Common Council

City Hall 200 East Wells Street Milwaukee, WI 53202 Common Council Chambers Agenda

Prof. Levine Presents Bleak Job Market

Professor Marc Levine presented a a communication from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development regarding employment trends in the country’s cities. Professor Levine presented a fairly bleak view of Milwaukee’s job market and although he thought some of the efforts by the City of Milwaukee were positive he said they were “micro fixes because they’re not market changing”. He went on to say that “we need a bolder market changing strategy” if we hope to improve the job market here in the City of Milwaukee. Much like when he present his report regarding the jobless rate in the inner city he again pointed to a mass transit system, such as Denver’s $4.7 Billion 120 mile regional transit system, as a possible solution to jump start job growth and encourage business development in the future. Resolution 071451 proposed increasing the Emerging Business Enterprise (EBE) requirements from 18 percent to 25 percent for City of Milwaukee funded construction projects. The goal of EBE requirements is to help small business within the City of Milwaukee access opportunities they might not otherwise be afforded. In the past the City of Milwaukee has averaged 22.9 percent participation for construction projects so this new target represents a higher goal of achievement but one that is obtainable. Alderman Ashanti Hamilton made the motion to hold the resolution for one cycle to get “all the pieces” in the resolution that the committee felt were needed.

Downer Avenue Redevelopment Heard at Committee

Resolution 071339 consolidated property at 2040 W. Wisconsin Ave. and 2027 W. Wells St. into one parcel to allow for the expansion of 2040 Lofts. The expansion of 2040 Lofts shows that there is a continuing demand for student housing in downtown Milwaukee and that developers are stepping in to fill this need. Substitute resolution 071408 approved a Riverwalk Development Agreement for construction along the Brewers Point Apartments. Allison Rozek from the Department of City Development pointed out that this particular portion of the Riverwalk has become known as the “the missing link” as its development has become stalled for years. With recent litigation behind the city and this new agreement in place it appears “the missing link” may be built in the near future. The resolution known Downer Avenue Redevelopment Phase II approved a change in zoning from General Planned Development to Detailed Planned Development which further specifies the project. The hotel and condominium buildings received little to no opposition during this hearing and despite the controversy over this project only three members of the public appeared to testify. Their concerns focused around the addition and renovation of the Mulkhern building. Specifically, where the trash would be picked up and that there would no longer have parking available for them on the second floor. Architect Matt Rinka made a comment about the poor condition of Mulkhern building, explaining that his engineers told him that “if this was not historic they would have recommended tearing it down”. With this building’s apparent poor condition its clear this building is need of redevelopment and that with a new structure around the corner those concerns should for the most part be alleviated.

A Not So Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

Elections, like sports, can be incredibly entertaining, especially when the outcome is in doubt. Both, however, require the proverbial “level playing field” which is why attempts to gain an unfair advantage or improperly influence the outcome of either are so infuriating. Whether it’s the use of steroids by overpaid athletes or misdeeds by overly-enthusiastic campaign supporters, it’s dishonest and it ain’t right. So when I heard a few conservative voters say that they had held their noses and voted for Hillary Clinton since she would be the easier candidate for the Republicans to defeat in November, I was troubled. Yesterday morning, I heard several callers to the morning talk show on WTMJ-AM say that they had voted for Clinton to undermine the Democratic primary and urged others, including host Charlie Sykes, to do the same. One recommended that Sykes should buy a bar of soap on the way to the polls so that he could take a shower after voting for Clinton since the very idea of doing so was so distasteful. Later, I noticed that Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Crocker Stephenson reported on the paper’s election blog that a Republican voter had told him that he had voted for Clinton to improve his party’s chances in the fall. Suddenly I began to suspect some curious right wing conspiracy was afloat to, of all things, benefit Hillary Clinton. An especially ironic development given that she once said such a conspiracy was responsible for the many investigations of her husband’s administration. Surely there weren’t too many voters who were engaging in this nefarious enterprise but if the election turned out to be as close as some suspected then, who knows, maybe these cranky Republicans would ultimately influence the selection of the Democratic candidate for president! We now know that I didn’t need to worry. Yesterday’s Wisconsin primary represented a stunning victory for Barack Obama. He won the state 58% to 41%. Not so shabby. He won by similar margins in Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay, all three of the major Democratic strongholds in the state. He won or held his own across demographic categories only ceding older women to Clinton. The last 36 hours of the campaign were not pretty. The Clinton side escalated its charges against Obama by attacking him for plagiarizing part of the speech he delivered to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s dinner on Saturday from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, an Obama friend and supporter. Most acknowledge this incident is largely a tempest in a teapot but it recalls the ill-fated presidential campaign of Sen. Joe Biden in 1988 that collapsed following the disclosure that he had extensively borrowed language from a British politician. Obama’s wife Michelle didn’t do her husband much good when she said in Milwaukee on Monday that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” You can imagine the fun the Republicans will have with that. Likely Republican nominee John McCain was quick to have his wife […]

Behind the numbers

I’m so glad this isn’t a daily

Or even a weekly, for that matter, given my bad habit of updating my blog — a BLOG! which is meant to be STEALTHY and TERSE and FULL OF EMBEDDED IMAGES AND VIDEOS! – approximately once every two weeks. (I’d like to get better at that, really! Maybe I should aim for once a week? Every Tuesday? What do you think? Will you help me?) I have felt absolutely paralyzed by the steady shake of startling news pouring over the wires in recent weeks. Just today, Fidel Castro resigned power in Cuba, Pervez Musharraf’s party was defeated in Pakistan (signaling certain political death for Gen. Musharraf in due time, I’m sure), Barack Obama took his ninth straight victory over Hillary Clinton in this magnificent state of Wisconsin, and NATO troops closed the northern borders of Kosovo after Serbs rioted. Kosovo, which of course declared its independence from Serbia on Sunday. Serbia, which of course withdrew its ambassador to the United States … yesterday. I’m so stunned. Less than a week ago — it was Valentine’s Day, after a visit to the swoon-inducing Art Museum (I would like to personally recommend, if I may, Erwin Redl’s stirring Matrix XV as an especially nice place to take someone you might be interested in kissing later) — I found myself with a friend and a stranger at beautiful Cubanitas on Milwaukee Street, drinking mojitos and eating plantain chips and dreaming about what Cuba must be like now and what it will be like when we’re all allowed to go there, speculating that perhaps 2008 would be Castro’s year to hit it and quit, planning, in that sincere-and-fevered way that only tipsy people can plan, a real trip to storied Havana. Then all three of us – me and the friend and the stranger – went dancing at a club across the street. It was only a week before that, a dirty Thursday, that my friends DJs Hulot & Naota and their frequent musical companions DA & The Madpack, who so rarely play shows outside attics (especially now that Naota lives, works & plays in Chicago) got all of their friends together at the delightfully yucky Mad Planet and everyone did shots of bad whiskey and danced to everyone’s good, stomp-y, bouncy, glitch-y music. And it was just Saturday, fresh and not at all chilly, that I accepted a new friend’s invitation to Chicago to see one of the five historic Wilco shows happening this week at the Riviera Theatre, in which the lauded band will be performing every song every recorded for all of their studio albums. I learned upon our return to Milwaukee that when I was swaying, dancing with my friend, mouthing the words to “Dash 7” (from their 1995 debut album A.M.), I was dancing and swaying and mouthing along to the only live Wilco performance of Dash 7 ever. It was just Saturday that I refreshed my love of rock music, and music in general, and did not find […]

The Lion King

Inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion, Disney’s 1994 animated feature The Lion King was a huge success at box offices nationwide. In 1997, it debuted with ridiculous success as a Broadway musical thanks to the songwriting talents of Elton John and Tim Rice, who also scored the film. The show prowls through the Milwaukee Theatre this month in a nearly sold-out series of performances. The Lion King is engineered for families, but the musical, though based on a 90-minute animated feature, is 2 hours and 45 minutes long, an expansion so drastic that the kids who would get the most out of the show couldn’t possibly sit through the whole thing. Take a cue from our own First Stage Children’s Theatre, one of the biggest professional children’s theatre companies in the country: you can do amazing thing with a 90-minute stage musical for families. But people would probably be less inclined to pay for an extravagantly priced show if it was only as long as a feature film, and regardless, stretching out the story gives it some artistic clout. The extra 75 minutes make for the best parts of the show. The exotic traditional African folk music and dance added to the stage musical may feel out of place next to highly-produced, glossy Eton John/Tim Rice music, but they impart a new life to the story. Gugwana Dlamini, in the role of the monkey Rafiki, gives this show’s single most impressive performance. She sings around the borders of the musical’s glossiness, giving the production a beautifully jagged edge. Dlamini’s African vocals call to something very primal that is rarely heard by an audience this big. The South African vocalist’s hypnotic song elevates the musical beyond its heavily commercial identity. The production design is predictable given the size and expense of the production – a fairly crude distillation of traditional African folk art. An impressive collection of animal puppets and costumes captures some of the feel of the wild, but completing the illusion requires a great deal of imagination on the part of the audience. The perfect seats for this visual feast are somewhere in the middle of the ground floor. Get too close to the stage and it’ll look kind of ridiculous. Get too far away and it just looks like a bunch of people in a well-choreographed musical wearing strange apparatuses. But wherever you sit, and no matter how many fidgety kids are surrounding you, somewhere in the distance you can hear Dlamini’s voice resonate the same sort of primal sound that might have inspired Osamu Tezuka to sketch his first lion. VS Broadway Across America’s production of The Lion King runs through March 2 at the Milwaukee Theatre. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the box office at 414-273-7206 or online.

Redevelopment Authority of the City of Milwaukee Regular Meeting

Location: 809 North Broadway, 1ST Floor Board Room Agenda

I’m Voting For Sam

I’ve been fielding a lot of questions as to who I’m voting for 3rd District Alderman in tomorrow’s primary election. The answer? I’m voting for Sam McGovern-Rowen. There are a lot of quality candidates out there, and they all (with few exceptions) are fighting for virtually the same thing. In my opinion I think the 3rd District is doing quite well, so any candidate running around saying “vote for change” have better have a really good answer to what is wrong. I haven’t seen anything conclusive answer other than name calling. The question I asked myself was who did I think had enough experience and political savvy to deliver results on this general consensus of more safety and sustainable growth? Sam was at the top of that list thanks to his experience at City Hall and his family’s political history. Urban Milwaukee supports Sam McGovern-Rowen for 3rd District Alderman. Don’t forget to vote tomorrow!

Crime and Punishment

It’s dry. The forced perspective is harsh. Dust and plaster are piled around a dark, drab space. And there’s a man lying there in dreary, heavily worn garments. Look closely and you’ll see he’s breathing. Most people don’t seem to notice until they sit down. The lights fall into complete darkness. They rise. There are two men there. One of them faces the audience. The way he’s sitting looks very uncomfortable, but not in any earthly way. He should be uncomfortable — he’s Raskolnikov, tragic protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s shadowy, voluminous novel, played by Mic Matarrese. He’s just killed two people. Everyone in the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre seems to know this but him. This is no mystery. He’s aware of what he’s done – he just doesn’t know what to do about it. There’s a voice. It asks Raskolnikov if he believes in the story of Lazarus: resurrection. The voice is that of Drew Brhel playing Profiry — a man investigating a pair of murders. His back is to the audience, but we get to see a great deal of him in this play: he makes up a third of the cast. The third cast member plays multiple roles. Her name is Leah Dutchin. She plays both of Raskolnikov’s victims and one of the main reasons for the murders. Dutchin brings a memorable female strength to the play. The drama runs its course as we see the layers of the murderer’s psyche gradually pulled back to reveal the complexity of his actions. Invariably, some of the complexity of the novel has been eliminated in the adaptation, but with only three central characters in the play, we get an interesting dissection of the act of murder. In a brief conversation, Director Patrick Holland compares TV’s Law & Order and the Christopher Nolan film Memento to Crime and Punishment, and while there are definite echoes of modern popular crime drama in this Milwaukee Chamber production, something infinitely classier is going on here. The knowing questioning of Drew Brhel, paired with expert lighting and the sound design, evokes Alfred Hitchcock. The concept of murder infuses every single line of the play, but it’s rarely spoken about directly. When it is – especially in Brhel’s galvanizing voice – we see more shades of Hitchcockian drama. The wicked forced perspective of Pitts’ clever set is pushed and stretched in so many places. Leah Dutchin appears in doors that once were walls. The doors are everywhere, constantly opening to remind Raskolnikov of something he desperately wants to forget. There’s an ebb and flow to the action. Moments of fragile peace are shattered every time the wall opens to reveal another door. Things don’t truly settle down until the end. The last door opens and a piercing light cuts through it all. Maybe it never seemed important until that final moment, but this is a physically dark play as well. We see things moving around in dust and shadow for the entire 90 minutes without intermission. […]

Enchanted April

There’s something transcendental about Getting Away From It All. Given the right opportunity, people shed their accepted identities, move toward something less constructed and take a closer walk with their ideals. At the turn-of-the-century, Elizabeth Von Arnim’s novel Enchanted April explored the transformative nature of a vacation, a theme which becomes the single most enduring element in the stage adaptation by first-time playwright Matthew Barber. With a well-poised cast that captures a diversity of personalities, the Milwaukee Rep’s production of Enchanted April has endearingly vivid charm. In the years following World War One, Lotty Wilton (Linsey Page Morton), the housewife of a British solicitor, runs across an advertisement for a vacation at an expansive, romantic estate in Italy. Lotty, a timid dreamer longing for something more than a life of servitude to her husband, seizes the opportunity to break out of her daily life. Since the vacation would be too expensive for Lotty to afford by herself, she approaches someone she’s never formally met – Rose Arnott (Laura Gornott) – and asks if she might like to go with her and split the costs. Rose, stuck in a distant marriage to novelist Frederick Arnott (Torrey Hanson), accepts. Making her Rep debut, Chicago-based actress Linsey Page Morton brings a charming, exuberant radiance to the stage. In the role of her husband, Brian Vaughn serves as a vaguely comic counterpoint to Lotty’s cheerfulness. Vaughn strikes a clever balance, playing his character somewhere between youth and middle age, halfway between conservative businessman and excitable schoolboy. The subtlety of Laura Gordon’s comic talent really shines in her role, but once the story moves to Italy in the second act, Gordon renders delicate, genuine emotion. This is Gordon in top form in a role that isn’t really written to break out beyond the ensemble. Deborah Staples and Rose Pickering nestle perfectly into their characters as the two other women approached by Rose and Lotty to join them and further diffuse costs. Staples is perfectly poised as wealthy young socialite Caroline Bramble, who goes to Italy to get away from the stress of English high society. Rose Pickering plays Mrs. Graves, a conservative British matron with hilarious steeliness. At the beginning of the second act, Gordon and Morton draw back the curtains to transform the darkness of London to the radiance of Italy. Amidst a beautiful, empty set (by Bill Clarke) Deborah Staples gracefully lounges, reading a book. There’s real comedy in the reveal – she seems so perfectly at home in the beauty of Italy that it’s as if the entire estate was built around the image of her there, reclining and reading, at home with her purer self. VS The Milwaukee Rep’s production of Enchanted April runs through March 9th at the Stiemke Theater. Please note that Vaughn’s performance features something rarely seen onstage: brief, full-frontal nudity. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the box office at 414-224-9490 or online.

Three Days of Rain

By Charise Dawson Windfall Theatre’s Three Days of Rain, the Pulitzer-Prize nominated drama, opened on Friday, February 15. The small three-person drama plays in the intimate space of Village Church Arts through March 1. The play opens with Walker (Jeremy Welter), a wandering thirty-something, crashing in the unoccupied Manhattan apartment of his late father, a famous architect. Walker talks erratically about his nearly mute and always aloof father and his crazy, out-of-touch mother. When we meet his sister Nan (Angela Beyer), it is easy to see that Walker shares many of his neurotic mother’s traits. The siblings meet to divide their father’s inheritance. Joining them is Pip (Robert W. C. Kennedy), whose late father was the architect’s design partner. When the lawyers determine that Pip is to be left with the landmark residence designed by the architects, the drama heightens and the three form theories about their parents’ lives, behaviors and choices. Walker becomes fascinated by his father’s diary, which described years at a time with emotionless, fragmented entries. The siblings brush off the first short entry, “Three days of rain,” as a weather report. The second act of the play reveals much more about those three rainy days. In Act Two, Ned, Lina and Theo appear in the same Manhattan loft, but 35 years earlier. Theo (Kennedy) is a charming and promising architect. Lina (Beyer) is a Southern-belle transplanted to the city. Ned (Welter) is an unsure and stuttering architect. All three characters are full of hope and life, but things change during three days of rain that change the paths of their lives — and the lives of the children they will someday have — forever. All three actors fill the space nicely with movement and voice in this ensemble piece.Nan and Walker (Beyer and Welter) weave together the story of a terrible night during their childhoods gracefully and brightly. Walter captures Ned fully in Act Two, using his eyes to say what his stuttering character cannot. Robert W. C. Kennedy plays both Pip and Theo with charm and flair. His characters have a knack for storytelling, and Kennedy executes the part seamlessly. Lighting designer Larry Birkett creates a simple arrangement that illuminates the stage and actors. Props and scenery are designed to suggest the same apartment in two periods: an unoccupied loft in 1995 and a tenanted loft in 1960. Both arrangements feel too pleasant for the mood that was created by the script and actors. In the second act, Lina describes Ned’s dwelling as a “dilapidated apartment,” yet the physical environment was neat and tidy. Overall, Windfall Theatre’s mission is to search for answers and provoke questions about the world we live in, an aim that Three Days of Rain appropriately meets. The play’s exploration of how the decisions of parents shape the destiny of their children charges the audience to decipher what influences each character and answer the question, “How well can one person fully know another person?” Richard Greensberg’s Three Days of Rain, presented […]