Wisconsin in Zimbabwe

School Children
Originally uploaded by Obi-Akpere, ObiAkpere.

What do you know?

I was browsing Flickr, and found this classroom in Zimbabwe. Bucky Badger, front and center.

How did he get there? Probably a clothing merchant bought a crate of used clothes, which were originally dropped off at Goodwill.

Problem Solved

Problem_Solved
Originally uploaded by Paul Grant.

There has been a bit of a buzz lately about T-shirts advocating domestic violence and relationship aggression. Before they disappeared altogether, I ripped a bunch of them and uploaded them to my Xanga photo gallery.

I do this to keep this transgression in front of Kohl's face. (Transgression is the word: this shirt is intentionally cool, and cool is inherently transgressive.) If we let Kohl's merely sweep these shirts under the rug, the conversation won't take place.

Kids will wear shirts like this precisely because of the reaction they get from adults. That's why we're adults: our job is to shape them into healthy, mature people, not perpetrators. So we can censor their jokes.

Kohl's is free to print whatever they want, of course, but - as Pamela Paul noted in her brilliant book Pornified - there is a third way between censorship and eternal tolerance. It's censure. It's shame. We need to shame those adults who tell kids it's ok to throw people out the window.

We can't uncool domestic violence. It's too late for that. We can only uncool ourselves. We can't uncool our children. We can only set models of compassion for them.

Neighbors and Food

Copp's Grocery, South Park Street, Madison, WI
Originally uploaded by Paul Grant.

I go back and forth on the issue of access to quality food in the inner cities. On the one hand, the grocery stores are a scandal. Copp's for instance: there's a filthy store on S. Park Street in Madison, with low-grade produce and flickering lights. Two miles to the south, there's a beautiful store full of high quality, low-pesticide food. The difference is the neighborhood. Copp's should be ashamed of themselves.

On the other hand, they have a business to run; why should they have to carry quality food that people don't buy? Food is more than a supply issue. If the south side demanded good food, it would materialize.

Here's a secret: the demand is there, and so is the supply. There are several small neighborhood grocery stores all along south Madison. But they are owned by - gasp - immigrant families. Yue Wah (below, bottom right) is a huge store, with great produce, albeit largely Asian and Latin American. Marimar (top right) is smaller, but much more familiar to mainstream American tastes. They've also got quality produce, including the best Avocados in town. Sundays they make their own corn tortillas from scratch. Then there's this other store - the name escapes me - on Fish Hatchery road (below, on the left). The owners are Vietnamese and the food is fresh.

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In all three cases, when I shop there, the owners are helpful and friendly, but there are no other whites or blacks in the stores. So whose fault is it if quality food is hard to come by?

It's the fault of the prejudiced shoppers, who won't condescend to crossing cultures when they shop. To be fair, there are occasional language barriers in the stores. But I chafe every time someone complains that there is no good food to be bought on the South side. It's anti-immigrant prejudice - the notion that there is nothing for me in a store with foreign-looking products - that is killing us.

Hip Hop: The Polka of Today

Club Majestic
Originally uploaded by Gordon_McMullan.

Madison the white city isn't going down without a fight. It's not really a hip hop thing; it's not really about race, either, even though the debate has been largely held on racial grounds.

No, it's a class thing, and it's been going on for well over a century. They did it to the Germans first, by cracking down on their peaceful - but noisy and raucous - parties.

Today our city fathers are busy trying to ban hip hop nightclubs because of "violence," which translates as people being having fights in the street outside a hip hop event. Never mind that people have fights outside UW-Badger events every single day. A few years ago a bar banned athletic wear, but chose to enforce it along obviously cultural lines, allowing Wisconsin varsity garb full access.

Hip Hop's crime is bad taste (in the judgement of Fred Mohs and the Downtown Madison inc. crowd), taste as adjudged according to the aesthetic minimalist standards that built the Overture center.

It would be an entirely avoidable waste if we (as a city) hold this debate without remembering the previous rounds in this fight. David Mollenhoff's incredible book of Madison history tells the story. In the 1870s, hordes of Germans settled in Madison, and unsettled the "native" city fathers.

The Germans' main crime was being ethnic. They held enormous beer parties in Brittingham Park on Sundays, parties that tended - like Club Majestic's hip hop nights - to spill into the surrounding neighborhood. Worse, the Germans favored raucous, low-class polka music. The kind with tubas that can be heard for blocks around.

Madison's big cheeses know that upscale, wine-sampling, art-buying tastes don't stand a chance in the free-market of arts and culture, so they need to enforce the standards with the support of government.

If hip hop fans started wearing sedate clothes, started driving quiet imports, and managed their disputes with lawyers instead of fists, the city fathers would be all smiles.

Sweet is Kitchy?

New Glarus Hotel
Originally uploaded by mizidymizark.

The Wisconsin State Journal published a positive but snarky review of New Glarus' Chalet Landhaus Inn restaurant the other day, and dropped a few cultural mistakes into article.

Author Chris Martell summed up his review with "Great service and food in a homey, if kitschy, environment." I've been to that restaurant many times, and I've never found a trace of kitch anywhere. So what is it that Martell found?

Authenticity.

Switzerland is a modern country completely at peace with its peasant heritage, its "Volkstum". Go into any cable car, restaurant or tavern in the mountains, and they'll be playing Alpine music over the stereo. It's not kitch; it's a celebration of heritage.

Trust me: Here is a TV ad for Switzerland, from YouTube. It ran in Germany during the buildup to the world cup. The idea was to suggest to soccer-weary German women a vacation in Switzerland during the tournament.

They play with all the national stereotypes, including the alpine music in question. It's modern, folksy, sweet and a little racy all at once.

[A rough translation of the voiceover is "Dear Women, consider spending your World Cup-summer in a place where the men care less about soccer - and more about you.]

The Chalet Landhaus Inn plays the same music. It's just like in Switzerland.

In fact, the entire hotel is uncannily authentic - not only the old-fashioned volkstum stuff, but the minimalist DESIGNsuisse architecture of the rooms. Alas, Chris Martell misunderstood the sweetness of "yodeling on the sound system" as phony heartland kitch.

The Killer's Caught; the Burglars Aren't

The suspect is under arrest in the Cypress Street murder. Looks like a standard domestic dispute resulting in a decidedly non-standard double murder. As in, a jilted lover killed his girlfriend and the man she was with, who happened to live next door.

The suspect has already served time for homicide in the early eighties.

While it's a relief to know that 1. They caught the guy, and 2. it was a relational issue (meaning it doesn't affect others), there is another problem going on: a series of break-ins and robberies on my street, including my next-door neighbor and his neighbor.

We've lived on this street for three years, but last night we locked the windows for the first time in a long time.

Neighborhood Murder

There was a murder a block from my house this weekend. A double murder, acutally. Stabbing.

It was a huge crime scene, with 23 cop cars present. (The Wisconsin State Journal counted "at least a dozen police vehicles".)

As I was standing around gawking with others, two people from the DA office came by, explained some of the details, and offered us counseling services.

The victims included a fifty-one year old white man and an unidentified black woman. Police are looking for a "person of interest".

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Here are a few more pictures ...

Above, here are some of the cop cars. Below, the "Dane County Emergency Command Center." Didn't know we had one. Fortunately, it says, right there on the bottom left, that it was paid for by Homeland Security. In other words, "we didn't spend your local tax dollars on this Winnebago."

Update: I'm trying out a new feature called Filmloop. Click here to see all these pictures in a scrolling bar.

Sweet Land

A recent movie I've seen better expresses the sadness of immigration and the meaning of land than anything I've ever seen: Sweet Land.

This is about a mail-order bride from Norway, who arrives in early twentieth-century Minnesota to meet her husband, a Norwegian immigrant farmer.

Olaf picks up Inge at the train station, and like so many other young couples right after World War 1, they head straight for the chapel. But as they are getting married - having spoken only a few words with each other - the young bride is found wanting. Inge is a German, not a Norwegian.

And we (Norway and the US alike) are at war with Germany. Worse, she is a member of the Socialist party.

Sweet Land tells the story of this young couple, as they build an international love in a land strange to both of them. It is a story of making a home.

The 1920 plot is set as a flashback; the surrounding story takes place today, after Inge's death at an old age. Her grandson Lars - an entirely assimilated American - has to make a decision about his land. It's worth millions of dollars as a suburban subdivision. How should Lars honor Inge and Olaf with this land, this home?

I was enchanted for days after seeing the film. Unfortunately, it's on the film-festival circuit, and is not slated for broader release. I emailed Ali Selim, the filmmaker, who replied that the DVD might be out by Christmas. Sigh. Until then, if you're interested in the story, it's loosely based on a short story by Will Weaver called A Gravestone Made of Wheat. The story is slightly different than the movie, but equally moving.

Homeowner. Non-Native.

As a homeowner in Madison, what responsibilities do I have, relative to the original, Ho-Chunk inhabitants of the area? Don't know. But the State of Wisconsin thinks I own the land.

That's not a real problem. The solution to complex evils (like the European conquest of North America and the subsequent settlement here by Europe's outcasts and peasants) is rarely to run away from the problem, but to meet it head-on.

Accordingly, I think I will try to find out as much of the history of this plot of land and the surrounding neighborhood as possible.

Happy Birthday, Switzerland

It's the first of August, and we all know what that means, eh? Swiss Confederation Day!

Some of my fondest memories of childhood relate to August 1 - bonfires, singing, fireworks, lanterns and festivities and more.

Representatives of three alpine counties gathered on a secluded meadow on this day in 1291 - that's right, 700 years ago - to declare independence from the Habsburg Austrians.

August 1 always makes me a little sentimental like July 4 doesn't. I'm not patriotic for Switzerland, mostly because I'm not Swiss. But having spent much of my childhood there, and because much of my heart is wrapped up in Switzerland, I feel secretly joyful on this day.

A Downpour out our Front Door

Our house is in a flash-flood district. While we're on a hill, and are thus not susceptible to flooding in our own right, runoff from our neighborhood flows past our house into a nearby creek. Here's our street, during a recent storm.

Here's what happens moments later, when several square blocks of impermeable surfaces start flowing downstream. A standing wave in the middle of the street!

Tomato!

My tomatoes have arrived--the first ones at least. Now is the sweetest time of the year. Is there anything better? Perhaps growing one's own, from seed. We cheated this year, going with plants from the garden store. Our neighbor still has no fruit, and he started from seed.

A Nearly-Missed Opportunity

There’s an intentionality about meeting neighbors. It can be a drag, sometimes. Becca and I decided long ago that we need to live, on a daily level, the way we want to be. Annie Dillard said it, in The Writing Life:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we live our lives.”

In other words, how we approach our moments with our neighbors is how we live our lives. Do we want to be rushed, hurried and on our own? We have to make that choice over and over again.

For example: Yesterday we walked to the library. It was going to be a short trip, because we needed to be back in a half hour. We wanted to do some internet business on a faster-than-dialup connection.

Alas, two hundred yards from the library, we ran into a neighbor, an older man from the Philippines, who told us two years ago to have a baby, because “Baby makes you
Happy!”

It was obvious that he wanted to more than say hello. He talked at us about his grandchildren. Then about his mortgage. Then about something else. I was anxiously thinking of the time slipping away, the time I could be spending uploading a document.

But Becca and I had already had this conversation: this is the kind of people we want to be – accessible to others, not too hurried or important to linger, love, and laugh. We didn’t need to discuss, even as Bert droned on and on: It was more important for us to talk with him than to go accomplish our petty errand.

In hindsight, we didn't miss the chance to upload a high-resolution photo. Rather, we almost missed an opportunity to become the kind of neighbors we want to be. Fortunately, we survived.

It’s hard. Because we didn’t actually get to do what we wanted. We had to turn around and go home. We were a little frustrated, but we knew that neighbors are made, not born. Without planning, precious opportunities to live life will pass us by.

Meeting the Neighbors

So Becca and I bought a house, and had a baby.

That's why I haven't posted here lately.

But I am now on a mission to meet my neighbors, so posting will begin shortly as I tell our stories ...