Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day
From: Nance Longley (longleyUMN.EDU)
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2003 17:16:57 -0600
Hey folks,

Tune up your banjos (or whatever) - this would be a great tribute to the
Wellstones, the work they've done, and the work still to be done. Feel free
to pass it on.

Nance Longley

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Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day

An E-Proposal From Me to You By Jim Walsh

I am standing in the northwest corner of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis,
in front of a silver monument that looks like a heart, a broken heart
really, and I am thinking about how wrong the world has gone, how Minnesota
Mean it all feels. I'm thinking about how much everyone I know misses the
man I've come to visit, how sick I am of sitting around waiting for change,
and about what might happen if I ask you to do something, which is what I'll
do in a minute.

Like most Minnesotans, I met Paul Wellstone once. It was at the Loring
Playhouse after the opening night of a friend's play. He and Sheila were
there, offering encouragement to the show's director, Casey Stangl, and
quietly validating the post-production festivities with his presence: The
Junior Senator from Minnesota and his wife are here; we must be doing
something right.

The year before (1990), I'd written a column for City Pages encouraging all
local musicians and local music fans to go vote for this mad professor the
following Tuesday. He won, and, as many have said since, for the first time
in my life I felt like we were part of something that had roots in Stuff The
Suits Don't Give A Shit About. That is, we felt like we had a voice, like
were getting somewhere, or like Janeane Garofalo's villain-whupping
character in "Mystery Men," who memorably proclaimed, "I would like to
dedicate my victory to the supporters of local music and those who seek out
independent films. "

After the election, Wellstone's aide Bill Hillsman told me he believed my
column had reached a segment of the voting populace that they were having
trouble reaching, and that it may have helped put him over the top. I put
aside my bullshit detector for the moment and chose to believe him, just as
I choose at this moment to believe that music and the written word can still
help change the world.

When I introduced myself to Wellstone that night as "Jim Walsh from City
Pages," he broke into that sexy gap-toothed grin, clasped my hand and
forearm and said, with a warm laugh, "Jiiiiim," like we were a couple of
thieves getting together for the first time since the big haul. I can still
feel his hand squeezing my forearm. I can still feel his fighter's strength.

For those of you who never had the pleasure, that is what Paul Wellstone was
-- a fighter - despite the fact that the first president Bush said upon
their first encounter, "who is this chickenshit?" He fought corporate
America, the FCC, injustice, his own government. He fought for the
voiceless, the homeless, the poor, the little guy - in this country and
beyond. He was a politician but not a robot; an idealist, but not a sap, and
if his legacy has already morphed into myth, it's because there were/are so
few like him. He was passionate, and compassionate. He had a huge heart, a
rigorous mind, a steely soul and conscience, and now he is dead and buried
in a plot that looks out over the joggers, bikers, rollerbladers, and
motorists who parade around Lake Calhoun daily.

Paul and Sheila Wellstone and six others, including their daughter Marcia,
were killed in a plane crash on October 25, 2002. I remember where I was
that day, just as you do, and I don't want to forget it, but what I want to
remember even more is October 25, 2003. So here's what we're going to do.

We're going to start something right here, right now, and we're going to
call it Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. It will happen on
Saturday, Oct. 25th.  On that day, every piece of music, from orchestras to
shower singers, superstars to buskers, will be an expression of that loss
and a celebration of that life. It will be one day, where music - which, to
my way of thinking, is still the best way to fill in the gray areas that the
blacks and whites of everyday life leave us with - rises up in all sorts of
clubs, cars, concerts, and living rooms, all in the name of peace and love
and joy and all that good stuff that gets snickered at by Them.

Now. This is no corporate flim-flam or media boondoggle. This is me talking
to you, and you and I deciding to do something about the place we live in
when it feels like all the exits are blocked. So: First of all, clip or
forward this to anyone you know who still cares about grass roots,
community, music, reading, writing, love, the world, and how the world sees
America. If you've got a blog or web site, post it.

If you're a musician, book a gig now for Oct. 25th. Tell them you want it to
be advertised as part of Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. If
you're a shower singer, lift your voice that day and tell yourself the same
thing. If you're a club owner, promoter, or scene fiend, put together a
multi-act benefit for Wellstone Action! ( http://www.wellstone.org ). If
you're a newspaper person, tell your readers. If you're a radio person, tell
your listeners. Everybody talk about what you remember about Wellstone, what
he tried to do, what you plan to do for Wellstone World Music Day. Then tell
me at the email address below, and I'll write another column like this the
week of Oct. 25th, with your and others' comments and plans.

This isn't exactly an original idea. Earlier this year, I sat in a room at
Stanford University with Judea and Michelle Pearl, the father and daughter
of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered
by members of a radical Islamic group in Pakistan in February of last year.
After much talk about their son and brother's life and murder, I asked them
about Danny's love of music. He was a big music fan, and an accomplished
violinist who played with all sorts of bands all over the world. Unbeknownst
to me at the time, Pearl was also a member of the Atlanta band the Ottoman
Empire, and his fiddle levitates one of my all-time favorite Irish jigs,
"This Is It," which I found myself singing one night last fall in a Sonoma
Valley bar with a bunch of journalists from Paraguay, Texas, Mexico,
Jerusalem, Italy, and Korea.

The Pearls talked with amazement about the first Daniel Pearl World Music
Day (http://www.danielpearl.org), the second of which happens this October
10th, which would have been Pearl's 40th birthday. I told them about
attending one of the first Daniel Pearl World Music Day activities at
Stanford Memorial Church, where a lone violinist silently strolled away from
her chamber group at the end, signaling to me and my gathered colleagues
that we were to remember that moment and continue to ask questions, continue
to push for the dialogue that their son and brother lived for. I vowed that
day to tell anybody within earshot about Daniel Pearl World Music Day, and
later figured he wouldn't mind a similar elegy for Wellstone, who shared
Pearl's battle against hate and cynicism.

Wellstone didn't lead any bands, but he led as musical a life as they come.
He lived to bring people together, to mend fences: Music. When he died,
musicians and artists were some of the most devastated, as Leslie Ball's
crest-fallen-but-somehow-still-beaming face on CSPAN from Williams Arena
illustrated. Everyone from Mason Jennings to Larry Long wrote Wellstone
tribute songs in the aftermath, and everyone had a story, including the one
Wendy Lewis told me about the genuine exuberance with which Wellstone once
introduced her band, Rhea Valentine, to a crowd at the Lyn-Lake Festival.
Imagine that, today.

So ignore this or do whatever you do when your "We Are The World" hackles go
up. I'd be disappointed, and I suppose I wouldn't blame you; in these times
of terror alerts and media celebrity, I'm suspicious of everything, too. But
I freely admit that the idea of a Wellstone World Music Day is selfish. That
day was beyond dark, and to have another like it, a litany of hang-dog
tributes and rehashes of The Partisan Speech and How It All Went Wrong,
would be painful, not to mention disrespectful to everything those lives
stood for and against.

No, I don't want anyone telling me what to think or feel that day, or any
day, anymore. I want music that day. I want to wake up hearing it, go to bed
singing it. I want banners, church choirs, live feeds, hip-hop, headlines,
punk rock, field reports, arias, laughter. I want to remember October 25,
as the day the music died, and October 25, 2003 as the day when people
who've spent their lives attending anti-war rallies and teaching kids and
championing local music and independent films got together via the great big
antennae of music and took another shot.

I am standing in the northwest corner of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis.
In front of the silver broken heart, three workers stab the fresh sod with
shovels and fumble with a tape measurer. Flowers dot the dirt surrounding
the statue base. I pick up a rock and put it in my pocket.

The sprinklers are on, hissing impatiently at the
still-stunned-by-last-autumn citizens who work and hope and wait and watch
beyond the cemetery gates. The sprinklers shoot horizontal water geysers
this way and that. They are replenishing patches of grass that have been
browned by the sun. They are telling every burned-out blade to keep growing,
and trying to coax life out of death.

Jim Walsh is a Minneapolis-based writer. He can be reached at
walshjim [at] earthlink.net

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