Bringing sexy back

The Journal Sentinel reported today that Marie Claire magazine has named Milwaukee its sexiest city. Back story: we’re all a little bleary in the office this morning, recovering from Random Exposure, our annual photo contest party at the sexy (and one-of-a-kind) Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design in the Third Ward, executive-directed by the extremely sexy and awe-inspiring Cori Coffman. Diamonds, one-half of the sexy and super-hot-right-now DJ duo The Glamour, provided the dance party and the aroma of horseradish-braised short ribs, marsala-soaked mushrooms and handmade port-infused chocolate and croquemboche from The Social and Times Square Pizzeria and Bistro wafted through the room. The turn out was incredible, everyone looked sexy and the photography – the party’s raison d’etre – was amazing. After the show, I rode my sexy bicycle down to the beautiful Pabst Theater, where a huge crowd of attractive young people had amassed for the sold-out Bon Iver concert. Justin Vernon, the pensive, haunting falsetto from Eau Claire, is a certified world-wide phenom, and I have never seen a show at the Pabst as packed to the gills as this one; Vernon himself kept telling us how amazing he felt to be playing at home, in Wisconsin, for a crowd so massively loving. During the incredible, captivating performance, I thought about Unmasked and Anonymous, the new Koss Gallery show at the Milwaukee Art Museum of portraiture by, primarily, Wisconsin photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann. Ryan and I went to the press preview on Wednesday, where we had the chance to preview the stunningly installed exhibition and hear Julie and John talk about their work. We met them at lunch afterward, where Julie told us about their decision to come back to Wisconsin after grad school in southern Illinois and a stint in New York City; they were fascinated, she said, by rural life, Wisconsin Death Trip, Orson Welles. Unmasked and Anonymous features portraiture from dozens of other photographers, including some important figures from Wisconsin art history like Walter Sheffer, Francis Ford and Stanley Ryan Jones. It was such a revelation to see robust and vivid evidence of Wisconsin’s art life in a way that’s not regionally ghettoized or superficially trendy. Julie and John are based in Manitowoc, an almost archetypically un-sexy city. But they love it. “We’re basically hicks,” she said. If it’s true, they’re the most glamorous hicks I’ve ever met: impeccable, mod, retro and devastatingly sexy. Holy shit, I thought to myself leaving the Museum. Wisconsin is so great. So you get my drift here: yeah, Milwaukee is sexy, and it’s about time somebody had the gall to say so. Unfortunately, the Journal Sentinel, after deciding to put this ultimately irrelevant fluff piece on the front page, poised the article in quizzical terms: what? Sexy? Aren’t we all just drunk, dairy-chubby cheese lovers? Once again, faced with an opportunity to live up to our burgeoning reputation as a sexy, cool, young, fun city, we stumble over our dogged insistence that we’re all a […]

DJ Rock Dee

Photo by Erin Landry We just received the heartbreaking news that DJ Rock Dee — 88.9 Radio Milwaukee on-air host, all-around DJ-about-town, consummate family man and hugely loving force in the community — died on Friday. He was 40 years old. Rock Dee was one of the first true personalities I met when I moved to Milwaukee. We worked together at Guitar Center in Brookfield, where I was the door girl, the first and last line of shrink defense. It was a job I’d done in Detroit for two years at one of the biggest Guitar Centers in the region, a hub for the city’s estimable population of hip-hop producers and performers. In Milwaukee, the store was small and patronized mostly by sweaty teenage shredders. I didn’t know anyone, and Brookfield was a haul. It was lonely, disillusioning and nowhere near as fun with a college degree and rent to pay as it was when I was an amorous 20-year-old. But from the get-go, Rock Dee, a diminutive bundle of dynamite, was explosively welcoming, greeting me every shift with a huge smile, a booming greeting and often a big hug. He called me “the pretty pitbull,” going out of his way to tell our coworkers that it was impossible to get anything past me. As a coworker he was helpful, patient, and warm; he was always moving, talking, selling, shouting, connecting with people, just brimming over with energy and positivity and soul. There was a wisdom and a confidence in everything he did, and his love of life, his zeal for it, was evident in every gesture, every holler, every reassuring grin. He was truly, more than anyone I have ever encountered, larger than life. It was a great joy over a year later to hear his voice in the morning on Radio Milwaukee, full of that same positivity and kinetic energy, more exciting than a giant cup of coffee. In VITAL’s October 2007 Music Issue, we ran a profile of Rock Dee in an article called “Know Your DJ.” When we asked him about his worst night as a DJ ever, he said, “God bless – none yet.” It sums up, I think, the grace and the gratefulness and the positive energy he lived by. It’s always painful to let people go, especially before their time, but it is a comfort to know that he lived large, he lived well and he brought so much joy and happiness to the lives of his family and friends and the countless listeners who listened to his radio show and saw him perform. He will be hugely missed. VS A benefit for Rock Dee’s family will be held at the Wherehouse, 818 S. Water St., on Sunday, August 17, from 1 pm to close. De La Buena, The Rusty P’s, Cache, Fever Marlene and dozens of DJs will perform. More information available at the 88.9 Radio Milwaukee Soundboard. This Wednesday, August 6, a memorial for Rock Dee will be held at Bradford […]

Sink or swim

There is so much I want to share with you, friends: about grief, about loss, about friends leaving town and friends returning to town, about the regal history of great Midwestern blue-collar families, about Poles and Italians, about the late-night ferry from Muskegon and the Milwaukee International Film Festival and Lakefront IPA and the Trusty Knife and the beach and Fitzgibbons and many, many other things. However, I am swamped, having just returned from an unexpected week at home (which I bet you couldn’t guess from that wistful first paragraph) and dealing with a wide expanse of life complications, including a stolen laptop, a death in the family and some sort of mysterious sprain in my foot. So all I have time to share with you now, at the beginning of this frightful and final full month of summer, is a video, a link and some stray thoughts. Remember Friendster? I’ve been thinking a lot about that long-abandoned social networking site, the one that got us all comfortable with the idea of a website that didn’t actually DO anything besides tell everyone else who you were and what kinds of things you liked to do. It was like an AOL profile on steroids, and with pictures, and without any useful functions such as chat or browsing or shopping or downloading MIDI files of popular songs (did anyone else do this during the early days of AOL?). I actually met people through Friendster that are still my friends today. I think of Friendster as we strategize new ways to bring VITAL to Milwaukee and to the world wide web. There is a life to every medium – every microfiche machine, slide projector, super 8 film and 3D Viewfinder, as well as every newspaper, radio station, TV channel and, yes, website. And the healthiness, vigor and length of those lives depends so much on any medium’s ability to get with the program, change with the times, man up or get out – sink or swim. Sometimes you do everything right and you sink anyway, and sometimes you don’t have to do anything to just float on by (what else explains the madcap success of shitty, shitty MySpace?) But we’re trying our damndest, practicing our butterfly stroke. We started a Tumblr page that we update at least 5 times as often as we post to these clunky, oh-so-2004 text-mostly blogs. Check out videos, images, links and soundbytes many times daily, and if you’re a Tumblr user already, why don’t you follow us? We’ve got a Twitter page, too, if that’s what you’re into, and a group on last.fm so we’ll know at all times what you like to listen to. So it might not all be the next big thing, or at all interesting, maybe not even relevant. But we’ve gotta fight to make it in a way that would make even His Girl Friday hide under the desk. It’s gonna be a rough road, but we’re going to make it work, Tim […]

Heartbeat City

Photos by Erin Landry “If you were standing in this spot 150 years ago, you might have been run over by a train.” On a cul-de-sac on the Hank Aaron State Trail – fish leaping in the Menomonee River below, the breeze carrying the scent of summer wildflowers – this interpretive sign is hard to swallow. Before its industrialization, the Menomonee Valley was a natural wild rice marsh, an almost inconceivable place to build industry. “It’s like building on oatmeal,” says Corey Zetts, Project Director for the Menomonee Valley Partners. The land was so swampy that the first rail tracks Byron Kilbourn laid sunk into the marsh overnight. But engineering and ingenuity persevered, and Kilbourn’s Milwaukee & Waukesha Railroad spent years filling the valley with earth and timber to firm up the ground. By the Civil War, the Milwaukee Road had turned the city into an agricultural and industrial powerhouse. In 1895, the Falk Corporation was established in the Valley after Herman Falk’s failing family brewery, built in the Valley in 1856, burned down. Together, Falk, the Milwaukee Road and the dozens of other breweries, stockyards, mills, packing plants and factories in the Menomonee Valley would become Milwaukee’s heart center for almost a hundred years, supplying thousands of jobs to a growing metropolis and bringing citizens from all sides of the city together in labor. But by the time sprawl and technology began to suck the wind out of the Valley’s sails after WWII, what was once a thriving channel of wilderness and wildlife was left polluted, smelly and blighted. There are stories in the Valley that exist beyond the industry triumphant/industry defeated dialectic. Natural history, of course, goes so far back as to render human history irrelevant. In Miller Park’s lot is a wall of 400 million-year-old rock – a Silurian reef, actually, dating from before the time the city was above water. And a huge part of the Valley’s story is a narrative largely omitted from our national history: the site of Miller Park was a gathering place for native tribes, who would meet during the rice harvest. At the top of that hill, the limbs of a tree are bent to point the way to the marsh. The word “Menomonee” means wild rice; when Potawatomi Bingo Casino, in 1991, chose the Menomonee Valley as the site of their development, they were choosing to return to the ancestral homeland. “The history is incredible,” says Melissa Cook, manager of the Hank Aaron State Trail, which cuts through the Valley like a vein. Her mother’s family lived on 39th and Michigan in Merrill Park; her relatives worked for Falk and the Milwaukee Road. The neighborhoods surrounding the Valley were built by investors in the railroad shops; today, they are some of the most diverse and densely populated districts in the state. The Menomonee Valley – “borrowed” from its native residents and the natural order – provided the backbone for Milwaukee’s livelihood. Now, after more than 20 years of vision, planning […]

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MHC Member Makes History as First American Selected for All-Ireland “Poc Fada”

A Milwaukee athlete is on the verge of an historic first: Dan McAuliffe, a member of the Milwaukee Hurling Club, has been selected to participate in one of Ireland’s most popular and prestigious sporting events – the “Poc Fada” (“long puck [hit]” in Irish) on August 2, 2008. This marks the first time that an American-born player will be competing in this cross-country version of Ireland’s signature sport. In its usual form, hurling is a team sport played on a field or “pitch” slightly larger than a soccer field. Grouped in teams of 15, the players use a curved stick made of ash (a hurley) to move a baseball-sized sliothar (pronounced “slitter”) down the field. The Poc Fada takes the sport to an individual level. Beginning in the town of Annaverna, Ireland, twelve invited competitors must “puck” a sliotar with a hurley along a course that runs a little more than five kilometers over the Cooley Mountains. An Corn Cuailgne (“The Cooley Cup”) is awarded to the player who takes the lowest number of hits. Featuring a field of hurling’s “All Stars” from the best teams in Ireland, the competition garners a great deal of television and press coverage every year. The event, which has taken place annually since 1961, is currently sponsored by M Donnelly & Co. Ltd., Ireland’s leading distributor of Milwaukee Power Tools. M Donnelly has also been a strong supporter of the MHC, and will once again be a sponsor of the club’s Youth League trip to Ireland in spring of 2009. “As far as being the first American to compete, I’m thrilled and honored to represent Milwaukee,” McAuliffe says. “I believe being invited reflects that Milwaukee has made a name for itself in the hurling world, not only for its introduction of the sport to a broad American audience but also its level of skill.” Training has presented a bit of a challenge for Dan, as Wisconsin is a little short on mountains. However, he has been improvising by running up the larger hills in our area, and is being assisted by an ad hoc training “team” of proud colleagues from the Milwaukee Hurling Club. About the Milwaukee Hurling Club Founded in 1996 by a group of locals who were inspired by a friend who had seen the game in Ireland, the MHC has since attracted attention and respect throughout the world for its growth and support of the sport. In the last two years alone, the club has been honored with founding member Dave Olson wining the Gaelic Athletic Association’s Presidents Award in Ireland, NAGAA championships for Junior B Hurling and Junior Camoige teams, the youth league’s first trip to Ireland, and GAA President Nicky Brennan’s visit to Milwaukee. A unique mix of aggression, speed, grace, and skill, hurling is a team sport played on a field or “pitch” slightly larger than a soccer field. Grouped in teams of 15, the players use a curved stick made of ash (a hurley) to move a […]

Celebrate Your Independents Prize Drawing

The prize drawing entry form is available online here: http://www.vitalsourcemag.com/index.php/events/celebrate/

Empathy for the disenfranchised

Smart people in diverse urban areas have always been at least aware, if not suspicious, of night club dress codes. Often in place to detract gangs, keep out the riff-raff and attract a classier clientele, the codes at their tamest ban slumpy clothes — no jeans, no sneakers, no baseball caps — and, at their most extreme, bar most common trappings of hip-hop fashion, including jerseys and athletic wear, do-rags, baggy pants (highly subjective?), Timberlands, certain brand names, “club” colors, and hairstyles including, egregiously, dreadlocks. A reasonable dress code is probably no cause for alarm, especially when enforced reasonably — and uniformly. (I can personally vouch for at least one bouncer at Tangerine, who refused entry to the glaringly white Matt Wild, who was wearing a black t-shirt, black dress and — the offensive accessory — a pair of black Converse All-Stars.) But I’d guess that for every club that institutes a fair and balanced dress code, there’s at least one more whose policies, in practice, serve to turn away scary, trouble-making black, Hispanic or otherwise minority clients and attract clean-cut, rich and respectable white men who aren’t interested in patronizing “urban” clubs. Student groups around the country, including in Madison, have organized to call attention to the dress code issue, and legislators in cities as disparate as Des Moines and Virginia Beach have taken action. And this week in Milwaukee, Decibel is rightfully being taken to the mat on the enforcement of their dress code after John Jordan, a 40-year-old black Milwaukeean, presented video evidence that he’d been unfairly turned away from the club, allegedly for wearing boots and baggy pant. It seems, however, that the gig is up: as if the video footage were not enough, Jordan SWITCHED CLOTHES with his white friend — who was admitted. The state has issued Jordan a right-to-sue letter and there is an appeal in to the Common Council to deny Decibel a license renewal when it comes up at the end of the year. Decibel, in the eternal words of Freddie Foxxx — you’re busted. Today I posted Judith Ann Moriarty’s of Gilbert and George at the Milwaukee Art Museum. While I was editing I reviewed my own notes from the press preview and remembered what the curators and artists had stressed as the fundamental take-away points of the work: empathy, and celebration, of the disenfranchised. And while it’s definitely a politcally charged, in-your-face exhibition, I think it’s great success is that its relevance isn’t hemmed in by issues of the day and time. Preposterously, I had kind of pre-conceived G&G as “that AIDS show.” Oh, was I wrong. It’s not even that G&G used to be that AIDS show, but now it’s the London Pakistani Diaspora show, or the Terrorism by Association show or the GLBTQ show or the turd-and-cock show. At the heart of the show is the simple matter that disenfranchisement, discrimination, racism, sexism, bloodshed and class warfare are part of the human condition, and always have been. […]

Mavericks and Leaders

There are only three paths in life for a free spirit: lazy dreamer, maverick and leader. Of course there’s a fourth option, and one that many attempt – some to the end of their days – avoidance of embracing one’s true nature. The strongest of these reassure themselves that they’re “doing the right thing” by attaining middle management status so their kids can have the opportunities they didn’t (though I believe this is a myth, and that foregoing your own fulfillment sets a terrible example). Others spend their lives bouncing from job to job, looking for that magical situation in which they can finally be happy. But for those who recognize their own nature and acknowledge its calling, none of the choices are easy (assuming the absence of a trust fund). Lazy dreamer is the most attractive option for the young. Life is simple: when you have ten bucks, you get three beers at your corner bar. You might have a guitar, or a cat, or a collection of first edition Raymond Carver hardbacks – things you cherish not for their material value, but because they’re special to you. You’re probably satisfactorily under-employed somewhere that offers a flexible schedule. Your friends are artists and activists, and collectively you reinforce each others’ belief in simple pleasures and the evils of material enslavement. It’s a good life for awhile, and some folks keep with it all of their days. For others, there comes a time – typically in one’s late 20s or early 30s – when la vie bohème loses its charm. You may want to set up house with your baby, you might be tired of being broke all the time or perhaps you’re simply sick of hearing that you’re a chronic fuck-up. At this disheartening fork in the road, there are two paths: the aforementioned denial of your nature (at least temporarily) or the reinvention of yourself as a maverick. Mavericks are the mythic darlings of American culture. They work tirelessly in pursuit of their personal goals while bowing to no man; they are the innovators, the self-made millionaires, the rock stars. They don’t punch a time clock. For hard-working free spirits, this is probably the best life imaginable. It’s helpful to have an in-demand business skill you can hone into a personal empire, but even if you don’t you can dedicate yourself to becoming a skilled artisan and make a nice living while maintaining your independence. One thing not taught in maverick school, though, is the catch: the successful ones will find themselves at another fork in the road, and they’ll have to make a choice: to stay free and accept the limits of the one-man band, or to build something larger than one person can achieve. It’s the very definition of irony. While mavericks enjoy (immensely, really) widespread fraternity with other mavericks, with the people for whom they provide services and with any envious joe they find on a barstool at 5:30 on a Friday night with their […]