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.
Well, remember the song "Ride the Train" by the Quad City DJs? "Come on ride the train, & ride it ... "
Amy: Yes. Of course.
Peter: It's nothing like that.
So far, I can confirm that genius summary. But Iowa is also, so far, great. We had an amazing dinner at the Embassy Club with some beautiful ladies from the CVB and a gorgeous panoramic view of the city at sunset. Afterward we went to El Bait Shop, which we've been talking about for days, and met some strapping gentlemen from greater Chicago. And I drank some Rogue Chipotle, which I've never had the pleasure to sample outside of Detroit.
Tomorrow: sleeping in, the Capitol, swimming, Valley Junction, bloody marys, Sherman Hill, wandering, the High Life Lounge, Gray's Lake, playing it by ear, Thai food. And riding the train. Hopefully we are all going to meet nice Iowans and get some attention. Already we are receiving lots of incredulous stares.
Matt will post video tomorrow, too. I promise. We like it here.
Summer is setting, and with it, the horizon of possibility for reckless adventure, late-night wanderings, wine by the bonfire and naps on the beach recedes. I don't know about you - but I'm scared.
It hasn't been the best summer for me. I would go so far as to call it "crummy." But it's still summer. For every personal catastrophe, awkward social situation and case of the stomach flu there's been grilled corn on the cob, rowboat-ing and long afternoons at the pool. I think I have the best tan of my life. And as much as I want the litany of disaster and disheartening failure to stop, I don't want summer to end.
Luckily, we still have Des Moines. Yes, Des Moines.
Remember Branson? Sure you do:
We had the time of our lives in Branson, forceful suppression of irony aside. And now we've been invited to Des Moines. Branson might be God Country's family-friendly answer to Las Vegas, but based on the research we've done so far, Des Moines might surprisingly hold its own to the Sin City. We're not even joking.
Originally we were going for a boxing tournament, which has since been rescheduled. And even Wayne Newton - Mr. Las Vegas himself - is going to be there this weekend, judging the Iowa Gold Star Futurity.
We'll be dining at the historic Embassy Club at the top of one of the tallest buildings in Iowa, hitting up the piano bar and hopping all around the East Village, where our fancy downtown hotel is located. We'll see you at El Bait Shop, a Mexican-BBQ-70s-fishing themed bar and grill featuring more than 170 beers on tap, and maybe Des Moines' oldest bar, The Locust Tap, which sounds kind of like the Landmark, or maybe Polish Falcons. From what we can gather, the city's LGBT community is HQ'd in the East Village, too, which is great news, because gay men love Matt Wild.
We're really excited to see the State Capitol and the history museum and shop at the Des Moines Downtown Farmer's Market, one of the biggest and best in the country - they actually shut down the downtown city streets on Saturday morning. And even though we like to play fast and loose on these trips, I am secretly holding out for a few moments of peace and quiet, maybe in Brown's Woods, the state's largest urban forest preserve, or on the beach at Saylorville Lake, or amid the crab apple trees at the Arie den Boer Arboretum.
Also we're stopping by the Field of Dreams on our way home.
Really, all of this sounds just picture-perfect, a far cry from the Midwestern kitsch-trip we had kind of expected when planning our On Assignment series. I really can't wait. I need a vacation.
Good thing we're leaving tomorrow morning. Des Moines ahoy! Stay tuned for frequent blogging and video updates, and tell all your friends!
When my dad saw the cover of our August issue, he railed at me for a half-hour about our lack of editorial responsibility. Apparently, I am too young to remember a time when empty refrigerators in basements and junk lots enticed curious children into their deadly depths.
My parents are subscribers, so they received the magazine right when it was hitting the stands. Since then, we've had dozens of calls, emails and hand-scrawled letters from furious readers who are terrified that young ones city-wide will see this issue, get ideas in their heads and go romping right to their death in the Fridgidaire.
When this gem arrived at our office, I knew I had to do some serious research, and by research, I mean a Google search of "kids in refrigerators":
Here's what my research turned up. The reason I'm too young to remember kids dying in refrigerators? Because kids don't die in refrigerators anymore. Abandoned iceboxes used to be a threat because of the mechanical latch on models manufactured before 1958. The widest rash of refrigerator deaths happened between 1956 and 1964, with accidents mostly tapering off after around 1984. From thestraightdope.com: "The problem hasn't entirely disappeared -- two kids in Guyana died in an old fridge in 2003."
But unless copies of VITAL are somehow migrating to the Third World, which is probably the only place you'll be able to find refrigerators old enough to trap innocent children, I doubt we've put any children any closer to an untimely end.
The crusade is over. So don't fret your head. And stop calling me.
The Journal Sentinel reported today that Marie Claire magazine has named Milwaukee its sexiest city.
Back story: we're all a little bleary in the office this morning, recovering from Random Exposure, our annual photo contest party at the sexy (and one-of-a-kind) Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design in the Third Ward, executive-directed by the extremely sexy and awe-inspiring Cori Coffman. Diamonds, one-half of the sexy and super-hot-right-now DJ duo The Glamour, provided the dance party and the aroma of horseradish-braised short ribs, marsala-soaked mushrooms and handmade port-infused chocolate and croquemboche from The Social and Times Square Pizzeria and Bistro wafted through the room. The turn out was incredible, everyone looked sexy and the photography - the party's raison d'etre - was amazing.
After the show, I rode my sexy bicycle down to the beautiful Pabst Theater, where a huge crowd of attractive young people had amassed for the sold-out Bon Iver concert. Justin Vernon, the pensive, haunting falsetto from Eau Claire, is a certified world-wide phenom, and I have never seen a show at the Pabst as packed to the gills as this one; Vernon himself kept telling us how amazing he felt to be playing at home, in Wisconsin, for a crowd so massively loving.
During the incredible, captivating performance, I thought about Unmasked and Anonymous, the new Koss Gallery show at the Milwaukee Art Museum of portraiture by, primarily, Wisconsin photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann. Ryan and I went to the press preview on Wednesday, where we had the chance to preview the stunningly installed exhibition and hear Julie and John talk about their work. We met them at lunch afterward, where Julie told us about their decision to come back to Wisconsin after grad school in southern Illinois and a stint in New York City; they were fascinated, she said, by rural life, Wisconsin Death Trip, Orson Welles. Unmasked and Anonymous features portraiture from dozens of other photographers, including some important figures from Wisconsin art history like Walter Sheffer, Francis Ford and Stanley Ryan Jones. It was such a revelation to see robust and vivid evidence of Wisconsin's art life in a way that's not regionally ghettoized or superficially trendy.
Julie and John are based in Manitowoc, an almost archetypically un-sexy city. But they love it. "We're basically hicks," she said. If it's true, they're the most glamorous hicks I've ever met: impeccable, mod, retro and devastatingly sexy. Holy shit, I thought to myself leaving the Museum. Wisconsin is so great.
So you get my drift here: yeah, Milwaukee is sexy, and it's about time somebody had the gall to say so. Unfortunately, the Journal Sentinel, after deciding to put this ultimately irrelevant fluff piece on the front page, poised the article in quizzical terms: what? Sexy? Aren't we all just drunk, dairy-chubby cheese lovers?
Once again, faced with an opportunity to live up to our burgeoning reputation as a sexy, cool, young, fun city, we stumble over our dogged insistence that we're all a bunch of small-town jerk-offs with nothing better to do than complain about Brett Favre. Every single Milwaukee resident quoted in the story expresses wonder or flat-out derision:
"But aren't we the fattest city?" said Jon Bailey, 26.
"I wouldn't call all us sexy," said Dobs, co-owner of Urban Sense, a flower shop on W. Vliet St. "I would call it more hometown."
"I've just been brainwashed with what I've heard and read" about the city, Jenkins said. "And cheeseheads and beer are not sexy. Sorry."
It's especially shocking to me that the owner of Bayou - A SEXY CAJUN RESTAURANT - can't come to terms with Milwaukee's sexiness.
What is our problem? Where do these people hang out? How many sexy new nightspots, world-class architectural marvels, independent businesses, art galleries, swanky restaurants, refurbished loft apartments, beach parties, music venues, terrific local bands, record shops and boutiques have to happen before we stop shooting ourselves in the feet?
Every sexy woman on this staff has spent the morning in state of righteous indignation at our inability to accept a nice compliment once in a while. Let's be gracious, proud and sexy, and let's move on.
There is so much I want to share with you, friends: about grief, about loss, about friends leaving town and friends returning to town, about the regal history of great Midwestern blue-collar families, about Poles and Italians, about the late-night ferry from Muskegon and the Milwaukee International Film Festival and Lakefront IPA and the Trusty Knife and the beach and Fitzgibbons and many, many other things.
However, I am swamped, having just returned from an unexpected week at home (which I bet you couldn't guess from that wistful first paragraph) and dealing with a wide expanse of life complications, including a stolen laptop, a death in the family and some sort of mysterious sprain in my foot. So all I have time to share with you now, at the beginning of this frightful and final full month of summer, is a video, a link and some stray thoughts.
Remember Friendster? I've been thinking a lot about that long-abandoned social networking site, the one that got us all comfortable with the idea of a website that didn't actually DO anything besides tell everyone else who you were and what kinds of things you liked to do. It was like an AOL profile on steroids, and with pictures, and without any useful functions such as chat or browsing or shopping or downloading MIDI files of popular songs (did anyone else do this during the early days of AOL?). I actually met people through Friendster that are still my friends today.
I think of Friendster as we strategize new ways to bring VITAL to Milwaukee and to the world wide web. There is a life to every medium - every microfiche machine, slide projector, super 8 film and 3D Viewfinder, as well as every newspaper, radio station, TV channel and, yes, website. And the healthiness, vigor and length of those lives depends so much on any medium's ability to get with the program, change with the times, man up or get out - sink or swim. Sometimes you do everything right and you sink anyway, and sometimes you don't have to do anything to just float on by (what else explains the madcap success of shitty, shitty MySpace?)
But we're trying our damndest, practicing our butterfly stroke. We started a Tumblr page that we update at least 5 times as often as we post to these clunky, oh-so-2004 text-mostly blogs. Check out videos, images, links and soundbytes many times daily, and if you're a Tumblr user already, why don't you follow us? We've got a Twitter page, too, if that's what you're into, and a group on last.fm so we'll know at all times what you like to listen to.
So it might not all be the next big thing, or at all interesting, maybe not even relevant. But we've gotta fight to make it in a way that would make even His Girl Friday hide under the desk. It's gonna be a rough road, but we're going to make it work, Tim Gunn style, starting with some rad-ass embedded video and continuing to do what we do best: tell great, well-written stories about what matters in this world, with all of its dimensions and mysteries and animated comic strips.
May we present the first episode of Get Your War On: the internet TV show based on the comic by David Rees, which VITAL is proud to run in print every month. Enjoy:
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. 
