Illustration: A sign advertising this year’s NOBULL Crossfit Games in front of the Edgewater Hotel. To the right is a graphic of a phone displaying the bicep emoji, peach emoji, eggplant emoji, and a question mark.

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

Gird your loins and log out of those dating apps, Madison. For they’re temporarily inundated with CrossFitters from across the world—along with any viruses they may carry. These diehard exercisers are vying for the title of “Fittest on Earth.” Yeah. You’ll recognize the invading horde by their thicker-than-average necks, sleeveless shirts, negligent body fat, and the words “fit” and “active” in their profiles. The visiting FIBs and airline staff who typically shake up the local dating pool are getting a run for their money through Sunday.

Madison’s convention- and event-destination status tends to saturate the myriad dating apps with correlating folks. The upcoming Great Taste of the Midwest attracts traveling boozehounds and beer aficionados. The early October World Dairy Expo brings a special breed of livestock and dairy people. WisCon, the feminist sci-fi convention, ushers in an interesting, intelligent folks. I might be biased on that last one.

Given a notoriously stagnant and homogeneous dating pool in Madison for people ages 35 and up—you know, past the Epic range—it’s refreshing to see some new profiles come down the line. 

Every so often, someone will hop on after a breakup or deciding to become ethically non-monogamous. Each semester, a few new grad students and professors join the ranks on the apps. (Note: This observation comes from a lifetime Tinder ban-ee of six months who's fled to other apps. A white guy said he didn’t like entitlement and then ended his profile with “Who wants to pay my college loans?” I couldn’t help myself. He reported me for calling him out.) Still, there’s a recognizable set of regulars with whom I’m tempted to match solely in order to offer tips to spiff up their profiles. 

The 2021 NOBULL (awesome brand name) CrossFit Games offers the opportunity to connect with many a Chad on Bumble. I swiped right on a few CrossFit profiles, purely for research purposes a la comedian Lane Moore’s Tinder Live. The first word on his profile? You guessed it: “CrossFitter.” 

Yet it remains to be seen whether these athletes have time and interest to mingle with mere non-CrossFitting mortals of our realm. It’s possible that the hotels and Airbnbs surrounding the Alliant Energy Center are a veritable Olympic Village of sexy people slutting it up with other sexy people—not that there’s anything wrong with that! Sex positivity for all. In that case, we might only glimpse these visitors sauntering down the street in bicep-bearing athletic attire, ordering low-carb entrees and drinks, and on said apps. 

That might be for the better. I Googled “is crossfit a…” and “cult” was the first predictive option that popped up. The lot do exhibit a noticeable zealotry. At the same time, workout and meditation communities are stepping in to fill the void once held by religious institutions. But watch your bod. A study found that nearly 30 percent of CrossFitters were injured from participation in the exercises, though it was mostly newbies and people who worked out less than three times a week.

Fitness and activeness are common aspirational identities. Mine is backpacker, and I’m heavily under the influence of REI. But modern fitness is a little different. One author and historian connected the ever-burgeoning American fitness craze with neoliberalism. In the book, The Age Of Fitness: How The Body Came To Symbolize Success And Achievement, Jürgen Martschukat posits that our individualistic fitness trends are geared toward achieving idealized, often unattainable “fit” physiques. The ability to possess a “fit” body is seen as symbolic of one’s potential, success, and competence. In this context, our body is part of us we sell in various professional and personal markets.

Dane County COVID cases have risen more than 100 percent in the last two weeks. It’s only a 34-case increase, but those numbers are likely to climb after an influx of fitness enthusiasts and craft-beer seekers.

Swipe right at your own risk, Madisonians. The outsiders are already among us. 

Composer and UW-Eau Claire music professor Chiayu Hsu has described her approach as “the combination of Chinese elements and western techniques.” Hsu's pieces have been performed by various acclaimed ensembles worldwide. But the composer's affinity for Wisconsin remains palpable.  

 Milwaukee City Hall—once the city’s tallest building—inspired Hsu to compose her two-section piece City Renaissance for Doors Open Milwaukee, an event that highlights the beauty of the city's architecture. In City Renaissance's first section, Hsu mimics the building's atmospheric calm during daybreak. Section two is oriented around the feel of the building when the sun's at full crest, allowing the piece to follow its inevitable descent, ultimately winding back down to a poetic stillness. Flutist Emilio Rutllant and cellist Trace Johnson will be tasked here with making the piece translate to Madison's skyline.

 “For composers, it’s always crucial to have performances of our music and to reach out to more audiences,” Hsu says. “I really appreciate the team at MMoCA for hosting and programming this diverse night of music, so audiences can have an opportunity to explore different kinds of composition.”

Evan Williams’ music has a tendency to work its way from avant-garde harshness to tender new-romanticism while underscoring unifying elements between the two. Digging into Williams' work, pieces like Steve Reich’s "Pendulum Music" are as likely to come to mind as any composition of pointed minimalism. There are sounds that are cloud-like, enveloped with atmosphere, and then there are others that sound like metal coffee shop chairs being dragged along stained tile. Spaces between the woodwinds’ breaths roll along and your ears swear they can still hear the beauty. Steph Lippert, on bass trombone, will perform Williams' composition "Amber Waves" at the festival.

 In its most traditional sense, the Inuit version of throat singing is a half-game, half-competition designed for two women or femme persons. For Nibiiwakamigkwe and Anastasia Adams, the practice offered resonance. Their friendship and creative partnership was forged over common bonds they discovered they shared as co-workers. “Having a musical connection and shared background were part of our survival tools, and we're grateful that it has grown into something we can share with others,” Nibiiwakamigkwe says.

 For the Madison New Music festival, Adams—who has a background as a musical performer, educator, and  is a direct descendant of the Alaskan Yup’ik tribe—will sing her native throat songs, while Nibiiwakamigkwe dances in their traditional jingle dress. “I didn't sing for 10 years because I didn't have anyone to lead me. It's a good principle to have for any extra-cultural work: involvement comes with permission and ability to listen,” Nibiiwakamigkwe says.

 “There are not many throat singers this far south (the closest I know live in Toronto),” Nibiiwakamigkwe continues, “and the practice is relatively unknown to non-Natives in this region. Throat singing, like many other forms of Indigenous music, is often relegated to intra-tribal or Native-focused gatherings where people have established understanding or is broadly considered one-time educational entertainment to non-Native folks, which is part of the colonial narrative that Indigenous people are remnants of a situational historic past as opposed to a contemporary, active present. We are still here, creating new works, and contributing members of our communities.”

 This year's edition of the Madison New Music Festival is free, and event organizers have reduced the event's capacity out of concern for safety. The music is scheduled to take place in MMoCA's rooftop sculpture garden, but will move inside to the museum's lecture hall if it rains. Masks will be required indoors.

Photo: A sign for MC Audio occupies a glass door in a strip mall. Above the sign is a partially visible advertisement for the soon-to-be-vacant commercial space.

Madison DJ Mike Carlson has closed up shop at his store MC Audio, ending a 21-year run of not just selling and renting music gear, but also providing a community hub for electronic music.

Carlson has already begun clearing out the store's space at 1734 Fordem Ave., where MC Audio moved in 2018 after vacating its original downtown location. He'll be selling some of the remaining inventory online via Reverb, and some will move next door to Jiggy Jamz Records.

"I've been fortunate in that I have a wonderful family in general, my wife and my kids allowed me to do this and deal with the time commitment, because doing this meant I also had to be DJing at night, because this wasn't going to be paying the mortgage," Carlson says. "I consider it a fantastic run."

Now that bars and music venues are re-opening, Carlson, long one of the most busy and popular DJs in the area, says he's been swamped with bookings. Running MC Audio and DJing—at venues from Crucible to the downtown Great Dane to bars in the Wisconsin Dells—often makes for days that start at noon and end in the wee hours of the morning.

"If I can't be down here proper hours to provide what I want MC Audio to be … then it's probably time to close 'er down," Carlson says. "Sure, I could work until 7 or immediately go to the Dells or immediately go to the Dane, or immediately go set up at Crucible for Leather + Lace, or anything else that I'm doing, and it's just too much. I'm too old a dog to be running that hard. I want to enjoy life a little bit more, and I want to take care of myself a little better than that schedule allows." 

Carlson founded the store in 2000, but has always relied primarily on DJ gigs to make a living. The store has served as an important resource, renting audio and lighting equipment for events, and selling music gear that ranges from cables to turntables to synthesizers and sequencers. The gregarious, laid-back Carlson and his staff also gave customers a lot of opportunities to learn the fundamentals of DJing and production. Madison still has its share of independent music-gear retailers—including Spruce Tree Music and Guitar Shop of Wisconsin—but MC Audio was really the only locally owned place where the curious could learn beatmatching, experiment with turntables and electronic DJ controllers, or try out the ever-evolving new generations of synthesizers and drum machines. 

"That's why we lasted 20-plus years, right there," Carlson says. "Truthfully, that was one of my favorite things to do. I really do like turning people onto it." He wanted to provide a resource to other DJs and musicians and event producers, all in a spirit of friendly competition: "I want you to be a super good DJ or synth dude or lighting gal or whatever," he says, "because then that makes me go 'the music [they're making] is really dope, I've gotta spend more time working on it!'"

At the Fordem Avenue space, upstairs in the Camelot Square strip mall, MC Audio had an ideal neighbor: Jiggy Jamz, which serves much the same clientele with a selection focused on house and techno on vinyl. During the pandemic, both businesses held online DJ streams and got by with a mix of online and in-person sales. 

"We pulled through COVID OK, I won't say shining," Carlson says, crediting his wife, Jen, for keeping his family afloat when DJ gigs dried up. 

Carlson is thinking about getting some other creative projects off the ground, though he's not sharing any specifics yet. He's also looking forward to riding his bike more and having a less hectic schedule.

"I can't be two places at once, no matter how hard I try," he says.

Photo: A row of four Transformers figurines stand behind a row of small toy cars on a shelf at Meep Meepleton’s World of Fun.

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

One of my greatest regrets is not taking better care of my toys.

That’s not to say I was some sort of unhinged Sid-from-Toy Story-clone, committing war crimes against every Transformer and Ninja Turtle unlucky enough to cross my path. But I played hard with them, and many have since been broken, lost, or donated, scattered to god knows where. I never anticipated that I’d be sitting here at 30, pining over lost action figures.

While time travel is still out of the realm of possibility, newly-opened Meep Meepleton’s World of Fun on Williamson Street offers the next best thing. No matter what your preferred form of nostalgic pop culture is, it’s likely that owners Dave and Amanda Farrar have it somewhere on their chaotically curated shelves. And I mean chaotic; at Meep’s you can get everything from a vintage John Travolta doll to a packet of Harry And The Hendersons trading cards.

Dave Farrar has been collecting toys since he was a teenager and selling them on Instagram for the better part of the last decade. In fact, the vast majority of Meep’s stock is from Farrar’s personal collection. During that time he and his wife have amassed more than 37,000 followers, including geek-aligned rockstars like My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way and Guns N’ Roses’ Slash (who recently bought a set of Metalocalypse figurines from Farrar).

“When I started selling on Instagram, people were so excited that I was like, ‘this is awesome. This is fun,’” he explains. “I got more joy out of finding things for people and selling them than actually holding onto them myself.”

Farrar, a St. Louis native, relocated from Chicago to Madison about six years ago. Prior to opening the brick-and-mortar Meep’s, he was a firefighter and a corporate salesman who just sold toys online as a hobby. But after experiencing the luxury of increased family time due to the pandemic, the Farrars pivoted and opened their doors in June 2021. So far, they’ve been overwhelmed by the community response. 

“We’ve been blown away,” he says. “We weren’t expecting the turnout—especially on the weekends—we’ve been getting, and the support from the community and our neighbors.”

It’s not hard to see why, at least personally. It’s a very pure sense of joy connecting with something at Meep’s: “I definitely don’t need this, but I must have it.” On my first trip to Meep’s, I brought home an old Bart Simpson doll, an unsettlingly realistic vinyl figure of Doctor Who star David Tennant, and a pin commemorating the home video release of the 1999 film The Mummy, among other things. 

But more than just offering these treasures, Farrar seems to really connect with them, almost as if he’s selling a part of himself. Take for example the Mummy pin. It ended up being a conversation point for Farrar and I as we both longed to see star Brendan Fraser “rise like a phoenix” and headline blockbuster movies again. (And for you fellow Fraserheads, rejoice! The actor appears in Steven Soderbergh’s new film No Sudden Move.)

Speaking with Farrar, it's clear that he really cares about each little niche item he sells, no matter how trivial it may seem. It's a little surprising (at least to this admitted packrat) he's able to part with some of it at all. But that begs the question: your passion for pop culture is this strong, certainly you have a toy version of “the one that got away.” So what’s the piece that leaves Farrar metaphorically tossing and turning at night?

“There are some monster things that I’ve sold over the years that are a lot harder to find. I’m talking things from the sixties and seventies, like Universal Monsters,” Farrar explains. “Like 25-30 years ago, it wasn’t that hard to find. But now it’s really hard, because everybody loves Halloween and monsters. So there’s some things from that era that I regret selling.”

Even so, I doubt Farrar is dwelling on it. After all, even when he loses something, it’s still a win.

Image: Layers of blurry numerical columns from Madison’s city budget overlap with charts and the City of Madison logo. Illustration by Tone Madison, source images via City of Madison 2021 adopted budget.

Last summer, uprisings for racial justice sparked a wave of engagement in local politics. In Madison, hundreds of people took to the streets—and to social media, as Facebook posts dedicated to tracking and publicizing the gritty details of legislation related to racial equity sprang up from week to week. Madison Common Council meetings received the live-tweeting treatment. Tutorials to navigate the pandemic-adapted Zoom systems for City meetings aimed to ease entry for those new to giving public testimony. As people showed up again and again to keep change for racial justice on the agenda, behind the scenes, a slower force was at work. 

The budget. 

Budgets suck. Do you have a budget? And how do you feel about that? 

I'm not talking about a budget as in the very real constraint of how much money you can spend each week or month. I'm talking about a list of numbers in specific categories like "Groceries" and "Entertainment." Think Venmo emojis: 🏠 💡 🍊 🍺  🐶  🎥  🚕, etc. etc. 

If you have a budget, sticking to it and keeping track of it is a chore. If you don't have a budget, you probably know that budgets can be hard or impossible to maintain at all. A budget requires some income to shift around—a little more here, a little less there. Otherwise, you're just plugging holes.

What is actually up with the budget?

The City of Madison is currently working on its 2022 budget. We're in 2021, so we're budgeting for 2022. You can keep track of the ongoing Madison 2022 budget process here. 

There are two City of Madison budgets, the capital budget and operating budget. Here's how the City of Madison website describes them:

The capital budget provides funding for the City’s major construction projects including building new facilities, improving our transit system, maintaining our roads and parks, and purchasing major equipment.

The operating budget provides money for running City departments and services. It pays for the day-to-day spending on employees and materials and supplies.

Let me offer a couple of mnemonic devices:

The Opera

The operating budget is like the opera of City activities day to day. A look at the operating budget tells the story of what we're funding in Madison each year. From public library services and staffing, to Metro Transit, the police department and more, the operating budget shows what is often in the spotlight when we talk about funding priorities within our community.

Those particular departments fall within what is called the "General and Library funds" portion of the operating budget. Most of the money for the General Fund—73 percent in the 2021 adopted operating budget—comes from property taxes. Additional funding for the operating budget comes from fees, fines, and government grants.  

The operating budget is much larger than the capital budget. In 2021, the City of Madison's $715.2 million operating budget was 81.1 percent of the overall adopted budget, compared to the $166.4 million capital budget. 

Major expenditures in the 2021 operating budget include $98.7 million for Debt Service, $84.9 million for the police department, $62.2 million for Metro Transit, $61.5 million for the fire department, $36.6 million for the Streets Division, $25.8 million for community development housing operations, $20.7 million for the Community Development Division, and $18.8 million for libraries.

The Capitol

If you have trouble remembering the difference between the operating and capital budgets, here's another trick. The capital budget funds buildings and physical infrastructure projects. Imagine the State Capitol building downtown. It's corny, I know, I'm sorry! But it works!

The planning process for the capital budget focuses on the upcoming year, like the operating budget, but it also looks ahead at the five following years. Think big, multi-year projects. 

Most of the funding for the capital budget comes from selling bonds. We pay back this debt in the operating budget. So although the two budgets are separate, the City's use of debt forms a major link between them. When we spend money in the capital budget, it ultimately impacts the amount that we're able to spend in the operating budget, because we have to pay down that debt.

Most of the 2021 capital budget went towards public works projects (45 percent), followed by transportation (16 percent), planning and development (15 percent), utilities (14 percent), and parks (6 percent). 

The timeline

The City of Madison's budget process begins in the spring. The mayor kicks it off by sending a message to the heads of all the City departments and divisions (a long list that includes everything from Parks, Transportation and Engineering to Library, Public Health and Civil Rights) with guidance as they work on crafting their budget requests for the following year.

This year, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway sent memos to agency heads for the capital budget on April 13 and for the operating budget on May 24. Her operating budget memo cited a projected $18 million budget gap and asked that all General and Library Fund agencies (except for Public Health Madison & Dane County) include 5 percent reduction proposals as they plan their budget requests.

Agencies have already sent their budget requests to Rhodes-Conway for 2022. Those requests for the capital budget are published on the City's website. Agency requests for the operating budget were not yet available online at the time of publication, but will be published here.

The Mayor uses these agency requests to craft the executive capital and operating budgets, encompassing all of the agencies and setting priorities for the next year. 

You can imagine the budget throughout this process like a volleyball, careening back and forth over the net. The Mayor serves the ball, the agency heads bump it back, and at this point, the Mayor gives it a wild whack, sending it off the court and into the crowd. (That's us! We are the crowd!) 

Personally, I think this is the most important part of the budget process, although it's not necessarily the most influential. When the volleyball (the budget) finally lands in the stands, it has already been shaped by the commitments of past years (it can be difficult to remove funding for ongoing services and projects), and the priorities of City staff (agency heads) and the Mayor. At this point, we have the option to shout from the crowd and demand change by appealing to our elected representatives on the Common Council—our Alders.

The executive budgets from the Mayor are made public in late summer or early fall. This year, the executive capital budget is scheduled to be released August 31, and the executive operating budget, October 5. 

Within a week or two of the budget's release, the Common Council's finance committee holds public hearings on each budget. The finance committee, which includes six Alders and the Mayor, can make amendments to adjust the budgets. During these hearings, people can speak in support or opposition to aspects of the budget, and request budget amendments.

Save the dates: public hearings on the capital budget will take place September 13 and 14, and on the operating budget October 11 and 12. 

By the time the budgets reach the Common Council for a final vote (slated for November 9 through 11 this year), there will already have been several meetings for public input. These November Common Council sessions are the last chance to amend the budgets before they are approved for the following year.

Why it matters

Practically, the budget outlines how we use our resources and where we put our time, energy and attention as a City. It also says a lot about our priorities as a community. Policy change can happen through legislation—individual resolutions and ordinances—as well as through the budget.

Demands to defund the police use budgets as a tool to make broader societal changes. Shifting money out of policing and into services like housing and healthcare is a strategy to take one (big and important) step towards a more equitable community.

The budget process is not perfect. If you want to read about alternative processes, I recommend checking out information about "participatory budgeting." 

So now you're hooked, right? You want to know all about the 2022 budget. Here's a link again to the City website charting this year's budget process and timeline. You can also contact your Alder for more information, and sign up for email updates. Also, show some love to your local journalists! If you find an article with information about the budget that you find helpful, remember to check back for updates from that publication and/or author.

Coda

The Dane County budget also matters! And it's not a terribly different process from the City's. You can learn more here. 

Save the dates: public hearings for the County budget will take place on September 13 and 14, and October 20.

Dane County also has a rather nifty budget simulation that allows you to look at the budget as a pie chart and shift money around before sending it off to the County to share what you think spending priorities should be for the next year. Do they take your feedback into consideration? That would be nice, wouldn't it. Make sure your County Supervisor hears from you.

TL;DR

Budgets suck. It is known. 

Operating budget = staff, services and debt. Capital budget = buildings and equipment. Of course it's not that simple, but also, it's that simple.

The operating budget is funded through taxes, fines and fees, and state and federal grants. The capital budget is funded through the warped system that is capitalism (i.e. local governments borrow money). 

Budgets start in the spring and are finished in the fall. If you're scheming to change the world (of municipal budgets), start that shit early.

We live on stolen Ho-Chunk land that is currently organized into cities, towns and villages within larger counties. You'll have a municipal budget—City of Madison, Middleton, Fitchburg, Verona, etc.—as well as a County budget—Dane County, in this area.  

Keep track of the municipal budget for the City of Madison here. If you don't live in Madison and your local government doesn't have a tidy timeline online, you can bug your elected representatives for more information. Bug them! 

Follow the Dane County budget process here.

Illustration: Three abstract figures await a bus in an altered rendering of one of Madison’s proposed Bus Rapid Transit stations. One figure appears to be stepping onto a displaced Madison skyline. Illustration by Tone Madison, station rendering and skyline image via cityofmadison.com.

In the latest battle to save the soul of the city of Madison, i.e. turn State Street into a pedestrian mall, the State Street business community lined up at a Common Council Executive Committee Meeting on Tuesday, July 13 to testify against plans to include Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) stops on State Street. The public comments were made before an update on the BRT project from City of Madison Transportation Director Tom Lynch, and they clearly illustrated why business owners should not be allowed to dictate major infrastructure decisions. Not only was there an impressive amount of confusion regarding buses and bus riders, but there was also an unfortunate undercurrent of entitlement and a real sense of victimhood throughout the remarks, which you can listen to here (the BRT agenda item was taken up at 35:15).  

While many (though not all) of the speakers claimed to support Bus Rapid Transit in some form, they are opposed to the plan to include two BRT stops between the 100 and 300 blocks of State Street. The plan adds new, significantly larger BRT boarding stations specifically designed to allow for faster boarding, as the word "rapid" might imply. Business owners complain that the boarding station designs will be too obstructive and may block customers from seeing their storefronts. The city quickly responded to these complaints with a new, less obstructive design, which was apparently not good enough. Business owners are also concerned that investing in BRT infrastructure on State Street will deter the city from eventually turning State Street into a pedestrian mall. 

I also spoke at the meeting. As I've written in the past, for the last eight years I've worked one block away from Capitol Square. Throughout that time, I've traveled to work by bike or by bus more and more often to offset the expense of parking. In 2019, I sold my car altogether. Something I've learned as a bus rider is that the safety, comfort, and convenience of transit users is unfortunately an inconsistent priority throughout the city. Meanwhile, the safety, comfort, and convenience of customers in one of Madison's most cherished business districts is a high priority, which means that State Street is one of the most comfortable areas to catch a bus, with no car traffic, spacious, covered bus stops, good pedestrian infrastructure, and sidewalks that are consistently cleared of snow and ice. Unsurprisingly. I want bus stops to stay where I know they'll continue to receive the attention transit riders deserve and where businesses are more immediately accessible to transit riders.

Even if BRT and transit weren't personal concerns of mine, I would be opposed to any change to the plans at this point. The city requested $80 million from the federal government to support the project, which it is now slated to receive. This federal funding is a necessary component for the BRT system to move forward, and Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway's office has been clear that a delay in moving forward could jeopardize the funding. 

What's more, we have known for years now about serious inequities in our transit system. Unless you live and work in very specific areas in Madison, using the bus as your primary mode of transportation is not feasible. Surprising no one, people of color in Madison are more likely to be on the losing end of the spectrum between car-free and thriving and having to spend 90 minutes on the bus just to get to a job. Abigail Becker detailed these inequities in an excellent Capital Times article in 2019. Citing Metro Transit's 2016 equity analysis, Becker writes that "African American riders transferred 2.5 times more and spent 25% more time traveling than white riders. Forty percent of Hispanic riders transferred compared to 25 percent of non-Hispanic riders, and Hispanic riders spent 9% more time traveling." 

Bus Rapid Transit will not solve these problems entirely. Transit aficionados in our city can list the many ways the project falls short and the additional steps they'd like to see the city take to develop a great public transportation system. But it's an important step forward and the time to take it is now, not several years from now or in another decade. 

Meanwhile, many of the individuals who spoke against BRT on State Street seem to struggle with the very concept of what buses do. 

Sean Scannell, who along with his wife Stacey became owners of the Soap Opera in 2016, was the first to expose a general misunderstanding of this point when he offered up alternatives to placing bus stops on State Street during the July 13 meeting. (Scannell tells Tone Madison he is no longer involved in the business and wasn’t speaking on its behalf.)

"Why not Johnson and Gorham?" Scannell asked. "We have these two very, very busy streets where there's not many pedestrians walking on so there's less concern of safety for people, too." 

Well, no, because buses transport people. People who step off a bus onto a sidewalk to head to their final destination become pedestrians, as are people walking from a destination to a bus stop. By suggesting that we put bus stops on Johnson and Gorham Streets, "two very, very busy streets," Scannell is suggesting that we put more pedestrians onto streets which, by his own admission, are less safe. 

Pedestrian and bike safety came up several times throughout the meeting in ways that made it clear that the speakers a) do not recognize that bus riders are pedestrians and b) do not actually know much about what makes pedestrians and cyclists unsafe. Pedestrians and cyclists are mostly hit by cars, not buses. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that of the 5,429 pedestrians who were struck and killed by a vehicle in 2018, 4,514 were hit by a car or a "light truck" (i.e. SUV, pick-up, or van) while 44 were hit by a bus. Meanwhile, buses actually reduce the number of car trips and thus cars on the street. 

Scannell was also the first to tap into a second thread of misunderstanding that was reiterated throughout the meeting when he declared that "Pedestrians buy things, buses don't buy things." He did then admit that buses bring people who buy things, but again suggested that these potential customers, who he clearly holds dear, be carted over to Johnson and Gorham. 

He wasn't alone in his skepticism that bus riders are customers.. Multiple speakers seemed incredulous that their customers might arrive by bus. Carmelo Alfano, who owns Madison Modern Market, said: "Tom Lynch forecasted that the BRT line will primarily be used by people commuting to and from work. Yet we continue to hear suggestions that State Street would benefit from congested bus traffic," and "I know of very few customers who take the bus." 

Emma Stepien, longtime manager of Madison Modern Market, also seemed to question data Rhodes-Conway shared previously about the number of transit riders who boarded a bus at the top of State Street in 2019 who reported interacting with a State Street business. Stepien attempted to counter this by pointing out that "In the 2015 Metro Transit Onboard Survey, looking at ridership for the entire Metro Madison system versus the top of State Street, it showed that 71.3% of rider trip purpose was to work." 

It seems pretty silly to have to explain something that is so obvious to me as a bus rider and regular human, but apparently it's needed: transit riders, much like people in cars, combine trips. For example, while the primary purpose of most of my bus trips downtown is to get to work, that doesn't mean that I don't get coffee or lunch during the day, or dinner or a beer after work. I have also shopped for gifts, groceries, books, and other random shit I probably didn't need downtown after arriving there by bus, primarily for work. Similarly, if a person who drives to work stops at a Starbucks drive through on the way, they would probably not describe Starbucks as the primary purpose of their trip, nor would someone who stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work report grocery shopping as the reason they left the house that morning, and yet the business interactions did take place. Incredible!

In addition to my own anecdotal experience, other cities that have implemented BRT have noted economic benefits to nearby businesses. The City of Madison cites the American Public Transportation Association's finding that for every dollar invested in public transportation, $4 is generated in economic returns. A study by the New York City Department of Transportation found that implementing BRT along a segment of Fordham Road in the Bronx helped increase economic activity in the same area, with businesses reporting an increase in sales even as they lost parking. There's good reason to believe that businesses and property owners alike will benefit from BRT.

I also don't care if it benefits them or not—and you shouldn't either. Our current transit system is insufficient and suffers from serious inequities that leave large swathes of our community disconnected from the city. The planet is in the middle of a frightening, climate-change fueled meltdown and transportation is the number one source of carbon emissions in the United States. Furthermore, car traffic in Madison regularly kills and injures people. Getting cars off the road is an imperative. To be clear, I do not believe that Bus Rapid Transit will hurt profits. At the same time, if it did put people—and the environment—before profits, it wouldn't be a moment too soon.

This is not the first time that business owners on State Street have demanded special treatment or suggested that they've been unjustly singled out for hardship. In fact, business owners on State Street have been wringing their hands for years about rising crime and "bad" behavior on State Street while calling for an increased police presence in the area. But while many of us took the opportunity of the pandemic and last summer's uprising against white supremacy to do some soul-searching about our place in the world and our complicity in causing harm, the entitlement and lack of self-awareness on display last Tuesday made it very clear that for others, nothing has changed. 

The worst of this attitude came from Joe Perkins, owner of Tutto Pasta, who shouted at Common Council President and District 12 Alder Syed Abbas, demanded answers to barely coherent questions, and accused the city of cutting the legs off his business. "I lost $500,000," he screamed at one point during his comments. To hear him speak, you would think the pandemic was a coordinated attack on him and his business personally, and not a global phenomenon that has killed millions of people and left millions more destitute and homeless. 

In response to this tirade, Tiffany Kenney, Executive Director of Madison's Central Business Improvement District, said, "I do want to give us all a second to breathe after Joe's passion. Joe represents one of our downtown businesses and I'm here to represent them as a whole." Of course Perkins wasn't "passionate." He was threatening and abrasive.

But while no one on the call could match Perkins for bluster, the same inability to place one's own concerns into a city-wide perspective prevailed throughout the comments and was extremely disheartening. It's not just that business owners are predictably interested in profit above all else, but that they've constructed an entire mythology about how State Street is central to the vibrancy of the community—the "beating heart" of downtown Madison, as Craig Bartlett, former associate publisher of Isthmus, referred to it during his comments at meeting. I think that's overstating things quite a bit, but if you do believe it, how do you then justify prolonging the disconnect that currently exists between many members of our community and our city's "beating heart"? 

Speakers complained about the lack of democracy, and how they didn't feel heard, though in reality few issues have garnered as much media attention as the constant evaluation of the health and vibrancy of State Street, with business owners' concerns always front and center. The subject of a possible pedestrian mall alone has been discussed in numerous articles in the past few months. And yet to hear business owners speak, the State Street corridor is the most neglected corner of the city.

Worst of all, however, it wasn't just business owners bleating about the horrors of buses on State Street. Christina Brungardt, director of the non-profit Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, also got in on the act, speaking out on behalf of businesses and unironically referring to State Street as a "struggling neighborhood." Brungardt also complained that the new BRT stations will prevent the public from viewing and being inspired by art in MMoCA's windows. In a letter to the editor published recently in the Wisconsin State Journal, a MMoCA volunteer similarly fretted that a new station would prevent the public from viewing the museum's historic facade. It is difficult to share these concerns, knowing that the station will not be several stories tall or built directly abutting the building itself. It is also distressing to know that the director of a free and public museum does not regard bus riders waiting at bus stops as members of the public who might be engaged or inspired by art.  

At this point, the question of where the BRT stops are located feels, to me, secondary to a more important issue, which is who determines how the city works and who it is for. Business owners and property owners relentlessly insist that every aspect of public life in Madison be molded to suit their interests, and assert their needs as a top concern in every conversation from transportation to public health policy. In the meantime, the day-to-day needs of regular people are neglected and we do nothing to resolve racist inequities. This state of affairs has not worked well for Madison to date. Regardless of how individuals feel about BRT stops on State Street, hopefully we can all recognize that allowing a group of business owners to completely derail a major infrastructure project that is years in the making doesn't bode well for our collective futures. 

Correction: This article initially stated that Sean Scannell was a co-owner of the Soap Opera on State Street. He is no longer involved in the business, and the reference has been updated.

Illustration by Rodney Lambright II.

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

As the title might suggest, this month's Pleasure Practices isn't about food again. I promise next month I'll have a food-oriented piece, but this summer has been hot AF and spending time in a hot kitchen is the opposite of pleasurable for me right now. Instead, I want to talk about water. I'm a water sign (emotional, home loving Cancer here, holla!) and I love being in and near water, especially when it's 90 friggin' degrees outside (hi climate change). Here in Madison we have an abundance of access to water from lakes to pools. This summer I am taking advantage of living near so much water and I think you should too! No matter your level of comfort with swimming, there are plenty of ways to find pleasure in getting in and around water to beat the heat.

 My most recent pleasure practice has been kayaking. Prior to the pandemic you wouldn't have caught me on a boat if you paid me because, well, the Titanic, but after a friend convinced me to try a pontoon boat on Mirror Lake for her birthday, I've found that slow moving, steady boats on small bodies of water where I can still see the shore feel pretty good to me. So this summer I've been kayaking. Kayak rentals from Wingra or Brittingham boats are $16 to $20 for the first hour. I enjoy these because you're on Lake Wingra or Monona Bay, which are smaller bodies of water than Lakes Monona and Mendota. My ideal kayaking experience is honestly mostly floating with a mild to moderate amount of paddling to get to a cute spot with a view. For me, being in the middle of a big body of water brings a certain kind of calm awe that is deeply pleasurable and satisfying.

But kayaking isn't the only way to get wet this summer. Here are some other suggestions for finding the water situation that's right for your body and budget:

• Hit up a splash park. I know these are mostly intended for kids, but have you ever put on your bathing suit on a Tuesday afternoon and run around some giant sprinklers? Highly recommended. I would suggest going to the splash pads at Elver Park, Cypress Park, or the Lakeview Splash Pad in Middleton.

• Go to a pool. Ask around to see if any of your friends have access to a community pool or a private one in their neighborhood or apartment complex. Get a silly pool float (I have two unicorn floats and one shaped like a pair of lips), a good playlist, some snacks, and have a good ass time in and around the water.

• Hang out by the lakes. Even when I can't get in the water, I still like being near it and catching the breeze off the shore. I like James Madison Park, the Terrace, and Tenney Park especially as places to hang out close to the water and maybe dip my feet in. Recently I put up a hammock right next to water in Law Park and had a nice time lounging around listening to the waves lap the shore.

• Get wet at home. If you have access to outdoor space and a hose, you have even more options. My friend recently purchased a kiddie pool for her adult self to lounge in the backyard. Last year another friend bought a giant rainbow arch sprinkler for her kid. You can go pretty cheap to fairly expensive with these things so make the choice that's right for you. Hell, sometimes I turn the two gallon pressure sprayer I bought to water my balcony garden into a mister for me when I'm in the hammock outside. Refreshing as hell.

The moral of the story is: get wet this summer. No matter your size, your gender, or your athletic ability, get wet. All bodies are good bodies. All bodies are beach/pool/lake bodies. Shout "I'm a badass bitch" as you run through the sprinkler or cannon ball into the water. You won't regret it.

Photo Collage: Bronson’s range in costume. Clockwise from top left, Bronson is seen in “Mr. Majestyk“ (1974), “From Noon Till Three“ (1976), and “Hard Times“ (1975). Bronson plays a Vietnam vet-turned-watermelon farmer in “Mr. Majestyk,“ wearing a brown newsboy cap and rugged blue button-up shirt. In the Western romantic comedy “From Noon Till Three,” Bronson, dressed in a black outlaw tuxedo, dances with co-star Jill Ireland. Onlookers press against a chain link fence enclosing Bronson as he squares up against his opponent in a bare-knuckled fight in “Hard Times.”

The summer schedule at UW Cinematheque always has some treats for fans of 1970s action films, and this season they’ve curated a trio of 35mm presentations—Mr. Majestyk (1974), Hard Times (1975), and From Noon Till Three (1976)—celebrating the 100th birthday or centennial of one of that decade’s biggest stars, Charles Bronson. Born into a family of Lithuanian-American coal miners in 1921, Bronson served in World War II and studied painting before taking up acting because “it seemed like an easy way to make money.”

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he appeared in Westerns and war movies but didn’t really break out as a leading man until heading to Europe in the late 1960s. Roles like the harmonica-playing gunman in Sergio Leone’s classic Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) helped make him an international movie star. Returning to Hollywood with an established fan base, Bronson was able to focus on vehicles tailored to his physical prowess and minimalist acting style. His role as an assassin in Michael Winner’s The Mechanic (1972) cemented his on-screen persona as a taciturn, mustachioed killing machine, one that he’d be typecast in for the rest of his career. While Bronson’s filmography varies wildly in quality, UW Cinematheque has selected three of his best performances to show there’s more to Bronson than just his most recognizable Death Wish (1974).

Written by great pulp fiction author Elmore Leonard and directed by Richard Fleischer, Mr. Majestyk (1974), screening July 16 at 5 and 7 p.m., is a tongue-in-cheek play on genre tropes and Bronson’s own macho persona. Bronson plays Vince Majestyk, a Vietnam vet-turned-watermelon farmer who just wants to get his crop harvested. After beating up a local hoodlum (the delightfully slimy Paul Koslo), Majestyk gets sent to jail, where he quickly runs afoul of mafia hitman Frank Renda (Al Lettieri). Foiling Renda’s attempted jailbreak, Majestyk attempts to use the gangster as a bargaining chip with the police, but Renda escapes and becomes obsessed with getting his revenge. When the mobsters beat up his farmhands and machine-gun his melon crop, Majestyk is forced to confront Renda head-on.

Filled with car chases, fistfights, and Leonard’s trademark flair for theatrical dialogue, Mr. Majestyk manages to be a rollicking action film while also having fun with the ridiculousness of its "they messed with the wrong guy" premise. Only an actor as stoic as Bronson could pull off Majestyk’s countless lines of dialogue about melons with a straight face, and his ability to play such a silly role seriously makes the film work. 

Mr. Majestyk was unfairly overshadowed by Bronson’s next film, Michael Winner’s incendiary Death Wish, originally released a mere 12 days after Majestyk. The vigilante revenge film struck a nerve with moviegoers, finally making Bronson a bona fide movie star in the United States. That film’s success at least gave him a chance to take risks with his next projects, which resulted in two of his most unusual performances in Hard Times (1975), screening July 23 at 5 and 7 p.m., and From Noon Till Three (1976), screening on July 30 at 5 and 7 p.m.

Writer-director Walter Hill’s feature debut, Hard Times, is set in Depression-era New Orleans, where aging drifter Chaney (Bronson) teams up with wily street-fight promoter Speed (James Coburn). Although they distrust each other, neither can resist the chance to make some money in the world of underground boxing. Speed’s wheeling and dealing coupled with Chaney’s fighting ability quickly makes their partnership a success.

Chaney plans to leave town as soon as he’s saved up enough money; but when Speed gets in over his head with the local loan shark, Chaney has to risk betting his own savings on one last fight to save his friend. Here, director Hill establishes the themes and storytelling techniques he would use throughout his career, exploring the tenuous bonds between characters fighting for survival and stripping his narrative down to the bare essentials. Hard Times is maybe the closest to an autobiographical film as Bronson ever made, having hopped trains and worked in the mines during the Great Depression. While his lines are scant and curt, Bronson plays Chaney with a world-weary realism not seen in his other films, and it's truly one of his best dramatic performances.

Frank D. Gilroy’s From Noon Till Three, by contrast, is a remarkably odd chapter in Bronson’s career—a light romantic comedy set in the Old West. After his horse is injured on the way to a bank robbery, outlaw Graham Dorsey (Bronson) is left behind by his gang and turns up at the home of wealthy widow Amanda Starbuck (Bronson’s then-wife and frequent co-star Jill Ireland). The two improbably fall in love over the course of three hours, but after the bank robbers are caught, Dorsey is forced to flee with a posse on his trail. Eluding his pursuers, he nevertheless ends up getting thrown in jail in a case of mistaken identity. Starbuck, believing him dead, turns their afternoon romance into a best-selling novel. When Dorsey is released from prison, he finds that he’s been turned into a larger-than-life folk hero, and realizes Starbuck as well as the rest of the world prefer a dead legend to a live man.

Adapting his own novel to the screen, Gilroy lets the film play as broad comedy until the third act, as Dorsey is slowly driven insane by the maudlin popular song based on Starbuck’s novel. Bronson was never known for his range or comedic touch, but From Noon Till Three shows his subtle ambitions as an actor. It’s easy to see why an intensely private celebrity like Bronson would be drawn to a story about the dangers of myth-making and having your personal life exposed to the public eye. The movie flopped, though, and Bronson then reverted to the typecast characters audiences expected of him, appearing in Death Wish sequels well into his seventies.

With a leathery, inexpressive face and stilted speech, Charles Bronson was an unlikely movie star. But his quiet charisma and imposing physical presence helped lay the foundation for the modern action movie genre, and more, as the UW Cinematheque showcases across three Fridays this month.

Illustration: Comedian Louis CK is drawn performing stand-up in a black T-shirt, holding a mic in his right hand and gesturing with his left as a bead of sweat runs down his forehead. To the left is a close-up of CK's head, grimacing uneasily and also with a bead of sweat on his forehead. Illustration by Rachal Duggan.

On his 2016 tour, Louis C.K. opened a set at the Overture Center with the best abortion joke I've ever heard. Annoyingly, I can't remember it (probably because I was high). But I'll always remember that it came from him.

C.K. has, of course, done a lot to sour such fond memories and immolate the goodwill that once accrued to him as a revered stand-up and TV show creator. He abused his relative power to coerce women into watching him masturbate. Five of them, risking professional suicide, mustered the courage to come forward in 2017. C.K. then backed into the bushes after a self-indulgent statement that was absent an apology. He should have stayed there. Just two years later, he hit the road on a world tour. What's worse, is that his surprise post-wank debut at Comedy Cellar in Manhattan ended with a standing ovation, as did many of the sold-out shows on his 2019 world tour. His comeback sets included some truly odious jokes at the expense of trans people, a transparently desperate grab for that anti-cancel-culture dollar.

In a few weeks, the masturbating clown will be back at it at Madison's Comedy on State, according to a surprise announcement Monday morning from the club. The five late-July shows sold out within hours. The Wisconsin State Journal reported on the brisk sales, and the club's owners and operators, the Paras family, offered the paper a "no comment." Does it even matter how performers and venues behave?

C.K. banked on his victims keeping silent under the threat of professional ostracization. Women and femmes and even men are often not taken seriously or blamed when they report abuse and discrimination. Does Comedy on State want to create that kind of climate? Touring comics have helped the club gain a national reputation and local comics depend on its weekly open mic to hone their acts, some of them eventually scoring the opportunity to warm the crowd up before the bigger weekend headliners. These performers and the club's staff and patrons deserve to feel they're spending their time in an environment that doesn't brush off abuse.

The argument can be made that C.K.'s done innovative work in comedy. Hands down, yes. His signature dramedy blend reached near perfection in FX's Louie (before it headed so unbearably and darkly downhill in the last season). His performances have been the source of many chortles and guffaws. The achingly familial drama Horace And Pete, in which he co-starred with Steve Buscemi, featured riveting performances by Laurie Metcalf and Aidy Bryant. Baskets, which he executive produced for FX, stars Zack Galifinakis as a depressed clown and his own twin, along with Louie Anderson as their doting mother, was fucking fantastic. 

Yet, these days, we have a holistic measure of artists' value to society. Excellent entertainment absolves no one from anything. (Looking at you, R. Kelly.) 

C.K. has neither apologized nor mentioned his sexist transgressions since Hollywood slapped him on the wrist to satisfy appearances. This gave him license to make jokes that punch down on people with different sexual identities and genders. How passively, toxically masculine. How very typical. 

But backlash against Comedy on State from locals with consciences is beginning, even if the shows will be packed. 

Jessica Gilkinson tweeted the number for Comedy on State, and encouraged others to join her in calling and voicing disgust. 

Just left a voicemail for @ComedyOnState to register my disappointment and disgust that they've scheduled Louis CK for an upcoming show. Join me @ 608-256-0099 if you feel the same. This has been my fave local comedy venue for years. Can't imagine returning anytime soon.

— Jessica Gilkison (@JessicaGilkison) July 12, 2021

Dana Pellebon asks:

Hey @ComedyOnState, have you reached out to Louis CK’s victims for a slot at your business? What message are you sending to the Madison community by having him perform at your club?

— Dana Pellebon (@ragingjourney) July 12, 2021

Former stand-up comic (and Tone Madison contributor) Alan Talaga tweeted about his distaste, adding that he's going on the record because he has no plans to perform at the club again: 

It is absolutely disgusting that the Comedy Club on State is booking Louis CK for a weekend. It is also disgusting that I only feel comfortable posting this because I never plan on performing there again.

— Alan Talaga (@danpotacke) July 12, 2021

And someone else picked up their chalk and took it right to the club's front door.

I guess Louis CK is coming to the comedy club pic.twitter.com/FcCRwmaUlW

— Misha Gurevich. Angel Investor, Photographer. (@drethelin) July 12, 2021

Without being held responsible by venues, booking agents and ticket sellers, people like Louis C.K. will continue to use their power to manipulate—and mock—others with less privilege. Many folks, often women and femmes, have been subject to unwanted dick viewing, touching, and worse. There are too many situations where it's easier, safer, or more acceptable to let a man or masculine person do the thing they want than it is to stop them and say "no." Most women and femmes are consciously or subconsciously acculturated to question their own autonomy and agency in favor of the wills and preferences of white men. Those who arrange entertainment have a responsibility to other performers, as well as their customers, and society in general, to weed out these malingers. How are women, femmes, and trans people, as well as any man worth his salt, supposed to feel performing on the same stage where an abusive, toxic comic has done an extended set? There didn't used to be a choice, but now there is. 

As a letterpress card I got at Print and Resist a few years ago (and haven't had the courage to give anyone despite many candidates) says, "JUST FUCKING APOLOGIZE." A great way to get the ball rolling would be for C.K. to punch at the mirror and make jokes about his reprehensible behavior. Genuine apologies are a huge step on the road to healing and repair for all involved. Society needs to see a nasty man like Louis C.K. set an example. No one can heal, no one can learn, when we double down on our wrongdoing. It doesn't make you right. It makes you an asshole. So he's bypassing that like only a rich white man can. 

And he's getting away with it with help from promoters and clubs. Comedy on State executed the same marketing strategy with a similar surprise announcement of Aziz Ansari's stint at the club following sexual misconduct allegations in 2018. Perhaps white liberal Madison was hesitant to chasten a BIPOC performer. Maybe that the allegations came from just one woman, and were first reported by an online news outlet with a messy reputation, put them beneath notice for some fans. All the same, Comedy on State is again putting profit over people. The club's owners also own the historic Orpheum Theater, and their 2016 agreement to let Live Nation exclusively book that venue paved the way for the concert behemoth's consolidation of several more local venues and promoters.

While Louis C.K. told the best abortion joke I've ever heard, that is the only good thing I have to say about him. Hopefully another great joke along those lines makes it my way soon so I can forget even the memory of his. That C.K. is allowed a second tour after sexual misconduct and a non-apology condones every person who's committed sexual abuses of power. It's unconscionable. Comedy on State has added its name to the list of those who disrespect women, femmes, and trans people while alienating their own performers and customers. Gross.

Photo: In a sequence from "The Fourth Man," the protagonist has a vision of one of his erotic interests, Herman, as a crucified Christ.

A provocative, deliriously stylized, and kaleidoscopic high-camp psychosexual thriller about the complex, often warped relationship between life and literature, Paul Verhoeven’s 1983 film The Fourth Man [De vierde man] serves as a spiritual predecessor to the controversial director’s more widely known Basic Instinct (1992).

Gerard Reve’s 1981 novella De vierde man provides the basis for Verhoeven’s final Dutch-language picture before he went to Hollywood. He and screenwriter Gerard Soeteman tell the strange story of Gerard Revé (Jeroen Krabbé), a dissipated, bisexual Catholic writer (sharing the same name as the novella’s author) who has disturbingly violent visions of death as he becomes entangled in an intricately woven web of intrigue, paranoia, and obsession. UW Cinematheque offers two free screenings of The Fourth Man on 35mm this Thursday, July 15 at 5 and 7 p.m.

The film boldly opens with a close-up of a spider cocooning flies caught in its web and crawling over a crucified Jesus figurine. This potent visual metaphor perfectly encapsulates the film’s themes while setting the stage for the lurid melodrama that follows. Gerard awakens dazed and naked, staggers out of bed, gulps down some wine to steady his shaking hands, and fantasizes about murdering his lover before leaving Amsterdam to deliver a lecture at a literary society in Flushing.

When Gerard arrives, he encounters the treasurer, Christine Halsslag (Renée Soutendijk), a wealthy, seductive, androgynous cosmetologist and widow who films him with a handheld camera. Gerard addresses the audience and reveals the secret to his creative process, which consists in extracting details from his everyday life and embellishing them. His remarks are the key to appreciating The Fourth Man. "If I tell that story often enough, I'll start to believe it myself," he explains. "And that, I think, is the essence of my work. I lie the truth. Until I no longer know whether something did or did not happen." 

Christine invites Gerard to her home and the two share a passionate evening of carnal pleasure. Their one-night stand eventually becomes a more complicated affair after Christine asks Gerard to stay and he becomes infatuated with her other lover, Herman (Thom Hoffman), an attractive young German plumber who apparently does not satisfy Christine in the bedroom. Gerard offers to correct Herman’s sexual shortcomings for her while secretly planning to seduce him. When Christine leaves Gerard alone in the house to fetch Herman from Cologne, he ends up drinking himself into a stupor and discovering a few reels of Christine’s home movies. After watching them and noticing a certain pattern in her past life, Gerard suspects that Christine may be leading him to his doom.

Verhoeven and cinematographer Jan de Bont meticulously craft a dreamlike, erotically charged atmosphere, while presenting a seamless succession of grotesque tableaux, lush textures, and haunting visual motifs. As Gerard becomes increasingly apprehensive about Christine’s intentions, the boundaries between his vivid inner life and his tumultuous corporeal existence begin to dissolve rapidly. The Fourth Man heightens the tension between Gerard’s fragmentary, alcoholic reveries and the ominous events of his waking life until it’s no longer clear what is real or illusory. New York Times critic Janet Maslin once called Verhoeven’s film a "feature-length hallucination." Has Gerard fallen into the trap of a cunning, diabolical temptress whose machinations and subterfuges beckon men to their demise? Or are his bizarre paranoid gothic fantasies the product of his morbid Catholic upbringing and his fertile, overactive imagination? 

At once a delicately balanced masterpiece of ambiguity, a multilayered, nightmarish descent into one man’s personal hell, a brilliant exercise in genre subversion, and an eye-popping cinematic spectacle, The Fourth Man exemplifies Verhoeven’s florid, overwrought style, while compelling the viewer to constantly question their own perception. Filled with exquisite, novelistic detail, extravagant religious symbolism, shocking, over-the-top gore, and gorgeous, sexually explicit images, The Fourth Man unfolds like a sly, feverish satire of a serious-minded European art film.

Photo: Poet Kora Schultz looks into the camera, wearing glasses, earrings, and a denim jacket embroidered with flowers on its shoulders. The background, out of focus, is an indoor setting with framed art on the walls.

Local millennial-zennial cusp poet Kora Schultz is managing late capitalism—as well as panic disorder, recovery, and the pandemic—with wit, honesty, and Twitter. 

In their first chapbook, released in late May, Schultz has taken the modern grind and its discontents to vulnerable, tactile, and humorous lengths. strawberry hole, published in late May by Bottlecap Press, is strewn with astrology references, deer hunting analogies, and thoughts on libido-killing meds. The book’s description asserts, "Hope you like sad femmes."

"Getting diagnosed and deciding to slowly start getting sober—around that time is when I started writing a lot of these pieces," Schultz says. "Poetry kept me alive through the pandemic. Not only writing it, but also reading it, and connecting with poets." 

Schultz, who grew up in an addictive and uncertain environment, was diagnosed with panic disorder in 2018. They had their first panic attack before the age of 10 and started using substances as a teenager to cope with anxiety. After a short stint in rehab at age 16, Schultz moved on to Wisconsin’s acceptable substance of choice: alcohol. Now they’re more than 9 months sober from everything but cannabis. 

"Putting a name to it, talking about it, writing about it, and putting it out there, and allowing yourself to be seen has been really helpful for me," Schultz says. Their feminist social media presence is also an outlet. 

The full-time UW-Madison student also works full-time at a housing justice nonprofit, and part-time at a coffee shop, while moonlighting as an editor. This all-too typical lifestyle is negatively affecting the health of many younger American adults. Wage stagnation, longer work hours, burnout, and depression are common afflictions for the post-Gen-X population. A 2019 Blue Cross Blue Shield Health Index study found that millennials' physical and mental health is declining faster as they age than Gen-Xers. So much so that millennials could see a whopping 40 percent increase in mortality compared to the older group. 

In "sorry sorry (sorry)," Schultz expressed that overload and the physical consequences of trauma through an adorable yet disconcerting metaphor: "my body is 1000 hedgehogs in a trenchcoat...they keep the score when my muscles can’t." The latter line refers to the New York Times #1 best-selling trauma treatment bible, The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk. 

"Poetry is a way to release a lot of that [trauma], not only in a way that's giving it space outside of you, but giving it a name; you really do gain so much power from it," Schultz says. 

Though Schultz initially wrote the poetry for themselves, publishing the collection has been equally as therapeutic in a world that simultaneously causes and stigmatizes mental illness and its chronic physical effects. 

"Our social structures manufacture that distance on purpose to not be able to talk about our mental health or addiction—the things that capitalism really capitalizes on," Schultz says. "That manufactured distance can really be solved by [sharing experiences publicly], poetry, and art. That's really the way forward." 

Some of the poems in strawberry hole started as journal entries and are titled with the dates Schultz wrote them. A few show up as phone texts—one concerning a baking challenge. 

In "on vampirism," Schultz weaves their father’s heroin addiction into Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Growing up, they often watched the film on a ratty VHS with their father. They write, "i watch [Gary] Oldman die a thousand times / to find a way to make you live."

"Addiction as monstrosity is a really overplayed and stereotypical thing in art, but it is for a reason—it tugs at people that way," they say.

Mentions of fruit run through strawberry hole, including citrus, the eponymous berries, and orchards. "Fruit is something that you're going to make a mess with; it's going to be soft and it's going to be juicy," Schultz says. In the second stanza of “in three,” they write: 

i tell the goblin no. tell her to clean her room.

tell her there is lacroix at home. trade her liquid

pulls for grapefruit ghosts. put that in your

tweet drafts. a citrus phantom - incredible.

Schultz found solace in writing, reading poetry, and connecting with other poets online during the pandemic.

"We look at Twitter as this nightmare place of constant garbage discourse, but I have found so many cool journals, particularly like Bottlecap [Press] through there," they say. The millennial-run publishing outfit is dedicated to authors' rights and fair pay. 

Schultz recently received an arts grant from Dane Arts, part of a $1 million program to help local artists stay afloat amid pandemic-related losses.

"[The grant] means being able to kind of take time off, take a breath. And focus on work without that two-jobs, full-time-school kind of headspace," they say. 

Through the pandemic-influenced introspection that strengthened their commitment to poetry, Schultz also decided to switch majors from social work to writing, with a minor in psychology.

"I think that's been fairly universal, particularly among creatives in the pandemic—realizing that we never know when it's gonna be over, and you might as well jump for it," they say. 

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

René Magritte’s “The Treachery Of Images” was painted to spark a debate about reality versus representation. He paired a realistic tobacco pipe with the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” or “This is not a pipe,” to plainly illustrate that it’s inaccurate to refer to an image of a pipe as a pipe. To properly make this point, the image doesn’t have to be a facsimile necessarily, but it does need to be a fairly faithful recreation of its real-world counterpart.

That takes us to the Pine Cone Restaurant: a mandatory stop in Johnson Creek between Madison and Milwaukee, if only to grab a cow and/or pig cookie for a sugar rush. Besides being tasty, the cookies are surprisingly anatomically correct, down to their shape and pink-frosted udders. One could easily hold up either barnyard cookie in front of a toddler and expect them to point it out as a cow or a pig, to which one could reply “Uh-uh, it’s a cow cookie. That’s different,” if one was compelled to be condescending toward a child.

The point is the Pine Cone’s cow and pig cookies have consistently met the “Treachery of Images” criteria for kicking off conversations about surrealism. That is, until recently, when my wife and I stopped for a cow cookie and a pig cookie and got an extra jolt to our concept of perception thrown in for free. The familiar shape and slightly discomforting details were gone, replaced by standard round cookies with only passing resemblances to cows and pigs.

Case in point: the man behind the counter referred to this new cow cookie as “some kind of white pig.” My wife must have looked concerned because he quickly assured her that it was just a “funny batch” and that the Pine Cone had definitely not abandoned its classic cow and pig cookie recipes.

Back in the car, the pig’s yellow eyes stared through us from the center of his too-round face, challenging our inherent knowledge of standard pig eye color. The cow’s nose was so similar to the pig’s that we began to wonder if maybe it really was some kind of white pig. These thoughts persisted until we ate both cookies, which were still delicious.

Next time we stop, I’ll be relieved to see our familiar farm friends back in the bakery case. The taste is only part of the expectation because the color and shape are both crucial for pretending you’re biting off an animal’s head. And if we’re going to talk about the difference between a real cow and a cow cookie, the representation needs to be udderly accurate. 

Driving bass, punk-minded tempos, vintage video game sound effects, dance-punk tendencies, and a heavy dose of synth-pop influence harmoniously coexist across these four tracks. On "Sheep RPG," the bouncy nature of the bass line readily invites dancing, while "Cryptaloid Dreams" encourages a thoughtful pause. Each track effectively navigates the liminal space between those two polarity points. Closing track "Ctrl Rom" demonstrates how Moth_OS bridges the apparent gap between push and patience, effectively utilizing a well-placed measure of restraint to invoke the closest thing to a genuine, multilayered emotional response that Mothware can muster. Mothware’s defining characteristic may be that it’s a hyper-adrenalized sugar rush but, as shown by "Ctrl Rom," Moth_OS are also self-aware enough to avoid the type of excess that invites exhaustion.

One of the aspects that helps set Mothware apart from its chiptune contemporaries is the way they form their lyrical narratives. While there’s a notable percentage of chiptune acts that prefer to go the full instrumentation route, a few are taking more direct cues from increasingly influential acts like Brooklyn, NY’s Crying and forming linear narrative structures. Moth_OS position themselves somewhere in the middle, opting for a vignette approach that enlivens the material to a considerable degree. On "Robobreak" it’s a meditation on dreaming and spiraling, reckoning with biological impulse. "Sheep RPG" is a stab at unlayering fear by way of a tongue-in-cheek meta-reference to the video games that serve as the band’s foundation ("Are you scared of monsters?"). "Ctrl Rom" sees the band continue to grapple with the confines of reality as their thoughts fracture; "there’s a housefly on the wall and it’s listening, late at night when I’m thinking."

Spanning a little under 15 minutes, Mothware feels notably complete. There’s a sense of purpose and urgency present throughout the EP, which is a trait that serves young acts well as they develop. How much Moth_OS can develop beyond this point will be the question going forward. For now, it might be best to leave the tenuous navigation of future, past, and present to a band capable of recalling all three at once.

We’ve got some exciting news to share: Oona Mackesey-Green has joined Tone Madison as Managing Editor. You've seen Oona's byline here before, including on last summer's ambitious Flight Path project, a written and audio series that charted grassroots resistance to the basing of fighter jets in Madison. Oona served for several years as managing editor of Northside News and has been deeply involved in the community as an activist and engaged citizen for years.

Over the remainder of this summer, Oona will be taking charge of Tone Madison's day-to-day editorial operations and working with the rest of our team to re-organize our site behind the scenes. We'll keep publishing, but things may be a bit slower for a bit as we do some much-needed planning for the future and make sure this small, scrappy publication is running as well as it can.

We are able to embark on this next phase because Tone Madison's readers have supported us. If that support keeps growing, we'll be able to do more hiring and build on our seven-year record of fiercely independent culture and politics coverage. If you value our work, please consider making a donation to help us do more of it.

Poster design by Mort Künstler.

The 1970s were a famously terrible decade for New York City. On the verge of bankruptcy and facing sweeping cuts in city services with skyrocketing crime rates, NYC truly seemed to be on the verge of collapse. There have been a lot of great films set in the deep-rooted malaise of that time and place, but none of them capture it with the grim humor of Joseph Sargent’s The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974), screening on 35mm at UW Cinematheque (4070 Vilas Hall) this Friday, July 9, at 5 and 7 p.m.

Pelham begins as a gang of heavily armed men, identified only by the color of their hats, takes a subway car full of passengers hostage. After the hostage-takers demand a million-dollar ransom from the city, it’s up to cranky transit cop Zachary Garber (Walter Matthau) to stall for time while the ineffective mayor and city bureaucracy scramble to find the money. Garber and the group’s leader Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw) engage in a radio cat-and-mouse game as Garber tries to figure out how the hijackers plan to escape with the ransom money. Ultimately, as in all great film heists, the hijackers’ getaway is destroyed by their own greed as Garber closes in on the gang.

Director Sargent has said that he thought he was making “just another heist movie” when he was filming Pelham, but his solid direction and a perfect cast and crew resulted in a film that’s endured as a cult favorite. Best known for light thrillers like Charade (1963), screenwriter Peter Stone expertly condensed John Godey’s original novel, simplifying the sprawling ensemble-character plot while building upon the book’s cynical sense of humor. In Godey’s novel, every character has their own backstory and internal monologue; in Stone’s screenplay, they all get at least one great line of dialogue. As the lead, Matthau is a perfect foil to Shaw’s cold, methodical ex-mercenary.

Theirs is an odd pairing, as the two have extremely different acting styles, but the dynamic helps balance the film’s blend of violence and humor. Matthau’s Garber is basically the same schlub he plays in every movie, but he’s so charming that it’s hard to complain. And the Shakespearean-trained Shaw sinks into his role with an icy intensity. Cinematographer Owen Poizman and editor Gerald Greenberg had both worked on The French Connection (another NYC film, released in 1971), and they bring their talents for precisely-executed action sequences and gritty realism to Sargent’s film here. Propelled by a driving twelve-tone score by David Shire, Pelham’s tension never seems to let up.

Although it wasn’t especially successful at the box office, The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three’s reputation has only grown through the decades. Blending elements of the heist film, police procedural, and the then-popular disaster genre, it can be seen as a template for the modern action thriller. It’s easy to see Shaw’s Mr. Blue as an influence on the villainous masterminds of 1980s and 1990s action movies like Die Hard (1988) and Speed (1994). Functioning both as a nonstop thrill ride and a darkly comic look at the decrepitude of 1970s New York, Pelham remains one of the best and most entertaining action films of the era.

Photo: Aaron Scholz sits on a couch in a living room, holding an acoustic guitar. In front of Scholz is a small coffee table with a notebook on it. Photo by Anna White.

Aaron Scholz has spent the past 15 years doing seemingly anything but playing his own songs. In a normal year, Madison show-goers have plenty of opportunities to encounter the singer and guitarist—playing in respected cover band The Low Czars, playing in other projects including country band Westernwhere, hosting open-mics at Mickey's Tavern, and working behind the scenes at WORT. Audiences have had vanishingly few chances to see him play an actual set of original Aaron Scholz material since the late '90s and early 2000s. After releasing two albums, 1999's Perfect Child and 2002's Come Back Down, Scholz kept writing and plotting out another release. But he got busy with other musical projects and decided that his efforts at a solo career were "a bit of a bust," as he puts it.

When live events came to a standstill in 2020, Scholz finally found the time and energy to revisit the project with fresh ears. He recorded 10 songs that combine the sparse wit of country music, an instinct for hooks, and frank but empathetic character sketches. The result, Third Place, came out in June. 

"I basically had the record written and conceived about 2005 or 2006. Some of the songs are older than that," Scholz says. "Some of the songs are older than my kid, and my kid just graduated from high school." 

Scholz fills the songs on Third Place with stories of dislocation and sadness, yet the mood never tips over into rage or despair. He often writes about people who've tucked themselves into the corners of everyone else's forgetting. On the closing track, "The Place," Scholz sings, "I never hesitate to get out of the way." The spirit of that line also rings true for the lovelorn drunk placing a possibly ill-advised call on "Payphone," the hapless drifter on "St. Paul," the unlucky bus traveler on "No Station." These characters, sometimes named and sometimes just implied, give the album an array of rich perspectives. 

"The songs that I put on the record before this, 19 years ago, were very wordy and very heavy and were very much, like, 'I'm singing this song about what I'm doing,'" Scholz says. "In retrospect that wasn't a bad move, but I think I wanted to write songs that were maybe about my experiences but maybe shift the narrative to be about someone singing that song, not necessarily me. I consciously tried to put that in there instead of saying, 'I'm gonna sing my song about me.' There's parts of me in here, but there might not be anything in there that's me."

The places are often just as lost as the people. Scholz puts his plaintive but deceptively strong voice to excellent use on "Dorothy Door," offering a wry meditation on Cold War paranoia and changing times: "Built in the backyard, for a Russian invasion / for the strength of the nation, or for self-preservation / now I wonder, should we all get together / way down in the bunker, while the world falls asunder?" 

When he started listening back to the album's demos last year, Scholz realized that he had unintentionally written a set of pandemic songs: "Some of them are about being isolated and feeling cut-off and not having any interaction, or feeling like society is changed and now I have to be like this. That definitely brought me back to say, 'OK, I should put these out.' It's not that they wouldn't have been relatable 10 years ago or 15 years ago, but they're even more so now."

He came up with arrangements that center on his own acoustic guitar, organ, piano, bass, and percussion—playing everything himself, except for Low Czars member Peter Fatka's contribution of pedal steel on "Little Bars." Scholz believes the songs benefitted from the long wait. He's not the same person he was when he wrote them, but somehow that distance made him more confident. All the years he's spent singing and playing various instruments in different settings also paid off in the album's crisp, uncluttered performances. This all plays to the strengths of the songwriting, which treats its subjects with tender care but never aims to embellish or evoke pity. That drifter on "St. Paul" stumbles into a schoolyard, gets arrested, and "in the morning he walks through the courtroom / the judge rolls his eyes." On one level, this is clearly a tragic character. Yet Scholz ends up giving the listener a strong impression of his resilience, even though he never mentions it directly. 

Scholz also uses the very title of the album to put a fine point on its currents of rootlessness and disorientation.

"The record is my third record, [but it was also] named after the sociological concept of 'third place,'" he says. "You live somewhere, you work somewhere, and the third place is like the bar or the restaurant or the coffeehouse, or even your band or your club or whatever. 100 years ago, that was built into society because people didn't drive everywhere. Everything was localized and media was localized, and communication was very much on a smaller scale, and that's how things were organized, and now that we're all kind of separated, either by physical distance or just by the fact that people don't go out of their houses because it's a pandemic, it's worked out that the sense of isolation that comes from that, if that sort of thing were still prevalent in our society and people naturally gravitated towards that, they would feel better. 

"Some of us folks are lucky," he continues. "I'm a musician, I have bands, I've met most of the people in my life because of that. Most people aren't so lucky. Most people don't have that built into their lives. They go to work and watch television and feel like shit. That's an oversimplification, but if there was more of that in our lives, if there were more places—I grew up in the suburbs, it's like, there's a bunch of houses and the shops were all in a strip mall or in a mall, there isn't a coffeehouse on the corner, there isn't a bar over here, there isn't whatever....and that's not the way it used to be."

At the same time, people ask a great deal of their "third places," and for Scholz that makes them as fraught as they are comforting. "The Place" captures that tension, drawing on experiences that don't match up with people's emotional investment in a given situation: "If we go there / will we be there / will we understand? / our hearts are breaking / find a place / better than an also-ran." Yet the song also manages to end the record with encouraging brightness, amid Scholz's keyboard swells and steadily jangling guitar chords. For all the letdowns and embarrassments they endure, the people in these songs are never truly defeated.

"You want to be able to go somewhere and belong to whatever's happening or the group of people or the event, and sometimes you go there and that doesn't happen, or you go there to actually interact with somebody or some people and that doesn't happen, and what do you do with it?" Scholz asks. "How do you deal with the emotional impact of that? You have an expectation and it's not gonna be fulfilled and then what do you do? You put so much on that. When I was younger, that was really how it was. I really felt like, 'I'm gonna show up, and if this doesn't happen, things are really gonna be bad. Things are really gonna be disappointing.' I think a lot of people have felt that way, that they put a lot of emotional resonance in their experiences at a show, wherever they go to get away from the rest of their life, and that's what that song is about. Even if we get together, we might not be able to actually make things happen, and why not?"

The liner notes for Third Place are a bit self-deprecating: "During the pandemic I revisited my cache of failed experiments and decided to update the naive vision of a thirtysomething singer-songwriter who had big plans for his Third Place record," Scholz writes. In our actual interview, though, he came off as deeply satisfied with the result—not cocky, but confident that these songs accomplish what they set out to do. We've been deprived of his solo work for a long time, but Scholz is at peace with that. 

"Sort of giving up on trying to promote my own music 15 years ago, playing here and there, but learning more about how to play other different kinds of music, how to work with others... I absorbed more about music in a different sense, because I'd been in bands but I'd mostly been trying to write songs and push that," he says. "Once I just said, 'OK, I'm not gonna try to do that consciously for a while and just play,' I think it definitely added to my vocabulary about what works."

In October 2015, A’Ziah “Zola” King, regaled social media with a 148-thread tweet about a “ho trip” that had gone south after she agreed to travel to Tampa to strip with a stranger she met when she was working as a Hooters waitress. The basic premise of this story is enough to make anyone sit up and take notice, but it speaks to the spiraling madness that has become American pop culture. Zola (2020), the new film by director Janicza Bravo (of Gregory Go Boom fame), brings this FloridaMan saga to life on the big screen with all of the unglorified mess that comes with stripping, love, sex, mayhem, and murder.

The titular Zola (Taylour Paige) begins narrating the initial tweet of this epic tale by talking about how she met Stefani (Riley Keough) waiting tables at a Hooters in Detroit. Stefani compliments Zola on her body, asks if she dances, and they become instantly drawn toward each other. Zola has made thousands of dollars on the pole, so this is not such a far-fetched question.

After knowing Stefani for a mere day, Zola is asked to head down to Tampa under the guise of making money stripping at some clubs. Zola doesn’t see the harm in going, but she’s somewhat thrown by the idea of travelling with someone she doesn’t know that well. After grilling Stefani for a bit, Zola is assured that she’ll just be with her boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun of HBO’s Succession) and roommate X (Colman Domingo). Things get off to a rough start as the women are taken to a run-down motel. She and Stefani will be working at the clubs anyway, so their staying in the room won’t be an issue. After a few shows, Zola has made some money and prepares to return home.

This is where she hits a few major bumps in the road in accordance with King’s actual tweets. X is not so much Stefani’s roommate but her pimp, and the trip was set up to “trap”—or, in stripper lingo, prostitute. And this is not at all what Zola had in mind. Unfortunately, she is in over her head and cannot flee the situation. X has set up some jobs for Stefani, but Zola quickly realizes that Stefani is not being adequately paid. This leads Zola to set up her own Backpages ad for Stefani, and they end up raking in thousands of dollars in one night. Meanwhile, back at the motel, an antsy Derrek is befriended by a guest with less than noble intentions. Pimping, as Big Daddy Kane says, ain’t easy. While Zola thinks she’s helping Stefani out, she has no idea what this wild ride will entail next.

From a cultural standpoint, Bravo’s film pushes a hodgepodge of American third rail buttons, but handles them relatively well. Without missing a beat, a scene in the car reveals Stefani calling another stripper “nappy-headed,” as if there are no racial connotations to this slur. At the absolute tone deafness of Stefani’s behavior, Zola’s incredulous expression is all of ours.

As almost all dialogue from the film is lifted straight from King’s original tweetstorm, the little notification dings metaphorically go off on cue to keep the story moving at a good pace. Watching a man running and laughing maniacally on a pool deck with a shotgun might be the most American thing seen in a film in a long time. It may only be 90 minutes, but Bravo does not waste a second keeping the thread moving from one tweet, or scene, to the next. The dialect coaches also deserve an award as Riley Keough transcends every fiber of her being and serves straight, ratchet, hoodrat realness from the jump.

In retrospect, it’s interesting to consider the now-deleted tweets that serve as the primary source for the film. But the Internet never forgets. Tweets and other social media posts have quickly surpassed primary and secondary sources as information for journalism. In our must-have-it-this-instant world where no one can postpone gratification, it makes perfect sense that a sensationalist story such as this one would be turned into cinematic cannon fodder. Surely, embellished fact is stranger, and, if nothing else, more satisfying than fiction. The reality that anyone can have anonymous sex delivered to their door in minutes is nothing short of miraculous.

As a distributor, A24 continues to take big risks, and they have paid off so frequently. On paper, the idea of recreating and translating a series of tweets should not work, but of course, Zola delivers with a graininess that gives it an extra layer of seediness. Bravo in particular shows that she has a knack for directing not just short films but features as well. Zola is one reason to put your mask on and head to a (Marcus or AMC) theater.

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

Construction photo in illustration by Allen DeWitt on Flickr.

We live in a time of brutally precise political and societal commentary, but it usually isn’t featured in the opinion pages of the newspaper. Nor is it featured on news networks, with their endless supply of shouting, questionably professional heads, and it is certainly not to be found on talk radio, with its own endless supply of shouting, decidedly unprofessional heads. The most thoughtful and focused political and societal commentary will not even be found on podcasts, populated as they often are with beards, broey bonhomie, and bloviation.

No, in this day and age, one finds the best political and societal commentary in the easy-to-access, preferred online format of the people: memes. And, once this idea is accepted, one can find all sorts of points made briefly, accurately, and scathingly that the studied, bland word counts of op-eds forbid, the theater of news broadcasts can obfuscate, and the aggrieved soliloquies of talk radio ignore or shred and leave for dead.

Madison resident Lisa Lauren has distilled years of runaway housing development conversations, policies, protests, and general disgruntlement into a five-by-five digital Bingo board fit for Madison meme hall of fame:

Jokes aside (as much as an entire article written about a satirical meme can put jokes aside), Lauren’s work neatly and entertainingly compiles a legion of complaints that have brewed amongst all sorts of Madisonians about the seemingly endless parade of new local high-rises over the last few years. It’s all there: the uncomfortably persistent truth that mostly only Epic employees can afford to live in the new apartments, the perceived lack of engagement that the new residents have with the established community at large, the way none of the new buildings have any character or personality, and the way that developers and investors always sell these projects to the general public. This meme is so successful because it leaves almost no stones unturned.

The underlying point of the meme is, of course, about money—or rather, lack of it, since much of Madison cannot afford local rent period, much less the cost of living in a new high-rise. It is necessary to note that the economic anxiety behind the meme is not comic at all. Many people who live here are worried that they will eventually be pushed out of the city they’ve made a home in, due to Madison’s constantly accelerating housing market. (Memes, if you haven’t learned by now, are deeply rooted in expressing cultural dread, economic and climate anxiety, and general discontent with social issues around the globe.)

It’s not just about high rises, either. Property values across the board are skyrocketing. A recent report from NBC15 describes the Dane County housing market as “red-hot” and notes that sometimes homes are selling for far more than the asking price. (And, incidentally, the author’s rent is raised every year.) The presentation might be a joke, but the concerns are very real.

“I feel like people just think more money = better, and that can be true in some cases, but not all,” says Lauren, who also runs a jewelry business called Kettle Black Silver, in a private message. 

In addition to this, Lauren clarified any potential meme misunderstandings. 

“It’s not like I want to stop people from moving here. I understand that people are going to move here, and somehow space is needed for them,” says Lauren. 

Luxury developments do sometimes include affordable units, and the vagaries of affordable-housing tax credits make the discussion about affordable housing even more complicated. It’s not only understandable, but worthwhile to wonder who can live in “affordable housing” that is placed in a bracket far above what many Madisonians can even think about affording, and what it will mean for those less wealthy Madisonians in the future. In light of these concerns, Lauren’s questions are thoughtful: “Where is the money going? Back to the community?”

Perhaps this quote from Lauren is the best summary of the thoughts behind the meme: “I would love more people, but if we are only catering to people who have money,” says Lauren, “we are going to lose what makes Madison desirable.” 

Correction: The initial version of this article included an erroneous reference to the relationship between property taxes and affordable housing.

Photos by Elizabeth Lang.

As you enter Richie Morales' exhibition The Effects Of Time On Memory, on display through July 10 at Arts + Literature Laboratory, you'll find richly textured paintings whose vibrant colors emit a positive energy but also point to much more complex themes.

Much of the show depicts Latin American flora and fauna in carefully layered blues, yellows, greens, pinks, and reds. Morales, a self-taught painter who grasps art as a way to understand his surroundings and reality, draws much of the show's imagery from his home country of Guatemala.

"Art chose me. It's the way I communicate to the world. It's sometimes difficult [to communicate] coming from such a hurt context like Guatemala," Morales says. "Sometimes you have too many prejudices and it was difficult for me to communicate by talking. That's how drawing came up, and then in [drug] rehabilitation centers I had the opportunity of interacting with paint."

Morales grew up on the outskirts of Antigua, Guatemala.

"Guatemala's history, just like the rest of Latin America, is a complicated history with the U.S. Their political interventions have greatly affected us," Morales says. "Guatemala is the result of years of interventions, military governments, coups, and oligarchies."

These external factors affected Morales' experience as a child that later in life transferred to his art.

"I had a complicated childhood: phases of drugs, alcoholism, and losing friends to violence," Morales says. "Losing a friend is very painful. You're speaking to them and, suddenly, right around the corner he's killed. Those conditions struck me and I was looking for a way to understand why those things were happening." 

But then he discovered paint. In it he found an ability to create movements and textures, which run through the curves of the flora and fauna in his work.

Flowers are opened up for the hummingbirds to feed themselves. The birds are outlined and their insides are filled with colorful lines to create the illusion that they're flying.

At first glance, the exhibition's 41 paintings (to match Morales's 41 years of life) on Arts + Lit Lab's first and second floor might seem simple. But they're not. They're asking the viewer to reflect on the concept of memory.

"For me, it's like another ritual to go deep inside. Play with that memory. For me, memories are in layers, and sometimes you can't access them directly," Morales says. "But an event, a song, food, or a beverage suddenly takes you to a time in your childhood, or a place that you were not planning to go to."

In exploring these themes, Morales found the connections between time, memories, and nature's beauty. 

"For Holy Week in Guatemala, carpets made out of flowers are created," Morales says. "Afterwards, the people carrying the procession walk over it and the colors are disassembled. That inspires me as well as the textiles of Guatemala."

This strong inspiration from his home country is also a reflection of Morales's Indigenous roots and his love for Guatemalan huipiles, a traditional garment worn by Indigenous women in Mexico and Central America.

"The huipiles represent nature and they tell stories through their embroideries. The symbolisms are part of the native cultures," Morales says.

And the huipil is deeply tied to Morales' art in the past that dealt with social topics such as the violence in deportation. He saw the huipil as a metaphor to find his way through Madison and use art as a tool to question society.

"At the beginning my art was more about complaints," Morales says, referring to earlier work in which violence and darkness play much more explicit roles. "But now I've allowed myself to feel the anger as well as the healing."

Now, the huipil is the inspiration for his textures, vivid colors, and healing after extensively painting about violence and pain.

Morales paints with a deep connection to both nature and Guatemalan Indigenous culture. His depictions of hummingbirds, beetles, deer, butterflies, dragonflies, cicadas, toads, turtles, and a quetzal bird in this exhibition illustrates this link. 

They're not there for their simple, aesthetically pleasing beauty. They are there to talk to you, and reveal to you their deeper meaning within Guatemalan culture, according to Morales.

Mayan culture treats the hummingbird as a powerful messenger, a role that Morales identifies with as an artist. He also includes the deer which in Mayan culture represents the birth of the sun.

"When it rains while the sun is out, people in Guatemala say that deer are being born," Morales says. "It's just as with Gabriel García Márquez, it's all that magic realism you grow up with; the popular sayings and all of that stuff."

And then, there are also butterflies, which Morales understands as a metaphor for his metamorphosis and intent of flying. The butterflies are also accompanied by dragonflies and cicadas throughout the Arts + Lit Lab.

Morales has a strong kinship with another critter found in his paintings. 

"Some cicadas spend 12 or 13 years underground. It's that necessity of spending time with yourself so that you can then surge into life," Morales says.

In one of the exhibition's standout pieces, Morales depicts the quetzal bird, Guatemala's national bird, in radiant but stately greens and reds.

Next to each of the 41 paintings, you'll find a short poem by the Bolivian writer and philologist Claudia Vaca.  These grew out of a collaboration that began when Morales asked her to write a set of poems that follow the structure of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar's 1963 novel Rayuela.

The novel's title is the Spanish word for "hopscotch." In the novel's instruction table, Cortázar tells the reader to read in a linear way until chapter 56 and then jump to chapter 73. It's not a straight order and the reader is immersed in a literary piece that does not follow the conventional reading style.

"The purpose of Cortázar's novel is to give a linear reading, but at the end he proposes a reading where you skip chapters and can read it in disorder," Morales says. "I asked Claudia to write the poems with a Rayuela style; that each poem went along with a painting so that it could be organized and disorganized [at the same time]."

In the poem accompanying the six canvases that come together to show a dragonfly, Vaca treats its wings as a metaphor for freedom: 

The windows of their wings watch

their inner flutter

migrating from one memory to the other

within the larvae movement 

they find the value of routine

in their eye's retina

they glimpse the rainbow

where they will be free

Through this multimedia approach, viewers interact with the paintings while the poems speak directly to them. During the weekend of June 4 through 6, Geraldine Paredes, the Race and Gender Equity Director at YWCA Madison and Morales' wife, read Vaca's poems out loud in the gallery while dancer Natalia Armacanqui performed as a means to honor cultures in resistance.

"Natalia interacted with the paintings on the first floor as part of her dance," Paredes says. "But how she interacted with them was a way to invite the art's metaphors in her movements."

Armacanqui incorporated into her performance a word from the Quechua Indigenous language, "kachkaniraqmi," which  means "we continue to exist," as a means to honor Indigenous and marginalized communities in Latin America.

All of these threads, from painted beasts to a commemorative dance, intertwine with Morales' main message. "Hope is the way," he says. "We should stop for a while and rethink the fact that we're more connected than we think. There's a hope in existence and not everything is lost."

Photo: Vincent Presley (left) and Lacey Smith in their living-room synth studio. Photos by Lacey Smith.

Walking into the East Side apartment that serves as headquarters to Madison label Secret Records, one immediately confronts a vertiginous staircase of synthesizers. Tightly arranged on a series of ascending keyboard stands, the synths take up about half the wall space in Vincent Presley and Lacey Smith's living room. They all feed into a large mixer that looms ominously in an upper corner. The collection spans from the early 1970s to 2020, analog to digital to FM, familiar names like Roland and Moog to far-flung ones like the Soviet Polivoks. It must all look like a glorious challenge course to Smith and Presley's cats. 

"I have another drum machine coming today," Presley says during our interview. "I think I got three synths in the mail this week." At the same time, he frequently sells off synths to fund the purchases of others he's curious about, making for a constant process of shipping in, shipping out, re-arranging, and re-connecting.

That restless (and potentially perverse) drive to collect has fueled Presley and Smith's efforts to grow Secret Records' doggedly eccentric catalog. They initially started Secret to release recordings from their own projects, especially Zebras, a trio that evolved from squirrelly post-punk to apocalyptic sludge (with Presley on guitar and vocals, Smith on synth, and Shawn Pierce and later Shane Hochstetter on drums). 

By the time Zebras broke up in 2017, Secret had started to branch out into vinyl editions of rare and almost-lost recordings from various corners of electronic, experimental, post-punk, and industrial music. Presley and Smith don't pay themselves for their work on the label, but they say it largely sustains itself—largely thanks to their relationship with the long-running experimental band The Residents.

Their first reissue was Snakefinger's Live In Melbourne 1981. The solo moniker of Philip Lithman, Snakefinger fused pessimistic punk aggression with Lithman's resourcefully snarled guitar work. 

 "The Snakefinger thing, that was a bootleg that was floating around for a long time, and we listened to it all the time," Smith says. "We were just like, 'This is so cool, somebody should put this out.' Since we knew La-Ni, his daughter, we were just like, 'Let's just make this.'"

Secret got it remastered and turned it into a limited-edition double LP, complete with new art from Residents singer Molly Harvey and liner notes from Jello Biafra. Smith drew on her skills as a freelance artist and designer to pull together the complete package. There were no master tapes to work with, which Presley says is often the case when digging up recordings that never got a commercial release, or came out on now-defunct labels. So, sometimes they're working from "a questionable source to begin with," Presley says, but he credits mastering engineer Carl Saff for the respectably sharp end result.

"We do pay money for a good mastering guy that can work with whatever we give him, and I think that's where a lot of labels skip," Presley says. "I buy a lot of vinyl, and I have some bad-sounding new vinyl. And I'm like, 'You could have done something with this.'"

Next came a 2016 vinyl reissue of Behind Closed Curtains, a 1978 album from the playful British electronic duo Renaldo & The Loaf. Both this and the Snakefinger project had connections to The Residents, and soon Secret Records began reissuing albums from The Residents' sprawling, nearly 50-year discography. Some of these had only ever come out on CD in the first place, and then gone out of print. "People would pay like $40 for a used CD and I'm just like, just put it on vinyl," Presley says. Secret found appreciative buyers among The Residents' devoted, diligently collecting audience. The label doesn't really do that much promotion, aside from placing ads in The Big Takeover, because Smith and Presley are already pretty well-connected with that audience. They're part of it, after all.

"[The label] just started to release our own stuff," Presley says. "Also, it came from me not being satisfied with what I could get. A lot of it, especially all the early stuff we've reissued for other people, or stuff that was never on vinyl, or you couldn't get at all, I was like, 'But I want it. Why is no one doing this?'" 

Residents fans have kept the label self-sustaining and given it the resources to pursue other reissue projects, both of Residents-related projects and other recordings that reflect Presley and Smith's varied interests. The highlights include two retrospectives of Scottish goth-rock band Twisted Nerve, a double-vinyl ambient-guitar album from Swans member Norman Westberg, several albums from gothic-country outfit Sons Of Perdition, a lost release from post-punk greats Chrome, and the first vinyl release of an album from Japanese punk trio Ex-Girl. At the end of 2020, Presley put his synth fortress to use and released two albums of his own: the grim, zombie-movie-inspired Music To Rot And Resurrect and the icy, ambient-leaning Music To Die To.

Secret tries to reward the loyalty of its buyers by fussing over the details. Smith and Presley put a great deal of time and effort into planning colored vinyl that matches the album artwork, and packing orders so the packaging won't get scuffed in transit. Most of the vinyl releases are limited, numbered editions of 300 or so, and when someone orders multiple releases, Presley tries to make sure they get copies with matching numbers. The focus is heavily on vinyl, but for the live Residents album In Between Dreams, Smith designed a longbox—a relic of the early days of commercial CD sales. Several sides of the Norman Westberg double-vinyl have locked grooves, allowing gentle guitar drones to repeat for as long as you leave the record on.

The label's schedule of releases has always been sporadic, and some years are busier than others. At the moment, months-long backups at vinyl pressing plants are making it hard for Presley and Smith to plot their next move. "I'll be lucky if I get one other thing released this year," Presley says. For now, Presley is working on a Secret Records collaboration album—on each track, he'll partner up with someone who's put out work on the label. There also might be another Residents reissue on the horizon. The ever-rotating synth collection was in part a response to the pandemic closing down record stores and disrupting the label's distribution. "We thought we better try something new just in case that stuff stayed closed for a while," Presley says. "The synth studio was part of a plan to have more published new music that could possibly be licensed for use in films or whatever." For now, you can watch the synth armory evolve in almost real time on Secret Records' Instagram page, where they're frequently posting about synths going in or out.

Just before the pandemic shut down live events, Smith and Presley were also working on launching an all-vinyl industrial DJ night, Haunted Ones. They only managed to put on two editions in early 2020, at Mickey's Tavern and Crucible, but Smith hopes to get it back up and running soon. In the meantime, Haunted Ones will continue to exist in the form of a couple of Spotify mixes and a forthcoming mixtape Smith is planning in collaboration with Madison drone duo Woodman/Earhart, titled Summer Jams For Hot Goths. (Full disclosure: Woodman/Earhart member Emili Earhart is a Tone Madison contributor.) While Haunted Ones is hardly the only goth and industrial night in Madison, Smith is hoping it can bring something distinctive to the mix.

"With Haunted Ones I think I just wanted it to be less of a dance-remix, flawlessly-mixing-tracks-together, club vibe," Smith says. "I definitely want it to be danceable, but more of a focus on just playing a wide variety of classic and obscure songs that fit in the realm of goth, post-punk, and industrial, pretty straightforward. Just creating a night for people who are into gloom and weird dark vibes, just simple. So far it's been all vinyl and we had videos playing during the first event, but not a lot of frills."

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A post shared by Lacey Smith Design (@luluweird)

Smith has not felt much of an urge to play music of her own recently, but her freelance design business has been expanding over the past few years. Bringing together elements that run from the earth to the surreal, Smith has been creating album covers, show posters, and plenty of things outside of the music world, including a T-shirt for The Green Owl and a print for activist art collective Supply Chain. 

"Zebras' The City Of Sun and Snakefinger's Live In Melbourne were the first layouts I had ever done and I was just starting school at that point," Smith says. "I remember kind of agonizing over those designs and learning along the way, just figuring things out as they came up. Also, especially with The Residents, feeling so out of my league. They have such a legacy of working with amazing artists and are so visually focused—it was very intimidating. I think after I did the layout for Snakey Wake, which is a really special, personal album written for and performed at Snakefinger's funeral, I got a compliment by someone from the band, saying I was doing a great job with the art. I wanted to print out that email and frame it."

Photo: Andy Manis, Getty Images

The story was produced in partnership with The NEWcomer, an independent publication covering politics, art, and culture in Northeast Wisconsin. 

While Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has slowly and begrudgingly confirmed the names of two retired cops joining a private taskforce he has hired to investigate bogus claims of fraud in the 2020 elections, and announced that a former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice will supervise the effort, Vos has withheld the identities of one more. 

The reasons for the secrecy around the officers' identities is not clear—Vos is paying for the investigation with taxpayer funds. A joint reporting effort by Tone Madison and The NEWcomer points to the likely identity of one other officer Vos has hired or plans to hire: Monica "Nikki" Janke, formerly of the Brown County Sheriff's Office. 

During her tenure, Janke headed up BCSO's part of an investigation into former Green Bay mayor Jim Schmitt’s 2016 campaign finance violations. Schmitt, a Republican, served as the city's mayor from 2003 to 2019. In 2016, prosecutors charged Schmitt with three misdemeanors, saying that he accepted illegal campaign contributions and then covered it up. Schmitt eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to pay fines and perform community service hours. 

Wisconsin trial lawyer Patrick Knight, who was Schmitt’s attorney in 2016, told The NEWcomer the leading investigator was a woman who worked closely alongside prosecuting attorney Bruce Landgraf. 

A 2016 criminal complaint against Schmitt written by Sgt. Nikki Janke lists her as the complaining witness alongside attorney Landgraf.

The NEWcomer reached out to multiple recently retired BSCO officers in an effort to confirm that Janke has been hired to participate in Vos' investigation. Former deputy Christine Bilgo told The NEWcomer that of any likely candidates, it would be “Nikki Jossart.” Jossart is Janke's former name, and she can be found listed on police reports as Sgt. Monica Jossart or as Nikki Janke. Bilgo said Janke was heavily involved in Janke's husband’s campaign for Oconto County Sheriff and had a long tenure in investigative work.

Nikki Janke is currently married to Ed Janke, former Oconto County Sheriff Chief Deputy who ran for Sheriff in 2018 and is the current Director Of Public Safety and Fire Chief for the Village of Howard. 

When asked if Nikki Janke was the former BSCO officer selected by Speaker Vos, Ed Janke referred The NEWcomer to speak with her directly. Nikki Janke has not returned a request for comment.

Speaker Vos’s office has not returned repeated requests for comment as of Monday morning. 

Janke retired from the Brown County Sheriff's Office in 2018 after a 30-year career during which she attained the rank of detective sergeant. A LinkedIn page for Janke says she held a number of positions within the Sheriff's Office throughout her career, including correctional worker at the Brown County Jail, patrol officer, drug agent, field training supervisor, and fraud investigator.

Since retirement, Janke has testified in two famed Green Bay court cases: the trial of James Prokopovitz—who was convicted of killing his wife, Victoria Prokopovitz, and is currently serving a life sentence—and the trial of George Burch, sentenced to life in prison for the 2016 killing of Nicole VanderHeyden. 

On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that the retired police officers Vos has hired will be paid $3,200 a month each to investigate “potential irregularities and/or illegalities” in the 2020 presidential election. The AP identified two members of the task force so far: retired Milwaukee Police detective Mike Sandvick and former Eau Claire Detective Sgt. and current private investigator Steve Page. The AP confirmed the names by using an open-records request to obtain Sandvick and Page's hiring contracts; Vos' office did not comment for the story. Sandvick has a history of stoking election-fraud claims: In 2008, he led a dubious investigation that claimed to find an "illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome" evidence of Wisconsin's 2004 election. Experts at the Brennan Center for Justice, a public-policy institute at New York University that focuses heavily on voting rights, examined Sandvick's report and said it mostly just found evidence of clerical errors. 

Vos' investigation comes as Republicans across the country continue a coordinated effort to push the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump. Dozens of election lawsuits have failed to establish a legal or factual basis for overturning the election results. Journalistic fact-checks and governmental investigations—including one Republican state legislators conducted in Michigan—have debunked claims of widespread tampering and fraud. Trump's own former Attorney General, Bill Barr, has also publicly broken with Trump over these claims.

During the Republican Party of Wisconsin's annual convention this past weekend—as he tried to deflect an attack from Trump and as some members of his own party called on him to resign—Speaker Vos announced that former conservative state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman would oversee his election investigation. Gableman himself gave a speech at the convention, demolishing any pretense that the investigation will be anything but a Republican propaganda effort.

Gableman is a noted and public Trump supporter who upheld a 4-3 conservative majority during his tenure on the state Supreme Court. Gableman wrote opinions in support of former Republican Gov. Scott Walker's Act 10 and intervened in the 2011 John Doe investigations into Walker's campaign. Gableman's investigation oversight compensation has not been disclosed at this time.

In Brown County, the city of Green Bay continues to be embroiled in unsubstantiated election fraud claims. The Wisconsin Elections Commission referred a minuscule 27 people, of over 3 million votes cast, for prosecution for illegal voter activity in the 2020 general election.

Illustration by Maggie Denman. photos by Holly Marley-Henschen except where otherwise noted.

In Making The Nature Scene, Tone Madison explores the splendor of the outdoors in the Madison area (and beyond), and encourages Madisonians to think more deeply about their natural and built surroundings.

Picture it: Michigan, 2021. You're standing on a cliff. There's water below as far as the eye can see. On the other side is a forest, miles thick. There's a fresh breeze blowing off of the lake and the sound of waterfalls in the distance. I was the Sophia Petrillo-inspired (but solo) peasant girl in this waking dream for five days of backpacking. The place: Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in the Upper Peninsula.

Each summer, Wisconsinites and others flock to the extra appendage of Michigan that's attached to our state. The resplendent forest and lake access are worth the five-hour road trip. The trappings of concrete and technology fade. Nature takes over (coincidentally, my personal sci-fi fantasy). Chillness ensues. 

Pictured Rocks is awash with opportunities to luxuriate outdoors. Named for its colorful sandstone cliffs, the 42-mile expanse is a composite of said cliffs, as well as dunes and coniferous and deciduous forests. Rivers and waterfalls are scattered throughout. I'd been pining for the ocean all pandemic, so I bugged out to the national lakeshore—the first area to be given that designation, in 1966. Here, Lake Superior gives off super low-key sea vibes. I gazed out into nothing but water and realized how big the world is, which quickly put the last year into perspective. The waves aren't surfable, but they are audible and soothing. The Pictured Rocks themselves are reminiscent of a tiny, tiny elevated slice of Grand Canyon cliffs. Groundwater trickles out of cracks in the sandstone on the cliff faces, mixing with minerals to create a rainbow of colors. Iron causes red and orange streaks, copper stripes are blue and green. Manganese makes brown and black lines on the rocks, where limonite creates white. 

The tranquility of the more than 73,000-acre park is secured by its distance from main roads. The North Country Trail (NCT), which runs along the cliffs and shores abutting the lake, is prime for backpacking—and my main motivation for visiting. Many of the park's notable spots, rock formations, beaches, and campsites are reachable by a car and a brief hike.

I live in a bustling part of Madison and am used to the urban cacophony of traffic, construction, commercial and war planes, and neighbor sounds. I love to be alone with nature and sink into a still, calm headspace. In mid May, Pictured Rocks was the perfect spot. Most visitors flock to the park from Memorial Day through Labor Day, making it a more social experience. 

Campers and hikers can visit Pictured Rocks' plentiful day hikes, which range from 1,700 feet (Munising Falls) to 10 miles (Chapel Loop—highly recommended). There are also a few accessible spots, like campsites and Miner's Castle overlooks.  

Pictured Rocks boasts a high concentration of waterfalls. Dolomite, a sturdier type of sandstone on the outer layer of the cliffs, suffers less erosion from the water flow. My top waterfall pick is Spray Falls, which is only viewable from the NCT or by boat. Its powerful cascade plunges 70 feet from a clifftop to the lake below. Another popular and easy to reach spot is Munising Falls, a one-way, semi-steep 800-foot climb that sits at a trailhead at the west end of the park.

One of my favorite spots was Little Chapel Lake. It's not technically a lake, but rather a very small cove cut into the bluffs where rivulets of water trickle into cool aquamarine water below. It's namesake, Chapel Rock, once resembled a small church. Rockslides and erosion have remodeled it. It's still fascinating to see how it's been sculpted by nature. Plus, the chapel is topped with a Tolkien-reminiscent tree. Its sprawling roots climb out across the stone like an Ent stretching to take a step. 

Critters galore dwell in the woods surrounding the NCT and adjacent hiking and skiing trails. Tiny orange-red squirrels are downright cartoonish compared to their engorged, bird feeder-raiding, Madison cousins. I spied several white-tailed deer and nearly kicked a wild chipmunk that scurried fearlessly across my path. One spot on the trail was marked as a Bear Area (or Bearea if you will). Park managers put up signs at both ends of the roughly one-mile stretch of trail after a recent bear sighting. Lucky for me, singing an impromptu song about bears (tentatively titled “Bear Song”) seemed to ward them off. 

In another memorable wildlife moment, I watched a scattered, peaceful flock of bluebirds gently flutter and hop up over the side of a cliff and into trees. Then they slowly carried on into the forest. For flora lovers, there's a feast for the eyes of moss and lichens, in addition to forests full of plants and trees. 

Amid the natural majesty of the park, there was also an odd amount of used toilet paper. And not even the easily biodegradable variety. This was the Charmin Ultra-thick Buttblanket stock. It's glaring bleachwhite dotted campsites—ones that had actual vault toilets for all of your waste elimination needs—and at sites like Chapel Rock. Which brought to mind Leave No Trace Principles. 

As a backpacker, Leave No Trace includes packing out all of the things you bring in with you. That means double-checking your surroundings when you skedaddle from any site to make sure you didn't leave anything behind, like a tent stake or small bits of plastic from packaging. Based on findings from recreation ecology, Leave No Trace also encourages keeping on the trail, camping where you're supposed to, and the old adage of taking only pictures and leaving only footprints. Respecting wildlife from a distance and others by avoiding general loudness makes for a more pleasant experience for everyone. These principles also protect the Earth—ya know, giver of all life. 

Note that Pictured Rocks visitors centers at Munising Falls and Grand Sable are closed this season for remodeling. Water fountains and most rest areas don't open for the season until Memorial Day weekend. My trip in mid-May during the week offered much privacy, but little potable water. It was actually quite fun and satisfying to gather and filter my own from the cool lake and streams. 

If you need encouragement to start backpacking, I think you'll love backpacking and be great at it! Learning to do it safely is super vital. If you have a friend who's into it, they'll most assuredly help you learn the ropes. While it can be pricey to amass your gear, it's easy to start small and with brief excursions. REI and other groups host backpacking trips and the NCT is nearly impossible to get lost on. Homemade Wanderlust has a trove of approachable backpacking vids. Note: Backpacking requires ample planning. I'm learning to strategize and prepare better in general because I could die or be seriously injured if I mess up on planning for my trips. That's part of the fun!

The mind operates on a different level when you're surrounded by nature and your only prescient concerns are getting to where you need to go and making sure you have enough to eat and drink. Backpacking is also fantastic motivation to amass snacks. Bring twice as much chocolate as you think you'll need. Treats (although they're probably not midnight girl-talk cake) are one of the few things that backpacking has in common with Golden Girls. Unless you hit the trail in Florida or with your Ma.

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

llustration uses “Head of a man with hair raised, expressing despair” via Wikimedia Commons.

There are two wolves inside the online-Milwaukee Bucks-verse. One is a nihilistic, self-deprecating poster who wants nothing more than to watch the Bucks win, but has no faith in Wisconsin sports. The other is a graceful angel who lives in fields of hope and prays for wins.

Both are likely the same person. 

In an attempt to interview the owner of the Nihilist Bucks Twitter page, I ran into shadowy facts, misleading narratives, and cones of silence. As of this writing on June 23—game one of the NBA East Finals—the account has just over 6,000 followers. 

My infatuation with the account came from the usual late-night scrolling. I am, like presumably a lot of Wisconsinites, not a die-hard fan of certain teams or sports, but more than susceptible to the excitement that surrounds this ascendant Bucks team. Basketball has a warm place in my heart, as I played when I was very young, and Giannis Antetokounmpo is a very humble and kind human being. Also, the Bucks’ 2020 wildcat strike in response to police killings and their joint efforts with other Wisconsin sports teams to advance equity in the business world, have made me even more proud to be a fan.

Enter nihilism.

The Twitter bio for @nihilist_bucks reads: “Bucks Basketball only serves as a distraction as we fight to avoid the inevitable embrace of death.” The account drew my eye because nihilism and Wisconsin sports seem like a perfect pairing. I’ve been a casual observer for long enough to know not to put my hopes all in one basket, season, player, or team. Most years it is a cynical cycle of Bucks do bad, turn on the Brewers, Brewers do what Brewers do, cycle and turn on Green Bay Packers games and an inkling of 2011 Packers pandemonium. There is always a tinge of despair in the eyes of Wisconsin sports fans. This Twitter account seems to be a manifested incarnation of decades’ worth of dashed hopes.

Given the intertwined nature of nihilism as a philosophical and artistic movement and early 20th century Dadaism, a meme account devoted to cataloging years’ worth of despair watching the Bucks is essentially a modern-day Parisian canvas.

This year, however, has obviously been different. On Saturday, the Bucks put in a lot of hard work and stamina to advance against the Brooklyn Nets after a grueling seven games and nail-biting, bar-gripping overtime. In the wake of Saturday’s victory, I wondered how a self-proclaimed nihilist wrestles with good news.

The Nihilist Bucks Twitter page does not accept private messages. Its bio links to an outdated SoundCloud page and further searching revealed a more recent SoundCloud, neither of which provide contact information, personal details, or a name. An episode of the shadowy figure’s sporadic podcast features a real conversation with other humans. Guests Jack, Beef Chief, and the sought-after man of mystery “Nihilist” hash out a fantasy basketball draft in which the twister from Twister (1996), Dr. Manhattan, a sandworm from Dune, the three-headed King Ghidorah from Godzilla: King Of The Monsters, and other characters from all realms fantasy and reality don fictitious jerseys. This conversation produced some context and background for the world @nihilist_bucks inhabits.

On the Bucks Reddit page, @nihilist_bucks did an Ask Me Anything segment a few years ago, but the answers are vague and unhelpful in determining the actual identity of the user.

Along the way, I began to email and ask people via direct Twitter messages if they knew the owner of the account and, if so, whether the owner would be up for an interview. Unfortunately, the Nihilist Bucks Public Relations office is closed. The “PR department” follows only four other on Twitter, which some-what helped fuel my search: a non-official BMO Harris Bradley Center (the now-demolished former home of the Bucks, replaced by the taxpayer-funded Fiserv Forum) account, a parody account for the now-defunct Milwaukee sports radio show “The Fan,” Nihilist Bucks who lives in The Graveyard of Hope, WI, and Nihilist’s younger cousin @optimist_bucks who lives in The Garden of Hope, WI.

Most people I reached said they didn’t know, one person said they wouldn’t want to be associated with the account because of their behavior (I assume @nihilst_bucks’ flagrant amount of shit-posting has something to do with it), and eventually someone told me “they are aware of your interest and will reach out if they are into it.”

Another Twitter account began to message me, after I inquired, with spam-like messages and lines lifted from Dr. Evil’s speeches in Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery. The same user accused me of attempting to dox the account owner and then proceeded to ramble. A journalist asking to speak with the person responsible for a public-facing online account and learn more about them, ask them about the creation of their online community, and gain insights into their world is not doxing.

After sleuthing into photos the user has posted on their public Twitter page, I believe the person behind @nihilist_bucks is a 20- to 30-year-old white male from either Milwaukee or Texas, who has an absurdly expansive and expensive collection of collectible basketball cards and video games. That narrows the possibilities down to *calculating* a mere couple million people.

I have another theory that it’s more than one person, given the interconnectedness of people who told me they know I am snooping.

In my search and inability to dig out the truth ahead of Wednesday’s game (what in the world happened in those last 20 seconds?), I was dejected. The user behind Nihilist Bucks has every right to not want to speak with me, but the bees in my bonnet demanded answers. Frustrated, I remembered a quote from @nihilist_buck’s three-year-old Reddit AMA: “It is but my sole duty to convince Bucks fans’ (sic) despair is our only method of survival.” 

I’m playing the long game. I’ll keep slogging through the graveyard in search of a garden. Nihilist, if you're out there, I just want to talk. 

Bucks in six. 

A few years ago the band members started describing their work as “sad lesbian music,” initially as a joke. “But it accidentally became our brand,” says Farnsworth, who enjoys explaining it to people to see if they totally get it, or are completely stumped. Their sound isn’t totally specific, and that’s what they want. It does have strong components of emo, folk, and '80s synth sounds, plus a whole lot of what Rose likes to call “Sapphic energy” drizzled on top for extra zest.

Another way of describing their music, according to the band, is queer-emo, or “queermo” for short. “We are a queer, trans, nonbinary band in the literal world of straight, cis-music industry. There aren’t as many bands out there doing what we are doing, and we want to do it for other people like us,” Farnsworth says. 

“But honestly it’s just good, queer music,” Rose clarifies. “It’s a refreshing step away from your typical four white dudes in a band singing about straight love. I think that’s why some people get it and others don’t,” notes Farnsworth. “Intentionally and unintentionally we are a bit of a hybrid. We take inspiration wherever we can find it. We try really hard to refrain from defining our sound, which in term makes it hard for people to figure out what kind of playlists to put us on. To be honest, we don’t always have an answer for them,” Rose says.

Farnsworth and Rose’s connection began in Janesville, where, Farnsworth says, “truly, nothing was going on.” In order to survive the mundanity of Rock County, Farnsworth found themselves participating in a local song share group that eventually coalesced into the folk-punk band Pancake Riot. Each Wednesday, they’d meet at a local coffee shop, Mocha Moment, to participate in their weekly open mic. “It was the first place I ever performed, the first open mic I ever attended. It really, truly, was the segue into what I’m doing right now,” Farnsworth says.

Around 2015, Pancake Riot began to dissipate into individual solo projects, leaving Farnsworth with the name Kat And The Hurricane, a slight tweak on a band name generator result of “Kat And The Weather.” “It wasn’t until 2018 when I saw Ben playing at Mocha Moment. I was like ‘Oh… look at that… another queer kid.’ I knew I had to be friends with Ben immediately,” Farnsworth says.

Rose’s early life revolved around music and religion. Surviving that environment was due in part to their interest in taking what they could from the experience, which largely came down to music. “For all of the ills that came from that environment, at least I learned how to play along with a band,” Rose joked. Eventually, Rose and Farnsworth found themselves in Madison, where working for a religious nonprofit and delivering pizzas supported their musical endeavors. While traversing local venues and cafes, the pair made the acquaintance of drummer Alex Nelson.

As a young child, Nelson’s introduction to live music came by way of their father’s bar and weekend-heavy touring schedule. “My father is a professional drummer, with all the gear sponsorships and all of that," Nelson says. "His cover band—which was his longest running project—was called Cheese Pizza. They’d perform in drag, and, in hindsight, it may have been a little offensive. But it made them the talk of the town. They’re really talented musicians, but sometimes I think back and I’m like ‘Oh, wow, I grew up that way, huh?’”

“I got to know Kat through a mutual friend and began attending a few of their shows here in Madison and others in and around Milwaukee,” Nelson says. “I think during one of those meetups I went up to Kat and told them that I noticed how [Farnsworth and Rose] didn’t have a drummer and, well, I play drums… only thing is I don’t have a kit.’”

Some time after that conversation, Farnsworth gifted Nelson a $100 Premier kit. Nelson’s Monona Bay residence became the trio’s practice space and they set to work on fleshing out the tracks that Rose and Farnsworth had been developing. Like that, Kat And The Hurricane was complete.

By taking influence from their past, Kat And The Hurricane can communicate honestly and directly about the experiences that shaped them, while finding room for a larger resonance among those who have shared some of the same experiences. If 2017's Miles Away EP and 2020's Libra EP were the expressions of earlier conflicts, The Sorry EP is an attempt at therapeutic resolution.

The Sorry EP’s pointedly uncompromising pop finds the trio operating in a bolder register than before. As Kat And The Hurricane’s grasp on songwriting continues to strengthen, the band’s sound packs more of a noticeable punch. Farnsworth and Rose’s tendency towards strong-willed guitar licks and impassioned lyrics remains sharply intact.  

“A Greeting,” a prologue consisting of passages from the ensuing songs on the EP, kicks the proceedings off on a slyly appropriate note. It’s like the fog before an introductory therapy session—an entangled wave of emotion that’s not yet ready to fully explain itself. Once the EP has its bearings, it blasts into a flurry of swaggering momentum on “Sorry That I’m Like This,” a joyous, synth-heavy, windows-down banger. 

“There comes a certain point in time where you just get tired of being sorry all the time,” Farnsworth says, “and it's like what am I supposed to do? This is me, this is how I am, this is my truth. A lot of what walking with joy entails is understanding how to navigate this world with the emotional tools you pick up and learn to use along the way.”

The music video for “Sorry That I’m Like This” adds a strong piece to the band’s “do-it-our-way” imprint. “Sorry That I’m Like This” effectively takes on the recent escalation of gender reveal parties, greeting the phenomenon with a sardonic wink. Not bad, especially for a production that was largely the result of some creative spontaneity and a $60 Dollar Tree trip. “I think it all worked so well because it was so simple,” Rose says.

Songs like “Out Of My Mind” nicely personify the emotional lulls and breakthroughs that litter everyday life. The song’s slow, ascending pattern invites a nostalgic reckoning at every step. And then, like a ray of multi-colored lightning, the song opens up to reveal a spectacular view from a new, hard-won peak.   

“Resonate” comes out swinging, staking its foundation in upbeat, unfettered pop. Every member of the band contributes vocals on the track, creating a cloud of euphoria that comfortably shades the song’s happiness. “Resonate” is the band’s version of pop-punk, a genre its members have enjoyed for years. Traces of the genre can also be found on “Dream Come True,” which expertly navigates a tension and release dynamic.

“I think overall, it feels like a very complete piece,” Alex says. “I can set it over here, and say it's done. It’s The Sorry EP, with all its focus on self-worth, lack of self-worth— self-acceptance, lack of self-acceptance—all things that are all very real for us.”

Kat And The Hurricane’s mission statement is, simply, to be there for their fans. The trio knows the value of what it means to offer up their time and talents for those who may need a constructive, reflective beacon to look towards.

“There’s this Instagramable version of self-love that I think is all about acceptance of how one should present themselves physically and emotionally, but that can be misleading,” Rose says. “Real self-love is full of ups and downs. Listening to your body, accepting the peaks and valleys, balancing yourself enough every day until you know exactly who you are, that’s truly what self-love is about.”

Johannes Wallmann’s new album, Elegy ForAn Undiscovered Species, was born after the pianist and composer took a sabbatical for a semester from his post as director of jazz studies at UW-Madison three years ago to compose a new project and travel with his family. He eventually settled on writing arrangements for a 14-piece string orchestra, which he had never done before, and intertwining the string parts with an improvisational modern jazz quintet playing his own compositions. The record is out June 25 on Minneapolis label Shifting Paradigm Records, which also released Wallmann's 2018 album Day And Night. Wallmann will also be performing on June 22 as part of Olbrich Gardens’ summer concert series.

The Elegy quintet consisted of longtime collaborators (noted New York jazz musicians Ingrid Jensen on trumpet and Dayna Stephens on tenor saxophone, and the local jazz bass mainstay Nick Moran) and new musical acquaintances (New York jazz drummer Allison Miller), alongside Wallmann’s refined, thoughtful piano compositions. “I wanted the project to be something that would help make me a better teacher and also add something else to my artistic repertoire," Wallmann says. "And I thought, ‘well, I’ve never written for strings before.’ I thought, with the sabbatical—if I focused on composition, rather than performance, I could do it from anywhere.”

Wallmann knew he was not trying to make an album that limped halfway between jazz and classical stylistically without amounting to either, or even an excursion into Third Stream, the hybrid subgenre of classical and jazz. Rather, the music had to be solidly and identifiably jazz, and the arrangements had to treat the element of strings as contrapuntal accompaniment that interpreted the melodic lines as beautifully and respectfully as possible, while the jazz quintet improvised at the standard that Wallmann’s music demands. “I wanted to bring the strings, who are classical musicians, into this jazz community—in a way that worked with their strengths," Wallmann says. "I didn’t want them to have to improvise when they’re next to Ingrid and Dayna, these world-class improvisors. [The strings are] incredible at making music sing, and playing counterpoint.” 

Wallmann had also found drummer Miller through a show with her group Parlour Game at the East Side's Trinity Lutheran Church in May 2019, where Miller had played in the hugely reverberant acoustic space of the church with enough dynamic control and groove to keep the music swinging without drowning out the other, unamplified instruments in the process. Miller’s musical and technical command was crucial to making the album work, because the natural volume of a drum set could have easily overpowered the strings with an overly heavy hand.

Elegy was recorded live at the Hamel Music Center in February 2020, right before COVID-19 brought in-person collaboration to a lurching halt. In some ways, the title seems to have anticipated things about the pandemic that no one besides an epidemiologist would necessarily have predicted. The title evokes feelings of isolation, forced introspection, and moreover the notion of writing a lament for something or someone you never knew. All are emotions and ideas that came into more focus for most people after what everyone experienced last year. In some ways, recording an album with something as communal as a live orchestra feels like a proper send-off to that time now.

Working with an orchestra during the rehearsal and recording process required Wallmann to wear the hats of bandleader, composer, arranger, and soloist at once, focusing on whichever role best fit the situation at the time. He did, however, delegate the responsibility of conducting the orchestra to UW graduate Michael Dolan—understandably, as having to conduct from a piano while navigating the immediate possibility of  improvising a jazz solo seems like a bit too much for anyone to handle, no matter how talented. 

“[COVID-19] didn’t really change any of the process," Wallmann says, though he acknowledges the looming X factor added some unpredictability to the mix. "The stress was more in the back of my mind, like knowing that it could just blow the whole thing, that it might just suddenly become impossible. This was about 20 days before things were really shut down, so there was a little time. But what had me worried was the air travel—cause Allison, Dayna and Ingrid were coming from New York, and I was starting to worry that because of the travel ban from China at that time… what do we do if they can’t get here? I think we would have had to just cancel and reschedule it.”

But everyone got to Madison and the schedule was set. “It was a very compact thing, seven days from start to finish. On Sunday we started rehearsing with the strings, then the New Yorkers flew in on Monday, and every day there were two rehearsals, one with the quintet in the afternoon and the full ensemble in the evening," Wallmann recalls. "Tuesday, Wednesday—then Thursday we did a concert, and Friday and Saturday we recorded the album.” No pressure. But the Thursday concert was crucial in making the music feel lived in: “You can tell sometimes, based on audience response, that, say, the pacing here needs to be adjusted a little bit," Wallmann says. "And having those musicians here, I figured it was important to share the experience with however many people I could do that with. We don’t have that many opportunities to have world-class players like Dayna and Ingrid and Allison here. So I didn’t want to do it all behind closed doors.”

Wallmann’s position at the UW, of course, was also critical in funding the album, since some grants from the institution made it possible to properly pay everyone involved in the recording. (Most present-day labels are not solvent enough to finance recording with an orchestra.)

Despite the rigidity of the timetable, or maybe because of the quality of all the musicians involved, the recorded music doesn’t reflect the strain that went into the preparation. Jazz, of course, fundamentally lives in the moment. Every performance reflects the melodic and harmonic vocabularies and emotional sensibilities of the players at that time, both in studio and live settings. What is fascinating about Wallmann’s album is how deliberately and deftly it balances the opposing needs of the orchestra with the quintet while, indeed, remaining a jazz album through and through.

The music puts paid to any lingering questions about whether jazz can work with strings in anything beyond a ballad setting, like the kind that Wes Montgomery soloed over in the mid-'60s: the answer is yes, but creatively. The needling strings juxtaposed against the oddly breezy theme of the horns on the opening title track show that this unorthodox blend works well. This distinctive character remains throughout, in various places on the album—particularly on the subtly hiccupy, uncommonly structured 3/4 bossa nova of “Longing,” whose feel was inspired by Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Luiza,” and the deceptively easy-sounding 15/4 funk of “Expeditor.” (Incidentally, Wallmann says the piece is much easier to play than the time signature would suggest: it’s actually one measure of 4/4, then a measure of 3/4, then two measures of 4/4 in a cycle.) And the album’s concluding multi-part piece, “The Greater Fool,” features the most memorable musical themes on the album, as well as the most interesting arrangement choices and interplay between orchestra and quintet. Miller’s drum solo at the end is a particular highlight.

This is not stuffy or syrupy, or even particularly touched by a chamber-music feel. It makes use of strings in an inventive manner that is perhaps most remarkable for how much it doesn’t call attention to itself. The string arrangements throughout are not used as a gimmick, but as nearly a second, supporting keyboard, or at least another player in the group. It’s possible to think, in a certain way, that a sextet performed on this album—which is a neat trick, considering it was recorded with 19 people.

The music also deals with political issues, though in a very subtle way. The title “Elegy For An Undiscovered Species” was inspired by the ongoing struggles climate change has imposed on the natural world, not COVID-19, though it certainly took on a different alternate meaning in the wake of the pandemic. And the title of “The Greater Fool” refers to the practice of selling off bad investments until someone is gullible enough to be saddled with fiscal misfortune.

Not that the music necessarily hammers any of these ideas home: Wallmann says that music, for him, is a way of “creating community,” and that “because instrumental music is abstract—they’re not songs about something specific, even in the times that I intend for them to be something specific, that’s not necessarily what the listener hears—they can come up with something entirely different for it, and I’m completely okay with it. If I create a sense of meaning, that means I’ve done my job, that I’ve accomplished my goal.”

For anyone who makes music in any capacity, all collections of recorded work are personal in one way or another. What differentiates this record for Wallmann was the realization of his artistic objective: “When you have something that, in hindsight, you feel you could have done it differently—there’s some things that you know afterwards, like, ahh, that didn’t quite work out the way you wanted it to, and so on… I have a couple of projects like that for sure," he says. "But the last couple—Love Wins, Day And Night, and this one—they were exactly what I wanted to do.” Wallmann can rest easy in the knowledge that his goal was, indeed, audibly accomplished.

Photo: Members of Milwaukee-based groups Forum for Understanding Prisons, and Abolish MKE, and Madison groups Black Umbrella Global and Free the 350 Bail Fund led a protest to Defund the DOC on June 10.

One June 19, 2020, the Juneteenth Flag was hoisted above the Wisconsin State Capitol for the first time. That same day, Democratic Governor Tony Evers and Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes introduced 9 bills in response to nationwide demands for police reform. As uprisings for racial justice continued throughout the summer, the bills languished in the Republican-controlled Legislature.

On August 24, the day after Jacob Blake was shot and paralyzed by a police officer in Kenosha, sparking renewed protests and pressure for legislative action, Evers and Barnes called a special session of the Legislature to consider the bills. Predictably, Republicans gaveled in the session but refused to take up the bills, as they had done twice before when Evers called special sessions on gun control and COVID-19. 

Instead, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos created a Task Force on Racial Disparities as a political tool for Republicans, rather than a good-faith effort towards reform. The task force issued a list of nonbinding recommendations for police reform this April. Both the committee and the bills it has proposed carry the stamp of bipartisanship—but few teeth. 

The Legislature has been taking up those bills this spring, along with a slate of seven police reform bills introduced by another bipartisan pair in the State Senate: Republican Van Wanggaard, a former police officer, and Democrat Lena Taylor. Some of these bills, like a partial ban on chokeholds, are watered-down versions of reforms that were already widely panned as part of the 8 Can't Wait campaign last summer, which was criticized for detracting from abolitionist demands with eight policies that fail to address police brutality, racist policing, and the structural issues rooted within policing itself.

Other bills from Wanggaard and Taylor would increase police funding and power, including a new program for community policing grants and changes to the Police and Fire Commissions that oversee Madison and Milwaukee's police departments. 

In response to the disappointing lineup of proposals, some Democratic lawmakers introduced bills that are a step closer to community demands for significant policy change, including legislation that would ban qualified immunity for police officers and no-knock warrants. But even these don't tackle systemic changes to policing.

There is little hope that proposals without bipartisan support will pass the Legislature. Community advocates have called on Evers to veto bills that don't go far enough. The yearlong back-and-forth is a master class in pushing "reformist reforms" that expand the scope of policing while sidelining abolitionist reforms that would defund and shrink police departments. And while Republicans may be obstructing the passage of meaningful legislation, Democrats have often been willing participants in the race for symbolic victories with little substantive change. 

Evers dodges community demands for changes at the DOC

While the spotlight is on policing reform, some advocates are pointing out that the Governor already has the power to make real change on another major piece of the criminal justice system—incarceration. 

On a sweaty mid-heatwave afternoon on June 10, protestors gathered outside the state Capitol in front of a large black banner with white block letters: NO MORE PRISONS. Individuals and members of Forum for Understanding Prisons (FFUP), Abolish MKE, Black Umbrella Global, and Free the 350 Bail Fund led the protest to "Defund the DOC." The Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) runs state prisons for adults and youth and probation and parole. 

The afternoon of the protest, a Pride Flag fluttered above the Capitol. Inside, the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee (JFC) was preparing to consider criminal justice-related initiatives within the state budget. Outside, people passed around a microphone to speak about their experiences with Wisconsin's prison system and the impact of mass incarceration on their communities and loved ones.

"What goes on inside those prisons is a nightmare. It's a nightmare. What goes on inside of those prisons, I'll never get out of my head," one speaker's voice quavered. "But what also goes on inside those prisons is living. People are fucking living… We're in there studying, we're in there learning, we're in there trying to figure out, what are solutions other than government and incarceration and policing. Today we're here in opposition of the budget they're trying to pass. Evers wants to sit there and tell us that, hey, the Republicans, they're standing in the way." 

But Republicans are not the answer, said the speaker. "We do not need to pass a single law through this building to change criminal justice here in Wisconsin. Not a single law."

That afternoon the group delivered a petition with more than 100 signatures to the Governor's office, outlining three demands aimed at releasing more people from prison as part of efforts towards decarceration: 

Wisconsin's prisons have been a humanitarian catastrophe for years. We do not want to see incarceration rates "bounce back" after COVID-19 stops slowing courts and creating capacity concerns. As Governor, you have the power to bypass legislative stalemate and prevent further tragedy.

We the undersigned demand that you take the following minimal actions.

1. Expand the criteria for your pardon advisory board to include all currently incarcerated people and create a process by which anyone held in WI prisons can apply for a pardon and receive serious consideration.

2. Veto any prison expansion money from the 2021-2022 state budget, including the $119 million you proposed.

3. Address overcrowding by releasing people using your pardon power, and modifying DOC policy in regards to revocation and early release programming.

You have the power to take these actions, regardless of what the legislature says. Use it. Keep your campaign promises and save the people who elected you from further harm.

This petition is still accepting signatures online.

"These are issues that we've been advocating on as soon as Evers came into office," says Ben Turk, a volunteer with the nonprofit Forum for Understanding Prisons (FFUP) and writer with the collaborative Abolish MKE. "The landscape is overall pretty dire," says Turk. "There are things that the Governor could do worse. But he could also do a good deal more and better."

Turk pointed to the Governor's recreation of the Pardon Advisory Board to consider applications for clemency as one example. "[Evers' executive order 30 in June 2019] reestablished the Pardon Board and everybody patted him on the back for it," says Turk. But only people who completed their sentence at least five years ago are considered for a pardon, which Turk said is a major limitation that excludes anyone currently incarcerated and many on parole or probation. "Everyone who is in prison who had a good case for release was being completely ignored by the Governor, who was taking all the credit for being more compassionate and forgiving," Turk says. That became an urgent issue during the pandemic, says Turk, when pardons could have reduced the number of people incarcerated. Nearly 11,000 people in Wisconsin prisons—more than half—have contracted COVID-19, and 32 people died.

But when it comes to pushing for change, Turk says there seems to be a pattern. "When we demand changes to the way the DOC operates, the Governor and [DOC] Secretary Kevin Carr say we would rather make those changes on a legislative level, because then they'll be permanent changes." But that passes the buck to the Legislature, says Turk, "knowing full well that this Legislature is gerrymandered and unresponsive to the public, and it's definitely not going to pass any substantive reform laws."

The groups' demands are written to address this. "We need [Evers and Carr] to stop blaming the other side for [their] inaction on these issues that are a dire crisis," says Turk. "Wisconsin has some of the highest incarceration rates, some of the greatest racial disparities, it's the worst place for Black kids to grow up. And that's all about mass incarceration and over-saturation in policing." 

Turk says that Evers has both the power and responsibility to change that.

Snitch houses 

On June 10, hours after protestors delivered their decarceration demands to the Governor's Office, the Joint Committee on Finance allocated $1 million in the budget to fund grants for municipal "community-oriented policing-house programs," or COP Houses. Wanggaard and Taylor introduced the bill to create this grant program. The bill passed in the Legislature on June 17, along with several other reform bills, and Evers has already indicated that he will sign it.

COP Houses were launched in Racine nearly 30 years ago as a community policing strategy. Although community policing is often offered up as a solution to police brutality and systemic racism, it depends on the myth that building trust between cops and the people they criminalize will make people and communities safer. 

Opponents refer to COP Houses as "Snitch Houses," seeing them as a way to increase surveillance and more deeply entrench police presence in already over-policed communities. Abolish MKE recently published a four-part series on the impacts of Snitch Houses. Though the Racine Police Department claims there is a significant decrease in crime in neighborhoods with Snitch Houses, an article from Jade Yan with Chicago's South Side Weekly points out that violent crime actually increased in Racine from 2007 to 2017, and the series from Abolish MKE argues that Snitch Houses ultimately reduce public safety and displace neighborhood residents.

The program is also, on the face of it, explicitly contrary to demands to defund the police and instead fund services—like housing—for communities. Abolish MKE charts how the COP House program in Racine sucks in both public and private dollars to house wrap-around services that are tied to cooperation with the criminal legal system.

Racine's Community Oriented Policing website says that COP houses provide "a positive and structured environment focused on learning. The police department provides the classroom and a computer lab, while the program provides everything from help with homework to arts and crafts. Volunteers provide their time to the program and the kids. Some houses offer specialized programs based on their neighborhoods unique needs."

In a conversation this May with Wisconsin Public Radio, Racine Police Department Sergeant Joseph Spaulding said that parole and probation officers had also been stationed at the houses and involved in neighborhood activities, including cookouts and helping to teach kids bicycle safety. 

This approach to policing is what the term "Snitch Houses" refers to: "Police gaining community trust and controlling resources means police recruiting confidential informants," writes Abolish MKE. "That's why we call them snitch houses. Any resources given to police will be used to turn neighbors against each other, target Black people, and do violence."

The Racine Police Department has published a "COP House Playbook" and the model is already being exported to at least two neighboring states. A former Racine police officer helped start a similar program in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and there are plans to establish a COP house in Chicago, despite community opposition. Efforts to begin a program in Milwaukee have already faced backlash.

Defunding the police and DOC

During the June 10 protest, Tai, a contributor to Abolish MKE and member of MKE Lit Supply, handed out flyers with the demands and water bottles to the small crowd. During an interview afterwards, Tai said that although policing and prisons are deeply intertwined, public pressure for police reform and abolition over the last year hasn't always translated into support for similar changes to incarceration.

“Police put people in prison," says Tai. "They are the frontline to the issue and the problems of mass incarceration, especially here in Wisconsin. Understanding that police are racist and their policies informs our understanding of the DOC’s racism as well.” 

“We feel and have always felt that Black Lives Matter, including those that are currently incarcerated," says Tai. "Defunding the police would be a big step towards closing and emptying our prisons.”

But the very structure of incarceration can be a barrier to organizing for change. "It's very difficult to highlight and to even know what goes on behind those prison walls when people are locked up and unable to communicate with people on the outside," says Tai. "It’s the state’s desire to silence and lock those problems up where people cannot witness and see the atrocities that occur to them as people.” 

In a separate interview, FFUP's Ben Turk said that some conditions in the DOC have worsened under Evers' watch. FFUP received information indicating that the Racine Correctional Institution removed all unit libraries on June 14. 

Mail for people imprisoned is currently routed through a private company in Florida, Turk said. The person in prison only receives a photocopy of the mail—a photocopy that is sometimes low quality or missing pages—and the original mail is shredded. 

The DOC contracts with Union Supply Group to run the canteen in Wisconsin prisons. “All of the prison canteen commissary companies are bad,” said Turk, “but Union Supply has particularly bad customer service and responsiveness when people have issues.”

But as Tai noted, it can be hard to mobilize public support to advocate for people who are incarcerated. 

“Even within anti-police-brutality circles, there's still a stigma attached to incarcerated people. A sort of desire to only fight for the perfect victims," says Turk. "[There is] a lack of recognition that what the good cops do is also harm people and kidnap people and put them into cages and ruin their lives."

Turk alluded to the myth that problems with policing stem from a few "bad apples" that should be addressed individually. Even "good" cops enforce the harmful and racist laws and norms that the criminal legal system as a whole is built on. 

Prisons and policing share the same tensions between reformist reforms that reinforce the current system and those that would divert resources out of the system. While "3 Demands to Decarcerate Wisconsin" focuses on getting people out of prison, Turk says that accomplishing these demands would also free up resources to make investments in education, housing and other community services. Shifting resources into the community is a key part of the framework to defund police and prisons.

Struggles at the local level

The conversations happening at a state level mirror efforts for reform—and the tensions between reformist and abolitionist reforms—in Madison and Dane County. 

On June 15, the Madison Common Council Executive Committee voted to accept a report from the Police Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee recommending the use of body cameras for the Madison Police Department, and outlining policies for their use. The Council has not yet voted on whether MPD should purchase or use body cameras. Critics point out that purchasing body cameras and reviewing footage increases police budgets, and that they are ineffective tools for changing police behavior and reducing police brutality; they can in fact result in increased surveillance and criminalization. 

One of the bipartisan police bills moving through the Legislature would create a grant program to help law enforcement agencies purchase body cameras. On June 10, the Joint Committee on Finance voted to allocate $2 million to the program.

Another bipartisan bill would collect data on no-knock warrants. Despite a push—and a bill—from some Democrats and community advocates to ban no-knock warrants outright, the Task Force on Racial Disparities recommended gathering more data before making a decision. MPD still uses no-knock warrants. This spring, the Dane County Board of Supervisors considered asking the County Sheriff's office not to use no-knock warrants, in a resolution that has yet to be voted on by the full board. 

And the Dane County Board of Supervisors continues to move forward with plans for a new $148 million jail despite community opposition (disclosure: I am part of a coalition working to stop the new county jail). Alders on the Madison Common Council will also have to go on the record soon when considering the jail proposal under municipal zoning codes.

Both Dane County and Wisconsin as a whole are projecting a return to incarcerating greater numbers of people as the pandemic eases. During COVID-19, changes in policies and practices led to far fewer people imprisoned. 

"That's entirely in control of the Democratic Party," says Turk. "The Governor has control of the DOC. And the cities that have the highest incarceration rates, Milwaukee and Madison, are in control of Democrats."

For the self-taught artist Michael Ward, creating vivid and colorful pen and pencil drawings means reflecting about his inner life. That is why he created the concept of Obsurd art, which is about questioning yourself and finding deeper truths through introspection. 

To explain why art is such an essential means of communication for Ward, the Madison-based artist goes back in time to when he was a newborn in New York. Just a few days after it began, his life abruptly and drastically changed.

“On the way going home from the hospital [at] five days old, I guess my father ran a red light,” Ward says. “The car that was coming [the other way] didn’t stop and my body crashed out. I hit the window and it shattered. I [now] have a brain injury. I’ve got only one side of my brain and the left side of my body is a lot weaker than my right side.”

Doctors diagnosed Ward with cerebral palsy, a condition in which brain damage impairs muscle coordination.

“I was always the person that was struggling. I felt that the world saw me, but my voice was not being heard,” Ward says. “My grandmother and my mama told me: these are little things that will help you be who you are.”

Both his grandmother and mother’s support from a young age have greatly shaped Ward as a person and artist. His grandmother constantly helped him find his strength while his mother encouraged him to use art as a tool to communicate.

“My grandma told me: you are special because you walk with your disability,” Ward says. “I’m faced with my disability every day. It’s like a force: get up, breathe, stick my chest up, and be the best I can.”

Ward found his passion for art when he was only three years old. Both of his parents are artists and when he was a child he would trace over his mother’s drawings.

In tracing these drawings, he discovered art served as a tool for him to express himself to people when he was struggling to make himself understood through the more conventional means of communication most of us take for granted.

“This was my language. The pen, paper, and I have been best friends for a long, long, long time. We’ve never been divorced,” Ward says. “I was going to get messages out somehow, some way, and the art just stuck with me. [Through art] I could make someone feel good without saying words.”

The lack of words became dancing lines that Ward drew with pen on paper, letting his feelings guide him. The work he now creates as an adult fuses an unmistakable element of play and mischief with a profound sense of purpose.

“I’m here for a reason. Not just to be Michael. I’m here to do something that’s greater than me. That’s greater than my disability,” Ward says. “That’s what made me just draw more. It helped me draw with my unconscious and have no fear.”

Understanding his feelings and expressing them through art led him to dive deep into his concept of Obsurd. 

“My art tells a story. Everything that I do is called Obsurd. Obsurd means to be questioned,” Ward says. “The only person that has the answer is you. It’s how you look at it. You can take the experience and live with it in your own means.”

Ward also began channeling this concept into coloring books both for children and adults, filling them with characters meant to inspire and challenge. In one of these books, Monster On The Surfaces, where Ward gives the reader/colorer an immersive experience. 

On each page of Monster On The Surfaces, Ward outlines his characters—each of them a funny but unsettling blend of human, machine, and cryptid—in black. Readers have the choice to color in the pages however they desire, but the experience does not end there. Ward’s characters are staring at you and making you wonder about what they are thinking.

Ward accompanies the drawings with statements and questions that hint at what he actually wants you to reflect on “Are you the dreamer in the dream or are you in someone else’s dream?” he asks on one page, under a pair of uncanny figures whose exact nature is hard to pin down.

Are you really living your dream? Keep coloring to find out and continue flipping the pages. You land on page seven to two broad-headed, almost owl-like characters labeled  “Up” and “Down.” They’re looking straight into your eyes with  serious expressions, and Ward helps them burrow into your mind with a caption that reads: “Start looking within, trust me the answer to all your questions are inside you.”

Do you have the answers or are you in a reflexive state of mind? Perhaps Ward wants to keep you a bit off-balance, but ultimately he’s trying to get across a positive message. These whimsical, unclassifiable characters are meant to help people find the strength to define themselves. As that caption above suggests, Ward is a deep believer in the idea that people have the answers to all their questions within them. His own answers are inextricably bound up in the practice of art.

His drawings outside of the coloring-book pages rely heavily on vivid and bright greens, reds, yellows, and blues to create strong contrasts and riotous bursts of energy. These colors reflect both what he’s feeling in the moment and correlate with the running themes in Ward’s art. His favorite is light blue.

“[Light blue is] infinity. It’s like the sky. Skies are the limit. It’s soft, it’s light, and it’s just easy to navigate through,” Ward says. “You could navigate through sky blue rather than a darker color that just has you stuck. Sky blue is me.”

These shades of light blue also tie in with Ward’s commitment to fearless creative freedom.

“We dress up in the style of art. Art is a signature. It’s a stamp that only you have. We walk up in a rhythm. We talk in a rhythm,” Ward says. “No matter how we look at it, we are all combined in a way that takes the form of our art, our style, and our craft.”

Photo by Barry Dale Gilfry on Flickr.

It’s always been the mission of Arts Wisconsin, the state’s community cultural development organization, to advocate for the arts, culture and creativity as powerful 21st century resources. Arts Wisconsin has continuously recognized those facets are essential to grow Wisconsin’s economy, educational systems, and civic life.

As Arts Wisconsin’s executive director, I know there’s powerful info to make the case. Before the pandemic hit, the creative industries leveraged more than $10.1 billion to Wisconsin’s economy and employed over 96,000 of its residents—more jobs than in the state’s beer (63,000), biotech (35,000), and papermaking industries (31,000)—according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The ebbing-away of the pandemic is the relief we’ve all been waiting for. Unfortunately, as we all know, the effects will linger in ways we can’t even imagine, and the creative industries are no exception. Wisconsin’s creative sector has been one of the hardest-hit industries and still faces an existential threat due to long-term loss of work and revenue. 

There’s an opportunity to make a better future, by investing in Wisconsin’s creative people, businesses and communities. It’s up to Wisconsin’s elected officials to seize that opportunity and truly treat the arts as a policy priority.

The State of Wisconsin is receiving $2.5 billion in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds, and there are possibilities of additional federal infrastructure and jobs funding coming along later in the year. The U.S. Department of Treasury guidelines state that “the funds can be used by state and local governments to help turn the tide on the pandemic, address its economic fallout, and lay the foundation for a strong and equitable recovery, including the specific use of funds for assistance to small businesses, nonprofits, and hard-hit industries like arts, tourism, travel, and hospitality.”  The guidelines also state that funds allocated to states cannot be used to directly or indirectly offset tax reductions or delay a tax or tax increase, or deposited into any pension fund.

Governor Tony Evers’ administration has sole discretion to distribute ARP funds as permitted under federal law. Since the funding was announced, Gov. Evers has vetoed several bills giving the Legislature more control over the funds.  

So the door is open for a historic investment in creative economic, workforce, and community development and resilience. Arts Wisconsin is asking the State of Wisconsin to establish the Grow Wisconsin Creatively Fund, to invest $20 million in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds over the next four years in rebuilding and revitalizing the state’s creative infrastructure. These funds can activate the full power of creativity statewide. 

Wisconsin needs local and regional creative economic development to recover and grow jobs, businesses and income, through downtown and community revitalization, civic engagement initiatives, and cultural tourism programs; to strengthen resilience, capacity and entrepreneurship for creative economy businesses and entrepreneurs: relief, recovery, and start-up programs; increased access to arts and cultural opportunities; core operating and programming grants to re-engage and grow audiences and community involvement; and venue-centered community development projects and facility adaption to accommodate post-pandemic public health guidelines; and to develop creative workforce development and strength, including cultivating an equitable, career development pipeline and support system for creative industries; expanding apprenticeship systems in creative businesses; establishing a “Creative Workforce”/ArtsCorps program to put artists to work on community-based projects and programs; and supporting and empowering creative workers to apply their skills in other sectors, such as health care, environmental, and advanced manufacturing.

Creative workers and businesses have been hit particularly hard by COVID. Wisconsin needs a competitive creative workforce, since creative talent fuels economic, workforce, and community growth. Many creative workers are still jobless or are not able to work at full capacity due to lack of opportunities, even as the pandemic eases. Arts venues and businesses were among the first to close when the world shut down, and many are still grappling with re-opening restrictions, making this sector the likely last to fully reopen. A Brookings Institution report estimates losses of more than 2.3 million jobs and $74 billion in average monthly earnings for the creative occupations across the United States.

These funds also support equity in the arts world. The 2020 unemployment rate among BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) artists in Wisconsin was higher than the rate among white artists, according to a report from Americans for the Arts.

And, in-demand fields need creative workers. The healthcare, marketing, and IT fields need digital video editors, graphic designers, writers, and communications specialists, to name a few. Over 70 percent of companies rate creativity as a primary concern when hiring.

“The arts should be included when decisions about investments in state and local infrastructure are made,” says Jerry Deschane, director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities. “The role of the arts within the broad context of economic recovery, and how the arts can be of service in addressing priorities for infrastructure development, is critical.”

Of course, the real, fundamental reason the arts are so important to Wisconsin, its people, and its communities, is because the arts make us human. Humans have been expressing themselves creatively since the beginning of time, and the creative spirit that lives in all of us can’t be stopped. Artistic experiences bring people together, bolster neighborhood vitality, address long-standing inequities, and help heal and rebuild our spirit, especially critical at this historic moment in time. 

And intertwined in that fundamental need for creative expression is the fact that the 21st century demands creativity to transform our economy, educate our children, bring people together, and add vibrancy to civic life. According to a recent article in Governing Magazine, the arts revitalize communities in many ways, especially important to places that have lost key industries. In addition, the arts add a special spark in rural regions, according to the National Governors Association, by mobilizing homegrown creative assets to spur economic growth. 

It’s well past time for Wisconsin to step up when it comes to creative economy investment. We have been long at the bottom of the heap when it comes to state arts funding, and right now other states are ramping up their investment in this arena.  Illinois is campaigning for a $500 million funding package; New York just passed a one-year budget that gives that state’s arts sector over $200 million in dedicated funds, plus access to $800 million in recovery grants; California legislators are championing a $1 billion package for the arts.  The Resilience Fund will help level the playing field for Wisconsin. 

Investment in the arts and creativity as economic, workforce and community development will help Wisconsin recover from today’s economic shocks and better equip our people, communities, and the state overall, to withstand economic and civic ups and downs in the future.  The Grow Wisconsin Creatively Resilience Fund is the right initiative right now.

The Resilience Fund is strongly supported by a diverse, growing, statewide coalition of people, businesses, organizations and communities. You should join this coalition: click here to join. And, click here to send a message to Gov. Evers to invest ARP funds in the state's creative sector. For more information, you can visit www.artswisconsin.org or contact me at akatz@artswisconsin.org or 608-255-8316.

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

This week’s Microtones column is brought to you in partnership with Madison Minutes. Hayley Sperling is co-founder and editorial lead of the weekday newsletter (but you may have seen her bylines in Tone). Subscribe to Madison Minutes today for a full daily roundup of all the news you need to know about Madison. And it’s free! 

Since the pandemic set in and shut us all inside for what felt like an endless period of time, my camera roll has been bare. No footage of late-night debauchery, no shaky unidentifiable faces, no bathroom selfies. It was a void in my life I didn’t know I was missing until I made my way back to the bar sooner than I had ever imagined.

A not-so-fun fact about my pandemic is that, like many millions of people in the country, I lost my job. I found myself in uncharted territory in so many ways. Ultimately, with the help of some amazing friends, I landed a job in the service industry for the first time. And what a time to start. 

When I started working at a downtown Madison bar/restaurant in November 2020, Wisconsin was on the road to a deadly winter. The seven-day average of confirmed COVID-19 cases was in the thousands. Hospitals were overwhelmed and stay-at-home and mask orders were the norm. Nevertheless, some people, for one reason or another, still decided to go dine out. (I’m not here to criticize these folks, it’s just a fact.) As I worked through the winter, guests continued to flow through the restaurant every night. 

On nights when I found myself in a ball of anxiety over going to work in a pandemic, I did the only thing I knew how to boost my self-confidence and patch together a mask of bravery: I locked myself in the bathroom and I took some selfies.

The bar bathroom embraced me with open arms and turned into the safe haven I knew and loved from what felt like a past life. Even with multiple masks covering my face, I still felt like a beautiful badass.

The thing about bathroom selfies is there are no rules. 

No, it doesn't matter what bar you’re at. It doesn’t matter if others are in the bathroom. It doesn’t matter if you're 10 drinks deep or stone-cold sober. The bar bathroom is a place where magic (selfies) happen. It’s a spot that offers safety, security, incredible vibes, and if you're lucky, possibly a new best friend for the night.

I’m far from alone in my love for the bar bathroom selfie. One look at the Crystal Corner bathroom mirror Instagram will tell you as much. The instant ego boost that comes with taking a kickass mirror selfie is honestly unmatched. 

Now as restaurants and bars around the state and country continue to open up and shed mask policies, my camera roll, and social media feeds have started to fill with smiling faces in familiar bathrooms. To me, that is the ultimate sign that nature is healing.

A few folks on Twitter were kind enough to share some bathroom mirror selfies of their own. Here they are!

From the Duck Blind bathroom at Madison Mallards’ stadium lol (not ~quite~ a bar but I had several beers so I’d argue it counts) pic.twitter.com/ErWP9KwsNA

— Logan (@loganrude_) June 16, 2021

here is me in the bathroom of what is now I/O pic.twitter.com/zVubOppqL7

— abby :) (@emo_gf420) June 16, 2021

helo pic.twitter.com/QKOjsxjLU8

— kat (@purrincesskat) June 16, 2021

A classic bathroom selfie at Genna’s after a @ForwardMSNFC win 😁 pic.twitter.com/UkvIVWFz4Z

— David ⭐️⭐️ (@YoungDH_) June 16, 2021

genna’s / argus / wisco / youngblood pic.twitter.com/PSriA22Nhm

— the fifa situation (@smellynoir) June 16, 2021

a REACH, but MemU Terrace bathroom after Pat McCurdy ??? pic.twitter.com/V8tmZvJPF6

— sneds (@JackATTKemo) June 16, 2021

The Wisco but I think they’ve cleaned the mirror since... pic.twitter.com/4hBD9vgs1B

— tygor 🚫👮🏻‍♂️ (@CrouchingTyGor) June 16, 2021

Red Sushi bathroom for a holiday party pic.twitter.com/Ig10ffxZvp

— †Jordan From ∆frica† (@MrOrigin) June 16, 2021

luv the mason lounge w my whole heart pic.twitter.com/XVXtQWPgfC

— princess atta stan account (@beerjorts) June 17, 2021

last day of the mask mandate at the malt house (and first day of my 36th year) pic.twitter.com/F30JcHtQN9

— Laura Ingalls Wildin' (@tastiestofnoms) June 17, 2021

churchkey (lol) // crystal // player’s // nattspil pic.twitter.com/VgDqL5w7PC

— ☞ gaylord plummer (@paulychromatic) June 17, 2021

same bestie pic.twitter.com/rPdH9SOtoa

— Alyssa Allemand (@allemand_alyssa) June 17, 2021

Genna’s!!! pic.twitter.com/nWliVqaOQB

— Séanna (@sydneyrosega) June 17, 2021

Photo by Ken Fager on Flickr.

One of the most craven and telling things a Madison Police Department official has said recently came in a discussion about how MPD handled two different situations. MPD officers brought tear gas and piles of riot gear to summer 2020 protests against racism and police violence, but showed up to the 2021 Mifflin Street Block Party (one of campus' most tiresome traditions) ready to play beer pong with unmasked drunken goobers and stand back as they destroyed a UW-Madison student's car. Community members have, understandably, demanded some explanations about this stark contrast.

The Capital Times reported on June 10 about a recent Public Safety Review Committee at which MPD leaders fielded questions about their distinct approaches to protests and Mifflin. Recently arrived Chief Shon Barnes said the department was "simply maintaining a sense of community," as reporter Addison Lathers puts it. That by itself says a whole lot about the kind of "community" police consider worth defending. But there's so much more to unpack in the kicker:

Capt. Mindy Winters, the lead commander of the special events team, clarified that officer conduct during the protests and during the Mifflin Block Party cannot be easily compared due to the nature of the events.

“Our officers enjoy opportunities engaging with people, but they're humans who are going to engage with people who are offering friendly banter, more so than perhaps an expletive or a gesture that is less than welcoming,” Winters said.

The argument is that you can't compare these two events because police were operating in two very different contexts. What this argument doesn't acknowledge here is that police have the power to create that context. The way Winters tells it, police at last year's protests had to behave differently than they did at Mifflin due to factors over which they had no control.

We know that this is false. Take May 30, 2020, the first major day of protests following the murder of George Floyd. During the first part of the day, there was a massive, peaceful march on the Capitol Square, in front of the Dane County Jail, and down Willy Street to the house where MPD Officer Matt Kenny shot Tony Robinson in 2015. During this part of the day, MPD officers were around but fairly hands-off with everyone. People were of course out there because they were very upset with the police, but there weren't any violent confrontations that I'm aware of between protestors and the cops on the scene at that time. 

Later that afternoon and into the evening, protests continued on State Street and police took a much more hostile approach, massing up in riot gear and occasionally charging up and down the street while they fired tear gas. When someone shows up in heavy military-style gear, that's a clear sign that they are getting ready to hurt you, or at the very least intimidate you into leaving a public space. Most people out there at the time weren't involved in looting local businesses or any other illegal activity. But if you were there, you were included in the collective punishment police were doling out. 

I fail to see where people engaged in these protests had a chance to "offer friendly banter" to the cops. The expletives and gestures were plentiful, because people have a right to express their anger when agents of the state murder people. Yes, some people threw rocks and plastic bottles at the cops, but there was never any doubt as to who presented a greater threat to whom. We often talk about "social unrest" as if it's just some vague force that cops have to confront, but the truth is that police help to provoke that unrest through their own behavior.

We should recognize the police response to the protests here in Madison, and across the country, for what it was: the police retaliating against the public for criticizing the police. A content-specific crackdown on speech. For all of MPD's talk of "facilitating" free speech, Captain Winters' remarks make it clear that if you call out police on their behavior—behavior that you pay for—they have a free hand to treat you violently and unequally. It's not illegal, strictly speaking, to demand accountability from the police or even flip off a cop, but if you do anything along that continuum, police are clearly excused from their supposed obligation to protect everyone equally.

The people at Mifflin, on the other hand, destroyed property and endangered others, but none of it really contained a political challenge to policing. It's just a little white hooliganism, and policing is so often just white hooliganism in a slightly more regimented form. People were there to act like idiots but not to challenge the police, so the police took a more calm approach. A few of the people who destroyed cars or violated alcohol regulations at the Mifflin Street Block Party will face citations or prosecution, but the consequences are nothing like the surveillance and severe charges that several anti-racism activists in Madison have experienced over the past year. God forbid that anyone at MPD should find this climate less than welcoming.

At what point did Ben Stiller's The Cable Guy (1996) stop being a guilty pleasure and start becoming something more culturally and aesthetically significant? This commercial enigma split critical and audience opinion in the '90s, then receded into the subconscious of the '00s. As Judd Apatow's star rose as director during the early '10s, his connections as the film’s producer and script editor retroactively gave The Cable Guy a little extra prestige. A quarter-century since its theatrical premiere this week, there's even more to this dark satire than meets the boob-tube-glued eye that's currently streaming on HBO Max.

The film's portrayal of self-referential media delusion recalls Robert Altman's The Player (1992), but The Cable Guy is also a multi-faceted parody. Stiller and screenwriter Lou Holtz Jr. construct it around a cavalcade of movie- and television-inspired set pieces that increasingly heighten the stakes in the labored, subtextually queer bromance between repressed Everyman Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick) and overly clingy and cunning titular character, or "Chip Douglas" as he calls himself (played with rubber-faced glee by Jim Carrey). The film both predates and transcends all the now-dead stitched-up spoof properties of its era, like Scary Movie (2000), that waded in the kiddie pool of cultural send-up.

Studied readings of the film reveal a general over-reliance on ascertaining a situation's truth purely through screen media manipulation. Stiller throws himself into the most extensive running gag involving twin brothers Sam and Stan Sweet, as he takes a shot at the impatience of TV news and public fixation during the trial of the Menéndez Brothers, which is complete with a bit of fabricated racist blame. In the conspiratorial sludge of 2021, the film’s account seems redundantly tame, but it's nonetheless a surprising masterclass of peripheral storytelling.

Stiller further augments this satire by dipping into the illusory aspects of the broadcast universe, including a Tony Robbins infomercial, Nora Ephron's heralded Sleepless In Seattle (1993)—an in-film ploy to win back the confidence of Steven's ex Robin Harris (Leslie Mann)—and a staticky montage of daytime talk shows and sitcom reruns rolling over the opening apartment scene. These preliminary inserts of scenes and characters foreshadow the central dynamic between Steven and Chip, which is sketched out less like an identifiable friendship and more like a bit of casual blackmail. But it's a kind of hyperbolically performative blackmail. Chip "just wants to hang out. No big deal!"

Even compared to Carrey's usual hyperactive schtick and oft-imitated, lanky silliness, his commitment to this role is almost analogous to Heath Ledger as the Joker—Carrey-as-Chip is truly a force of nature. Chip uninhibitedly, and somehow reverently, channels various characters and personalities he's seen on television since he was a boy. Chip’s amalgamation of identities becomes inescapable, just like the film's media landscape. Carrey also brings to the role an overarching tragic desperation that feels cuttingly real and divorced from the antics and ploys that Chip thinks will facilitate a memorable bonding experience with Steven.

Chip Douglas first presents himself as a nosy, touchy-feely cable guy (from the hilariously anonymous "The Cable Co."), borrowing his mask from My Three Sons characters. On his first date with Steven, he adopts the mannerisms of a proto-TED Talk presenter or talk show guru when he introduces Steven to his Internet futures at the central satellite dish. But there is a hidden closet full of costumes. Chip appears in an outmoded 1970s gym uniform at an indoor basketball game with Steven and friends, then hosts a karaoke jam as a hippie dude in garish country-western attire before turning into a mentor, a frat roommate, a bathroom attendant who's stepped out of a DB Cooper sketch, a mock lawyer from Midnight Express (1978), a Fred Rogers-dressed pseudo-brother, an Evelyn-esque stalker à la Play Misty For Me (1972) who transforms into a green-eyed Mod Squad-themed nightmare, a poor man's GoldenEye (1995) villain, and the sympathetic anti-villain. Is there a core person here, or simply a series of extroverted disguises that mask introverted trauma?

Carrey sells his character's unique TV- and movie-fueled delusion with intriguing psychological detail throughout the film (including strange hints at a Stonecutters-like cabal of "preferred customers" who are bonded by illegal cable hookups rather than blood). Chip attempts to conclude conversations as one would turn off the idiot box, miming the pressing of the power button on a remote with a click. This extends into the film's more action-oriented scenes with some shrewd screenwriting from Holtz and ingenious audio editing that integrate Chip's flair for vocalizing musical cues that layer with nondiegetic orchestration.

Chip's idea of a fun hang is attempting to recreate a memorable or significant moment from screen days past, just disconnected from all formal safety perimeters of an actual production set. The most madcap example from The Cable Guy is the Medieval Times battle-axe and jousting duel between Chip and Steven, which incorporates Gerald Fried's music from the original '60s Star Trek series. However, Chip also reprises the fantastical idea in the final act's central satellite dish chase and confrontation that loosely pays homage to The Fugitive (1993), as he ascends the scaffolding while touting that the trouble with real life is "there's no danger music." Here, he's essentially verbally conducting the film's score by John Ottman to put himself back into a comfortably familiar mental space when he sat hypnotized by the glow of the tube even when he's physically throwing himself into mortal peril.

While it may have been completely clouded by the film's more overt and aforementioned commentaries, a queer reading has always been lurking, at least of the triangular dynamic between the men that includes odd man out Rick Legatos (Jack Black), Steven's friend from a local TV station, who initially pressures him into pursuing an illegal cable hookup from the Cable Guy in the first place. In the film's surrealistic set piece construction, seeing Chip as a manifestation of Steven's subconscious desire for male companionship isn't a stretch. ("Free cable is the ultimate aphrodisiac," Chip declares, psychologically connecting one definition of hookup to another.)

In addition to the pervasive media presence, Stiller litters the film with comically sexual innuendos, both verbal and physical. After their near-fatal melee at Medieval Times, Steven cradles Chip and thrusts forcefully to realign his back. The film's sharp edit from the restaurant arena's swarming, celebratory thrills only magnifies this kind of joking, yet subtly serious, eroticism that Chip effuses in his clinging to Steven as a prized confidant. Rick's peculiar jealousy over Chip's sudden presence in Steven's life also extends beyond an innate suspicion of his character. The brief but standoffish encounter between Rick and Chip at the karaoke jam has the dynamic of an ex-partner interrogating a new flame, as Rick insists on investigating his "story." Later, when Rick's Soundgarden concert plans with Steven are broken, his reaction is less incredulous than it is genuinely pouty, which suggests his interactions with Steven have naturally developed into something amorous.

In the film's final act and climactic chase sequence, the Cable Guy pleas for genuine commiseration in rebelling against the media overload that made him. But in the very same minute, he confesses into a police helicopter's floodlight as if it were a divine mother finally embracing him, and the film devolves into the sort of screen-obsessed turmoil that has infected his on-screen behavior throughout. The Cable Guy "understands his purpose," choosing to jump to his death and "kill the babysitter," smashing the satellite dish, and severing the TV signal's hold on collective consciousness. Has his desire for a Hollywood ending merely come to fruition in his own head? Or has his life actually become a Hollywood story where there's a way out of certain death and he can become a sort of ludicrous, momentary hero? As Chip is airlifted away, critically injured but very much alive and awaiting another potential buddy, a brass-driven fanfare swells triumphantly in all its razor-edged irony. Steven is reunited with Robin. "Let's go home," she says before a dramatically framed kiss that seems as scripted as any of the Cable Guy's antics.

Audiences who left theaters a quarter-century ago (perhaps at Westgate Art Cinemas) were likely perplexed after going down film's pitch-black and tortuous avenues with Carrey, the poster-face for '90s mainstream comedy. What Stiller directed, though, was antithetical to breezy entertainment. The Cable Guy has become a memorable and culturally significant moment in itself, like those lodged in the Cable Guy's memory bank—just more darkly shaded. The Cable Guy addressed everything from the influence of movies and television themselves, to personality disorder, loneliness, and media addiction that has only been exacerbated by social media. With all the notable references, cameos, and star-studded bit parts aiding its case (including Janeane Garofalo, Owen Wilson, and the late George Segal), it's no wonder it remains one of the most strikingly strange and predictive works pre- and post-millennium.

One of the highlights of a Madison summer is the chance to see a variety of high-caliber DJs and producers, from locally based artists to international electronic-music heavyweights. A lot of that is free, including the outdoor portion of the Musique Electronique series that ties in with La Fete De Marquette (which unfortunately isn't coming back until 2022). And usually, the summer is dotted with a series of laid-back outdoor dance parties from Foshizzle Family, a crew of young house and techno obsessives that formed in 2012. Foshizzle's customary gatherings at James Madison Park, featuring core members of the crew and guests from Madison and beyond, offer a good way to ease back into the dance music world. This summer might not bring a full series of James Madison hangs, but there will be at least one, on Saturday, June 19 from 4 to 9 p.m.

Foshizzle DJs UMI, Carrick, O2, and Scribe will all be spinning at different points throughout the evening. They'll be set up in the shelter at the east end of the park, and the setting allows plenty of room to spread out. Usually the Foshizzle crew would follow up these events with an afterparty at an indoor venue, but they're skipping that part this time. 

Max Wasinger, a Foshizzle co-founder who also DJs under the name Wangzoom, says there's "definitely some apprehension, but overall [it] feels great" as these and other electronic-music events around town get started again. Some of that apprehension is bound to come out in the music. In a recent mix for San Francisco-based Androids Dungeon Radio (which will also be featuring fellow Madison DJ Kitty Spit on June 25), Wasinger took a "heavier than usual" approach.

"I'm predicting that's going to be a theme with a lot of the DJs in the crew coming out of pandemic: A lot of us are getting into faster and harder music, branching out into electro and jungle and other broken pattern styles," Wasinger says. "I think house and techno will always be the common threads, but gotta shake off the pent up pandemic energy somehow."

Only a few minutes into Penelope’s Thrill’s Twilight On Tunnel Road, the Madison-based project gives listeners an exceedingly present sense of both place and purpose. While the music skews more towards dusty, roots-tinged southern rock, there’s the unmistakable glint of a Midwestern Americana lens, paralleling the April 2021 release’s dual commitment to the plaintive and the epic. While it’s certainly drawing on well-established sounds and stylistic approaches, Twilight On Tunnel Road boasts an intangible, indefinable quality that makes it more absorbing than the bulk of its contemporaries.

Former UW-Madison Cross-College Advising Service director Timothy Walsh, who originally developed Penelope’s Thrill alongside his son Andrew, drew inspiration for the record from a wealth of experience. In talking to Walsh earlier this month, I got the sense the poet and author knew that a momentous 2014 trip to Kazakhstan—which found Walsh collaborating with the avant-pop artist Mergen—ultimately shaped the record as much as what would become the ordinary, everyday mundanities of pandemic survival.

With some true familial support and the time Walsh had after retiring from UW-Madison in 2018, Twilight On Tunnel Road came into focus. A concept record heavily inspired by the backroads of southern Wisconsin, Twilight On Tunnel Road tells the story of Lonnie and Chloe, two young kids who awkwardly stumble through a formative relationship, bonding over shared interests before ultimately taking divergent paths. The music tends to lean a little more BoDeans than Tom Petty. Walsh imbues this story with surprising moments, both in terms of narrative and instrumental selection, and establishing a thoughtful imprint into a genre that has thrived on traditionalism.

Throughout our interview, Walsh’s joy and genuine interest in various aspects and people was palpable. From discussing his early experiences with the East Coast music scene to his recent stint in Tent Show Troubadours, he showed an enthusiasm that also comes through in the record’s material. Eagerness doesn’t define Twilight On Tunnel Road, though, thanks to Walsh’s implementation of foreboding surrealism and grounded self-awareness. For every moment that threatens to be mawkishly optimistic or tip over into treacly sentimentality, there’s a sharp counterbalance, lending the record some necessary gravity.

On “Shelter For Your Soul,” which incorporates a six-violin arrangement, that gravity comes by way of Lonnie’s recognition of his own limitations, giving the song’s softness an edge. Similarly, when “Clockwork Clouds” hits one of its most memorable moments in a handclap-adorned rundown of classic Wisconsin hallmarks, the abundance of pep is weighed down by the song’s preceding illustration of borderline dissociation, again underlined by a rumination on personal shortcomings. Even at its brightest, 12-string-assisted moments, Twilight On Tunnel Road isn’t afraid to kick up some dirt.

Throughout our conversation about Twilight On Tunnel Road, Walsh expounded on his connection to making music, noting that he’s been drawn to it since feeling it, physically, while holding a guitar to his chest when he was 11. Walsh enlisted the help of Ben Jaeger and Wendy Lynn Staats of Madison band Sunspot, along with Mergen and Tent Show Troubadours’ Ben Lokuta, to contribute their talents to the record, making sure to note his gratitude. Blast House Studios’ Landon Arkens, who has recorded Walsh’s work previously, also supplied some pivotal guidance.

Twilight On Tunnel Road went through an arduous mixing process as Walsh navigated acclimating to Logic Pro software, taking a few songs through around 40 mixes before settling into final versions. All of the time Walsh has put in pays off across Twilight On Tunnel Road, leaving the multihyphenate with a worthy collection of work.

Tone Madison: While Penelope’s Thrill is making its debut through this album, you’ve played in a few projects in the past. Can you give me a timeline of what your bands’ releases and your collaborations have looked like so far?

Timothy Walsh: Growing up in New Jersey as a kid starting out, I was like 13 and then into my 20s [I] was getting progressively better [at music]. So I just grouped up with a bunch of neighborhood kids and we played, literally, garage stuff in New Jersey. We got serious enough that when I was in college in Boston we decided that we were going to try to make an attempt to get into the great Boston music scene at the time. So we moved up, practiced a lot, played a couple of little gigs, but it never really worked out because we all also had to get different jobs and work and we worked different shifts. So we spent a couple of years sort of doing that and it never really worked out. And that was the prelude to me coming up to Wisconsin.

I originally came out here to do the grad program in English at UW-Madison. At that point I mainly put my guitars away. I played them a little bit when I got here but nothing seriously. Then it wasn’t until my son Andrew got older, and he got real interested in guitars, [that] I cracked out my old guitars. We started playing together. I started recording some early stuff with him, under the Penelope’s Thrill name. My very earliest things, just stuff we did at home. I still wasn’t that serious about doing it again, I was more focused on the writing I’d been doing. [During] 2014, I started becoming involved in this collaborative project for three years over in Kazakhstan.

I eventually met a musician/composer named Akmaral Zykayeva [who performs and records as Mergen]. She asked me to help her [with] her album. I worked with her on that for a couple of years. Doing that made me want to refocus on music. I got charged up again about music. When I retired in 2018, originally I was thinking I was going to spend my time writing. As it got closer, I really wanted to pursue music.

Tone Madison: Was there a specific moment from those sessions with Mergen that made you want to commit to making music more post-retirement, or was that decision more driven by a collection of moments?

Timothy Walsh: I think, really, it was a collection or accumulation of things that were shoving me in that direction. One of the first things, and this was early on, was when I was playing guitar with Andrew and he was like “You should really do some recording,” and I was like “Nah, I’m not going to get back into that,” and then without telling me, he just ordered a bunch of recording equipment on my credit card. I wasn’t that happy about it initially but then I was just like “Alright, let’s see what we can do with this,” and then when I went to Kazakhstan, I just happened to fall in with some people who were musicians.

And they have an interesting, ancient music culture over there and they have an instrument called the dombra, which is one of the many ancestor instruments for the guitar, and I just got really interested in that, in the history of it, in the people, in the musicians. At the same time, because Andrew had ordered this recording equipment, I was doing some stuff and fiddling around. It wasn’t like a huge single instant, it was a conglomeration of things that kept continuing to push me back that way and it was, it was still working with Akmaral on her album that made me decide “Okay, I need to do an album, like a focused album of my own.” Not just a collection of songs that I’d done. I wanted to come at it differently.

Tone Madison: In Kazakhstan and at UW-Madison you were serving in a capacity that saw you do a large number of advisory tasks. Were there any traits you cultivated in your time working in those capacities that informed or recontextualized how you were approaching songwriting?

Timothy Walsh: Just the experience of going to a place like Kazakhstan and getting to know it was such an eye-opening experience that it kind of shook me out of a little shell, I think, and really opened me up to thinking about possibilities in a much larger way.

To get way more specific, though, about the album, working with Akmaral was really interesting because the process would be that she would write out a song and she’d map out some English lyrics but her English wasn’t that good, so it definitely needed to be re-written. But she’d give me a scratch track of the recording with the melody and most of the instruments sketched in but not the actual final mix or the final recording. So, in trying to rewrite the lyrics, I would have to adjust the lyrics so that the syllables and consonants and vowels would actually work with the melody, because not just anything is going to work with a melody that pre-exists, and I think that kind of carried over.

Tone Madison: You picked up a small handful of awards for poetry and had a collection of literary criticism published. When it comes to writing do you see any other distinct demarcation lines between poetry and writing lyrics?

Timothy Walsh: Definitely. Some people ask me that and one thing that some people are surprised at is that I never, ever start with lyrics for a song. Which, you might think I would or people that know that I write poetry kind of think that would be the natural thing to do: start with lyrics and then put it to a melody and try to think of how I could make it into a song. I’ve never done that.

For me, the essential thing is that songs always start with me noodling on a guitar. When I hit some type of progression I like, I’ll generally at some point just start singing nonsense syllables to try and find what would the melody or melodic line be with that chord progression. Often I’ll get to the point where the song is basically done but all I’ll have really is nonsensical syllables that I can sing the melody to and then there’s a stage at which I go, “Okay, I actually need some lyrics here,” and I just play it until it just kind of comes to me, a way into [the song], that I can switch into actual lyrics.

Tone Madison: Twilight On Tunnel Road is a record that sounds distinctly Upper Midwest. Was that an organic manifestation or something that was premeditated?

Timothy Walsh: I would say more just organic. In terms of the album, from the beginning I was focused on getting the guitar tones I wanted, which would work with the different songs. I have a pretty idiosyncratic style I think and I was just focused on trying to get that. And, it is a more retro sound a lot of the time, which I guess could sound Midwest, I’m not really sure. The other thing about the album which is interesting and does kind of tie into the whole Midwest thing, [was that] when I started with the idea I was going to do this album, which would’ve been around fall 2019, I had no conception that it would have anything to do with Tunnel Road [near Belleville] or be a concept album.

It wasn’t really until the pandemic kicked in that everything kind of gelled and it was just accidental. It was because my 88-year-old mother lives down in Monroe, and I would have to drive down there to bring her groceries and supplies because of the lockdown. Coming back, I’d always come back on the back roads. I really liked the stretch from Monticello up to Belleville on the back roads there, which I’d always take. The scenery, the farms, the whole countryside, just started getting into the songs in an almost weird way.

The actual songs just seemed to come to me from that area. They’d be small things, like going past one farm, sort of in the middle of nowhere, in this beautiful countryside. I remember one time there was this young girl, maybe 11 years old, who was in a farmyard with a bunch of goats and she had her hair dyed purple and she was doing handstands and singing out loud. That was like Chloe to me. It was probably around several months [into that routine] that I thought “Okay, all the songs are going to be about this.”

Tone Madison: So the drives back and forth worked as the impetus or springboard for the story. In developing the narrative, were there any other external factors that helped you shape it or was that something you’d sit down, think about, and intensively plot out until you had an embedded structure?

Timothy Walsh: It was almost an eerie feeling, I’d have to say, at times, where I’d be working on a particular song and it was almost a feeling of like these ghostly people from [the rural Southern Wisconsin] area infiltrating my song. It was kind of like an odd feeling, actually. It felt like… it was hard to explain. But that kind of repeated itself because over the months. Over the weeks, I’d always be at a stage where I had a song going and maybe I kind of had the proto-syllables, nonsense syllables, and I’d go explore different areas of that whole region there on my bike or walking or in the car or all those things together and I’d just see something that would jog me into focusing on a particular thing.

As the Lonnie and Chloe thing became more palpable to me, they became real characters. I started, in my head, forming their backstory, which then became a foundation for when I was going to write a song, what I could focus on. So I did, sort of in my head, form their backstory before the album was done. I kind of knew that in the last song, “Letter To Chloe,” or in the song where she leaves [“Wind and Whispers”], I knew she was going to leave early on. But the songs that came out weren’t actually written at that point.

Tone Madison: There’s a reliably straightforward narrative across the record but it ends on a note of highly realistic ambiguity. Do you find endings in general to be more satisfying when they avoid tidier resolutions?

Timothy Walsh: I think the answer is yes. I would say, in general, I think it’s true and in this regard I think it’s true. You know, I had actually thought I was going to do one more song to make it end that might have provided a little more resolution to things, and then I just axed it. It was more of an active decision to leave things unresolved and not have some sort of neat, pat happy ending to it but sort of keep things complicated and, you know, the way things really are I suppose. I didn’t at any moment go, “I’m going to conceptually make this end in an ambiguous way,” it was sort of a natural process for the story. I did have an impulse to—at one point I even sketched out a whole song for it—and I thought, “Okay, this is going to be the last song that resolves things in a more satisfying way.” And I think it’s a good song but I thought “Nah, I don’t wanna do that,” and I axed it.

Tone Madison: For what it’s worth, I think that’s also usually the right decision. I like the ending as is, with a few things left open to allow in an emphasis on lingering longing and various other emotional intangibles that carried an impact that might’ve been jeopardized a bit had you followed that impulse.

Timothy Walsh: It’s good to hear that, I did kind of wrestle with that right up to the end, over whether or not to put that song in there but ultimately thought, “No, that doesn’t go.”

In the past few weeks, traditional movie theaters have seen a soft reopening thanks to a modest slate of blockbuster holdovers from 2020. However, some of the theater chains in Dane County and beyond have also had their doors open for quite a few months now for those willing to venture out, and they've built lineups of some repertory and modern favorites in big digital presentations in lieu of much-hyped commercial releases. On the other hand, UW Cinematheque, the beating theatrical heart of Downtown Madison at 4070 Vilas Hall, has been shuttered to the public since the second week of March 2020. This free screening series makes its return on Wednesday, June 30, with a full six-week repertory scheduling announcement all the more exciting, and it begins with Leo McCarey's 1937 drama Make Way For Tomorrow (1937) (a film "that would make a stone cry,” as Orson Welles once touted).

Cinematheque's temporary seating accommodations include doubled-up screening times at 5 and 7 p.m. (for all features that do not exceed 105 minutes), and a social distancing enforcement to ease any worries audiences may be understandably clinging to about safety. Cinematheque will be following UW-Madison policy (last updated June 2), which states: "The size of the event will be limited to the maximum allowable to ensure that 6 feet of physical distancing can be maintained by all those attending (vaccinated and unvaccinated) who are not members of the same household/living unit." Capacity at the 4070 Vilas screening room, then, will always be slightly variable based on attending groups, and an official limit has not been designated at this time. As the summer weeks roll on, though, look for potential adjustments and updates from staff. 

As for the films themselves, regular curators Jim Healy, Mike King, and Ben Reiser have tapped into the nostalgia that has gestated in our quarantines, choosing a slate of 18 films all on 35mm projection. We've been shut in smaller rooms to consume digital media on discs and streaming services. The analog sounds of celluloid in a proper space are sure to be a beacon in that foggy, over-saturated virtual expanse and even a reprieve for all of us indulging in diverse outlets. The Cinematheque selections further reflect that classic programming decision with a majority of features primarily from the 1930s through the 1980s. A number of notable classics immortalized in the international conversation are here, including Paul Verhoeven's The 4th Man (1983) and Yasujirô Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) (originally set to conclude Cinematheque's spring 2020 calendar). But the schedule leaves ample room throughout for American-made features, including Cinematheque's season finale on August 6 of James Cameron's Aliens (1986), three Stateside films with French star Jean Gabin (Wednesdays from July 21 through August 4), including Pépé Le Moko (1937), and a presumably over-the-top trio of Charles Bronson films through the last few Fridays in July—Mr. Majestyk (1973), Hard Times (1975), and From Noon Till Three (1976).

Perhaps most exciting for me is the July 8 screening of Ann Hui's Song Of The Exile (1990), which can serve to complement the recent virtual Wisconsin Film Festival’s spotlighting of Hui's life and work in Man Lim-chung's documentary Keep Rolling (2020). One of Hui's most acclaimed and semi-autobiographical features and one of the finest of the Hong Kong New Wave in general, Song Of The Exile stars the always-compelling Maggie Cheung (of Irma Vep and In The Mood For Love) as a woman in her mid-20s returning to Hong Kong from study abroad in London only to clash with her Japanese mother (Lu Hsiao-fen). A period film that takes place in 1973, it stands as a well-observed and poignant portrait of fraying of familial ties and changing cultural identity.

For the complete list of screenings and showtimes, please visit cinema.wisc.edu.

Photo: The use of lead water pipes dates back at least to ancient Rome. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

No matter how jaded you get about Wisconsin politics, our state Legislature's refusal to address lead water pipes remains heartbreaking. This horror often gets obscured in the greater shuffle of the state budget process, but government officials who neglect this problem are poisoning children. Not many political issues are as simple as "you are poisoning children." This one is. 

The human body has no use for lead. There is no safe level of lead for a person to ingest. But even though lead is a highly toxic metal, your body stores it rather than flushing it all out. A little bit here and there adds up over time, and children are particularly vulnerable to the worst effects, including effects on their brain development. We as a society have made exceptional, life-saving progress on phasing out lead in paint, gasoline, and other common products. To leave it in some of our most essential infrastructure is unconscionable. 

Congress and the Biden Administration could make this a moot point with a $2 trillion infrastructure bill that includes $45 billion to replace all of the lead water pipes in the United States—assuming that Congressional Democrats advance the bill without watering it down too much, and assuming that Wisconsin Republicans don't find some absurd way to turn down the money for spite. Republicans have made a habit of inaction on this no-brainer public-health and infrastructure problem, amidst the power grabs and unhinged Holocaust comments. 

Earlier in June, the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee rejected a proposal in Democratic Governor Tony Evers' budget that would have provided $40 million to help property owners replace lead service lines—the pipes that run from a public water main to an individual building. Wisconsin news outlets including Wisconsin Public Radio and Up North News have reported on this, as legislators get into the nitty-gritty of budgetary evisceration. Republicans rejected a similar proposal in the state's last biennial budget cycle, complaining that it would have sent too much money to Milwaukee, where most of the lead service lines are.

The progress Wisconsin has made on lead pipes is inadequate, given the scale of the problem. Federal, state, and local governments have put in a few million here and there, toward what is really at least a billion-dollar problem. We learned this week that Wisconsin is on course to attract a $4.4 billion windfall in surplus tax revenues over the next three years. There can be no excuse for inaction. The Legislature should provisionally put up the money to root out every single lead pipe we can find across the state, then draw on federal funds once the federal infrastructure plan (hopefully) goes through. 

The state has taken its sweet time on replacing lead water pipes. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that Wisconsin has about 176,000 of them, though the EPA has acknowledged that this number is incomplete. Communities around the state are replacing their lead service lines, at a gradual pace, as the state uses federal dollars to fund replacement programs. Additionally, some individual cities have gotten creative. For instance, Madison used revenue from leases on cell-phone towers, and buy-in from homeowners, to fund a historic effort to get rid of every lead service line in the city. Green Bay recently followed suit, using its share of leftover money from the Lambeau Field sales tax. In 2018, then-Governor Scott Walker signed into law a bill that makes it easier for public water utilities to help pay for lead service line replacement. (Long story short, this used to be a legal headache because the service lines cross between public and private property.) That bill did not create new state funding for the problem, so it's still going to have a limited impact for utilities that don't have money to spare or aren't willing to raise their rates.

Now, even Madison's water isn't entirely lead-free. Lead is a naturally occurring element, which means it can contaminate our groundwater sources from the start. In places that do have lead pipes, various other chemicals in the water (including some that water utilities add to treat other contaminants) react with the lead, causing it to corrode over time and seep into water. Putting a filter on your faucet can help, but doesn't solve the underlying problem of a decaying and literally toxic infrastructure. People are mostly made of water. When you're drinking it, bathing in it, and cooking with it, there's only so much risk you can really accept. 

Even if you think we can reasonably manage the health risks, upgrading water pipes is a good investment. It would tune up our water infrastructure, pay people for materials, and pay people for the work. The conventional wisdom in politics is that major infrastructure spending is a hard sell, a massive price tag for something unsexy. But I think most ordinary people are more than ready to move past that attitude. Nationwide polling on the Biden Administration's proposed $2 billion infrastructure plan suggests that a narrow majority of voters support it, and that a narrow majority favor Biden's plan over a Republican counter-proposal. .

Republicans in Wisconsin are blocking funds for lead pipe replacement because they simply love any chance to treat Milwaukee as a punching bag and stir up more resentment in the areas they consider the "real Wisconsin." Milwaukee is a place full of people they've already written off. But lead pipes, and water quality concerns writ large, give the lie to simple urban-vs.-rural narratives. It makes sense that Milwaukee would get the lion's share of funding for lead pipe replacement, because it's got more people, more buildings, and more infrastructure built during the time when people were still using lead pipes in new construction. But dozens of other Wisconsin communities large and small have lead service lines in the ground. They all deserve safe drinking water and they will all suffer as long as Wisconsin continues to neglect this problem.

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

Beige purgatory or blinding glass hell? These are the two options developers must weigh when participating in Madison’s stampede of new construction. A lot of the apartment, condo, and mixed-use buildings going up around town these days look spiritless and bland. But among them could rise up an even more relentless contingent of forbidding glass towers, most of them still in the planning or building phases. Even the architectural renderings submitted to the city show these edifices projecting white-hot solar glare or teeming with some kind of irradiated glow in daylight. They evoke Godzilla and his rival Titans battling each other with great pulses of radiation.

Foremost among them, to my poor seared little eyes, is Archipelago Village, currently under construction on the 900 block of East Wash. Its centerpiece, perched upon high like a god sipping mead from the skulls of the damned, is an 11-story office tower whose glass facade appears to fold in a bit like great abstract wings, though this may be an optical effect. 

It may have a rival in a recently unveiled plan for a new building that would house both the Wisconsin Historical Museum and Wisconsin Veterans Museum. I personally don’t think this ambitious design inspires the same level of primordial dread as 929 E. Washington Ave., but this building, planned for the 200 block of East Wash, seems perfectly capable of generating its own severe beams of reflected sunlight. Both make the nearby U.S. Bank Plaza look quaint and stumpy by comparison. If these plans and others following the same design trends go through, central Madison could soon find itself bathed in annihilating glare from dawn til dusk. Build enough of these things and we can just imagine we’re living on the surface of the sun. Maybe Scott Walker had a point when he kept doing that silly bit with the shades a few years ago.

In London, one glass-fronted building reflected sunlight and heat with such intensity that it melted a car. This was likely a product of the building’s concave facade, which ended up focusing the light like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass. I don’t think 929 E. Wash is shaped so as to create a giant death lens, but that effect could provide a useful incentive as Madison tries to create dense, pedestrian-friendly spaces. Especially on East Wash, where we keep kidding ourselves that we’re going to construct a hip walkable entertainment district—Cap East, baby! It’s totally a real neighborhood!—along what is in fact a busy highway. Or maybe there will just be a lot of distracting glare that causes car accidents.

Glass buildings do raise serious and complicated environmental questions. As the world gets hotter, glass buildings will often require more energy for air conditioning. And Madison is already an urban heat island. Madison has also created new building regulations to protect birds. In fact, the hate group and right-wing lawsuit factory Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is preparing to sue the city over these regulations, in partnership with construction and real-estate groups. Is the real danger that birds will accidentally fly right into the glass? I’m convinced they’d just get vaporized before they could ever make an impact. For whatever reason, there are little flocks of birds in the background of renderings for both Archipelago Village and the museum project. Surely the architects mean well and have no intention of coaxing poor defenseless geese into a gigantic air fryer.

In Madison’s gold rush of new development, the more visually tame buildings around town come off as disingenuous. They put an inoffensive face on a relentless pursuit of profit that displaces poor residents and locally owned businesses. These blisteringly bright glass projects, on the other hand, embrace the megalomania behind this mix of destruction and renewal. In that sense, they are fascinating in their honesty. Just don’t look directly at them.

Indoor and outdoor live events are coming back with a vengeance in Madison. Here is how Tone Madison will determine whether or not we consider a given event for preview coverage. 

We will not cover:

• Events that allow children under 12.

• Full-capacity indoor events with no vaccination, masking, or distancing requirements, or with "honor system" vaccination requirements. No shoulder-to-shoulder stuff just yet, sorry.

• Events involving venues and event organizers who have flouted health guidelines during the pandemic or taken risks we consider unnecessary. We may consider covering their events again as the overall public health picture improves and if these venues demonstrate a commitment to improving their practices.

• Events involving venues and event organizers that do not provide accessible and clear information about safety measures. 

We will cover:

• Events that require full vaccination and check vaccination cards for admission, provided that they demonstrate that artists and service staff are also vaccinated.

• Outdoor events that have an anticipated attendance of 300 people or less, allow for multiple points of entry and exit (i.e. events in public parks without gates or lines), and minimize common points of contact like concession stands. 

• Events at indoor venues that are extremely large and where the event has a smaller niche appeal—a concert inside the cavernous Garver Feed Mill, for instance, is indoors but has a much better chance of being safe than one at a packed bar.

• Indoor events that allow for some reasonable distancing.

We will adjust these guidelines going forward by:

• Loosening them as things get better.

• Scaling back if there are significant new outbreaks.

• Following up on any credible information we receive about COVID cases at a given venue or event organization.

On top of these safety concerns, we'll make our decisions about what to cover the same way we always have: asking ourselves what is most compelling and what we can do with our finite capacity, and prioritizing local artists and smaller venues.

Here is why we're adopting the above guidelines:

Masks and capacity limits are now purely voluntary in Dane County. People and businesses are officially allowed to do whatever they were doing before the pandemic. No one wants to let another Madison summer go to waste. And wow, we tried to be good sports about it but livestream shows are just kind of sad.

What is a media outlet's responsibility in all of this? Personally, I think it's to try and make sure that events are reasonably safe, and to avoid implying that things are completely safe if they are not. This is not about shaming or punishing people who don't follow the exact same precautions I would, just about spelling out some specific criteria for the decisions we're making. We can't make rules for anyone else, but we can make some rules for ourselves. I’ve had some conversations on background with epidemiologists and public health experts of late, and that has informed the approach here.

It's objectively getting much safer for Madisonians to go out and do things in person. Dane County's vaccination rate is ahead of most parts of the country (keep it up, folks!), and new cases are declining. There are plenty of good reasons for most individuals to feel safe, and good reasons to think the community as a whole will be protected from another major outbreak. We also know that we're still in a global pandemic, that there are open questions about the emergence of new COVID variants, that we can't count on everyone to behave safely, that a large part of the population remains unvaccinated—including young children who are not yet eligible, immunocompromised people for whom vaccination is too risky, and people who simply choose not to out of selfishness and/or stupidity. 

We will likely never attain perfect, certain safety from COVID for every single person, so we have to try and find some other benchmark that's good enough. Right now, we don't really have solid consensus around what that benchmark would be, not even from the scientific community or from health officials. The vaccination rate is the percentage of those eligible for the vaccine who are vaccinated, not a percentage of the overall population, so as good as it is we should also not develop a sense of false confidence. Everyone's going to have a different comfort level, and that is totally understandable.

Venues and event organizers also have a responsibility to consider the vulnerable members of our community, and to show a little sensitivity. People have been through 15 months of whiplash and uncertainty. If you're having a hard time trusting a bit of good news, no one should fault you for that. Let's continue to respect each other's boundaries and give people time. And space! Space, please.

When public health officials and concert promoters say that things are fine, we should pause and ask questions. It is not our job to simply take people's word for it, especially when those people have power and when their decisions impact the health and safety of others on a large scale. We should not let the business community set the baseline for the conversation. If you're heading out to concerts this summer and fall, I think you should exercise some skepticism as well. If you're giving a venue your money, ask if that place treats you like a person worthy of consideration, or like livestock with a wallet.

Even before the local health orders expired, it was not good enough for a business to simply say "we're following all of Public Health Madison and Dane County's guidelines." Government regulations are not based solely on health concerns and scientific data. Instead, public health rules attempt to balance different interests, with varying degrees of fairness and success. In this case, both Tone Madison and Madison365 used public-records requests to show that the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce played a disproportionate role in shaping PHMDC's decisions. PHMDC did a lot of good work to protect the community during the pandemic, often stepping in where the state and federal officials failed. But in light of the clear, well-documented influence of business interests on the agency, it would be media malpractice to put absolute trust in its decisions. Here's hoping that our venues, performers, event organizers, and fellow audience members will do a better job of earning that trust.

This story was produced in partnership with Red Madison.

Following a year of protests against police violence, the Spring 2021 elections were a mixed fortune for leftists on the Madison Common Council. Two of the most vocal members of the Council's left flank departed: District 8 Alder Max Prestigiacomo, who stepped aside to make way for Juliana Bennett's successful run for the seat, and District 18 Alder Rebecca Kemble, who lost her re-election bid to challenger Charles Myadze. 

Prestigiacomo had a brief but memorable tenure on the Common Council. He was sworn in in April 2020 to serve the remainder of former Alder Avra Reddy's term. At the time he took office, the Madison native was a freshman at UW-Madison with a background in youth climate activism. Over the following year he showed an uncommon willingness to criticize fellow Alders and the Council as a whole, took the lead on an unsuccessful attempt to bar the Madison Police Department from using tear gas, and criticized UW-Madison administrators' response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prestigiacomo talked with me recently about the challenges of balancing movement building and mental health in office, as well as the challenges of getting city government to acknowledge the complexity of harms in our community. (Note: This interview was edited for clarity and length.)

Tone Madison: Could you talk about how you decided to run for Alder, to start with?

Max Prestigiacomo: Yes, I feel like my understanding of why I ran probably changed a little bit. I would say that, for me, the specific reason I ran was because I considered myself a socialist, a leftist. Completely ignoring the broader political context of how successful leftism can be in electoralism, I saw that District 8 specifically... we have this unique district, that's just students. Everyone's always like, "it's the radical district." And that was not true. In fact, it was probably the farthest from it. We probably had neoliberal representation for 10, 15 years. The last leftist that we had, I would say, and I confirmed this, was Austin King [who represented the district from 2003 to 2007]. Still, I wouldn't even consider him the abolitionists that I think like, Juliana, Brandi Grayson, or some other people are. 

But yeah, I ran because I saw that I had privilege in having grown up in Madison, and knowing all the right people and lots of people in relationships that I had formed. And you know, it was a one-year term, I thought it was a perfect opportunity for someone like me to go in and shift the dynamics in District 8, so that we actually had a guaranteed leftist seat. And I didn't really care about my reputation or whatever they would call it. That was it for me, was that there was a severe lack in representation for communities that are always plowed over by UW administration, city council leadership, the mayor, state, whatever it is.

Tone Madison: What was the political landscape like going into your term?

Max Prestigiacomo: So obviously, I'm coming in halfway through… I'll just be honest, and I feel like I need to make the point more to talk about how I have made mistakes. Like I said, I was learning everything. I was trying to be as deliberate as possible to, like, actually reduce harm. On the other side, I'm continuously learning things. And I'm blindsided probably every other week by something I didn't know about...no one really took it upon themselves to mentor me the way I would have appreciated. It was a difficult time to come on, with everything that happened. And I think that Rebecca] and [District 15 Alder] Grant [Foster] served as good anchors for me to ground myself in some moral center.  

Tone Madison: I wonder if you'd be willing to expand on that a little bit. It sounds like there might be mistakes in the sense of, week-to-week or every-other-week you're blindsided by something. But thinking back a little bit, what were some of the things that you felt like, in your approach to the office, you would have done differently?

Max Prestigiacomo: Oh, gosh, I think, obviously, the elephant in the room is that there are just so many procedures, background understanding, all the moving parts that, like, even [longtime District 4 Alder] Mike Verveer still doesn't understand. There's an ongoing joke that only Mike Verveer and [former District 5 Alder] Shiva Bidar would understand how to actually make amendments to the capital budget. In that sense, I've just learned so much since then, that if I went back, I probably would have used parliamentary procedure differently. I would have known when the city attorneys were cheating me out of getting something on the agenda. [They were] lying to me and putting me at a disadvantage. I think I really appreciate that I've had the experience, even if it was just one year and I never went into a city building because it's all remote. There are times where I feel like I've gotten caught up in focusing on a problem—that the movement in the street supports—but then there's always so many moving parts, just to understand something, to get it done. 

And then obviously, I'm also a student. I do have to do my schoolwork and burnout is real. So I think probably the one thing I would have gone back and changed would be my own mental health, like how I approached working. Because I feel like I did burn out quite quickly because of the workload of COVID and just everything. There's lots of different mistakes. I'll call them mistakes because I feel like politicians are always lying [and] saying they don't make mistakes—vulnerable obviously isn't something politicians like to be.

Tone Madison: Whether it's COVID or not, if you're working full time and you're trying to be on city council—it is a full time job to be an alder—you have to figure out how you can take care of yourself while also doing that job.

Max Prestigiacomo: Yeah. And that was something also no one really talked about with me. Obviously, I knew it. As an activist and organizer I knew how important mental health and all that stuff was. But it's so stripped of personality sometimes, the whole process, and it's a little bit scary at times. I can admit that. It's a big thing.

Tone Madison: Yeah, it’s as though it doesn't look like mental health in the moment, it looks like just more work that you have to get done and a feeling that you should be able to get the work done. And you can doubt yourself when setting a boundary on that, like, "Do I just not know how to work hard enough?"

Max Prestigiacomo: Yeah, oh for real.

Tone Madison: You decided to not run for re-election and I wonder what motivated your decision.

Max Prestigiacomo: It's my duty, like in the movement as a whole, to mentor and train someone. I tried to communicate that as well to some of my colleagues, some of them obviously ran again. I think, obviously, having Rebecca run was something I ended up supporting because of her opponent. But, in a lot of other cases, [District 2 Alder] Patrick Heck, white alders decided to run again, even though they were preaching equity. So I also felt like it was a little bit hypocritical to have me even pursue that route. And it just says something that it dawned upon me, but no one else.  

Tone Madison: There were two people who were running in District 8 who both supported defunding the police, and really seemed to shift the politics of the district. Did this election reflect changes in the politics of students at UW? 

Max Prestigiacomo: I almost feel like this constituency has always been there. But obviously activating that takes a candidate [people will want to vote for]. Maybe these people aren't, ideology-wise, saying "I'm a socialist," but they are, in terms of the broader sense, like, "Fuck the system." We've all been manipulated by it as young people. I want people in there that'll shake some things up. 

Tone Madison: Is there an opportunity for something different to come out of electoral politics for students in Madison? You mentioned that Associated Students of Madison, UW-Madison's student government body, has changed in the last year, certainly the alder seat has changed. And yet a lot of students vote absentee in someplace other than Madison. So there's relatively low turnout in Madison elections for students in District 8.  Do you think that in the future, electoral politics in District 8 is going to look different at all?

Max Prestigiacomo: I think we've got our foot in the door. [Low engagement has] obviously been something that's been in my brain. It's so much bigger, unfortunately. Like just how young people are raised in schools and how we're so often dismissed as not being smart enough to have a valued opinion. And that even manifests in the District 8 alder seat. Like, obviously, we have a guaranteed spot for young people. And like I think a lot of politicians have accepted that. Whereas other cities, you wouldn't have that. They would be like, "Oh, a young person on the county board? No, we need experienced people." Here, I think that we've accepted that in some sense, but every person on the council has their own idea of like, what I should be, or what should the District 8 Alder be in their own definition. There's all these systemic issues pushing back. 

I'm obviously not leaving campus. I'm still in ASM. As we start to build more coalitions and student power, I think we will start to see reduced harm for communities on campus that have just been left out at every step of the way. But in another sense, I think we have something very unique. I am always talking about how we need self-determination for communities. It's absurd that, like I just said, white people are having opinions on what impacts the black community. I really do think that District 8, what's happening on campus, can serve as a model for how the Common Council moves forward as a whole. I think that the District 8 Alder seat is a perfect example of how we can have guaranteed representation for communities. Obviously, not every community lives in one physical space. But right now we have that. And we seem like... when there is a voting bloc like that, we can guarantee ourselves a young person at the table. 

Obviously, it hasn't benefited everyone. But we have such great bus service, like in certain areas, like we want to have free bus pass for all students, so you can negotiate with the city. And there's lots of other examples where we've gotten some concessions here and there. But obviously, those are benefits for mostly affluent, privileged people, because there are worse problems that are impacting people on campus. If we want to get somewhere in terms of the dynamics between students on campus and all that, we'll need some systemic push from, you know, whatever power it be. But I just think that we do have a great opportunity to show the city how this has been working, and how we plan to push forward. 

Someone like Juliana isn't going to be quiet, is going to be unapologetic about speaking truth to people like the mayor and some of her colleagues. And so far I've seen some really great stuff. She's ready to go to bat for us.

Tone Madison: Are there things where you look at the last year and feel like either they were successes or things that you were proud of? 

Max Prestigiacomo: Yeah, I do think that, overall, I was able to contribute in certain ways. I was proud that we were able to pass something as simple as banning facial recognition, which is why—I didn't realize part of me was like, why am I doing this? Why was this not done before? You know, it's a lot of that stuff. I think I was very focused on the campus community coalition and all of that stuff. We helped put together a neighbor association. [UW administrators] do not like it when elected officials come to talk to them. And they were not used to the District 8 Alder specifically speaking up. All my predecessors, they all told me, like, "We don't really talk about UW, it doesn't really involve us." But I have a campus platform, so I use that. 

I just learned so much about how personal relationships—just relationships as a whole—how that is the process, that is the system. Like how as an Alder, like having to have a relationship with my colleague will influence me in some way. And a lot of times that means it becomes about my own personal uncomfortability or comfortability. So yeah, I think the proudest thing for me is, I was able to kind of put together and map out how uncomfortable votes, what could happen, and how that should play out. We need to be thinking [about] uncomfortable votes, even if that means white people, privileged people sacrificing their definition of safety. Because the other thing I've seen too often is how the system... likely, you know, usually the police... will create excuses, that will very likely seem legitimate to everyone on the council. Even if they're not experts on the topic, they would be like, "Oh, we're gonna have this much shooting, we're predicting this much increase in crime if this many cops are taken away." I'm just so thankful that I had the opportunity to witness that. And now I won't be wasting time like I was before talking about things that I feel like didn't really have an input. 

Tone Madison: Talking about the nature of influence: In city politics, there's a lot of that which is interconnected between the Alders and the relationships with each other. Outside of the Council itself, I'm curious what you see as being the most influential political or community groups or interest groups. Who seemed to have the greatest influence on the politics of the Council?

Max Prestigiacomo: I get asked iterations of that question...and I don't know if I have a perfect answer, but I think that is a combination of—I'm just gonna label it. I'm gonna label it "property." Technically everyone is on equal footing when you are emailing or testifying. But I think there's this skew on the Council, that there is higher value in places like the East Towne Mall, when we're having a discussion on the homeless shelter. Or like campus neighborhood associations, which are usually run—obviously a privilege, you have to be privileged to get involved, like that's a non-starter—run by those types of people. Usually, overvaluing NIMBYism and undervaluing the other side—which isn't even there! Like, unhoused people aren't coming to testify. There is no opposite to that. Obviously, we are having  people, activists, movements come and testify. But a lot of times too, the most impacted people are not there. 

So I just think that property at the end of the day always wins out...businesses bring jobs and jobs are human lives. You know, that kind of stuff. Property value means businesses will want to come here and provide good jobs. I've rarely heard people say, "screw all that." What brings people here is quality of life and having housing for all and all that stuff and, you know, abolishing the police so that we actually have street medics and CAHOOTS.  

Tone Madison: You’re thinking is that it's not necessarily one core set of groups, but there's such an ingrained attitude.  For example, you're talking about the way the police would say, "Well, if we cut this many positions, crime will go up by such and such an amount." And when you're talking about predicting the future, it's completely an assumption. 

Max Prestigiacomo: Oh, yeah. Arbitrary.

Tone Madison: It's just a guess. And the same thing happens with jobs. We assume that "better" businesses will bring “better” jobs. What’s not articulated is that “better,” means that mostly White people will come to town. And so that way of thinking about it, and people's self-interest in wanting to maintain the property they have, is really the sort of influence that is hard to break.

Max Prestigiacomo: It is. It takes more than just one or two Alders. We tried, though.

Tone Madison: So where does that leave leftists? You're doing movement building through the office. For example, giving resources and knowledge so that people can continue it on. But what do you think leftists in Madison—whether in District 8 or otherwise—what do we need to be doing to make bigger changes?

Max Prestigiacomo: Yeah, um, got me with that question. I mean, one thing for me is—I mean, I just talked about it—we have all these leftists that want to support someone who they believe in, who they believe will change the system. I just can't figure it out. I still haven't. 

I'm from the west side. A lot of west-side leftist youth were able to elect this former student, recent graduate, to the Middleton Cross Plains school board [Simrnjit Seerha]. And the biggest issue was SROs. And we got her elected. And they were endorsed by the Working Families Party. So we thought we really had a good leftist anchor, at least over where there was no leftist at all. I just point to this because it's a very recent example. The last meeting, which was last week, this person voted to renew the SRO contract. And so, I am constantly seeing examples of that.

I'll just be honest, I think that federal electoralism, state electoralism [is a] lost cause. I've always just believed that the important decisions should happen at the local level. I mean, I talked about self-determination for communities. I think we've seen examples of how this is the way to go ahead, especially with our climate deadline. And I just think that District 8 is for me, like my focus for now. Because I think that'll probably lead me somewhere to an understanding of how we can get another district in. 

I think that groups like DSA, any leftist organization, whatever you want to call yourself, the small district coalitions, community building, hopefully can lead us somewhere. Especially because I, like so many other people, hate electoralism… you know, it is really frustrating. So, hopefully, Juliana too will be another person that joined me and, you know, she's obviously learning a lot, too. And we do have a few other people. I've been pleasantly surprised with [newly elected District 10 Alder] Yannette [Figueroa Cole] on the Common Council. So you know, there's some hope there. I won't say I have zero hope.

Tone Madison: You were talking about this earlier on, about the impact of being an Alder on your own mental health. After being an Alder for one year, what's changed for you as a person? 

Max Prestigiacomo: Yeah. So I mean, I alluded to it, but I've really realized the importance of relationships, just in non-political spaces as well... I think when I came into elected office, I was like, "I'm not going to talk to people who are pro-cop." Like, I was just like, "I'm going to tell them to shut the fuck up and leave me alone." 

I think I've in some ways figured out how to navigate that, as someone who is a person, a human, a part of the community, not a perfect person. And sometimes engaging with people that disagree with me. Which I obviously did, but I don't think I've had enough time to actually cultivate relationships. And I do think that there is a possibility. I've seen it happen. I think maybe I was able to do it sometimes, but convincing some of these swing votes. Like for leftists—especially for leftists, with lived experience—which I obviously didn't have at some times, I do think that that's something that can be done. Obviously, I don't like the idea of having politicians that are not for the people. But if we can elect people that can actually engage in some of these relationships without letting that relationship hold them back, it's really powerful. 

Tone Madison: What should be the focus of attention for city politics? How should we try and influence them? 

Max Prestigiacomo: Yeah, obviously the big one I will always say, the first step for everyone should be our focus, at least right now: mutual aid. And it's likely that once we start seeing more climate disasters, that'll also be another huge need. It's unfortunate that we don't have many, like, citizen-led mechanisms, like a petition to get a referendum on the ballot or something like that thanks to state law.

Recognizing that electoralism does kind of exist outside of reality at times, if we have opportunities like District 8, like District 4, and District 2, Nada [Elmikashfi]'s campaign [for State Senate District 26 in 2020] is a great example too, just going all in on like, all the accessibility and digital stuff and adapting to the new mediums. Run young people, and get young people on your campaigns, because they will win elections. And it's annoying, because a lot of these neoliberal alders take campus leaders and be like, "You're my campaign manager." And I'm always annoyed that they took time from these young people who could have been put into some other leftist campaign. But I do think that we have some new tools that can help, especially with people waking up. Affluent, white privileged people waking up to the reality that so many people have faced for so long. So I hope that once more young people are entering in this really scary time, you know, we don't know if they will be entering anything, but jobs, whatever it be, community organizations, that we get more background that can, you know, aid... digital stuff, all that stuff can really help.

Tone Madison: Any other thoughts that you have, as you're leaving your time on the Common Council?

Max Prestigiacomo: I've just been thinking about this a lot too, while we're talking. Just the power dynamics of it all? And how myself—I, Max Prestigiacomo – am a part of the problem. I think it's—no one understands it. [Mayor] Satya [Rhodes-Conway], especially, we saw over the summer. 

I am a leader in the city, or sorry, I was a leader in the city. But like that is something that, like, we hold all the cards. The balance has always tipped in our favor. I will always continuously benefit from it. I can be a part of the solution, but I can also contribute to the problem at the same time. And just that is something that I'm so surprised that, like, no one understood it. They just kind of see it as very rigid, like yes or no, binary. I support you or I don't. And I wish that was talked about more. That we can have people like me who can be a part of the problem. And that doesn't necessarily mean I'm cancelled. Like, you know, people automatically take that as "I can't be vulnerable." Like I said, politicians aren't vulnerable. It's just a huge thing.  Everyone has a difficult time admitting they were wrong. I think that's one side of it. 

And I would say it's hard to admit now, when protests are on the streets. I recognize that. I had to go through that myself. But it needs to be done. And then I think on the other side of it is... you know, we have a city that... we have contracts with Porchlight, and some of these other groups that help unhoused people. [At] the same time, we are taking people out of parks. Right? Actually, I feel like a better example would probably be with police... maybe a police officer did like help someone… but that Matt Kenny is still on the force. And can you think about... what goes through someone's mind when they know that Matt Kenny is on the force training people? 

So I don't know why it is that difficult sometimes. It wasn't for me, maybe I could have done a better job admitting that I was part of the problem, and be open about that. Maybe it would have helped them change their minds. But I think that's what I meant by the rigid view is that it has to be either or. And I think that they have an uncomfortable time reckoning with that fact.

Image of “Under The Silver Globe” cassette insert courtesy of Mills Music Library at UW-Madison.

This is the second in a short series of articles Tone Madison is running about the recorded works of pianist Joan Wildman. Read our previous piece on Wildman's elusive discography, and check back soon for a collection of remembrances of what it was like to collaborate with Wildman.

Joan Wildman played, composed, and collaborated with a relentless curiosity right up until her death in 2020 at the age of 82. The pianist and longtime UW-Madison music professor had deep foundations in jazz and classical music, but also created her own approaches to electronic and experimental music, programming custom sounds into her Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer and splicing together genres and traditions as she pleased. 

Those who got to see Wildman perform live, or better yet play or study with her, don't need recordings to understand that she was a masterful improviser and uncanny composer. That said, her recordings deserve wider recognition. For the moment, many of them are not easy for listeners to access. Wildman's entirely self-released discography spans a range of settings and approaches. This body of work is so varied and accomplished that it'd be tough to really do it justice in the space of one article. To give you at least some sense of Wildman's range, I've picked out a few key moments from across the decades.

"Mumble Mombo"

Of the three albums Wildman recorded in a trio with bassist Hans Sturm and percussionist Dane Richeson, 1989's Under The Silver Globe is the absolute hardest to track down. It was only ever released on cassette, and like most of Wildman's recordings it never enjoyed much in the way of distribution or promotion. Sturm recalls that Wildman came up with the title after becoming fascinated with the disco ball at an old North Side ballroom where she used to play Dixieland jazz the late trumpeter Doc DeHaven and other musicians. The actual music on Under The Silver Globe, though, was recorded partly at O’Cayz Corral and ventures far afield from anything traditional, melding free-jazz improvisation with synths that rumble, grunt, and refract. The closing track, "Mumble Mombo,” at once embraces rhythm and deconstructs it, giving Richeson and Sturm plenty of time to stretch out before Wildman's tangled synth phrases come skittering in. 

The same composition reappears in 2012 as the opening track of the Full House Quintet's self-titled debut album. This time, Wildman sets the pace with electronic percussion, while violist Diedre Buckley and bassoonists Willy Walter and Richard Lottridge channel the coiled melodies through an array of timbres and phrasings. (Bassist Douglas Hill was also a member of Full House Quintet, but not credited on this specific track.) 

These two recordings of "Mumble Mombo" took place more than 20 years apart and in radically different settings. In the Joan Wildman Trio, Wildman was working with two fellow seasoned improvisers. In Full House Quintet, she was working mostly with accomplished classical musicians who'd had less experience with improvised music. (All five members contributed compositions.) The trio's recording of the composition gives it a wild, almost meandering feel, while Full House Quintet takes a more taut and driving approach. But in both versions, this deeply odd, ungainly composition comes through with a remarkable clarity of purpose.

"Miles Of Tiles"

Full House Quintet's second album, 2013's Wild Cards, burbles to an ominous start with this Wildman composition. Wildman's synth arrangement here could stand on its own as a full piece, combining an eerie pulse with patiently unspooling lead phrases that Lottridge, Buckley, and Walter all pick up on and tug in different directions. Already pulling a multitude of ideas from jazz and classical music into fluid conversation, Full House also delves deeply here into the realm of electronic music. "Miles Of Tiles" gradually seems to turn into something else entirely, shifting its focus to Wildman's piano, Hill's conversational bass work, and shimmery electronic chimes.

"Quince"

Wildman collaborated with bassist and flutist Joe Fonda for the 2015 album Conversations, recording much of it during a live show that same year at the Brink Lounge. "Quince" begins in striding and strolling territory, then takes a hairpin turn as Wildman layers together tense cascading figures that have more in common with the likes of Steve Reich. Wildman, who was 77 at the time of the recording, manages to keep a whole array of musical ideas in play at once, both in her mind and on the keyboard. After four simply dazzling minutes of this, Fonda comes to the fore with figures that become steadily more percussive and brash. 

"Phrygidair"

In the liner notes she wrote for the Joan Wildman Trio's 1987 album Orphan Folk Music, Wildman offers a frank and personal window into her creative process. In just a few paragraphs, these notes tell us so much about both the technical complexity of the music and the many facets of life that Wildman celebrates in it. She writes that the title track, for instance, is "Dedicated to the relationships between nature and people—particularly my reaction to a happy spider who caught a wasp in his web." The second side begins with "Phrygidair," a solo piece for DX-7, an EMAX sampler, and a digital delay. The title is a pun on both the weather and the phrygian scale—capturing the way Wildman reconciled her most esoteric music with a sense of humor and play. 

Wildman dug deep into the capabilities of electronic musical tools—just about anyone who worked with her will point out that she insisted on programming her own synth patches, rather than relying on the DX-7's preset sounds. She also experimented heavily with loops, often pushing them far past the simply repetitive, rhythm-setting role we're used to hearing them play in many genres of music. With Wildman, loops stretch and mutate, participating gamely in an improvised conversation. On "Phrygidair," Wildman calls up a range of textures and fleet melodies from the tools at hand, but also keeps the listener sublimely off-balance. Here's how she explains it in the liner notes:

"Phrygidair" (4:54), a solo, contains synthesized and sampled sounds in superimposed layers of tempo and meter. In addition to notated and improvised considerations, time relationships are reflected in the manipulation of the loop size in the sampled sounds, the speed of the envelope and vibrato in the synthesized patches, digital delay rates, and the movement of sound from right to left channels. It consists of five tracks of music, performed in real time and stored on a computer disk.

"Phrygidair" is dedicated to Roscoe Mitchell, always an inspiration (even on a wintery Wis. morning when it was too cold to go to his house for a rehearsal—and I started working on this composition.)"

The liner notes for the trio's 1992 album Inside Out are just as enjoyable, if you can get ahold of a CD copy. 

This is the first in a short series of articles Tone Madison is running about the recorded works of pianist Joan Wildman. You can also read some deeper notes on some standout tracks and check back soon for remembrances of what it was like to collaborate with Wildman.

Dig into the career of Joan Wildman and you will find a gulf. On the one hand, the pianist, synthesist, composer, and UW-Madison music professor created boundary-pushing music, left indelible marks on Madison's music community, and once sat in for an ailing Duke Ellington. On the other hand, it's pretty hard to actually get a chance to hear much of her work. 

Since Wildman died in April 2020, a few dozen copies of her recordings have made their way to Black Horse Auction, a resale and auctions shop on East Washington Avenue that cleared out Wildman's belongings at her family's behest. Included in that haul were several sealed LP copies of the 1987 album Orphan Folk Music. It's among the most daring works of a musician who constantly sought out new sounds, who understood the distinction between different genres and traditions of music but also never let that get in her way. Along with bassist Hans Sturm and drummer Dane Richeson, Wildman combines avant-garde jazz composition and improvisation with ideas from classical music, folk music, and the electronic frontier, programming her own sounds into the Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer and creating long, sophisticated loops with an Emax sampler and digital delay effects. 

The Joan Wildman Trio released three albums: Orphan Folk Music on LP in 1987, Under The Silver Globe on cassette in 1989, and Inside Out on CD in 1992. On all three, Sturm plays bass and Richeson plays percussion and drumkit; Bob Stright contributes vibraphone to one track on Inside Out, "Prairie Music." (An earlier iteration of the trio featured Peter Dominguez on bass and Michael Weiss on percussion.) Wildman paired up with bassist/flutist Joe Fonda for the 2015 release Conversations. Around that same time, she recorded and self-released five CDs with a group called the Full House Quintet, with Diedre Buckley on viola, Doug Hill on bass, and Richard Lottridge and Willy Walter on bassoon.

Of the above, only Inside Out and Conversations are available to buy digitally. You can borrow a CD copy of Inside Out from the Madison Public Library, and UW-Madison students or staff can access a few more of her works through the Mills Music Library on campus. "We don't have a lot, but it seems as if there isn't a lot available to acquire!" says Tom Caw, a librarian at Mills and an admirer of Wildman's music. WORT-FM's formidable music library has also preserved several of these releases. And a local record collector named Marcus Geishert has uploaded all four of Orphan Folk Music's tracks to YouTube, though that's unauthorized and could come down at any time. 

Beyond that, these works seem to be vanishing into the obscure realms of collector-dom—try your luck digging around in record stores, secondhand shops, or on eBay, because that's literally it. No one has even really bothered to write down a complete list of Wildman's recorded works. Even resources that obsessively catalog music, like Discogs and AllMusic, don't account for everything. Wildman played on several other recordings, including the great reedist/composer Roscoe Mitchell's Four Compositions and Numbers, the UW-Madison music-faculty collaboration Something New, and Sturm's Altered States Of Bass (2005). 

I only managed to track down most of Wildman's recordings in the first place because I happened to bump into a couple of record collectors who were talking about them one day, and later because some of Wildman's collaborators were kind enough to share some of their personal copies. As detailed in an earlier piece, I was at the Monona record store The Door back in January when I heard owner John Sands and his friend Geishert talking about the copies of Orphan Folk Music and Inside Out they'd found through Black Horse. Later I got in touch with Tony Coulter, a DJ at beloved New Jersey independent radio station WFMU, who sent me a digitized rip of Under The Silver Globe, which is perhaps the most adventurous recording of the bunch. Buckley shared her CD copies of Full House Quintet's five albums, released between 2012 and 2017 under playful poker-themed titles like All In and Raise Ya One.

Of course, recordings are only one part of a musician's legacy. They don't capture the life-changing impressions Wildman left on her students at UW-Madison, the countless hours of practice and rehearsal with a host of collaborators, or the nights of live improvisation so crucial to jazz music. Someone listening to these records won't necessarily pick up on the respect and friendship she shared with musical contemporaries like Mitchell, or the lasting contribution she made to Madison's jazz musicians and audiences as co-founder of the Madison Music Collective—a non-profit that continues to organize shows for local and touring artists to this day. But it feels wrong that such a rich body of work is so hard to access.

Absorbed in the music

Wildman self-released just about everything that came out under her own name, paying for recording sessions and pressings herself, often serving as the producer too, and apparently never involving a record label or any other sort of music-business middleman. Sturm recalls Wildman negotiating at one point with Chicago-based jazz and blues label Delmark Records, but nothing ever came of it. Copies of Inside Out and Orphan Folk Music include the address of Wildman's North Side home, printed right on the liner notes and labels. I couldn't figure out how many copies she made of anything. When I visited Black Horse Auctions, the staff seemed convinced that they've got the absolute last copies of Orphan Folk Music on their hands, but who knows. 

Wildman wanted to retain full creative control and avoid unfavorable business terms, so it's likely that she retained all the rights to these recordings and compositions. When she died, the rights may have passed on to a family member or another party via her will. (A family member and a family attorney declined fo comment for this story.) The master tapes? Who knows. Wildman was also an early adopter of digital technology and recorded many of her own sessions at home, including with Full House Quintet, so she likely left behind a considerable amount of digital recordings. She fully embraced the creative possibilities of electronic tools, not just delving deep into the world of synthesizers and samplers but also created digital animations to pair with music, some of which you can see on a YouTube channel she created. Wildman clearly used some kind of early art software to create the cover of Orphan Folk Music, portraying what appear to be dancers in a pixelated black-and-white haze—an image that acknowledges both new frontiers and deeply rooted traditions.

Despite the creativity, pride, and care that clearly went into Orphan Folk Music and the rest of Wildman's albums, they never got much of a push in the way of distribution or promotion. 

"She didn't have the publicity gene," says longtime Madison journalist and author Dean Robbins, who began covering Wildman for Isthmus in the mid-1980s. "She just didn't care about it, she wasn't good at it, she was just totally obsessed with making the music. I think she could have had a national or international reputation if more people knew about her, but it just wasn't in the cards...the music was utterly absorbing to her."

Richeson and Sturm also say that Wildman showed little interest in self-promotion or the record business. "She had a tender side," Sturm recalls. "She bruised. For her, to reach out to a record company and get a rejection would be very difficult." Sturm also points out that Wildman was balancing her music at the time with a full-time teaching load, raising a family, and paying the bills. In that light, creating such inventive, complex music and putting out a small private-press run of albums is no mean feat.

"I think what she really needed to have in her corner was someone who was willing to toot her horn for her," Sturm says.

Wildman also didn't dwell too long on promoting any one album because she always had more to explore and more to say. "She did stuff and she put it out, but she was always interested in moving on to new things," says violist Diedre Buckley. Once, Buckley recalls, Wildman's synthesizer crashed, wiping out a bunch of the unique patches she painstakingly created. But instead of being upset about losing all that work, Wildman was excited to make new patches. "She didn't mind, because, 'let's move forward, those sounds are old, I've done those before, let's go forward,'" Buckley says.

Sturm also remembers Wildman as someone who didn't linger and wallow, creatively speaking: "Joan was all about doing something new. That was what she was always about. A lot of the pieces that you have on these recordings were written for the recordings." 

Wildman extensively documented her work outside of formal recording sessions intended for public release, including live performances and home rehearsals. "I am fortunate to have a private recording Joan gave to me from an Isthmus Jazz Festival [performance] with her trio. I'm sure she has lots of private recordings but, of course, they are private so [they’re] not available," says pianist Jane Reynolds. Whether improvising or working out composed material, Wildman made a habit of recording her creative process, often sitting down with her collaborators to listen back, critique, and revise.

"She records whenever you're with her," says bassist Laurie Lang. "Anything you do, she's recording. And then she's deciding, 'Did that work? Is that something I want to save?' So many people have come to her house and played music with her, and her practice is always that she records."

Reynolds says that several of Wildman's performances at UW-Madison were recorded. I have yet to figure out if anyone on campus has preserved these recordings. Caw didn't mention them in his complete rundown of the Wildman materials in the Mills Music Library collection. The current head of UW-Madison's jazz program, pianist Johannes Wallmann, couldn't point me to much else either. "Outside of what treasures my colleagues might have in their respective teaching studios, we don't have an archive or storage of recordings in the School of Music separate from Mills Music Library," Wallmann says. Additionally, Reynolds says that saxophonist Hanah Jon Taylor, another longtime friend and collaborator of Wildman's, recorded some more recent performances of Wildman's at his jazz club, Café Coda. 

Wildman was creating, playing, and collaborating until almost the very end. Buckley last played with Wildman less than two months before Wildman's death of complications from cancer. One of Wildman's former students, Milwaukee journalist Maayan Silver, recalled in a memorial piece for WUWM that Wildman "[said] no to a drug that might prolong her life because it would make her hands and fingers go numb, preventing her from playing the piano that was so much a part of her."

Inside and out

Because Wildman had such a long and fruitful career at UW-Madison, and because her fellow musicians respect her so greatly, it's easy to overlook the fact that she was often going against the grain. Her music combines an insider's mastery with an outsider's utter creative fearlessness. Sturm recalls that the Joan Wildman Trio drew on its share of relatively straight-ahead jazz elements, but also on the influence of avant-garde pioneers like Muhal Richard Abrams and Cecil Taylor. (Taylor himself spent some time teaching at UW-Madison in the early 1970s, a few years before Wildman arrived. Imagine the possibilities if their time had overlapped.) This meant that Wildman was often joyfully out of step with prevailing trends.

"The '80s, of course, in jazz was a time of neo-classicism, and that's when Wynton Marsalis and his hordes came in, and that was the reigning style," Robbins says. "That was such a backward-looking style, and it was so conservative, and it was just the exact opposite of what Joan stood for. She was so grounded in tradition in a way—just the verities of jazz, swing, and improvisation, and blues—and yet everything about her was forward-looking, and using those elements in a completely new way and taking the music in a new direction."

It wouldn't be quite right to say that Wildman was ignored in her time. Wildman did find an appreciative local audience during her most active years of playing live around Madison, mostly at long-gone downtown venues. Her students would of course come out to the gigs, but they weren't the only people there—Richeson calls the crowds at the Joan Wildman Trio's shows "a pretty interesting mix of people." He also says Wildman was an outlier among UW's music professors during the '80s and '90s.

"My sense is that she was out of the mainstream of the music faculty that I knew there. Not that they didn't respect her—I think that they just didn't seem to be interested in the kind of music she was creating," Richeson says. "She clearly wasn't a standard jazz improviser. She could improvise around standard jazz tunes, but in a Joan kind of way.... it was always Joan bringing her Joan-isms to standard tunes." 

Wildman was also a woman in both academia and music. When someone this accomplished doesn't quite get her due, it's hard not to wonder how much sexism plays into it. "People just didn't take female instrumentalists that seriously," Robbins recalls of the '80s. "I mean, you could name a few examples of female instrumentalists, pianists who broke through, but she struggled with that. She definitely felt the sexism that was out there regarding women."

What happens to these recordings?

No one I spoke to for this story is aware of any efforts to reissue the Joan Wildman Trio or Full House Quintet recordings. Tom Caw, of UW's Mills Music Library, notes that Wildman's recordings are included in the library's ongoing efforts to digitize thousands of analog materials. As campus libraries lift their COVID restrictions, members of the public will at least be able to visit Mills in person if they’d like to hear the recordings in that collection.

Most of the people I talked with who collaborated with Wildman were certainly open to the idea of someone either re-releasing this music or at least putting it into some kind of digital form that's easier for more people to access.

"I don't know if she necessarily thought about preserving a legacy," Buckley says. "She was about moving forward and getting better. But I would really like to see a collection of her recordings be available, if nothing else, so that someone else could come in and listen and study, even if it's only available through one location or inter-library loan or something. I would just love to have her work be collected and available for people to check out."

Bassist Laurie Lang notes that someone would probably need to get ahold of Wildman's computer to explore the full extent of her archive. "It would definitely be a labor of love, because there's probably a lot of stuff on there," Lang says.

In a historic uprising against racism and police violence, we've at once seen Madison at its absolute best and Madison as a mediocre parody of what it imagines itself to be. Thousands of Madisonians contributed to a nationwide protest movement during a pandemic, sticking up for their neighbors and pushing a more honest conversation about race and inequality in our city. Meanwhile, local police and their advocates made summer 2020's events all about the spark—George Floyd’s murder— distancing themselves from the devastating cruelty of police violence and playing Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s actions off as an abberation. Everyone else knew the uprisings were really about the tinder that's been stacking up for generations, in Madison and everywhere else. Police here are wrapped up in the problems of policing writ large, even though we often tell ourselves they're an exception. A year out, we have barely begun to unravel those problems.

This does not mean that the activists, organizations, and community members pushing for justice have failed—indeed, they've made some hard-won policy gains and expanded our sense of what we can accomplish in local politics. It means that there are significant obstacles, plenty of ways to deflect calls for change, and too many Madisonians who let downed statues or looted businesses distract them from the true horrors on display in American policing. 

The Madison Metropolitan School District removed cops from four high schools last summer, amid the initial heat of the uprising. Abolitionist activists have been pressuring MMSD to do so for years, most significantly Freedom Inc., which has led repeated efforts to disrupt school board meetings over this issue. The City of Madison created a long-awaited police oversight board and police monitor staff position, both independent of the Madison Police Department. Later, the Madison Common Council voted to separate parking enforcement from MPD. The city and Dane County are working together on a mental health crisis unit that would take cops out of the equation in some emergency situations. 

But the bigger problems are still intact: cops at local police agencies can still commit needless violence without consequences, and the Common Council has yet to hold MPD accountable through the only real mechanism it has—cutting its funding in the annual city budget. For all the progress, we still lack significant structural checks on the power or budgets of police agencies in the Madison area. MPD's new chief, Shon Barnes, wants to put a gentler face on the department, a development that’s tempered by the fact that community members felt shut out of the hiring process that brought Barnes here in the first place. 

Madison's new Police Civilian Oversight Board gives police reform advocates and abolitionists a voice at the city, and it will likely help Madison have a richer, more transparent conversation about what police are doing. We know that just shedding more light on police behavior does make a difference, so let's not discount the power of what PCOB can do. That said, on a legal level, the body is  fundamentally toothless. The actual power to discipline, hire, and fire cops in Wisconsin still resides with Police and Fire Commissions, and their authority is enshrined in state law. Police unions still wield powerful leverage in struggles over budgeting and accountability, and various layers of case law and internal procedure shield police from civil and criminal liability. 

The Common Council also has not held MPD accountable over one of the actual public safety threats involved in protests: The multiple instances of malicious or simply panicked drivers running their cars or motorcycles through groups of people. This is a dangerous national trend, and Republicans in state legislatures across the country are trying to incite and legalize this behavior. In the wake of the 2017 murder of Heather Heyer in Chartlottesville, any city that has as many protests as Madison should have had a game plan to prevent vehicular attacks on crowds. When I asked then-MPD spokesperson Joel DeSpain about this in late June 2020, he simply referred me to the department's standard operating procedure on demonstrations and assemblies—which does not specifically touch upon vehicle attacks at all. 

Common Council has also failed to rein in MPD's use of tear gas. On May 30 and 31 of last year, squads of cops in full riot gear would muster up in front of a crowd of protestors, stand there for a while, and then eventually start marching toward the crowd and launching tear-gas canisters, causing hundreds of people at once to run off in the other direction. Police repeated this process multiple times, touching off dangerous stampedes up and down State Street and sending chemical agents wafting through the crowds and residential neighborhoods. This simply did not do a thing to protect people's safety or even to protect property, nor did it achieve the ostensible goal of dispersing the crowd. In fact, as one former MPD chief has pointed out, such tactics escalate violence at protests. 

MPD justifies its actions during protests by saying that it's trying to strike a balance, facilitating free expression while protecting public safety. Its failures on this front give a lot of credibility to chants of "we keep us safe," and to the work protest organizers do to escort protestors with protective cars and bikes.

It's hard to see the cops’ behavior  as anything other than a punitive and brutal response to the  people who challenged them. On May 31, 2020, my colleague Alice Herman personally witnessed police tear-gassing a crowd of young protestors who weren't doing anything violent. Cops in Madison, just like cops across the country, justified their suppression of protests by complaining that protestors were throwing water bottles and rocks at them. We did see a few people throwing things at police, but not very many, and it would take a whole lot of rocks and water bottles to really endanger people who showed up with helmets, riot shields, and an array of lethal and "less-lethal" weapons. 

Given the opportunity to forbid its police department from attacking civilians with "chemical agents" that are technically illegal in war, the Madison Common Council hemmed and hawed for month after month. Nevermind that this would have been an easy moral gesture and that it would be reasonable to ask MPD to solve whatever problems it may have without resorting to chemical weapons. Rather than voting to take MPD's tear gas away, the Council voted in October to commission another goddamn study. Who carried out the study on the police department's use of tear gas? The police department. 

This turned out to be a very, very good way to muddy the waters. Some Alders fell for the argument that SWAT teams needed tear gas to flush out “subjects” who had “barricaded” themselves in buildings, hiding from the police.   The Wisconsin State Journal framed the report's findings as some sort of gotcha, focusing on the instances of tear gas deployment before the 2020 protests, and then implying that property damage justified gassing protesters. The WORT-FM news team did a much better job of placing the use of tear gas into context, pointing out that according to MPD's own numbers, the department's use of tear gas during the 2020 protests was off the charts.

During last year's demonstrations, Alice and I saw multiple people who were in some form of medical and/or psychological distress. The first day, there was one young man clearly having a mental-health episode on State Street, screaming and picking fights as various people in the crowd tried to restrain him and calm him down. The next night, we ran across a disoriented woman on Langdon Street who had seemingly gotten caught up in the riots without really meaning to, and was wheezing and panicking as tear gas lingered in the area. We gave her a ride home, lucky to somehow be able to get a car through the area. I realize this is just a story based on personal observation, but it was clear that the swarms of cops  downtown that weekend were of little help to these vulnerable people.

Cops nationwide are pushing the lie that lefty local governments have defunded police and thus encouraged a new crime wave. This is not true in most cities around the country, and it's not true in Madison. The Common Council did rebuke one $50,000 MPD budget request for "less-lethal" weapons, but there was never a resolution on the table that significantly threatened MPD's funding in the city's 2021 budget.

Madison is still by and large a community that thinks it can police and punish its way out of handling social problems. Even if you don't have an ideological problem with policing, it doesn't take that much to see that this approach doesn't really work. Let's not discount the positive steps we've seen so far or the capacity that so many Madisonians have shown to question some deep-down assumptions about the need for police. Let's keep on demanding so much more.

Illustration by Rodney Lambright II.

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

Sometimes when I’m feeling down, I like to bring a little extra color and sparkle to my world. It’s simple but delightful. My house is full of things I’ve glittered and/or painted, particularly since lockdown. I love bright, colorful, glittery, iridescent, holographic, metallic, and shiny things. 

Recently, I revamped a previously sun-faded yellow planter into a pink and purple glittery unicorn dream planter full of flowers. Every time I look at it on my balcony, it brings me joy. Similarly, I love seeing the light reflect off of one of my many glitter plant pots or my freshly painted glitter fingernails. By placing these small aesthetic delights all around my home or on my body, I guarantee myself a little pleasure every day without much effort. I’m not particularly gifted artistically, but I can paint something a solid coat and cover it with glitter. 

Making art, in whatever ways work for you, especially making your life into art, is a way of centering pleasure in your life outside the confines of capitalism. My glitter shit is for me. It’s not something I try to turn into a side hustle or do for others, I just enjoy turning something drab into something visually appealing to me and looking at it. It’s a dual satisfaction of both appreciating how it looks and appreciating that past me did something for present me.

Now I know not everyone is into bright and glittery things, so if dark and creepy shit or weird and kitschy is what makes you happy, then just mentally replace that aesthetic with what I’m saying here. The point is not that glitter = joy (although for me, it does), but finding small ways to bring yourself regular sustained pleasure. So here’s a recipe for creating some aesthetic pleasure in your life.

Now I know not everyone is into bright and glittery things, so if dark and creepy shit or weird and kitschy is what makes you happy, then just mentally replace that aesthetic with what I’m saying here. The point is not that glitter = joy (although for me, it does), but finding small ways to bring yourself regular sustained pleasure. So here’s a recipe for creating some aesthetic pleasure in your life.

First, decide what you want to glitter/paint. Bonus karma points if you re-vamp something you already own or get something used online, at a thrift store (I recommend Habitat for Humanity ReStore), a garage sale, your grandma’s house, the curb, or the Madison Really Really Free Market on the last Sunday of the month at James Madison Park (noon to 4 p.m.). Consider giving new aesthetic life to:

• Plant pots

• Wooden furniture

• Earrings or necklaces

• Picture frames

• Shelves

• Your fingernails or toenails

• Your face

• A mug you no longer drink out of and want to use to hold pens or something

• A vase

• Your walls

• A walker or cane

• Notebook covers

Once you’ve chosen your object, choose your paint. For bigger projects, get house paint (a “sample size” covers like 20 square feet). For smaller projects, get some acrylic paint or spray paint. For your nails or face, buy nail polish or body glitter. To glitter with house paint, buy a glitter additive made to mix in paint or buy a paint that’s already glittery. For spray paint and acrylic paint, several brands make glitter versions that can stand on their own or go over an existing color. They also make metallic and glow-in-the-dark spray paint as well as iridescent acrylic paints if that’s more your jam. Make sure to get a clear topcoat or sealant for glitter if your chosen object will be outside, exposed to water, or frequently touched or handled.

Next, get the right tools: paintbrushes of appropriate size, drop cloth for bigger projects, a mask if you’re working with spray paint, and an appropriate workspace (enough space and ventilation).

Now, glitter/paint! Let objects dry between coats (length depends on the type of paint). Turn on your favorite music or podcast. Take progress pictures (or at least before and after ones). Hell, tag me on Twitter with some beautiful shit you make. I definitely want to see it. Place your object in a place you’ll see regularly. Use it as a reminder that your pleasure and joy matter, that YOU matter and are worth the time and effort to care for and delight. Go get your glitter on, babes!

Illustration by Maggie Denman.

In the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, the politics of mask-wearing were deceptively simple: those who wore them cared about their fellow citizens and were dedicated to slowing down the spread of the virus. Those who did not prioritized (illusions of) freedom and pushed (warped) arguments for bodily autonomy. During a time when there seemed to be more unknowns than knowns, the moral delineation that masks embodied was the closest thing we had to seeing the situation in black and white. Masks were synonymous with social responsibility—a show of communal respect, scientific humility, and societal diligence. 

But with mask mandates slowly lifting across the nation—and our own mask mandate in Dane County lifting on June 2—it's become clear that differently abled and racialized bodies will confront varying consequences to our newly-bare faces. Those living with chronic illness are pleading with even fully vaccinated community members to continue to wear masks to accommodate their weaker immune systems, sensing that their needs will once again be pushed to the margins of everyday life. For those of us of Asian descent—who make up the largest group of non-white residents in Madison—the choice to forgo face coverings when out in public might just be the difference between safely running an errand and becoming another statistic in the growing number of Anti-Asian hate crimes globally. 

For Asian people, masks have functioned both as physical protection and social defense. Living through the pandemic, I’ve felt as though my wearing a mask has not only decreased my likelihood of contracting coronavirus, but has also signaled reassurance to others that I would not be responsible for transmitting it to them. Whether in the supermarket or out on a walk, the fleeting eye contact I would make with another person was always used to try and communicate the same thing: I am scared of this virus too. I care about your health and safety as much as my own. I am not the vessel of disease that you think I am. The small piece of cloth on my face not only protected me from my own illness, but served as the thin veil between me and a wide array of racist microaggressions and bodily harm.

But this unspoken message has not been successfully communicated in many instances. Incidents as brutal and bloody as the March attack on a 65-year-old woman in New York City are cropping up faster than we can keep count. Thanks in part to the racist slurs and fear-mongering that Donald Trump's administration encouraged, Asianness has been tagged with a certain level of distrust that has led to hate erupting as verbal and physical assaults, up to and including homicide. 

After the horrific Atlanta spa shootings in March, when a white man murdered six women of Asian descent, a palpable fear swept through Madison, Milwaukee, and other Wisconsin communities with significant Asian-American populations. Statements from Madison Assembly Rep. Francesca Hong and Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Coalition of Wisconsin executive director Jessica Boling expressed unshakeable terror and demands for rightful accountability. In cities farther north like Appleton, Green Bay, and Wausau, which are home to large Hmong-American populations, Hmong-American community members have noticed a dip in support for their businesses and have been victim to verbal and physical attacks and targeted vandalism.

Even when we abide by the rules and do wear masks, Asians are still met with accusations of spreading disease and the panic of contamination. In a Medium article from March, California-based cartoonist Khalid Birdsong tells the story of a trip to the store with his Japanese wife where a white clerk began hysterically asking if she was sick, simply because she was wearing a mask. The idea of our Asian bodies being inherently infectious has left others deeply suspicious, with the threat of our bodies’ imagined toxicity overpowering the scientifically-proven task that face masks are intended to carry out. 

In moments like these, face masks serve as an indictment of guilt and disease, an admission to the accusation that our bodies are the primary carriers of COVID-19. Rather than being thanked for doing our part in helping to slow the spread, the very fact that we are wearing masks instead stands as confirmation that there is indeed something to hide, something to cower in fear from. 

The double standard of breaking code has always favored the side of whiteness—and at times, even white supremacy. We saw this at the coup staged on January 6, where armed white supremacist protestors put dozens of representatives’ safety on the line as they stormed the nation’s Capitol. The months it has taken to prosecute the hundreds of violent instigators who participated in the riot stand in stark contrast to the months of daily arrests of peaceful BIPOC protestors during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations held last summer and beyond.  

Similarly, I’ve watched in awe as one white person after another confidently marches maskless into establishments that enforce mask requirements, and have been doing so throughout the pandemic. When stopped by a store clerk, they feign an unconvincing apology and ask to be supplied with a mask, knowing full well that their carelessness will not only be overlooked, but will in no way be a reflection of their entire race. Rather than being coded as dangerous agents of disease, unmasked white people are treated with pity and deemed worthy of protection from the virus. While Asian individuals run the risk of violence for just existing in the pandemic—whether masked or not—white people’s recklessness and inconsideration prove inconsequential. 

Ironically, despite the severe uptick in crimes against Asian-Americans and Asians over the course of the pandemic, many of these incidents have not been labeled as hate crimes. In a The Daily podcast episode about the Atlanta spa shootings that occurred in March, host Michael Barbaro explains that a key part of identifying a hate crime as such is the presence of an explicitly racist symbol. In the absence of a swastika or a noose, it is almost impossible to prove racist motives to the satisfaction of the legal system, with hundreds of atrocities falling through the cracks over a technicality. 

With the expiration of our local mask mandate, the symbolism of masks has become more ambiguous than ever, and the stakes of being a target of racialized hate are higher than ever. During much of the pandemic, masks implied an individual’s personal protection and communal respect, and continuing to wear one can serve as an appropriate act of solidarity. The absence of masks can imply illness and guilt. With masking up offering us limited protection during the worst of the pandemic, it is not a stretch to think that unmasking will come with its own set of unique, racially-fueled consequences. 

The expiration of Dane County’s mask mandate redraws the lines of safety and social acceptability here in Madison. Especially now, with 65.6 percent of Dane County residents having gotten at least their first vaccination dose, the decision to go maskless can be backed by a wide range of reasons, all differing in complexity and logic. As mandates come and go, one thing remains: the ways in which Asian bodies are read as we move around our neighborhoods and cities has been forever changed.

As we begin to forge ahead in a maskless Madison, we must think critically about the ways in which we have internalized the hatred with which people treat our Asian-American community members. As our worlds begin to face outward again, we must turn inward to challenge the new and insidious ways that hate has festered in our own imaginations and instead, work to build solidarity with and create systems of support for one of the many minority groups disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.

It was four hours into a five-hour-long hearing when the first transgender person took the stand to testify against two bills that would ban transgender children from playing sports in Wisconsin schools. Rachel Crowl of Appleton, who says she had to give up a successful acting career for 12 years after finally coming out and transitioning as an adult, addressed the members of the Assembly Committee on Education. It was one of three separate committee hearings held on May 26 to consider the legislation.

“When the world tells you you don’t belong, it sticks,” Crowl said during the hearing. “The legislation you’re considering will only further complicate (trans youth) lives when they’re already so very complicated. Life’s already hard. Why make it harder?”

The two bills would require transgender athletes play on sports teams that align with their sex assigned at birth by a physician, as opposed to their actual gender. As written, neither bill says who exactly would be responsible for making those decisions or how exactly challenges would be allowed to be made against individual children.

It’s unusual for both the Assembly and Senate versions of a bill to have overlapping hearing times, but the tactic seemed aimed at spreading out the overwhelming opposition and to front-load testimony in favor of the legislation. Testimony against the bills outweighed that in favor by more than two to one. (Full disclosure: I also testified against the bills.)

It wasn’t until the final 20 minutes of the five-hour hearing that testimony came from transgender and nonbinary youth themselves, several of whom only made it to the stand when an adult ally gave up their spot. At that point, many of the committee members and much of the press had already left the room. It didn’t stop these young Wisconsinites from giving some of the most compelling and emotional testimony of the day.

One 12-year-old, who testified last, recounted a period of bullying and self-harm after they began using they/them pronouns and identifying as nonbinary. They said that joining the track team and finding friends and community had really helped them.

“I haven’t self-harmed since,” they said.

A 15-year-old cisgender girl who also testified near the end of the proceeding railed against the bills, saying she was glad to play sports alongside transgender and nonbinary teammates and that the proposed bills were cruel and unnecessary.

Rep. Sondy Pope (D-Mt. Horeb), one of the committee’s ranking members, stayed until the end and commended the students for their bravery. Pope was the most outspoken in her criticisms of the proposed bills, frequently fact-checking proponents and other members of the committee.

“You call this the ‘Protect Women in Sports Act?’” she said at one point early on. “Transgender women are women. You are singling out which women you want to protect, which I find confusing.”

No organizations in Wisconsin have signed on to support the bills. Some 30 groups have come out publicly against them, including the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, which regulates high school sports, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the statewide teachers union, the ACLU, the State Bar of Wisconsin’s civil rights and liberties section, the LGBTQ advocacy group Fair Wisconsin, GSAFE, Planned Parenthood, and the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

The WIAA sent its testimony in writing, since the committee hearings were scheduled for the same day as the group’s annual meeting.

In addition to barring trans athletes from sports teams that align with their correct gender, the bill language also suggests that schools create “co-ed” teams for transgender students to join instead.

Hope Owens-Wilson, the Youth Organizer for the ACLU of Wisconsin, made the connection between what the bills attempted to do and civil rights battles of the past. “This bill and the language around it conforms with the antiquated logic of 'separate but equal.' It tries to solve a problem where one does not exist.”

Transphobia on display

Testifying in favor of the bills were a string of adult cisgender women who are part of the “Save Women’s Sports” lobbying group that’s part of the push behind similar legislation in states across the country. Currently, Legislatures in 30 other states, most of them Republican-controlled, have considered banning trans youth from the correct sports teams. Twenty have weighed bans on gender-confirming medical care for transgender minors as well. Several have now passed into law, teeing up what’s likely to become a major legal battle nationally.

Leia Schneeberger, a competitive mountain bike racer and Madison West High School graduate, testified that she’d recently lost two races to a transgender woman and that it “was the most demoralizing experience of my life.” Schneeberger has also won several recent races, and finished behind several cisgender women athletes as well. Neither bill would impact Schneeberger’s sport, because the bills apply specifically to public schools, voucher-funded private schools, the UW System, and state technical colleges.

That kind of cherry-picking of results an individual competitor does or doesn’t like is also at play in the court case cited most often by the Wisconsin bill’s proponents as an example of why they feel such legislation is needed.

The case, in Connecticut, targets two transgender high school track athletes. Chelsea Mitchell, the plaintiff in that case (with the backing of the Alliance Defending Freedom, classified as a hate group by the SPLC), went on to twice win against one of the girls she complains about in the lawsuit. She also won a scholarship and is currently competing at a D1 college, whereas both of the runners in question—Terry Miller or Andraya Yearwood—have opted not to continue to compete at all.

The adult women testifying in favor of the bills last week also included longtime Madison anti-trans activist and musician Thistle Petterson, along with Miriam Ben-Shalom, a former military drill segreant who successfully challenged her discharge for homosexuality in 1976 but has gone on to become a prominent voice in trans-exclusionary radical “feminist” circles (aka TERFs).

Petterson cited a formative childhood experience on a girl’s gymnastics team that she says provided her with a sense of friendship and camaraderie she wasn’t getting at school. However, she doesn’t think transgender girls should enjoy the same opportunities, and she used plainly transphobic language to make her point.

“Had a boy, deluded into believing he was a girl, been allowed to join our team, it would have forced the girls on the team to buy into his delusions,” Petterson said. “There is no such thing as a boy who is a girl.”

Ben-Shalom took the accusations a step further, claiming that “biology is biology and there are only two sexes.” She briefly acknolwedged that intersex people do exist, however.

The bill’s co-authors, Rep. Barabara Dittrich (R-Oconomowoc) and Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonie), meanwhile opened the public testimony period with a series of accusations and unfounded claims.

“This is not a matter of transphobia, hate, or any of the false pejoratives thrown at women who wish to stand up for women in sports,” Dittrich said. “Despite the fact that I have transgender acquaintances that I love, that does not give them the right to steal my accomplishments.”

Dittrich again leveled accusations of being “anti-women” at Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, and lashed out at “the power brokers of sports” that are against the anti-trans legislation.

Pushback on several fronts

Rep. Don Vruwink (D-Milton), one of the committee members, noted early in the hearing that he failed to see why the bills were necessary. He highlighted that a real problem in girl’s and women’s sports was a lack of investment.

“I’ve spent 40 years coaching girl’s teams, 45 years around sports,” Vruwink said. “I haven’t seen the problem you’re bringing forward. In all the years I coached I never saw the things you’re describing. I personally think the biggest threat to girl’s sports is finding people to umpire and officiate them.”

There were also questions about the constitutionality of the bills. Ray Hacke, an attorney with the right-wing Pacific Justice Institute, claimed that the legislation would stand up to legal scrutiny. “Girls will be reduced to spectators and cheerleaders in their sports if we don’t act,” Hacke added in his testimony.

However, attorneys from the Freedom From Religion Foundation and Wisconsin Education Association Council both said that a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Title VII held that “discrimination on the basis of sex” does cover transgender people. Legislative Council for the committee meeting noted that the issue wasn’t entirely settled but was likely to be in the near future, with a federal circuit court poised to take up a case to determine whether similar language in Title IX also includes transgender people.

In addition to the legal arguments, Rep. Donna Rozar (R-Marshfield) brought up support for the exclusion of transgender girls in sports by gay tennis player Martina Navratilova and transgender former Olympic swimmer and current candidate for California governor, Caitlyn Jenner.

“Why, with their outspoken lifestyles, would they likely come out in support of bills like these?” Rozar asked of GSAFE Co-Executive Director Brian Juchems after his testimony in opposition.

“A year ago, Caitlyn Jenner spoke in support of transgender athletes and has since flip-flopped, so I can’t say I know her motivation for that,” Juchems replied. “I do know that Caitlyn currently competes in a women’s golf tournament so there might be some hypocrisy on her part. She also doesn’t speak for all trans girls or athletes. She’s just one person with a microphone.”

Andi Janeway, a Madison-based arts educator, summed up the frustrations of many in the packed hearing room with their pointed testimony.

“There are children here in Wisconsin...who are asking you to allow them to live,” Janeway said. “They are not asking for preferential treatment. In fact, they are asking you to treat them as you treat their peers. This is not a difficult task. I am speaking from experience as a transgender individual as well as an educator who works with transgender and nonbinary youth when I tell you that affirming transgender and nonbinary youth is not a difficult task, and it starts with letting this bill die.”

The battle continues

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has stated that he wants to move these bills quickly to a floor vote this June (coincidentally also LGBTQ Pride month). Each committee will need to meet again to vote on whether to pass the bills on to the full Legislature, though it’s unlikely they will take further public comment.

“Trans kids deserve our love and respect and support just like any other kid,” Gov. Tony Evers tweeted during the hearings. “I stand with them.”

Despite the fact that Evers will likely veto both bills if and when they come before him, simply having these public debates in the first place can do untold harm and help sow confusion and hatred toward an already vulnerable community.

“It’s great we have more knowledge about things happening against us and how to advocate for ourselves,” Ollie Heide told me. Ollie is a nonbinary 14-year-old who is finishing up the 8th grade and took the day off to testify against the bills. “But it’s also hard for lots of trans kids to know that so many adults are working against us like this. It adds so much anxiety.” 

Illustration by Maggie Denman. photos by Holly Marley-Henschen except where otherwise noted.

In Making The Nature Scene, Tone Madison explores the splendor of the outdoors in the Madison area and encourages Madisonians to think more deeply about their natural and built surroundings.

There’s a place about an hour away from Madison where one can wander in a fairy-tale-like wilderness. Many (of my friends and acquaintances) have heard of it, but few have taken full advantage of Kettle Moraine State Forest in Southeastern Wisconsin. Neither had I, until a few weeks ago. 

This geological wonderland comprises 56,000 acres of rolling, wooded hills and prairies. Kettle Moraine, divided into five units, was constructed by glaciers during the Pleistocene epoch, aka the Ice Age, somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago. Now it’s home to numerous resultant natural landmarks and a healthy portion of Wisconsin’s famed Ice Age Trail, among other trails, including mountain biking, cross-country skiing, beaches, and campsites galore. There are horse trails and snowmobile trails too. And. So. Many. Trees. The perfect place for getting your forest bath on.

“The Kettle Moraine is a world-class example of glacial depositional features—some of the most classic, textbook glacial features that you will find anywhere in the world,” says Wisconsin State Geologist Ken Bradbury.  

So, what’s a kettle? What’s a moraine? Let’s jump in the Way Way Back Machine with Bradbury.

The Kettle Moraine began to take shape between approximately 20,000 to 15,000 years ago, Bradbury says. Ice and snow had accumulated for thousands of years, building mammoth ice sheets—continuous glaciers that cover large landmasses. The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered what is now Canada, and much of the northern United States, from New York City to Chicago and as far south as St. Louis. Two curved lobes of the sheet—the Lake Michigan and Green Bay Lobes—met in what is now the Kettle Moraine. The gravelly sediments they carried from far distances were deposited along the way. As the lobes receded, the ice melted more quickly than it accumulated. Then, about 14,000 years ago, the deeper permafrost and buried ice melted away. These conditions created the curious landforms that mark Kettle Moraine.

Kettles, in the geological sense, are deep depressions that developed in spots where sizeable blocks of buried ice left over from the receding glacier melted, leaving cavities in the landscape. Many kettles became lakes as they filled with water, like Butler Lake in Kettle Moraine North. The Ice Age Trail rounds Butler Lake atop a formation called an esker. Eskers are narrow ridges of sand and gravel that were deposited by rivers flowing on or in tunnels beneath the glacial ice. When the ice melted, these sharp-topped, winding ridges remained, Bradbury says. The Parnell Esker flanks Butler Lake. 

In early May, I hiked 20 or so miles of the Ice Age Trail in Kettle Moraine North. Starting at New Fane Trails to Butler Lake, I camped at nearby Long Lake for two nights. On the second day, sans backpack, I continued on the Ice Age Trail up to Parnell Tower, which offers awe-inspiring 360-degree views of the rolling hills in the area. The tower area has its own 3.5-mile hiking loop, which I declined to take because my right pinky toe had formed the largest blister I’ve ever developed. Foot topography! 

Later, this noob was relieved to learn that backpackers often buy boots one to two sizes larger than normal to accommodate swelling and changes to the shape of the foot from constant walking with added weight. And you can loosen your laces to your heart’s content. Foot agony begone. 

Blisters aside, traipsing through the woods around Butler Lake felt like braving the wilderness in an unsanitized folk tale in which both peasants and royalty are threatened by wolves, bears, and witches. Forests: the great equalizer. I evaded these threats, but encountered a new one: giant woodpeckers. Pileated woodpeckers, the largest and wily-est-looking of woodpeckers, are the Babadook of birds. (And not the cool, openly gay Babadook.) Males have wingspans of about two feet. They’re fascinatingly creepy and clamber up trees in an unsettling, off-kilter see-sawing motion. They also straight-up destroy trees. If you scare easily like me, beware of these red-headed devils.  

A pleasant 2021 feature of not just Kettle Moraine, but all hiking trails, is the vaccination effect. I’m vaccinated and assuming that some people on the trail are as well. With this newfound immunity, I wasn’t gripped by a visceral impulse to leap 10 feet off of the trail to protect my life from approaching fellow hikers. This chill new-old hiking experience is highly recommended. Nature time is for chillness. 

Backpacking is allowed in Kettle Moraine North and South. But the only permissible places to sleep are in the three shelters in the South Unit and five in the North. And they’re booked up months in advance, particularly over the weekends, but you can try your luck booking a shelter during the week. Reservations are good for one night and 10 people. You’re also welcome to pitch a tent outside the shelter if you prefer the earthy comfort of sleeping on the ground versus concrete. Who doesn’t?

In Kettle Moraine South, I explored the Ice Age Trail from the Southern Unit Forest Headquarters to Brady’s Rocks, a settlement and trail loop marked with a historical plaque. The nearly 11-mile round trip was more prairie than forest, yet just as calming. Except for the hour that it took to get out of hearing range of the unceasing shelling from a gun show at the nearby McMiller Sports Center public shooting range. You’ve been warned. 

Though pets are generally verboten in Wisconsin’s state forests, parts of Kettle Moraine are pet-friendly. Many campsites allow dogs and Kettle Moraine South has two pet swim areas. Check the web for the rules of individual locations before packing up the pooch. Due to the pandemic, office buildings, visitor centers, enclosed shelters, and nature centers at state parks remain closed until further notice. However, some admission windows are open in fee areas. 

You don’t have to hike, bike, horse, or ski the Kettle Moraine’s trails. The 115-mile Kettle Moraine Scenic Drive snakes through six counties and ample landforms filled with flora and fauna. 

Kettle Moraine State Forest has green space for days and sights that allow the mind to wander, conjuring bucolic inspired musings like, “John Deere tractors are the same color as grass and dandelions.” If you can stomach the hazard of ghoulish behemoth woodpeckers, check out Kettle Moraine: a state forest for all seasons. May you avoid blisters and enjoy greeting approaching hikers with ease. 

Photo credit: "'Just a bit high' -Bob Uecker" by Ken Mattison is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

In Illeana Douglas' memoir I Blame Dennis Hopper, the illustrious actress pondered the film industry and assessed movie-goers by saying, “I think all movie-lovers have some sort of void or sadness in them that movies fill.” The state of Madison’s cinema landscape has left that void open and unfulfilled. 

Westgate Mall and Art Cinemas. The last Madison picture show. All the independent movie theaters in Madison are finally gone. The Orpheum and The Majestic are now music venues, University Square Four is an apartment building, Hilldale is a Target, and Westgate is currently well into its demolition. The 60-year-old mall that housed an art theater from 1978 until 2008 will eventually be yet another (probably) overpriced apartment building. I loved all of these theaters, but Westgate was special to me. So like any nostalgic Gen X-er, I hopped the fence recently and went inside to chase some ghosts.

The anticipation and excitement for the 1997 opening night of Boogie Nights inspired the staff to dress in 1970s clothes and hire a DJ to spin disco tunes in the lobby. Andy Gibb was singing "Shadow Dancing" as I bought my ticket and went into the main theater. The audience gave a wildly enthusiastic round of applause at the end of the film. 

On Halloween 1998, a very young, very sweet, and very uncorrupted coworker asked me: “What’s The Exorcist?” I immediately bought tickets. The place was packed, the energy was high, and we settled in. Then a somewhat sketchy-looking guy from down front got up and sat directly behind us. Then the main door to the theater slammed shut. Then the lights went out and the movie immediately started. The opening music filled the theater and stilled the audience. It was terrifying. It was also the most fun I’ve ever had watching The Exorcist. And I’ve never seen or spoken to that coworker since.

On the 2005 opening night of Brokeback Mountain, three-fourths of the audience sat silently through the end credits listening to Willie Nelson singing “He Was A Friend Of Mine.” The audience remained in their seats even after the lights came on, just taking it in, processing. On another viewing a few weeks later, a man sat alone a couple of rows behind me. As the end credits rolled, a young couple walking up the aisle recognized him. “Tom? Well, hey. Where’s Lisa?” The names have been changed for obvious reasons.

There was the brilliant spectacle of seeing the classics on a big screen: Singin’ In The Rain, Psycho, The Birds, Bonnie And Clyde, A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather, Cabaret, Blazing Saddles, The Shining, Tootsie. But there are other movie moments and images that have also stayed with me: an audience’s reaction to a rain of frogs in Magnolia; the curb stomp in American History X; a telephone conversation using only pop music in The Virgin Suicides; a close and unexpectedly erotic audition in Mulholland Drive.

There was a bruised and bloody (and shirtless) Brad Pitt in Fight Club; a disheveled Mark Ruffalo wearing his best shirt while he visits his parents’ grave in You Can Count On Me; Gene Hackman trying to be a caring grandfather in The Royal Tenenbaums; Lisa Bonet singing in High Fidelity; Thora Birch dancing in Ghost World; Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová making music in Once; the warmth of Virginia Madsen in Sideways; the melancholy of Bill Murray in Lost In Translation and the sadness of Hal Holbrook in Into The Wild. 

It was a great reminder that at their best, movies are (or used to be) hilarious, shocking, sexy, violent, uncomfortable, romantic, weird, inspiring, depressing, and beautiful. A grateful thank you to Westgate Art Cinemas for helping me feel just a little less alone during a time when movie culture really mattered. 

Welcome to Capitol Oaf Watch, a Tone Madison column that tracks the horrible, foolish, and absurd things Wisconsin state legislators do and say. Look for it once per month, and perhaps more frequently in the future—keeping up with all the oafery is a tough job for a tiny publication like ours.

How are Democrats going to put up a meaningful fight against the Republican majority in the Wisconsin State Legislature during this term? Coming up with an opposition strategy is genuinely complicated: Republicans have such wide majorities in both houses because they've blatantly drawn the maps in their own favor, Democrats have a Governor's veto to hold over Republicans, but Republicans haven't shown any willingness to give an inch, because the GOP's long-term strategy is to amass as much power as it can, mostly illegitimately. 

The majority is as determined as ever to rain holy hell on Wisconsin. In just the past week, Republicans rejected $1.6 billion in federal money that would have funded beneficial projects all over the state simply because they don't want to expand Medicaid, moved to end the UW System's tuition freeze, pushed another pointless bill from anti-abortion freakazoid Andre Jacque, held hearings on transphobic legislation, and began putting together their own weird little Stasi. There's no reasoning with these folks. Democrats need a plan of attack and they need to all get on the same page about it.

So far, this is not looking like a disciplined opposition. A couple of recent moves in the Legislature indicate that Democrats haven't really come to terms with what they're up against. Democrats' votes and alignment on police reform and the goddamn dumb national anthem will allow Republicans to frame their own actions as "bipartisan," and these days "bipartisan" usually means Democrats showing the spine of a damp noodle.

One Republican enjoying such an easy win is District 50 Rep. Tony Kurtz. Inexplicably imbued with the life force after accreting on the floor of a Supercuts, Kurtz recently introduced a bill that would require "the playing or singing of the national anthem" before any sporting event at venues built with public funds. That's all it does. You have to hear the shitty song at the ballgame. Red meat for braying racists who just can't get over Colin Kaepernick.

We know Republicans are going to routinely do this sort of "freedom fries" stuff. They can't really help themselves, and they're all-in on a strategy of stoking bigotry and resentment. In that sense, the bigger oafs are Democrats who cross the aisle to needlessly enable these sorts of things. And in the May 11 vote on Kurtz’s bill, 14 of the 38 Assembly Dems be-oafed themselves by joining the ayes. 

Most resplendent and regal in oafery among them was Minority Leader Gordon Hintz. A good thing for a minority leader to do would be to steer the Democratic caucus away from bills like this, which solve none of Wisconsin's many real and complex problems. Hintz appeared to mock the anthem bill on Twitter, but I checked multiple times and legislative records do show him voting for it.

If you are in fact leading, maybe set yourself apart from the other side's crass, opportunistic culture-war pandering. Send a unified statement that you're not going to buy into rinky-dink patriotism when Wisconsinites are waiting for their legislators to lead us out of the pandemic and the economic hole it's created. Instead, we have a minority of the Dems, including their leader, voting for this utterly pointless bill, and the rest either casting “no” votes or abstaining. It looks sloppy and weird. What the fuck are you doing, Hintz? This was an easy one. Republicans were going to pass it with or without the Dems anyway. Get it together and show them you’re more than just a pair of pretty eyes.

And so it is that we have a veritable clown car of oafs this month, packed with the other 13 Dems who voted for this silly and vile piece of legislation: Deb Andraca (District 23), Jill Billings (District 95), Steve Doyle (District 94), Evan Goyke (District 18), Tip McGuire (District 64), Beth Meyers (District 74), Tod Ohnstad (District 65), Daniel Riemer (District 7), Sara Rodriguez (District 13), Christine Sinicki (District 20), Shelia Stubbs (District 77), Robyn Vining (District 14), Don Vruwink (District 43).

Pretending to like a dumb song won't help with re-election. On top of that, indulging bills that waste the people's time during a crisis in a Legislature with some of the most odious members of an authoritarian cult, should be an obvious “no.” Our legislators need to realize that they are in a fight with dire consequences and start acting like it. And remember that there is a concept called "compelled speech" and it's unconstitutional. Until then, oafs ye be, one and all!

In the higher chamber, it is District 4 Sen. Lena Taylor who reigns supreme among oafs with a “D” next to their name. Taylor has teamed up with Republican District 21 Sen. Van Wanggaard to push a package of police reform bills. As we've already noted, people like Wanggaard are simply not good allies in the pursuit of meaningful change to criminal justice. The task force Republicans formed on racial disparities was a bad-faith exercise in the first place and it's frankly shameful that even a single Democrat signed on to lend it credibility. 

Four of the bills from Taylor and Wanggaard's joint effort have so far passed the State Senate. Among other things, the bills create new reporting requirements for uses of force, new funding for "community oriented policing," and other policies that look nice on paper but won’t stop cops from killing people. 

While teaming up on multiple proposals, Taylor and Wanggaard have also declined to partner on some law-enforcement bills. Taylor does not support Wanggaard's proposal to cut state funding for cities that reduce police budgets, and Wanggaard does not support Taylor's proposal to ban no-knock warrants. In fact, in an April interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wanggaard called the latter proposal "ludicrous" and "absolutely nuts," demonstrating that even if you help Republicans, they still won't treat you with respect. But the cooperation between a churlish Republican ex-cop from Racine and a Black Democrat from Milwaukee creates an irresistible narrative for people who want to think we can gradually reform our way out of the problem.

What's worse is that some of this legislation will actually reinforce the culture of impunity in policing. One of the bills the Senate passed will require the Police and Fire Commissions in Madison and Milwaukee to include police union-approved members. Under Wisconsin law, local Police and Fire Commissions (PFCs) are the only bodies with any real power over police hiring, firing, and discipline. PFCs, including Madison's, already do very little to actually discipline cops. They'll do even less if they're even more open to pressure from police unions, which are already among the most powerful forces shielding cops from accountability. So, in the name of bipartisan police reform, Taylor has voted for a bill that would make it easier for police to get away with violence and abuse. And she's aided Wisconsin Republicans in their favorite pastime: sticking it to Madison and Milwaukee. From here, Taylor's positioning on this reads like a most oafish betrayal.

In all fairness, not all of the Democrats in the Legislature have been feckless on police reform. Milwaukee Assembly members Jonathan Brostoff, LaKeshia Myers, and Supreme Moore Omokunde, for instance, have introduced bills that go much farther. They include proposals to eliminate qualified immunity protections for cops in civil suits, ban no-knock warrants (again, something Taylor supports), and make it harder for cops who violate their agencies' use-of-force policies to find jobs elsewhere. May these legislators continue to walk a path where no oafs dwell.

Of course, just about every day in Wisconsin politics involves more than one act of oafishness, so at the end of each Capitol Oaf Watch, we'll shout out at least a couple other oafs. This time around, they are as follows. If you would like to report an oaf, please oaf-box us at editor@tonemadison.com.

Earning a salary to not solve problems oaf: Senator Mary Felzkowski

"His racist ass" oaf: Representative Mark Born 

Oaf who doesn't have to listen to you: Representative John Spiros

Transphobic "humor"-enjoying oaf: Representative Shae Sortwell

Robin Vos has long epitomized a gruesome brand of corrupt, mercenary, comically disingenuous right-wing politics. This week, he has outdone himself. It is no exaggeration to say that he has become one of the most virulent fascists in the United States.

Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly and de facto political boss of the Wisconsin Legislature, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday that he is hiring a group of retired police officers to investigate the 2020 election, on the public dime. The Journal Sentinel's Patrick Marley reports that Vos said people he subpoenas would be granted immunity from prosecution, but also that Vos "did not rule out the possibility the investigators would refer some matters to prosecutors." It sure sounds like Vos is trying to keep us in suspense about what his weird private cops with subpoena power will do. 

This goes beyond Vos' usual slippery power plays. The speaker is pushing into brazenly authoritarian behavior. While he's an easy man to laugh at, we should all be furious and afraid. 

Vos claims he's not trying to overturn the results of an election that took place seven months ago, gave Republicans another decisive majority in the Legislature, and put Republicans in five of Wisconsin's eight House seats. All the same, Vos keeps on nursing doubts about the legitimacy of the election anyway, saying, "Is there a whole lot of smoke or is there actual fire?" It's a fire Republicans deliberately started so that they could point to some smoke. 

Alright, so an aggrieved nitwit and popcorn landlord is hiring three retired cops and a lawyer to go on a fishing expedition. Scoff at your own peril. Accountability and checks are weak enough for real police agencies and investigative units, but these are just contractors who answer to the legislative majority. Who governs their conduct? What rules do they have to follow? This is a legal and procedural grey area. We'd better hope Vos is too small-time and inept to exploit it to the fullest. If the group takes on greater numbers and resources, or expands the scope of its activities, it will become a powerful instrument of abuse, harassing Vos' political enemies with impunity. 

If legislators had real concerns about the conduct of the election, they could carry out their oversight function—i.e. hold hearings, conduct investigations, even issue subpoenas—without the need to hire their own pet cops. They could appeal to the state's Department of Justice and Attorney General to investigate their allegations of election tampering, for which they've provided no evidence. Vos tells the Journal Sentinel that one of his goals is to "identify laws that should be changed." All you need for that is a lawyer or a legislative staffer or two and, I dunno, a table at the state law library. 

So what are cops doing here? Simple: They are intimidating people who get in Republicans' way. Given Vos' fixation on events like Madison's "Democracy in the Park" ballot-collection effort and his insistence that people in Madison and Milwaukee aren't legitimate members of the state's electorate, we can expect his goon squad to particularly target local elections officials. They likely won't find any solid evidence that election officials or voters did anything illegal or improper. They might find some flimsy pretexts that Republicans can throw on that carefully tended fire to create more convenient smoke. They will definitely create a chilling effect, make voters feel afraid to vote, make elections officials feel afraid to do their jobs, and make activists feel afraid to help people register to vote. How else can you feel when there are cops sniffing around in the absence of clear boundaries?

After months of other sham investigations and failed court cases across the country, we know Republicans don't have real concerns about the 2020 election. What they do have is manufactured suspicion, a manufactured narrative, and most importantly a relentless drive to de-legitimize anything that doesn't build their power. Republicans have largely pursued those goals by keeping up their coordinated, nationwide attacks on voting rights, and by drawing legislative maps that will keep them in power in state legislatures whether or not a majority of voters support them. In states including Wisconsin and North Carolina, they've passed lame-duck laws to take powers away from incoming Democratic governors.

There is another pattern we need to pay attention to here. Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature have consistently tried to give themselves powers that parallel the functions of the executive branch rather than the legislative one. And these powers aren't vested in the legislature as a whole, but in the Republican majority and in specific legislative committees, especially the Joint Finance Committee. The more this effort advances, the closer the committee's 12 Republican members (there are only four Democratic members) get to unilaterally running the state, rather than playing its already powerful role of approving budget measures that then go on to the Legislature as a whole for debate and votes. Legislative Republicans have a free hand to hire private attorneys with public funds, although a Dane County judge has checked that power in at least one case. The lame-duck laws passed in 2018 gave the JFC new powers to approve or block routine moves from state executive-branch agencies—and ended up slowing down Wisconsin's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the Legislature has bothered to address the pandemic at all, it has also unsuccessfully tried to give JFC the power to approve the state's vaccination plans (clearly not a job for a budget committee), create a relief fund the JFC would directly control, give JFC control over the state's use of federal relief funds, and give JFC the power to unilaterally cut salaries for some top officials at the state's Department of Workforce Development. 

I've made this point in previous articles over the past couple years and I'm belaboring it now, but it bears repeating: Republicans are trying to build their own parallel executive branch in the Legislature. If Vos actually gets to have his own cops, the parallel executive will have enforcers. It's a bit late to be shocked about anything Vos does or says, but everyone who cares about Wisconsin must understand that he is truly dangerous.

Illustration made with the first Wisconsin unemployment check, original image via Wisconsin Historical Society.

The pandemic has given us an opportunity to reshape the public conversation about unemployment benefits in the United States. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people signed up for benefits for the first time ever in the past 14 months, and that means more people now know somebody who’s been on unemployment. With any luck, this will make it a little harder for austerity-minded politicians to muddy the waters about how public benefits work and what people on those benefits actually get. It makes it harder for even right-wing voters to buy into the myth of lazy people becoming "dependent" on a profligate welfare state. Of course, well-meaning people who want a robust social safety net still get tripped up in debates over amounts and cutoffs and requirements and who’s worthy and who’s not. This is also a good chance for those folks to challenge their own thinking. 

And where better to reflect on this shift than in Wisconsin, a state that pioneered unemployment insurance?

This opportunity is a bit lost on the Wisconsin State Journal's editorial board, which declared this week that the state should end a supplemental $300 benefit paid weekly to unemployment recipients. The supplement is already set to expire this fall, but the State Journal argues that Governor Tony Evers "should phase it out sooner if the economy continues to improve." Even while acknowledging that unemployment insurance isn’t the main obstacle in the country's economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, Wednesday's editorial argued that Republicans targeting the benefit “have a point.” It does not explain what this point actually is, or indeed how such a thoroughly useless group of people could conceivably have a point about working and earning. The editorial does offer some reasonable big-picture observations about demographic trends and economic infrastructure in Wisconsin, namely the fact that our population as a whole is aging, that undocumented people should have a path to citizenship, and that we need to expand high-speed internet access in rural areas. The editorial also boldly calls for raising the state’s minimum wage—to $10. 

Cutting the $300 unemployment boost is a more solemn matter, of course, than ending the minor encumbrance of mask requirements, which the very serious folks at Madison's largest newspaper greeted last week with cries of "Smile!" "Hallelujah!" and "Yahoo!" But if we're talking about bigger structural issues holding back Wisconsin's economy, why call for ending a modest, federally funded benefit that doesn't cost Wisconsin anything? The State Journal cites Republican complaints that “a recipient can receive the equivalent of a $16.75-and-hour (sic) job for not working." In other words, the argument is that the unemployment boost is not the culprit, but probably one of the culprits. 

The problem is that this framing lends credibility to the idea that unemployment benefits give people a long-term incentive to not work. Anyone who's worked a low-paying job and/or received unemployment payments knows that this is absurd. In Wisconsin, the base rate for unemployment benefits tops out at $370 per week. The amount a specific person gets depends on their former work earnings, so it's often less than that. During the pandemic, federal relief funds have added $600 and later $300 to that base rate. So, at the height of these benefits, a person on unemployment in Wisconsin could receive $970 per week, or $24.25 per hour. That's assuming that your claim doesn't hit a snag and that payments show up promptly. After a disastrous year for the state's unemployment system—for which Evers' administration truly shares blame with the legislature—people who need help know that's not always a safe assumption. They are well aware that they're going to need some other source of income before long. Wisconsin's state legislators have pulled a full-time salary equaling about $24.50 an hour to do basically nothing but make things worse for the past 14 months, on top of scuttling massive win-win opportunities and dicking around at the US-Mexico border. They've got job security, at least until we get fair legislative maps. 

If anyone should be sympathetic to the unemployed, by the way, it's people who work in the media world. Especially at a newspaper where everyone had to take furloughs or a pay cut during the pandemic! Including, logic would seem to dictate, the very people who wrote the editorial I'm complaining about! Journalists in this day and age have very little job security and usually work long hours for lousy pay. They worry constantly about how their publications' owners will screw them over next, including by selling to even worse owners. And as precarious as the industry is, it still generates wealth. Executives at the State Journal's publicly traded parent company, Lee Enterprises, took a pay cut during the pandemic as well, but SEC filings show that CEO Kevin Mowbray still made a total of $1,187,428 in 2020. I'm sure reporters making three or four percent of that appreciate Mowbray's sacrifice. The average working journalist, including at the State Journal, is a classic example of someone doing really valuable work under garbage conditions—sometimes downright dangerous conditions, especially when covering riots and fascist rallies—while someone else reaps most of the benefits. They need a functioning social safety net too! Perhaps it's easy to lose sight of that when you're getting paid to write an endless string of tedious and repetitive bromides about State Street.

Everyone else needs to find real jobs on the double. Starting this week, people receiving unemployment money in Wisconsin have to meet work-search requirements again—something the editorial doesn't mention. With or without the $300 top-up, people will be incentivized to look for work and take it if they get an offer. People receiving unemployment benefits can also work reduced hours and still get those benefits, up to a point, so this isn't a strictly either-or deal in the first place. Even people who get decently paying new jobs could use the padding as they get back into the workforce—that gap between starting a new job and getting your first paycheck can be a real strain too. While we're touching on the basic factual framing so often missing from the discourse about public benefits, these unemployment payments are subject to state and federal income taxes. While people often call unemployment benefits an "entitlement," this is in fact a form of insurance. 

If you weren't making all that much money before the pandemic, temporary payments of up to $970 and then $670 per week, pre-tax, still add up to a temporary lifeline. This money will at least help people catch up a little on bills and back rent, and at best give them room to breathe during a monumentally dangerous and stressful ordeal, and during a period in history where wages are stagnating but the basic costs of living keep going up. Heaven for-fucking-fend, you might get frisky once in a while and order some nice takeout from a local restaurant that employs people, throwing in a generous tip for service workers who've been through all kinds of hell. Granted, if I were the kind of person who became outraged at the idea of poor people getting apartments with nice views, this scenario might piss me off too. Who knows. As much as the State Journal's editors opine, their thinking remains a queasy fart-clouded enigma. 

Why is it so hard to conceive of being temporarily generous to people who've been working and paying taxes into the unemployment system for years, while rarely getting a fair cut of the world's most productive economy, and by and large never tapping into unemployment funds until they slammed into a global economic crisis? I don't expect the WSJ's editorial board to share my view that everyone should just be guaranteed a decent standard of living, no ifs, ands, or buts. It's just that whatever your ideological perspective is on all this, giving people some extra help right now is constructive, and the downside is minimal to imaginary. 

We are still up against the reality that too many people can't live on what their employers pay, which the WSJ kind of acknowledges while pushing for an also-unlivable $10 minimum wage. Indeed, so much more is needed. If you're complaining about unfilled jobs but not addressing these long-festering conditions, then what you're going to end up doing is just coercing people back to work. We need our commentators to stick up to the powerful, not to provide muscle for the crappy bosses of the world. The authors of the State Journal editorial correctly point out some bigger structural problems that go beyond pay and unemployment. They also know full well that politicians who fail to solve these problems are largely insulated from consequences. People relying on unemployment benefits, though, will suffer immediate hardship as the money dries up.

The real problem here is not that unemployed folks are entitled to money, but that employers are effectively entitled to labor. The real shortage is not one of workers, but of good opportunities that offer livable pay, rewarding work, valuable experience, and opportunities for advancement. Cutting off unemployment benefits that are already temporary will not fix this. Wisconsinites are trying to recover from an absolutely dreadful year. Being kind to them literally doesn't cost that much.

The record took shape during a period in which Schultz found the supportive environment he needed to grow as an artist in the form of the Willy Street area. Similar to most coming of age stories, his start involved a push in the right direction. Living next to his best friend Tamir Smith (known to many as King Kronos), was that push. “If I hadn’t moved to the Willy Street area when I was ten and met Tamir, my life would have been totally different,” Schultz says. 

The pair’s 2014 song “A Dead End Called Merry St” referenced the splinter just off of the Yahara River that served as the grounds for their musical awakening. It was here where they’d pass each other their favorite forms of music and share the spotlight during cypher sessions with a group of friends—who would go on to become the group Synchronized Mindz—over industry beats they’d find on the internet. 

While the ciphers and voices on a clean hip-hop track proved to be vital in cultivating Schultz’s taste in the long run—an affinity for the verbal dexterity of CunninLynguists and Wu-Tang Clan ultimately steered him away from Will Smith CDs, which seemed to be the only rap his mother approved of—he credits his goldfish memory for convincing him to find a home away from the mic. “Even if a song’s lyrics are so-so, it’s the beats that I hear first. If the beats are great then I could listen to a track over-and-over again," Schultz says. "Which made me think, well, maybe I should try my hand at producing music and see how it goes.”

And it went about as well as one could expect, at first. “It all sucked,” he says. “I was never happy with anything I was making. I didn’t know anything about sampling. I was trying to make things strictly off of my keyboard without much know-how.” The gap between what Schultz knew and what he was looking to accomplish wasn’t simple. Being the dedicated artist that he is, he set his sights on studying the artists who persuaded him to dig into that side of artistry:  The Alchemist, RZA, KNO, Ant, and a handful of others. 

The many years that followed his initial plunge into the production realm were typical of a struggle-rap producer attempting to carve his name into a small scene: congested creativity, mismatched audio mixes that would confuse both him and his emcees, little to no exposure, and “DJing” sets around Madison (including the “Rhyme Room” sessions at the now defunct Mr. Roberts Bar & Grill on Atwood Avenue), some of which found him simply standing behind an emcee and hitting the next button on a laptop. It was all worth it in the long run for Schultz’s confidence, but in the moment it began to feel very stagnant, and boredom began to sit in. 

Navigating the Madison DJ circuit for five years was enough experience for Schultz to gain some strong footing with his craft and within the Midwest scene. He amassed a collection of experiences that would prove formative, including losing two beat battles and picking up a foundational piece of advice from producer-turned-cryptocurrency tycoon !llmind: “Build from the ground up; work with what’s around you.” Schultz took the words to heart. 

“I know I’m good enough to work with larger artists,” Schultz says, “but we have so much amazing talent here in Madison, it was really easy for me to forget the big time and be passionate about what I have around me.” The Madison hip-hop scene gifted Schultz in many ways, a momentous one being his relationship with a network of Madison-bred hip-hop producers and emcees.  Collectively, Schultz and this group would become Outside Voices. 

Before the pandemic, the crew would record and polish entire projects in a single weekend while hanging out in a Northwoods cabin owned by Zach Salvat, a Madison DJ/producer/digital artist who works under the name Evaridae. Schultz and Salvat would pair up under the name CliqDark.

“Before I met Zach I never really had a personal mentor," Schultz says. "He’s kind of like the RZA for Outside Voices. With him being someone who went to the [now-closed] Madison Media Institute, it was really interesting to see how he did things. I’m very grateful to have met him.”

The soft, meditative approach that Schultz takes on Defective Portraits seems to be undergirded by the fondness and gratitude he has for his come up, archetypal of a hip-hop producer who enjoys the peace of making music in the deep woods of Wisconsin. The record’s final track, “Fearless,” was Defective Portraits' seedling and focused his efforts on crafting the gently crackling sonic palette he'd use across the record.

“It might be the winters we have here. Something about them really makes people want to enjoy the emotional vibe that comes with cold days,” Schultz says. Always soft, with airy, brisk rhythms that heighten the record’s unabating enthusiasm for ambient noise, it’s perfect thinking music. Listeners may catch their next best idea by simply staying indoors and following along to the rounded, mellow zeniths found on “Dreaming Out Loud” or by putting their legs up next to an opened notebook, waiting for their next big idea to be coaxed out by the gentle release of “Sun Beams.”

In true testament to his own musical upbringing and fascination with establishing accessibility within the Midwest hip-hop community, Schultz set out on making Defective Portraits his version of a creative co-op. In an intentional decision to make the record free, Schultz stayed true to his community-bolstering vision. In an Instagram post earlier this year, he encouraged artists to enjoy the record and do with it what they pleased. “Bargazing'' was built with this collaborative spirit in mind, with its spatially aware rhythms and melodic frames ready for any type of voice or rhyme scheme to accentuate it, no matter the artist’s background or experience.   

“I’ve had some people hit me up before saying how badly they want to work with me but don’t really have the money or resources to do it. And I don’t want any of that to be a factor anymore. I want to spark creativity in people. If that spark happens then I want artists to be able to express and access that creativity as quickly as possible,” Schultz says.

Caring, introspective, soft-spoken; the music you hear on Defective Portraits truly is a piece of both Brent Schultz and B-Luv, who are not too far off personality-wise. The allure of the alter-ego has always been of interest to Schultz, being a fanatic of the WWE wrestler Bret “The Hitman” Hart due to Hart’s commitment of injecting extravaganza with realism. In the same truthful-and-performative vein, Schultz finds a way to be who he truly is as a person and as a performer by way of a morning routine that’s as warm and mellow as his music. “What I love is waking up, having my coffee, maybe having a little herb, and making music. Some people like making music at night, but there’s something about being in the morning, when your brain is fresh; it's the optimal time to create for me,” Schultz says. 

“I’ve made about 90 percent of my music while high,” he continues. “I really fall into a groove when I combine the two. There was a time in my life when I was concerned that maybe I couldn’t work without it, so I had to test myself on that by letting up for a bit. But the only thing that proved was how my sound came from within me all along and from nothing else.” 

“Many Faces” opens Defective Portraits with grating plucks alongside a sample of Game Of Thrones’ Arya Stark describing how difficult it is to be forced within a false reality: “Neither of us got to be the other person, did we? But I can now. With the faces, I can choose.” “I think—in a musical sense—I put on a different mask for each situation,” Schultz says. “I’ll always stay within my realm, but I am a different variation of myself depending on the desired sound, morphing myself into a way that works. I am attracted to popular things, sounds, ideas, but I want to make sure I actually like it for what it is and not because someone told me I should.” 

This diligent pursuit in honoring the face value of each song’s title is one of the record’s defining qualities. The melody withering within the song “The Sweet Collapse” is consistently bent, evoking a prepossessing tower in mid-collapse. “Hollow Intentions” produces a melodramatic soreness that rings in the ears, as if begging for forgiveness. And the shadow that lingers behind the bright textures in “Silhouettes'' plays on contrasts to mesmeric effect. 

“For a while I kind of gave up on labeling songs,” Schultz says. “It was hard for me to come up with them. Whenever I’d send beats out to rappers they’d get mad at me because they’d never know which one I was referring to. They’d be like ‘which beat is the one you want me on, 4:20 or 4:21?.’ And I came to find out that a lot of them really benefited by having a place to jump from.”

And if there were a beat to designate as a final jumping point for our defective 2020, it might as well be the melancholic-yet-euphoric vista of rapturous triumph, “Bye To Yesterday.” “With everything that’s happened this past year, I think we are on the come up as a society” Schultz says. “I think people will start enjoying the little things a bit more: being able to hang out with friends, going out on the town... geez, even being able to hug people, for God’s sake.” 

For him, there’s no such thing as losses, only lessons. And Defective Portraits is the tasteful result of the many lessons Schultz has managed to compile during his lifespan as a DIY producer. If the human condition is anything but permanent—in ways that forces us to paint how we want to see ourselves portrayed in place of accepting the beauty that already stares back at us in a natural reflection—Schultz is opting to alleviate the toxic fumes of societal perfectionism with some therapeutic resonance. 

As optimistic as it all may seem, it may also be a good thing, sometimes, to reflect and blow down the cobwebs. “As we know, there are a lot of issues with this country that need to be faced head-on,” Schultz says. “And I feel like we’ve done a lot of that this year. Our eyes have been opened. I think we needed to break it all down before we could build back up.”    

Soviet-era propaganda was so thorough and effective that it created a small black hole in history, as the personal and psychological wreckage of Joseph Stalin’s regime (1927-1953) is still being sorted through by historians. Filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa has made his modern career mostly on making found-footage documentaries that explore this period, with each film its own minor revelation as an act of archival record-setting. Setting aside any of their quality as works of film, they’re major historical works simply for existing as coherent modern visual documents of the things people usually read about in textbooks.

MUBI is currently hosting a short series of Loznitsa’s documentaries, the centerpiece being his most recent and historically explosive State Funeral (2019). In the film, citizens of various Russian towns are informed of Stalin’s death in 1953, and they later participate in an incredibly long procession to visit his body and pay their final respects during his three-day funeral event. And this is basically all that happens.

There’s a sort of irony to State Funeral’s existence, given the event was so widely attended because footage of it was too hard to circulate in Russia. During a time when television still was not a standard medium worldwide, the only means people had of verifying and processing Stalin’s death was to travel to Moscow and see it for themselves. Sorting through the visual detritus of modern streaming services, you can now participate in the funeral of one of history’s most famous villains from the comfort of your living room, as many people in Soviet Russia surely would have preferred.

But there is one major caveat that accompanies Loznitsa’s films— the footage he uses was originally taken by Soviet-approved cinematographers. To simply acknowledge these clips, all Russian citizens truly did grieve the death of Stalin, which is obviously only true insofar as these feelings were enforced by the state and documented in a tightly controlled way. In some capacity, State Funeral fuels this laser-focused worship of the regime, omitting the fact that many people actually died as a result of stampedes at the funeral.

Just as François Truffaut famously said there could be no truly anti-war film, perhaps the same could be said about propaganda. In order to present and understand what makes propaganda work, a film has to buy into the material’s seductions and risk perpetuating the same message. While Loznitsa can’t be accused of actually being sympathetic to Stalin, his hands-off approach creates a dubious final product. 

A better use of this sort of found-footage neutrality is his prior documentary, The Trial (2018), which fares better as a human study by giving credence to actual victims of Stalinism. Taking place in Stalin’s earlier days of power in 1930, the film documents one of the Soviets’ infamous “show trials” where purported enemies of the state were purely put on trial for entirely trumped-up charges to demonstrate the state’s power. 

Accused men gradually break down as even their attempts to agree with their own manufactured guilt prove not to be enough. Groveling, they create more and more extensive stories about themselves as subversive radicals, as they hope to save some face by actively prosecuting themselves and begging for forgiveness. The ultimate “success” of their patriotism is seen as convincing the jury of their predetermined guilt and being sentenced to the gulag.

The two films work in counterpoint. On one end, they characterize the gorgeous pomp and circumstance that fueled the most effective Soviet brainwashing; and, on the other, they depict the crushing psychological toll that public fealty to a malevolent dictator exacts on the average citizen. The Stalin regime created such a publicly deadly spectacle that there’s little to no sense to be made of the actual tragedy of rule, hence why Loznitsa’s films are content to just reproduce the period for study.

While State Funeral and The Trial are undeniably impressive acts of historical preservation, this quality is perhaps better suited for museums where viewers could engage with the pieces for five minutes at a time with contextualizing materials. As is, the films share a deadening quality, much like Stalin’s rule. Whether spending two hours marinating in that is worthwhile is up to the viewer to decide.

This story was produced in partnership with Red Madison.

When the aliens come to Earth, nobody expects them to make first contact in a Dane County board meeting. The tech moderator is calling out names over the Zoom call, activists are talking about spending too much money on a jail, and then the moderating tech chokes on a new name. "Zer-zee... Zidj... Ziglax Liaison? You have three minutes."

"Greetings, humans. I will keep this brief. I am part of a team of liasons sent to run spot checks around your planet to verify if humans are ready to join the Galactic Society."

Not many people are listening live. These board meetings are usually deathly boring. But fortunately, the next day, someone digs a video link out of Legistar. We aren’t sure if it was some elaborate prank, but with folks from other cities around the world posting similar clips to social media over the next few days, it becomes clear that the prank was either global, or aliens really visited various municipal meetings all over the planet. Possibly the place we least expected them.

Here in Madison, that video makes the rounds, and we hear the alien call us out in vibrating, computerized tones: "I have some questions, as you live in an area with major racial disparities in what you loosely term 'criminal justice outcomes.' Does it worry you at all that the leaders of your state justice system say everything is fine and try to cover things up, when their own experts disagree?"

Silence sits heavy on the call. The facilitator hesitantly speaks up. "Zig... lacks... Liason? Are you still there?"

"Sorry. Internet problems. Ahem... Does it concern you at all, that your jail is half full of Black humans, when anyone who has spent any time walking the streets of Madison can clearly see that Black people make up less than 7 percent of your county?"

The alien makes a sustained staccato choking noise.

"I apologize, our translator is not yet perfected. Lastly, the thing I am most concerned about today is the strange contradiction between your presumption of innocence and your practice of cash bail."

A loud, distorted bell rings. "Uhhhh, Ziglax Liaison, your time is up, if you would like to, umm, finish your point..." The moderator trails off.

"You Earth people let rich humans accused of murder pay to walk free even when they break the terms of their agreement and your police crowdfund to get them out, but you disproportionately hold poor, presumed-innocent people before they even have a fair trial. Why? That is my primary question, for now. You all can reach me at firstcontact42@aol.com. I will be listening."

We assume it to be a joke, or some weird advertising ploy. We go on with our lives. But their shining ships materialize like glossy turtle shells in orbit a month later.

Learning about bail in Dane County

The first thing we all need to do is bone up on how exactly bail works in Dane County. We're all law-abiding citizens! We never really thought about it! We’re so sure the system makes sense. But then, we start digging.

Let’s walk through it, real quick. Let’s say you are arrested for disorderly conduct. The police decide if you are cited or if they should take you to jail. In a recent Nehemiah lunch and learn about arrests, Officer Lester Moore from the Madison Police Department explains: "Each arrest is a serious thing, because you’re dealing with someone’s life. At some point, people can possibly lose their jobs. When you make that arrest, this big ball starts to roll that has this huge effect on many parts of—not just that person’s life, but people who are connected to them as well. If you arrest the breadwinner… You have to think about those things when you deprive someone of their freedom. At that point, you have to ask yourself, what’s the effect?"

If you are taken to jail, you wait for a charge and a bail hearing. If you’re judged to be "not risky" to release, you can sign something and walk out soon after, returning for your trial, paying a fine if you don’t. But if the judge thinks you might skip out, or a risk assessment thinks that you’re dangerous, you might get a cash bond (also known as bail) and have to pay fat stacks to get out of jail before your trial. Of course, the system promises to give that money back when you show up to court.

When the Ziglax come back, we need to explain ourselves. What is happening when we hold people with bail? Searching the news, we find claims that downplay these possibly life-destroying effects of an arrest followed by bail. Dane County Circuit Judge Nicholas Judge McNamara claims that "Dane County is not routinely holding defendants on excessively high cash bail for low level misdemeanor charges." That makes us feel better, for a bit. But what does "excessively high" mean? And what about race? Other reporting we’ve mostly ignored over the years shows that racial disparities have, if anything, widened over time.

The 2018 bail report by Judge McNamara and his team did not break anything down by race or gender. The circuit court publishes some summary statistics, but bail is not included. The Criminal Justice Council (CJC) Pre-Trial subcommittee has been trying to report in more detail, after the county board passed 2020 RES-177 in September of last year, requesting specific details on cash bail "based on race, gender, and age". Preliminary results were shared in a March 25 meeting, and there are more details in an April 27 presentation to the Public Protection & Judiciary committee (PP&J) (which starts at the 24 minute mark).

But this report does not properly break down the numbers of who is getting bail and who can pay it, as RES-177 asked. Their statistics show the demographics of who has posted bail, but not the demographics of those who were able to pay compared to who was actually held on cash bail. This major missing piece is brought up in the Q&A at 1:05, and presenters Noemi Reyes and Colleen Clark-Bernhardt claim it was accidentally dropped from the slides.

The Dane County Sheriff's jail website also does not break down current holds by case status and race; the Sheriff's Office only does that in quarterly reports. So who’s in jail pre-trial, and what’s their bail set to, right now? It should be easy to find out, but it’s not. The Sheriff’s site does not publish any bail information, and you have to delve individually into the circuit court cases. We found now-retired Sheriff Dave Mahoney treating people pre-trial like they were assumed guilty last summer, so the Sheriff’s Office might not be the most reliable source for this data in any case. What happened to the presumption of innocence? The Ziglax probably aren’t going to like that.

As of April 26, there were 598 people in the Dane County jail system. 236 of them are pre-trial or pre-arraignment. How long have they been locked up? What is their bail set to? Going by booking date, the mean pre-trial "length of stay" is 50 days for misdemeanor-only cases and 174 days for cases involving felonies. If we instead use the most recent arrest date, those counts go down to 41 days and 138 days. Of those folks who have bail set, the amount is mostly between $250 and $400 for misdemeanor-only cases. 

Again, these are people who have not had a trial. They are sitting in jail because they can’t pay, or choose not to pay in the case of some unhoused people. We shouldn’t forget there is a pandemic happening. But is this justice, for people to sit in cages for months before trial, on misdemeanor charges? In the past, Judge McNamara has said, “If people are looking in the wrong places for solutions, if they’re looking to fix something that’s not a problem, we’re not making progress.”

But there are clearly real problems here—and a lack of solutions, let alone progress—if you can sit in jail for months on a misdemeanor charge waiting for a trial. Let’s dig deeper.

Does bail make us safer?

If we don’t keep all those people in jail before trial, what about dangerous people, you ask? Violent... "criminals?" Well, even if you buy into that logic, the recent RES-177 report to PP&J showed that from 2016 to 2018, 3121 of the 7288 people given cash bail were not charged with "violent crimes."

Judge McNamara said in the April 27 committee meeting that "In Wisconsin [bail] can only be set when it’s deemed necessary to ensure the defendant will reappear for future proceedings. We don’t set cash bail in Wisconsin based on risk of new crime, but the severity of an offense can drive cash bail partly because there’s a logical, common-sense kind of analysis that someone who’s facing serious consequences may be less inclined to return to court to resolve the case given serious penalties."

A common-sense kind of analysis.

So we’re not keeping people in jail on bail for safety reasons. Plus, our current system doesn't solve violence, sexual or otherwise. All that stuff is already happening right now, under the existing greed-fueled system, with our bloated carceral budgets and bail systems in America. It doesn’t take an alien expert to see that.

If imprisoning people kept us safe, our country—which has five percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners—would be the safest around. It's clearly not. Prosecuting and imprisoning people feels like it should keep us safe. We're all taught that; we all assume it. But it's just not true. Prisons make us feel secure, but they don’t make us safe.

A new study (PDF) has found that choosing to prosecute misdemeanors can lead to more future misdemeanors, instead of reducing what we label as "crime." (Crime is in scare quotes here, because the terms we use to define if actions are "criminal" are quite loose and open to interpretation. "Disorderly conduct" could easily apply to drunk people on State Street most weekends, but most of the folks in our jail charged with "disorderly conduct" are poor or... not white.) 

Back to our focus: safety. Eliminating cash bail should not seem so radical, or unsafe. The federal criminal courts got rid of money bail across the U.S. in 1984. Was there a spike in crime? There was not.

There are places in the U.S. that have eliminated cash bail at the state and local level, so we have before and after statistics. Does all hell break loose? It does not. In fact, in many cases, it reduces the average population of the local jail by half. That could save us a ton of money, and improve people’s lives to boot.

We’ll explore the racial biases that influence who is locked up in the next section. But before we do, consider the Ziglax’s question: Is it worth holding all these presumed-innocent people in a cage, just for the vanishingly small chance that one of them might do something violent upon release? Does it matter who they are? Is this justice? Or is it just us trying to hide behind excuses?

Jail and the wealth gap

When we talk about bail, we’re talking about cash. In a country where wealth is unequally distributed along racial lines, Dane County is on the extreme end of that money gap. In 2011, well before a pandemic that has exacerbated racial disparities, over 54 percent of African American Dane County residents lived below the federal poverty line, compared to 8.7 percent of whites, meaning they were six times more likely to be poor than whites. Dane County African Americans were also almost 5.5 times more likely to be jobless than their white neighbors.

Putting up $300 for bail might not sound like a big deal to you, but at a time where most folks are living paycheck to paycheck, surviving a pandemic where even more families are living on the brink and personal debt is at an all-time high, $300 can easily ruin a life. Those of us who have financial privilege might not really understand it, until we talk to people who went through hell to pay bail.

Public Defender Catherine Dorl explained in an April 7 pre-trial subcommittee meeting that "[During the last six months or so], it’s holding steady as to who gets cash bail and who doesn’t. But as far as the amounts? Lately we’ve seen a trend where a small amount of bail is set, presuming the person can post it, maybe two or three hundred dollars, and then they don’t. [...] There’s an intent there to make an amount that people can post, but then the reality is that they can’t even post a small sum."

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne keeps claiming, as he did again in that same meeting, that "we release some 80 plus percent on recognizance or signature bonds already." But that number is years out of date, includes traffic cases, and as noted earlier did not break anything down by race. So what’s actually happening in the remaining 20 percent right now? Does the DA even care? The residents of Dane County haven’t forced him to care yet, but we should.

Judge McNamara went on to say: "As the decision maker for those [bail] questions, I have almost zero factual information about a defendant’s ability to pay. I can make inferences from whether that person qualifies for a state public defender representation. [...] There’s a strong inference that can be drawn from that about poverty, but [...] we rarely ask, what can you afford? We really don’t do that. We should, perhaps…"

What purpose is cash bail actually serving, if our judges do not even know if people can pay it? Simple: it serves to keep poor people in jail. This is what any alien observers would be angry about. This is what we should be questioning.

More details about race, ethnicity, gender, and age were revealed in the report for RES-177, but unfortunately that research did not examine how cases were chosen to have cash bail or not. They essentially narrowed down the number of cases to the "20 percent" with cash bail, and then broke down demographics within that subset. This does not reveal the whole story: we can have a fairly even distribution of amounts across races in that 20 percent, but still be assigning cash bail far more to Black people. (We are.)

We need to demand that the people driving our justice system continue this research, but we also need to start looking ourselves.

The Ziglax liaison’s point seems pretty simple, when we step back and look at the system. Rich people walk out. Poor people sit in jail as their lives unravel. How is that justice?

Fairness in bail

Still, there is more to understand. 99 percent of the growth of U.S. jail populations in the last 15 years has been in pre-trial holds—for people who are legally innocent. Who gets held with bail and who does not? Here in Dane County, prior to 2016, we don’t really even have the statistics. It all differs by case and judge and jurisdiction, so let’s look at some recent numbers.

We wrote some code to look at the 384 Dane County criminal cases we could find in WCCA with only misdemeanor charges, from 2019 to 2021. (WCCA sometimes blocks access to cases, so this analysis from outside the system is, unfortunately, an incomplete look.) 155 of those misdemeanor-only cases have "Caucasian defendants." 211 have "African American" defendants. 13 of the 155 Caucasian defendants were given cash bonds and held pre-trial. 59 of the 211 African-American defendants were given cash bonds and held pre-trial. That's 28 percent of African-American defendants to only 8 percent of Caucasian defendants. 

We are jailing three to four times as many Black people on misdemeanor charges, before trial, and that’s before adjusting for population. In a perfect world where everything was even by population distribution and the rate of cash bail given was the same, given 155 Caucasian misdemeanor-only cases, we would expect to see 11 African-American cases, with one African-American defendant held in jail. Instead, over the past two years, we’ve jailed at least 59 African-American people pre-trial.

The CJC committee and leaders like Judge McNamara may not consider this a problem, and see these additional people held in our jail as something of a drop in the bucket. But why is allowing (and perpetuating) this disparity even an option?

Next, let's draw cross-product comparisons between cases with similar charges, across felonies and misdemeanors from 2019 to 2021. 

Within one year of recent cases, I found 1,378 pairings where African-American defendants were jailed, while Caucasian defendants with similar charges were given signature bonds and walked free. I found only 156 pairings where Caucasian defendants were jailed and African-American defendants were released on signature bonds for similar charges. 

We have a clear picture of systemic bias in Dane County: we arrest more African Americans for misdemeanors, then we give them cash bonds instead of signature bonds at a rate much higher than their Caucasian counterparts. When we see that, we start to worry: what are we going to tell the Ziglax Consortium? It looks bad. How will we explain this to an outside observer?

How do judges assess risk?

Now, digging further, how do we actually choose to either give someone cash bail or let them sign something and walk away? Part of it is judges’ discretion, and part is based on risk assessment reports.

In the Wisconsin Department of Corrections' arrest intake flowchart, we can see the acronym "COMPAS" all over. The place we're interested in here for bail is near the top, "Decision #3." What is COMPAS, exactly? It’s an artificial intelligence statistical system for supposedly predicting "high risk" defendants. With all the recent press around racial bias in algorithms, this sounds like it might be a bad idea.

An American Bar Association journal article about risk-assessment algorithms from 2017 quotes Angel Ilarraza from the company that created COMPAS, as "[thinking] that this concern is ill-founded. 'There's no secret sauce to what we do; it’s just not clearly understood.'" But the algorithm is secret: we are not allowed to know fully how it works, because it's a private company’s intellectual property. 

So, great. It is not going to please the Ziglax to find out that these systems are "not clearly understood," the public are not given details of what’s in the box, we’re paying big bucks for it, and we're using it to make decisions that can ruin people's lives. The Atlantic had coverage from Ed Yong in 2018 of a Dartmouth study that showed COMPAS is no better at predicting crimes than groups of random people on the internet.

What exactly is in the COMPAS box? Is it a correlation where the system simply feeds itself, by relying on past charges? Since the current system incarcerates Black people far more than white people, do we end up using risk assessment algorithms to perpetuate cash bonds on more Black people? Or does COMPAS actively discriminate against Black people in other ways, even though race is never directly entered? 

The systems are so opaque, there might not be a way to explain to the Ziglax what’s actually going on. We begin to discuss the repercussions amongst ourselves... at least it seems unlikely that their enlightened society would throw us on a prison planet for our systemic misdeeds.

Even from what little we do know, this confusing exploration into COMPAS is a reminder that systems which are "not clearly understood" are being used to make important, life-altering (and in many cases, life-ruining) decisions for people in our community. 

It's time for radical solutions

We want our justice system to meet some definition of fairness. But we'll never know what fair means if we, the public, can't understand what our justice system is doing. From what we can see through the cracks, there are massive disparities in who gets cash bail for what charges. The life-ruining hammer of cash bail falls on poor people, where judges don’t even know who has the ability to pay.

And does bail make us safer? There's little evidence it does. Plenty of places have done away with cash bail, often reducing their average jail population by half in the process, with no measurable impact on safety.

Task forces, minor reforms, and attempts at change have failed, as disparities in Dane County have simply gotten worse. More task forces and more signalling for change without actually changing systems is not going to solve anything. Reform-focused committees studying "pre-trial release" or "repeat offenders" have no imagination; they assume the existing system of cash bail is necessary.

Let’s lay it on the line. We're choosing to jail people before they have been proven guilty. There's an even easier way to fix the resultant racial and class disparities: we can do away with cash bail, while working to ensure we don't build the newest Jim Crow and increase e-carceration. We can reduce the number of people in the supposedly-necessary giant new $225 million jail our leaders seem set on building, fix some major racial disparities, and save some taxpayer money to boot—money that we can spend on programs that actually help people.

In the April 7 meeting, chair of the pre-trial committee Judge McNamara commented on the unfairness of bail: "It’s all just very loose. [...] It’s not a good process in that way. Money in this whole business is an unpleasant feature in lots of ways." He went on to claim that "the legislature’s really kind of the decision maker" when it comes to bail. Now, we are not lawyers, but we can see our statutes, as written, seem to give judges entire control of giving bail or not, for misdemeanors or felonies. We’ll have to ask him why the legislature is the scapegoat here.

Judge McNamara went on to point out that Illinois and other jurisdictions are actively eliminating cash bail right now, "taking that whole set of questions out of the [process]."

Dane County judges could decide right now that cash bail is unfair, cruel, and racist. They could agree that it feeds a cycle of poverty and jail time, and we should decide not to use it any more. If they keep using it, we need to ask: Why?

As we log in to hear the next county board meeting, with some possible answers in hand, we hear the unsettling voice of the alien liaison again: "I've gotten some feedback explaining your choices to jail poor people pre-trial. Some of you still can’t imagine what’s wrong with the system, and I implore you to look deeper. Try to imagine a system that is more fair. It would be hard to imagine building a system that was less just. Next, I have some questions about those people living in tents in your park..."

A distorted bell rings out, as the facilitator interrupts the meeting. How are we going to explain ourselves? It’s time to learn more.

In the meantime, if you’d like to help get people out of the cages we have put them in pre-trial, people who our system supposedly considers "innocent until proven guilty"... There are people who may be held in jail on bail as low as $200 or $300, so please contribute to the Free the 350 Bail Fund. (If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a bail fund: Your money pays to get people out, then cycles back into the fund to free more people. We should Free Them All!)

If you or someone you know has experienced the unfairness of cash bail, call in and tell your story to the Dane County Jail Listener Hotline at 608-200-3096. Folks will forward your message to county board and committee meetings about the jail.

You can also join the conversation about prison abolition in general: the Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America (MADSA) Abolitionist Working Group meets every other Wednesday. Check our calendar. You don’t need to be a DSA member to come to these meetings. Come imagine what a world without jails looks like, together.

Photo credit: "'Just a bit high' -Bob Uecker" by Ken Mattison is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.

At the beginning of April, legions of people were sent scurrying in a panic to find that dusty radio they hadn’t used in ages. That panic wasn’t launched by the start of tornado season; it was because it was the start of baseball season.

Season openers generally don’t launch a panic unless you’re a New York Mets fan. But it wasn’t until that moment that many Milwaukee Brewers fans discovered they couldn’t watch their team on TV, making them just the latest would-be viewers left in the dark as the spats between TV networks and providers have clearly traveled from cable to streaming.

In 2019, Sinclair Broadcasting Group acquired the 21 regional Fox sports networks that included Fox Sports Wisconsin. FSW had been on most cable, satellite and streaming services and was previously where local sports fans could watch Brewers and Milwaukee Bucks games. This spring Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has a way of making everything it touches worse, rebranded FSW as Bally Sports Wisconsin and couldn’t reach an agreement with anyone covering the network except most cable providers, DirecTV and only one streaming service—AT&T TV—which with its sports package costs $84.99 a month. Streaming services are the only providers that aren’t shedding subscribers, but those subscribers are getting to experience all the things that made them flee cable and satellite.

Sports is an easy hostage for TV providers. It’s the only remaining consistent must-see money-making live TV. If you absolutely must watch that sportsball game, providers pretty much have you by the nose hairs to pay up and/or put together an Excel spreadsheet to see which service carries which channels for which sports. And it’s only going to get worse. God only knows where one might find the Olympics this summer if they actually happen. 

I would imagine there are a lot of sports fans like me who have simply waved the white flag. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Brewers fan and it’s pretty much what would be on in the evenings and definitely Sunday afternoons if I’m home. Baseball was the first sport I loved, my gateway sport, and I’ve come back around to it over the years. That’s not necessarily for its history or the inflated mythology and romanticism that surrounds it, but because I rather like a sport I can take a nap to.

That nap actually goes better with radio than TV anyway. The shift is a good reminder of what Brewers fans have known for, oh, about 50 years: Because of Bob Uecker, the games are way more fun on the radio than they are on TV. In Madison, they’re on WOZN, 1670 AM or 96.7 FM.

Baseball and radio already go together like pedal pubs and drunk bachelorettes. The announcers aren’t screaming all the time and drawing all over your television screen. You’re not stuck watching endless replays and there is never, ever a mention of a Cover-2 or a nickel package.

Beyond that, Uecker has entertained Brewers fans since 1971. He doesn’t work every game, and he doesn’t work every inning—hey, the guy is 87 years old. Most baseball announcers have the skill of talking about something else—a previous game, roster moves, details about a player—while calling the game—but Uecker long ago elevated that to an art form. A couple years ago I was listening in my car and was lucky to hear an exchange that went something like this:

Uecker: We’ve got a long homestand coming up, so I can finally get my garden planted. Curveball missed inside, ball 1.

Other guy: What are you planting?

Uecker: Fastball down the middle, strike 1. Well, I’ll plant some corn. Sometimes it grows nice and tall in my garden. High and outside, ball 2. And then I’m going to plant some jicama.

Other guy: Jicama? What the heck is jicama?

Uecker: Swing and a miss, strike 2. It’s Mexican. You can use it in salads. You can even make jicama fries. Just missed the outside corner, ball 3.

And it went on from there.

Uecker is a connection to an earlier time in baseball—when the sport was far more popular, when ballplayers were public figures even non-fans could name, when everyone listened on the radio. Sadly Uecker won’t be around forever, and a slice of Wisconsin entertainment will, like baseball’s popularity, fade away.

In the meantime I’ll chop up some jicama, toss it in a lovely salad, tune in to the Brewers on the radio, and listen to the musical sound of a ball on a bat and Uecker’s goofy stories.

I’m already looking forward to the nap.

This year’s Wisconsin Film Festival has managed to persevere embracing a virtual format. While the offerings are not as numerous, they are no less engaging. Viewers don’t have to worry about long lines or parking, as they are free to view their selections from the comfort and safety of home. Sure, a certain camaraderie is lacking now that we’re not standing in line and comparing notes or reminiscing about past festivals; but the good folks of the fest have once again curated a heavily stacked smorgasbord of cinematic delights (that are available through May 20). Keeping within the theme of Wisconsin’s Own is director Kristin Peterson’s unusual relationship drama, Ringolevio (2020).

Straight-laced Ada (Nicole Velasco Lockard) is an amateur entomologist. The opening close-ups of various insects introduce us to someone meticulous in character who errs on the side of orderliness. She’s taking a road trip with girlfriend Marissa (Meredith Johnston of Pet Names from WFF 2019) to a remote Wisconsin town to reunite with her three brothers who she hasn’t seen in quite some time. While Marissa tries to warn Ada that the sibling relationship is a bit unconventional, Ada is not prepared for the all-out level of weirdness.

Marissa’s three brothers—Ozzie (Joshua Koopman), Arthur (Cory Hardin), and Wren (Zachary Krueger)—make a jarring and excited first impression upon the girls’ arrival. And things go out of whack from that first meeting onward. Ozzie ends up grilling Ada on why they have not met her until now. But this has little to do with any of Ada’s decisions, as we slowly come to realize she is doing the very best she can to try and blend in with Marissa’s family.

For example, the titular “Ringolevio” is a childhood game the siblings play that involves two teams. One group has to chase and capture the other by placing a hula hoop-type object around them. Meaning, they can’t escape once they are captured. During the game, Ada tries to tag Marissa; and in the process Marissa unfortunately falls and badly injures her leg. Naturally, Ada feels horrible as every attempt she makes at fitting in seems to fail. Marissa and Ada have to sleep in bunk beds during the visit, which only adds to the already hyper-awkward situation.

Marissa’s brothers do not make their stay an easy one, as they all have bizarre habits and poor sense of boundaries. In one scene, one of the brothers runs in to the restroom as Ada uses the shower, and he just tells her to “do what she needs to do” while he’s in there. Ada is clearly trying to take this all in stride so she can be supportive and present for her girlfriend. As the situation begins to wear on her, however, it becomes apparent that the brothers’ strange antics have only aggravated the cracks already present in the veneer of the relationship. Marissa does not always feel understood, and this was an issue prior to their dating. Any attempt Ada makes to connect to Marissa pushes her further away. Their odd couple dynamic is delicate and intense all at once.

If anyone has family in a remote Wisconsin town, an element of this weirdness may be somewhat relatable, as long-distance visits can often bring out deeper family issues. Kristin Peterson does a commendable job directing this film, which is aided by Dana Shihadah’s glowing cinematography style that captures beautiful golden hues and hushed tones of rural Wisconsin’s natural earthiness. At a breezy 80 minutes, Ringolevio is a nice slice of Wisconsin life that makes a good addition to the 2021 festival lineup.

Header image: Detail of T.L. Luke’s poster for the 2021 Madison Print and Resist Zinefest, which shows masked critters holding zines and retrieving printed pages from a risograph machine.

On Saturday, May 22, the Madison Print and Resist Zinefest is coming back in a different format as a citywide event spread out among multiple locations. After a year of protests and a global health, economic, and social crisis, the event will resume and re-adjust its celebration of varied, innovative, and often politically radical print media.

The festival took on its current form in 2013, growing out of a long-running series of local zine fests. From 2014 to 2019 (with the exception of 2016), Print and Resist consisted of a day-long event at the Central Library where zinemakers, printmakers, and artists gathered to sell their work and participate in workshops and demonstrations. The 2020 event was initially scheduled for March 18, just in time for the COVID pandemic to force its cancellation.

This year the festival continues under the organization of arts nonprofits Communication and ArtWorking, the Madison Public Library’s Bubbler program, and the design company UnderBelly. (Full disclosure: Communication is Tone Madison's non-profit partner organization.) 

The organizers came up with the solution of changing the festival’s format and holding it at locations that include the spaces of Communication, ArtWorking, Garver Feed Mill, and Giant Jones Brewing Company. The folks behind Print and Resist see art, printmaking, and zines as a foundation to building community and keeping people politically engaged. That spirit has helped them push through the challenges of developing a safer, more dispersed setup for the event. 

“Being able to spread out and feature different venues around town seemed like an opportunity to do a similar thing, just a little bit more safely and with a little bit more of control,” says Bubbler Program Assistant Carlee Latimer, who is the Madison Public Library Bubbler Program Assistant and one of the organizing festival members of the festival. 

“That way we can also make sure that we can have a little bit more grip on what’s happening in the space, and how we want people to move through the space,” says Latimer.

Jennifer Bastian, director of Communication and one of the main organizing team members of the festival, says having the zinefest in-person would not have been something she dreamt as feasible or possible a year ago.  

“We’re trying to do things at a few locations and not have the vendors present, but have their work there so that we can still promote them and share their work,” Bastian says. “The way that we’re handling it this year is in the spirit of giving people access and promoting people who are either marginalized or don’t have access to get their work out there.”

Everyone involved had to do a lot of brainstorming and constantly seek ways to capture some of the excitement of what is usually a bustling event with dozens of vendors all in one space.

Olivia Wisden, co-founder and CEO of the Milwaukee-based UnderBelly, says it all started out with basic questions that arose in the middle of the pandemic.

“Before COVID the conversations weren’t much around: how do we do this safely? We were definitely trying to be creative, bring new things, and add more value to our vendors,” Wisden says. “There was never this question about: what is the format? What is the formula of Print and Resist?” 

But beyond the logistics, organizers also had to reflect on what the “print and resist” concept means in the current context we’re living in.

“Drawing, painting, and printing, these are all things that anyone can do and everyone should be able to do,” Bastian says. “That’s the spirit of Print and Resist: it’s giving everyone the most access to making art, making printed materials, and getting it out into the world.”

And this reflection is part of the philosophy that ArtWorking, one of the organizing members of the festival and a nonprofit that works with artists with disabilities, wants to uphold while helping with the organization of the event. Several of ArtWorking’s artists and instructors created zines and other works that will be on display at Print and Resist.

“We’re deeply centered on people getting to say what they want to say and not being censored or restricted in any way,” says Laura Falkenberg, assistant director at ArtWorking.

“One of the artists that I was working with is putting together a zine of her writing over the year, and she had the best quote,” Falkenberg says. “She’s non-verbal, but she typed it to me. She said: ‘promise you will not quell my voice,’ and that sits in my head: do not dampen what I have to say.”

Falkenberg believes it is crucial that people in this political moment can express themselves while also being receptive to the lived experiences of others.

 “It’s even more important having artists have a way to make income, and to have a community. So much of Print and Resist is largely a community getting together and sharing. That’s even more important after this year,” Falkenberg says.

Community is also an important element of zinemaking and printmaking for Ash Armenta, a UW-Madison printmaking MFA student and co-president of the university’s Fresh Hot Press club.

“We’re looking forward to events like Print and Resist where we can be together again, which is a huge part of printmaking: the community aspect of it. Printmakers always make work in communal spaces,” says Armenta.

Armenta, along with the rest of the members of Fresh Hot Press, will be participating in the festival by selling their prints and doing live printing at Giant Jones’ brewery and currently dormant taproom at 931 E. Main St..

“We’re curating the work from our Fresh Hot Press members that have some tone of protest or some underlying feeling of resistance,” Armenta says. “Print [and Resist] has protest as a really deep underlying tone.”

And to Bastian, simply holding the event feels like an act of resistance. 

“Doing this fest is resisting being beaten down. It is resisting the desire to slip into being exhausted, maligned, or languishing depression,” Bastian says. “You can’t always avoid those things, but the balm for it is to be with community and push back on what is trying to keep us apart or down.”

Cameron Davis describes the opening song on her latest album as an internalized mass. “The Fever Room” is a progressive, jazz-laced metal dirge in which Davis brings herself to the altar in search of the self.

Davis is the sole member of Cicada The Burrower, a death-metal project that dives into self-discovery, healing, and trauma on the newly released Corpseflower. The album is a followup from Cicada’s dark and sludgy 2017 post-metal album The Great Nothing. Corpseflower was released through Davis’ Blue Bedroom Records on April 23. 

“I realized I was transgender around the release of The Great Nothing,” says Davis.

Davis says that around the end of 2017, she felt like she needed to make meaningful life changes or she would kill herself. The last three years or so have been a “joyless grind” for Davis, in which she has wrestled with gender, mental illness, and self-improvement, with the occasional fleeting moments of gentle bliss and catharsis.

All this turmoil is buried deep within Corpseflower. The album opens with spinning jazz guitars and syncopated drumming, which carry listeners through a lyrical procession of lit candles, slit wrists, coughing choirs, and an ominous swaying thurible. Davis switches between piercing screams and soft chanting, one of many sharp binaries that define the sound of the record. 

For all of its sonic variety, the album has enough cohesion that it can feel like a single, loosely continuous song. “The Fever Room,” elongated post-metal followup “Glamour,” and “Where Old Crystals Grow,” build complementary themes around threads of slightly out-of-tune and shimmering jazz guitars. 

The record’s often bright sound and focus on natural imagery is a departure from The Great Nothing. The intervening years of self-discovery and change helped to drive that musical evolution. 

“Nature, for me, represents a kind of inalienable truth and mental illness is an unreliable narrator,” says Davis.

On “Where Old Crystals Grow,” Davis’ jazz riffs expand into a more encompassing, atmospheric post-rock sound. Davis’ vocals carry a lot of weight in this song, with layered deep vocals, gruff choruses, and sharp screams trekking through an underlying dark mire. The lyrics point to a sort of patient hope that comes with years of healing:

“I'll bloom like a flower / when I open up / When I say what I am / where the sun shines aloft.”

From there, the album moves into what feels like a second chapter on “Psilocybin Death Spiral,” which uses the same drum pattern as the previous track, but builds on more straightforward, chugging guitars. 

Davis has been self-recording and releasing music since the early aughts. Throughout the writing process—especially when it comes to the complex genre of progressive metal and the more harmonic and bright focus of this album—Davis says she’ll write a drum pattern she likes, loop it, and improvise guitars until the song emerges.

“It's difficult to write a song all at once, but breaking a piece of music up into its core elements makes the process a lot more manageable,” says Davis. 

The prolonged isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted many artists to look inward and start recording at home. Davis, however, has been mastering this practice for years. Lockdown allowed her to revisit old, unfinished drafts and hone in on composition.

On the 11-minute-long eponymous closing song, Davis wields the power of composition with a firm grip. “Corpseflower” is an instrumental blend of sharp, plucking lead guitars, wailing shadowy chugging, and momentous drumming. The layers of this barnburner harken back to the structure and themes of the previous four tracks, but Davis focuses the ending few minutes on nurturing a brightness to cut through the mud. 

Davis defines a “corpseflower” as a transgender person stuck between the moment they realize what they are and medical transition. Currently she is continuing the practice of self-discovery and care, with multiple other Blue Bedroom Records albums planned for later this year. 

“Though I started my medical transition a few months ago, in many ways, I am still a ‘corpseflower,’’' says Davis. “There’s much more left in life for me to discover.”

Witness Underground (2021) is largely set in the past, but its arrival is a timely one. Scott Homan’s documentary—screening virtually as part of the 2021 Wisconsin Film Festival—centers on a group of ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses who all played a role in developing Nuclear Gopher, a record label and community for indie-minded creatives. Eric Elvendahl, Cindy Elvendahl, James Zimmerman, and Chad Rhiger were among those Nuclear Gopher attracted. All of them would gain a level of notoriety for playing in various indie-punk bands in Minnesota, raising more than a few eyebrows among the Jehovah’s Witness community in the process. Ryan Sutter, the community’s founder and a hyper-involved musician, was the head of the operation. When Nuclear Gopher started garnering attention during its mid-’90s to early 2000s growth period, all of them were Jehovah’s Witnesses. None of them are now.

Homan meticulously tracks the arc of each central figure with remarkable clarity, as their journeys mirror one another. All of them start as upstanding Witnesses before becoming controversial figures as emergent creatives. Ultimately, they all make the extraordinarily difficult decision to upend their lives by excommunicating themselves from what they see (and Homan sees) as a cult. While the Elvendahls (wife and husband Cindy and Eric), Zimmerman, and Rhiger are granted considerable screen time, Sutter is Witness Underground’s charismatic anchor, mirroring the real-life dynamic central to Nuclear Gopher.

Sutter also gets the documentary's most cathartic and heartrending moments. Homan grants his Darwin-aided, ecosystem-driven epiphany with rousing post-rock and lets the more emotionally resonant moments breathe. When Sutter leaves the JWs, he winds up facing down a run of exceptionally hard events: the abrupt dissolution of his marriage, being disowned by his father, and the unexpected loss of his brother, which leads to Sutter being demonstrably shunned at his funeral. During these scenes, the score is dialed down to an ambient hum or removed entirely, allowing the gravity of those moments to take hold. Here, Witness Underground sheds its playful aesthetics to underscore the crushing reality of the situation. It’s as startling as it is effective.

Witness Underground’s strongest ancillary point is its understanding and respect of music. Throughout the documentary, the most frequently heard songs are from the projects of its subjects. Roughly a dozen Nuclear Gopher-affiliated projects make their way onto the soundtrack, with the earlier works highlighted by Kloey—a band who would’ve slotted in neatly alongside the first wave of Riot Grrrl acts—and the expansive post-rock of Daytrip. When Witness Underground reveals that several of the film’s core subjects reunited to form (and later expand) HighTV, our understanding of the interior lives of this group makes the moment feel that much more significant. For the people of this film, music wasn’t just an outlet; it was a savior. Witness Underground’s respect for that level of influence strengthens its margins and helps elevate the film from a strong multipurpose study to an essential one.

Frequently searing and undeniably confrontational, Witness Underground also doubles as a paean to context, fitting neatly into a long tradition of Wisconsin Film Festival titles that act as subtle analogies for contemporary political discord. (See: Deerskin (WFF 2020)’s take on abuse of arbitrary power, Hail Satan? (WFF 2019)’s ode to challenging traditionalism, or Bugsy Malone (WFF 2012)’s winking depiction of maturity in authoritative figures, for example.) The willfully disingenuous tactics increasingly prevalent among Wisconsin’s extremist right wing sect and mirrored within the “foundational literature” central to the beliefs of Jehovah’s Witnesses is unavoidable. While the pain of recognizing this parallel can’t quite compare with the traumatic ordeals that being a Jehovah’s Witness imparted on Witness Underground’s cast, there’s still a sense that the ongoing fight for a more accepting world is far from over.

Preceding Witness Underground in the Wisconsin Film Festival program is Jonny Zeller’s SCARS (2019), a short narrative film inspired by a Reddit prompt that is determined to interrogate how we view truth. While there’s room for nuanced comedy and drama, SCARS consistently struggles to hit those notes. The scant eighteen-minute running time doesn’t allow Zeller to lay the groundwork for a compelling character study, leaving the film with a fatal flaw. While it does eventually work its way to a cogent and even somewhat moving conclusion, the weight of the events fall flat, because the central characters are largely half-formed.

Despite the relative lack of strong character writing, Jeremy Shada—whose voice some may recognize as Finn from TV’s Adventure Time—delivers a compelling performance as Private Deets, a young man of privilege prone to hostility, especially when his entitlement is challenged. Deets is one of a small handful of new recruits of a national military that exempts “pures.” In the world of SCARS, every time a person lies, a scar appears somewhere on their body. When the lie is repeated, the scar reopens and worsens the resulting scab. Those who have achieved “purity” get to navigate life with unblemished skin.

Of course, this leads to a cheat via “slick,” which allows the wealthiest citizens to cover over their scars to appear pure. Why that isn’t construed as a lie is never explained, leaving one to wonder what constitutes a lie in Zeller’s world. Vocalization? It’s never made explicit. Slick does ultimately provide the film with one of its best moments in a “bikini body” ad that doubles as a funny, cutting introduction to the film’s core concepts. Shada’s Deets tries to skirt military duty by way of slick and is inevitably ousted. Turns out that scar-covering material is no match for military-grade equipment built to detect it.

While SCARS never finds stable footing, the plot solidifies about a quarter of the way into the film. After a quick adjustment period, Deets and his fellow new recruits discover that “Master Sergeant,” a man who has survived five tours without a scratch, has a massive scar along the length of his back. Zeller is quick to focus on this new mystery, leaving his characters to speculate at the origin of the scar, trusting their body language to round out their characters’ identities to scattershot results. The film concludes with the abrupt reveal of this particular lie. The mystery is resolved as quickly as it was introduced, raising questions about the nature of how we perceive honesty. Ultimately, even while feeling rushed, this finale sends SCARS off on a strong note but doesn’t totally absolve the film of its blemishes.

I did not set out to draw an unflattering portrait of former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin. It just sort of happened, during a fast-paced online drawing workshop that illustrator Rachal Duggan hosted last week to benefit Tone Madison. Rachal didn't give us a name up front, but instead gave us descriptions of facial features, and workshop participants began putting it together, police-sketch style. I had my suspicions that Rachal was describing our beloved Soggy, but was not certain until she told us to draw that mustache, in all its salt-and-pepper virility. 

From there, our wonderful Madison Twitter friends assimilated this upsetting image into some very local-specific discourse, suggesting that we pair it with the words "Save State Street"—a cry that recurs in Madison throughout the ages, usually associated with some gimmick or other. Maybe it makes sense, maybe it doesn't, but it's bound to start a conversation or two. 

We are now selling the shirt through Bonfire as our spring 2021 fundraising drive continues. We need at least 50 orders to get these printed, and as of Monday morning we are getting close. 

We are roughly $400 away from meeting our match goal of $4,000 as of Monday morning and we're deeply grateful to those who've supported us so far. If you are or become a Tone Madison Sustainer at the $25 per month level, email me with your shipping info and size and color preference and I'll send you one.

We have it on good authority that Soglin's favorite color is taupe. In honor of that, this is available as a cream-colored premium tee (plain white is also available). Again, profits from these sales will support Tone Madison's ongoing efforts to publish fiercely independent journalism about culture and politics in Madison, and all who wear this shirt are guaranteed to have a hot Soggy summer.

Header photo: A white flag with the words "Land Back" flipped off City officials that arrived the morning of May 10 to enforce an eviction order at the Reindahl Park homeless encampment. Following community protests, Madison's Parks Superintendent recently indicated that there is no plan to forcibly remove those remaining at Reindahl, although some residents have already left the encampment. Photos by Oona Mackesey-Green.

When the City of Madison issued an eviction notice for a homeless encampment at the far East Side's Reindahl Park in April, it was both familiar and frustrating to resident James DeGray. DeGray moved to Reindahl after the City closed down an encampment at McPike Park in late February, evicting the residents of what people had dubbed "Tent City." He spent two weeks contacting organizations and individuals, trying to confirm whether he could move to Reindahl, a City-approved temporary permissible encampment (TPE) site. "I didn't want to move to this park if they thought, thought, I might have reason to get kicked out of here within six months, because I'm trying to get stable to start my own business," says DeGray.

The City of Madison moved forward with the eviction despite resistance from some Alders, community advocates, and residents at the encampment. Revoking approval for camping at Reindahl leaves a Starkweather Creek site off of Milwaukee Street—a site that advocates have described as inadequate and inaccessible—as the only City-approved TPE, a bureaucratic designation officials have sparingly used to accommodate camps of homeless people. DeGray and others who have chosen to stay at Reindahl have not been forced to leave yet, and it is uncertain how or when the City will enforce the eviction order. In a recent update, the Madison Parks Superintendent said there is no plan to forcibly remove campers from the park.

The order took effect May 10, nearly a year to the day after Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway's emergency order authorizing temporary encampments in accordance with ongoing CDC guidelines. The emergency order included contingencies, though. The Mayor retained the ability to revoke approval of any TPE for various reasons, including opposition from neighbors or if the encampment makes the site unavailable or unsafe for the area's "intended public uses." Less than a week earlier, the Madison Common Council voted down a proposed homeless shelter barely a mile away from Reindahl Park, in part in response to complaints from neighboring homeowners and businesses. The Mayor's office issued a brief but pointed statement criticizing the Council vote. But complaints and requests from neighbors were also justifications used to shut down the Reindahl encampment.

The encampment is spread along a short stretch of the bike path through Reindahl Park, with tents spaced apart from each other in the shade and meager privacy offered by a grove of trees. Even with community gardens, a basketball court, tennis court, soccer fields, cricket field, splash park, playground, and shelter, the 90-acre park still feels spacious.

People bike and jog through the park regularly, DeGray says. There have also been at least three people in the neighborhood who approached him directly to welcome him. "I don't understand where the pushback is except from the City," says DeGray. "If there's a bunch of people who are annoyed, please show me who they are so maybe I can make things right with them."

Jim O'Keefe, Director of Madison's Community Development Division, said during a phone interview, "The idea here is to be able to reactivate that park and resume the programming that has been a mainstay of that park." O'Keefe cited the bike path, community garden, and a park shelter a short distance from the encampment that is already receiving requests for graduation parties and family reunions. 

Pushback from Alders and grassroots activists

A small group gathered at Reindahl Park on Sunday, May 9—the day before the eviction was scheduled—to make signs in protest. The sign-making event was public, but most of those who turned up had been volunteering at the encampment and other sites for weeks, months or years.

Evy Gildrie-Voyles got connected to volunteering at the encampment through a friend.  Gildrie-Voyles showed up that afternoon to make a sign. It was Mother's Day, Gildrie-Voyles pointed out, while criticizing the argument that the encampment prevents families from using the park. "That kind of excuse makes me angry," said Gildrie-Voyles. "It's using families to hurt other people, and I resent that. My kids can handle seeing an encampment. There's nothing dangerous here." 

Alder Juliana Bennett, who represents downtown District 8, arrived at the sign-making event bearing two boxes of pizza. At the Common Council's last meeting, on May 4, Bennett introduced a resolution to continue authorizing the use of public parks as TPEs and to prohibit the eviction of the encampment at Reindahl. The resolution is on the Council's May 18 agenda.

As of Tuesday, May 11, O'Keefe did not anticipate the resolution changing the City's eviction at Reindahl, though. O'Keefe questioned whether the Council had authority to authorize TPEs or to prohibit their closure. "The foundation for the temporary permissible encampments exists within a mayoral executive order that was issued last year," says O'Keefe. "It's not at all clear to me what effect this resolution would have."

In a recent phone interview, Bennett said that there would be some changes to the resolution's language. "I will be calling for staff to find or identify two to three more permissible locations for encampments that can provide a more sustainable solution in the long term," Bennett says. Bennett pointed to the Mayor's power to act on this issue: "The Mayor has the authority to do more for homeless people than is already being done. I would really call on Mayor Satya to take further action to help our community members find more options other than what are already presented."

What next steps the City might take towards eviction at Reindahl are still uncertain. "We're trying to gain the cooperation of the few remaining campers there," O'Keefe says. The day before the eviction order was to take effect, someone living in the encampment died of an overdose. "There was a tragedy over the weekend. We want to give people an opportunity to deal with that and don’t want to be heavy-handed," says O'Keefe.

The loss of a community member to an overdose two days before the eviction went into effect didn't surprise DeGray. "That sort of thing is typical when you try to evict people who already have nothing," he says. "People decide to take what they've got and go and buy as much alcohol or whatever it is and drink themselves to death or put themselves in the hospital."

The City needs to listen, says Red, a community member who has been involved with outreach to unhoused people since 2011. "And treat people as people, not homeless. Not chronically homeless. They're a person. They're a human being. They too deserve a way of life. And with our capitalistic ways, there is absolutely no way that that's going to happen, unless we start changing things."

"It's ghoulish" 

Another sign made during the May 9 event read: "One piece of parkland out of all this. Your inconvenience during times like these does not warrant or justify depriving people of place or peace."

"The notion that anybody would be kicked out of the semblance of a home that they have built for themselves in this pandemic, by virtue of, so someone can frolic in the fucking grass, I mean, it's ghoulish," says Rusty, another community member who showed up to Reindahl during the sign-making event. Most of the community members at the event that afternoon were there as individuals and chose to share only a first name, including Rusty.

"The City is continuing to try to hide the fact that they have a chronic homeless issue in the Dane County and Madison area. And they keep moving people to move people so it's not an eyesore. And we've lost people to that," says Red. 

The remaining City-approved TPE at Starkweather Park, where residents at Reindahl are being asked to move, is a narrow plot of land between a family farm and an Amazon distribution center on Milwaukee Street. To reach it, you have to walk, bike or drive down Milwaukee Street—there is no sidewalk—or cut through the Amazon parking lot. The City installed a gravel access road but blocked the entrance, preventing vehicles from accessing the site. 

It's easy to believe that the site could have been chosen to keep an encampment invisible. In contrast to Reindahl and McPike Parks, the tents at Starkweather are entirely hidden from public view. The only place to camp along the access road is on high ground among trees and undergrowth. A portable toilet and handwashing station stand solitary at the end of the gravel road. There is no easily spotted communal area, as there is at Reindahl. There is no set-up for service providers and volunteers to gather with residents or drop-off donations. 

"It's really frustrating that this is being proposed as a solution because it's not a solution, it's an insult," says Bennett.

"It's not a park. It's just an overgrown piece of land. It's secluded, there's no lighting. It's dangerous," says Alder Yannette Figueroa Cole, who represents District 10 on Madison's West Side, in a recent phone interview. Figueroa Cole stopped by the Reindahl Park encampment on May 9. Figueroa Cole was prepared to support the move to the Starkweather Creek location until seeing the site firsthand.

"It’s not that nice there," says Ulysses Williams, Co-Chair of the City-County Homeless Issues Committee. "The community here, they’re self-governed. If there’s a problem, they’ll handle it. They have a community [culture]. Here, they’ll help each other. At Starkweather Creek, it’s everyone for himself."

Dispersing the encampment at Reindahl will not only break up the community, but will damage residents' trust and relationships with service providers as well, says Figueroa Cole: "Building trust with this community doesn't take a day or two days, sometimes it takes years."

O'Keefe says the City plans to keep the Starkweather site open with handwashing stations, trash receptacles, and portable toilets until October 31. "We’re trying to provide some stability and predictability with respect to that location using that October 31 date," says O'Keefe. 

But there is a possibility that the Starkweather site could also be shut down before October. "If the behaviors of people who are using the facility became disruptive or illegal," says O'Keefe, "then we may revisit that issue." 

The City currently has no plans for an authorized encampment over the winter. 

Permanently temporary

"I want to push back on the notion that the City actively moved people from McPike to Reindahl and now are asking them to leave again just a short time later," says O’Keefe. "We probably didn’t do a good enough job of conveying to outreach staff that they should not encourage people to move to Reindahl, because I think it was becoming clear to us even in those earlier months this year that the situation at Reindahl would also be changing." O'Keefe says there were already plans from the Madison Parks Department to "reactivate" that park, and growing impatience from other park users. 

"The whole notion of temporary permissible encampments was really borne out of the pandemic," says O'Keefe. The CDC recommended (and continues to recommend) avoiding disrupting encampments, since the disruption could potentially increase the spread of COVID-19. But the need for sanctioned encampments has waned as vaccination rates increase, says O'Keefe: "This was never intended to be an ongoing or a permanent solution. Or a strategy that the City would have this enduring support for camping outdoors."

O'Keefe expressed a concern that establishing a permanent encampment might encourage people to live outdoors rather than using alternatives, like shelters. And while O'Keefe noted that overnight shelters have become more accessible during the pandemic as restrictions related to sobriety requirements and the number of days someone can stay overnight have been loosened or lifted, shelters are still not an option that works for everyone, or the option that they would choose. 

DeGray worries about potential exposure to COVID-19 in shelters, among other concerns. "I have PTSD," says DeGray. "I don't like confined spaces especially with a lot of other people. I like sunshine, grass, and trees. I'd rather bird poop than an angry neighbor that I can't get rid of."

The situation highlights Madison’s struggle to support unhoused people and address the city's lack of affordable housing. Homelessness has increased during the pandemic while housing prices continue to skyrocket. Despite a federal eviction moratorium that is now under threat, evictions in Wisconsin have continued throughout the pandemic. 

And systemic housing issues intersect with racism in Madison with devastating results. There is a long history of racism in Madison when it comes to housing access. In 2017, Madison's Biennial Housing Report found that an individual in a family was 27 times more likely to be homeless if Black rather than white, 15 times more likely if American Indian, 10 times more likely if multiracial and seven times more likely if Hispanic/Latino.

Recently, Dane County launched a regional housing study and Mayor Rhodes-Conway announced a "Housing Forward" plan to address Madison's housing crisis. But these issues are systemic, and those most impacted do not always reap long-term benefits of proposed solutions. Olivia Williams, Executive Director of Madison Area Community Land Trust, recently wrote for Tone Madison that an "upzoning" proposal included in the City's plan could potentially hurt low-income renters. 

The Capital Times described a "screaming confrontation" between homeless advocates and City staff at Reindahl Park the morning that the eviction order was to take effect. Advocates expressed anger and frustration, wrote Cap Times reporter Nicholas Garton, that despite the funding poured into organizations and services, there is still not enough affordable housing, and—also noting Mayor Rhodes-Conway's absence that morning—that volunteers continue to be the ones showing up to support people at encampments like Reindahl. 

While the City and County scramble to find imperfect solutions to an urgent problem, it is people struggling to find or keep housing that are caught in the middle. 

DeGray says that he wants people to know "That in general, I feel the entire way this [eviction] is being approached is wrong, because they're trying to make it illegal to be a person in public. They're trying to make it where it's somehow unlawful, criminal of you to be in public, just because you have nowhere to go."

Housing is the long-term solution, says Figueroa Cole. Figueroa Cole has been volunteering at downtown homeless resource center The Beacon since it opened, and said that she did plenty of intakes with people who had jobs but couldn't afford housing. "One of the things that really bothered me about the shelter idea was to have a bigger shelter," says Figueroa Cole. "The goal here should not be to make a bigger shelter. The goal here should be not to have people in shelters. Why should we make something bigger and better when it's something we want less of?" The focus should be getting people out of those situations and keeping them housed. The federal funding available in response to COVID-19 is a chance to invest in long term solutions, says Figueroa Cole.

DeGray also brought up the resources spent on unhoused people. "The money is getting spent, it's just not getting spent on the right things," says DeGray. Although there are plenty of rental assistance programs, very few of them will help you purchase a home, says DeGray, and the few that will help with mortgage assistance only step in once you're already in a financial crisis. The system is not set up to help those like DeGray, who might be interested in homeownership but are unable to access it.

The business that DeGray has been working on for the last two years involves building tiny houses. But DeGray was met by skepticism when he mentioned his business plan to other people living in encampments. They were interested in housing, but didn't trust that they wouldn't have to give up rights to get it. "They don't want another program. They feel burned out, everyone has abandoned them, whatever," says DeGray. "That's a big part of why a lot of us are out here. We want to do our thing and we don't want a bunch of other crazy crap."

What's next at Reindahl

The City-County Homeless Issues Committee meets this Monday, May 17. The agenda includes TPE updates from Madison's Community Development Division as well as Bennett's resolution to prohibit the eviction at Reindahl. At its last meeting May 3, the committee voted unanimously to request that the Mayor extend the closing of Reindahl by at least 30 days. The request went unheeded. Co-chair Ulysses Williams noted that "All [the committee] can do is advise. That's all we can do. We just don't have any kind of power."

Figueroa Cole expressed appreciation for the City staff that have been working on this issue. "But for the City as a whole," says Figueroa Cole, "we shouldn't be patting ourselves on the back for how much we've done for this population. The only reason we're doing this is because the pandemic is forcing this issue to the top of the list, but this issue has always been there. It's just never been prioritized, it has always been taken care of by nonprofits."

We're talking about 10 people at Reindahl Park, says Figueroa Cole, out of Madison's population of about 250,000. "What does that say of us as a city that we cannot fix that small number? We can't impact that small number of lives and make it better. If we were to focus on lifting these people up, by doing so we'd destress so many other agencies. The police, neighborhoods, so many other nonprofit organizations." That would in turn free up resources, says Figueroa Cole. "It would impact all of us in a positive way if we just manage the way that we respond to the people that need us the most. Look at the numbers and ask yourself really, why can't we make this work?"

In a Facebook post, Community Action Against Reindahl Eviction asked people to contact the City-County Homeless Issues Committee (cchic@cityofmadison.com) and Common Council (allalders@cityofmadison.com) in support of Bennett's resolution.

Want to help? Red noted that it's best to ask what's needed, rather than making assumptions and dropping off food or clothing that might not be wanted. Here are a few local groups that accept donations: Friends of State Street Family, The Beacon, Occupy Madison, Catalyst for Change.

Illustration by Shaysa Sidebottom.

CW and note: This letter contains descriptions of sexual harassment, violence, and abuse. I do not speak for everyone in every restaurant, but to my experience in the Madison restaurant scene. I do not speak for my former co-workers and opinions around this subject will vary. I hope that by sharing my experience and offering a call to action that others will feel empowered to do so in ways that work for them.

I move through my city and I don’t think I see it the way some people do. At least definitely not the rich people who live here do. I am sure of it. Or, I don’t see it the way academic people or the heady tech people do, or people who haven’t had to work in restaurants. I don’t see the glimmering lights or the romance of new couples holding hands as they walk to Graze. I don’t see the delightfulness in coupe glasses or the neatness of a folded napkin. I am never mad about the tiny speck I can’t identify on my plate. I don’t look at the Capitol after a very expensive meal on the Square and think, "Wow, I live here! This city is mine." In fact, as time goes on, it becomes more and more apparent that this city is not for anyone who lives below a certain annual income level.

I started my nearly 14 years in the service industry at a hibachi restaurant when I was only 17 years old. I worked there every weekend through college, coming home from art school in Milwaukee, just to make an unreasonable amount of rent money very quickly. I smelled of grill smoke and turpentine the whole time. After college, I returned to Madison and worked at a pizza place, where I served and managed for a few years. I also managed a few years at a sushi restaurant. I hosted and served and did some very light management at Merchant for the better half of seven years. 

In 2018, I applied for and received a job outside of restaurant work: a UW-Madison marketing position. It was a blessing at the time, but despite that blessing, I kept hosting at Merchant, because, well, I liked hosting. I loved Merchant. I loved being in a restaurant. It was all I really knew.

When I started working in an academic setting I was on edge constantly. I had to be told to relax at one point, or that I could relax, because I was so concerned I was not making the most of my time. I would stress about getting to work late. When I was there and I didn’t have anything to do, I would panic. I had this mentality of there is always something to do. My boss, who may not remember, told me that sometimes there is nothing to do. I could use that time for professional development. A concept I had never heard of. I don’t work for UW-Madison any longer, but it took me a year to undo the conditioned behavior I had learned at restaurants. If you work in a restaurant where people care, then you are constantly moving, constantly doing something, and the risk of being yelled at is very high.

All that being said, let me tell you why I am poorly conditioned to respond in certain ways to work environments. Or rather, let me tell you what I saw when I was knee-deep in a two-hour wait list that ended with an adult White man yelling at me in front of his children because I didn’t have their table ready (not a one-time occurrence, at all). 

It isn’t private knowledge to restaurant workers that restaurants are very stressful and often toxic places to work. It might be private knowledge to the man who comes in with his three business partners and demands that we, the servers, know exactly what they want without them even telling us. But it isn’t private to us. What is also not private knowledge to us is that our restaurant owners—much like the rich patrons who ignore us when we ask, “how is everything?”—are culpable in the culture that is created. 

Many of the restaurant owners you know are the rich people who go out to eat in Madison. Many of them believe they are, you know, like their employees: working for the same reasons, passionate about culinary practices, and excited about food and alcohol. The difference is, a good chunk of restaurant owners go home at night to their families or out with their friends to eat. They take home a profit without ever being yelled at by an angry mother who says she spends thousands of dollars a year at your restaurant and it’s absurd you don’t have a table available for her to reserve one week before UW-Madison graduation.

That’s not to say there aren’t restaurant owners busting ass in this city. In fact, I know there are. I can think of a list off the top of my head of some amazing, hard working, wonderful, in-the-kitchen and on-the-floor owners who are doing their best to also make ends meet while doing something they are passionate about. I know that some owners, even very wealthy ones, do stay late and work very hard on their businesses. But I also know that those owners who work closely with their staff also get wrapped up in the culture of power plays, addiction, late nights, verbal abuse, and coercion. 

I’ve had restaurant owners punch walls in front of me, throw silverware, become uncontrollably angry, and even swear at me an inch from my face. I’ve seen owners call out employees at all staff meetings for petty mistakes, ask employees who they think should be fired, and show up drunk to the middle of a brunch shift just to disrupt it and put the staff on edge. I have seen managers do the same things, because when an owner does it, a manager can get away with it. Right? And when the managers become chummy with staff, then the staff can get away with it, too. Right? Then at the staff holiday party we will all get drunk together, maybe stay out late at someone’s house, reconcile for an evening, and bond over our shared hatred for the people profiting off of our work. Then in the morning it starts all over again.

I have seen the problem. I have been the problem. I have loved the problem. Sitting at the bar with all-you-can-drink whiskey, a free cocktail, and waiting until everyone gets off work. I’ve taken home tap beer in to-go cups, agreed not to say we stayed late at the restaurant drinking, and I’ve been solicited for oral sex by a drunk co-manager while locked in their car. I’ve had a co-worker sit too close to me at the bar and place my hand on his erect penis, where no one could see. I was once cornered in the office at one restaurant by a coworker who was off-shift and drunk. He grabbed my face and kissed me, suggesting we close the door. I had once been offered by another male coworker to join him in the back hallway after a shift. I snuck out the back door instead. I recall a time when I was serving with two other servers who were in a personal conflict. They were arguing loudly while running plates of hot food and one of them turned to the other and said, “why don’t you go kill yourself,” in the middle of a busy dinner shift. I am certain, with great heartache, that someone I have worked with can pull a hurtful memory of me from their mind and feel just as terrible as I do recalling my own memories.

The one of two times I broke my no-coworker rule and dated a chef, he ended up being fired for threatening to kill the head chef and then proceeded to show up at the restaurant uninvited. He would threaten to hurt himself and me. When things got THAT serious, as if the other things that happened to me were not serious, I had support from my managers. To be honest, there is a lot more. A lot that I never reported, because it was easier not to. You can imagine how horrible it is to hear that a person in a powerful position, such as owning a restaurant, has been abusive to people in their immediate circles. It feels as though we hear it time and time again. 

I write this having recently heard another case of abuse from a restaurant owner. Merchant co-founder Patrick Sweeney currently faces criminal charges in a domestic abuse and stalking case and is "stepping down" from his restaurant group, Rule No. One Hospitality. I don’t feel at liberty to speak specifically to on-going legal issues or Sweeney's behavior, or to offer you, my beloved reader, more than is necessary. What I will say is that it isn’t just this one person who owns a restaurant who has caused harm. There are more that we know about and don’t know about yet. It isn’t just restaurant owners. It’s management, too. A 2018 Capital Times story in which I'm quoted documented a range of abuse and harassment in Madison's celebrated restaurant industry.

I shake as I write this because the body keeps the score. It doesn’t forget unwelcomed hands, verbal threats, the sound of a plate smashing on the ground, or the sound of an adult man screaming from the kitchen. The body also knows that it doesn’t stop until someone makes it stop. That unless the abuser is held accountable, they will keep coming back for more. 

The body remembers all of its previously experienced harm as it reads the familiar name of a restaurant owner, who you have heard plenty of horror stories about over the years, is being charged with a felony. It remembers seeing him very drunk and aggressive at the restaurant he owns. It remembers harmful encounters that friends have had with him. 

If you’ve been in a relationship with someone who was constantly manipulating situations to have the upper hand, you get it. You understand the fear of reading a familiar name in the news, the allegations of violence and harassment, and it makes you worry for everyone involved. The fear is a physical response as much as it is emotional. What people are capable of when they have power, especially in a setting like restaurants, is extraordinary. 

The truth is, and no matter how many times this particular restaurant owner tries to write it over, this kind of harm from this kind of person is not new news. People caught abusing privilege and power often dismiss other people's concerns and seek to defend their own behavior. They claim their accusers don’t know what they’re talking about. The erasure and lack of validation for the experiences of the individuals harmed is tell-tale predatory and manipulator behavior. They portray as weak or unqualified those who've failed to comply and kneel before their aggression. 

Restaurant workers have begun to talk more openly online about restaurant owners who've been aggressive with their management or staff. That’s one of the complex beauties of social media: those harmed can speak their truth in a semi-protected way. They are able to call on their community for assistance and security. The restaurant owners called out for their behavior, and their enablers, can deny it all they want and blame their personal demons. No matter, the harm is done. 

In the Madison restaurant scene, enablers run alongside abusers. Those left to pick up the pieces of their colleagues’ violent mistakes will find some way to wisely write it off as being a private matter or due to personal reasons. In a trickle-down effect, we have all suffered the effects of these behaviors time and time again. Whenever a restaurant owner does something horrific, their behaviors affect the entire staff of the restaurants that they own as well as the lives of their friends and family. In turn, it has also triggered many former employees. Certainly we can never know what happens in a person’s private relationship or the decisions they decide to make outside of their place of business. What we can say for sure is that, as Jenny Holzer has said, the abuse of power comes as no surprise.

You might be at this point of my letter and are wondering why I am writing this. Why is this letter for you? Because we know that restaurant owners get away with mistreating their employees and this has to stop. Not just a few people who've been outed publicly, but other people who own restaurants and disregard basic human decency in the running of their business. For everyone who's faced some degree of accountability, there is another person in another restaurant in this city doing very similar things. At the end of that violence is someone who is not sure how to get out. Perhaps this someone thinks this behavior is normal, because they’ve been conditioned to think so. I certainly thought it was normal for my male coworkers to solicit me for sexual favors, normal to be pitted against my female coworkers, normal to drink as heavily as we all did, normal to ignore the signs of mental illness, and to compete for shifts and the general affections of managers and owners just to survive the work week. I think of two chefs I have worked with who are no longer with us because of the heaviness of the world, personal struggles, and the burden of the work we would do. Perhaps because of the unaddressed stigmas of mental illness and addiction. 

So, reader, I am asking you to participate in undoing this service industry culture which you, despite being unaware, are fully responsible for participating in.

How do we do it? First, we demand that abusive and harmful restaurant owners divest from their roles and make no profit from anything they’ve previously been a part of. We must afford their business partners the opportunity to do what is right for their community: hold their colleagues accountable for the harm they have caused. We follow up with co-owners and managers and we ask for documentation. It’s important that we do this, because there is word that it has been promised before and it has never been delivered. In fact we’ve seen it here in Madison before. Not only in restaurants, but in other small businesses and in the DIY music scene. Harmful community members claim they’re working on something and six months later they’re back with a new project. That’s not, in my opinion, how accountability and growth beyond harm works. If we need to press things further, we ask that any business partners culpable in enabling someone who has caused great harm also be held accountable and also divest from the businesses they profit from. Here is the thing about this big wonderful, booming city of Madison that you live in: there are harmful people behind many businesses you give your money to. It is when you find out about their harm that you can hold them accountable.

What about the employees? As someone who was present the year that Merchant opted to ban durags and other specific apparel, a blatantly racist act owners and managers used to “improve” the crowd at late-night parties, I one hundred percent believe you need to leave the employees alone. Employees are there for their livelihoods. They are not decision makers. Employees of harmful business owners need your absolute grace, and your cash tips if feasible. This pandemic has been especially hard for the restaurant industry. Harassing employees does nothing toward aiding in accountability and doesn’t even touch non-present owners. Yes, a lot of restaurant owners don’t even see their staff day-to-day. If you have or know of a job you can extend to employees of a business whose ownership is causing great harm, extend that position. If you can tip extra, tip extra. If you can, keep pressing and disrupting the work flow of the owners. I beg my entire community to hear me when I say: employees need you to care about them. You need to care about how you approach conflict. These individuals are dealing with enough.

If you’ve read this far, I give you my greatest thanks for your patience, for your eyes, for your mind, and for the support I hope you will give everyone who has been affected for years by abusive ownership. Harm can sometimes be overstated. In this case, I fully believe those individuals who have been harmed by restaurant owners and management in Madison over the last decade or more, and I believe there is no overstatement here. However, so-called "cancel culture" is quickly going out of style, it is not the answer, and it is not going to prevent wealthy people in power positions from abusing their power. It isn’t going to bring us together, either. What will help is accountability, transparency, and mutual aid. 

We cannot let one man burn his house down with everyone he claims to care about inside of it. We must get everyone out of that house and, as hard as it may be, get that man out of that house, too. Because this restaurant owner is a human who has experienced personal loss, addiction, grief, and in order for him to stop the cycle of harm he must be given the tools to do so. He must be shown that he cannot buy his privileges and freedoms. His position has been a privilege he has abused. That’s why it is pertinent that we, the community, demand that his friends and his business partners stop enabling him and hold him responsible for his actions.

My anger is real. I can feel it so heavily within me. Within my shaking hands, my hot face, and my swiftly-approaching headache. But still, I look back at my years serving and managing and I relish in some beautiful moments. Some truly deep and beautiful friendships that I have had. Drinking tea in the office at 9 a.m. with my beloved GM or closing a really late weekend shift with my fellow managers and heading to Paul’s Club. A chef who I loved dearly and spent many wonderful months seeing, sneaking through back halls just for him to give me back the earrings I left at his house, because the owner said we couldn’t see each other. Or sitting on the Merchant patio after work, laughing over drinks with my fellow servers. All cigarettes and lake breeze cooling through the night. Showing up to a shift and seeing my sweet friend running food and my amazing floor manager polishing silverware, even though she was busy managing. Or my favorite chef, who always did favors for me as I did for him, smiling at me from behind the line. A time that is so far gone now. A time that I wish I could still be in, for better or for worse, with the people who also understood fully what I was going through. 

There is something so special about working at a restaurant. I wish that I still saw the charm in the edge of a knife on a napkin on a wooden table in the banquette of a restaurant where white string lights hang in the window, or the smell of herbs and oils frying,  or the sound of bartenders shaking their cocktails. I wish so deeply that I wasn’t heartbroken and longing all at once. If two things can be true at once, many things can be true all the time. The question is, how are you going to hold them all?

With all my love,

Alejandra Perez

Collage (clockwise from top left): Kate Corby’s "West," Gracie K Wallner’s "Blood Runs Out," Dan Su and Aaron Granat’s "Erosion Project," Young Min Choi’s "In Due Time"

Although the number of feature films for this year’s virtual Wisconsin Film Festival is slightly pared down (by about a quarter), the fest still boasts its usual striking array of Wisconsin-focused short films. There may be a reason for that. After surveying over a dozen shorts from returning and newly inducted filmmakers, it’s quite easy to make the blanket assessment that they rank among the fest's most refreshing and essential viewing.

During an isolated year that has wreaked havoc on my attention span, watching a short film or two per week has become something of a cleansing ritual to the ever-present distractions of (and comforting interactions with) live-streamers, whether they are hosted on Le Cinema Club, Short of the Week, or even YouTube. The festival's well-curated thematic collections—"Wisconsin's Only The Lonely," "Birth And Rebirth," and "Do Not Adjust Your Sets"—can hopefully serve to reinvigorate those who may consider it a bit daunting to dig in to more extended fare and plan a whole festival itinerary before we all properly return to theatrical havens later this year.

All shorts are listed alphabetically. For their respective programs, please visit the accompanying links.

Blood Runs Out (2020)

The blood cravings of Gracie K Wallner's film may make one reconsider the very idea of the vampire genre, perhaps in the same way Jenny Hval's Blood Bitch does as an album cycle and sound collage. The subject matter may seem shockingly funny at first glance, as a young woman (Wallner herself) checks a handwritten list of her friends' menstrual cycles and prepares to dial them on a cordless landline phone. But there's quite a bit of pathos and lustily eerie red and white imagery sewn into the latter half through inventive cuts (sometimes literally), as the nameless woman sinks deeper into desperation.

Cocoons (2021)

This poetically candid short from director Megan Zabel Holmes is a family affair and stars three-year-old Dottie Jean, who laments the loss of connection to friends through the past year of home isolation. But during that time, as Dottie narrates, she's developed a fascination with caterpillars entering chrysalis and their hatching into butterflies. This sort of fantastical optimism carries through her free-form imagination for herself, which the director mirrors with the act of freeing butterflies from their netting. Cocoons is a sweetly innocent meditation on personal transformation amidst social stasis in quarantine.

Erosion Project (2020)

A collaboration between choreographer-musician Dan Su and festival veteran cinematographer-editor Aaron Granat is constructed as a waking brutalist hallucination. Scored by Su's eerie minimalist techno that recalls Jing