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During the fall and spring semesters my commuter rhythm has me spending the first couple days of the week in Chicago. I am at home in Madison for the second, longer half of the week. On that first weekday at home I often run my town errands.

Some who read this might recall that once I participated in a series of walks organized by my colleagues Bonnie Fortune and Mike Wolf, who for a couple of years collaboratively and energetically created the project Free Walking. This must have been about five years ago. It was a great series; Melinda Fries took a group through the Kinzie Industrial Corridor; Jennie Bastian walked us through the sites of the 1893 Columbian Exposition; Mike Wolf guided a sizeable group on a nighttime trek along the elevated and officially off-limits Bloomingdale Trail. I did my part by leading a group of intrepid art-walkers around my old neighborhood of Hyde Park while running my weekly errands. The stops included the dry cleaners, the bank, the record store, the Renaissance Society, the hardware store, and other neighborhood stops.

I bring up this past because on my errand day last week I had reason to reflect on how my life has changed since then. Good, bad...and just different.

For some reason my errands for the week just happened to constitute something of a tour of alternative Madison. I suppose this was not totally by chance, since it is more than possible to live a substantially “alternative” life in Madison, supporting and depending on cooperative and semi-capitalist institutions for reasonable portion of life’s necessities. There are more alt-orgs, shops, and living places than what I covered in my afternoon, but here’s where I went.

 1)   Just Coffee. I had to pick up two 150 lb sacks of organic, free trade beans for David Meyers. Just Coffee was started by a group of Madison activists looking to establish meaningful economic ties with farmers in Chiapas.

 

2)   WORT. I had to drop off my pledged donation from the last membership drive. WORT is one of the best community radio stations in the country. We are so lucky to have it. Like I always try to, I donated at the ‘browse shelf’ premium level. That’s when you’re welcome to pick out a freebie from their always changing shelf of promotional copies of CDs, DVDs, and books. I chose a CD by The Breakup Society.

 

3)   Rainbow Bookstore Co-op. I stopped in to discuss organizing an AREA and Art Work event. Looks like it’ll happen, but not for a while, ie not until well into 2010, after the bookstore has cleared out most of their course book inventory. Will post info about that event here.

 

4)   UW Credit Union. Very nice to not have to use a bank for our savings.

 

5)   Regent Market Co-op. I am grateful to have not only an alternative to the chain grocers, but also an alternative to the Willy Street Co-op, too. (I’ve complained about Willy Street here.) And not just because Willy Street is too far from our home. Regent is more our kind of place. Because, goddam it, sometimes I want to buy a Snickers bar with my bag of lentils, and I would be very happy to never again in my life see a carob chip.

 

Now the good:  how many towns the size of Madison would even have two very different food co-ops? Okay, that may be a sad commentary on the state of the food retail scene in America, but nevertheless, I appreciate it. Chicago only has one. Milwaukee has two. For a little while Madison had three. Plus the farmers’ markets. And the evident and active presence of the progressive spirit and mindset among the Madison citizenry really does become apparent when I connect the dots like this in an afternoon. And make no mistake, it is not simply a mindset or attitude. It is concrete support, decisions being made by a great many individuals to put their time and financial resources into things like WORT and the food co-ops. There are enough people here who choose to pay more for their food, to give money to various organizations, and to work for free for groups that benefit the community...instead of living in oversized houses, driving RVs, and buying fashionable clothes.

(Actually, I have to say it: there are a lot of people in Madison who could stand to cultivate their fashion sensibilities.)

And then the bad:  first—I had to drive. Now granted, one of my errands was transporting 300 pounds of organically grown coffee. But even if that weren’t the case, I might have had to drive. Because I certainly wasn’t going to walk. Biking is a great option, but not so much in foul weather. At least not for me. And the distances are still borderline inconvenient, in terms of travel times. My errands ran over a good breadth of the town, as opposed to the compactness of a neighborhood in the big city.

Finally, the different:  the prevailing spirit I just lauded above? Well, it comes from the sheer social dominance of the educated white liberal-left residing in Madison. When describing Madison I choose to not use the word homogenous, because in fact Madison is home to a sizeable population of black, Latino, and Asian peoples. Segregated is a better way of putting it. Chicago and Milwaukee are very severely segregated, obviously, but the absolute numbers combined with the density of the big city mean that most public spaces and incidental social landscapes will be fairly mixed. That is not true in Madison. The physical segregation is comparatively spread out, such that a kind of physical and mental invisibility takes hold. The institutions I patronize and value pay quite a lot of lip service to “diversity” mostly without actualizing a diverse social body. I’m not faulting them; this is not a condition that any organization or community served by and for white lefties has creatively addressed. Because the condition is reinforced by the built environment, in some sense lip service is all that can be paid.

Or is it? The white hippy-left-liberals of Madison, who have built a deeply entrenched local infrastructure that includes media and economic enterprises, would do well to prioritize this challenge of segregation. I am not interested in throwing the words racism and racist around; that is hardly the point, and there are other people who will do that, anyway. Rather, the discussion should be about whether opportunities for social creativity exist in Madison that do not exist elsewhere (precisely because of that infrastructure?), but that might be missed for lack of recognition.

 

On the night of President Obama’s speech outlining his new strategy for the War in Afghanistan, I opted to listen to Emory Douglas instead. Anchor Graphics at Columbia College Chicago brought him in as their last visiting lecturer of the season.

 

Mr. Douglas made his name as the point man for visual communication and main artist for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. His illustrations and graphics were featured in just about every issue of the Black Panther newspaper. In the party he held the title of Minister of Culture.

 

It was a marathon two-hour lecture. He went through nearly 200 slides. Most of them were of his classic work, from the Panther days, covering the provocative anti-police messaging of his early stuff to the graphics giving visual identity to the Panther social service work.

 

He ended by running through a selection of recent work, including this painted portrait of Black Panther Field Marshal Richard Aoki. After the lecture when I went up to get my copy of his monograph signed,

 

 

 

he confirmed for me that Aoki was indeed the man who scored the first cache of weapons for the Panthers. So the legends I've heard are true!

 

 

 

Also terrific in the new works is a picture of President Obama offering an apology for slavery. Mr. Douglas, whose burning political passions are tempered by a great sense of humor, remarked that the work was inspired by the imagined irony of the first president of African descent offering the apology for slavery to America’s descendents of African slaves. It is true; that is a real mind-bender!

 

 

 

The best question during the Q & A was offered by one Dawoud Bey, he of photo mastery and a longtime faculty member at Columbia College. He explained that as a youngster coming of age during the Panther days, and now an established figure on the official art scene, he could hardly wrap his head around the fact that LAMOCA mounted a large show of Mr. Douglas’s work, and that it earlier this fall traveled to the New Museum in New York. Dawoud’s question was simple: how on earth does Mr. Douglas reconcile in his own mind the bridging of what originated as a true revolutionary art that attracted the most malicious involvements of not only the local police but of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, and was done in the service of a movement that cost more than a few people their very lives, with the welcome, forty years later, offered him by the official and elite world of culture? Mr. Douglas’s answer was straightforward: there are now some very good people who inhabit that world professionally, and that it is possible to find allies who operate there. As for showing his work in the museums, he said only that they provide another outlet for the same messages he has always championed.  

Mister Koppa and I made the trip to the first ever Hamilton Wood Type Museum Wayzgoose.

What’s a wayzgoose? Back in the day it was the end of summer bash thrown by the master printer for his shop underlings and apprentices. And now, I guess, it’s the kind of event the Hamilton staff put together for us–“us” being a gathering of type nuts, artists, letterpress printers, typographers, graphic and type designers. About 50 were in attendance. Mister Koppa and I were just about in the middle of the pack, age-wise. It was good to see so many young people turning out, seeing this as a living thing.

We were treated to power point presentations by Rich Kegler and Juliet Shen on the first evening. Juliet Shen told the story of working with Pugent Sound Salish tribes to design a font for the preservation and continuation of the Lushootseed language, which is down to ten or less native speakers, and having the font cut as a new wood type by Hamilton.

 

She had an elegant explanation for why she approached Hamilton about producing a new face in wood type, and in a language that does not use the straightforward Latin alphabet. She said simply, working and printing in wood type is better for getting the young people interested in learning to read, speak, and write in the language.

 

The second day was organized around four different presentations, including a demonstration of the pantograph router by Norb Brylski, one of the old-timers from the Hamilton workforce. This man was a printer with his own shop first, and then after leaving that part of the trade spent years cutting wood type faces for Hamilton, in time becoming a master of the pantograph router, understanding all the nuances of the tool. This tool, in which the pantograph is machined to such a quality of stability and precision that it can be attached to a router run on pressurized air, was at the heart of the Hamilton production of wood type, and one of the main reasons decorative faces could be produced cheaply enough to be used widely in commercial printing.

 

All throughout the demonstration people got to ask him questions. Most were of a technical nature. Paul Aken asked him about the shoulder height and depth of the counter (sorry, those are cast type terms). I asked him how they measured the productivity of each pantograph operator. He said that management had figured out a standard of output, so many fonts in a given face in a given size in a given amount of time. I can’t remember if he said it was all charted out or not, but that’s how I’m picturing the information. The reason this is crazy to think about is, this was a pretty skilled kind of work, including having to cut by hand every single inside corner to a sharp angle for many faces, because the router bits all leave a round corner. Quantifying all that across the room full of pantagraph operator-craftsworkers, such that the information could be figured into larger decisions regarding the future prospects of the company, was probably a typical industrial efficiency problem for the time. I think it was one of the Moran brothers who noted that over the decades there had been a great many women in this occupation. I also asked Mr. Brylski if he was in a union. He was; I think he said it was the carpenters and joiners union. 

 

Richard Zauft, under whom I studied about thirteen years ago, led a hands-on print session using for the first time the newly unveiled Hamilton face, Carter Latin, the first typeface designed by Matthew Carter for wood type. Matthew Carter has done just about everything a guy can do in the field of typography and type design, but it turned out he hadn’t ever designed for wood type. So this, too, was (for type nuts, at least) a pretty special moment, and super fun to do. Hundreds of proofs were made over the course of the day, including many on paper taken from a shop scrap pile, with entertaining results. Matthew Carter was there, presiding like a pleased patrician grandfather.

 

Jim Moran gave us a wonderful introduction to and status report on the recently acquired inventory of printing blocks from the old Globe company of Chicago. I don’t know what the proper name of the business was. It might have been Globe Print, or Globe Printing, or Globe Show Print. They were in the business of letterpress printed advertising. Movie posters, rodeo, car racing, and circus posters, and signage for grocery stores and small retailers.  And some political signage, including a lot of blocks for the old Illinois US Senator Dirksen. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, in terms of a fusion of material and social history. Who were these people in the 40s, 50s, and 60s who were going to rodeos, circuses, and scary movies? The whole thing had the air of a healthy working class world, with its own amusements and nascent consumer economy. Jim made the point that some of the circus posters that feature clowns are actually quite sinister, with the clowns playing as figures of chaos and menace. So what was life like for the classes of citizenry who consumed the thrills and contrived scares of the circus midway and freak shows? Who shopped at the stores that advertised their meat discounts in the windows? And who Senator Dirksen wanted to reach? Lots to wonder about there. Unfortunately, not much is known about Globe. Jim is starting to get some leads on the company, people who may have been involved, but it sounds like that is in an early stage.

 

The Hamilton staff and volunteers are slowly making their way through an estimated 1400 blocks, many of them damaged, and all of them having arrived in a completely disorganized state. The story is, the Globe company cleared them out and packed them for storage, but then they were somehow left in a tractor semi-trailer for 25 years, and practically forgotten. A whole bunch of type came along with it that they are also sorting. Some of the blocks are just amazing, and the proofing of them is what is a great motivation for putting in the labor. 

Most of the blocks are carved or cut vinyl. But check out this one, which is pure woodcut, handcarved.

 This place is the mecca of wood type, no question. For the letterpress printer, there’s interesting stuff at every turn.

 

The other day Sarah received a box from her parents containing a bunch of odds and ends from her high school and college years. It was fun to look through the stuff, travel the paths of memories. The re-discoveries included these two flyers from the Carleton College campus, from 23 years ago. I still remember the Cesar Chavez lecture. He was amazing, and already a legend in 1986. The UFW was engaged in a new campaign then, this time linking the working conditions of the fruit pickers to the heavy use of pesticides by commercial growers. It was a precursor to today’s many-sided environmental and climate justice movements.

 

I try to tell my younger friends about how it was then, at least on the Carleton campus. Every few weeks there were campus visits from noted activists, progressive thinkers, and workers for justice and liberation campaigns. People like Michael Harrington, Dennis Banks, and Angela Davis. And lots of other less famous people. The "tenured radicals" and so-called Closing of the American Mind backlash was right around the corner, but these widespread and frequent appearances by left wing figures were yet to be targeted by the organized right. Looking back on it, it was a very free moment in liberal education. I honestly don’t recall any of those events being documented. Partly, I’m guessing, because they weren’t recognized as so unusual or worthy of archiving. And partly out of simple neglect. So these flyers, randomly saved by Sarah years ago, are an important slice of our political eduction, i.e. a documentary bit of how that education actually was delivered two and a half decades ago.

Chicago pals Daniel Tucker and David Meyers found a way for my Madison/Chicago commute to function as something more than just a private two and a half hour meditation. They are both roasting and peddling coffee as small scale cottage industries. The fair trade organic beans are being supplied by Madison’s own Just Coffee. And guess who is driving regularly enough to make the deliveries? Yes, yours truly!

 

Tonight I made the first of probably quite a few more deliveries. Three bags @ 150 pounds each. I did not notice any appreciable increase in gasoline consumed. At least not on the highway. The stopping and starting in the city with a fully loaded vehicle does eat gas quickly. Still, this is a very good way to stack added value to the energy being consumed through transporting only myself, and to do my part in cultivating micro-economic activity and increased self-sufficiencies. Helping out in this way also gives me a reason to connect with more people in Madison–in this case, the fine people at Just Coffee. Their enterprise started out as an expression of their solidarity with the Zapatista rebels. These ragtag Madison activists found that the best way for them to get justly grown coffee from Chiapas to North American markets was to buy, roast, and sell it themselves through their own company. Now they have fair relationships with growing co-ops in other countries. The coffee I delivered was grown in Peru and Nicaragua. Check out the Just Coffee “politics” page.

 

The final bonus is that David is paying me in fresh roasted coffee.

 

The only downside is the smell inside the car. Unroasted beans do not have much of an aroma. Instead, there is the earthy but not terribly pleasant smell of burlap sacking. Drag.

I scooted over to Milwaukee yesterday, to meet up at the Milwaukee Art Museum with Ethan Lasser, a curator from Chipstone, and, in yet another capacity of working together, good ol' Rebecca Zorach. Ethan walked us through the galleries that house the combined Chipstone + Milwaukee Art Museum displays of American decorative arts. Ethan and his team are doing some really innovative curatorial work, truly bringing rare, masterfully crafted objects into contemporary relevance, and doing it without sacrificing the preciousness. Hard to describe their exhibition strategies fully. Some of the strategies are really simple, but very effective. For example, simply elevating chairs, such that eye-level apprehension of the chairs brings fresh shapes, detail, and negative space to the viewer's eye:

Other displays made use of digital and multimedia elements, bringing in some very smart interactive dimensions. One of the multimedia tweaks on an old object is Theaster Gates's video, installed to accompany the display of an impressively opulent and complexly crafted clerk's bureau.

The video brings in issues of historical memory, antebellum realities and myths, spoken word performance, early American economics, spectres of chattel slavery, dreams of miscegenation, and layers of beauty that expands on the aesthetics of the object itself.

Ethan, Rebecca, and I gathered to talk over Theaster's upcoming project at MAM, which will be much bigger than this installation, and think about producing texts to accompany it.

After the meeting I took advantage of the complimentary museum entry to see the Warhol Last Decade show. For anybody with any interest in Warhol (and that really should be just about anybody), the show is recommended.

But the real surprises for me were 1) the War Bonds posters in the halls of the offices (where Ethan took us for a few minutes), and 2) the temporary show of art by veterans.

I am a total sucker for old posters, of course, so the War Bonds propaganda got me and my camera going, quick.

As one would expect, the art work by veterans was intense, bringing home the war experience in ways we just don't see in the news. I was happy to see a contribution by our anti-war comrade and Iraq War vet Aaron Hughes. It was a painting titled "Checkpoint."

Of course, this being the Milwaukee Art Museum, just getting to spend some time in the sparsely visited space on a weekday was a treat. Especially since this time we got to see the insides of the Saarinen War Memorial part of the complex, as well as enjoy the grand entry lobby (which I think is called the Windhover Gallery).

It was more than three years ago that I picked up a remaindered copy of Hannah Arendt's classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. It sat on the shelf for a long while before I decided to tackle it. Nobody would call me a voracious reader, but I try to read at least one difficult book a year. I mean, that's opposed to the light reading that balances my book diet, or, even lighter, the re-readings of old favorites. Anyway, The Origins of Totalitarianism was to be it. And it is. I'm about 140 pages into it.

Around when I started it, my brother-in-law, who is a historian by training and blogs on urban development issues, told me that it took him some time to understand that starting a book, or reading a book, doesn't necessarily mean reading the whole thing. That selective and partial reading is allowed, and may often be a better use of one's time. I have always been a bit of a purist in that respect, expecting myself to read a book in full, if I was going to say that I had read it. But The Origins of Totalitarianism is a big book, about two inches thick; I thought to myself, maybe this is the book I'll try that out on. Or at least, be open to it.

So I started by aiming to read only Part One of the three parts, Antisemitism. But then I talked to political science professor and Mess Hall keyholder Sophia Mihic. Turns out she teaches this book regularly. I told her my plan. And she says to me, "well, you've got to read Part Two, Imperialism, because it's amazingly relevant and current material." So I am. And she's right. Oh my god, is she right.

I'm only about fifteen pages into Part Two, and it's all there: our current situation. Arendt describes the economics of imperialism, which she defines as existing as a historical period from 1884 to 1914, and forming the transitional period between the 19th and 20th centuries, as the crystallization of expansion for expansion's sake. Part and parcel of this political-economic development was the move from a production economy to a speculation economy. The other essential element in her narrative is the subservience of states to business. When speculation ran aground, armies were called in to do the dirty work of pacifying native peoples, the better that the speculators could realize their returns, through straight plunder, if necessary.

Weirdly (or not?) the currency of Arendt's analysis was just yesterday recognized by Richard Bernstein in the New York Times. The thing Bernstein does not talk about, and what really distresses, is the fact that Arendt wrote all this in 1948. Between '48 and the period of Imperialism, only a catastrophe across Europe and much of the world brought some clarity following the decades of dysfunction. What will a political historian be writing about in 2048? What awful events, what multiple holocausts, will happen between now and then, that said historian will emerge mid-century clear-eyed?

But that all said, I'm still making no promises on finishing the book.

Nicolas Lampert and Jesse Graves came to town to lead a mud stencilling action for the Wisconsin Books to Prisoners campaign to end the Department of Corrections bad habit of denying prisoners from receiving used books from the outside. The ostensible rationale is to prevent contraband from entering prisons. But that makes no sense at all since mailings are examined anyway, and newly purchased books are allowed but present the very same threat. Moreover, the refusals seem to be arbitrary and inconsistent. And we're not even talking about books being sent by individuals; these are books coming from bookstores that sell or donate used books. And nevermind the fact that (as any book aficionado can tell you) good condition used books are hardly any different than newly purchased versions.

Anyway, it was a well-coordinated action. The super-organized Sarah Quinn got the whole thing going.

Then the twenty (give or take) people divided up into five teams, each with an assigned area, moving out from the UW campus.

Before heading out, Jesse Graves, the young artist who first perfected the roofing paper technique, gave us a quick demonstration.

Jesse, Nicolas, and myself formed one team: the smallest crew! We hit the sidewalks in front of the Memorial Union and then went up State Street. The streets were alive, it being a football Saturday–and homecoming, no less!

We made our way up the street, laying down a few stencils here and there, ultimately aiming for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. When we got there, we saw that one of the other crews beat us to the site; the sidewalk in front of the museum already had a nice, rad image laid out in mud. We went across the street, aiming for the federal courthouse. And there, too, the quicker crew beat us to it. But their image had been deliberately stomped out. Later we got the story. Some petty dictator security guy came out of the courthouse and harassed the activists. Our people didn't back down; it's only a little dirt, they pleaded, and went on with the project. By the time we got there, the earlier work was more than a little smudged. Of course, we put down another.

But what I really wonder is, was that security guard (one of the people from the other crew thought the guy might have been, in fact, a U.S. marshall, but who knows) heavily influenced by the bas relief wall design on the side of the Overture Center, directly across the street from the courthouse? Because there seemed to be, after the guy's footwork job, some aesthetic relationship between the two art works.

Students at the school that employs me, Columbia College Chicago, have been very active in trying to save the Monetary Award Program in Illinois. This publicly funded program helps tens of thousands of young people in Illinois gain access to higher education. Right now the program is, like all worthy public programs, facing a dire threat of defunding. I am impressed by the mobilization I see among Columbia's students. They have been tabling in the lobby of my department's building everyday, and a student delegation went down to Springfield to lobby today. I hope my colleagues who teach in other schools around Chicago are seeing the same.

Here is an informative video made by Columbia students about the MAP program and what it means to students.

Go here to add your support to this important campaign.

As a human yo-yo, I do try to hit the best of both poles. On Wednesday night at the Wisconsin Book Festival going on in Madison I caught all of Lewis Koch's presentation and most of Barbara Manger and Janine Smith's, who together authored the book Mary Nohl: Inside & Outside. Lewis's work is really somthing, proof that straight photography remains the most surrealistic medium.

But Manger and Smith's work was the revelation of the evening. Mary Nohl was a legend by the time I moved to Milwaukee for grad school in the mid 1990s. I'd been told about her sculpture-filled lakefront property up in Fox Point, but never bothered to make the trip up to see it. Manger and Smith made it clear that even if I had, the best of Nohl's creative life was to be found inside the house. Simply put, over the decades this obsessive-compulsive creative spirit in the body of a wealthy woman made the whole property–especially the interior of the house and all it's furnishings–into a single, vast artistic statement. The pictures of the inside–the walls, the floors, the furniture–as well as Nohl's diaries and other writings, made an impression that will not soon leave me. Part outsider artist, part formal visionary, part wealthy eccentric, Mary Nohl is one of those oddball figures that makes the Wisconsin cultural landscape so fun to explore.

On the other end of my commuting string, tonight I got into Chicago in time for a screening of Autumn Gem at Columbia College's Film Row theater. The movie was a documentary profile of Qiu Jin, a Chinese nationalist insurgent from a hundred years ago. I didn't know anything about Qiu, so most of the hour-long documentary was informative. Still, it was very basic and could have been much deeper. There was very little said about Qiu's contemporary relevance, apart from some near-meaningless generalities about her as a precursor to later feminism. The bulk of the commentary within the movie came from historians who spoke about Qiu as a figure from a distant episode; the case was not made for why we as engaged artists and citizens should really care about this person. The movie did a good job of explaining China's state of political and governmental crisis a hundred years ago, but made zero effort to relate that revolutionary moment to the states of crisis we as a global populace are now facing. It should have. My goodness, what an opportunity missed.

In fairness to the filmmakers, they did aim for a 56-minute length and this was their first production. But even so, it could have been much more creative stylistically. The overall aesthetic was rather drab and institutional, like a high school educational video that tries to address an interesting subject but manages to bore for fear of being too adventurous or polemical. Also, the filmmakers placed too much emphasis in the visuals on martial arts, calligraphy, and too much reliance on traditional guzheng and other classical Chinese music.

An Injury to One this was not. (Can't wait to see that on the big screen; after yo-yo-ing back for Madison's Tales from Planet Earth film fest. Thanks to Nick Brown for giving me a heads up on the upcoming event!)