Jay Wrote

The topics of censorship, oppression and youth mental health occupy my mind quite a lot these days: Jeez, just grow up!      Toughen them up - they don’t have a clue about stress. Or oppression. If you are shielded from dis-ease in your encounters, you’ll miss a lot of good in the world. Someone else’s myths should not censor me or anyone else. Both my children have had treatment for anxiety. Why would you say something to deliberately hurt someone? Isn’t it as bad to be cruel to a group as it is to a single person?  Or worse? How can you, in your position of privilege, have anything legitimate to say  about this issue to the victims of historic violence? Isn’t some art beyond acceptable? To you?  To everyone? Censorship, Essay 1, Breasts (elsewhere on blog) Censorship, Essay 2 Taravat Talepasand’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” - Art and Action At Macalester College The Art Macalester College, like its neighbor, Hamline University, has recently dealt with question...

Finger Poppin’ with The Horace Silver Quintet, An Appreciation Jay Wilkinson, August 23, 2023 When eyes are closed, it is hard not to imagine that I am at a table in a club.  Facing the stage. Thirteen feet away.  The table in front of us is, miraculously, still unoccupied. There oughta be the clink of glasses twenty feet behind me and murmurs of drunks and lovers around us. Sax and drummer, Junior Cook and Louis Hayes, are to the left, bassist Eugene Taylor center and trumpeter Blue Mitchell stands to the left, behind pianist Horace Silver, who plays the 1954 Steinway that stretches across the front of the stage.  When the snare or trumpet launches a variation or a solo, their sounds arise up. How is the cymbal sounding like it’s five feet higher than the piano?  A sax solo on the left will not be echoed on the other side of the stage but is heard there organically.  Silver vamps behind the horns - a trainer’s hands stimulating a horse’s shoulders just before t...

Censorship - Time, Place and Manner    The topics of censorship, oppression and youth mental health occupy my mind quite a lot  these days. • Jeez, just grow up!    • Toughen them up - they don’t have a clue about stress. Or oppression. • If you are shielded from dis-ease in your encounters, you’ll miss a lot of good in the world. • Someone else’s deeply held myth should not be allowed to censor me or anyone else. • Both my children are getting treatment for anxiety-related troubles. • Why would you say something to deliberately hurt someone? • How can you, sitting in your position of privilege have anything legitimate or helpful to say  about this issue the victims of historic violence? • What is the purpose of art?   • Isn’t some art beyond acceptable? To you?  To everyone? BREAST     My mother grew up in the rock-ribbed conservative farm country of northern Vermont. It was  the Depression and her land-rich, cash-strapped, dirt po...

My Brother Knows Nabokov * When with close listening we draw meaning from disarticulation his constricted life expands and rolls along in curves and cuts   as alluvial streams trace through the silting out  of memories and plans, of Bond movies watched on DVD,  the nightly news of ’76, his two flights west and Alice Cooper lyrics.  Broken twigs and latticed leaves tumble loose  pressured by his very certain reveries of hard-edged, dark, unbounded efficacy.  Today:   His guilty premonition  of the oil train explosion,   a smoldering conspiracy,   just across the border. This tragedy rises, not  from a loss of meaning, but in the raging  floods of consequence. *Vladimir Nabokov wrote about parents caring for their schizophrenic son and “Referential mania” where he      “imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and  existence…. Clouds in the sta...

None selected  I came home and immediately listened to the soundtrack of Koyaanisqatsi (or “life out of balance” in Hopi), the masterpiece of modern music and video by Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio. I experienced, with ever-changed ears and saw with new-sighted eyes, the Philip Glass Ensemble play the full score live with a wide-screen showing of the film at Northrup Auditorium more than thirty years ago. It was an intense, beautiful and disturbing experience. Ashwini Ramaswamy’s Invisible Cities , a dance, music and visual show strikes me to be of  equal ambition and is similarly intense and inventive. The music was dynamic and varied, with  classical Carnatic (South Indian) instrumentation and modern production alternating and blending.  The Invisible Cities score is not, like Glass said of his first movement “ahistorical”, but rather it  takes in essences and excellence from the past 2000 years of Indian music and from today’s house, hip hop and cinemati...

  It Could Have Happened Like This… December, 1959. Betty and Truman on opposite ends of a lime green polyester couch at a party in The Village, nodding in angular bebop time with an eyes-closed piano player who danced a nervous shuffle in his pork-pie hat. Capote yawned: “Betty my dear, do you think that I should fly to Provence with Jackie Kennedy? Or take the train to see that bad boy in Kansas?” Behind smudged glasses, his eyes strayed as a well-muscled boy tangoed an empty tray through the crowd. Betty kicked at him with a red pointy-toed shoe. “Damn it, Truman, first fetch me another drink. Two olives, lime twist and just a rumor of vermouth.” Truman rubbed his sore ankle, rolled off the settee and careened a rolling stumble across the room. Martini in one hand, Old Crow and Lucky Strike in the other, Capote returned, swayed and hiccuped back to her: “Cannes or Kansas, Betty?” Betty sipped in the smoky party, twirled the glass between her fingers, “Kansas, Truman, Kansas. For...

  Legal Aid in greater Minnesota referred this case due to a conflict of interest. An 18 year old needed help with a threatened rejection of her application for a subsidized apartment.  The client had been thrown out of the house just before the 18th birthday and was dealing with an abusive ex-boyfriend and tremendous mental distress.   Management was suggesting the applicant pay for damages done in the mom’s apartment (same management company) and seemed to be setting up other barriers.  But still, the onsite manager seemed sympathetic.   I wrote a gentle demand letter - not wanting to trigger involvement of another lawyer.  The letter touched on: The definite end of the residency in the mother’s home (because a tenant cannot be covered by 2 subsidies at the same time); Project-based Section 8 admission standards The limited contractual responsibility of minors The limited contractual responsibility of listed residents as opposed to the person si...