Pegasus Games: Madison's community fun resource & WORT underwriter

Song from the 1920s

"A [person] only plays when, in the full meaning of the word, (s)he is a [person], and (s)he is only completely a [person] when (s)he plays."  - Friedrich Schiller, "On the Aesthetic Education of Man"

Pioneering Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga argues in Homo ludens (Playing Human, 1938) that play is primary to - indeed it's a necessary (albeit insufficient) condition for - the generation of culture itself. In other words, playing is the ultimate non-profit, unproductive, yet freedom-inspiring activity human beings engage in.

Huizinga (1872-1945) outspokenly opposed the Nazi killjoys who occupied his country during World War II.  That was not a good time for fun and games in Europe. Things improved after the war, of course, when America went crazy for group-participatory board games.

Hobby gaming, including role-play games, remains a popular way to play in our increasingly digital-electronic age. Madison offers many opportunities to play and thereby generate positive culture, including those offered by one of WORT 89.9 FM Community Radio's loyal underwriters, Pegasus Games.

Named for the mythical winged steed created by Zeus for his son Hercules to fight Hades, Pegasus Games was created in August 1980 in a converted house off State Street in downtown Madison by three friends.

That store closed in 2002, due mostly to changes in gaming habits among college students, according to Pegasus Games official Boss Lady Lory Aitken.

In 1991, Pegasus opened a store on Madison’s west side (at Market Square Shopping Center on Odana Road). The business has thrived, expanding in order to provide space for players, who throng there evenings and weekends.

I observed a group of six guys playing Champions in the back room at Pegasus Games on an early March Saturday afternoon.  The shop is fun to peruse, with its diverse gaming miniatures (don't call them "action figures"), marble chess sets and games like Zombicide filling the shelves.

I recently posed a few questions to Pegasus Games co-owner Lory Aitken.

Joe Crawford Mrazek (for WORT): What do you mean by the Pegasus Games motto "Games You Never Outgrow"?

Lory Aitken (for Pegasus Games): Games are not just for children!  Play is good for humans at ALL stages of life.  Science has proven it!  Not only is PLAY of any sort good for stress levels, using our brains is good for staying sharp as we age.

WORT: How do you think tangible (i.e. board & role-play) games will evolve in the future, especially in a culture already cluttered with digital/electronic games?

Pegasus Games: There's a strident backlash against electronic games, mostly on the parts of parents and grandparents who want to see more of the (grand-)kids than the tops of their heads as they bend over their electronics.  Games are GREAT for socialization, too!  Young professionals also seem to enjoy actually engaging with humans, when they're not at work dealing with electronics.

WORT: Why does Pegasus Games support WORT 89.9 FM Community Radio, given the fact that you already reach potential customers statewide through your underwriting at Wisconsin Public Radio?

Pegasus Games: We assume that the same folks who enjoy local radio are people who enjoy both using their brains and sharing the company of other human beings.

Pegasus also means "poetic inspiration."  Get inspired to play more by visiting WORT Underwriter Pegasus Games! Tell them you appreciate their support for WORT while you're there.

motto:  Games you never outgrow

http://www.pegasusgames.com/

Chantal Akerman (1950-2015): The Passing of Time on Film & in Life

Chantal Akerman in 2012 (photo by Mario De Munck) 

Reviewing:
I Don't Belong Anywhere:  The Cinema of Chantal Akerman - documentary, directed by Marianne Lambert  (Belgium, 2015, 67 minutes); and 
No Home Movie - documentary, directed by Chantal Akerman (Belgium, 2015, 115 minutes)

The death of experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman, an apparent suicide, on October 5th was a personal tragedy for her sister Sylviane Akerman, the sole surviving member of their immediate family.  It was also a major loss for world cinema & the art scene in general.  You should get to know Ms. Akerman, if you don't already, especially now that she can't produce any new work.

Viewing No Home Movie & I Don't Belong Anywhere at the University of Wisconsin's Cinematheque in Madison last weekend moved me.  They not only gave me a deeper appreciation for avant-garde film, they also left me with a profound sympathy for a woman I'd only vaguely heard of before.  

This Jewish lesbian, the elder daughter of Auschwitz survivors, was a vital humanist who made just one mainstream "commercial" movie in English, the romantic comedy & box-office bomb A Couch in New York (1997), starring Juliette Binoche & William Hurt.  

Her esteem among cinephiles & adventurous critics is based primarily on a film released when Akerman was 24 years old, a mesmerizingly minimalist 201-minute study of a middle-aged woman. Bearing the prosaic title Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), it concerns a Holocaust survivor who eventually murders a man who pays her for sex.

This weird feminist masterpiece, structured in long steady takes with soft ambient sound, even influenced such notable male directors as the Austrian Michael Haneke as well as Americans Gus Van Sant & Todd Haynes.  In it, Akerman used images to suggest that "the domestic lives of women are the stuff of art," according to critic & devoted fan Richard Brody (see http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/postscript-chantal-akerman.)

In his New Yorker tribute, Brody claims that Akerman's early films prove that "the pressures of women's unquestioned, unchallenged, and unrelieved confinement in the domestic realm and in family roles is a societal folly that leads to ruin, a form of violence that begets violence."  Throughout her career, she disrupted the escapist tendencies of film, a la Bertolt Brecht's "alienation effect" in theater.  

Akerman was an enfant terrible, a film-school dropout who acted in her apocalyptic first short film (Blow Up My Town) at age 18.  After moving to New York at age 21, she joined the circle of experimental filmmakers loosely led & sustained by Jonas Mekas.  Akerman remained a determined & clever iconoclast throughout her life.  

During an extensive series of interviews for I Don't Belong Anywhere - conducted in New York, Europe & (apparently) Israel - Akerman shares several revealing, provocative thoughts with fellow director Marianne Lambert.  She asserts, for example, that the line between fictional movies & documentary film is necessarily fluid. 

"As soon as you create a frame [for a cinematic shot], it's a fiction," Akerman points out.  She always aimed "to make people feel the passing of time" in her films.  The static effect can be boring, even excruciating in its refusal to tell a conventionally entertaining story.  But the result rarely seems contrived or intentionally dull, as in the experimental films of Andy Warhol.  Hers ring eerily true to life.

We see Akerman's theories demonstrated perfectly in No Home Movie.  A poetic melancholy documentary about Akerman's affectionate relationship with her ailing mother Natalia, who died in 2014, the film drained the director emotionally.  By depicting mundane conversations (some via Skype) with her beloved "maminka," Akerman gently bonds the audience to them both.  Lengthy interspersed shots of landscapes, some through the window of a car, offer respite from all the understated mother-daughter drama.

Following a hostile reception after the press screening at the Locarno (Switzerland) film festival, Akerman took her own life, according to a report in Le Monde (see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/arts/chantal-akerman-belgian-filmmaker-dies-65.html?_r=0).  Sylviane Akerman said that her gifted sister had been hospitalized for depression in Paris shortly before attending the Locarno event.

Acting on firm principal, Akerman refused to participate in film festivals dedicated only to works by gay, Jewish or female directors, regarding them as ghettoizing.  She considered herself a nomad, as reflected in the ambiguous title of her final film, No Home Movie.  In fact, she embodied the modern Jewish diaspora in microcosm by maintaining simultaneous residences in the United States, France & Israel.

Here's a sample of the sensitive, provocative voice of Chantal Akerman, from a 2011 online interview (see http://www.lolajournal.com/2/pajama.html) prompted by the release of Almayer's Folly (2011), an "ecstatic, hallucinatory yet trenchantly political" (per Brody) adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel of the same name, shot on location in Cambodia:  

"To make ‘art’ is usually wonderful. The art market is another thing. It’s often tied to power, to the phallus – but not always.

"In cinema, when you make a film, even for four people, anybody at all can enter the darkened theater; it’s democratic. In the art world, there’s an elitism that reigns sometimes that’s tied to capital. Fortunately, not always. In the Renaissance, the Medicis let Michaelangelo make revolutionary work like ‘The Slaves.’ Claude Berri, who, like my father, was a small Jew who came from leather and fur, would get up and say he was looking at his Yves Kleins. They were his. What was he really looking at, the painting or its value? Both, without a doubt; I don’t know. Ultimately, it’s touching.

"My father also started to buy paintings at the end of his life. Bad paintings, but he liked them. I find it very moving."

[© 2016 by J.C. Mrazek]

Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUStWsegZ0k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chantal_Akerman

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/06/chantal-akerman-pioneering-belgium-film-director-and-theorist-dies-aged-65

We Shall Overcome: Gov. Walker's Hypocrisy on Display this MLK Day

Martin Luther King Jr. under arrest in 1958

In the ornate Wisconsin capitol rotunda last Monday afternoon, divisive Republican governor Scott Walker finally faced a political foe that he could not possibly vanquish:  the ghost of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The official annual state ceremony celebrates the inspiring life of that uncannily eloquent American, abbreviated simply MLK, who led the civil rights movement into the promised land of overdue voting rights & the abolition of inhumane racial segregation in the South.In his capacity as chief executive of state government, Walker was obliged to attend, but the irony of that union-busting enemy of public education presiding at the event was hard to ignore.  He opened the tribute with some uninspired remarks, a sharp contrast to the moving a capella    
gospel song that followed.

The baritone performer of that number was ethnomusicologist Dr. Jonathan Overby, executive producer of the ceremony as well as its diplomatic master of ceremonies.  Overby is also the longtime host of the Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) show Higher Ground.

Throughout the nearly two-hour ceremony, broadcast live via  WPR & WORT-FM Community Radio, religious & patriotic music alternated with appeals to God & mostly empty political rhetoric.  All the while a greybearded silent protestor in the gallery held up a stencilled sign asserting that "WAR IS AN ENEMY OF THE POOR."  Indeed, the ceremony was rather marred by militaristic tributes - one guest given special recognition was a black female Army general.  The anti-Vietnam War activist King would have grimaced.

It was dangerously cold outside, with below-zero wind chill temperatures, yet warm sunlight poured in through the skylights & windows surrounding the gold-leafed mural high in the dome overhead.  As full of contradictions as American society itself, the program featured the Kenosha Tremper High School Wind Ensemble performing "America the Beautiful" one minute and, the next, a speaker citing Mississippi activist Fannie Lou Hamer's outrage at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

"Is this America?" Hamer wondered aloud, after party officials denied her integrated group their rightful place at the electoral table.

The diversity & forbearance of the audience, however, encouraged me.  Nowadays it's rare to see so many children & adults of all ages & races attending a public event with a noble purpose.  It's even rarer to see people keeping their smartphones out of sight for so long.  I didn't notice a single person checking email or Facebook during the long MLK tribute.

"I've decided to stick with love," said the elderly African-American minister who gave the invocation, quoting Dr. King.  "Hate is too great a burden to bear."

Later, as the multi-racial University of Illinois Black Chorus led the singing of "We Shall Overcome" I nearly believed that the mean-spiritedness of self-serving politicians such as Walker would be as transitory as the hateful racist tactics of Alabama governor George Wallace proved to be in the 1960s.  That resonant anthem of the civil rights movement still engenders hope in a cynical dreamer like me.

On cue, a group of protesters draped a banner from the third-floor railing that read "JUSTICE 4 TONY."  It referred to the shooting of an unarmed mixed-race 17-year-old named Tony Robinson by a Madison police officer last March.  The small group stood silently throughout "We Shall Overcome" with arms raised in the black-power salute that has been in vogue again since the Black Lives Matter movement gained national traction in recent months.  Several white teenagers in the audience gave the salute in solidarity.

Perhaps the most salient speaker of the day was Aja Brown, 34-year-old mayor of Compton, California.  Brown appealed to young people, urging them to take political action now.  She noted that youth have always ignited historic change - far more often than their cautious elders.  Dr. King, for example, was just 25 when the Montgomery (AL) bus boycott started in 1955.  She suggested that responsible adults mentor young people who lack positive role models in violence-plagued communities.

"Do you plan to die with the baton in your hands?" Brown asked, decrying older leaders reluctant to cede power to the next generation of activists.

The MLK ceremony concluded, as most similar events now customarily do, with the recitation of a passage from Dr. King's August 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech.  This year the statewide honor went to precocious 12-year-old Zaria Roller, a budding actress, singer & pianist who attends Verona H.S. Exploration Academy.

Gesturing as she intoned the familiar prophetic words, Roller embodied well the theme of this 2016 MLK tribute ceremony:  Stand Up & Stand Out.

Scott Walker wore the bland mask of white male privilege as he issued an official proclamation declaring Monday (January 18, 2016) THE REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. DAY throughout the state of Wisconsin, further "commend[ing] this observance to all of our citizens."  He seemed to be unaware of - or unconcerned by - his own hypocrisy in doing so.

"Power is the ability to achieve a purpose," explained Martin Luther King Jr.  In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, King closed by paraphrasing the words of poet John Keats:  "Beauty is Truth / Truth Beauty."

Combining Mahatma Gandhi's moral force of non-violent resistance to tyranny with his own radical vision of an American society based on human need rather than corporate greed, Dr. King was a tragic hero who casts a long shadow over US history.  We ignore his message at our peril.

Ghosts of War: Saving Vietnam Vets' Lives through Songs

Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC

Reviewing:
We Gotta Get Out of This Place:  The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War 
by Doug Bradley & Craig Werner (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015)

The best hit songs of the post-JFK 1960s make Baby Boomers, including me, nostalgic.  But for American veterans of the Vietnam War, some pop, rock, soul & country music of that era has the emotional power to save lives marked by severe trauma.

In this gut-wrenching yet inspiring narrative, punctuated by "solos" (first-person stories told by candid veterans), vet/journalist Doug Bradley & co-author/professor Craig Werner take readers inside the absurdist nightmare of hot jungle duty during the height of the Cold War.

Bradley & Werner focus on accounts of vets' & musicians' experiences as they processed - through popular songs - the horrors of a futile, genocidal war in southeast Asia during the 1960s & early '70s.   Whether militant African-Americans, culturally proud Latinos or white Southern officers, these servicemen & -women (i.e. military nurses & Red Cross "donut Dollies") found solace in songs played over Armed Forces radio and, above all, via personal tape decks & record players in Vietnam.

It was a communal shared music experience, the authors emphasized at a recent book-signing event at Mystery To Me bookstore in Madison (Wisconsin/USA).  In contrast to the post-1990 period of Gulf Wars I & II, plus the ongoing war in Afghanistan, when personalized digital music is being played mainly through earbuds & laptops among combat troops abroad, in Vietnam fights even broke out over jukebox choices.

A labor of love laced with humor & anger, this cultural history packs a punch that many books about marines & soldiers in & after the 'Nam lack.   It was born, appropriately enough, during a 2003 Christmas party conversation at the Madison Vet Center, home base of the Deadly Writers Patrol group of veteran-writers.

The book also addresses the vital contribution to healing made by more obscure Vietnam vet singer-songerwriters, such as the dog-handler MP Jim Wachtendonk.  Plagued by disorders caused by exposure to Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant widely used during the war, Wachtendonk channeled his distress into art.  For example, he wrote & recorded the satirical "Claymore Polka," a song about an Army grunt's wish to rig a bomb in the officers' latrine.

Performing Pete Seeger's anti-war anthem "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" at a 1989 Veterans' Day celebration in the state capitol rotunda in Madison, Wachtendonk moved a somber procession of hundreds as they dropped roses on an altar bearing a US flag, a shroud & a body bag symbolic of their losses.  Similarly emotional events have taken place countless times at the stark polished black marble Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The title is a nod to the song mentioned most by vets discussing their time in South Vietnam.  The authors call "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" an "unlikely anthem."  Written by Cynthia Weill & Barry Mann about wanting to escape a stifling working-class existence, it was most famously recorded in 1965 by the Animals, a British rock band.  Animals singer Eric Burdon recalled meeting a Vietnam vet who told him that the song literally saved his life once during combat duty at a firebase.

"They had a cassette of our second album, and they wanted to hear it.  So he said to me, 'I left to go back to get a copy of that album, and when I came back all my buddies were dead."

That mid-Sixties hit's choral refrain, "We gotta get out of this place / if it's the last thing we ever do," struck a chord with many who served in Vietnam, Bradley & Werner discovered.  It inspired a young Bruce Springsteen as well.  During his 2012 keynote speech at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin (Texas/USA), Springsteen said the song put him on an artistic path that he still follows today.

"To me, the Animals were a revelation.  The first records with full-blown class consciousness that I had ever heard," the Boss noted.  "'We Gotta Get Out of This Place' had that great bass riff.  [He plays the riff & sings the first verse.] That's every song I've ever written . . .  That's 'Born to Run,' 'Born in the USA,' everything I've done for the past forty years."

Several songs by ex-Army reservist John Fogerty, of the late-60s California-based rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival, also had special meaning to many Vietnam vets.  "Fortunate Son" & "Who'll Stop the Rain?" were composed out of Fogerty's anger at the government.  He rejoiced upon receiving his final discharge papers in July 1968 & immediately started writing the oft-covered "Proud Mary."

The United States, especially under the leadership of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-69), sent millions of predominantly working-class and minority men to fight & die in a pointless war, one largely driven by ideology (see the so-called Domino Theory) & a desire to protect corporate assets (mainly rubber plantations) in Indochina.

The book features many anecdotes of pathetic gallows humor among troops.  It also offers the ribald insider story of Lee Hazelwood, writer & producer of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'."  This monster hit carries special meaning among GIs whose lives depended on good combat boots.  It became the signature number for Nancy Sinatra, the go-go-booted pin-up daughter of Frank, upon its release in 1966.  She later performed it during USO tours of Vietnam & still sings it at veterans' gatherings.   Hazelwood reputedly encouraged Sinatra to sing it "'as if she were a sixteen-year-old girl who fucks truck drivers.'"

In the final chapter, "'What's Going On':  Music and the Long Road Home," the authors describe movingly how Marvin Gaye's classic Motown concept album, based in part on Gaye's brother & 'Nam vet Frankie's experiences, helped returning veterans.  Syracuse University professor Art Flowers, for example, discusses in a solo how it allowed him to overcome addiction & cope effectively with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) back in the suddenly weird civilian world.

Aretha Franklin & James Brown were particular favorites among the vets.  Brown even made a dangerous tour of US bases with his soul-funk band in 1968, demanding that he be allowed to carry a handgun in the helicopter that shuttled him from base to base.

Soulful songs like Aretha's "Respect," Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe" &  Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" as well as Simon & Garfunkel's folk-rock "Sounds of Silence," "Homeward Bound" & their orchestral pop masterpiece "Bridge Over Troubled Water" helped homesick men & women deal with the daily stresses of life in a guerrilla war zone a vast ocean away from the States.  Then they helped them come home.

Here is the Vietnam Vets' Top Twenty, as compiled by Bradley & Werner during their extensive research for the book, and as presented in familiar reverse countdown fashion.  The titles alone are evocative of the physical & emotional struggles that most 'Nam vets have faced:

(20) "For What It's Worth" by the Buffalo Springfield (1967);
(19) "Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen (1984);
(18) "Ballad of the Green Berets" by Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler (1966);
(17) "Reflections of My Life" by Marmalade (1969);
(16) "My Girl" by The Temptations (1965);
(15) "And When I Die" by Blood, Sweat & Tears (1969);
(14) "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash (1963);
(13) "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye (1970);
(12) "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" by Nancy Sinatra (1966);
(11) "Say It Loud -- I'm Black & I'm Proud" by James Brown (1968);
(10) "Green, Green Grass of Home" by Porter Wagoner (1965);
(9) "Chain of Fools" by Aretha Franklin (1967);
(8) "The Letter" by the Box Tops (1967);
(7) "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding (1968);
(6) "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969);
(5) "Purple Haze" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967);
(4) "Detroit City" by Bobby Bare (1963);
(3) "Leaving on a Jet Plane" by Peter, Paul & Mary (1969);
(2) "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" by Country Joe & the Fish (1967);
(1) "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" by the Animals (1965).

[For Bobby Dickert, Greg's brother who served in 'Nam.  He came home, but couldn't stay long.]

© 2015 by J. C. Mrazek

Links:
http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/we-gotta-get-out-place

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/11/we-gotta-get-out-of-this-place-the-soundtrack-of-t.html

Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dATyZBEeDJ4 (Country Joe & the Fish)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys_R3VIpxNY (Nancy Sinatra)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxNEiZhpinY (The Animals)

Practicing mindfulness: a scientifically tested, easy way to improve your mental and emotional health

The 14th Dalai Lama relaxes

Like most Americans, you probably have to cope with several daily mental and emotional stressors.  Whether it's a commuter's crowded trip to the office or a busy mother's hectic schedule, it's difficult to avoid stressful situations.  

An effective way of managing stress, psychology researchers are discovering, is by practicing such "mindfulness" techniques as meditation or yoga.  Simply focusing on conscious breathing and being calmly aware of your surroundings can bring mental health benefits, experts say.  Over the past decade, in fact, there's been a clinical trend toward applying the lessons of "positive psychology."  This includes the study of what makes people happy. 

"Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of happiness," says Harvard University psychologist Matthew A. Killingsworth [see http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/wandering-mind-not-a-happy-mind/].  The more focus a person has on the specific task at hand, be it washing dishes or making love, the happier they reported feeling.  This Harvard study used an iPhone app specially designed for the subjects, ranging in age from 18 to 88.

One notable center of happiness research is located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (CIHM) is part of the UW's brain-research institute, the Waisman Center.  The CIHM was founded in 2008 by Dr. Richard Davidson, in response to a challenge from his friend the 14th Dalai Lama.  Davidson has studied the brains of Tibetan Buddhist monks engaged in the calming practice of meditation.  

Dedicated to learning how well-being can be nurtured through insights from neuroscience, the CIHM balances research with practical training in mindfulness.  Davidson is also the director of the Brain Imaging Core at the UW's Waisman Center, which uses technology such as fMRI and PET to discover interventions for such common mental-health challenges as depression and anxiety. 

I recently visited the facility and met Marianne Spoon, CIHM's Communications & Marketing Director, outside the meditation room.  She offered a scientifically tested suggestion for improving your mental & emotional health:  simply paying close attention.

"There are studies showing a relationship between attention and happiness," Spoon said. "One study found that on average, people weren't paying attention to the task at hand 47 percent of the time. This was associated with their happiness.  We know that certain forms of meditation can improve attention, and we suspect, a person's well-being, based on this line of research."

Mindfulness can and should even be practiced in such frequently stressful places as schools and workplaces, Spoon told me.

"Our Center is just beginning to understand how mindfulness-based practices can work in schools and workplaces," she said. "We're conducting more research to learn about what's effective and, as with all our research, we plan to make it publicly available as we find out. There's plenty of research - not our Center's, necessarily - focusing on teacher burnout and other challenges in the classroom. We are focusing on our piece of the puzzle to learn what interventions may be helpful for teachers, students, families and people in the workplace."

The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds is motivated by what it considers a moral mission to maximize human happiness.  But can clinical psychologists really achieve meaningful, measurable results among mindfulness practitioners - despite the distracting temptations of such omnipresent digital devices as smartphones?

"We're very optimistic our Center can make a difference," Spoon asserted. "We regularly receive encouraging and collaborative messages, social media posts and comments regarding our work. We were thrilled to see a recent video [see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzd444JvjCs] on our research reach more than one million people on the UW-Madison Facebook page."

Spoon noted that her Center has many allies in its campaign to promote the personal and social advantages of adopting the habit of mindfulness.

"We're driven to make the world a kinder, more compassionate place and we owe our success as a research organization to people - scientists, staff, community members, schools, donors, as well as journalists - who also want to see this vision become a reality."

She spoke with the conviction of a true believer, backed by verifiable scientific data.  

"CIHM focuses on cultivating well-being and relieving suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind across the lifespan, which fits into the Waisman Center's focus on human development throughout the lifespan," Spoon explained.  "Both organizations are focused on discovering how the human mind and body work to help people of all ages thrive."  

The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds offers an example of another growing trend:  public-private partnerships, with a shared goal of promoting well-being.  Much of CIHM's funding comes from private donors, with some federal grants as well as contributions from the University of Wisconsin (amounting to about three percent of its annual budget).

Perhaps the best part of a mindfulness practice is its low cost.  Neither prescription drugs nor expensive medical interventions are required.  Just a quiet mind and a focused attention to the present moment are all it takes.  And, with a little training, anyone can do it.  Tom B., a busy corporate executive and father in the Milwaukee area, learned Transcendental Meditation (TM) at age 14.

"My older brother had become a TM instructor and reported amazing results from meditating," Tom told me at Christmastime.  And he learned the basics of TM practice in just three or four one-hour classes.

"These days I do qigong meditation," Tom said.  "Most of it's done in my living room.  I also practice yoga at home, and I try to get to the [yoga] studio once a week because it tends to be more challenging, more rewarding."

Tom reported that his combined yoga and qigong meditation practice has done wonders for his fitness and overall health.

"I'm 57 and have no chronic health issues.  I just got the highest rating possible for life insurance.  I catch a cold maybe once a year.  I sleep seven hours a night and have good energy all day long.  I can't party like I used to, but overall I'm doing pretty well."  Tom smiled, then added a closing thought.

"A mindfulness practice that I've committed myself to this year is to give my full attention to anyone I may be talking to," he said.  "This means no looking at the computer while talking on the phone, and fighting off the distractions of 'gee I'm getting hungry, restless or bored' while talking face-to-face.  I try to make eye contact and be fully present.  It's not easy, and I'm not one hundred percent yet.  That's why they call it 'practice.'  But the people I interact with really seem to appreciate it, and that for me is fulfilling."

[© 2015 by J. C. Mrazek]

Links: 

Center for Investigating Healthy Minds 

https://www.facebook.com/investigatinghealthyminds/

http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/about.htm 

A Doll's House Revisited - Natasha Nicholson: The Artist in Her Museum at MMoCA

When you enter the first gallery, the "Thinking Room" as it's called, of the Natasha Nicholson:  The Artist in Her Museum exhibit, you see an inviting cream-colored divan.  It sits amidst lovingly arranged pieces of artwork by Nicholson's friends.  On expansive display at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) until November 8th, this is an exhibit that keeps drawing me back.

This astounding show lures you to take meditative rest.  It acts as a kind of comfortable chair in a quiet space after a tiring day.  My most fruitful visit took place on September 22nd, when I attended a tour led by the petite yet formidable Ms. Nicholson herself.  She shared her thoughts & feelings about this major exhibit of her art, more or less as she displays it at home.

Silent Buddha (2014), Nicholson's somber assemblage, is situated at an appropriate entry point.  It harkens you mysteriously to her work:  a 6-inch black wooden statuette stands inside a frame against a white wall, its right hand severed, its head bound with red thread.  It's an attractive, enigmatic, vaguely ominous presence.

Nicholson admitted to our group of twenty visitors that she finds it hard to leave these things after spending hours at MMoCA, as she is wont to do.  Born in wartime (1945), Nicholson says that she arranged her personal "treasures" with secretive devotion as a girl growing up in St. Louis.  This self-described autodidact seems to have had a precocious artist's eye as well as a keen collector's enthusiasm at a tender age.

Surprisingly for someone so clearly cultivated, so fond of foreign objects, Nicholson said that she didn't visit Europe until she was 30 years old.  "How you live with objects is important," Nicholson told us.  She said that she prefers to gather "precise and consistent" things.  She gets them everywhere:  from the sidewalks around her Schenk's Corners studios, at estate sales & thrift stores, even via the Internet.

The objects that Nicholson has curated & arranged in the four MMoCA gallery spaces struck this appreciative viewer as charming, eccentric, even eerie.  Surrounded by a rusty iron rocking-horse frame, an age-faded Chinese lamp, a"spirit painting" of a dead child (circa 1840), glass-tipped titanium electrical thread & a thousand other odd items, the wondering mind is encouraged to delight in the rich, diversity of human products. 

In the "Studiolo" (Italian term for cabinet of curiosities), for example, a tall shelf of books, mostly about art & culture, rises high beside an armchair upholstered with West African beadwork.  The walls of Nicholson's replica parlor ("always in flux," she explained) are painted dark green.  She displays items ranging from Bavarian hunting amulets to a "dumb piano," a one-third-scale piano keyboard that folds into a black wooden box, used for practice while traveling.

The "Bead Room" gently guides you to the exit, which doubles as the entrance to MMoCA's fine museum store.  As you pass the silent parade of objects - beaded jewelry, embroidery, photos & drawings - you get a sense of what Nicholson means when she says that she was influenced more by painting than sculpture.

In the final ramped wall-space, you can enjoy images of models & masterpiece paintings from fashion magazines which, Nicholson explains, are a "source of ideas and connections" for her.  The artist embodies the spirit of sharing that art & culture strives to achieve.  She is generous with her creative output, allowing us to observe her personal possessions in this large, yet intimate MMoCA exhibit.

Nicholson offers a kind of post-modern silent Doll's House for adult art-lovers.  Henrik Ibsen would've appreciated it:  "Hedda Gabler & A Doll's House center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive & destructive for those around them.  While Hedda has few similarities with Nora in A Doll's House, many of today's audiences & theatre critics find Hedda's intensity & drive to be more complex, less comfortably explained than Nora's rather routine feminism." [- Wikipedia, Henrik Ibsen, edited]

Please see this inspiring MMoCA show before it's dismantled next month.  You'll feel right at home, meaning occasionally discomfited with the world & its artifacts.

Links:
http://www.mmoca.org/exhibitions-collection/exhibits/natasha-nicholson-artist-her-museum
http://natashanicholson.blogspot.com/p/cabinet-of-curiosities.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen

Metaphysical California: Jenny Lewis, The Voyager

Jenny Lewis in 2006

A friend who knows more about rock music, including the unglamorous business of music, than I do admitted that she didn't know The Voyager album.  Released in 2014, this laid-back yet challenging indie-pop album by Jenny Lewis suggests a 21st-century film noir.  It's a satisfying meta-movie set to a groovy soundtrack by a self-deprecating hipster.  Lewis is an artist who's unafraid to get personal, even confessional, in her candor.  The Voyager is her long-awaited masterpiece.

At times this ten-track record suggests the disciplined soul of Beach Boys wunderkind Brian Wilson.  It follows in the footsteps of Fleetwood Mac in its 1977 heyday.  Jenny Lewis is the aesthetic heir of the Laurel Canyon '70s scene.   Singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell & Neil Young thrived in that environment.  The Voyager is a shimmering collection of introspective songs, a brilliant collaboration with producers Ryan Adams & Mike Viola.

As the similarly gifted Neko Case, Cat Power & Aimee Mann do on their best records, Lewis takes the listener on a trip to aural Nirvana, traveling through a landscape populated by lonely people.  There's "a john gettin' a hand-job on the balcony below."  She rests at a cosmic motel where "you'd better hide the weed 'cause the maid is at the door."  Lewis moves gracefully from acid-tongued resentment ("Just One of the Guys") to a restless dream-reverie ("The Voyager").

Indeed, on the title track Lewis offers a world-weary, yet stoical, deadpan mantra for aspiring fellow escape-artists in search of Paradise Lost:

Jenny Lewis, The Voyager (2014) - cover artwork

The voyager's in every boy and girl

if you wanna get to heaven get out of this world . . .

You're the voyager! I'm the voyager!

Whether it's performed live, broadcast or commercially recorded, good music is angelic & generous.  As novelist Rick Moody puts it in his masterful book of essays, Celestial Music & Other Adventures in Listening (2012):  "Music has soul."  Moody goes on to expand his thesis with an intriguing argument, albeit rather awkwardly phrased:

"Why music, then?  Because when we sing it and play it, we are not only imitating the things that are, but we are [also] praising the things that are, and praising is good, and you find it, too, in almost any account of heaven.  The angels sing their praises, and when we sing, according to, among other, the Levites, we are imitating the angels." [- p. 280, italics mine]

Moody laments the loss of vulnerability in contemporary popular music, as exemplified in Otis Redding's riveting live performance of the Memphis soul hit "Try a Little Tenderness" at the Monterey Pop Festival (June 1967).  "Longing, and compassion, and tenderness are heavenly, and they make you better than you otherwise were."

Jenny Lewis's songs are rife with melancholy longing & melodic tenderness.  Her recordings have always felt intimate.  She's a clever, compassionate & bemused artist.  Other musicians respect her skills, as evidenced by the notable guest artists who appear on her albums.  Benjamin Gibbard (Death cab for Cutie) performs on Rabbit Fur Coat.  Benmont Tench (of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers) & the Watson Twins play on The Voyager.  Beck & Ryan Adams also perform on The Voyager.

Lewis is keen to project an attractive media image in her CD artwork.  The Voyager, for example, features a booklet of photos of Lewis posing in sunny weather wearing a pastel rainbow jumpsuit.  Even when issuing work with other musicians, she's a self-confident artist who wears her heart on her sleeve.

Jenny Lewis, in fact, reveals a genius for collaboration.  Her first major group, alt-county indie-rockers Rilo Kiley (1998-2011) issued several good records & toured regularly.  Signed as a solo artist by Conor Oberst to the Team Love label in 2004, Lewis put out the poignant Rabbit Fur Coat album (2006), featuring the gorgeously harmonizing Watson Twins, Chandra & Leigh.  More recently, she made the intriguing Jenny & Johnny album I'm Having Fun Now (2010), a project shared with her romantic & artistic partner Johnathan Rice.

Ironically, this California-based angel arrived via Sin City.  Born Jennifer Diane Lewis in Las Vegas to show-biz parents in January 1976, Lewis was a child actress.  Her film work ranges from a comic pre-teen role in Troop Beverly Hills (1989) to a dramatic role at age 21 in Pleasantville (1998).   Lewis has a family legacy to build on:  her singing mother Linda & a Harmonica Gang member father Eddie Gordon instilled ambition in Jenny.  Fortunately for Lewis's fans, her Ma & Pa apparently encouraged their precocious redheaded girl's considerable talents early on.

Jenny Lewis continues to take advantage of visual platforms.  In 2014, for example, she contributed an exclusive track, "Completely Not Me" (a collaboration with Rostam Batmanglji of Vampire Weekend), to that semi-feminist HBO show Girls.  Indeed, Jenny Lewis plays well with others.  She covered the Traveling Wilburys' "Handle with Care" in collaboration with M. Ward, circa 2006.  She appeared as a guest artist on Brandon Flowers's album Flamingo (2010).  And she sang a lovely duet with Elvis Costello on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman in 2011, when her Acid Tongue CD came out.

Throughout her nearly 20-year music career, she has demonstrated how to make sound-art that's catchy & yet gets deep.  Put simply, The Voyager rings true.  It's a fascinating document, one artist's take on loss & yearning.  A memorable portrait of our era, a time after "the Twin Towers fell / and it all went to hell."