I was rounding the corner of Norway & Willow
near the village of Ephraim (Wisconsin) on my
Trek bike one hot afternoon when I nearly ran
into a doe, a deer - a female DEER -
standing in the middle of the street.
I stopped, hoping she wouldn't charge me.
I finally won the inter-species staredown:
scuttling hooves as she turned, she hurdled a
wooden fence & ran into the forest.
A beautiful tawny female animal
in the bright sunlight of July asphalt
darted into the darkness of woods & disappeared.
Karin Wolf of Madison told me that deer
are totems of gentleness & I believe it.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Jack, Sam, Me & Death - an essay
"Poetry is the revelation of higher truths." -J.W. von Goethe
"There are no truths - only stories." -Zuni proverb
After my cousin Sam's funeral in Fond du Lac on October 5th, 2009, I walked into a bookstore and bought The Dharma Bums. It was my 49th birthday and I wanted to commemorate the dual occasion, Sam's death and my birth, by getting a novel that would honor his memory and inspire me. A fellow Jack Kerouac fan, Sam had barely made it to age 30 when his mental pain became so unbearable that he killed himself. I understood that kind of desperate grief, having survived an overdose of anti-depressants. But I was luckier, or less determined, than my cousin.
Sam had chosen a remote location for his final act. In fact, it took a few days for searchers to find his remains inside the parked car near the marsh. I decided to bid the world adieu from a busy stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline. After riding a bus into downtown Racine, I managed to walk as far as the public library on Lake Street when I collapsed, unconscious, and was rescued by some good Samaritan. The hospital was nearby and so the emergency-room staff had time to defibrillate my stopped heart and filter my poisoned blood before brain damage had set in. Sam chose carbon monoxide poisoning for his duel with Depression. He left a wife and small child behind. His mother, at least, was spared the terrible news. Judy - Sam's lovely Mom, my sweetheart of an aunt - had already staked her claim on the grave. She killed herself six years earlier, by CO poisoning.
When I entered the bookstore on Main Street that sunny autumn afternoon, I was pleased to discover a new Penguin edition of Kerouac's novel on the shelves. I asked for a pack of American Spirits cigarettes, charmed at having found a literature store that also sold tobacco. I justified the purchase by noting that Sam was a smoker too. Then I started the long drive north to Oconto County, where I was going to visit my friend Wolf. Ironically, Wolf's only brother, a pharmacist and Vietnam combat veteran, had killed himself too, swallowing a precisely fatal dose of barbiturates in the winter of 1979.
As I sped north on Highway 41 in my little black Volkswagen, I passed Winnebago, where the state had institutionalized me for the second half of 1984. The treatment consisted of: (1) psychotropic medication (not unlike the stuff that had nearly killed me); (2) group therapy; (3) occupational therapy (art /craft projects); and (4) exercise, especially via sports (basketball, softball, tennis) and hiking. I had survived ECT, so nothing psychiatric scared me anymore.
I also recall reading a book during my 5-month stay at Winnebago Mental Health Facility, by the Catholic priest-philosopher-scientist Fr. Teilhard de Chardin. It may have provided some mental stimulation, but it certainly failed to convince me of God's existence.
Somewhere north of Neenah, I cast my mind back even further, to the summer of 1983, when I discovered The Dharma Bums at the public library in Portland, Oregon. I was living hand to mouth at the time, auditing lectures on Chaplin and Nietzsche at Portland State University and briefly staying at a skidrow flophouse where I got pubic lice from the bedlinen. I had hitchhiked to the Rose City all the way from San Antonio, Texas, where my meager bus funds had taken me from New Orleans. I stayed with friendly drivers or at less glamorous places along the way. In exchange for my staying awake to an hour of gospel propaganda, for example, some hospitable Christians fed and bedded me at their rescue mission in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
I was emulating Kerouac's hobo-inspired mode of living before I had read his road novels, which helped set off the Sixties "rucksack revolution." Like Jack, I had acquaintances on the West Coast who'd put me up for a few days. But mine were in dull middle-class places - San Diego, Burbank - rather than Jack's beloved bohemian San Francisco. And yet, as much as Ronald Reagan tried to turn America's cultural clock back to the repressive Fifties, my road experience could sometimes be weirder than Kerouac's. Jack, as far as I know, was never escorted to a gay bar in the Castro district by a Christian Brother high-school teacher. That highway savior gave me a lift from near LA all the way to San Francisco Bay. Afterwards, I was glad that I had not chosen the life of a Catholic monk.
Nevertheless, as a natural loner and habitual observer (so was Kerouac), I've always felt monkish. That inclination cannot be undermined by society's disapproval or people's suspicions. In his Buddhist days, Jack aspired to be a bhikku, a Zen monk who lives out a creed of compassion. He sometimes wanted to become a bodhisattva too, an enlightened person who renounces nirvana in order to show others a way out of their suffering. Like his nineteenth-century American literary forebears Mark Twain (an agnostic Southerner) and Walt Whitman (an impoverished homosexual), Kerouac saw himself an outsider.
The son of strict working-class French-Canadian Catholic immigrants, Kerouac also had Iroquois blood and a dead brother, Gerard. He didn't even master the English language until he was in his late teens, attending Columbia University on a football scholarship. Despite that chance at entering the nation's elite, he dropped out of the rat race instead. He dared to became a writer, turning his sympathies toward fellow outsiders, rebels and misfits.
Preferring wild men to tame ones, Kerouac celebrated in his writing the antics of personalities as diverse as the delinquent speed-freak Neal Cassady (called Dean Moriarty in On the Road) and the scholarly Zen-poet Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums). Despite his embrace of adventure and exuberance, Jack's moods could turn world-weary in a heartbeat. Norbert Blei may be right in asserting that "there's a Kerouac inside every writer." Fortunately, not every would-be Kerouac drinks himself to a death by middle age.
There are many better - yet, admittedly, some far worse - ways to die. In a dark poem from Mexico City Blues (1959), recorded for posterity by Kerouac on Poetry for the Beat Generation, Jack seems fed up with this sad planet: "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven dead," he says in a deadpan monotone.
By the late Fifties Kerouac had written his best stuff. Arguably, he had accomplished the mission laid out for himself in a moving passage, set in September 1955, that opens The Dharma Bums. Here Jack (as Ray) describes his encounter with a timid old hobo, with whom he shares his wine, bread and cheese in a railroad freight car travelling from Los Angeles to San Francisco:
I believed that I was an oldtime bhikku in modern clothes wandering the world . . . in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero of Paradise . . . The little bum in the gondola solidified all my beliefs by warming up to the wine and talking and finally whipping out a tiny slip of paper which contained a prayer by Saint Teresa announcing that after death she will return to the earth by showering it with roses from heaven, forever, for all living creatures. [Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, Viking Penguin, 2008 hardcover edition, p. 2.]
Kerouac then introduces the character who inspired the novel while suggesting what its title signifies:
The little Saint Teresa bum was the first genuine Dharma Bum I'd met, and the second was the number one Dharma Bum of them all and in fact it was he, Japhy Ryder, who coined the phrase. Japhy Ryder was a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods . . . interested in animals and Indian lore so that when he got to college by hook or crook he was already well equipped for his early studies in anthropology and later in Indian myth . . . [He] became an Oriental scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen Lunatics of China and Japan. [The Dharma Bums, p. 5.]
Whether unconsciously or by design, Kerouac summons the compelling power of myth by casting his literary alter egos, Sal Paradise and Ray Smith, and their buddy-protagonists in On the Road (Dean Moriarty) and The Dharma Bums (Japhy Ryder) as heroes enacting a sort of mythic quest across the epic landscapes of the West in nuclear-age America.
As Joseph Campbell notes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), mythological adventures are similar across all cultures, whether the hero is Prometheus, Gautama-Buddha, Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Myths share this story-pattern: (1) the hero ventures forth from the common world into (2) a region of supernatural wonder, where (3) she wins a decisive victory, after which (4) she returns with the power to bestow boons on the community. Myths derive their power, Campbell says, from a kind of tough spiritual instruction, surpassing both moral didacticism and psychological drama:
Where the moralist would be filled with indignation and the tragic poet with pity and terror, mythology breaks the whole of life into a vast, horrendous Divine Comedy. Its Olympian laugh is not escapist in the least, but hard, with the hardness of life itself - which, we may take it, is the hardness of God, the Creator. Mythology, in this respect, makes the tragic attitude seem somewhat hysterical, and the merely moral judgement shortsighted. Yet the hardness is balanced by an assurance that all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain. Thus the tales are both pitiless and terrorless - suffused with the joy of a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered battling egos that are born and die in time. [Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1973 paperback edition, pp. 45-46.]
I suppose I was on my own kind of quest in the summer of 1983. Jack was an enthusiastic adventurer some 30 years earlier, but he grew tired of the road. Then fame really soured him on life. Travel, when done in a spirit of receptivity, is the perfect antidote to the soul-sucking tendencies of television and the Internet. Adventure-driven travel is active, spontaneous, liberating, reflective and real. Therefore, it can be dangerous. My travels throughout the 1980s and into the mid-90s were less mythic adventures than attempts at the old geographical cure. I was fleeing the feeling that I had become a hostage of depression. I was more fugitive than hero.
Sam drove to Nevada once, reportedly on just such a romantic geographical quest. In Sam I saw a kindred soul: a young man struggling to derive joy from a melancholy existence. He endured, putting up daily resistance to the seductive siren voices urging self-destruction. Death seems merciful when your own mind turns against you. Death, after all, is the ultimate egalitarian, a massive leveler. Death doesn't give a damn who you are. In the end, death embraces us all with the cold indifference of a Great Plains blizzard.
Jack Kerouac, at least, tasted the satisfaction that successful artists know. He left us a library of stories and poetry that continue to move and inspire millions. As far as I know, Sam left no suicide note. So I'll compose this epitaph on his behalf: Spend your allotted days as meaningfully, as intensely, as beautifully as you can. Bring back a boon of some kind. Share the fruits of whatever victory you manage to attain in this contentious world.
And, above all, dream harder.
"There are no truths - only stories." -Zuni proverb
After my cousin Sam's funeral in Fond du Lac on October 5th, 2009, I walked into a bookstore and bought The Dharma Bums. It was my 49th birthday and I wanted to commemorate the dual occasion, Sam's death and my birth, by getting a novel that would honor his memory and inspire me. A fellow Jack Kerouac fan, Sam had barely made it to age 30 when his mental pain became so unbearable that he killed himself. I understood that kind of desperate grief, having survived an overdose of anti-depressants. But I was luckier, or less determined, than my cousin.
Sam had chosen a remote location for his final act. In fact, it took a few days for searchers to find his remains inside the parked car near the marsh. I decided to bid the world adieu from a busy stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline. After riding a bus into downtown Racine, I managed to walk as far as the public library on Lake Street when I collapsed, unconscious, and was rescued by some good Samaritan. The hospital was nearby and so the emergency-room staff had time to defibrillate my stopped heart and filter my poisoned blood before brain damage had set in. Sam chose carbon monoxide poisoning for his duel with Depression. He left a wife and small child behind. His mother, at least, was spared the terrible news. Judy - Sam's lovely Mom, my sweetheart of an aunt - had already staked her claim on the grave. She killed herself six years earlier, by CO poisoning.
When I entered the bookstore on Main Street that sunny autumn afternoon, I was pleased to discover a new Penguin edition of Kerouac's novel on the shelves. I asked for a pack of American Spirits cigarettes, charmed at having found a literature store that also sold tobacco. I justified the purchase by noting that Sam was a smoker too. Then I started the long drive north to Oconto County, where I was going to visit my friend Wolf. Ironically, Wolf's only brother, a pharmacist and Vietnam combat veteran, had killed himself too, swallowing a precisely fatal dose of barbiturates in the winter of 1979.
As I sped north on Highway 41 in my little black Volkswagen, I passed Winnebago, where the state had institutionalized me for the second half of 1984. The treatment consisted of: (1) psychotropic medication (not unlike the stuff that had nearly killed me); (2) group therapy; (3) occupational therapy (art /craft projects); and (4) exercise, especially via sports (basketball, softball, tennis) and hiking. I had survived ECT, so nothing psychiatric scared me anymore.
I also recall reading a book during my 5-month stay at Winnebago Mental Health Facility, by the Catholic priest-philosopher-scientist Fr. Teilhard de Chardin. It may have provided some mental stimulation, but it certainly failed to convince me of God's existence.
Somewhere north of Neenah, I cast my mind back even further, to the summer of 1983, when I discovered The Dharma Bums at the public library in Portland, Oregon. I was living hand to mouth at the time, auditing lectures on Chaplin and Nietzsche at Portland State University and briefly staying at a skidrow flophouse where I got pubic lice from the bedlinen. I had hitchhiked to the Rose City all the way from San Antonio, Texas, where my meager bus funds had taken me from New Orleans. I stayed with friendly drivers or at less glamorous places along the way. In exchange for my staying awake to an hour of gospel propaganda, for example, some hospitable Christians fed and bedded me at their rescue mission in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
I was emulating Kerouac's hobo-inspired mode of living before I had read his road novels, which helped set off the Sixties "rucksack revolution." Like Jack, I had acquaintances on the West Coast who'd put me up for a few days. But mine were in dull middle-class places - San Diego, Burbank - rather than Jack's beloved bohemian San Francisco. And yet, as much as Ronald Reagan tried to turn America's cultural clock back to the repressive Fifties, my road experience could sometimes be weirder than Kerouac's. Jack, as far as I know, was never escorted to a gay bar in the Castro district by a Christian Brother high-school teacher. That highway savior gave me a lift from near LA all the way to San Francisco Bay. Afterwards, I was glad that I had not chosen the life of a Catholic monk.
Nevertheless, as a natural loner and habitual observer (so was Kerouac), I've always felt monkish. That inclination cannot be undermined by society's disapproval or people's suspicions. In his Buddhist days, Jack aspired to be a bhikku, a Zen monk who lives out a creed of compassion. He sometimes wanted to become a bodhisattva too, an enlightened person who renounces nirvana in order to show others a way out of their suffering. Like his nineteenth-century American literary forebears Mark Twain (an agnostic Southerner) and Walt Whitman (an impoverished homosexual), Kerouac saw himself an outsider.
The son of strict working-class French-Canadian Catholic immigrants, Kerouac also had Iroquois blood and a dead brother, Gerard. He didn't even master the English language until he was in his late teens, attending Columbia University on a football scholarship. Despite that chance at entering the nation's elite, he dropped out of the rat race instead. He dared to became a writer, turning his sympathies toward fellow outsiders, rebels and misfits.
Preferring wild men to tame ones, Kerouac celebrated in his writing the antics of personalities as diverse as the delinquent speed-freak Neal Cassady (called Dean Moriarty in On the Road) and the scholarly Zen-poet Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums). Despite his embrace of adventure and exuberance, Jack's moods could turn world-weary in a heartbeat. Norbert Blei may be right in asserting that "there's a Kerouac inside every writer." Fortunately, not every would-be Kerouac drinks himself to a death by middle age.
There are many better - yet, admittedly, some far worse - ways to die. In a dark poem from Mexico City Blues (1959), recorded for posterity by Kerouac on Poetry for the Beat Generation, Jack seems fed up with this sad planet: "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven dead," he says in a deadpan monotone.
By the late Fifties Kerouac had written his best stuff. Arguably, he had accomplished the mission laid out for himself in a moving passage, set in September 1955, that opens The Dharma Bums. Here Jack (as Ray) describes his encounter with a timid old hobo, with whom he shares his wine, bread and cheese in a railroad freight car travelling from Los Angeles to San Francisco:
I believed that I was an oldtime bhikku in modern clothes wandering the world . . . in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero of Paradise . . . The little bum in the gondola solidified all my beliefs by warming up to the wine and talking and finally whipping out a tiny slip of paper which contained a prayer by Saint Teresa announcing that after death she will return to the earth by showering it with roses from heaven, forever, for all living creatures. [Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, Viking Penguin, 2008 hardcover edition, p. 2.]
Kerouac then introduces the character who inspired the novel while suggesting what its title signifies:
The little Saint Teresa bum was the first genuine Dharma Bum I'd met, and the second was the number one Dharma Bum of them all and in fact it was he, Japhy Ryder, who coined the phrase. Japhy Ryder was a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods . . . interested in animals and Indian lore so that when he got to college by hook or crook he was already well equipped for his early studies in anthropology and later in Indian myth . . . [He] became an Oriental scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen Lunatics of China and Japan. [The Dharma Bums, p. 5.]
Whether unconsciously or by design, Kerouac summons the compelling power of myth by casting his literary alter egos, Sal Paradise and Ray Smith, and their buddy-protagonists in On the Road (Dean Moriarty) and The Dharma Bums (Japhy Ryder) as heroes enacting a sort of mythic quest across the epic landscapes of the West in nuclear-age America.
As Joseph Campbell notes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), mythological adventures are similar across all cultures, whether the hero is Prometheus, Gautama-Buddha, Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Myths share this story-pattern: (1) the hero ventures forth from the common world into (2) a region of supernatural wonder, where (3) she wins a decisive victory, after which (4) she returns with the power to bestow boons on the community. Myths derive their power, Campbell says, from a kind of tough spiritual instruction, surpassing both moral didacticism and psychological drama:
Where the moralist would be filled with indignation and the tragic poet with pity and terror, mythology breaks the whole of life into a vast, horrendous Divine Comedy. Its Olympian laugh is not escapist in the least, but hard, with the hardness of life itself - which, we may take it, is the hardness of God, the Creator. Mythology, in this respect, makes the tragic attitude seem somewhat hysterical, and the merely moral judgement shortsighted. Yet the hardness is balanced by an assurance that all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain. Thus the tales are both pitiless and terrorless - suffused with the joy of a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered battling egos that are born and die in time. [Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1973 paperback edition, pp. 45-46.]
I suppose I was on my own kind of quest in the summer of 1983. Jack was an enthusiastic adventurer some 30 years earlier, but he grew tired of the road. Then fame really soured him on life. Travel, when done in a spirit of receptivity, is the perfect antidote to the soul-sucking tendencies of television and the Internet. Adventure-driven travel is active, spontaneous, liberating, reflective and real. Therefore, it can be dangerous. My travels throughout the 1980s and into the mid-90s were less mythic adventures than attempts at the old geographical cure. I was fleeing the feeling that I had become a hostage of depression. I was more fugitive than hero.
Sam drove to Nevada once, reportedly on just such a romantic geographical quest. In Sam I saw a kindred soul: a young man struggling to derive joy from a melancholy existence. He endured, putting up daily resistance to the seductive siren voices urging self-destruction. Death seems merciful when your own mind turns against you. Death, after all, is the ultimate egalitarian, a massive leveler. Death doesn't give a damn who you are. In the end, death embraces us all with the cold indifference of a Great Plains blizzard.
Jack Kerouac, at least, tasted the satisfaction that successful artists know. He left us a library of stories and poetry that continue to move and inspire millions. As far as I know, Sam left no suicide note. So I'll compose this epitaph on his behalf: Spend your allotted days as meaningfully, as intensely, as beautifully as you can. Bring back a boon of some kind. Share the fruits of whatever victory you manage to attain in this contentious world.
And, above all, dream harder.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Cory Chisel & some Fourth of July synchronicity
Well, it's nearly Independence Day & I just experienced a weird bit of pre-midnight synchronicity at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union (UWMU). Here's the story, friends, as briefly as I can sketch it.
"The show ain't great till somebody gets naked," said Cory Chisel from behind Ray-Bans on the sun-blinded stage at Memorial Park in Appleton this afternoon, near the end of his fantastic hometown set with The Wandering Sons. Part gospel fervor, part hipster cool - a perfect blend in music & style.
As much as it pains me to say it, a performance by mediocre LA roots-rockers Dawes' here at the UWMU terrace tonight might have officially gotten great: I just saw a nude dude diving off the pier into Lake Mendota. In fairness, he seemed more inspired by booze than music.
I still maintain, as I said to the UW sound guy, that Dawes sucks compared to Cory's band. Anyway, the thing is, I saw Cory open for Dawes in February at the Mercy Lounge in Nashville - and he was far better than them.
Okay, nobody's ever erected a monument to a critic. But the truth deserves to be told. While getting Cory's autograph on his (re-released 2006) CD "The Little Bird" today, he said that he was still jetlagged after his return from the famous Glastonbury Festival in England.
For you trivia buffs, Cory Chisel shares a hometown with fellow Appletonians Houdini & Willem Dafoe. Cory certainly knows how to make magic with a guitar & microphone. You lucky people in the Fox Valley can see him at the Paperfest in Kimberly & at Cranky Pat's in Neenah later this month.
And God bless America - for producing such wonderful music!
"The show ain't great till somebody gets naked," said Cory Chisel from behind Ray-Bans on the sun-blinded stage at Memorial Park in Appleton this afternoon, near the end of his fantastic hometown set with The Wandering Sons. Part gospel fervor, part hipster cool - a perfect blend in music & style.
As much as it pains me to say it, a performance by mediocre LA roots-rockers Dawes' here at the UWMU terrace tonight might have officially gotten great: I just saw a nude dude diving off the pier into Lake Mendota. In fairness, he seemed more inspired by booze than music.
I still maintain, as I said to the UW sound guy, that Dawes sucks compared to Cory's band. Anyway, the thing is, I saw Cory open for Dawes in February at the Mercy Lounge in Nashville - and he was far better than them.
Okay, nobody's ever erected a monument to a critic. But the truth deserves to be told. While getting Cory's autograph on his (re-released 2006) CD "The Little Bird" today, he said that he was still jetlagged after his return from the famous Glastonbury Festival in England.
For you trivia buffs, Cory Chisel shares a hometown with fellow Appletonians Houdini & Willem Dafoe. Cory certainly knows how to make magic with a guitar & microphone. You lucky people in the Fox Valley can see him at the Paperfest in Kimberly & at Cranky Pat's in Neenah later this month.
And God bless America - for producing such wonderful music!
Friday, July 2, 2010
How weird can Door County get?
After a personal walking tour (nobody else showed up) of historic downtown Fish Creek, led by retired schoolteacher & native local Barb, whose parents ran the Summertime ice-cream parlor/gift shop on Cedar Street for decades, I hurried north along the coast to Sister Bay in time to catch the Newtonburg Brass Band play in period attire at Waterfront Park yesterday. The musicians sat in formal 1910 dress as though the intervening century of progress in more comfortable styles & cooler fabrics had never happened.
Man, I thought, dig that lady pounding the drumkit, garbed in a big black sun hat & ankle-length dress like some proto-punk Lizzie Borden! I sat on the grass, surrounded by the geriatric set, stifling an urge to mock those bandgeeks from Manitowoc County who acted as though Sousa marches remained all the rage in 2010. A sad sunny spectacle indeed. Still, their music may have sounded better than the hip-hop & pop dreck no doubt pouring into the iPod-covered ears of those teenagers barely clad in bikinis on the beach a stone's throw away.
I stopped at the Piggly Wiggly to pick up a few food items & I ran into my former media-crush, Milwaukee TV sportscaster Jessie Garcia for the second time this week. I hightailed it home, ate & read some Norbert Blei essays. Later I got drunk while watching Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas on a DVD courtesy of the Menominee Tribal Library in Keshena (via inter-library loan, godsend to poor intellectuals stuck in the boondocks). The drug consumption habits of Dr. Gonzo & Raoul Duke made me feel like a piker, so I drove off to Husby's to hear The Mullet Hunters. The band was a no-show, though, due to a sick child, the baldheaded bartender told me. Note to self: never trust any group, rock or otherwise, with "mullet" in its name.
I sat & studied the crowd, sobering up by slowly sipping a Guinness stout for an hour and a half. The more energetic drinkers, mostly youths born before I managed to graduate from college (1986), regarded me with suspicion - as small-town folk regard all silent strangers. I was pleased, however, to have found a Northwoods tavern where women outnumbered men. My patience was rewarded in with a song by The Ramones: "I Wanna Be Sedated." And so, it seems, does sedate Door County, Wisconsin, USA.
Man, I thought, dig that lady pounding the drumkit, garbed in a big black sun hat & ankle-length dress like some proto-punk Lizzie Borden! I sat on the grass, surrounded by the geriatric set, stifling an urge to mock those bandgeeks from Manitowoc County who acted as though Sousa marches remained all the rage in 2010. A sad sunny spectacle indeed. Still, their music may have sounded better than the hip-hop & pop dreck no doubt pouring into the iPod-covered ears of those teenagers barely clad in bikinis on the beach a stone's throw away.
I stopped at the Piggly Wiggly to pick up a few food items & I ran into my former media-crush, Milwaukee TV sportscaster Jessie Garcia for the second time this week. I hightailed it home, ate & read some Norbert Blei essays. Later I got drunk while watching Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas on a DVD courtesy of the Menominee Tribal Library in Keshena (via inter-library loan, godsend to poor intellectuals stuck in the boondocks). The drug consumption habits of Dr. Gonzo & Raoul Duke made me feel like a piker, so I drove off to Husby's to hear The Mullet Hunters. The band was a no-show, though, due to a sick child, the baldheaded bartender told me. Note to self: never trust any group, rock or otherwise, with "mullet" in its name.
I sat & studied the crowd, sobering up by slowly sipping a Guinness stout for an hour and a half. The more energetic drinkers, mostly youths born before I managed to graduate from college (1986), regarded me with suspicion - as small-town folk regard all silent strangers. I was pleased, however, to have found a Northwoods tavern where women outnumbered men. My patience was rewarded in with a song by The Ramones: "I Wanna Be Sedated." And so, it seems, does sedate Door County, Wisconsin, USA.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
A Chinese fiddler in Egg Harbor
This summer I'm volunteering at the Peg Egan Performing Arts Center in Egg Harbor, Door County (Wisconsin/USA), home of the 2010 Sunset Concert Series. At the opening show on Sunday evening, June 27th, hundreds of sun-drenched music fans enjoyed Chicago harmonica virtuoso Corky Siegel's eclectic Chamber Blues project.
Siegel presented an intriguing fusion of the blues, classical & world music. His touring group features a beautiful young Taiwanese-born musician named Chihsuan Yang on violin & erhu, a traditional Chinese two-stringed fiddle. The highlight of the show for me was when Ms. Yang led the group on her own untitled composition - "a Chinese blues," Siegel quipped - which started with a long, captivating erhu solo.
At the post-concert reception, I asked Ms. Yang whether she agrees with critics who claim that the violin is the most emotionally expressive instrument, aside from the human voice. She disagreed, asserting that the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) is actually the most expressive instrument. Ms. Yang, who also plays piano & Okinawa shansin, admitted that she was distracted during the concert by the sublime clouds floating around the Egg Harbor venue.
Ms. Yang is versatile, having played erhu for the Dalai Lama (during his June 2007 talk at Millenium Park in Chicago) as well as having toured as a violinist with Brian Wilson (The Beach Boys). The Corky Siegel Chamber Blues group is playing at the Chautauqua Festival in upstate New York & the Montreal Jazz Festival this week. Catch them if you can.
Siegel presented an intriguing fusion of the blues, classical & world music. His touring group features a beautiful young Taiwanese-born musician named Chihsuan Yang on violin & erhu, a traditional Chinese two-stringed fiddle. The highlight of the show for me was when Ms. Yang led the group on her own untitled composition - "a Chinese blues," Siegel quipped - which started with a long, captivating erhu solo.
At the post-concert reception, I asked Ms. Yang whether she agrees with critics who claim that the violin is the most emotionally expressive instrument, aside from the human voice. She disagreed, asserting that the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) is actually the most expressive instrument. Ms. Yang, who also plays piano & Okinawa shansin, admitted that she was distracted during the concert by the sublime clouds floating around the Egg Harbor venue.
Ms. Yang is versatile, having played erhu for the Dalai Lama (during his June 2007 talk at Millenium Park in Chicago) as well as having toured as a violinist with Brian Wilson (The Beach Boys). The Corky Siegel Chamber Blues group is playing at the Chautauqua Festival in upstate New York & the Montreal Jazz Festival this week. Catch them if you can.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Steel Bridge Song Fest 2010
Here's an incredible small-town music festival you might not have heard of: the Steel Bridge Song Fest (SBSF). This year, the 6th annual SBSF, was an inspiring gathering of 150 musicians, singer-songwriters & (mostly ad hoc) bands, spread over 4 days on an outdoor stage & inside 15 various venues in downtown Sturgeon Bay, Door County, Wisconsin (USA).
Saturday I spoke with LA session drummer Wally Ingram (of Timbuk 3, Stockholm Syndrome & the Sheryl Crow band), who worked with me in Madison in the summer of '81. He played at Butch's, a throwback neighborhood bar, Friday night with co-organizer pat mAcdonald (Timbuk 3) as well as San Francisco guitar virtuoso & singer Eric McFadden in a heavy-blues group called the Legendary Sons of Crack Daniels (sample lyric: "I'm all out of love, baby, let's make some more!").
Pat's raw blues project with fellow Door County resident melaniejane, Purgatory Hill (listed as hailing from "Heaven/Hell, WI") might just blow your mind. Their CDs distributed by the University of Wisconsin Press. The crowd on Sunday afternoon certainly dug their abbreviated set. Among the other highlights for me at SBSF this year:
* Dry-witted, big-hearted Texas troubadour James McMurtry ("Painting by Numbers" etc.) performing with his banjo-playing son Curtis at a moving Fathers & Sons/Mothers & Daughters set.
* New Orleans native (a Hurricane Katrina refugee by way of Memphis & Atlanta) James Hall, who coaxed sweet sounds out of his Gibson hollow body & sang with a passion reminiscent of the late Alex Chilton. I rewarded him with an ear of roasted corn during the closing blues jam Sunday.
* Wisconsin-born ukulele-strumming singer-songwriter Victoria Vox making uncanny trumpetlike vocalizations on both her own tunes and during an all-star jam session.
* Noah Engh howling his California blues into a eerily distorting CB microphone while wailing on slide guitar, sweaty hair flying to the delight of the audience at Butch's late on Friday night.
* Geri X, a riveting rootsy tattooed brunette rocker transplanted from Tampa Bay to Atlanta, moving the Saturday crowd to dance. She autographed my copy of her new CD, "The Bedroom Sessions." She looks as good as she sounds too.
* Solo Per Adulti (For Adults Only), a weird acoustic group of Italian pretty boys led by a scatalogical blasphemer of a singer, who did one tune in English.
*The Maybenauts, a self-described glam pop band from Chicago, featuring a male guitarist who performs in a panda mask, a dynamic young female singer in silver pants plus a pair of tattooed chicks on drums & bass.
* Gospel & bluegrass for the churchy feeling of a Sunday morning coming down.
Not only is Sturgeon Bay (pop. 9,500) packed with hipsters & hotties on SBSF weekend, the supportive community vibe of SBSF is spectacular. The skies may have been mostly gray, but the music was bright & intoxicating. Put it on your calendar for next year (second weekend in June) if you love live original music. It's a non-profit event created, in part, in order to preserve the historic 1930 Michigan Street steel bridge (currently undergoing rehabilitation by the state). Among the vendors this year was Guitars for Vets, whose slogan is "putting the healing power of music in the hands of heroes."
And always remember, folks, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that TWANG!
Saturday I spoke with LA session drummer Wally Ingram (of Timbuk 3, Stockholm Syndrome & the Sheryl Crow band), who worked with me in Madison in the summer of '81. He played at Butch's, a throwback neighborhood bar, Friday night with co-organizer pat mAcdonald (Timbuk 3) as well as San Francisco guitar virtuoso & singer Eric McFadden in a heavy-blues group called the Legendary Sons of Crack Daniels (sample lyric: "I'm all out of love, baby, let's make some more!").
Pat's raw blues project with fellow Door County resident melaniejane, Purgatory Hill (listed as hailing from "Heaven/Hell, WI") might just blow your mind. Their CDs distributed by the University of Wisconsin Press. The crowd on Sunday afternoon certainly dug their abbreviated set. Among the other highlights for me at SBSF this year:
* Dry-witted, big-hearted Texas troubadour James McMurtry ("Painting by Numbers" etc.) performing with his banjo-playing son Curtis at a moving Fathers & Sons/Mothers & Daughters set.
* New Orleans native (a Hurricane Katrina refugee by way of Memphis & Atlanta) James Hall, who coaxed sweet sounds out of his Gibson hollow body & sang with a passion reminiscent of the late Alex Chilton. I rewarded him with an ear of roasted corn during the closing blues jam Sunday.
* Wisconsin-born ukulele-strumming singer-songwriter Victoria Vox making uncanny trumpetlike vocalizations on both her own tunes and during an all-star jam session.
* Noah Engh howling his California blues into a eerily distorting CB microphone while wailing on slide guitar, sweaty hair flying to the delight of the audience at Butch's late on Friday night.
* Geri X, a riveting rootsy tattooed brunette rocker transplanted from Tampa Bay to Atlanta, moving the Saturday crowd to dance. She autographed my copy of her new CD, "The Bedroom Sessions." She looks as good as she sounds too.
* Solo Per Adulti (For Adults Only), a weird acoustic group of Italian pretty boys led by a scatalogical blasphemer of a singer, who did one tune in English.
*The Maybenauts, a self-described glam pop band from Chicago, featuring a male guitarist who performs in a panda mask, a dynamic young female singer in silver pants plus a pair of tattooed chicks on drums & bass.
* Gospel & bluegrass for the churchy feeling of a Sunday morning coming down.
Not only is Sturgeon Bay (pop. 9,500) packed with hipsters & hotties on SBSF weekend, the supportive community vibe of SBSF is spectacular. The skies may have been mostly gray, but the music was bright & intoxicating. Put it on your calendar for next year (second weekend in June) if you love live original music. It's a non-profit event created, in part, in order to preserve the historic 1930 Michigan Street steel bridge (currently undergoing rehabilitation by the state). Among the vendors this year was Guitars for Vets, whose slogan is "putting the healing power of music in the hands of heroes."
And always remember, folks, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that TWANG!
Monday, June 7, 2010
A wounded fawn along a Wisconsin country road
At the corner of Sugar Hill Road & Hillcrest Drive in the town of Brooklyn (Wis.) this morning I saw a fawn. She was stoically dragging her broken right rear leg as she moved dow.n the side of the sunny asphalt country road.
A white wolfish dog watched the injured deer from across the road, his owner keeping him at bay by voice command. It was just about the saddest damn thing I'd seen in ages, but I admired that fawn's struggle to survive. I slowed down immediately. I pray that I never hit a deer with my little Volkswagon.
I am moving to Door County (Wisconsin) this Friday - just in time for the Steel Bridge Song Fest this wseekend. I hope I have better luck finding a job up there, where the rich Chicagoans temporarily dwell. At least for the summer tourist season. Enjoy the summer, everybody!
A white wolfish dog watched the injured deer from across the road, his owner keeping him at bay by voice command. It was just about the saddest damn thing I'd seen in ages, but I admired that fawn's struggle to survive. I slowed down immediately. I pray that I never hit a deer with my little Volkswagon.
I am moving to Door County (Wisconsin) this Friday - just in time for the Steel Bridge Song Fest this wseekend. I hope I have better luck finding a job up there, where the rich Chicagoans temporarily dwell. At least for the summer tourist season. Enjoy the summer, everybody!
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