Jay Wrote

Three Cold Holsteins Three Holsteins down before the first dark milking of March the oil tank echoed empty an overdue assessment tacked on the kitchen door rope thrown over the rafter stronger than hope closer than spring.

Fourteen thousand American men in uniform and two hundred fifty-eight women sailed from Southhampton for New York harbor in 1944. In the Queen Mary's officers' lounge a Rothschild heir turned her head to peer over the wing back chair, crushed velvet, like bruised cabernet skin, and peeked at the pilot's copy of The Decameron .  "You should read it in Italian."  Pages slammed shut with place unmarked. The captain shoved the leather-covered volume into a brass-buckled canvas briefcase emblazoned with his squadron's mascot. The black-eyed, sharp-nosed joker wore a fool's tri-corner hat and a high ecclesiastical collar and looked over a fanned hand of four aces.  "So are you Italian?"  "No, I am French, my name is Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. I am a Jew. You can call me "Nica."  "I am an American, my name is Jim. I think I am a Protestant, but my initials are JEW."  Her crimson nail traced the...

Extravagance Friday I experienced the superior powers of Beethoven and Berlioz at Orchestra Hall where the Minnesota Orchestra performed the Violin Concerto in D Major and Symphonie Fantastique. Big, sharp and bravura, the program was my first live experience with these familiar favorites. Soloist Augustin Hadelich showered the audience with both fast and tip-toeing violin bowing and picking in the Beethoven and, after several ovations, played a solo piece showing again his warmth and technical prowess. The full orchestra (two harps, three tympani, 6 basses, etc.) blew up Berlioz’s dramatic score of love, loss, torture and tragedy. My Berlioz recording is a 40+ year old l.p. so I really enjoyed hearing the high definition of live performance, especially the english horn calls in the “woods” section, the trill of flutes and the rumbling tympani that filled the musical floor for the thunderous finale. You know Beethoven and Berlioz. This performance of this extravagant romance ...

Faith in Nothing Smaller  In an apocalyptic cul de sac Cult ray charismatics  Plan megachurch penetrations New age Jonestown massacre A recrudescence of Cadillacs, Let’s dig up a golden Mormon! In your dolmen documentaries Shiite Savonorolas  Sense sanctified micturations  Dousing for Vatican infallibility Tumescent faith in misogyny, Weren’t you once a Lubavitcher? While they venerate dromedary bones  Bastard sons of Prester John  Stir entropic Rastafar maternity Fulfilling Fuhrer birthday masses Nam Renge Kyo catechisms, Next we sacrifice the dancing angels. Manifest destiny mixed in Ganges ashes  Buddha’s papal pedophiles  Pick psalms for bestial Eucharists Wailing Wall astrologist franchises Rosaries’ rapacious ex-sanguination, Let’s pray next to Kim Il Sung.

Among my forebears are the Schwenkfelders, reformation-era sectarians who emigrated from Silesia (now part of southwestern Poland) to Pennsylvania in 1700s, with stops in several German states and the Netherlands. These were followers of Caspar Schwenkfeld, who in the early 1500s had earned the enmity of Martin Luther because of doctrinal disputes.  They were despised by both Catholics and Lutherans.  The main issues in contention were whether infants should be baptized ("no" said my folks) and whether bread and wine were really Jesus's flesh and blood in communion ("no" said  my folks).  They thought that individuals' direct and unmediated pursuit of salvation through faith in Jesus and God was the way.     As minor states in the region became increasingly sectarian and rulers came and went, the pacifist Schwenkfelders, who also believed in strict separation of church and state, became targets. Their books were burned. Those who hid the books were...

Ethel Barrows                         Jay Wilkinson Antique dealers from the Hamptons drove to East Calais to drink Aunt Ethel's tea and talk down JFK.  Their pickups filled with battered chairs, from garage sales, carriage houses and pilfered sheds.   Estate sale heirs will later purchase the transformed antiques from California designers who drape them with Navajo prayer rugs and tout their authenticity.  The dealers left primitive ladder backs fashioned with hand-turned stiles and smith-cut nails in the outbuilding that tilted toward the mill pond.   Ethel rocked on the second story porch as turtles with warmed backs snapped dragonflies hatching amongst lily pads.   Blade sharpened on the family millstone, she cut out a seat woven by a Green Mountain sheep farm widow abandoned by a '49er.  And another assembled in a Chic...

Le Voyage Preaches The Whole Story Minnesota’s experimental jazz navigators, Le Voyage, played two sets at Icehouse in Minneapolis on April 2.  Spiritual affiliates of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM), the quartet played all originals. They explored the full range of dynamics with intensity that was unstinting, whether it was drummer Steve Hirsh’s quiet finger-taps setting up the combustibles of several tunes or reed man Donald Washington’s vocal by-play with his partners.  Between creative solos and choruses on tenor and baritone saxes and clarinet, Washington syncopated Hirsch’s beats with tambourine, rang a cowbell with a vigor that warned off any evil spirits haunting Icehouse. Throughout the performance Washington’s vocals, somewhere between shouts and scatting praise songs, urged the band, particularly tenor man Matt Trice, to tell “The Whole Story.”  To the suggestion that he was inspired by Mingus and a better singer, h...