Amy, your friendly neighborhood managing editor, likes dogs, coffee and sleeping in late. A native of Detroit and the daughter of a meat magnate, she moved to Milwaukee last summer and has spent most of her time here taking walks, riding bikes, and falling in love with everything. She no longer consumes the animal products that paid for her college education.
I've been to the Old German Beer Hall (once on my birthday, for shots on skis and that hammer/stump game; again, days later, after the Scarring Party show at Turner Hall with Brent Gohde and Matt Wild, where I ran into a bunch of guys I sort of knew in college) and I've seen bar time at the County Clare, BBC, Roots, the Riverhorse and Walter's. On St. Patrick’s Day I drank gin and tonics with some financiers at the Hi-Hat and lost my wallet not once but twice – first at the Landmark, then at the Nomad (I got it back the first time, but lightning never strikes the same place. Milwaukee bartenders and bouncers, beware; that pretty girl with the dubious Michigan driver’s license is SO not for real.) I've sidled up at Foundation with Captain Rick and Eddie Kilowatt and I've hunkered down at The Social , Coppola zinfandel precariously in hand, to get the inside story on Milwaukee film culture (and other less serious subjects) from scenesters like Andrew Swant and Bobby Ciraldo of Special Entertainment and Milwaukee's own Mark Metcalf, who told me how he drove from Ann Arbor to Detroit in 1967 to see the riots -- while he was on mescaline.
Seeing shows
I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Echo Base Collective down in the factory district, which on the basis of my three visits I've inferred is ALWAYS a good time, regardless of whether it is packed with hundreds of people watching an Israeli punk band light themselves on fire or attended by two dozen high school kids watching their friends jump up and down on a beat-up crash cymbal. Dave Casillo (the brains AND the brawn behind the organization) brings in shit-crazy local and underground bands (think Geocash, We’rewolves, Cougar Den) and some folksy, understated operations (like the soft-psychedelia of Minneapolis’ Daughters of the Sun). He also fixes up bikes for kids. This was the first place I thought to seek shelter during that terrible Friday snowstorm when my car was buried in high, desperate drifts, and I was comforted with beers, a puppy, terrific music and a couch on which to crash.
There’s also been the typical noise issuing forth from the Bermuda Triangle of the Pabst/Riverside/Turner – the aforementioned Scarring Party CD release show at Turner Hall, the champagne-brunch-appropriate Pink Martini at the Pabst two days later, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks (that was the show where PR maven Cecilia Hrobsky crab-walked across the floor of the Cudahy Pub to score a tote bag) – and just last night, Swedish pop crooner Jens Lekman with his honey-voiced tales of love, woe, excitement and incredible beauty.
Hiding away
I house-sat in Wauwatosa and stayed in all weekend playing waltzes on my accordion, drinking tea and cuddling with an elderly schnauzer, leaving only for a well-documented trip to Rooter’s with Matt Wild, Chinese take-out on the East Side and a little accordion/marimba jam with Alex Cain of The Candliers at his parents’ house.
A long-lost friend came to Milwaukee and I shared the town with him, of course the Art Museum (and the long-awaited Infinity Room), the lake, the parks, the buildings I like to see, the food I like to eat, the walks I take every day. We had a picnic in my living room that night, with French bread, garlic and good olive oil, apple slices and rioja, and we talked about the lives we live now, the lives we used to live, and our current orientation to the rest of the universe. He’s returned to his faith after a long, searching absence, and in the morning he woke me up early and we walked to the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist for daily mass. When it was over, the sun was bright, the bells were ringing, the day was fresh and we chased geese in the square.
I guess what I’m saying, here, all in all, is that this month has been fleet, but fuller than just about any time in my life I can imagine, which is why, dear and patient reader, I haven’t been blogging. And there has been time apart, whole days given over to rest and reconsideration, more than I have allowed myself to have in a very long time. I guess what I’m saying is that time might be flying, but that gives us all the more reason to get everything we can out of every second – and that the more we fill our days with, the more our days give us, and the more time expands for us.
That’s esoteric, and I don’t mean it to be, but here at the outside of March, about to give way to frantic, troubling April, I’m feeling as though I’ve earned the right to be obtuse.
Check back often next month. I’ll be blogging more – and dancing more and doing more and loving more and giving more and having more as a consequence. I hope the same will hold for you, too.
Maybe it was my visit to the cellar bar at Roots this week (where I’m told the chef is perfecting his own recipes for corned beef, rye bread and sauerkraut), or maybe it was my dad’s sheepish confession to me last weekend that he loves to Google his own name, but I was reminded recently that my dad – a corned beef producer and wholesaler whose secret recipes have made him famous among foodies nation-wide – has a video on YouTube.
Meet my dad. And learn something about how corned beef is made, in the meantime. Think of it as an early St. Patrick’s Day offering. Those squeamish about raw beef brisket might not want to press play.
My brother Sean and his wife Janel are having a baby girl, probably some time in the next week, so I’ve been talking to my family a lot more than usual as I call in daily for updates on Janel’s health, well-being and cervical dilation (she’s been at two centimeters for more than two weeks now). When I asked my dad if he was excited about grandchild number EIGHT, he said he would be, if Sean and Janel lived a little closer.
This is funny, because they live less than an hour’s drive from my dad’s house. When I asked dad how he was going to feel when I had kids of my own, he said it didn’t matter because he’d be dead by then –which pretty much sums up my dad’s attitude about life. It’s a joyous sort of grumpiness that he abides by most of the time, and I love it about him, except when his grumpiness pisses me off.
Finally, I'd like to contribute something to Matt's weekend music report. While he was crying into his ice-cream over a Sonic the Hedgehog medley, I was at a tiki bar (Foundation) dancing like a maniac to the unbridled soul commotion of Iowa City's Diplomats of Solid Sound. Then I saw The Chain open for Jail. Then I went home and slept like a baby.
But wait! Sunday night continued to bring the noise! VITAL sponsored The Black Lips at Turner Hall, who brought along with them the fabulous Mr. Quintron. Mr. Quintron plays several interesting instruments he built himself, including a Hammon organ/Fender Rhodes synthesizer combo. His lovely wife Miss Pussycat shrieks along with him, plays the maracas and puts on puppet shows.
After her production, a little cautionary tale about a hexing art gallery owner who turns one of her patrons into a marble statue, in which Santa Claus saves the day with an AK-47, The Black Lips – known in some circles for their really raucous antics – barely registered as more than four smart chords and some spitting. Jeff and I retired to a cabaret table near the back, which means we almost missed it when our friend Jared got up on the stage, spun around like an airplane, and then jumped right back off again, into the crowd, inciting a wave of other stage-divers to take their chances, which resulted in tough guards tackling frenzied concert-goers.
It was a hard-won moment of pure rock clarity in a minefield of tight pants, PBR and sloppy haircuts.
And this weekend there’s more where that came from: a whole slate of insanity AND a taco bar at the Echo Base Collective, Maps & Atlases at the Cactus Club, The Trusty Knife (also at the Cactus Club), of course the Get Down, Vijay Iyer at Alverno’s Pitman Theater. Even CHUBBY FREAKING CHECKER is in town. And Matt is taking me to see more cover bands at Rooter's. I am a fool.
I’m tired just thinking about it. But also thrilled! BRING IT, WEEKEND!
Oh, yeah. Every Tuesday. Come ON! What was I THINKING?! I can't play this game. It's Thursday night. Tomorrow is Friday. Fail, fail, fail.
Jesus, what happened to this week? I had every expectation that this was going to be one of those breezy, pretty weeks, that I'd just sleep a lot and stroll into the office whenever I felt like it and spend a lot of time at my desk poking at various flabby spots on the internet and then go home early and drink juice and take a nap.
It did NOT happen like that. This week opened up like a big ol' jaw and swallowed me whole.
On Tuesday (remember Tuesday, when I was supposed to be blogging? Preferably whilst drinking juice?) I stopped in at the 88.9 RadioMilwaukee anniversary fête at Palms Bistro. I met the fine gentlemen of Great Lakes Distillery -- at the wizened age of 1, now Wisconsin's oldest distillery, our first since prohibition -- and sampled their very nice gin, which is made with sweet basil and Wisconsin ginseng, two botanicals that have never been found in gin -- before now. It was delicious -- sweet and spicy -- and I am not just saying that in hopes that they will write in and say, "oh hey Amy, we love your blog and we know you're a lush; here's a bottle of gin for you."
But some friends & former coworkers (including my esteemed colleague Mr. John Eding) thought it might be nice to catch up over some more banal libations, so we skipped over to Landmark Lanes, everyone's favorite palace of trash, for $2 beer night. (Yes, friends who are not from Milwaukee and do not understand, you are correct in interpreting that special to mean $2 for a pint of any beer at all.) Before I knew it, it was bedtime.
On Wednesday, when I should have been blogging my apologies for missing my self-imposed Tuesday blog parade (Matt Wild, am I driving you crazy!?), I was at the ever-grand Turner Hall Ballroom, PBR Tall Boy in hand, working the sponsorship table for the Sia show, wondering why no one was dancing to opening phenom Har Mar Superstar, who you just have to see to believe. I didn't really know what to expect from the night at all. Sia seemed nice enough, a cute Australian with a pretty voice and credentials -- former singer for Zero 7, spots on the soundtracks for Garden State and Six Feet Under -- that had me looking forward to sort of ambient, possibly production-heavy, likely sort of humdrum pop finery. All I knew about Har Mar was that he is frequently booed offstage, and that it was possible he would show up in a cape and a g-string.
But he was great, exactly the kind of kitsch that I fall for -- a genuinely incredible, Prince-esque R&B voice, a tight back-up band (with a bass player in a Storm Trooper costume), lots of dancing in the aisles (and on the cabaret tables, to the evident chagrin of unsuspecting audience members), plenty of groovy beats. At the end of the set, the other VITAL staffers and I decided we'd had enough -- something had to be done about the total lack of booty-shaking, which Har Mar kept saying was making him feel really awkward. So we stormed the stage. And we danced. And other people decided to dance, too.
And Sia -- well, Sia was pretty incredible herself. Besides being possibly the most adorable person I have ever seen on stage (and it was an adorable stage, with giant neon flowers, stuffed animals strewn hither and yon, a band dressed in white), she sang beautiful songs with striking power, palpable exuberance and rare talent. It was captivating! I was so impressed. I stayed for the whole show and cheered for the encore, despite repeated warnings to my cohorts that I'd probably leave before the end of the set (to go home at watch Project Runway, but I didn't tell anyone that part).
And so here it is Thursday. And all I have to give you is this recipe, and a glimmer of the undying, eternal love I have for Mark Bittman. I hope you actually try it. I think I will. We are hours away from the end of awful February, and we will have very little need for winter tomato soup before too long. Hang in there.
Or even a weekly, for that matter, given my bad habit of updating my blog -- a BLOG! which is meant to be STEALTHY and TERSE and FULL OF EMBEDDED IMAGES AND VIDEOS! - approximately once every two weeks. (I'd like to get better at that, really! Maybe I should aim for once a week? Every Tuesday? What do you think? Will you help me?)
I have felt absolutely paralyzed by the steady shake of startling news pouring over the wires in recent weeks. Just today, Fidel Castro resigned power in Cuba, Pervez Musharraf's party was defeated in Pakistan (signaling certain political death for Gen. Musharraf in due time, I'm sure), Barack Obama took his ninth straight victory over Hillary Clinton in this magnificent state of Wisconsin, and NATO troops closed the northern borders of Kosovo after Serbs rioted. Kosovo, which of course declared its independence from Serbia on Sunday. Serbia, which of course withdrew its ambassador to the United States ... yesterday.
I'm so stunned. Less than a week ago -- it was Valentine's Day, after a visit to the swoon-inducing Art Museum (I would like to personally recommend, if I may, Erwin Redl's stirring Matrix XV as an especially nice place to take someone you might be interested in kissing later) -- I found myself with a friend and a stranger at beautiful Cubanitas on Milwaukee Street, drinking mojitos and eating plantain chips and dreaming about what Cuba must be like now and what it will be like when we're all allowed to go there, speculating that perhaps 2008 would be Castro's year to hit it and quit, planning, in that sincere-and-fevered way that only tipsy people can plan, a real trip to storied Havana. Then all three of us - me and the friend and the stranger - went dancing at a club across the street.
It was only a week before that, a dirty Thursday, that my friends DJs Hulot & Naota and their frequent musical companions DA & The Madpack, who so rarely play shows outside attics (especially now that Naota lives, works & plays in Chicago) got all of their friends together at the delightfully yucky Mad Planet and everyone did shots of bad whiskey and danced to everyone's good, stomp-y, bouncy, glitch-y music.
And it was just Saturday, fresh and not at all chilly, that I accepted a new friend's invitation to Chicago to see one of the five historic Wilco shows happening this week at the Riviera Theatre, in which the lauded band will be performing every song every recorded for all of their studio albums. I learned upon our return to Milwaukee that when I was swaying, dancing with my friend, mouthing the words to "Dash 7" (from their 1995 debut album A.M.), I was dancing and swaying and mouthing along to the only live Wilco performance of Dash 7 ever.
It was just Saturday that I refreshed my love of rock music, and music in general, and did not find it tedious but instead thought, "yes, this is meaningful, and I would not rather be in bed, because at the end of my life I would rather say I was a part of this." And then on Sunday I woke up to the BBC and pressed coffee and went to Roots with some of my best friends.
And it is only tonight, trying to catch up with everything that made headlines and learn what I can about what didn't make headlines, weighing the opinions of the hundreds of people whose opinions are respected on the internet, reading recently-updated auditoriums like Orangette and The Post-Rockist and Slate, which I only remember that I really like about once every six weeks and sites that I'm starting to pay attention to like Muzzle of Bees (thanks Dwellephant!) --
it is only tonight that I am feeling really glad that I don't work for a daily, that I can just take the time to edit carefully and lay out beautifully and think about the big picture. And that when I go home I can make a late-night run to the grocery store to get some New Glarus with which to toast Mr. Obama and the lovely state which I am happy to call home these days, that I can sit here and listen to a Chicago radio station stream tonight's Wilco concert and talk to my roommate and enjoy being an infinitesimal but ultimately very content human being.
Since seeing the show at the Milwaukee Public Museum when it opened two weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about Body Worlds, and I’ve been thinking a lot about Gunther Von Hagens, the German scientist and provocateur behind the international museum sensation.
His name (and his image) is plastered all over the exhibition, and his vision is not just overt – it’s his signature. Von Hagens, with his trademark black fedora, sees himself as a maverick anatomist, a Renaissance man and an artist – a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci whose detractors are merely ignorant or unwilling to see the bigger picture. To the great writ of history, Vesalius is not a grave robber or an exhibitionist, a picture somanypeople are eager to paint of Von Hagens. Von Hagens, I assume, does not think history will treat him with such ill will, either, and in time, they will come to understand what we view now as grotesque eccentricities – his enduring fascination with public autopsy and dissection, for example.
Gunther von Hagens' life reads like an archetypal scientist's resume — distinguished by early precocity, scholarship, discovery, experimentation, and invention. It is also the profile of a man shaped by extraordinary events, and marked by defiance and daring.
Von Hagens' two year imprisonment by East German authorities for political reasons, his release after a $20,000 payment by the West German government, his pioneering invention that halts decomposition of the body after death and preserves it for didactic eternity, his collaboration with donors including his best friend, who willed and entrusted their bodies to him for dissection and public display, and his role as a teacher carrying on the tradition of Renaissance anatomists, make his a remarkable life in science. Body Worlds, amid all of its shock and bravura and bragging feats of technique, carried one-word message for me, a word the Von Hagens publicity machine has used to describe the mastermind himself: defiance. Body Worlds is full of real displays of things that kill us – aneurysms and hemorrhages, cancerous growths, lungs clogged with tar – but above all it attempts to suggest that with science (and in particular with plastination) we have found a way to make the decay of the mortal body avoidable and therefore impotent; moreover, we have managed to make it possible for bodies in death to do what they could not do in life. It is likely – even probable – that the bodies posed as ballet dancers, gymnasts, horsemen, basketball players, skateboarders or practitioners of Tai Chi never did such things when they were alive.
There’s a defiance, too, of the way we practice science today – with our heads, and not with our hearts – that Von Hagens is trying to challenge. By displaying the body in all of its grace, it is written in a Body Worlds text panel, it becomes evident to the viewer that something is missing – the soul. "The presentation of the pure physical," it reads, "reminds visitors of the intangible and the unfathomable." Science as we know it is obsessed with dismantling the mystery of existence and creation; perhaps that is why Von Hagens above all identifies himself as an artist. And a defiant artist, at that.
I think Von Hagens has it all wrong, and I think Body Worlds confounds. It’s full of whole bodies that walked, talked, hurt, felt good, loved other people, gave birth and ate amazing food, but it’s one-note – because it’s a one-man show. There’s so much opportunity for delicacy, warmth, inviting moral ambiguity and open-ended questions, but Von Hagens and his team have instead opted for ham-fistedness, a chill in the air, avoidance of nuance and simple answers to all of the questions we might be tempted to pose.
But his defiance has captured me for weeks. I am in awe of it, astounded by it, impressed and almost covetous.
There is much to defy these days, mainly the deep, enveloping cold. But there’s also a heavy air cynicism which is now, for the first time in a long time, open to us to defy. For whatever it means, at my little magazine in my little city in my little life – it is an act of defiance almost in its smallness – I am ready to personally endorse Barack Obama for President in 2008. Do I believe he will change everything? No, I don’t. I was born in the Reagan years, grew up in the Clinton years, came into my own under the Bush regime, and I don’t believe anything anymore. But I am ready to defy that, personally, just for now.
In fact, in a country that is losing its grip, in a human race that is ultimately ravaged on a planet that we have nearly destroyed in a universe that probably doesn’t give a damn, I almost feel like anything even remotely affirmative can take on an air of defiance. Like this weekend’s Brewcity Bruisers championship; I may have been the last person in Milwaukee (besides Matt Wild) who didn’t know that roller derby was totally amazing, but I know now, and the extent to which I enjoyed myself was downright subversive.
Afterward we went to the Old German Beer Hall, which was a recipe for disaster: standing-room-only, drunk Water Street drinkers, a lecherous old accordion player, gigantic beers, waitresses in lederhosen and long, sticky wooden tables. But someone must have gotten the measurements wrong, because it turned out to be incredible. Beer steins were smashed, the accordion player hit on me, the bros at the next table kept standing up and shouting toasts for no reason, and by the end of the night I was dancing with strangers and declaring my infatuation with everything and everone.
I’m really starting to feel that the only thing that can save us now is dancing on tables, making every gesture – every shouted toast, every bang of a drink on the bar – a declaration of massive, radical love. Pumping cadavers full of polymers isn’t going to do the trick, but total abandon might. We’re going to die, for God’s sake – by fireball or avian flu, nuclear warfare or massive heart attack, a fall down the stairs or a bad crash on the freeway. We’d better make this shit count – so that when some mad celebrity scientist turns us into a trapeze artist or a symphony conductor in death, the people that knew us in life can come see us and say, “Please. Show us something really impressive.”
Amy, your friendly neighborhood managing editor, likes dogs, coffee and sleeping in late. A native of Detroit and the daughter of a meat magnate, she moved to Milwaukee last summer and has spent most of her time here taking walks, riding bikes, and falling in love with everything. She no longer consumes the animal products that paid for her college education.
