Culture Currents nabs a 2023 award for “best critical review” from Milwaukee Press Club

A Culture Currents review of saxophonist Miguel Zenon and pianist Luis Perdomo (above) won a 2023 Milwaukee Press Club award for “best critical review.”

The Milwaukee Press Club is the oldest extant press club in the world, it claims, so there’s baked-in gravitas to the annual journalism awards it gives out. All judges are out-of state to maintain integrity in this state-wide cemptition.

Culture Currents won it’s third award from the press club for best critical review, after two previous first-place gold awards. This time it received a silver, which is second place.

Culture Current’s Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch) displays his 2023 silver award for “best critical review” from The Milwaukee Press Club. Photo by Ann K. Peterson

I happened to read the three finalist entries for “best critical review” and I would concur with the judges on the top prize for best review. It went to coverage of a remake of Edward Albee’s laceratingly acerbic play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” staged by the Milwaukee Chamber Theater. The review was written for Urban Milwaukee by Dominique Noth, coincidentally my editor many years ago, at the old pre-merger Milwaukee Journal. Features editor at the time, Dom was always a highly accomplished theater and film critic, and proved it once again. His review commented comparatively with his memory of seeing the play on Broadway in the early 1960s.

The bronze award for criticism went to another former colleague of mine, Rob Thomas, long-time pop music and film critic for The Cap Times in Madison, for his excellent review of Bruce Springsteen live in Milwaukee.

Culture Currents received the silver award for its review “Miguel Zenon builds a bridge from his Puerto Rican soul to the world.” The subject was a sublimely affecting and lyrical duo concert by MacArthur “Genius” Award-Winner saxophonist Miguel Zenon and his longtime mate  pianist Luis Perdomo at The Art + Lit Lab for the 2023 the Madison Jazz Festival. In a program titled “El Arte del Bolero,” they interpreted popular songs they grew up with in their native Puerto Rico and it was a pan-cultural revelation. Here’s the review:

https://kevernacular.com/?p=15647

The awards were presented at the annual Gridiron Awards Dinner at the Pfister Hotel, always a highlight of the year in Wisconsin journalism. The event always features two “newsmaker award” winners, one of whom was ex-Packer Hall of Famer Leroy Butler.

Leroy, one of the most popular and celebrated athletes in Wisconsin,  was charmingly humble and funny in his acceptance speech.

Green Bay Packer Hall of Famer Leroy Butler (right, with a local news reporter) received a “Newsmaker” award at the 2024 Milwaukee Press Club Gridiron Awards Dinner.

The event “climaxes” with a speech by a nationally known figure in journalism. In this case that was James Bennet, former editor-in-chief at The Atlantic magazine, and former Editorial Page Editor at The New York Times, when the page won two Pulitzers. He’s currently a columnist at The Economist.

Bennet was a trenchant political and journalistic commentator and impressed us by explaining he’d read a certain sampling of our entries — not anything he was requested to do — and felt heartened by the quality of our work. He even mentioned Dominique’s review of the Albee play. Such recognition is something for Wisconsin journalists to build on in an uncertain future for the profession.

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“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.

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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

 

 

Louisa Gallas offers incisive sanity for America’s gun madness, and its attendant politics

Louisa Gallas.

 

Culture Currents guest comment is by Louisa Gallas (a.k.a. Louisa Loveridge-Gallas), a beloved Milwaukee poet, who has quickly proven a fearless, fierce and incisive political commentator, on The New York Times online opinion page.

Here she responds affirmatively to an op-ed by celebrated columnist Paul Krugman. It’s a superb rejoinder to America’s gun madness.  

 

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Louisa Gallas | Michigan
YES! The perspective that gun violence is a public health issue, in fact, emergency, is essential. Any use of the word ‘control’ does alienate those who frame accessibility as their freedom. The NRA and legislators who promote guns create a real infection across the country and slander the original constitution’s definition of ‘well-regulated militia”, instead allowing any individual to legally buy a weapon to murder. The irresponsibility the NRA supports is a bacteria they grow in their laboratory and purposely release into the environment. They are a systemic disease based on a lethal skewed originalist interpretation of the second amendment. They have no shame about their demolition of public physical and mental health as they further the epidemic of murder, maiming and despair.

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Diana Jones’ masterwork of border-crisis empathy belatedly gets stateside release

 

Cover of Diana Jones album “Song to a Refugee.” Courtesy Proper Records

The exquisite singer-songwriter Diana Jones reached a career peak with the 2020 release of her album Song to a Refugee, which I reviewed when it was released. However, at the time, her British label, Proper Records, only released it in the British Isles and Europe, even though the Greenwich Village-based artist’s inspiration and focus was the U.S. border crisis during the Trump administration’s travesty of policy cruelty.

The issue remains painful as righting the horrible wrongs of that administration will take time. Proper has now released the album stateside, prompting a fine interview feature from The New York Times. (Due to a peculiar Times change in link sharing, Culture Currents, as a Times subscriber, can only share the Diana Jones article link on my (Kevin Lynch) Facebook page post of this blog post).

Diana Jones, photographed for The New York Times

And here is my November review of the album, reposted:

Diana Jones sings a “Song to the Refugee,” as if she’s lived that life

Why Elizabeth Warren may still catch and ride the big wave, if Bernie slips

Illustration by Ricardo Santos; photographs by T.J. Kirkpatrick, Jordan Gale, Demetrius Freeman, and Allison Farrand for The New York Times.

Want some political meat to chew on, as you decide what Democratic candidate is most palatable and digestible in November?

Here are three articles that address why one Democratic candidate remains in the lead pack, but needs more spotlighting of her quality and viability as a winning candidate, and as a the best president for America, right now. Yes, I’m talking about Elizabeth Warren, who has really taken fewer arrows than any other candidate in the current Democratic infighting. Partly that’s because she’s not the targeted front-runner. But it’s also because few have much of substance to complain about her as a flawed candidate. She’s clearly the best equipped, almost comparable to Hillary Clinton in terms of serious credentials and leadership chops. But she’s a better candidate than Clinton to ride out the long test. Warren is behind Bernie but still capable of catching the same big wave he rides without the baggage, real or perceived, that sank Clinton in the final inside maneuvering of the Electoral College.

One of The New York Times’ most prominent liberal opinion columnists, Michelle Goldberg, makes a sterling new case for Warren as the best can-do president to fix what ails America and its economic system, here:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/sunday/elizabeth-warren-2020.html

Note that Goldberg addresses how Warren has the most compelling personal success story of any presidential candidate, one which should speak to ordinary Americans struggling to get by. People need to pay attention to her, to realize what an inspiring candidate she could be in the general election..

This leads me to the other two articles, by political scientist Melanye Price. The first, from January, address the perceived “electability” factor which has assumed out-sized focus in this crucial election. The first article shows how Warren foiled Bernie Sanders on the alleged “woman can’t be elected president” trope. Sadly there’s substance to the reality of American sexism, especially in presidential politics. But If Warren can continue to fend off that notion smartly, as she did in the January debate, she can alter perceptions in the various corners of the worrying electorate who are afraid to support her. Here’s that piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/opinion/warren-sanders-debate.htmlhttp://

The other article by Price, from November, 2019, took a larger view of the current electorate, and still seems to still hold up as an analysis of the dominant dynamic in this race, and a projection of how things could play out. Her big-picture argument about the youth vote clearly buoys Bernie Sanders at this point. But is he really more electable than Warren in a general election? Wait till Trump starts piling on the easy “socialist radical” albatross which may be signified, in effect, by Bernie’s shoulder hunch. Ram-rod erect Warren has much of the same vision, but less ideologically and more pragmatically, with her cleansing-and-reinventing capitalism depth of planning and credibility. And she’s long been a superb debater, who recently demonstrated how she can deliver combination punches and body blows in debate, while having a natural affinity for the high road, and thus coming out looking good.

Is this enough to break the stubborn-but-clearly-aging “glass ceiling” of American misogyny?

Price makes it quite plausible. And here’s where both her recent “electability” article and her bigger-picture take can read as one whole scenario. Warren has plenty of work to do to become the nominee, but she still holds strong potential. Price’s combined arguments help explain why Warren remains the relatively unscathed Dem candidate “waiting in the wings.”

To my pleasant surprise, her persuasive analysis from last November ends up seizing on the two presidential candidates at the time, whom I think would be the best Democratic ticket for coalescing a strong, broad, diverse coalition: Warren (as president in my book) and Julian Castro (my choice for her running mate). That team is already in the cards as Castro, since dropping out of the presidential race, has become a primary surrogate for Warren and an obvious bridge builder to the growing Latinx and minority electorate. These Seven Million Young People Can Beat Trump

Because Warren clearly needs help these are also reasons why now’s the time for those who do and can believe in all she brings to the table need to step up as citizens in the election and actively supporting her. That’s what I’m doing.

The primary race might feel like Bernie’s to lose right now, but could he lose? I mean really lose? I think he’s a much more viable November candidate than a similar lefty — and doomed — darling, George McGovern, was in 1972. Times have changed in plenty of ways since then, but history always holds echoes for us to perk an ear to, and reconsider in the light of the present.

These are reasons why my mantra, left over from the 2016 campaign, now takes on new meaning: “Run, Liz, run!”

Read up these pieces and see what you think.