Know What They Call A Quarter Pounder With Cheese In England?

A Pair of Hit Men Raise Money to Fight Cancer

What A Wonderful Closing Song

Fantle gives the Bronze Fonz back story

“Bronze the Fonz.” Bewilderingly, this simple phrase has rekindled Milwaukee’s on-again, off-again debate about public art. On one side is the art community, with illuminati ranging from MARN Executive Director and Hotcakes Gallery owner Mike Brenner to Milwaukee Art Museum CEO David Gordon to Brooks Barrow, owner of a gallery of the same name, protesting the proposed life-size bronze statue to be installed on Milwaukee’s Riverwalk. On the other side is Dave Fantle of Visit Milwaukee, ersatz patron organization of the piece, working in concert with Dean Amhaus and Spirit of Milwaukee. In what can probably be best categorized as a clumsy PR strategy, Dave made a very enthusiastic, very public announcement about the impending arrival of the leather-jacketed 70s TV icon, assuming that people would understand and embrace the installation. I say it was clumsy PR because in the end, what should have been a simple addition to the many attractions of our Riverwalk has become contentious, with Brenner and Barrow loudly threatening to leave the city and Gordon imploring (in a very genteel way, of course) Visit Milwaukee to see reason and keep the Fonz off Wisconsin Avenue. In an email exchange of my own with him (which I chose not to copy to the known universe), I asked him for clarification of Visit Milwaukee’s motives with the piece, why it was announced as a fait accompli and what, if anything, he had done to connect with the art community in making his decision. His responses felt pre-rehearsed to me, doggedly breezy and optimistic. Polite but firm. I wasn’t satisfied; email is a pretty pathetic tool for meaningful discourse, so we met to discuss this whole crazy affair. He was seated at a table at Mocha when I arrived, holding a printed, marked-up copy of VITAL managing editor Amy Elliott’s recent anti-Fonz blog. We went over it in some detail, each of us probably carrying certain assumptions about the other’s viewpoint. He wasn’t happy, and I must admit that at first I wasn’t really concerned about his discomfort. I maintained to him that the issue wasn’t the statue itself, but the feeling that we so rarely commission public art these days in Milwaukee and this Fonzie thing came out of nowhere, with no discussion, no open bidding process and no effort made toward community buy-in. In short, the whole thing was lacking in transparency, a thing most people don’t utilize when it’s there but that everyone decries when it seems not to be. In response, Dave explained in greater detail his position and the genesis of the statue itself. Now, the whole thing makes much more sense to me and in fact is no skin off anybody’s nose. I asked Dave if I could publish some of his comments and he agreed. Perhaps they will shed some light. In a nutshell: a while back, Dave Fantle and Dean Amhaus looked into TV Land’s sponsored program of erecting statues of TV icons in the cities where their programs took […]

The Bronze Fonz Debacle

Mike Brenner, owner of Hotcakes Gallery and big-time mover and shaker in Milwaukee’s art community, sends a seething, vitriolic letter to every major media outlet and art informer in Southeastern Wisconsin vowing to shut Hotcakes’ doors and leave the city for good should a life-size statue of the Fonz be erected in our fair downtown. It registered like Old Testament prophecy, with Brenner’s foot-stomping, foaming-at-the-mouth, head-turning-360-degrees registering somewhere on a scale between “Shut up” and “What a creep.” You know, the kind of crazed clarion that always comes to devastating fruition in the end. The project bears very little exposition here: Visit Milwaukee, formerly the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, is quite close to its goal of raising $85,000 in private funds to put a statue of Henry Winkler as Arthur Fonzarelli of Happy Days somewhere along the Riverwalk. In the old days, people used to construct monuments of people of influence or historical importance — leaders, war heroes, city founders, martyrs, saints, and every once in a while the visage of a crazed dictator longing for a gigantic, oxidizing, bird-shat-upon place in history (many of those statues, appropriately, have since been torn down). On a southward stroll down Prospect Avenue, you will come upon three of these statues in a row, first of Scottish bard Robert Burns, then of viking Leif Erickson, and finally of fur-trader and Milwaukee father Solomon Juneau, his musket poised. On the back of my ankle I have a tattoo of an iconic Detroit image, the 1950s Marshall Fredericks’ statue The Spirit of Detroit, a big shirtless bronze man, seated, holding aloft a small family in one hand and a bright golden sun in another, emanating the impervious, ineffable rays of God. But the canned responses that Dave Fantle of Visit Milwaukee’s PR team has CC’d to everyone from Mike Brenner to the intelligent, considered team of experts at Susceptible to Images to Milwaukee Art Museum CEO David Gordon, arguably the heaviest weight in Milwaukee’s rather little art world, makes it clear that the Bronze Fonz isn’t like those “other” statues. Yes, we hear you, Visit Milwaukee. We know all about Chicago’s Bob Newhart, Minneapolis’ Mary Tyler Moore, Manhattan’s Ralph Kramden (all of which were pitched and placed in a promotional project by the TV Land network). You have only reminded us that they exist every SINGLE time someone wonders why on EARTH we would put a Bronze Fonz on the Riverwalk. We know that you are casting the statue locally and employing a “local” artist (he’s from Lake Mills — a full 55 miles from Milwaukee — not such a great distance, but a stretch when it is considered just how many hundreds of artists live in the city of Milwaukee, proper, or even in the county, or the next county over). You keep trying to tell us that this is “pop” art, not “high” art, the art equivalent of burgers and custard. The hidden message here is that this is not an art project, […]

VITAL’s predictions for 2008

Formulating predictions for a new year can be ironic -- they usually revolve around the roadblocks we couldn't bust through in the previous year. What license are we issued to move the immovable just by the setting and rising of the sun one more time, one more bout of shuteye, one more flip of a shiny but flimsy paper calendar?

Milwaukee in Miami? Hotcakes takes us there

Hotcakes will be bringing art from Milwaukee to Miami for the Aqua Art Miami art fair and international market from December 5 through December 9, since most of us aren’t fortunate enough to go there ourselves this chilly time of year. The exhibition will be at the Aqua Hotel, a classic South Beach resort which has become a favorite gathering spot to relax and socialize during Art Basel week. The event is located within walking distance of Art Basel, and an Aqua shuttle will run in a continual loop between the hotel and Art Basel Miami Beach each day during regular event hours. Hotcakes will be showing the following artists at Aqua Art Miami: Annie Aube, John Balsley, John Will Balsley, Joseph Bolstad, Rory Burke, Peter Carlson, Melissa Dorn Richards, Meredith Dittmar, Bill Dunlap, Gregory Euclide, Noah Friedman, George Jirasek, Gary John Gresl, Ariana Huggett, Jeremiah Ketner, Mayuko Kono, Matthew Kirk, Paul Kjelland, Tara Klamrowski, John Loscuito, Miel Margarita-Paredes, kathryn e. martin, Colin Matthes, Kevin J. Miyazaki, Ashley Morgan, Christopher Niver, Micaela O’Herlihy, Josie Osborne, Nate Page, Kristopher Pollard, Michelle Sherkow, Robert Smith, Roy Staab, Ric Stultz, Sonja Thomson, Heimo Wallner, Betsy Walton, Dan Wilson. We’re happy to be there in spirit, if not in body. We hope our art gets a good tan and has a nice couple of drinks on the beach.

Insurgents, Bananas and Holidaze

Listen to the national Democratic Presidential debate 12/4 on WUWM 89.7

Milwaukee Public Radio will air the national Democratic Presidential debate live from 1:00-3:00PM (CT) on Tuesday, December 4, 2007. The national debates are an exclusive radio-only broadcast and will also stream online. NPR News and Iowa Public Radio (IPR) are hosting this debate, which will be held at the State Historical Museum in Des Moines. NPR News journalists and hosts Steve Inskeep, Michele Norris, and Robert Siegel will serve as moderators. The two-hour event, leading up to the Iowa Caucus, will offer the first audio-only debate of the presidential, using the format introduced in 2004 by NPR and the NPR Member Stations of Iowa. All major Democratic candidates are confirmed to attend. Breaking away from the question-and-answer structure traditionally presented by the television networks, the NPR/IPR debate will feature three areas of discussion and the moderators will enable the candidates to conduct a dialogue with each other. Following the initial exclusive broadcast and webcast, NPR will make the recording fully accessible to all media outlets and individuals, without license restrictions. It will also be available for permanent on-demand streaming at NPR’s website and at wuwm.com. NPR is offering listeners the opportunity to submit questions online. Visit wuwm.com to share your questions. NPR will put some of the questions to the candidates at the debate on December 4. NPR and IPR are working with the Republican presidential candidates to reschedule the forum originally planned for December 3. The leading Republican candidates cited scheduling conflicts and multiple debate requests from news and political party organizations. NPR is currently working closely with them to identify another suitable date and location.

Another Mistake on the Lake?

Last night, WUWM hosted Project Milwaukee: Creating a Vibrant Regional Economy, a forum of nine influential local figures responding to questions from the moderators, the audience and website visitors about the challenges facing Greater Milwaukee. All of the hot-button issues were trotted out in a drive-by hour-and-a-half – transportation, education, the economy, crime, race, poverty, “brain drain” – with barely a raised voice or interruption and no threat of fisticuffs. An informative – if not momentous – program, indeed. The facts are on the table, Milwaukee: you’re a pretty great city, and most people seem to like you a lot. But you have some seriously ugly moles on your face that are going to get malignant if you don’t freeze them off right quick. Statistics released in October confirm our deepest fear: we have the second-highest black male poverty rate in the country, next to PITTSBURGH, at a punch-in-the-stomach 43%. We have one of the worst public school graduation rates in the country, in a list that includes CLEVELAND. And you’re going to hate this: of the 50 largest cities in the United States, our unemployment rate is the second highest. Number one? DETROIT. The forum lacked a sense of alarm, and it lacked compelling vision for addressing the city’s problems – indeed, at times panelists outright, glass-half-full, golly-gee denied that there were any problems. Maybe that wasn’t the point of Project Milwaukee, anyway; maybe it was imagined as an exploratory, low-stakes roundtable. Still, there were so many moments in the discussion that made me want to stand up and yell: when Rocky Marcoux suggested that segregation and poverty in the city would be alleviated as well-off suburbanites buy condos and move downtown (that’s not a solution; that’s called “gentrification,” thanks very much), or that the new Marquette Interchange was an example of a laudable transportation initiative (as opposed to adding bus routes, lowering fares, thinking out of the box about better public transportation, or moving forward with regional public transit); when Ricardo Diaz, executive director of the United Community Center, countered a question about racial hatred by insisting that Hispanics on the city’s south side are well-educated, employed, financially stable, happy, safe, bustling and “95% undocumented” – and apparently not at all affected by racial issues, which has become a fancy way of saying “black.” When I told my family I was moving to Milwaukee, my dad offered to PAY ME to move somewhere else. I’m part of that educated, imaginative “creative class” (represented on the panel by restaurateur Mike Eitel and Shelley Jurewicz, director of talent pool FUEL Milwaukee) that mid-sized cities all over are courting. Baby Boomers are starting to retire and the shortage of what Sheldon Lubar (panelist, philanthropist, entrepreneur, activist, reigning city patriarch) called “intellectual capital” is growing extreme. Young people with good ideas need to be encouraged to come here; driven graduates of Wisconsin colleges and universities need to be convinced to stay here. I moved to Milwaukee for a number of reasons, some […]

Lame Dreams – Vol. 1

See kids? Isn’t this fun?

We are still a year away from next year’s presidential election but it’s already painfully obvious why so many people are so turned off by politics. The spectacle of the nominating process consists of each party’s candidates gouging eyes and pulling hair in a struggle to separate themselves from the pack. Despite such critical issues as an unnecessary war, a growing number of Americans without health insurance, a nonexistent energy policy, and a crumpling infrastructure, the circus we call an election appears to have all the dignity of a Beavis and Butthead Meet the Three Stooges feature film. This year, for once, the Republicans are acting even more childish than the Democrats. Rudy and Mitt, the laughably-named GOP frontrunner, are so busy pointing out each other’s spending outrages and liberal social policies that even Newt Gingrich has referred to the Republican candidates as a bunch of pygmies. You can almost hear the GOP base agonizing over the absurd notion that its standard bearer will come from such a bastion of conservatism as New York or Massachusetts. The leading Democrats struggled early to avoid speaking ill of one another, but that didn’t last long. Recently, Hillary Clinton’s opponents have started lobbing rhetorical grenades at her in a concerted effort to penetrate her veneer of inevitability. They cite her acceptance of campaign contributions from lobbyists, her refusal to apologize for her vote authorizing the use of force to oust Saddam Hussein and her failed attempt to reform health care early in her husband’s first administration as evidence that she is an unlikely agent of change. I guess it’s no surprise that by voting time, so many of us have tuned the whole distasteful enterprise out or simply hold our noses as we choose the least objectionable option. Yet I do not blog before you today to criticize politics. Truth is, I am hopelessly addicted to this stuff. After all, political campaigns offer many of the same attractions that draw people to such popular televised competitions as American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. Surely if we are held on the edge of our couches wondering who Donald Trump is going to fire, we ought to care at least a little about which candidate has a better plan for reforming health care or ending the quagmire in Iraq. Would it help if they added a witty panel of celebrity observers to critique responses at the debates, or required the candidates to eat a bug before answering a question? At the very least, couldn’t they do something imaginative with a giant tic-tac-toe board or carousel that spins them around? Apathy here in Wisconsin may partly be due to the widespread belief that the candidates will be chosen by the time our primary rolls around on February 19. Nearly every other state has elbowed its way in front of us in the fight to be relevant. With big states like New York, Florida and California set to cast their ballots ahead of us, conventional wisdom […]