Community & Economic Development Committee
City Hall 200 East Wells Street, Room 301-B Milwaukee, WI 53202 Agenda
May 29th, 2008 by Dave Reid
Public Works Committee
City Hall 200 East Wells Street, Room 301-B Milwaukee, WI 53202 Agenda
May 29th, 2008 by Dave Reid
Public Works Committee Holds Alley Vacation
Resolution 071564 proposed the vacation of two “paper” alleys to support the Palomar development project within the Park East. Apparently Alderman Bob Bauman read Mary Louise Schumacher‘s article in the Journal Sentinel, History lost in Park East bait-and-switch, because he stated that “I see this as a bait and switch” referring to the dramatic change in design that the Palomar project has undergone since it was originally proposed before Milwaukee County. The original design included the utilization and preservation of both the Sydney Hih and the Gipfel Brewerys whereas the latest design would demolish the Sydney Hih structure and move the Gipfel Brewery to another site. The committee voted to hold this file in attempt to exert some influence over this development. Normally the City of Milwaukee would have influence over development projects that involve land sales and zoning changes but as the new design required neither this is an unusual course of action. Resolution 080211 was a communication from the Public Policy Forum regarding their report on the Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS). The report indicates that in coming years MCTS will have completely spent all of a $44 million reserve of funds and will be projecting deficit spending. It goes on to show how MCTS has spent capital funds to support operational budgets and by doing so has deferred the purchase of 150 new buses. These deferments have pushed maintenance costs higher and will help create a $18 to $20 million dollar hole in upcoming budgets.
May 29th, 2008 by Dave Reid
Friday Photos Friday, 30. May 2008
Transpak 235 E. Pittsburgh Ave The Edge The North End The Residences on Water The Brewery
May 29th, 2008 by Dave Reid
A stitch in time
Woodland Pattern Book Center Devotion to Thread 720 E. Locust St., Milwaukee Now – June 13 Reception: Saturday May 31, 5-9pm, with a Gallery Talk at 7 pm Photos by Faythe Levine Woodland Pattern has long been a mainstay of the Riverwest neighborhood, and over the years, it has extended its reach to include the greater Milwaukee area with programming ranging from music to workshops to art exhibits and beyond. The venerable non-profit venue is a mix of hippie, uber-hip and points between. A mural fronting the building reads “28 years of power to the people.” Frankly though, some of that power should have been used to quell the endless, booming chatter of the 20-something woman whose loud mindlessness invaded the quiet gallery where I was trying to concentrate on writing this review. Apparently, she’d just dropped by to chat up the worker behind the desk. Quiet Please! Reviewing the work of 15 artists is all but impossible, and I felt myself pulling away from examining each of the approximately 40 pieces. That changed as I circled the room. The lone work I gave a zero rating was “We Other Victorians” (Xander Marro), primarily because it was a bad fit with the other works. A quilt of sorts, with an edgy motif, the colors were heavy, and, well, depressing among the mostly pastel threads used in the balance of the work. That said, I understand it satirizes the dark creepy era of Queen Victoria, so perhaps it was included in the exhibit to add a note of contrast. Jenny Hart’s 23”x36” wall-hung wonder “Pink Forrest (Flattery plus Charm)” is, even at the lofty price of $2,300, what I most wanted to take home. Ms. Hart hails from Austin, Texas and her exquisite naughty threads stitched on sleazy orange-pink satin fabric conjure the balls-out flavor of Western kitsch. If your grandma has a really awful tourist pillow from 1940’s Texas, you’ll get my drift. Kristin Loffer Theiss from out Washington way stitched three lovely heads (perhaps family members?) in black on white material. They reminded me of loose line drawings, or threads unspooling from a bobbin gone wild. Faultless to a tee, they are marvelous in the way that Jean Cocteau’s line drawings are marvelous. Orly Cogan contributed five works, one priced sky-high at $10,000. But what a piece it and her four others are. Surely she must know the work of self-taught Chicago artist Henry Darger (you can see his scroll drawings in the Milwaukee Art Museum folk collection); if not, it’s a real coincidence that her figures resemble Mr. Darger’s “Vivians,” sweet little girls with less than sweet attitudes who now and then sprout penises. Look here at this one: a lady, quite naked, playing ring toss with her naked partner, the object being to toss the ring over his waiting penis. These are delicate sensational works, none more so than “Bittersweet Obsession” where girls snort blow and, wearing nothing but fishnets, crouch while eating cupcakes. The thread work […]
May 29th, 2008 by Stella Cretek
The Boys Next Door
Staging Tom Griffin’s The Boys Next Door can be a tricky endeavor. The comedy about a group of developmentally disabled men and the social worker who looks after them uses a brand of humor that doesn’t always make people feel comfortable. The audience is encouraged to laugh at the cognitively impaired not because they are strange and freakish, but because their offbeat idiosyncrasies are honest reflections of neuroses common to even the most functional among us. The key to a successful staging of the play is the delicate balance between the comedy of the individual and the comedy of disability in a way that maintains a universal level of human dignity. The Sunset Playhouse production, which opened last weekend, comes perilously close to presenting its subjects as stereotypes of mental retardation, but only in brief, fleeting moments. For the most part, this is an exquisite production of a well-written contemporary comedy. Mark Neufang plays Jack Palmer, the social worker keeping track of four men who live in a group home for the developmentally disabled. The play charts Palmer’s uneasy desire to find better, less stressful work elsewhere. Neufang has an impressive amount of nice-guy charm, but the subtleties of his character’s mounting job dissatisfaction are largely missing. However, Neufang brings more than enough compassion to the stage to make up for any other shortcomings in his performance. Scott Kopischke plays group home resident Arnold Wiggins. Wiggins is a reasonably functional individual who works at a movie theatre. Wiggins has a mildly obsessive compulsive personality that is warped by an aversion to internally consistent logic. Kopischke recently played Elwood P. Dowd in a Sunset production of Harvey. His performance here is far more accomplished. Here he shows a profound amount of humanity and a clear aptitude for performance in a larger ensemble piece peppered with a few clever stretches of monologue. Lawrence J. Lukasavage plays group home resident Norman Bulansky. Norman’s cognitive development seems to be stuck at grade school level, but he’s functional enough to hold a job at a local donut shop. This is Lukasavage’s first performance with Sunset and probably one of the few he’s had outside Off The Wall Theatre. Lukasavage takes to the new stage quite well in a brilliantly subdued performance. It’d be all too easy to simply pretend to be a child in the role of Norman, and Lukasavage gracefully avoids this in a very sympathetic performance. Kurtis Witzlsteiner plays mild schizophrenic Barry Klemper. Klemper believes himself to be a professional golfer. Probably the most functional of the four men, Klemper may be one of the trickiest roles to play. The character has to seem completely functional until a key moment when everything turns around for him. Witzlsteiner is capable at conveying the character’s emotional dynamic, but seem to lack the kind of stage experience necessary to make the role as powerful as it could be. Mario Alberts rounds out the central cast in the role of Lucien P. Smith, a profoundly impaired man […]
May 29th, 2008 by Russ Bickerstaff
Whitney Gould Day (May 29th, 2008)
Mayor Tom Barrett today utilized his power of mayoral proclamation to declare it Whitney M. Gould Day in honor of the long-time Milwaukee Journal Sentinel urban landscape and architecture columnist who recently accepted a buy-out from Journal Communications and now serves as a Commissioner on the Historic Preservation Committee.
May 29th, 2008 by Jeramey Jannene
Fest me
Fest Me Milwaukee is in the grips of “Festivalism,” a word coined by Peter Schjeldahl (art critic for the New Yorker magazine) after surviving the Venice Biennale in 1999. “The drill is ambulatory consumption,” he quips, “a little of this, a little of that.” As I write, Memorial Day weekend’s Kite Fest unfolds below my balcony, and we’re off and running in the art fair race, where the most asked question is, “Where are the restrooms?” The Milwaukee International Art Fair has come and gone in a bowling alley event; it wasn’t on the lake, though it did feature water spouting from a can encased in plexiglass fronting the General Store booth. Of course Milwaukee isn’t Venice, but we do have Lake Michigan and organizers of art fairs get as close to it as possible (the most notable being the Lakefront Festival of the Arts), or if that’s not feasible, they hug as many inland lakes as possible. The media publishes long lists of where to go and what to peruse (Google on) though one needn’t travel far from one’s neighborhood these days because art fairs are everywhere, some resembling rummage sales for the culturally challenged. It’s almost required that shoppers come home with something, and it might even be a decent piece of art. In the corner of my office is a wooden sculpture purchased twenty years ago at the aforementioned Lakefront Festival of the Arts. It’s a female figure resembling a Marisol sculpture. It has multiple drawers and the head lifts off to reveal a secret chamber. I’m giving it to my grandson who is busy re-decorating his bedroom in “Indiana Jones” style. She was with me when I lived out in the country and the day my small house caught fire, I fled with one thing … her. When the firemen arrived, she greeted them on my front lawn. The first painting I ever purchased (in the late ‘60s) came from an art fair in Oconomowoc, and I think I may have bought it because the artist was lolling around the grounds in a leopard-skin bikini, accompanied by an exotic dog. It’s was a pretty bad painting and eventually I donated it to an auction even though it matched the couch in my suburban tri-level. Actually, art fairs aren’t a terrible way to start collecting stuff, because there’s plenty to choose from. The things you bring home may eventually teach you a thing or two, and at the very least you can say years down the line, “I bought that at an art fair years ago.” They become grist for your memory mill, but it’s doubtful they’ll teach you what art is. That takes years, and art fair viewers don’t have time. A few hours outing on a sunny day is really what they’re about, so go ahead, have some fun. This isn’t to say that whopper fairs like the Venice Biennale will teach you what art is either. I’ve never attended an uber-whopper, but I imagine […]
May 28th, 2008 by Stella Cretek
The Spitfire Grill
The Spitfire Grill still sparkles. The award winning musical, a reprise production from September 2002, literally glows through the book, music, and lyrics by Wisconsin natives and friends James Valcq and Fred Alley – especially on this particular Saturday night, when the four piece orchestra played under composer Valcq’s guest direction. Based on the 1996 film The Spitfire Grill by David Lee Zlotoff, first screened at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, Valcq and Alley adapted the movie to one of a small Midwestern town: Gilead, Wisconsin. This is where the young ex-convict Percy Talbot dreams of starting over and setting down deep roots, but finds little to love when she reaches Gilead’s only restaurant and discovers its few inhabitants discouraged by life. But as Percy learns to forgive what others think and say about her and how they treat her as she participates in rural living, she also learns to forgive herself for committing a crime of desperation. Overlooking a bright morning sunrise, Percy ultimately begins to believe when she sings that “A diamond of hope shines a light in this dark heart of mine.” The cast of The Spitfire Grill lives out the frustration of a bleak Wisconsin winter on the Skylight’s spare, rough-hewn set, showcasing an open staircase of timber. Yet Alley’s compassionate lyrics, set to Valcq’s lovely melodies, resonate as a paradise of color, similar to a hill of October trees, enhances the backdrop through scene changes on the stage. From the opening “A Ring Around the Moon” to the charming “Into the Frying Pan,” Valcq’s rhythms use every frying pan lid, clanking car chain and snow shovel as percussion in a perfectly-timed performance. In an exceptionally poignant moment of music, Shelby Thorpe — the young woman helping in the grill when owner Hannah breaks her leg — comforts Percy after she reveals her personal grief with the haunting “Wild Bird.” The audience remains as silent as the night woods as the vocals haunt the theater throughout much of the performance, except when down-home humor punctuates the dialogue. This profound attention focuses on a strong professional cast including Katy Blake as Percy Talbott, who at first is all bravado but settles in to the softer aspects of the role as the evening progresses. Leslie Fitzwater as Hannah Ferguson and Elizabeth Moliter as Shelby Thorpe bring touching voices to the musical harmonies, and Becky Spice creates notes of laughter with her portrayal of Effy Krayneck. Today’s audiences still applaud this tale of redemption and hope, which won the Richard Rodger’s Production Award in 2001. Alley, who died only a month before the honor was awarded, continually lives on in through this performance and all his art. The musical resonates evocatively when the lyrics, “Shoot the Moon … Life is hard and gone to soon” resound on stage. His songs speak to the simple but profound truths in life, always delivered with a smile. Since its 2001 premiere in New York, The Spitfire Grill has played continually across the […]
May 27th, 2008 by Peggy Sue Dunigan
City Plan Commission
809 N. Broadway 1st Floor Boardroom Milwaukee, WI 53202 CPC 6/2/2008 Agenda
May 27th, 2008 by Dave Reid
The truth of the matter
As a kid I believed everything I read was true, especially the Bible (the Old Testament was particularly frightening), and odd as it may seem, tales from True Confessions magazine, a publication forbidden in my Midwestern childhood home. Fortunately, my best friend lived across the street in the shadow of the Presbyterian Church, and when her mom was away, we two would smoke her mom’s Lucky Strikes and dive into what was forbidden in my home. I confess, those were exciting times. Recently, I received a yellowing copy of True Confessions: Sixty Years of Sin, Suffering & Sorrow (1919-1979). It was a time-warp packed with familiar ads: Adola brassieres (“flatters where it matters”), Tayton’s Cake Make-Up (“a Hollywood favorite”), Marchand’s Golden Hair Wash (“don’t let time darken your hair”), and Yours-Truly nylon hosiery, which urged me to send for a FREE sample stocking. Tempting? Yes, but even I realized that a single stocking was useless. Balancing the ads promising full-throttle beauty were many hinting at the disaster of scaly skin blemishes, bad breath, and for one on the cusp of young womanhood … underarm perspiration, which could be fixed with a dab of Odo-Ro-No. The publication was aimed at females, ages 20-35, 75% of who were married. The confessions had sizzling titles: “Shakedown Marriage” (When a showgirl down on her luck meets a naïve lad in khaki on a 36-hour leave, a lot can happen … and does!), “Interrupted Elopement” (But Lester was impatient with anything that thwarted his desires), or this from “My G.I. Joe” (He leaned forward and his big hands covered mine), and “The Girl They Called BAD” (All her sorry, pitiful life, Ivy longed for someone to care, anyone!). Shadow-filled black and white photos of real people in fake situations hinted at Film Noir, another of my early obsessions enjoyed at our town’s Rialto Theater. I never tried Marchand’s Golden Hair Wash, but seven decades have left me with a mop of natural silver. Recently, I learned on Wikipedia (another benefit of age) that confession magazines gave way to comic books in 1949 before staggering forth in condensed form in Reader’s Digest. My computer also revealed that a 1981 movie (True Confessions) starred two Roberts (De Niro and Duvall), as priest vs. gangster. In 1985, television made a stab at a series culled from the pages of True Confessions, but even the show’s host, Bill (“My Favorite Martian”) Bixby, couldn’t keep it from expiring. In 2006, Dorchester Media linked with Leisure Enterprises to launch paperback anthologies titled True Confessions, True Romance, and True Story. Believe it, True Confessions is alive and kicking via subscriptions. Magazine Values.com touts it as a “glimpse into the forbidden!” An image of the magazine’s cover carries headlines titled “Toxic Love,” “My Son Shot His Best Friend,” “Talk Show Terror” and “Why I Married a Gay Man.” Given our current world of “confessions,” a world where celebs mea culpa daily and Jerry Springer is a hero, the True Confessions of my pre-teen […]
May 26th, 2008 by Stella Cretek
Milwaukee International
It’s a little late to be posting any coverage of last weekend’s Milwaukee International, and I don’t have much to say for myself – besides that I’ve been thinking about it, sorting out the hour or so of art I saw and the subsequent hour or two of beer I drank at Polish Falcons. There’s a lot to say about Milwaukee International, and it deserves more careful coverage than it’s received. Timelier coverage, too, but that’s another matter. The show (which you can read more about here and here if you need background) was fast and low. It was crowded and god-awful hot as the gallery lights beat down on the exhibition hall, normally reserved for weekly dartball league, which is a game I had no idea existed until Andrew Swant told me about it. The choice of venue may have been in celebration of Milwaukee blue-collar/polka/bowling culture, but make no mistake, it was also completely tongue-in-cheek. This is an art movement — and more widely a cultural movement — that celebrates the unexpected, the kitschy, the almost-condescendingly but incongruously sincere appreciation of low-fi, low-brow, low-cost, low-maintenance. Yes, friends: Milwaukee International is an expo of the best hipster art from around the world. I felt like I was walking through an issue of The Believer, live outtakes from Me and You and Everyone We Know and a Riverwest rummage sale – all at once. Photos by Faythe Levine Mano Izquierda from San Juan presented large, colorful portraits of Magic Johnson, Cookie Monster and other artifacts of the recent past, leaving out sticky notes and writing utensils for viewers to participate in the installation. There were a lot of adorable, poorly-drawn sketches of everything from plastic forks and knives (in what was actually a compelling selection of works on “obsessive consumption” by Kate Bingaman-Burt at the Paperboat Gallery booth) to men and women in their underwear and folks looking mopey to legions of scary, miserable, wobbly-faced troops (presented by Hiromi Yoshii from Tokyo, whose sat miserably by, surrounded by flickering, despondent TV sets piled on cardboard boxes; a groaning post-apocalyptic work that reminded me of a less fluid and exuberant Kristopher Pollard, whom I saw in attendance a few minutes later). The Green Gallery presented a clock made out of tostadas (for $2,000, it can be yours). Perhaps the ultimate in garage sale style was the riotous installation of “Milwaukee Artists 1946-1956″, representing derivative mid-modern works from Milwaukee’s “Layton School” period. The editorial edge classifies such works as “the zenith” of our city’s artistic achievement. Photographs from gallery openings in the era were scattered across the bar; a graph on a nearby wall tracked Milwaukee’s art in a thick red line, with the ‘80s and ‘90s were labeled merely “Drugs” and an arrow crashing below the graph’s threshold where “Milwaukee International” appears. It’s an obvious stab of cheeky sarcasm and a statement about what makes art what it is, who gets to decide and how we all assume that we’re living […]
May 25th, 2008 by Amy Elliott
