31 posts tagged “madison”
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.
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).
