30 posts tagged “madison”
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.
The night we returned from China, our mischieveous, murderous cat Messy tore up a small animal. I think it was a young rabbit. Or maybe a large mouse. He had a rabbit cornered in my office a couple months ago, so I know it's a possibility. I wasn't much for poking the carcass too many times to figure it out. There wasn't much of a face or even a head left. There was what appeared to be one whole eyeball in with the scattered remains. Thank you, Messy.
How this cat that is so attached to us and so docile with us can be such a brute death machine is always a head trip.
Mike Wolf did the dirty work. Messy bloodied up the carpet in my workspace. I had to steam clean it the next day.
We invited the artist-traveler Mike Wolf to be our house sitter and resident artist for the fifteen days we would be out of the country, traveling.
This is something I have been thinking about for a while, what with the comfortable home and nicely set up letterpress shop I have. It is a shame when we are out of town and the work space could be put to use by somebody else, but isn't. I thought, wouldn't it be nice for an artist to come and make use of the gear while we are away, and keep the house occupied and the cat company, too.
Of course, it has to be the right person, with the right skills, and a schedule that fits with ours. This summer, and for the first time, that person was Mike Wolf. He's got some basic printmaking experience and is a quick learner, has an interest in and history with cheap book and zine making, and, most auspiciously, had already spent a couple of weeks this summer elsewhere in the midwest making paper for the first time. Talk about 'green,' sustainably produced paper–this stuff was made out of garlic mustard fibers. So he biked into Madison with a stack of paper and his ideas for printing (and other projects). After giving him a basic Vandercook and typesetting tutorial, we were off to China.
The printing went well.
On the garlic mustard paper:
Mike says he plans to use these prints as a cover for a zine yet to be assembled. After folding, the front will read "THE WORD hood rural area?"
And here is a pic of his second project, using some of my favorite border pieces, abstractly, and on some scrap end pieces of paper I had laying around. The paper, I later informed Mike, is actually gummed and he printed on the right side, so now's he's got the option of doing some convenient wheat pasting.
So the whole thing was a success. Like when I hand over my guitar to somebody else to play, and produces a different and better sound out of the same old instrument, it is a hoot to see what another artist does with my collection of type and ornaments.
Here is the scan of the first flyer I've designed and drawn for a Madison event. The gig is a benefit show being played by my pal Bill's band, Bonobo Secret Handshake. The beneficiery is the Madison Arcatao Sister City Project, and the occasion is the celebration of the recent elections victory of the FMLN in El Salvador!
The original was hand drawn. Bill caught a typo and made some digital adjustments, which I will correct by hand later (he still has the original!). And he added the WORT logo at the bottom. Next time, I'll hand draw that, too.
Nice to see some real leadership out of Congress every once in a while. It is especially gratifying when it's your representative. In this case, Madison's Honorable Tammy Baldwin.
What is sad is that there are no co-sponsors. Perhaps you could ask your rep to consider it?
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.
And speaking of World War II, check out this video I shot the other day, over at Lewis Koch's East Side work studio.
Lewis Koch shows WW II posters from Dan S Wang on Vimeo.
There was big crowd on hand for Noam Chomsky. Not surprising considering this is Madison, after all. There were probably two thousand people or more.
I had my usual Chomsky gripes, though. To sum it all up, it goes like this: AND???
As in, okay, American hypocrisy is a fact...AND?
Okay, our elected leaders and ruling elites are morally bankrupt...AND?
Okay, some of them are honest and/or brazen enough to not even lie about it, thereby skirting the hypocrisy charge...AND?
Chomsky is uncompromisingly negative, frames foreign policy tightly around admirably simple moral codes (um, 'though shalt not kill' comes to mind), and exposes the brutality of projected American force for what it is.
But we already knew all that. Going to see Chomsky is like the inverse of going to see Neil Young. We don't want the nuggets, the sing-alongs, the greatest hits...we're buying tickets to see him take some risks, say something experiemental. And he never does.
And one other gripe: in the introduction Scottish physician-activist Dr. Graham Watt made a joke about how when he told a Canadian colleague that he was headed to America, to Madison, for a symposium, the colleague then said, 'Madison? That's not America!' The assembled throng let out a collective chuckle, unmistakably self-satisfied in tone. It irked me. I am as happy to be living in a non-conforming city like Madison as anybody, but a rolling of the eyes would have been a more appropriate response. Let's us never forget, yes, Madison is the enlightened city, in many respects more European in feel and governance. But like small, homogenous, wealthy European countries, Madison's progressivism is built on a kind of affluence that is not to be shared, an affluence that allows for a measure of denial.
More promising was an event two nights later. This was a screening of Democracy's Ghosts, an excellent documentary about the disenfranchisement of those with felony convictions. The event was part of an ongoing monthly screening series about prison-related issues at Rainbow Bookstore. The small room was maxed out at about twenty-five people, and the ACLU reps on hand did a good job breaking down the situation here in Wisconsin.
Expanding working and middle class waistlines in large parts of the midwest have accompanied the rise of the suburban feeding troughs known as Chinese buffets. You know the ones. Strip mall-friendly, often purportedly 'international' in its offerings, and always the best value in town.
There have been some days in Madison when I need Chinese food and that means, from at least the time China Palace closed (and boy do we miss that place), I'm going to have mediocre-to-bad Chinese American fare. So I might as well go to the nearby China Wok Buffet (I mean, as opposed to one of the table service establishments). Their food is at least very fresh, especially during the lunch rush. That makes up for the fact that something like nine out of their twelve protein offerings are some variety of chicken. And plus, it's cheap. Which explains the usual lunch clientele: packs of teens or students, retired folks, and working men who wear shirts with a name patch.
But today I saw something new. Guys with coats and ties, women in office wear, folks from the insurance company, the law office, the accounting firm. People who might have gone not so long ago to the nearby upscale chain Biaggi's for lunch digging into the $6.95 lunch buffet (includes bottomless soda pop). Maybe these folks were part of the mix all along and I just never noticed. But the customers at these particular tables I saw today, they were still fresh either to the buffet or to the concept of a great deal, because they attacked the buffet with an eagerness I've rarely noticed among the regulars. I suppose it is just another example of history's tables being turned by the twists of neoliberal globalization. Where the relationship between China and the West was once encapsulated by the 'rice bowl Christians' in China, so-called because of the two-way exchange missionaries relied on for converts in China, ie conversions in exchange for food, now we have the Chinese buffets in Middleton, Wisconsin, Middle America. This is the capitalist imperative, moving at the speed of light, as fast as electronic orders can be filled on the futures markets, bent by the gravitational forces of biopower (our bodies need fuel, today and tomorrow) and cultural difference (eating is social, the social is cultural).
For sixteen consecutive weeks beginning at the end of last August I had not slept in Madison for more than five nights straight. So after the semester ended in early December, it was a relief to put down the car keys for several weeks. Actually, after all that time splitting between places, being at home for even two weeks felt like a long time. Very nice to get back to
cooking and baking;
printing;
on ausgang,
on Mark's blog,
and for eipcp;
walking;
getting angry about the Israeli pummeling of Gaza, and the supremely dysfunctional Palestinian and Arab response (okay, not very nice to get back to this);
simply enjoying the cold, cozy season;
and catching up on some dvds, like a mini fest of Hitchcock films I'd previously not seen: Saboteur, Torn Curtain, The Trouble with Harry. Wow, I can now see why Matthew Weiner takes so much from the Master!
Best wishes to all visitors for the New Year!
