4 posts tagged “madison-chicago”
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!)
I am in the middle of a very busy season. Shanghype! is open now at the Hyde Park Art Center. Heartland is open at the Smart Museum. And Demise continues at the South Side Community Art Center. Well, a busy three weeks, anyway. It means making a lot of trips between Madison and Chicago, which is tiring but better than having to fly places. In these periods my car and the road become a kind of third home for me. Millions of car commuters do this everyday, all year round, but for me it is only a periodic chore. Plenty of people do it, but I don't know if I could spend two and a half hours commuting everyday. Probably not.
But even the worst forms of traveling are still traveling. And that means, in the case of my drive, which is mostly bad because it is so boring, I still occasionally see things that make me wonder. Like this vanity plate.
Okay, maybe not so interesting. But I have to take what I can get on this drive.
When my driving spikes I also get to experience one of the hidden pleasures of commuting: the relief of pulling into the driveway of our home, our castle, and appreciating it anew. The quiet joy in coming home never gets old.
Today on WORT's noon time show, A Public Affair, host Chris Dols had a much needed conversation by phone with Bob Quellos, an architect and Chicago citizen who is helping with the activist effort No Games Chicago. This was the first time I've heard in Madison a critical discussion of the City of Chicago's effort to woo the International Olympic Committee and the 2016 Summer Games. The reason it is important that this analysis be heard in Madison is because our city has become part of Chicago's official Olympic bid, having officially been named as the site of several competitive events. The governor and the mayor are on board. There has been virtually no voice on the issue other than that of those who are already sold on the idea. Predictably, from the get-go they have deployed the usual boilerplate about tourism and economic boons.
Missing is any analysis that takes into account what hosting the Games will probably mean for Chicago, and, in turn, how the crushing fiscal burden left on Chicago by the Games might affect the surrounding region. Including Madison. This lack of analysis is major problem given the anxiety bourgeois Madison feels regarding poor and working class people moving to Madison from the nearby big cities of Milwaukee and Chicago. How the economic and living conditions in those cities are managed and, in this case, maybe worsened substantially, should be of concern to people (and activists) here precisely because the demographic shifts in Madison probably correspond to those changing conditions.
Instead of blindly considering a Chicago Summer Games an automatic good, and, in the worse cases, simultaneously bemoaning the outsiders who are bringing to Madison new levels of violence and lawlessness, we should be thinking through the operations that make the nearby big cities unlivable, driving poor people out. This would include such strikingly neoliberal developments like hosting a summer Olympics. Unfortunately, even during the conversation on-air there wasn't much time spent on the regional ramifications, but it was a good start.
I love the novel V. I really should reread it since it has been a million years. But part of the opening I remember pretty clearly. Benny Profane, 'a schlemiehl and human yo-yo,' moves up and down Manhattan by subway. Well, I'm with Benny. The last few days I've moved between my poles of Madison and Chicago so frequently, the yo-yo effect is being felt.
Notes and questions that have arisen as a result of this spike in drive time, having to do with the drive itself, which is, on my normal one round trip a week schedule, usually a two and a half hour experience I'm trying to escape:
1) For most relaxing driving, leave either end at around 10:30 at night. It seems the freeways and tollways are usually wide open then, but the overnight construction hasn't gotten rolling fully yet.
2) Driving into Chicago on Sunday at midnight gives you a taste of the quiet, lonely highways of years past. You still almost always see headlights on the interstate, but the cars are very widely spaced. Everybody's got their own section of road.
3) I wonder what the story is with that powerline that's going up right now, running along the southern easement of the I-90 tollway from about, I think, Schaumburg to out past Hoffman Estates. Anybody know what I'm talking about?
4) People have not been speeding, not like in years past. I wonder if the recession has something to do with the seemingly fewer speed limit scofflaws on the roads.
5) It's hard to beat a really good radio show. But still, why do people listen to Bill Cunningham?
6) Chrysler's Belvidere Assembly plant has been idle for weeks now. Driving by, one cannot help wonder if it will ever return to activity, or if we've just witnessed the end. Or rather, the beginning of another mouldering, disused midwestern factory.
7) Mike Wolf sent me a scan of a drawing he did recently. Now I'm imagining this satellite covering the midwest, making visible and maybe keeping track of all the ant-like movements of us humans on the ground. So I would be that one ant you sometimes notice that for no apparent reason to us seems to move between two places, back and forth. Yeah, that's me, and Mike's Satellite of Love floats above.
