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 in 2006 and has spent most of her time here taking walks, riding bikes, and falling in love with everything.
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.”
The day I found out that the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra would be announcing the music director to replace Andreas Delfs after the 2008-2009 season, I went to bed wondering when the Milwaukee Art Museum would get their ducks in a row and pick someone to replace Director and CEO David Gordon, who will be leaving in March.
I didn't have to wonder long -- I got an email the next day from the MAM press team announcing that a "successful museum director," Daniel T. Keegan, would be taking the job. After months of what I imagine to have been sweaty deliberation, secret rehearsals, googling for dirt, maybe even confessional audition tapes, two of the city's brawniest art organizations rang in the new on the same day. Their choices make sure statements about how they see themselves and where they hope to head in the next few years.
The Symphony's choice, Edo de Waart, is absolutely magnetic. At 23 he served as Leonard Bernstein's assistant conductor at the New York Philharmonic; over the course of a storied, cosmopolitan career, de Waart has conducted the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Holland, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and most recently the Hong Kong Philharmonic. Edo de Waart also brings an extensive catalog of recordings with a number of orchestras on major music labels. In person he is full of European charisma -- funny but focused, comfortable and sincere.
He just moved to Middleton with his wife and family, but everyone, including Edo, went to lengths yesterday to stress that this is not a late-career move made out of ease or laziness. De Waart called the MSO "a great sleeper orchestra," unfettered by the weighty reputations that sometime "exceed reality." In the past he has spoken with impressive conviction about what a wonderful symphony orchestra can do for a smaller city, or a city in transition (take a look at this interview about his work with the orchestra in Hong Kong). His experience in opera conducting -- including but not limited to the Met in New York and L'Opera National in Paris -- as well as a track record of taking chances on contemporary composers and lesser-known repertoire should prove revitalizing to the MSO. And I think Milwaukee is going to love him.
Daniel T. Keegan, a different choice for a different beast, comes to the Milwaukee Art Museum from the San Jose Museum of Art, rather persistently described in the press so far as a "Silicon Valley museum." The phrase gives a lot away about what MAM was looking for in its new leader; San Jose's most notable distinction, besides its expansive collection of West Coast and Pacific Rim art, is its use of technology and multimedia in exhibitions and galleries. Their podcasts are award-winning, and you can dial their audio guides from your cell phone.
The Milwaukee Art Museum has been reaching for a savvier demographic -- a multi-tasking, wireless, gadget-infatuated and quick-on-its-feet group of people -- for some time, with limited success (did anyone ever catch the almost-endearing Francis Bacon blog?). Keegan seems to be a clear affirmation of MAM's desire to shuffle forward with the rest of us.
He also has a reputation as an attendance booster, and the Milwaukee Art Museum, like most art museums in America, definitely wants to boost attendance, more now than ever since crowds arriving to witness the glittery novelty of the Calatrava have leveled off. His record of support for educational programming is a good fit, too, considering the Museum's dedication to education in the community and its reputation as a “teaching museum.”
Keegan is markedly unlike David Gordon, who came to Milwaukee from the Royal Academy in London and served as the CEO of The Economist in the ‘70s. Gordon brought a sharp financial mind and frugal management skills to bring MAM out of its expansion debt, but he also brought an old-Europe attitude and a starry sense that the Milwaukee Art Museum could be key in promoting Milwaukee as a modern, urbane city, more like the German Athens of old than the post-industrial Rust Belt town perception cuffed on the city now. In one of MAM's greatest coups, the 2006 decorative arts exhibition Biedermeier traveled to the Louvre and the Albertina in Vienna. David Gordon has not since given up the joke that goes something like this:
Austrian: So, Milwaukee? Beer?
Gordon: No, Beer-dermeier.
I hope that Keegan’s nonlinear agenda will continue to steer the Museum toward mounting original, exciting exhibitions of scholarly importance and popular appeal and enhance the Museum’s collection as well as its reputation. Podcasts, cell phones, attendance initiatives and solid supplementary programming are all good things, but at the end of the day the work hanging in the galleries should speak volumes for itself. Perhaps Keegan will have less of a taste for bad puns, as well, though that may be missed.
So look out, Milwaukee. There are some new sheriffs in town.
Edo de Waart conducts the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest Holland in Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries"
I really love the winter, especially in these early weeks, when the cold is bracing but exhilarating, the snow is fresh and pretty and even the most dreadful parking conditions barely detract from the gingery warmth of early December.
It's always a tricky transition: what to do when faced with such deep wind chills and such early darkness, how to break out of my routines and get my friends out of their routines, whether or not it's worth excavating the car (with no scraper and crappy wiper blades that haven't been changed for years -- I need to work on that) and the easiest way to turn off the television.
But it's been a few weeks of white-out weather, depressed thermometers and distance from the sun, and I'm starting to feel that cold winter blood pumping bravely through my veins. Here's my loose, slushy road map through treacherous seasonal territory:
Do something boring with someone else
Watching TV reruns by yourself is sort of boring, but watching TV reruns with a bunch of friends and a six-pack? Infinitely more rewarding. Lately I've loved 30 Rock and Flight of the Conchords. Also Iron Chef America, mostly because I have a huge you're-too-evil-and-slimy-to-be-real crush on Bobby Flay.
Learn something
I've been learning to play the accordion since I bought an old Crucianelli at a gas station in Door County in July, but I've really stepped up my game now that it's too cold to leave my apartment. There have been times in the last few weeks when I've been too engrossed in "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" to answer my phone or grab drinks with my friends. Bonus: I'm learning Christmas songs.
Get ready for Christmas
This is probably the first Christmas since I was 13 that I've been genuinely excited about. I wish I could tell you why. Maybe it has something to do with watching too much TV, seeing commercial after commercial and holiday special after holiday special, enough to get me thinking that Christmas is a very real thing. Maybe it is also the snow. It could be that I decided early on this year to buy as many holiday wares as possible locally, fairly and preferably handmade. Thanks in large part to Art Vs. Craft and Paperboat Boutique (both brainchildren of local artist Faythe Levine), this year, most everyone in my family is getting something local and handmade, mostly by artists I know personally and adore, and one piece I commissioned from Liz Keuler, a friend and a Fasten Collective designer, for less than $5 (a holiday challenge/pact between my broke self and my broke sister). Even the kids are getting some artfully-made tokens of loveliness and a hopefully-not-too-preachy lesson that sometimes Christmas means more than video games, at least to your grown-up, sentimental, hip-and-conscious Aunt Amy. Relatives who aren't getting art are getting cheese, bratwurst or craft beer. This is Wisconsin, after all. People expect it of me.
I've never sent Christmas cards before, either, and this year I made all of mine myself. I was worried that hand-making my cards with gluesticks and glittery snowflakes would make me look less adult than I actually am these days, but I used mostly recycled materials (clippings from old National Geographics and illustrated science books pasted on some hideous vintage greeting cards I had laying around) and they turned out swell: heartfelt, pretty, quirky.
Get out of the house
When worst comes to worst, it pays to just face it and leave.
Thank God for The Get Down. Nothing beats dancing on a bitter winter night.
Other helpful establishments include Roots, where Blake Leinberger makes a really mean wassail, a hot apple drink that's creamy, spicy, nourishing and very alcoholic. Roots also boasts one of the most attractive wait and bar staffs in the city.
The County Clare has a fireplace and the good grace of being a few blocks away from my apartment and VITAL's own Erin Wolf is a regular there. Comet Cafe's half-price bottle of wine night on Thursday is a super way to make sure you're not as cold walking home as you were walking there.
And then there's The Bremen Cafe, which has over the past few months become that place where everybody knows my name, for better or for worse, and I can always count on knowing at least one sordid face when I walk through the door, tired, cranky, maybe PMSing, maybe very lonely, likely not quite as enchanted with the winter as it seems I am now, always ready for a glass of wine or a mostly-whiskey whiskey soda.
Hats off to you, Bremen Cafe. I miss you down here on the south side.
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 in 2006 and has spent most of her time here taking walks, riding bikes, and falling in love with everything. 
