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I got a cow that's gone dry
And a hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills
Getting bigger each day

Johnny Cash

The image that prefaces this plea sums things up nicely. So perilous is the current financial corner that I can no longer afford dues to any reputable religious establishment in the neighborhood to nourish the spiritual dimension. (Even a set of budget viola da gamba strings is out of the question.)

For religious instruction I’ve taken to attending the Dyson Service Center (walk-ins welcome) on North 124th Street in Brookfield. 53005

When a Dyson All Allergy Plus — Model number 447961-01, featuring Radial Root Cyclone technology and a self-adjusting cleaner head is your “go-to” Rebbe, it’s time to ask for help.

Dear subscribers: please consider upping your subscription to “paid” to help me move to a less idolatrous path.

With appreciation,

Jonathan Brodie

CFO Cream City Grub

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But the cat came back the very next day,
The cat came back, we thought he was a goner
But the cat came back; it just couldn’t stay away…

Harry S. Miller

The left side of the envelope that held the string showed an ebullient scene; a congregation of kittens frolicking in an English garden. The middle of the panorama; their quiet parents seen in postures of indolence and ease. Now a visitor at the gate. A quadruped, but with a face that was not a cat’s face. Moving on; a battle. The elders too decrepit to flee are devouring their tribe. Occasional solitaries consume themselves. Now to the end: a magisterial creature rising on two legs from a sarcophagus sized for a large cat. The fiend gazes from his stone peak with a look of wild, furred eyes.

Many times Shankmeir had looked upon all this with disquiet. Now he saw a touch he had never noticed before.

The creature had a withered ear.

This set Shankmeir back. For a moment he considered not opening the package and risking defacing the hideous tableau. Only for a moment. Then his curiosity, commingled with musical pride, clouded any prudence he had. With delicacy he cut the paper open. The string fell to the floor and curled in on itself like a worm. Marvin, across the room, saw. He wandered over and pawed at the writhing thing. It had adumbrations of being alive.

Then a frolic.

Shankmeir found his legs and fled. He was discovered in the shrubbery of a nearby park, faintly chanting, as a balm, the fundamental notes to a venerable ground bass: The Italian Ground.

A month later Frank visited. For a change, no quip; but a subdued question.

“Where is Marvin?”

“Long gone,” said Shankmeir. And he continued chanting.

Postscript:

Another year passed. After a necessary sabbatical, Shankmeir took up the viola da gamba again, now avoiding any music that required scordatura. Even adjusting the instrument to standard tuning was daunting. He was more able to be with people, qualify for a day pass, and play consorts with members of the local Gamba Society.

Another year and a flustered Frank appeared at Shankmeir’s door with the latest issue of The Journal of the International Lute Society.

“This,” he said, “is of interest.” He then read from the obituary section in a quiet voice:

The Society records with sadness the death of Nicola Alphonso, Latvia’s foremost lute pedagogue, on the 22nd of March in his studio in Rēzekne from injuries sustained in a freak accident. A fragment from his Tieffenbrucker theorbo (circa 1556) became detached from the instrument and, at explosive speed, fatally injured the Maestro. It is surmised that the tension occasioned by the employment of a radical re-tuning of the instrument caused this disaster. The grief of the Society is moderated by the knowledge that this tragic cadence, a distinctly musical one, signaled an end to a distinguished musical life. The master will be interred with the numerous fragments of his remarkable (and alas, now defunct) lute.

He is survived by his loving wife, the prominent cornetist Matilde Alphonso, children Bella and Felix, and numerous grandchildren. Also surviving is his recently adopted and adored cat, Marius.

Hearing this last name, Frank fell back on his former ways. He couldn’t resist an unsympathetic and scurrilous quip.

“Score one for Marv.”

**********************************

CHAPTER 3

Shankmeir was wrong. There was one more G string remaining. He had found it in Utrecht many years before; a specialized shop on the Nieuwegracht. That he had forgotten about it is easily explained. The now-recalled string he hardly considered a string at all. For Shankmeir it was not a tool for music. He conceived of it as an objet d’art. For that reason it wasn’t kept in the string box or the music room. What reasoning went into this decision? It was the splendid iconography on the envelope that served as a container for the fragile gut. Shankmeir felt an archivist’s obligation not to deface the illustration by opening the envelope. Thus, what was inside would never be used for its intended purpose. To tear open that exquisite holder would be a defacement. The string would stay where it was; interred in its paper crypt; never to be wound up to make sound or music.

That long-ago transaction that gave the package to Shankmeir was memorable. After a floral-infused Genever in one of the convivial cafés that populate the Oudegracht, the tourist ambled aleatorically toward his pension and came across the shop. From its name, Oude Geneesmiddelen, Shankmeir surmised that the store’s inventory would only appeal to a small and eccentric clientele whose interests were far from the sphere of music: collectors of antique scientific instruments. Long-obsolete surgical supplies especially; primarily from the 18th and 19th century. Shankmeir surprised himself by ringing the bell. He had no interest in outré pliers and wheels of disintegrating surgical gut. But such places sometimes also sold an occasional globe.

For globes, Shankmeir was a sucker. He went in there.

No globes.

More out of politeness than need, Shankmeir lingered to chat and browse. The main floor was largely devoted to implements of the 18th-century dental trade. The various tools on display made him thank his lucky incisors that he lived in an age where the dental arts had advanced to a place where such ghastly implements were now housed in museums and specialised antique shops.

To the doubtful question of whether or not there was any musical ephemera, the proprietor, much to the customer’s surprise, answered in the confidently witty and idiomatic English that seems to be a special talent of Lowlanders: “Yes. Of course. I have something here that … how do you say it in Milwaukee? It has your name on it.” He bustled off into the basement chuckling at his linguistic adeptness.

Shankmeir noticed that the door had been locked. Above it was a sign: Oude chirurgische instrumenten en hulpmiddelen. “Chirurgische,” he guessed to be ‘surgical.’ “Hulpmiddelen.” was beyond him. Though he had a Dutch-English dictionary in his pocket, he kept it there. He didn’t want to know.

So much was Shankmeir disquieted that he found himself glad that Mijnheer Lessen had locked the door after himself. A few minutes later he came back with a cigar box. A disappointment! What musical item could there be in such a small container? Shankmeir was hoping for a folio or a score of music; with any luck a Requiem or something properly funerary. No such luck. From the box was carefully removed a smattering of esoteric tchotchkes. Out as well came the catalog of the London auction where the items had been offered for sale. The pamphlet described them as “musical artefacts from the studio of the legendary Early Music pioneer, Arnold Dolmetsch.” At this, Shankmeir perked up. Even if the stuff was of minor interest as kitsch, the name Dolmetsch had a distinct appeal. For Shankmeir, Dolmetsch was a deity. He was caught, hook, string and sinker. He had to have it. Without his usual dickering, he took possession of Dolmetsch’s detritus: three cakes of crumbling French rosin, a glop of wax used to ease the stubborn pegs of Arnold’s viol consort, and the viola da gamba string housed in the envelope.

Included in the sale was errata that the auction house had appended to the lot: an intriguing warning:

Given the age and the dubious quality of its workmanship, this string should not be used as intended. Its value lies only in its historical significance.

What specifically was the string? That didn’t matter, as it would never be used. But among the ornate decorations had been inscribed that information by the fastidious shop-keeper:

G-snaar van de viola da gamba

Back home, Shankmeir had the leisure to carefully inspect the copiously ornamented envelope that held the string. If a Mystery Sonata by Heinrich Biber had been transmogrified into a graphic, this, Shankmeir was convinced, was what the music would look like. That early-18th-century Austrian composer’s quasi-improvisatory, wandering melismas had been turned into cunning inked lines. The scenes depicted on the package were not for the timid. Shankmeir discovered that he could not study the depiction for long. Yes; decidedly not for the timid.

The illustration, grotesque and captivating at the same time, had to be preserved. The interred string would stay interred. It was safe from the vibrations of the music room and the outer world. It could rest in pace. Shankmeir had a sensible plan for how the curious object would be used that would conceal the more hideous scenes from his eyes. It would find a place in the library.

It would become a bookmark.

Now the remembrance of this package was decidedly cheering. Given the current tuning challenges the gambist was facing, he decided that it had been a mere marker long enough. Wasn’t it time to use the string as the maker had intended? What did auctioneers, a criminal class on a good day, know about such things? The idea that it was merely a decorative object was absurd. Plus, Shankmeir was impatient. He didn’t want to wait another two weeks for his order to get from Portugal Street in London to Summit Avenue in Milwaukee. The worst outcome of putting the string on his viol would be another breakage. No big deal. It had already happened five times. It was worth a try. The string might not survive, but Shankmeir most certainly would. He would open the package like a surgeon so as not to damage the graphics, and use the gut as St. Cecilia and the unknown maker had originally intended.

The question now was in what book in his two-thousand-book library was the envelope tucked? What good fortune! No need to search through innumerable editions. It was in the music room after all; almost under Shankmeir’s hand. In fact, it was under Marvin’s furred and copious belly, largely concealed from view; his often-used copy of Playford’s The Dancing Master. The cat had usurped it as a paw-rest. At the convenient moment Marvin, always gracious, had shifted his bulk to allow Shankmeir to see the biblio-treasure. Without thanks, Shankmeir snatched the book away.

Shankmeir had no manners. For this he would pay.

Before pulling the envelope out of the edition, a scholarly curiosity prompted the rude musician to see what music the envelope had marked. The King’s Maggot was at the top of page 96, and Lady Banbury’s Hornpipe was at the bottom. But it was not those titles that tickled his humor. Between those two chestnuts was a tune the name of which Shankmeir found serendipitous.

He liked that there continued to be a generous dose of feline ephemera in his life.

The name of the tune was The Kit Cat Club.

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Stay tuned for Chapter 4…coming soon.

Chapter Two

I’ve gambled down in Washington

And I’ve gambled up in Maine

I’m going down into Georgia

To knock down my last game

I’m a gamblin’ man, man, man

I’m a gamblin’ man…

“Like kissing your sister.” Frank, an obnoxious amateur musicologist whom Shankmeir occasionally consulted about obscure musical questions, was fond of the cant of the locker room. “Don’t substitute strings.”

He was dismissing, in his usual bigoted way, Shankmeir’s proposal to cure his tuning problem, to wit: Tune=ing up the fourth string from it’s normal G 6 half steps to AA C# was impossible. The gut wouldn’t survive the ordeal. So what to do? Abandon the G string. Toss it. Who needs it? Substitute a different gut to get up to that excruciatingly high C#. Another D string would do the trick. It was a mere half step step higher than that pesky C#. It would easily hold and the scordatura would be achieved. Like the Vegamatic in his kitchen, it would get the job done. No muss, no fuss.

“Crude fellow,” thought Shankmeir when he heard Frank’s dismissive reaction to his brilliant idea. Not only had the clever solution been rejected as being in poor musical taste, but the musicologist’s bon mot showed no sympathy, not only for Shankmeir’s non-existent sister, but also for the financial burden that Marvin’s scordatura project was causing. Four G strings (circa 48 dollars a pop) in the past two days had been sacrificed to the Muses trying to get the Gamba tuned up to Marvin’s specifications. Shankmeir imagined Euterpe and Terpsichore using his hard-earned cash to go to Handy Andy’s on Teutonia Ave to buy party favours for Melpomene’s birthday celebration.

Damned Muses. Famed C#s. Damned Cat.

The top three strings had been easy. Tune the high D up a whole step pitch, keep the A where it was, the E down a whole step to an E. So far so good. The E down to a D high make it floppy, but the sound produced was not unacceptable. Funerary, but pleasantly so. The low D could thankfully remain unchanged. It was the G that was causing problems.

But this is not a treatise on viola da gamba tunings. All the reader needs to know is this: the work of cranking up a gut string three whole steps was daunting. Verging on the impossible. It was also unbearable not only to the wallet, but to the temperament of the tuner. With each half-crank of the peg, the suspense amplified. The instrument didn’t seem to enjoy the project either. Each turn of the peg brought forth from the bowels of the instrument a sonic complaining. Croaks of protest. Almost human. By the time the string had been tightened up to the neighborhood of B natural, the gut couldn’t take it anymore. Each one went kaput in the vicinity of that pitch (give or take a cent or two) without achieving the desired goal, still a full f step away. The inevitable snapping sound, when it came, became to Shankmeir’s ear intolerable and taunting. He had an impressive collection of strings, but it was finite in number. Each was subtly different in gauge and construction. Surely one of them would tough it out. Despite the variances, none was able.

Meanwhile, Marvin, reclining like a patriarch after a long day on the Badminton Court, with front paws resting on a collection of English Country Dance tunes, looked to Shankmeir as unsympathetic and vaguely amused.

Frank’s argument was that of an insufferable authenticist: the radical scordatura conceived of by Marvin, for that matter any scordatura, could only be honoured properly, according to purists like Frank, by using the strings originally assigned for the instrument. Retuning those strings would produce tensions that altered the sonic landscape into new and untravelled places. String substitutions, as proposed by Shankmeir, would produce more easily the pitches dictated by Marvin’s art, but not the dark and mystic atmosphere any radical string retuning bestows.

“Yup, my friend. Substituting strings is about as exciting as kissing your sister.” The shameless scholar repeated and augmented his witticism with glee. Then, serious: Here’s your solution.”

Then, in a keening, faux-Jacobean dialect, he piously quoted a passage from a 17th Century music treatise:+

…wind it up to so high a Pitch, as you intend it shall stand; yea, rather something higher, so that it may seem almost ready to break.

Shankmeir put aside his irritation. Although he wanted to reject the advice, he couldn’t dispute that this really was a fine idea. Tune up the G until it seemed almost ready to break and then stop. Now tune all the other strings proportionally to that pitch. Certainly there was a risk involved. How was Shankmeir to know when it was time to stop cranking? He would trust his instincts. The more he considered the strategy and the risk involved, the more intrigued he became. There was even a vague allure circulating around this dangerous project.

Damn it all! He was fresh out. It would take a week (plus 22 dollars in shipping) for a replacement C to arrive from Portuguese Street in London. An interminable time. When it came at last, he would give it a go.

All for love. He loved an occasional gamble.

He was a gamblin’ man.

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(Stay Tuned for Chapter 3)

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+Thomas Mace, Musick’s Monument; or, A Remembrancer of the Best Practical Musick, Both Divine, and Civil, that Has Ever Been Known to Have Been in the World (London, 1676)

Photograph by the author, Oak Leaf Trail

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The actual events of life are perhaps unimportant. One is born, grows up, falls in love, falls out of love, works, is happy, is unhappy, grows old, and dies—a tedious, a vulgar succession; but not there lies the significance of a personal history: it is the atmosphere that counts. Lytton Strachey

The defense is wrong! Mona Lisa Vito

And so is Lytton. How so was conclusively proved this past week by the artist-students enrolled in Milwaukee’s Next Act Theatre Summer Intensive Program. Foolish Lytton! You should have gone to their play. Maybe you would have learned a lesson.

Sundry fragments of daily life were presented there; from unfinished shawls knitted by dying aunts to the extravagant pleasure inherent in a piece of pie. It’s not the atmosphere that counts. Was the pastry apple or rhubarb? That detail escaped me. To my dismay, because what fruit it was, I realised by the end of the show, could well decide the fate of empires, the shape of future constellations, and the status of the consumer’s current acid reflux complaint. Such details are important. The mood is the outcome. It’s the artifacts and turbulent rubble contained in the room that are radiant. All the rest is ambiance and commentary.

As I watched the play, a curious vision kept popping into my head: the main Milwaukee Post Office on Saint Paul Street, of all things. What’s more tedious and vulgar than that bureaucratic pile? But ah…the mailboxes inside, singular and burnished, with their letters that adumbrate the slivers of life.

“It is with joy that we announce the birth of Dawn Ginsbergh; 7 pounds, six ounces…”You are cordially invited to the celebration of graduation from Rufus King High School of Fester Bestertester”…”Dear Alice; I love you more than life itself; and a raspberry O&H Kringle from Racine”….”Dear John”….

It’s not the post office that counts but the letters it holds.

Take a hike, Strachey. Join the postal service.

This is what Small, Easy, Simple Good taught me. I might join the U.S. Post Office too. Lytton and me.

The drama is brilliant in conception, moving in presentation, and delightfully Milwaukee-centric. The script draws upon transcripts of interviews conducted by the actors with local dancers, teachers, healers, clergy, musicians (and even an itinerant viola player, G-d forbid). The conversations centered on a significant question: how has your life and Milwaukee’s social and cultural fabric been enriched by love or your experiences with your conception of love?

A provocative question!

Each of the dozen young actors, all high school students and recent graduates, took the answers and formed them into a collection of soliloquies. These solos were all performed this afternoon in a manner that soliloquizing aspires to: at the conclusion of every speech, silence was drawn into the space from where silence comes, allowing the audience to place into that collective quiet the detrital splendor that life may give.

A dozen actors; a dozen moving soliloquies. A triumph.

The structure and logistics of the production brought to mind a late-eighteenth-century musical form: the divertimento. It is in many movements, each proclaiming a separate and distinct conceit. The method used to separate these dramatic compartments in Small, Easy, Simple Good was brilliantly efficacious. At the conclusion of each episode, the actors abruptly, and with mercurial quickness, changed their positions and postures on stage, taking with them as they moved the props of the production: four portable, cube-shaped podiums. They rearranged themselves to end the display of one human artefact so as to be ready for the next one. It was a play in 12 poignant acts.

Once newly situated, the characters not soliloquizing ceased being actors and became, like the ticket-buying audience, onlookers and contemplators of the human events being narrated. What a convocation! Actors as audience; and then back again.

This shift brings up a question. If the actors could so easily shift their roles from participants to observers, why couldn’t the audience, sooner or later, in that room or next week, shift as well from observer to actor? All the world is an audience. Is that what the Bard said? Something like that.

The scarcity of props in this production made for an advantage. It made the play portable. How simple it was to do “outreach” with this splendid work, taking it to public library basements and other significant places. Before this play is retired, I suggest taking the small troupe, not only on the road, but parking it there. Take it to the intersection of Weil and Hadley Streets in Riverwest; directly in front of Nessun Dorma. Easy. Become street performers. Simple. Become buskers. Good. It will light up the street.

Busking counts.

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Photograph by the author, Milwaukee Main Post Office

.

Go to it!

Two performances happened yesterday. One more performance remains. Today.

The drama is brilliant in conception, moving in presentation, and delightfully Milwaukee-centric. The script draws upon transcripts of interviews conducted by the actors with local dancers, teachers, healers, clergy, musicians (and even an itinerant viola player, G-d forbid). The conversations centered on a significant question: how has your life and Milwaukee’s social and cultural fabric been enriched by love or your experiences with your conception of love.

A provocative question!

Each of the dozen young actors, all high school students and recent graduates are apprentice-students in Next Act’s program, took the answers and formed them into a collection of soliloquies. These solos were all performed this afternoon in a manner that soliloquizing aspires to: at the conclusion of every speech silence was drawn into the space from where silence comes from; allowing the audience to place into that collective quiet the detrital splendor that life may give.

But this is not a drama review. It is a blurb.

Friday, August 7, 2026

2:00 p.m.

Shorewood Public Library/Village Center Meeting Room

3920 N Murray Ave, Shorewood, WI 53211

GO TO IT!

That’s my soliloquy.

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…wind it up to so high a Pitch, as you intend it shall stand; yea, rather something higher, so that it may seem almost ready to break. —Thomas Mace, Musick's Monument; or, A Remembrancer of the Best Practical Musick, Both Divine, and Civil, that Has Ever Been Known to Have Been in the World (London, 1676)

Chapter One

“That was a 316 Hz Mannheim ‘E,’ said Shankmeir to the cat-shelter lady. He wanted to show off that he could identify musical pitches everywhere. But at an animal-shelter?And from a cat? The source of the pitch was a candidate for adoption, all 9.98 kilograms of him with a withered left ear, Marvin was able to incorporate enough overtones to make him a chanteur. Surely the note was an ‘A’.

“This fellow is a keeper,” thought Shankmeir. He signed the necessary documents, paid double the adoption fee, and took Marvin home.

The cat had an immediate affection for the music room. There, among stacks of urtext editions of old Netherlandish composers and broken cakes of rosin, he made himself comfortable. Finding a place near the bass viola da gamba, Marvin slept the day away. No more music from this cat. But Shankmeir kept his ears open. You never knew when a spare muse would make a visit. Why rush an artist? Surely that first note was a prelude to a wild toccata, or something even more fun. The cat was composing. That sometimes takes time. Maybe even more than a toccata. But it didn’t look like Marvin took requests. Shankmeir was hoping for a requiem.

The second note came a week later at the same time of day as the debut. It was five notes lower than the first. The animal had to extend mightily to get the note out. Yet despite the contortion, the ‘A’ had resonance and conviction. Shankmeir suspected that Marvin kept a regular schedule. He waited for the third tone. The week went slowly.

When it came, the note went still five notes lower to D. Shankmeir thought that that note would be out of Marvin’s range. It sounded like a singer from Tuva, but miraculously, Marvin made it. This choice of pitch gave the musician a hunch where things were headed. Next week Marvin would descend to a be G.

And it was.

Undoubtedly the cat was sounding out The Italian Ground first notated in John Playford’s The English Dancing Master: or, Plaine and Easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances (London, 1651). Serendipitously, this compilation of chords was a favourite of Marvin’s new owner. There was a profoundness to the sequence that never failed to envelop Shankmeir and move him into a sphere far removed from the suburbs of The Cream City. Marv (for such was now his colloquial name) was not only a musician. He was more. He was a guide. Shankmeir knew his furry Rebbe would take him to ancient places and long corridors. That doubled adoption fee was not enough. He had brought into his house not just an overweight quadruped, but a sage.

Sage or no, the cat was unpredictable. The next week did not bring the expected G. The composer went up an augmented fourth to a C sharp. This note made The Italian Ground dissipate from the podium. The musical landscape was now strange and open to anything. How about that wild toccata, maybe? Shankmeir was more intrigued than disappointed. He was ready for a new song.

He waited for the sixth note. Marvin spent his time sleeping. When he roused himself, which was seldom, he would wander over to his adopter and head-butt him six times. Always a sucker for the numerological in tunes and life in general, Shankmeir was intrigued. Especially when it came to old music, six was a significant, if not a sacred, number. This cat was the entire package.

Tuesday came at last. Marvin, right on schedule, let out a hideous squawk in the late afternoon. It was rough, almost barbarous. But there was enough backbone in it for the audience to discern a pitch.

No tonic for Marv. The return home to an ‘A’ wasn’t in the cards. It was a D.

Though initially disappointed that Marvin hadn’t gone for “The Italian Ground, Shankmier decided that the cat more than made up for it by installing an augmented 4th into the conversation. In truth, he had even morbidly rejoiced from that jump from a G up to a C sharp. This musical interval had, for the Ancients, a name: diabolus in musica. What could be better than that. Italy was pleasant. The shades that lay below were better.

Maybe not a sage after all, but a bit of a devil. That interval was nothing to fool around with. Shankmeir’s fascination touched on a removed and grayer world.

Next Tuesday Marvin snoozed through his scheduled recital time. Apparently he was done composing. Shankmeir considered the totality of the composition. The departure away from the tonal centre, despite the cat’s obsessive-compulsive behaviour of head-butting exactly six times, made the critic reconsider that the cat had composed a piece of music after all. The disappointment was almost enough to either re-home Marvin or return him to the agency. He went to get the cat carrier. When Marvin saw it, he moved himself, approached the gamba with abundant purrs, and marked it with his wet snout.

Shankmeir now understood. Marvin had not been composing a requiem. Or any tune at all. He had done something more remarkable.

As if fifty-eight ways to tune the six strings of a viola da gamba weren’t enough, the animal had invented a new tuning.

High Harpway Sharp and Alphonso Way were engaging, but dated. It was, after five centuries, time for a new scordatura. Marvin had obliged. Shankmeir was ecstatic. He put away the cat carrier, tickled his pet under the chin, and got to work. Time to tune up the viol.

Immediately the gambist confronted a fundamental question. Was that initial E the low string or the high string? From low to high...D C# G D A E Or al reverso: E A D G C# D? Shankmeir looked at Marvin for guidance. The cat gave no sign. Marvin was asleep.

The gambist waited. Four hours later the cat woke, augmented himself into almost twice his normal length, and sidled over to the part of the instrument that held the highest string.

The high string would turn into an E. The query was answered.

Musicological Marv.

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(Chapter Two in preparation)

An FYI for all art lovers cognoscenti and Viola Players:

If you want to not just hear, but feel and know the inconvenience of being incarcerated in “The Georgia Slammer” (who wouldn’t?) come hear the country-quartet PLANK ROAD PROJECT cover that country anthem as well as other jail and train songs in the genteel gazebo in the village center of Greendale (5602 Broad Street) tomorrow morning 8:30-10:30.

“These troubadours have walked the walk. The sound of the Macon County sheriff’s oppressive keychain is ingrained in their sonic souls…”

The Daily Trotskyite

“Cowpersons who know well the pain of the prairie….”

The Huron (South Dakota) Intelligencer

Four musical mensches…”

The Jewish Daily Forward

“A string band that brings a profound if not sacred rusticity to the tedious artificiality of urban life with immediacy and verve….

Cream City Grub

Don’t miss it!

Last night, in an attempt to uphold my self-identity as an up-and-coming “metro-textual”* I hit The Pizza Man on Downer Avenue to snag some “live” music. Serious metro-textuals don’t “go” or “attend.” They hit and snag. So off I went, with an old high-school buddy visiting from Chicago, to hear Glenn Asch, Neil Davis, and Emily Mitchell play chestnuts (and an occasional burnished almond) from the Songbook. “American Songbook” wouldn’t be accurate to say because the band’s set list occasionally dipped into pieces from other places. Autumn Leaves is from a French bistro on the Rue Mouffetard, and Garota de Ipanema comes from a Brazilian beach house. “Global Songbook” would be more apt. But American music predominated: Bye Bye Blackbird, Get Out of Town, On the Sunny Side of the Street, and the expected but always welcome Summertime. These tunes are as American as apple pie.**

Does the band have a name? “Pick-up” or occasional groups often don’t. For the purpose of this note, I’ll call them, using in alphabetical order the names of its members, the “Asch, Davis, Mitchell Trio.” “Alphabetically” is stressed because the list order is not meant to infer that any particular member had a prominent role. Musical equality was the modus operandi of these musicians. No one stood out, and they all stood out. Their work arrived at a sonically tasteful tie. In achieving that, they were able to do this intimate music right; their work became luminous work. Each brought to the occasion their own particular genius. Asch with viola and violin, Mitchell plucked strings and voice, and Neil Davis with plucked strings. As a trio, they together tied up a weighty and welcome package.

Glenn Asch has been giving to various Milwaukee music genres his violin work for decades. Jazz, chamber music, symphonic, country (both alt- and traditional), zydeco, etc. Name me a musical style in the “Western” (or beyond) canon that he hasn’t sounded out over the years, and please let me know. You name it; he has done it. The endlessly expressive chanteuse Emily Mitchell did what wise artists do: when higher in tessitura, that musician became softer in volume. And sprinkled here and there, at just the right moments, would come a “dying fall.” “Dying falls” don’t happen enough in Milwaukee County. With this musician, that old gesture has come home. A dapper Neil Davis plucked counterpoints and judicious modal melismas with unerring aplomb.

This was, is a fine, fine band. May it continue and flourish!

My friend at the pizza table is now mentioned because of his audience credentials. Behind him, he has forty years of discerningly sensitive listening to all the musics that Chicago has to offer. Early music, avant-garde, chamber, symphonic, choral; he has heard it all. His most remarkable and singular listening achievement cannot be left out of this narration: when the late, lamented Spektral Quartet performed Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2017, he was the only person in the audience who stayed seated throughout the entire performance. He had invited me down for the show, but, having a cursory knowledge of the work’s challenges, I politely declined. My excuse could not be argued with: a surprise bout of incontinence. Feldman’s quartet, if played at a stately tempo, lasts six hours.

But this is not a medical report.

Given his distinguished and record-breaking audience adventures, I studied, across the expanse of a respectable “Milwaukee Style” Margherita Pizza, my friend’s facial expressions. Was he pleased with what he was hearing? His smile told me that he was. The clink and clatter of that East Side restaurant made it difficult to catch his critique, but, as best as I could hear, he told me that he was happy to get out of town and to be with music that was good for him.

I agreed. It was a sweet revelation to hear Bye Bye Blackbird as a new song.

Hello Blackbird.

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*I don’t know what that is. If you do, please tell me. I’m curious.

**Come to think of it, “it ain’t necessarily so” that apple pie is exclusively American. The best slab of the stuff I ever put down the hatch was on a side street in Koudum, a Friesian-speaking village in northern Holland (17 Hoofdstraat, just in case you find yourself in the neighborhood). Iconographic evidence of the tart is found at the top of this article.

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If a viola section does not keep pace with their companions, perhaps it is because they hear a different drummer. Let them step to the music which they hear, however measured or far away…

Thoreau (more or less)

When enrolled in a Post-Baccalaureate K-12 Instrumental Teaching Certificate program at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the last century, I was required (much against my will) to enroll in “Conducting 101 and 102.” These classes I detested. Taking instruction in how, with absurd physical circumlocutions and a stick, to force musicians into the confines of a pre-determined, and predictably dubious, rhythmic schema, was not my bag. I was a child of the late “60s, educated by the artistry of Captain Beefheart’s Band and the Concentus Musicus Wein. Those estimable ensembles didn’t need a conductor; proof that the occupation was obsolete. Such is a précis of my deluded dissertation. In short, the craft of music-conducting I thought was bogus on a good day and vaguely fascistic on an intemperate one.*

But since passing these classes was a prerequisite for obtaining a teaching certificate, one might sensibly assume that I kept such outré opinions to myself. Only an idiot would blab. But blab I did. To the professor, no less. I was the aforementioned idiot.

How I managed to exit that class with a passing grade is a mystery. Maybe I had enough diplomatic smarts to mumble my opinions and the teacher didn’t hear or comprehend my incoherent rambling.

To spout this nonsense to the professor — the one person in the world who had the power to determine whether or not I would be granted a teaching certificate — was folly. The piece of paper held, in its bureaucratic folds, a gateway to respectable employment along with the possibility of basking in the financial prowess of the Wisconsin State Pension System. That’s nothing to sneeze at, Bubba. My attitude risked putting me “on the outs” with the giver of grades and a more radiant future.

Such a contentious attitude also diminished my musical skills: it militated against my developing even a mediocre baton technique. Then a more appalling development entered the auditorium; halfway through the semester I came down with an incapacitating case of podium-phobia. I would approach the task of conducting the student orchestra with the same enthusiasm that a graduate of the École du Louvre would approach the souvenir stand in The Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. So extreme was the presenting psychosis that a latent “essential tremor” kicked into overdrive. Apparently my vintage psychosomatic engine had a fifth gear. To hold the baton with a steady hand, much less wield it, was beyond my ken. Where was Ken when I needed him?

With the final exam on the schedule (to conduct the university orchestra, if I remember correctly, through Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila), I went down a dark alley. Instead of studying the score, I popped (compliments of the North Shore Pharmacy on Capitol Drive) 20 milligrams of Inderal.

That ally was pitch dark; but it had Sun and light at the end. I passed. Drugs. That did the trick.

For the exam, Glinka’s masterpiece was led by a hand more steady and composed than the voice of Norman Vincent Peale on Easter Sunday.

Could it be? Did I hear right? Or was my addled imagination able to concoct out of the opaque beta-blocking mists words that, to this day, still reverberate in my distressed conk? The syllables were whispered by a witty and perspicacious undergraduate at the back of the viola section to her stand-partner during a grand pause in the Glinka.

“Inderal to the rescue!”

Who was I to argue?

Not with flying colours did I pass out of that wretched class (C-), but I got into my hand the requisite piece of paper, which in turn helped me get hired into a 30-year public school teaching job in the neighborhood. For better or worse, the students I worked with during my tenure owe their acquaintance with me to a beta-blocker.

Fortunately, I needed to do little conducting in that job. The young scholars were beginners with stringed instruments. It was more important to teach them how to hold their violas and listen to each other while playing a simplified version of Buddy Holly’s Everyday than to witness any fancy-pants conducting gestures. For that they would need to go elsewhere.

When I did need to keep the troops together, I fell back on the no-nonsense and sensible methodology of the 18th-century musical hero, Jean-Baptiste Lully. That prodigy was also practical; he would keep beat by slamming a ponderous and percussive staff on the floor to keep his flock in order. I modified his technique by whacking any convenient objects that were near at hand. That was most often a pencil sharpener hit violently with a spoon pilfered from the teacher’s lounge. Also, in the interest s of self-preservation, I took care not to smack my foot with any conducting implement like poor Lully did. 18th-century conducting technique and performance practice should only be taken so far. injury from hitting his left-big toe (some scholars say it was the right) with his heavy baton. Three weeks later he was dead.

Gangrene.

Now a consonant coda to this dramatic life-symphony.

Two weeks ago, after a brief interlude of forty years that remarkably passed by as quickly as forty years, I ran into my old conducting teacher. Our meeting was (at least from my perspective) in a far more congenial place than the previous dungeon. She was on a conducting podium (where she deserved to be) and I was in the viola section of the orchestra in front of her (where I was happy to be). It was a delightful and informal musical occasion that brought us together: a “reading orchestra.” The sole purpose of this ensemble was to give local amateur musicians a chance to play through the venerable chestnuts (of which there are many) of the 19th- and early-20th-century repertoire.** On the docket for the session was a piece I had long wanted to play: the “Hebrides Overture” by the precocious Felix Mendelssohn. Then Ludwig’s Egmont, the metronome movement from his 8th Symphony, and Mozart’s Symphony No. 29. That’s a lot of masterpieces to pack into two hours.

I approached this occasion with what was for me a rare tactic. I practiced. This was for both aesthetic and selfish reasons. The music deserved it, and I wanted to impress upon my old teacher — assuming my mediocrity with the baton had stayed in her memory, which I devoutly hoped it hadn’t — that although I was a miserable conducting student, at least I was a respectable viola player.

She greeted me warmly. If she remembered my deficient baton technique and anarchistic manners, she showed no signs of it. I even got an invitation to join her civic orchestra. What a mensch! Her. Not me.

To say the same about myself will not happen in this reality. But I can at least brag about another achievement. A modest one, perhaps, but for me, a significant triumph.

As I was busily running, as best I could, through the sixteenth-note passages of Mendelssohn’s music (at MM quarter-note = 100), not a tremor, essential or otherwise, disturbed my work.

Such a medical complaint was as far away from me as Mendelssohn’s Hebrides.

Better yet: no Inderal.

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*My conducting bigotry only extended to instrumental music conductors. Choral directors (at least two, if not more, of that distinguished guild subscribe to this newsletter) I held, and still hold, in the highest of esteem.

** The name of the prime mover of this project, and the one who brought it to sonic reality, should be named: Jamin Hoffman. His significant and tireless work as conductor and teacher has made Milwaukee a richer place.

Next week, when I visit the Department of Motor Vehicles office on Teutonia Avenue to get a replacement-title for my old Volvo, I won’t be able to reward myself afterwards by going two doors away to order fried rice from the YICK INN. Chef Jimmy is retiring after contributing to the culinary scene of Milwaukee’s Northside for a remarkable 49 years. From the archives, then, is the following review I wrote a few years ago about his remarkable work. Bravo, Chef! Bravissimo, Maestro!

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When you visit the Department of Motor Vehicles on Teutonia Avenue, I suggest that afterwards you celebrate the rare sweetness of bureaucratic liberation by going two doors north to YICK INN. You might miss it as, from a cosmetic standpoint, it is the most unprepossessing looking of restaurants. Who could be captivated by it? If one is prone to over-thinking, the idea might occur that its complete plainness is a celebration of a paradox. The facade of the place is intentionally so lacking in ornamentation that it manages to immediately catch attention. If done on purpose, this would be a fine strategy. But I doubt that the jarring sameness of the place is planned, and I believe this for a good reason: to survive and flourish as it has since the Carter administration, YICK INN doesn’t need inventive marketing, or for that matter, any marketing at all. The place has been under Chef Jimmy’s ownership for seemingly untold generations. It captivates for the simple reason that it has always appeared to exist; it is such an entrenched part of Milwaukee’s north-side culinary scene that one could well-imagine it was there before the city around it put down stakes.

YICK INN (take-out only and cash only!) is permanent.

Upon closer inspection, especially if you have a hankering for the hyper-Americanized Chinese restaurant food of the last century, the temptation may arise to give the place a try. Since that cuisine was part of my childhood, I far too late in my life did precisely that. Entering YICK’S door turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made; right up there with quitting the clarinet in middle-school, a decision I every day thank God for helping me make.

“Go in...don’t be shy,” I heard a faint voice, more distant than the sands of old Egypt advise. When the sands of old Egypt start talking to you, it’s best to pay attention.

I went in there.

Before getting to what YICK does best, it would be negligent not to mention the sign that prominently greets and informs the patron upon entering. This text defines the spirit of the eatery’s place in the cosmic scheme of things.

PLEASE READ BEFORE YOU ORDER

THIS IS NOT A FAST FOOD RESTAURANT.

EVERYTHING IS MADE TO ORDER

PEASE DON’T RING THE BELL AND LEAVE NOW.

ONCE YOU HAVE PLACED AN ORDER AND WE HAVE STARTED PROCESSING YOUR FOOD, “NO REFUND”

NO CHANGE WILL BE MADE, NO EXCEPTION. IF YOU WANT SOME FAST FOOD, WE SUGGEST YOU TRY THE FOLLOWING RESTAURANTS. THEIRS MAY BE FASTER, BETTER AND CHEAPER.

CHINA ONE 64TH AND BROWN DEER, CHINA ONE 74TH AND APPLETON CHINESE CHEF 78TH AND APPLETON, WONG’S WOK, CAPITAL AND APPLETON, HONG KONG EXPRESS 74TH AND GOOD HOPE, ROYAL WOK GREEN TREE AND GREEN BAY, WOK2GO SHERMAN AND BRADLEY, YENS CHINA 78TH AND GOOD HOPE.

And then a reassuring coda:

WE ARE NOT RELATED! GOOD LUCK!

This is a remarkable, and in some ways, inspiring passage. It brings to mind some ancient clerical advice that I have been conveniently trying to avoid for a good part of my inattentive life. YICK INN, I am happy to report, did me a favour. It helped me start to pay more attention. As it tuns out, the restaurant has made a significant contribution to my spiritual growth; a herculean task if there ever was one.

“And when you pray know who before you stand….” I can’t vouch for Jimmy’s theological stance when he is in the kitchen. But his words on that sign tell me that he knows where he is, he knows what he is doing, and he knows the glory of making the best friggin’ fried rice in Milwaukee County.

Reverend Jimmy.

Enough of the religious digression...this is a restaurant review.

At the risk of losing the curious reader who wants to get to “the meat and potatoes”, I must confess something: the only food I have sampled on the Yick Inn menu is the Fried Rice. The wisdom needed to approach the egg rolls is not yet with me. Not yet. Perhaps not in this lifetime. If I roll the cubes right, maybe in the next.

How is the fried rice? Is it “authentic.”? This last is a word I have recently begun to move away from using in any critical discussion. It tends to make critics even more insufferable than they already are.

“I am what I am” a voice adumbrates from the depths of the “take out” carton. Who could refuse to see what that “am” looks like? Not me, bubba. Here it is: a magisterial conglomeration of grains that when delved into, separates into wise counterpoints, breaks down further into pleasing intervals (mostly major sixths to those who want to know the specifics), and lastly arrives into individual pitches, seminal, golden and browned.

Maestro Jimmy.

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Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspaper, to people in public life, to friends and relatives, and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.

Saul Bellow Herzog

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In the hierarchy of tone-deafness, there is the general dead, the obscure dead, and at top of the list, the Publicity Department of The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

Being dead, the dead have a valid excuse. Being run by people presumably alive, the Milwaukee Symphony Publicity Department can’t fall back on the convenience of being kaput to defend itself. Fortunately, the music-making arm of the Orchestra is happily very much kicking. The ensemble plays beautifully; it supports artistically and financially a stage-full of virtuosic musicians; it adds to the ambience of the neighborhood by programming diverse repertoire. In short, the organization makes Milwaukee a better place.

The publicity side of the business needs some work.

A blurb promoting an upcoming “pops concert” from their office came to me last week with an invitation. Usually such a gesture would tempt a potential ticket-buyer, not send them to the E.R. So what specifically in the text of the invitation almost got me there suffering from a blood-pressure scare? Written by a mid-level bureaucrat in the department just mentioned, it was this:

Hello Milwaukee Musician Showcase Participants, (of which I was one.)

ENJOY FREE TICKETS TO OUR NEXT PBS TAPING: PATRIOTIC POPS, SATURDAY, MAY 23

Thank you again for making our first Milwaukee Musician Showcase a rousing success! We’d love to see you back to enjoy a performance — and as thanks for participating, we’re pleased to invite you and a guest to attend our 2025.26 Pops season finale for FREE! Join Principal Pops Conductor Byron Stripling on May 22 or May 23 for America the Beautiful: Patriotic Pops, a showstopping evening that captures the American spirit in sparkling sound.

Dear __________(I wrote back)

Your offer to “Showcase” participants of complimentary tickets to the MSO’s upcoming “Patriotic Pops” concert is generous; but I can’t say the prospect of attending pushes any aesthetic or ethical buttons I still may miraculously have.

The theme of the music brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s words:

“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

Not wanting to associate with scoundrels, I won’t be there tomorrow.

Fuck your invitation to this concert. Strong letter to follow.

Cordially,

Jonathan Brodie

In truth, the last three sentences I didn’t include in the letter. But I hope they were implied by what came before.

As it turns out, my response was hasty and intemperate. For that I make a public apology. Intemperance was not justified at all. When I saw what the program was, intemperance fled to the wings. It was replaced by disbelief and outrage that covered me in a shroud. What I sent was relatively pleasant. That bureaucrat got off easy.

The idea of a “patriotic pops” concept is bad enough, but to advertise such a thing and then populate the program with some fine music that is anything but patriotic is worse. From my subjective viewpoint here in the ‘burbs there were two significant tunes presented: Amazing Grace and Shenandoah . To taint these sublime utterances with the strokes of a patriotic brush is a grave musical crime. Then there was a smattering of Gershwin; always pleasant to hear at a Pops concert. But Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ on the Ritz, diverting as it is, has as much to do with the glories of the Fatherland as an insurance adjuster has to do with the content area of a graduate course in business ethics.

What almost tempted me to use the F word in my letter to that administrative factotum? Several things. On the program were only two pieces that were inarguably “Patriotic.” One was a minor masterpiece: The Stars and Stripes; always a delight, especially if you are fond of the piccolo. (Apparently such a public exists.) But that good piece was canceled out by the inclusion of something so blatantly hideous that it makes Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite seem in comparison like The B minor Mass:

Irving Berlin’s God Bless America.

Hence the expletive.

That the piece was composed at all is a sonic tragedy. But that it was written by a landsman makes for a cultural embarrassment. Such a reality almost makes me want to reconsider my pending application to the local Reconstructionist Shul and flee to the corporate office of the Southern Baptist Church (South Dakota Chapter.) Almost but not quite. I’ll keep my application active and stay close to home.

The other clearly patriotic piece on the program wasn’t much better: the intolerable National Emblem March. But at least in that music has a vaguely lyrical second subject in its exposition. That manages to rescue Edwin Eugene Bagley’s clap-trap from the dustbin of music history.

But what kept me away from this concert was not the unevenness or aptness of the program. Even mediocre music, when played brilliantly (as it undoubtedly was last weekend) is survivable, especially if you don’t have to pay for it. The essential scandal of the event was its title: America the Beautiful. To come up with that label in the course of this disastrous domestic era elevates tone-deafness to a new level. In these distracted times America is many things. But “beautiful”?

The coda to this recital, according to the program, fit in well with the obvious obliviousness adumbrated by the programming:

What a Wonderful World.

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(Near the birthplace of Liberace in South Milwaukee)

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“I don’t give concerts, I put on a show.”

Liberace

Until the end of this month, The Fine Arts Quartet will be in town for their annual chamber-music-fest. Although this year they will be playing some of my favourite music, I won’t be going to hear them. The group’s repertoire is rich, even addictive. What they perform I love almost more than a July weekend in The Dells. It’s not that the members aren’t virtuosos. They are. And it’s not because I consider them “old news.” Admittedly their current publicity photos do show a group visually different from more recently-hatched; no pictures of four hipsters brooding and gazing with malignant introspection down a gritty urban alley; no alto clef “tats.” (But who would go to a string quartet recital to check out the violist’s tattoo choice anyway. Not me.)

Why then my absence from hearing this distinguished quartet? What’s my problem?

I don’t know, and that makes me curious. Given the ensemble’s undeniable advantages, I’m even surprising myself; and that’s what’s motivating; to do some delving, if not grubbing, into the turbulence of my musical prejudices. Not a pleasant occupation. **************************************************

The Fine Arts Quartet is part of a musical trinity that has for generations shone high and lustrous in the firmament of Milwaukee’s musical and cultural life. They, along with two other groups, “made it big”; in town: or at least as big as a string quartet can reasonably expect to get in Milwaukee. (Don’t complain that I haven’t included Les Paul in the list. He comes from Waukesha.)

The first of these musical groups, in chronological order, was an ensemble unto himself: the inimitable Walter Busterkeys. Even as late as 3:00 o’clock this afternoon his memory is a blessing in the Village of West Milwaukee where he grew up and took on the less flamboyant stage name of Liberace. (I always thought that was a big mistake. If he had kept “Busterkeys “ he would have had a bigger career.)

The second is the only band in the history of alternative rock that some scholars say could give Captain Beefheart a run for his money: The Violent Femmes.

Third in line is the subject of this essay, The Fine Arts Quartet. The ensemble started in Chicago as the founders were members of the Chicago Symphony. They soon moved seventy miles north and settled in for the next half-century (give or take a decade) to a comfortable residency at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Though the personnel has changed over the years (especially in the viola section), they are still not only extant, but vigorous. They tour regularly at significant concert venues around the world.

For many years (when the founding musicians were in charge) it could be said that the University benefited from the partnership with the Quartet, as much as the Quartet did with the University. What could be more pleasant for musicians than to have a prestigious “day job,” especially if that employment comes with the benefits and (well-deserved by those who teach) given to tenured academics at public universities. They could go on tour, but when they came home from Lucerne or Toledo, Ohio they would teach string lessons at the University. The advantages were twofold: they were famous in the capitals of Europe for their performances and they were admired at home for maintaining teaching studios where they could pass on their venerable wisdom to a new generation. It is fascinating to reflect on the fact that, although the early members of the group (Sorkin, Sopkin et al) were born in the early twentieth century, their teachers were trained in the previous one. Thus those musicians, though they made it into the new-fangled 20th, were fundamentally musical creatures of the 19th century. To hear the first generation of the quartet was to hear music-making imbued with the exotic ambiance of a romantic age. These remarkable adumbrations the quartet willingly and heroically carried, and continue to carry to this very day. A rare and olden torch! For anyone who enjoys hearing the standard string-quartet repertoire played as if the group had been coached by Fritz Kreisler, get in line now. The chances are good that you will hear sacred ghosts turned into sound.

To hear this quartet, then, is to hear a concoction of sublime and dusty beauties. At least it was last time I heard them a decade ago. The chances are good that they have continued to play at an extraordinarily high level. An added advantage for their audiences is that they are, in a round-about way, attending a seminar in late-19th century performance-practice. Who doesn’t want to do that? Especially if it’s free.

When the quartet toured, offered local performances and taught, their students benefited from the quartet’s pedagogy and Milwaukee gained some cultural cachet. The Chamber of Commerce could brag that it was home to not only a Motorcycle factory, professional wrestling, and Miller Beer, but also to an internationally renowned string quartet. Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue and brews. What tourist with any discernment could stay away from such a place?

In those days, their work reached everywhere. Even to Denver. When I was a kid in that provincial town circa 1967, my first quartet-listening experiences came from hearing the Quartet via VOX BOXES LP recordings. Their discography was impressively prolific and extensive. They traversed the quartet repertoire, from Haydn to Bartok, as easily as Jack LaLanne could dispatch a century of “military push-ups.” Hearing them, I came to imagine with the flamboyant imagination of a confused adolescent, that Milwaukee was a cultural hotspot. New York had a decent symphony orchestra and blintzes, but they didn’t have The Fine Arts Quartet. I never imagined that in the vague and distant future I would not only come to live in Milwaukee and enjoy their concerts, but even more fortunately (despite endemic intonation problems) be permitted to to enroll in coaching sessions offered by members of the ensemble.

Then the path of the group took a new turn. The Chancellor of the University agreed to a new contract. The Quartet would be released from teaching responsibilities. They could retain their professorships and they could tour the globe; their only performance obligations in Milwaukee was to offer (if memory serves) six concerts per year.

That was one generous Chancellor, especially if you were a member of The Fine Arts Quartet. It also could be described with a favourite Yiddishism used by my Grandmother (at every opportunity) to describe situations scandalous if not criminal:

It’s a Shanda

Through the “grapevine” I heard rumours that the rest of the UWM music faculty were not as happy with the contractual agreement as the quartet was. If these reports from the front lines were true, who could blame them? Imagine trudging down unshoveled sidewalks on Kenwood Boulevard at 7:30 A.M in early February to teach a classroom full of sullen sophomores the rudiments of 2nd species counterpoint when somewhere in the background of your drowsy cognition a strange ringing intrudes. What could it be? Not tinnitus thank God. But it was certainly annoying; the repetitive clicking of toasting champagne glasses. Somewhere in the world, Lisbon perhaps, or the 14th arrondissement, a post-concert reception (complete with smoked-trout croquettes, the transatlantic fragrance of which sent those left behind in the UWM Music School faculty lounge into apoplexy) was being held in honour of a certain musical group.

Chin-Chin to The Fine Arts Quartet.

That generous bureaucrat has long since departed to higher administrative spheres. She could well be criticized for her overly-generous offer, but I won’t criticize the Quartet. It was a gig too good to refuse, and like any sensible musician, they didn’t. After a time, this idyllic existence came to an end. The Quartet retired from the College. And with that, so does this brief history.

When compared to the past and present turbulence of the world the drama just told is a minor one. The rise and fall of dynasties, the death of tyrants, creeping (make that sprinting) authoritarianism, and the quality of the hamburger buns at Kopps on Port Washington Road: aren’t those the things we should reflect on?

Yet something in me can’t let go of an imaginary scene: a delving and devoted under-graduate violin student, fresh out of rural Oshkosh, no longer had the chance to grasp on to a noble chord; a grouping of intertwined golden threads that connected the fast dissipating aural treasures of Kreisler, Heifetz, Mischa Elman (and even Bronislav Gimpel) into her hands, fingers, and musical perspectives.

The string was broken and the golden dust scattered. That student would need to search elsewhere because The Fine Arts Quartet was nowhere to be found.

They were far away doing what Liberace did.

Putting on a show.

Exiled for ever, let me morn;

Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,

There let me live forlorn.

John Dowland

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There is an occasional tendency in music to express tragedy in sevens. John Dowland’s Lachrimæ or seaven teares figured in seaven passionate pavans, Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ, and closer to our own distracted time: The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed by the Black American composer Joel Thompson. This last was performed in Washington Park last Summer by Milwaukee’s remarkable and significant Black Diaspora Symphony Orchestra.

Movement I: “Why do you have your guns out?” — Kenneth Chamberlain, 66

Movement II: “What are you following me for?” — Trayvon Martin, 17

Movement III: “Mom, I’m going to college.” — Amadou Diallo, 23

Movement IV: “I don’t have a gun. Stop shooting.” — Michael Brown, 18

Movement V: “You shot me! You shot me!” — Oscar Grant, 22

Movement VI: “It’s not real.” — John Crawford, 22

Movement VII: “I can’t breathe.” — Eric Garner, 43

These were the last words of unarmed black people murdered by the armed. To hear these utterances set to music and withhold tears would have been far more difficult than letting them flow. So I cried in that old park on the westside and vowed that if I ever returned to playing in an orchestra, it would be in that orchestra with that conductor. No other.

Last night I made good on my word in the sanctuary of a Lutheran Church on West Wisconsin Avenue. The leader was Dayvin Hallmon; the same as in the Washington Park concert. For me, none other would do. His rehearsal work was abundant with civility and completely liberated from bombast. He was gentle in gesture, collaborative in approach, impeccably clear with the beat and deeply friendly with the score. What else is needed? When a superbly expressive musician apologised aloud that an intricate solo had been played in a slightly altered tessitura, the answer of reassurance was short and wise:

“It’s good. It exists.”

I’ve heard lots of blather in my time in music rehearsals. Those four words made me forget that lamentable history. That musician had taken the notes from the page and done with them what was important: sounding them so that the pitches spoke and became existent in the room. Had the passage not sounded well, the notes would have been “there”, but it could be argued by the metaphysically inclined (or maybe a pack of phenomenologists) that those pitches didn’t “exist. I’ll leave that quarrel to the learned. I’m just a simple viola player.

The message I heard in that briefest of critiques was that the sounds had flown beyond the reach of criticism or words. What greater praise than “it exists.”? With those two words, Maestro Hallmon told the artist that good work had happened. Nothing else needed to be said.

The repertoire at hand was unjustly neglected pieces by late 19th and early 20th century Black American orchestra composers. It was fine music. One piece especially stood out to my ears: an arrangement (by the conductor) of Frederick Douglass Funeral March composed by Nathaniel Clark Smith (1866-1935.) It is exquisite and lasting. This funeral music comfortably takes its place with Dowland’s lute and the rose gardens at Esterházy where Haydn was.

If you try to find a recorded performance of it, you will not succeed. That lacuna in the catalog sums up the unjustness of how the stream of music has flowed in this lost country; injustice that flows beyond the cup of music like Dowland’s tears.

The shameful neglect of this funeral march is symptomatic of fractures beyond music. It points to the reality that in this country, the Civil War has ultimately not been won by the Union. The secessionists came out on top. They are still winning.

But this is not a political tract.

Maybe it is.

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Dear B…

You asked me yesterday what my problem was with playing in orchestras. Why did I quit? Was it a slowly accumulating culmination of slights and embarrassments that made me cut the long-cultivated bond? Or was it one seminal and definitive experience? Seminal did the trick.

Here you go:

The roots of my symphony-disillusionment (and a curious byproduct; my terror of Florsheim wingtips 12 and a half -extra wides) were planted in the counterpoints of my alto-psyche twenty-five years ago in a dismal suburb of the Cream City that, for reasons of diplomacy and politeness, will not be named. The drama was spun out on the stage of a college auditorium during the rehearsal of a piece of music that is marginally better, but not by much, than the Delius Requiem**. The best that can be said for it is that, unlike Delius’s miserable turgidity, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony has a tolerable piccolo solo in the third movement. (If Delius had included a piccolo part in his piece, it might have improved it…but it’s too late now.) If we had just played the notes to the Tchaikovsky with out any “fancy pants” things would have been copacetic.

But the maestro of the moment had other ideas. He wanted to make a splash. To help in that regard, he concocted a spectacularly hideous idea to start the music. Maybe he thought that his plan would take him from the provincial place he found himself in and launch him into “the big leagues.” If the strategy worked, it shouldn’t have.

His choreography was this: he would stride across the stage with baton held forward and high in a fashion uncannily reminiscent of a fascist salute. During his creeping processional, the members of the Orchestra were instructed to surreptitiously raise their instruments into playing position. This was a good idea because there could be no way of telling when the down-beat might happen. Best to be prepared. We were ready for anything.

When near the podium, our leader would make a leap onto the elevated box in front of the ensemble. Although a four-foot jump would have been more impressive, in this case it was prudent for this particular specimen, who, if nothing else, seemed to have a finely honed sense of self-preservation (and appeared not to be in the best of shape to begin with) to postpone his jump until he was within two feet of his perch. The goal of this remarkable athleticism, it cannot be denied, did have an artistic bent and a vague relationship to music-making. But a dubious one. His acrobatics, so he strategised, would coordinate his landing with his downbeat. The smack of his shoes contacting the wood of the podium would be simultaneous with the descent of his baton. This percussive landing would also be the cue for the French Horn section to let the sheep out of the barn. Those magisterial A flats in the opening fanfare would sound out at exactly the instant of touchdown and the baton was at the lowest point of its predictably uncertain and unclear ictus.

Have you figured what commercial brand this high-jumper chose for footwear? A rhetorical question. You have always been intuitive, if not sagacious, beyond measure.

Florsheim wingtips (12 and a half -extra wides.)

What did this outlandish pantomime have to do with any reputable performance-practice of Tchaikovsky symphonies? Or any music for that matter? What would Richard Taruskin say? Thank God that that eminent musicologist who specialised in everything, but especially the history of 19th and 20th Century Russian music, died before he had to consider in his scholarly work such a musical travesty. Unfortunately, the orchestra (which happened to be alive at the time) was not as lucky.

Life then took a turn from the absurd to the torturous. Although approaching competence with manipulating his baton, the gross motor skills of this particular maestro were lacking. Thus it was necessary for his musical gesture to be rehearsed in order to “get it down,” It took half an hour for every one involved to be on the same page and achieve anything close to rhythmic consanguinity.

For this I went to graduate school?

Towards the end of those thirty minutes I was in such a state that any moral compass I possessed had departed (making me still worse) and dispersed itself in the harmony of the spheres (which I flattered myself in thinking would make the spheres a little better but probably didn't). After the twenty-fourth repetition of his shtick, I found myself devoutly praying con passione that the flying fellow would miscalculate the distance to his seat, conk his head on the nearest hard object and need to be transported on a gurney to the nearest emergency room.

Forgive me, Dear B; I had become a monster. It was time to quit playing in orchestras and consult Rabbi Twerski. Apparently maestros weren’t good for my soul.

I never got to the Rabbi, but despite that, the outcome of all of this was largely positive. For the next twenty years I turned my back on orchestral playing and took up new avenues in my life with music: namely participating in recreational string quartets, playing the viola da gamba out-of-tune with tolerant friends and most recently, and most exciting, discussing with my “roots and country band” new approaches to the interpretation of The Amazing Rhythm Aces big hit:

… you don’t look like my type but I guess you'll do
Third Rate Romance Low Rent Rendezvous.

To play the music you want to play with people you want to play it with is my definition of a happy musician. It’s entirely possible I learned that wisdom from you. If so, I thank you for it. For the past two decades I have been often musically happy. That is far better than a third-rate rendezvous. It’s first -rate:

How could I voluntarily leave such an idyllic sonic tableau? Yet this coming Sunday I will. My long romance with a non-orchestral life will be over. The vow to never again sit in a viola section will be broken.

On Sunday at 5:00 pm I will attend an orchestra rehearsal and have a stand partner. What is the orchestra? It is, in my view, a significant, if not the most significant musical ensemble in the Milwaukee community. That is why I’m diving in.

It looks like my type of band. It will do.

Turn your Florsheims in to the nearest Goodwill. Turn your radio on.

Stay tuned.

With appreciation,

Jonathan

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** https://jonathanbrodie.substack.com/p/the-china-chef

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Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.
Samuel Johnson (from Boswell’s Life)

"And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.

John Keats The Eve of Saint Agnes

Through forty-six years of blizzards, hideously humid Julys, and political turmoil, there was, until last week, something in Milwaukee that remained reassuringly unchanged: Beans and Barley’s Cheese Quesadillas. The dish had a quietness to it. It was a quintessential simple food; rich queso blanco neatly compressed between the folds of a fragile and artfully browned flour tortilla, a few scallions and black olives carelessly sprinkled on top almost as an aleatoric afterthought. There was no effort made to be imaginative or flamboyant in its preparation; the dish didn’t need it. No “fancy pants” or quests for “authenticity” and that was just fine. Like a good tune that doesn’t want over-orchestration and is able to stand on its own, so Beans’ cheese quesadillas were able to do that too. This food was not a tone-poem by Richard Strauss; it was a Rossini tune meant to be whistled, snatched out the celestial concert hall (where it had been discovered cooling its heels in the “nose-bleed” section) delivered to North Avenue just west of Farwell, plated, and sent out to fill up a belly.

It is sad to write all this as history. Until eleven days ago, a more cheerful present-tense would have worked. It doesn’t anymore.

Beans and Barley has closed. This event brought to the East Side of the Cream City ululations, orations, meditations on the frailty of temporal things, and impromptu street requiems. Anyone in town with any pretensions to culinary taste or civic sensitivity, has, over the past two weeks, joined in the chorus of lamentations. Whether or not there had been a run on sack-sloth at local fabric stores, I do not know. But it wouldn’t surprise me. I myself started eyeing our fire-place, but held off stuffing myself in there. It lacked ashes, and I wouldn’t have fit anyway.

Beans closing is a sad event from several vantages, but the foremost one is the loss of jobs that the restaurant supplied to many hard-working people. That is the harshest news. After that, any sadness about losing what the place served, sold or offered in the way of comfort to the neighborhood’s ambiance, pales. It is merely commentary.

Yet so tasty was the restaurant’s food, so delightfully quirky were many of the wares it tempted the full-bellied and still amply-walleted patrons as they left for home, that a reflection on that aspect of Bean’s landscape, and its disappearance from Milwaukee’s orbit, warrants the indulgence of words.

It was not only in the restaurant, but with the objects stocked in the retail room of the shop that made the business inimitable. How to explain this rich and exotic inventory? A dhow hired by the Chamber of Commerce of distant Fez (a more proper argosy would have been preferred, but it would have been too big to fit in the parking lot) must have showed up every other Tuesday morning and dumped its cargo onto the loading dock in the back on Kenilworth Place. That could be the only explanation. If there’s a more accurate description you can tell me of how the business got its stuff, I don’t want to hear it. A more mundane explanation, while having the advantage of being truthful, would have a disadvantage that weighed more. It would deflate the rarefied air of distant places; it would steal that atmosphere that was the poetry of the place and disperse it, God knows where; probably over the Lake a few blocks away. There the vapours would slowly dissipate into the depths surrounding the Municipal Water Treatment Tunnel. Poetical air deserves better.

I’ll stick with dhows and argosies.

Last week wasn’t the first time that Beans made me grieve. It has happened before. The first episode was more traumatic than the more recent one. The final cadence, sounded last week, although difficult to accept, was not an overwhelming event. Like any healthy final chords found in a symphony in the classical style, it might even have contained a certain consonance to be thankful for.

This first crisis happened in 1993. A blow torch used by an employee of Community Roofing, Inc. attending to a minor roof repair was aimed wrong. It started a conflagration. If the building had been a common piece of architecture that had turned to ash, I would have said that the place “burned down.” But this structure was splendid and quixotic in a fatigued sort of way. Temples like that don’t catch fire. They conflagrate. It was a long and low structure that from the street looked to be made of cheaply stained plywood. That gave it the look of wisdom. Well-done plywood can have that effect. The building must have been made of more solid material, but whatever had been used in its construction, the place gave off vibrations of being temporary and temporal, the architectural version of a disreputable vagabond from Tulsa. This look of vagrancy made the place, to me at least, seductive. Vagrancy in Tulsa must have held a special cachet for the intelligentsia of the East Side as well. They went there to eat in droves. That the place looked like it was ready to fall down gave it a leg up. It made the business alluring to a big enough audience. It was worth visiting not only for its prideful shabbiness, but also for its largely vegetarian menu.

Going in there backed up the impression adumbrated by the exterior. To get to the cafe, you needed to be led as the route was labyrinthine. First you went westward (so I remember) through a long passage that seemed to extend further than anything the building could contain. How could the journey be so long? It was not possible that you were still in the borders of Cream City. Had you been able to see outside you would know that the Mississippi River was far behind you eastward and you were now in the outskirts of Spillville, Iowa about to buy tickets for the Dvorak Museum. And to add to the adventure of the journey, you soon perceived that the path had gone underground. You were tunneling. After an epoch you emerged, now a newly-minted and certified pilgrim. You took a sharp turn left and north to see the dining area. Like the path to it, the room was a long and low place; warm and spacious. It was low-lit and tinged with the colors of a gentle, amber-colored rose. You needed to duck your head, to get into that room. For me, this motion, originally instigated by the practical consideration of not wanting to bop my noggin, took on a liturgical cast; a movement akin to a genuflection. The move became an acknowledgement that this was a sanctuary. That it was a sacred place was nice news, but not as good as the prospect of what brought me to the dining room in the first place: putting down the hatch Beans and Barley’s celebrated cheese quesadilla. After all, I had my belly to mind. First things first. Me and Dr. Johnson.

With the restaurant gone, I was devastated. There were those who averred that the catastrophe was a “blessing in disguise.” Those who averred that idea should have gone back to aver-school to complete an undergraduate degree. Their foolish argument was that the business was well-insured; the ash had been swept up. Now a new more fancy-pants structure could be built at last. Wasn’t it time for the East Side and the North Avenue business district to step up and improve? The vagrant from Tulsa was dispatched back to where he belonged. Business and quesadillas would continue on in a more trendy-looking place, with a more convenient kitchen and more tables. Beans and Barley would continue on and make more money than before. This scenario neglected a reality that any rube with a modicum of architectural discernment could see.

The new Beans building, finished a year and a half later, was an abomination.

It looked like the branch-office of an insurance-title company in suburban Appleton. The ceiling was absurdly and pretentiously high and the acoustics were wrong. The old hall kept the whispered chatter of the scoundrels in the next booth inaudible. Now, in the new room you could hear the elderly citizen across the room discoursing to his nodding table companions the deficiencies of Keynesian economics and the state of his peptic ulcer. The place was no longer a cave. The dining area had the look of a medical-center waiting lounge to such an extent that it was a reassuring surprise to see a food-server coming through the kitchen door; not a nurse calling you in for your annual prostate exam.

The other relief was that the recipes used by the kitchen remained unchanged and the retail items stayed as exotic as ever. This is what saved the place for me and, after my initial despair, kept me going there. All I needed to achieve that was a subtle adjustment to the mental engine: in the old building I was there to nourish the insatiable pilgrim that has shadowed me since, if not the cradle, at least since graduate school. I went there to spark up the adventure-synapse in my fading psyche; to rouse myself up from suburban slumbers, get off the sofa and hit the town. For a few months, the new environment didn’t allow me to conjure up the old visions of distant harbours, arbours and auto-parts stores. But once I made the adjustment and re-set my priorities, Beans regained first-place in my restaurant-affections. I continued to go there with a new understanding from that day until last week.

I was there for the food, for the cheese quesadillas, and on the way out the door, the organic chewing gum.

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I went in there and looked for the pearls. I found the dead man.

Raymond Chandler The Long Goodbye

I nodded toward the inner office to indicate that I was going in there, and went in there.

S.J. Perelman Farewell My Lovely Appetizer

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If Marlowe could go in there, why not me? That was last week. I was standing outside Jo’s Café on 35th and Silver Spring.

In Chandler’s world, various expected inconveniences would face Marlowe when he did go in there; among them the dead man already mentioned, a gun, a sap, and on festival days, a blonde.

I didn’t need any of those problems. Let Marlowe have them. This was, after all, Milwaukee, not L.A. It was the convivial Jo’s Cafe on Silver Spring. Not a tragic flat on Bunker Hill. The chances of meeting Marlowe’s usual challenges were slim. All I wanted was a veggie omelet with extra onions. No dead grifters or blondes. If you want those, go to Bunker Hill or the crime fiction section at the Whitefish Bay Public Library. For a respectable veggie omelet around here, go to Jo. It’s a trip. She’s as far away from Whitefish Bay as Egypt is.

There was another reason for visiting the place; to do some poking around. Word had it that the restaurant was under new management. Was the elevated standard raised by Jo herself in circa 1954 being maintained? Her splendid oeuvre had been preserved by her daughter for 40 years and the next owner briefly for the next four. Was the newest proprietor keeping the flame under the grill unvanquished with its first primal fire? Were the omelets still good?

I went in there.

It didn’t take long for the verdict. The fork broke the laced shell of the food. It was thinner than a harpsichord’s voice and as delicate as a Sonata by Baleassare Galuppi. Revealed to the critic’s eye was a luscious mish-mash of lightly-sautéed and sauced green peppers, tomatoes (no doubt grown in rural Kewaskum) and the essential extra onions. The melted Kraft cheese slice made the plate turn into a Saharan sun. There were more alliums in there than there are sharps in the theoretical keys that lay beyond C# major. I’m no theorist, but I can tell you that that’s a lot of sharps and a lot of onions.

Couldn’t I tuck down the breakfast and go home? Was it necessary to make a turn away from the griddle to the musicological? Didn’t the omelet deserve to be honored for its eggy essentiality, a three-egged bundle honestly stuffed? Why bring in the third Fugue from Book One of the friggin’ Well-Tempered Clavier? Metacognate somewhere else buddy. Enjoy the damned omelette already and go home.

Here’s a defence for bringing music to the counter: I didn’t start it. The chef did. As he worked on the next order (it appeared to be the “Denver” variation but I couldn’t be sure), I heard him singing above the hissing of the grill. His song sounded jaunty and Handelian. Blame someone else. Blame the chef. Blame Handel.

I usually keep my trap shut in public places. My jaw was already occupied anyway. But then I remembered that not only was I there for eats: I was also on a journalistic if not scholarly mission. The primary source of my inquiry was close by, on the other side of the counter. I conducted a brief interview. I’d be a fool not to.

“What were you singing?”

“That’s a song I came up with about Jo’s.”

In the spirit of the song-collector Alan Lomax on the beat in Appalachia, I asked the composer if he would reprise his Opera. He stepped away from the stove and sang. His music was concise and brilliantly occasional. The libretto was buffa and clever. The notes formed into phrases that easily passed the quality-control Rossini test: any audience with any ears at all would be humming the tune as they left the hall. It was a fine piece of music.

In approximately 5 seconds, KJ (for such was the composer-chef’s name) had turned the place into the stage of The Pabst. Or something close to it. Velvet emerged from the hard vinyl of the lunch counter stool. The stenciled text on the wall altered itself from “Less attitude …more gratitude” into Vita brevis…ars longa. Jo, frozen in her portrait over the silver-keyed cash register underwent a long-needed makeover. Her last one was in 1963. It was time. Her stately bouffant had already been undone. She now wore a wig of the 18th Century. Powder from it descended and fell to the counter top. It wasn’t 1954 anymore.

Franz Joseph KJ

The framed portrait of Jo started to jiggle. This made more powder, strangely musty, shake off from her headpiece and float around the room as dust will do. The venue changed colour. Jo had stepped out. She was dancing. Under the daily special sign she was jiving to the song of the chef. Mac and Cheese with a slice of the shop’s home-made pineapple up-side down cake for desert was going for $8.99. It was a good day to be on West Silver Spring Drive.

But there was one disadvantage, a personal one, that came with this sudden festival. It made me into something I have been trying to get away from for a good part of my life; that most wretched of the species homo sapiens: a music aesthetician.

In that low and desperate state, I came up with this:

Expected music is good to hear. Unexpected music is a wonder.

I had only gone in there for an omelet, and now this?

You take the 18 bus downtown to Wisconsin Avenue to hear a Mahler Symphony. You listen and it’s wonderful. You knew the program ahead of time. You expect to hear a Mahler Symphony and Mahler is what you get. You have been in the hall many times. You knew that your hundred dollar seat would be purple and plush.

When I went into Jo’s I expected an omelet with extra onions. That’s why I was there. KJ made me one. But then I got more. An unexpected opera, plush, and Jo’s dance. That was more than wonderful. It was a wonder. It was a wonder not because it happened but because it was unexpected. There were no Blondes and I didn’t get sapped.

I paid the tab and went out of there.

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In memory of Bruce Ferden.

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A curious attribute of musical taste is how the formation of it by a listener may be of little relation to specific elements in the music itself or the abilities of the person who wrote it. Thus, the formation of musical opinion may seem covered more by capriciousness than intelligence….

What a pompous-ass I was when I wrote that 46 years ago for the possible delectation of the Nebraska Chamber Orchestra audience gathered expectantly in the sanctuary of Plymouth Church to hear that ensemble belt out the sonic excogitations of Rossini, Mendelssohn, Michaud, and Peter Maxwell Davies.

Fortunately, the intervening decades have dealt kindly with this critic’s analytical equipment if not my personality. You may be heartened to know that things have improved in the prosody department as well. Just in case there are doubts, here is how I would currently express the same notion:

A curious attribute of musical taste is how the formation of it by a listener may be of little relation to specific elements in the music itself or the abilities of the person who wrote it. Thus, the formation of musical opinion may seem covered more by capriciousness than intelligence

Much better. Nothing helps rhetorical chops more than the passage of four-plus decades and innumerable fish-fries put down the hatch of The Five-and-Dime Tap on Water Street.

Enough of that. The quoted insight first concocted in Plymouth Church on “D” Street just shy of half a century ago came back to me last week as I sat in the pews of All Saints Cathedral on Juneau Street and immersed my weary sprit in the splendid choral work of Aperi Animam

The denominational, geographical and genre-specifics that separate the defunct Chamber Orchestra and the extant Choir are formidable; but the insight conjured up by the two ensembles are remarkably the same same; namely:

You can listen to tunes wrong and still get it right.

Not all landscapes in life are as forgiving as the musical one. If you are curious to hear a defence of this opinion, turn on your radio.

And keep it on. More soon.

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G. K. Chesterton

Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Raymond Chandler

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Not against all odds, but more than a few, on 92nd and Silver Spring Drive there is a palace. The drab street is out of a dream from Chesterton. To be there is to be at the end of the world. The neighborhood is densely populated; thirty-four thousand people reside close by but that doesn’t count for much (across the street is Valhalla Memorial Park.) The cemetery must makes money, but beyond that, the area is economically depressed and tired. Isn’t this particular palace misplaced? Shouldn’t it be back east among the vigorous and prosperous in Whitefish Bay or Shorewood instead of in a derelict strip-mall on the North-West Side?

If The Food Palace did its cooking in one of those glittering old suburbs it might not get noticed among the other competing castles. Had it raised its ramparts by The Lake it would have to compete with the numerous towers of prosperity in the vicinity. Here on 92nd and West Silver Spring Drive, there is no contest. Rampart-raising in that neighborhood is not part of its mission or ambiance. The Food Palace stands out like Marlowe’s spider. Seeing it made me wonder if angel food was on the menu.

I went in there to find out.

My query was partially answered before I could get inside. Posted on the door in a sure script was this: The struggle you’re in today is developing the strength you need for tomorrow.

This sign made clear that the restaurant had as its mission not only making soul food but making food for souls. Maybe there is something more special about Silver Spring Drive than I usually give it credit for. It didn’t escape my recollection that another restaurant on that same street, Jo’s Cafe on 35th, specializes not only in “browns and over-easies,” but also in dispensing wisdom and sermonettes to its patrons. On Jo’s wall is “Less attitude…more gratitude,” a mantra that I adopted many years ago to replace the previous shop-worn sloka “Buy low…Sell high…buy low …sell high… No great loss. It didn’t work anyway.

I went in and ordered the mac and cheese. It was sublime; the best specimen of that dish I had ever enjoyed in Milwaukee County. What happened in the kitchen to make it so?

It was one of those brilliant strategies common in many spheres of work so obvious that only a visionary could realize it. Bach did this with the principal theme of his Musikalisches Opfer. The anonoymous author of “Able was I ere I saw Elba” achieved the same kind of wonder. Read it from left to right the sentence is doggaral. Now go the other way. With Al Rovescio it becomes a poem. If not a miracle.

Now here on 92nd and Silver Spring Drive, the chef of The Food Palace performed the same simple manipulation to great effect. I had ordered mac and cheese. What was placed on the table five minutes later was not that at all. It contained the same ingredients but the word order and then the culinary priorities had been reversed.

Cheese and mac.

By reversing the ingredient quantities the chef came up with a revelation. I raved about the dish to whoever would listen. The noise must have been audible all the way back to the kitchen. The chef came out from her studio to see what all the commotion was about. We immediately fell to chatting with the intimacy only attained by those who have met for the first time. We talked about cheddar cheese, measurements, and the harmony of the spheres. About the last, I knew close to nothing and she knew everything. She did all the talking.

The repository of her wisdom is in her kitchen; the proof of it is found in a plate of cheese and mac.

Then we became polite and introduced ourselves:

“Jon”

“Queen”

Not surprised.

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