For the health of it

By Catherine McGarry Miller Photos by Erin Gebhart Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all know we should eat healthier. We Americans are overfed and undernourished and we know it. Still, to most of us, the words “healthy” and “tasty” seem incompatible. It’s Judy Mayer’s job to bridge that gap. As Nutritionist for Outpost Natural Foods, Mayer guides clients toward healthier lifestyles. She is neither zealot nor evangelist. Personally, she’s a meat minimalist but not pure vegetarian. Her husband is a hunter who prepares his venison alongside her in their kitchen whilst she prepares her vegetables. They come together over side dishes, proving that vegetarians and meat-atarians can successfully coexist. Mayer comes to her present position after many years in the retail grocery business. Her father died tragically young in a car accident when Mayer was just 12. It’s still tender ground. Her mother, an occupational therapist, did not remarry but raised her three children alone. From that young age, Mayer was impressed with her mother’s devotion to her children and her ability to keep food on the table, even with a very demanding schedule. “My mother was a good cook and that’s all I knew. At home we ate the same 10 meals over and over again.” The menu included good old Sunday pot roasts drenched in gravy, broccoli swimming in butter, the “best pork roast ever,” tuna casseroles, fabulous pies and the “best sugar cookies in the world.” Still, it was a limited palette. When she started a job at Red Owl at age 16, Mayer was amazed at the range of foods available. “My love of food came from that first job and working in retail groceries my whole life. I think I’ve worked for every chain. I love being around people and food. As a cashier you get to talk to a lot of people. You also see all the foods people are buying and all the foods they shouldn’t be buying. It really bothered me to see what parents were feeding their children and I experimented at home with recipes. Most people read magazines; I read cookbooks. I’ll take a good cookbook instead of a novel any day.” At home, Mayer experimented with healthful alternatives. “I started adding more fiber, reducing fat and using whole grain instead of the white flour we all grew up with. We were always adding to our repertoire with recipes like cherry crisp with oatmeal crust with cherry pie filling – my kids still love it.” Mayer started in management at Outpost 13 years ago. “Outpost helped me through school and helped me create my own job and I love it. Every day is different – I get to share my passion for good food and my mission is to get everyone to eat a healthy diet one step at a time.” Her main duties are store tours, individual nutritional counseling, nutrition classes and cooking demonstrations at the store and in the community. For just $25 an hour, Mayer offers nutritional counseling […]

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

Despite his reputation as a weirdo, Stephen Malkmus’s fourth solo record plays like the work of an average dude hashing out life’s universal kinks. That’s right — even beatniks like Malkmus struggle with the same “sometimes it feels the world’s stuffed with feathers, table-bottom gum just holding it together” thoughts that we all do – though maybe he does have a more imaginative vocabulary. The instantly relatable “Gardenia,” a tidy pop song about the dissipation of a relationship’s honeymoon phase, actualizes how easy one can flip from doted-on (“I kinda like the way you dot your Js with giant circles of naiveté”) to damaged goods (“Are you just a present waiting to be opened up and parceled out again?”) and delivers some of the record’s best lines. Malkmus’ savvy lyrical poetry is recurrent with the former Pavement front man’s previous Jicks releases, as are his percussive vocals and gritty, southern-Calfornia guitar noodling. Composed of multiple movements that host peppery prog-rock interludes, the 10-minute title-track, which documents a trek through the southwest, and the single “Baltimore” are elaborate epics. The unfussy “We Can’t Help You” is accompanied by ragtime piano and a coy female harmony, while “Wicked Wanda” is curiously redolent of the “lemon drops” bridge of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” It’s the clincher that brings Malkmus, “the Grace Kelly of indie rock,” and now a dad in his 40s, closer to the ground. All 10 tracks are indispensable and fully realized, making Real Emotional Trash a treasure. VITAL Source welcomes Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks to Turner Hall on March 20 with John Vanderslice. For more information call 414-286-3663 or visit The Pabst Theater online. And check out Erin Wolf’s interview with John Vanderslice.

The Mars Volta

Popular consensus holds that The Mars Volta reached their creative summit with their debut Deloused In The Comatorium. I would argue against this with the notion that creative masterminds Cedric Bixler-Zavala (vocals and melodies) and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (guitar and creative direction) aren’t reaching upward – they’re reaching outward. These gentlemen are essentially a protean entity, constantly moving and shapeshifting within their own limits (a term one must use loosely). And while The Bedlam in Goliath, their fourth full-length in five years, doesn’t quite have the impact of their debut, it’s still effective and highly praiseworthy. Their melodies in particular cover new terrain. Album centerpieces “Wax Simulacra,” “Goliath” and “Tourniquet Man” contain Cedric’s most streamlined phrasings, even taking on a pure pop-couplet form at times. The music is still rhythmically aggressive – poly-Latin with a hardcore lean – with signature emphatic punctuations. The instrumental interplay is dynamic and cohesive throughout. Bedlam might not be their definitive work, but I’m not sure that’s the goal. They’re still a “tight as a mosquito’s ass” group of confident and explorative musicians, songwriters and sonic sculptors. “Definitive” implies a destination, and I don’t think they want to have one. (Though I’ll probably lose cool points, I strongly urge you to pick up the Best Buy edition, as it comes with a live DVD that showcases their fiery initiative, muscular chops and their definitively brilliant cover of The Sugarcubes’ classic “Birthday.”)

Destroyer

Destroyer’s Dan Bejar has always been the sort to overshadow his music through his verbosity and the sheer precociousness of his vocal inflection. Fortunately, with his 3-D attention to production and his knack for atmospheric, cabaret-style ballads populated by pianos, strings and jazzed-out guitars, he pulls it off. Like the love child of David Bowie and Bob Dylan and the sibling of Luna’s Dean Wareham, Bejar has attracted fans and critical praise for his bombastic used-bookstore brain, his affably indecipherable nasal croon and his penchant for drifting into reverb-y, shimmering space jams. Bejar’s eighth album under the moniker Destroyer (Bejar has also collaborated with the New Pornographers and Swan Lake), Trouble in Dreams was concocted with much of the same band behind his last release, Destroyer’s Rubies. Trouble in Dreams is a bit more restricted, more sonically dense, more sweet than crass, peppered with Bejar’s poetic sailor mouth and washed in the osmotic environs of fresh, vaporous Canada. Bejar sugars his usual dose of medicinal lyrics with delicacies such as “common scars brought us together” (“Introducing Angels”) and “blue flower, blue flames / a woman by another name is not a woman” (“Blue Flower / Blue Flames”), an obvious reference to his new beau Sydney Vermont and their duo Hello, Blue Roses. Trouble in Dreams is balanced by a more direct sound than Destroyer’s Rubies’ meandering one. Tracks such as “Dark Leaves Form a Thread,” “The State” (complete with a ghostly organ solo) and the shining “My Favourite Year” cut the meandering ‘Euro-blues’ to a minimum, adding percussion that is more characteristically drum-y than filler-y and vocals that are more spot-on than anything that Bejar has completed to date. It isn’t necessarily a pop album, but it has little pockets of silver lining peeking through that previously didn’t exist.

John Vanderslice is practicing disable-ization

“I don’t even have a suitcase right now – i’ve gotta go out and buy one. The zipper is broken on my old one and it’s still got the tape on it.” John Vanderslice is one week shy of heading off on his European/ United States tour. First stop: Café Mono in Oslo. “‘Disable-izing’ is the perfect word for right now,” he says of the whirlwind of activity surrounding the creation, production and release of his new album – Emerald City – and his impending tour. The 40-year-old musician is also the owner of San Francisco’s Tiny Telephone, an indie-centric recording studio famous for its excellent but affordable production. The studio equipment is not playing nice today, but Vanderslice still manages to be conversational and good-natured despite his distractions. Emerald City (named for the Green Zone in Baghdad), his sixth album, combines the efforts of Scott Solter (Mountain Goats, Spoon) on production and band mates Ian Bjornstad, David Douglas and David Broecker. Emerald City is Vanderslice’s second album to address 9/11 and its aftermath; the first, Pixel Revolt, garnered mixed reviews, and while Emerald City follows the same themes, it is grittier, a bit more cut. A sonic “study in distortion,” Emerald City ditches the lush orchestral arrangements of Pixel Revolt and muddies things up. “I don’t know if we went far enough [on Pixel Revolt … so] we got rid of the strings,” he says. You can’t blame him. Vanderslice’s juxtaposition of big, bright Technicolor sounds with words born of intense, introspective paranoia played out as gorgeous but confusing. Emerald City settles into place so the dust and debris can register. Don’t expect Vanderslice to brush the orchestra away completely, though. He’s simply relocating it, keeping it just enough within earshot to be influential without dominating the sound. It’s not the only thing that’s changed this time ‘round. “On Emerald City I wanted to get away from the ballads that were so much a part of Pixel Revolt, and now all I want to do is write frenetic, electric guitar songs. I want to feel disable-ized … there are very few electric guitars on Pixel Revolt and none on Emerald City.” This constant urge for transformation is evident in Vanderslice’s jump from former band mk Ultra into his varied solo career, as well as his avid adoration of other art forms: literature, film and especially photography, his counterpart addiction. Photography has lent a new depth to his songwriting of late, he says. His photographs are rich with perspective, showing Vanderslice’s love for architecture (he calls Milwaukee’s architecture “stunning” based on its “industrial powerhouse” roots) and the people he encounters in the studio and abroad. Spain holds a particular charm for the artist. “If I’m close to the Mediterranean, I’m happy,” he says. “The people have so much energy; the streets are so alive at night.” It fits with his overall sensibility regarding imagery and how it relates to the music he writes. “I think about photography, and photography can […]

Mr. Tomatoface

Oh, yeah. Every Tuesday. Come ON! What was I THINKING?! I can’t play this game. It’s Thursday night. Tomorrow is Friday. Fail, fail, fail. Jesus, what happened to this week? I had every expectation that this was going to be one of those breezy, pretty weeks, that I’d just sleep a lot and stroll into the office whenever I felt like it and spend a lot of time at my desk poking at various flabby spots on the internet and then go home early and drink juice and take a nap. It did NOT happen like that. This week opened up like a big ol’ jaw and swallowed me whole. On Tuesday (remember Tuesday, when I was supposed to be blogging? Preferably whilst drinking juice?) I stopped in at the 88.9 RadioMilwaukee anniversary fête at Palms Bistro. I met the fine gentlemen of Great Lakes Distillery — at the wizened age of 1, now Wisconsin’s oldest distillery, our first since prohibition — and sampled their very nice gin, which is made with sweet basil and Wisconsin ginseng, two botanicals that have never been found in gin — before now. It was delicious — sweet and spicy — and I am not just saying that in hopes that they will write in and say, “oh hey Amy, we love your blog and we know you’re a lush; here’s a bottle of gin for you.” But some friends & former coworkers (including my esteemed colleague Mr. John Eding) thought it might be nice to catch up over some more banal libations, so we skipped over to Landmark Lanes, everyone’s favorite palace of trash, for $2 beer night. (Yes, friends who are not from Milwaukee and do not understand, you are correct in interpreting that special to mean $2 for a pint of any beer at all.) Before I knew it, it was bedtime. On Wednesday, when I should have been blogging my apologies for missing my self-imposed Tuesday blog parade (Matt Wild, am I driving you crazy!?), I was at the ever-grand Turner Hall Ballroom, PBR Tall Boy in hand, working the sponsorship table for the Sia show, wondering why no one was dancing to opening phenom Har Mar Superstar, who you just have to see to believe. I didn’t really know what to expect from the night at all. Sia seemed nice enough, a cute Australian with a pretty voice and credentials — former singer for Zero 7, spots on the soundtracks for Garden State and Six Feet Under — that had me looking forward to sort of ambient, possibly production-heavy, likely sort of humdrum pop finery. All I knew about Har Mar was that he is frequently booed offstage, and that it was possible he would show up in a cape and a g-string. But he was great, exactly the kind of kitsch that I fall for — a genuinely incredible, Prince-esque R&B voice, a tight back-up band (with a bass player in a Storm Trooper costume), lots of dancing […]

The Clintons and the Dallas Cowboys

While most of the universe has already reached the conclusion that Barack Obama will ultimately receive this year’s Democratic nomination for president, there are a few voices reminding us that it ain’t over until it’s over. Among them is Dan Schnur, a Republican consultant originally from Wisconsin, who presents his argument in terms all fans of the Green Bay Packers can relate to. He compares the Clintons to the dreaded Dallas Cowboys who could never be counted out while there was still time left on the clock. I also recall inspired come-from-behind victories by the Cowboys though mostly from an earlier era. Back in the ‘70s, I was often amazed by the Cowboys of Tom Landry and Roger Staubach who routinely scored two or three touchdowns in the closing minutes of key games. More recently, the Jimmy Johnson-Troy Aikman teams committed similar atrocities at the expense of the “green and gold.” Schnur draws a parallel between Dallas’s mojo and the times that the Clinton clan came back from certain death, during the 1992 New Hampshire primary, following the health care reform debacle (aka Hillarygate), the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and the Lewinsky scandal of the late 1990s. For the most part, I don’t buy it. For Hillary Clinton to overcome Obama’s lead in delegates, she would not only have to win the remaining primaries in delegate-rich states of Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania but by extremely large margins. But it certainly is entertaining to imagine some Republicans shuddering at the thought of facing the Clinton machine. Surely, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole and George H. W. Bush wish they had a wooden stake they could bury in the heart of this family. It is true that in politics, as in sports, momentum can shift in a New York minute. So make sure you don’t get a sandwich or take a bathroom break until either Obama or Clinton have nailed down the nomination. You don’t want to miss this finish.

sadly, not actually the same thing

THIS SUNDAY! The Black Lips w/Quintron and Miss Pussycat @ TURNER HALL!

We are sponsoring this sure-to-be-spectacular show at beautiful TURNER HALL this Sunday, March 2. Visit us at the VITAL table and sign up for ticket giveaways, grab a copy of the new March issue, get some VITAL crayons or a limited edition VITAL 5th Birthday tote bag, or just say hi! Or dance with us! We are champions on the dance floor. We hope you come say hi!

The Kitchen Sink Strategy

It’s about time that I set the record straight. Despite my vast experience and Mensa-worthy intelligence, the public seems enthralled by the soaring rhetoric and surface appeal of my rival bloggers. Since being raised modestly by working class parents, I have devoted my life to poking fun at the foibles and hypocrisies of the worlds of politics and government. Who can deny that I am best prepared for a career as an online political humorist? I attended the same high school as Art Buchwald and the same college as Dave Barry! My career in journalism and media relations has given me unparalleled insight into the compromises and petty struggles that are endemic malignancies on the authority figures and institutions of power of our time. Now that I am toiling away day and night to share my insights with the masses surely the world will recognize that I am entitled to my rightful place as blogger extraordinaire despite its apparent attraction to the pretty words of my clearly less deserving competition. So after careful consultation with my coterie of respected advisors, I have decided to launch my “kitchen sink” strategy to point out the flaws of these pretenders who dare challenge my blogger preeminence. Before I start, let me state clearly and unequivocally that I have the utmost respect for all of my peers in the blogosphere. They are all extremely accomplished and, if I wasn’t in this race, I would passionately and energetically support whichever one of them wins the endorsement of the public. But you would have to be deaf, dumb and blind (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) not to recognize that I am the most qualified and therefore undeniably entitled to ascend to the throne of top blogger. For starters, let’s take a look at my distinguished colleague from Madison, Ed Garvey. I welcome Ed’s contribution to the public discourse; his liberal credentials and institutional memory are assets that we all should treasure. But surely I am not the only one to notice that Ed spent years working for one of those unions representing athletes. With all the controversy surrounding sports these days, is it really much of a stretch to imagine Ed sticking a syringe into the butt of Roger Clemens? Think about it? I hereby declare that I have never injected an athlete with performance enhancing chemicals. Et tu, Ed? Next, I call your attention to Bill Christofferson, a smart and talented former journalist and political operative who I have the utmost admiration for. Nobody gets under the skin of Wisconsin’s conservatives more than Bill. They blame him for every tactic undertaken by the state’s Democrats and assorted progressives ranging from creating 527 groups to masterminding Jim Doyle’s election as governor. But isn’t it time that we reject the politics of the past? Certainly nobody has ever compared me to Rasputin and I doubt Charlie Sykes or Mark Belling even know my name! Then there’s James Rowen, another worthy blogger whose contributions on politics […]

Weekend Music Report #2 – The Chain

88.9 RadioMilwaukee announces winners of Milwaukee Music Awards

Local music artists Element with J. Todd and Paul Cebar won top honors Tuesday in 88Nine RadioMilwaukee’s first annual Milwaukee Music Awards, which recognize the best of Milwaukee-area music in 18 different categories. The song “Bombs Away,” by hip-hop artists Element and J. Todd, was named Song of the Year in the awards’ urban category, and R&B/world music bandleader Paul Cebar’s song “Her New Church” won Song of the Year in the pop/rock category. Other top awards included Element’s Life is a Heist as Album of the Year (Urban) and Fever Marlene’s Civil War as Album of the Year (Pop/Rock). The station honored Adi Mack (of the band Growing Nation) as Vocalist of the Year (Urban) and Scott Starr (of Fever Marlene) as Vocalist of the Year (Pop/Rock). RadioMilwaukee announced the Milwaukee Music Awards winners on the first anniversary of the station’s new format. The station launched the new format on February 26, 2007. The seasoned music staff of RadioMilwaukee, which has been featuring local artists heavily since the new format began, chose most of the winners. More than 1,000 area music fans also selected Listener Choice Awards winners in several categories by voting online. Winners of the Milwaukee Music Awards are as listed below: Song of the Year (Urban) – “Bombs Away,” Element with J Todd Song of the Year (Pop/Rock) “Her New Church,” Paul Cebar Album of the Year (Urban) – Life is a Heist, Element Album of the Year (Pop/Rock) – Civil War, Fever Marlene Vocalist of the Year (Urban) – Adi Mack (of Growing Nation) Vocalist of the Year (Pop/Rock) – Scott Starr (of Fever Marlene) Best New Artist – Leo Minor 414 Music Award (in-studio performance of the year) – Ali Lubbad & The Desert Sound Ensemble TNT Award (artist most likely to blow up nationally) – Northern Room Kick-Ass Guitar Riff of the Year – “Can U Dig It?” Certain Stars Earwig Award (catchiest single song of the year) – “Losin’ My Mind,” ShutDemDown Productions Album Cover of the Year – Dance Casador! The Championship Best Band Name – Dark Horse Project Winners of the Listener Choice Awards: Artist of the Year (Pop/Rock) – Northern Room Artist of the Year (Urban) – Element Live Performer of the Year (Urban) – De La Buena Live Performer of the Year (Pop/Rock) – Northern Room Club DJ of the Year – Old Man Malcolm Listeners are invited to the station’s anniversary party from 8 p.m. to close on Saturday, March 8 at Moct, 240 E. Pittsburgh Ave. Four local DJs will spin records, and station disc jockeys will attend. Admission is $10, with all proceeds going to RadioMilwaukee. VITAL congratulates 88.9 RadioMilwaukee on a great first year!