignored his pledges to the common Americans who elected him. His approval ratings are declining already.

“First they came for…” has been part of the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since its opening in 1993. Initially, Niemöller’s words were part of a text panel. Today, they are prominently featured on a wall as the final words of the exhibition. They serve as an indictment of passivity and indifference during the Holocaust.

Time to contact an elected leader and organize. The Democrats have been way too passive in the face of the Second Trump Administration.

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Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNw7AeOBHBQ

All reactions:

John Ehlers

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

Posted on February 14, 2025 by Kevin Lynch

Ukranian soldiers disembark from a tank. Kyodo News

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

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

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

“The Ashcan School” reveals America’s underbelly and many shades of character

Posted on November 25, 2022 by Kevin Lynch

A prize possession of The Milwaukee Art Museum’s “Ashcan School” collection is the large painting “The Sawdust Trail,” from 1916 by George Bellows. Milwaukee Art Museum

Happy New Year Culture Currents readers!

Notice: I’m reposting this review because I chose a favorite John Sloan painting for my new Culture Currents blog theme, the night-time image (at top). This painting “Six-O’Clock, Winter,” (1912) is not in the Milwaukee show but there’s more than enough that’s well worth seeing.

Also, it’s easy to let an art show run slip by: THIS EXHIBIT RUNS THROUGH FERUARY 19. It’s a great tribute to the artwork in the MAM’s permanent collection. Speaking of visual art, The Ashcan School was “the first American art form.”

Art Review:

The Ashcan School and The Eight: Creating a National Art. The Milwaukee Art Museum, through February 19, 2023. Bradley Family Gallery

For information and tickets: https://mam.org/exhibitions/details/ashcan-and-the-eight.php

To see a world in a grain of sand” poet William Blake once put it. Later, American poet Walt Whitman would see “a grain of sand” as no less perfect than a leaf of grass.”

These great modernist poets saw things profoundly magnified in the humblest of earthly entities, light years from most of the art and music that for centuries courted royalty. So perhaps it was inevitable that the nation built on the anti-regal and messy moorings of democracy foster an art movement antithetical to royalty-schmoozing. Rather, one of the commonfolk, at least in its ideals. This American motherlode would bear the nation’s first “national art.”

Known as The Ashcan School, its name derived from a pejorative critical comment that the art was as good as “a can of ashes.” But in that comment’s snoot the artists saw soot, as in a poetical paradox. The ashes contained dirt, enough to allow seedlings to grow and tilt toward social justice, found in artistic truth. That is, a great, if profoundly flawed nation’s life and essence might be extrapolated from something as slight as a cigarette butt’s droppings.

The Milwaukee Art Museum’s The Ashcan School and The Eight: Creating a National Art allows Americans to see themselves in the early 20^th century, a time of great cultural upheaval, a nation shapeshifting in its peculiar genius — troubled, compulsively creative, proud, and quotidian. It was also struggling through the first World War with the Great Depression around the corner. Yet immigrants poured in, adding diversity, labor energy, and societal tension. Perhaps more than anything, modernism’s post-industrial revolution had shackled and driven America.

How did the Ashcan School capture all this? First, they objected to exhibition practices that they considered restrictive and conservative. They often employed an expressionistic, painterly style to portray gritty and downtrodden subjects previously deemed inappropriate for high art and museums, the stuff of “ashcans.”

Accordingly, the museum’s curators and guest show catalog essayists draw parallels to cultural and social issues still relevant today.

The Art Museum owns one of the nation’s largest collections of works by the Ashcan School, and this is the first exhibit to include nearly the entire 150-object collection, says curator Brandon Ruud. Prints, drawings, paintings, and pastels represent artists of the so-called “The Eight,” who largely produced the Ashcan style and sensibility: Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, George Bellows, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, Arthur Bowen Davies, Maurice Prendergast. Several affiliated artists like Stuart Davis reveal the full range of the group’s subjects and artistic practices.

One’s eye might easily gravitate to a large painting in the show, Bellows’ “The Sawdust Trail,” by traditional measures of scale and complexity a “masterpiece,” even though the group’s aesthetics strove to burrow beneath grand art conventions that may obscure the truth as they saw it. The painting earns its renown, an epic canvas with a cinematic view of a religious revival meeting.

It tells a rich and sardonic story of post-Puritan American impulses that continue to this day in evangelic churches. The charismatic preacher, named for a real historical figure, Billy Sunday, would solicit salvation while typically delivering a thunder-and-lightning sermon to spook believers out of their savings. The air above his big tent virtually billows with a dense cloud of sun-lit smoke that might easily exalt the illusion of the divine.

Billy Sunday himself glad-hands one convert. Is he still a man of the people or is this just the old quotidian poseur, compulsively pressing flesh, greasing it to open the wallet? Meanwhile, several women faint (from the fumes of divine inspiration?) amid the dense, motley crowd. Exaltation, or delusion, or some other strange strain of behavior is distinctly American as it is universal, to see the “MAGA” power deluding today, and the global trend to political authoritarianism.

A man with that kind of power might be a Republican presidential candidate — if he can beat out Donald Trump who, heathen though he may be, knows most of the preacher’s hidden gifts for dark persuasion and personality-cult politics.

An even more insidious example of how compromised holiness undermines the truth is Mike Pence, who has said he will not testify to Congress about the January 6 insurrection, even though he was a primary execution target. He’s played it politically all the way, claiming a dubious “separation of powers” privilege — only because he survived.

So, these Ashcan diggers uncovered America haunted by cycles of power as old and foreshadowing as the first conquests of Native Americans and slavery.

Yet one might better experience this exhibit on a smaller scale, as a kind of forensic mystery, investigating the human figures that tell personal stories of lives possibly forsaken or transgressed.

John Sloan The Barbershop, etching and aquatint, 1915, MutualArt.com

Zoom down from, say, the atmospheric expanse of “The Sawdust Trail” to individual figures in intimately revealing scenes. No one surpassed painter-printmaker John Sloan at carving out these small-window revelations of what would become known as Americana, in a land still grappling with its identity.

The class-laden print The Barbershop animates to the point of satirical comedy. A crowded barbershop is recast as a tableau of sublimated class-warfare. The two men being serviced clearly reign. One seems to eye, with lust or disdain, a young lower-class woman manicuring him. Seated in waiting, a middle-class man reads the satirical Puck magazine, and beside him lies a subversive Marxist magazine called The Masses, for which Sloan served as art editor. The complex, beautiful composition (less than 10 by 12 inches) is riddled with America’s contradictions of social indulgence and defiance.

Among Sloan’s numerously displayed gritty parables of the underclass is Night Windows. A Peeping Tom husband spies on a bathing neighbor in a nearby window, while his wife hangs out his family’s laundry amid squalling children. In Sloan’s world, God may or may not have been invited for dinner. They are too busy trying to put bread on the table for the brood.

Robert Henri, Dutch Joe, (or Jopi van Slooten), oil (24 by 20 inches), 1910, Pinterest

Robert Henri, who was the movement’s leader, had the portraiture skill to humanize the mother, the man, or boy, in the brood.

Witness his marvelous portrait of a street urchin named Dutch Joe, (or Jopi van Slooten), from 1910. In this bundle of mischief, you sense potential, yet risk. “The disparity between the innocence of the hero and the destructive character of his experience defines his concrete, or existential, situation.” That’s how American literary critic Ihab Hassan characterized what he called America’s “radical innocence.” 2 It entailed the possibility that, in his scruffy vigor, brash will and ingenuity, Joe might get ahead in the world, or be swallowed up in it.

This show is populated with a fascinating array of colorful actors, many of problematic agency.

John Sloan, Reading in a Subway, etching, 1926. Pinterest

Everett Shinn, The Nightclub Scene, oil, (36 by 34 inches) 1934

From Shinn’s iridescent Nightclub Scene to Sloan’s bundled-from-the-cold flapper in Reading in a Subway, or the vibrant gaggle of 9-to-5 women in Return from the Toil, these artists encounter a diverse populous and gives lie to the contemporary criticism (on an exhibit wall commentary) that these artists diminished women and minorities in the class-struggle tableaux. They were doubtless men of their time, subject to certain biases, but by this evidence they strove for greater understanding and truth of how we live together, and in isolation, in America, to envision a real yet better way, one quotidian day at a time.

In other words, they often told a small “d” democratic story, creating heroes among quietly courageous women and other folks hidden in the cracks of society.

And the men depicted are often satirical subjects of classism and sexism, as in preacher Billy Sunday and Sloan’s “Barbershop” scene.

George Bellows, Dempsey and Firpo, lithograph, 1923-24, (18 by 22 1/4 inches), Pinterest

Perhaps the most famous image in the show is Dempsey and Firpo, the lithograph print that led to George Bellows’ explosive painting of a big-time heavyweight boxing match, a literal witnessing of the brutal sport that came of age in this era. “When Dempsey was knocked through the ropes he fell in my lap,” Bellows explained to Henri. “I cursed him a bit and placed him carefully back in the ring.” So, Bellows justifiably includes himself in the painting’s corner, a bit like director Alfred Hitchcock’s impish cameo appearances.

Bellows had studied art under Henri. John Fagg’s superb catalog essay describes how “Henri encouraged his students both to scour city streets for inspiration and to read widely and embrace culture in all its forms.” This sounds like the best kind of voraciousness that would exemplify the American striving these artists documented and interpreted, warts and all.

“Henri talked not only about the students’ paintings but also about music, literature, and life in general, and in a very stimulating manner, and his lectures constituted a liberal education,” recalled Stuart Davis. 3

This exhibit constitutes such an education, as rare as it is valuable, at a time when it feels sorely needed. If you want to learn about confounding America, of both yesterday and today, in the Faulknerian sense that the past is never dead, this Ashcan art provides you, in immersive depth, yet free of academic pretenses, though the catalogue essays are welcome. It is an experience of vast pleasures amid what Duke Ellington called murmuring “Harlem airshafts,” and Hitchcock’s rear windows, and pregnant, grimy shadows of night. 4

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This review was originally published in a slightly shorter form in The Shepherd Express: here: https://shepherdexpress.com/culture/visual-art/america-unvarnished-in-mams-ash-can-school-exhibit/

1 The exhibit also includes a lithograph version of The Sawdust Trail, which shows more of the fine details in the dense composition.

2 Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel, Princeton, 1961, 7

3 John Fagg, “The Unseen City: The Ashcan School’s New York,” The Ashcan School and The Eight: Creating a National Art, show catalog, The Milwaukee Art Museum 2022, 78

4 A reflection of this collection’s ongoing contemporary relevance and vitality is that it is still growing even after decades. A primary curator of the show, Brandon Rudd explained to me: “One of the truly amazing things about the Ashcan School collection is that it is both such an integral part of the Museum’s rich history and is also active and growing: This exhibition features new acquisitions and never-before-seen donations, as well as loans from private collections in the Milwaukee community and works rarely displayed or seen by the public because of their fragility.”

In a new biography, hip-hop artist Klassik emerges transcendently talented, but still rooted, a native son of Milwaukee

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Kevin Lynch

Book review: The Milwaukeean: A Tale of Tragedy and Triumph by Joey Grihalva

Joey Grihalva will present SONSET — a book reading by the author and solo improv by Klassik — for The Milwaukeean, at a new venue, forMartha, 825 E. Center Street, from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday. The event will follow the Center Street Daze street festival. Cover is $10, or $25 with book.

Is a thirty-ish hip-hopper with only regional renown worthy of a biography? In his new book about Klassik (Kellen Abston), author Joey Grihalva forges, in effect, a freshly painted, still-mutating portrait of a creative man, of Milwaukee and of contemporary times, with all the urgency and potential for tragedy and agency that all implies. In that sense, Klassik emerges as a comparatively humble embodiment of a Black Milwaukeean, even as he manifests genius that might characterize the city. The painfully enlightened and haunted saga – he watched his father die of bullet wounds at age 11 – bends toward the arc of triumph, if justice remains elusive.

The victory comes, in one sense, because the personal is still political. Klassik is one of many who’ve grown as the art of hip hop has grown – fitfully, defiantly, and dynamically – to where Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. If there’s a connection, Klassik has much more in common with Lamar’s 2015 jazzy masterwork To Pimp a Butterfly than with Lamar’s ensuing album Damn.

It might also be the cultural difference between Compton, California and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Maybe, ultra-hipness vs. a kind of ultra-hopeness? As in “keep hope alive.” As this book reveals, Klassik’s deep troubled history with, and vision of his hometown, sets him apart. It’s partly why he’s watched many Milwaukee area rap artists become bigger names than him.

Standing over his hometown’s skyline, Kellen “Klassik” Abston says he thinks of Milwaukee as a character more than a place. Photo courtesy Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

That does not mean they’re better. That’s why, among increasingly aware Midwesterners, Klassik is as essentially Milwaukee as contemporary hip-hop gets. Grihalva captures a nearly lost Midwestern bonhomie, a pan-racial faith in humanity, hidden beneath the grime of post-industrialism and the crime of racism.

Klassik, who studied jazz saxophone with Milwaukee master Berkeley Fudge, was an early musical prodigy. To the degree he manifests his own filtered amalgam of jazz, classic R&B, and hip-hop, I hear and feel how much he makes good on the thoughtful presumption of his name, Klassik. His previous album, American Klassiks, demonstrated how he can reinvent classics of American vernacular musics, and make them present, alive for today and pointing a beacon forward, musically and spiritually. The artist in him won’t do it any other way.

“This is the problem with Kellen’s stuff – it’s too smart,” says his friend Jordan Lee, a DJ, and a former station director at 88/Nine Radio Milwaukee, who’s also a member of the jazz-hip-hop trio KASE, with whom Klassik as recorded and collaborated. 1 “It was never going to work at the beat battle,” referring to a competitive hip-hop event Lee produced from 2005 to 2015, known as the Miltown Beatdown, which brought together produces rappers, and hip-hop heads from all over the city.

Rather than always “on the beat,” that can be as delimiting as it is compulsively attractive, Klassik’s music unfolds with an almost Midwestern shapeliness, as if informed by the Kettle Moraine as much as by the staccato pulses of the urban environment. As a primal Klassik source, I’ve always heard the soul-praying-to-the-moon existential angst of Marvin Gaye, whom he shouts out on “Black-Spangled Banner,” on American Klassiks, recorded live late one night in Bay View’s Cactus Club.

Klassik’s expressive power dates back to, among other things, Marvin Gaye and the hauntings of his childhood. Courtesy IAMKLASSIK.com.

He’s also decidedly more improvisational than most hip-hop or pop. “Maybe it’s the jazz purist in me,” he muses to Grihalva. “When you think about live music and playing an instrument, even the most rehearsed and refined part has its own idiosyncrasies or little inflections that make it human. I’m making something, I’m adding layers and depth.” 2

Klassik performs at Pianofest, at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, a few years ago. Singer Adekola Adedapo recalls, at age 10, Kellen played “Over the Rainbow,” on saxophone at a Heath Brothers jazz workshop at the Wisconsin Conservatory, one of the first discoveries of his talent. Photo courtesy JGCA

The book, a prime example of “new journalism,” is also the author’s own story, about his relationship to his subject and their shared hometown, “an eternal tie that binds.” Abston and Grihalva are virtual contemporaries and Grihalva teaches at Milwaukee’s High School of the Arts, which is Abston’s alma mater.

Part of Abston’s burden is that he feels he could have done more than simply freeze up, to possibly save his father from dying, and that, 20 years past, Robin Abston’s murder remains unsolved. That’s plenty to drive a young man to drink and drugs – a large part of his struggle, aside from his often-exquisite peculiarity as a young, gifted, and black man, within our race-obsessed culture. And yet he won’t leave Milwaukee, as partly a spiritual detective still on a homicide case grown cold for most others. His relationship with police is deep ambivalence, hardly hatred. But he’s also doing close investigation of his own identity, which messes with him, with ghosts of what he’s been, shouldn’t be, won’t be, and can be.

Klassik’s bling always includes the dog tags of his father, veteran Robin Abston, who was murdered 20 years ago, in a crime that remains unsolved. Courtesy Milwaukee Magazine

Ultimately the redemption and triumph of the story is the hard-earned wisdom that arises from it, in the experiences and voices of both author and subject, as well as a choir of street-sage homies. The way that choral mosaic enlightens the story, like a vast stain glass window, is Grihalva’s achievement, his crafting of a sense of authenticity by finding common cause with your roots. One of Klassik’s defining ventures into communal creativity was his key role, in the summer of 2016, in Milwaukee’s Strange Fruit Festival, named for the searing anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” popularized by Billie Holiday. The festival was spurred in response to two police killings of unarmed black men on back-to-back days: Alton Sterling in Louisiana, and Philando Castile, killed in his car in St. Paul Minnesota.

“That was one of the first times where I felt pulled artistically, in terms of feeling a responsibility with my platform,” Kellen explained. “It heightened this desire to wield it, almost like a weapon, for good.” His profile was rising, as he was performing in New York City during the first two nights of Strange Fruit. Kellen flew back to Milwaukee for the final night of the festival.

Then, that weekend’s Saturday afternoon, Milwaukee police shot and killed Sylville Smith in the Sherman Park neighborhood. The incident sparked riots that culminated in the burning of a gas station, a bank, and a beauty supply store, images seen on international news the next morning.

And there, defying hell-on-earth fury, Klassik and friends conjured a lifeline to redemption. “Everybody was on their A-game…It was such an amazing event,” he says. “You could tell everybody was there for the betterment of the community in whatever small or large way they could. And was just crazy timing that we had this festival amid the madness that ensued.” The event played again the next two years, and Abston wrote a manifesto for a potential relaunch of the festival, though it never got off the ground.

Much chaos and transformation has come down since then, the era of Trump and George Floyd, and Klassik has achieved a kind of personal-is-political triumph of textured passion on his last album QUIET, with assists from Milwaukee artists who’ve gone to greater renown, SistaStrings, the nationally celebrated singers-string-players, and folk-rock artist Marielle Alschwang, among others.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about protest in the form of joy, specifically Black joy,” Abston says. “With the new stuff I’m working on, there is this element of defiance in being happy and free. That’s like the most powerful thing you can do as a minority in this country.”

The power, he understands, also derives from accepting himself as a Milwaukeean, “The Milwaukeean.” He’s lucky to have a biographer as attuned as this one, who can tell his story so tenderly and beautifully. Abston reflects on the notion of faith: “If I hit a good note or I’m writing a good melody or these chords have a certain color or have the ability to stir up emotion from thin air, that’s magic. That’s God. It’s all those things. It’s being connected to something greater than ourselves.”

Almost two years ago to this day, he meets with Grihalva at high, windswept Kilbourn Reservoir Park, which overlooks downtown where North Avenue curves into Riverwest. It’s one of his favorite places in the city. “I would go up to that hill over there when I was super-fucking depressed. I would just sit and cry, let it out and wipe them tears off. Then this warmth would come over me, especially at night. Something about the lights. It’s weird because it’s not a spectacular skyline. But it’s mine, you know?” He continues, “In all my videos, I’ve always thought of Milwaukee as a character, not a location.”

That idea of making a city a living, breathing character – a father figure? – seems to speak volumes about Klassik’s genius, as an archetypal son of a quintessential American city, in all its grit and glory, it’s patriarchal sorrow and shame, its defiant brotherhood and sisterhood.

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Klassik’s most recent appearance on a recording is his largely wordless vocalizing on KASE + Klassik: Live at the Opera House, on B-Side Recordings.
Grihalva’s previous book was Milwaukee Jazz, a photo history from Arcadia publishing’s Images of America series.

It may start in a small town but this movie’s heart grows as big as Milwaukee

Posted on June 19, 2022 by Kevin Lynch

In one of the toughest scenes in “Small Town Wisconsin,” alcoholic Wayne Sobierski, pounds down liquor while desperately searching for overnight accommodations for the night in Milwaukee. badfeelingmag.com

Small Town Wisconsin runs only through Tuesday, June 21, at the Oriental Theatre in Milwaukee, but continues through Thursday at Marcus Theaters in Franklin, New Berlin, Delafield, and Saukville. For times and tickets: https://mkefilm.org/oriental-theatre/events/small-town-wisconsin

Small Town Wisconsin is now available for purchase or rent on YouTube, here:

As was my mother, I consider myself something of a movie buff. As a professional arts journalist, I have only occasionally reviewed films, as I’ve worked for publications with designated film critics, per se.

But the new film Small Town Wisconsin hit me pretty hard, partly because it is a small-town Wisconsin story (my folks are from Two Rivers) that strives, like a salmon swimming upstream, towards a big spawning ground of dreams, the big city of Milwaukee Wisconsin (my hometown).

Director-turned-executive producer Alexander Payne understood the qualities he values in this film. He’s provided some of the richest indie-courting-the-mainstream films we’ve had in recent years: Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska and Downsizing. So, he produced Small Town, which was written by Jason Naczek and directed by Milwaukee-native Niels Mueller and has racked up a slew of film festival awards. I suspect Payne saw the heart he brings to all his films even though this, to my eyes is, more than his satires, among other things, a gentle poke at small-town manners.

Producer Payne is also an actor’s director, having elicited some of the finest roles of various actors’ careers, including Laura Dern, Bruce Dern, Reese Witherspoon, Jack Nicholson, Sandra Oh, Paul Giamatti, George Clooney, Will Forte, (Aaron Rodgers-ex-girlfriend) Shailene Woodley, and character actor June Squibb, among others. So, there’s the imprimatur.

The biggest name actor in Small Town Wisconsin is Kristin Johnson, the Emmy award-winning actress for Third Rock from The Sun.

What we have here is a sort of fish-out-of-water story, times two. The main character Wayne Stobierski (Daniel Sullivan) is slowly being reeled out of his comfort zone — as a failing divorced father virtually immersed in alcohol, literally kicking and screaming — up into the harsh reality of losing any custody of his adorable son, Tyler (Cooper J. Friedman). He seems basically a good guy and an extremely sympathetic character, but Wayne also has anger-management issues. So, it’s obvious to everyone how he’s floundering as a father.

Wayne’s only daily responsibility is to one goldfish, Buster, who also is symbolically forced out of his little water bowl simply by Wayne’s inebriated neglect. So, we fear Wayne will meet a similar fate, which hangs over the story. Point beer tall boys, with occasional whiskey shots at the local bowling alley bar, seem to be his primary fuel (the small town’s street scenes are in Palmyra).

So, the writer and director proceed to force Wayne up on a tight rope, in varying degrees of intoxication, with the poor schlep tottering between high-spirited comedy and utter pathos. Bowling scenes seem a variation on those of The Big Lebowski and provide the most notable cultural context for small-town Wisconsin — easygoing solo and team sport play to sustain folks through the state’s long, cold winters. The director strives for balanced political context by including cardboard cutouts of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton observing the bowling matches. Wayne’s comical lane mishaps extend to an offbeat scene of him driving around drunk with his bowling ball, another symbol of self-destructiveness.

It is only Wayne’s fundamental if dysfunctional decentness that persuades his ex-wife Diedra (Tanya Fischer), to warily allow him one last weekend with his son, on two conditions: that he explain to Tyler that he’ll be moving to Phoenix with her and her new husband, and that Wayne be accompanied by a chaperone, his best friend, Chuck (Bill Heck), an archetypal clean liver. Tyler clearly loves his father even though he realizes he’s an alcoholic and understands, at a basic level, what the word means.

Wayne struggles to break the news to his son Tyler — that the boy will be moving with his mother and stepfather to Arizona. wsaw.com

That relationship provides most of the film’s heart squeezing and tear-jerking which is, in my book, hard earned, but with golden aspects, like the humble luck of finding a great baseball card in a random gum pack and making hay with that card. In fact, Wayne shows his true colors by financing his last big bid for his son’s heart (and perhaps more) by selling his baseball card collection, including his Hank Aaron rookie card. Though he pitches the weekend to Deidra as a typically rustic fishing and camping outing, Wayne’s secret idea is grander: give Tyler something he’ll always remember his dad by, a trip to Milwaukee, and the boy’s first major league baseball game.

Indeed, it’s a small odyssey with one eloquent classical allusion. Wayne declares Milwaukee’s baseball stadium as what “the ancient Romans called a coliseum.” Wayne, a drinking-on-the-job car mechanic, plans a night or two in Milwaukee’s finest hotel the Pfister, and the big game, “Milwaukee versus Chicago” (curiously the Cubs and Brewers are never specifically named). Sullivan, and increasingly Heck and Johnson, carve out richly-textured characters. Chuck’s personal situation almost drives him to find some new solace, on this trip. They end up at the Milwaukee home of Wayne’s sister Alicia, played by Johnson in one of the most substantial and affecting roles of her career.

Despite all the things working against him, Wayne is lucky to have a sister like Alicia (Kristen Johnson). screen daily

One curiosity is that a movie this excellent has only earned about 80% Rotten Tomatoes critics rating, though a 95% audience score. As I see no real flaws in it, I might only speculate that it was victimized by our cultural schism between rural and urban. Milwaukee itself is somewhat idealized and the movie provides a rich panorama of the city’s diverse virtues, including a Lake Michigan boat tour of the lovely cityside, a visit to Usinger’s sausage retail outlet, and an impulsive quest to the McMansion of ex-Milwaukee slugger Gorman Thomas. I must leave the wiggling storyline in the water at that. Suffice to say, sister is the better angel on bro’s shoulder, in a story of redemption as tough-minded as it is bighearted.

So, I wonder if those less taken by it adopt the small-town viewpoint, as defensive about the characterization of the lead as an alcoholic, with little apparent self-awareness. Of course, alcoholics exist in big cities at least as much, if not more, than small towns. And the film’s makers walk their own tight rope of avoiding precipitously heavy-footed political commentary.

After all, ex-wife Deidra, Chuck and Alicia are fully sober and reasonably intelligent. And Wayne himself, in his lucid moments, displays a distinct sensitivity, especially interacting with his son. Is there a small-town critique that isn’t only defensiveness, and is this the posture of dissenting critics? The movie strives also for an overriding cultural point: We need to start bridging the gap of rural and urban, red and blue, because our commonalities as Americans are quite evident and valuable in such things as baseball games, road trips, fishing and bowling, and the gratifying and heartbreaking dynamics of nuclear families.

To me, a film like this also allows us to see our humanity shorn of illusions created by politicians promising the moon and snookering those who desperately grab onto, what appears to them, the fading American dream. Facts and stats bear it out: Urban minorities still have much more to overcome in America. Yet a film like Small Town Wisconsin suggests that even a decent white man, with black heroes, can lose his grip and must, at some point, do something other than blame others for his apparent fate.

A final symbolic pattern surfaces: Two people, who help open Wayne’s eyes in Milwaukee, are black. A third black person, with a “halo” for a name, grew up in Milwaukee, and shows him a possible way to a new start in life.

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Steve Earle, and James McMurtry, mine the hearts of forsaken Trump voters

Posted on February 27, 2021 by Kevin Lynch

“Ghosts of West Virginia” album cover. Courtesy www.bear-family.com

Exacerbated by the January 6 Capitol mob attack, President Biden’s greatest domestic challenge is bridging the chasm between “red” and “blue” America, as deep and wide as any Appalachian valley. Thus, Steve Earle’s brilliantly insightful 2020 album, Ghosts of West Virginia, is so pertinent.

It took courage and empathy, but this Texas liberal imaginatively inhabits the lives of West Virginia coal miners – among Donald Trump’s most forsaken followers. 1 Earle’s outlaw country singer-songwriter sensibilities might’ve helped him to connect with the lives and spirits of other “outsiders” of sorts, plus he’s a native of the neighboring Confederate state of Virginia. 2

Ghosts became the soundtrack to a 2020 documentary theater work, inspired by the tragic 2010 explosion in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, Coal Country, written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen.

Steve Earle performs material from “Ghosts of West Virginia” in a live performance of the 2020 theater documentary “Coal Country.” Courtesy Pinterest

Earle’s crusty singing, and the sinewy band playing, often sound as expressive as the heaving guts of a working miner, or his exhalation in pained repose and reflection. Earle unearths richly peopled story-songs, “Devil Put the Coal in the Ground,” at once grave and scathingly boisterous, or the deep-veined singing and words of “Time is Never On Our Side,” as if Earle is tenderly scraping shards of blood-stained coal from the blast’s ravaged site. “Black Lung” is a worker defiantly testifying to The Grim Reaper, about the industry’s deadliest side-effect. On “Union, God and Country,” Earle deftly personalizes the history of mining unions, their decline, and the company’s ease in exploiting unrepresented workers.

Earle doing a solo version of “Devil Put the Coal in the Ground”:

Despite Trump’s promises, West Virginia coal miners and their industry lost both jobs and production during his administration. Courtesy commondreams.org

Hear also the achingly lovely widow’s lament “If I Could See Your Face Again” sung by the Dukes’ Eleanor Whitmore, and the indignant “It’s About Blood,” where Earle lays blame, and ends with resounding recitation of all twenty-nine Upper Big Branch blast-victim names, like an aural tour of a fresh grave site. It rings, too, like hammers on buttresses of a rising bridge to a better, more whole America: “It’s about muscle/ it’s about bone/ it’s about a river running thicker than water/ ’cause it’s about blood.”

When I saw Earle this summer at the Big Top Chautauqua in Bayfield, Wisconsin, he performed “It’s About Blood” and, sure enough, at the end, he recited the twenty-nine dead men’s names from memory, with raw, stentorian power. And now it seemed as if they were a band of brothers, his very own, and the names had lacerated his heart with so many scars.

But the bridge across America was still rising.

This review was originally published in shorter form in The Shepherd Express: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/ghosts-of-west-virginia-by-steve-earle-the-dukes-new-west/

***

Earle’s magnificently immersive evocation and its vividly-drawn characters – amid our careening political zeitgeist – helped me circle back to another important Texas songwriter. James McMurtry may have surpassed Earle as America’s greatest living male singer-songwriter “south of Bob Dylan,” as I put it in my review of McMurtry’s quietly stupendous 2015 album Complicated Game (Joni Mitchell and Lucinda Williams prompt the gender qualifier). I’ve been watching many of McMurtry’s almost-weekly solo home virtual concerts during the pandemic, which have helped me burrow deeper into his artistic sensibilities.

He lacks the vocal expressive range of Earle or Williams but, as Texas music writer Mike Seely aptly puts it, McMurtry is “rivaled only by Jason Isbell in his ability to construct compelling tales of small-town pathos without sounding patronizing, McMurtry doesn’t exploit his characters or paint them in overly dour strokes…” 3

“Complicated Game” album cover

So I returned to my thoughts about Complicated Game, in striving to understand the psychological makeup of a small-town, rural or working-class Trump voter, especially one who has real-world grievances and hardships, rather than racist hatred, or off-the-deep-end conspiracy-theory intoxication.

For these genuinely struggling people, intoxication may not be the word, but there’s a power Trump has over many of them, the kind who attend his rallies, and who may have shown up on January 6 to protest. Some of them may have not realized the protest would lead to forcibly attempting to stop the election’s certification. But to be clear, Trump’s demagogic culpability clearly includes cultivating the disinformation propaganda campaign that led to the protest rally, stoked by radicalized right-wing groups, and then inciting the attack. Even GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell strongly concurred (despite his hypocritical impeachment conviction vote).

Nevertheless, for possible bridge-building that such cultural beacons as Earle and McMurtry might imagine, let’s step back and contemplate the dynamic between Trump and his loyal people. He does boast an easy-sell spiritual elixir, especially in his speaking voice’s persuasiveness, as author and cultural critic Lorrie Moore has observed. What she sees as “reassuring” is the smoke in Trump’s mirrors, the quivering illusion that he, and only he, can fix their problems. Hear out this liberal writer, who’s spent most of her teaching career in Madison, Wisconsin:

“So sue me: I sometimes find President Trump’s voice reassuring. Not what he says. Not the actual words (although once in a while one of his “incredibles” reaches inside my chest cavity and magically calms the tachycardia). Trump’s primitive syntax, imperfectly designed for the young foreign woman he married, always dismays. But during a coronavirus-task-force press conference, when one hears him on the radio, his voice has music. Sorry. It does. A singer’s timbre; it is easy on the ear. Trump’s is a voice you use to calm down people you yourself have made furious. (His foremost mimics—Alec Baldwin, Stephen Colbert—have not captured its pitch, its air, its softness, which they substitute with dopiness, which is also there.) For the first ten minutes, before his composure slackens and he becomes boastful and irritable, he actually just wants to be Santa Claus in his own Christmas movie, and the quality of his voice is that of a pet owner calming a pet. I hear it!” 4

To be honest, I do, too. So it seems such people fall prey to this vocal intoxication, and achieve an almost zombie-like state of acceptance, wallowing in wish-fulfilment, harkening to a lost, pure, white America that never really existed. It’s the essence of Trump’s populist demagogic appeal. But who are these people, and what makes them tick?

The typical aggrieved Trump voter is a middle-aged white male – like Earle and McMurtry – so the songwriters inhabit their empathetic characterizations like walkers-in-their-shoes, having long-observed humanity closely in Texas, the virtual Southern nation-unto-itself, and in the petri dishes of their art’s genius.

Here I refer back to my review of Complicated Game. To me, the album achieves a greatness perhaps unparalleled in recent times, partly because it sounds as confessional as it is observational. Several superb songs about the vicissitudes of love (discussed in my full-length review) are first-person and feel autobiographical, whether they are or not. 5

James McMurtry. Courtesy photosbynanciblogspot.com

This puts McMurtry at the same psychological level of his scruff-necked American archetypes – living and losing, and somehow bubbling back to the surface, right before drowning. And on Game, McMurtry casts a perspective that seemingly reaches across the nation’s myriad highways and byways.

McMurtry typically offers a dead-insect windshield view — but which retains the land and the people’s tough, odds-defying spirit. “Carlisle’s Haul” frames such harsh magnificence in terms of a crab-fishing job, done after the fishing season’s closed: “It’s hard not to cry and cuss/ when this old world is bigger than us/ and all we got is pride and trust in our kind.” McMurtry’s observational story-telling powers have been compared to those of his father (Larry McMurtry, who wrote The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove and the screenplay to Brokeback Mountain, among other indelible works).

But the younger McMurtry also recalls Charles Dickens in the way his gritty details and array of eccentric-but-familiar characters serve a broader critique of society, industrialization, and globalization. His renowned 2005 protest anthem “We Can’t Make It Here” still encapsulates the betrayals of America’s economic times as well as anything.

Consider: The world’s billionaires increased their wealth by about a fifth over the course of last year – to more than $11 trillion, according to Forbes. Meanwhile, a quarter of U.S. adults said someone in their household was laid off or lost a job because of the pandemic.” 6 That’s how well Trump has fulfilled his promises to his blue-collar followers.

“Complicated Game begins to feel like a great artist’s most mature statement to date, and also a recording that ought to resonate across the nation’s political spectrum for its invocations of American freedom, and of its discontents. Both seem to flow through McMurtry’s veins by now. But he’s holding steady. 7

“ ‘Deaver’s Cross’ is a righteous bluegrass song and the first of two remarkably magnanimous pieces for a guy stereotyped as a grumpy pessimist: So when you’re fishing that March brown hatch/ Won’t you share your morning’s catch/ with those whose ground you walk across/ May their memory be not lost.

“A song that follows, after a few of the tough-minded ones, reminds us that, though unmistakably a worn-denim Texas troubadour, McMurtry has clearly traversed America, gigging and searching for dusty companionship. And he sure can celebrate, even as he stares down reality, in the lovely, Uilleann-piping ode to ‘Long Island Sound.’ Riding a gentle, rolling melodic wave evoking that long, lapping coast, he sings: These are the best days, these are the best days, boys put your money away, I got the round. Here’s to all you strangers, the Mets and the Rangers, long may we thrive on the Long Island Sound.

It’s the understated peak of the record and it catches the setting sun on a horizon of rooftops, because McMurtry has climbed this high to see what a magnificent place the great old island is. And then, the two closing lines are poetic strokes — he might be looking at Anywhere, U.S.A.

scan0586 Liner photo from James McMurtry’s “Complicated Game.” Photo by Shane McCauley

And yet, McMurtry remains too much of a cold-eyed critic of easy social conventions to leave us with only comforting thoughts. The album closes with its strangest song “Cutter,” about a sorry soul who physically mutilates himself with a knife, for reasons ostensibly sociological and psychological, yet ambiguous: “I miss my dog from years ago/ Where he went, I still don’t know./whiskey and coffee while I burn my toast, and build a cage for all my ghosts.” He could be one of countless desperate military veterans, or other American survivors. McMurtry’s under-appreciated vocal vibrato nails the man’s unsteady, just-hanging-on societal mask.

This character feels like just the sort of person who Trump pushed over the edge, into anarchic violence at the Capitol on that fateful January day.

Nevertheless, as (McMurtry) told recently told Rolling Stone, he sees his characters as “enduring, not fading away. Standing against the current that wants to wash you away but can’t, yet.” 8

We can only hope, and strive, for the time when such folks endure as a reasonably healed part of America’s social fabric, while the raw edge of the nation’s anti-democratic and anti-diversity malignance begins to fade away. Musical storytellers like Earle and McMurtry have laid forthright footsteps to follow, and perhaps to a bridge to new understanding, healing and common purpose.

_____

1 The number of people employed by the coal mining industry has fallen 15% since Trump took office in January 2017. Job losses temporarily stabilized during his years in office, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics Data, but the trend is continuing. Jobs did not increase, partly due to Trump’s trade wars and unsuccessful efforts to use the Defense Production Act to prop up coal plants, before the pandemic curtailed coal demand and employment.

Production has followed suit. Despite coal prices remaining stable around $35 per ton over the last decade, production fell during Trump’s years in office to just 706 million short tons, the lowest amount since 1978, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

2. Earle’s empathy for surviving West Virginia family members now extends to his own profound personal loss. He just released another album, J.T., dedicated to his gifted son, the noted singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle, who died in August, at the age of 38 of an apparent drug overdose.

3. Mike Seely, https://www.houstonpress.com/music/james-mcmurtrys-10-best-songs-6518030

4. Lorrie Moore, April 13, 2020 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/the-nurses-office

James McMurtry’s “Game” reveals more of himself, and of a vividly evoked America

6. Vauhini Vara, “The United States of Amazon,” The Atlantic, March 2021, 93

7. I was even more prompted to revisit, and extoll, McMurtry’s album because it, and McMurtry himself, still seem underappreciated. I surveyed two appropriate “Best of” lists: UDiscoverMusic‘s “The 10 Best Americana Albums of All Time,” (published in May of 2020)

The 10 Best Americana Albums Of All Time

, and Paste Magazine’s “50 Greatest Alt-Country Albums,” (published in August 2016). https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/alt-country/the-50-best-alt-country-albums-of-all-time/

Neither list includes Complicated Game, much less any McMurtry album. Interestingly, Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, is Number 2 on both lists, and Earle tops the “Ten Best” list with his Copperhead Road album. Several other Earle albums make Paste‘s “50 Greatest”, as does Jason Isbell’s Southeastern.

Are these big-picture best-of lists too high a bar for McMurtry? I don’t think so.

More encouragingly, Complicated Game scores 87 with MetaCritic, indicating “universal acclaim” based on 9 reviews (including Paste‘s). Isbell’s Southeastern also scores an 87 with Metacritic, which began in 2001, so the iconic Williams and Earle albums predate the site, which measures an album’s contemporary critical reception. Game also was voted No. 3 in NoDepression.com‘s Top 50 albums of 2015, and scored in All-Music‘s list of 22 Favorite Singer-Songwriter albums of 2015. History will have the last say.

8. http://www.jamesmcmurtry.com/

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