Twice removed – the reflection reflected, on the south side of State Street, at an angle from north and west, viewed from north and east.
Once removed – the original reflection, looking north from Red Arrow Park.
And the real thing – viewed by pivoting 180 degrees to look due south across the park. Note the flag waving in the opposite direction, sort of a “mirror image” in reverse 🙂
Seen on Milwaukee’s near west side. If you were born in the last 25 years, you might not know what this sign means. The truth is, it probably doesn’t mean anything anymore. Just a relic of a bygone era.
During the Cold War, one form of preparation for surviving nuclear weapons attacks was the designation of many buildings with basements as “fallout shelters” (Wikipedia article here). This sign looks pretty old, and the “capacity” number has been covered over. I somewhat doubt this building’s owner still considers it a civic obligation to shelter citizenry in the event of an atomic bomb explosion in Milwaukee.
Another way America prepared for nuclear holocaust was to teach the “duck and cover” maneuver to schoolchildren across the nation.
America’s preoccupation with the existential threat of “mutually assured destruction” persisted even into the 1980s.
See 1983’s “The Day After,” for example, which according to Wikipedia remains the highest-rated television film in history. This movie documented the horrific ordeal awaiting those “lucky” enough to survive a nuclear attack.
Or 1983’s War Games, starring Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy, Dabney Coleman, and a really scary computer named “Joshua” that learns an important lesson by film’s end about what constitutes the only “winning move” in the game of Global Thermonuclear War.
Apparently the Cold War was still quite hot as of 1983.
I came across the video below recently. If real (and I assume it is because I found it via a story on NPR), it boggles the mind that anyone would be so foolhardy as to stand “Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb,” as the NPR (National Public Radio) story’s headline reads.
Our capacity for self-delusion is pretty staggering. After letting the genie out of the bottle, we remain arrogant or stupid enough to believe we can control the consequences.
Which may be an inescapable aspect of the human condition.
Found in the neighborhood just northeast of 35th and Vliet in Milwaukee. Saving lives in more ways than one 🙂
Americans don’t realize how rich we are. It’s so easy not to feel rich when we read about luxury homes sold in London, Paris, or New York for eight or even nine figures. Millions and millions and millions of dollars. Who can afford that? Not us, the vast unrich.
Yet what constitutes “rich” is obviously subject to interpretation—a point that is driven home whenever I teach my Survey of Third World Literature class. (Yes, the course name is outdated. I inherited it and hope to rename it, although I will say it does provide an opportunity to explain terms like First/Free World, Second/Communist World, and Third World. Perhaps not surprisingly, these are fuzzy concepts for many students born after the end of the Cold War.)
A few weeks into the term, someone will observe that the stories we’re reading all seem to be about poor people. Why do so many “third world” authors choose poverty as a central topic/theme in their short stories and novels? At which point another student with first-hand knowledge from travel abroad will speak up and tell them it’s because poverty is the norm.
Literature allows you to experience life inside the skin of another person. It expands your consciousness in a way no other art form can, except maybe cinema. So today’s post is about literature and cinema and real life and perspective.
My last year in college I had three Chinese roommates. One of them lived with me the entire year. Her “American” name was Daphne. Chinese students at my college chose American names for their time studying in the United States. Many of these names were clearly inspired by Greek and Roman mythology, although names like Florence and Gertrude also somehow made their way into the mix. When Daphne arrived at our apartment, she was literally right off the plane. Her flight landed in Columbus, where her sister, a grad student at Ohio State, picked her up and drove her over to Dayton. My other roommate and I had put up “Roommate Wanted” signs around campus with little tear-off strips across the bottom with our phone number. Daphne and her sister went to campus as soon as they got to town, found our sign, and called us.
Daphne had never previously been to the U.S. She had no car and and very few belongings. After her sister departed for Columbus again, I took Daphne food shopping with me. It was her first time in an American grocery store.
Once there, we split up to do our own shopping. I zipped up and down the aisles and eventually found Daphne standing in front of the dairy case. Just standing there, paralyzed. As I approached her, she turned with an expression somewhere between wonder and horror.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“So many milks!”
Suddenly I saw that dairy case through her eyes. Whole milk, 2%, 1%, skim. Gallons, half-gallons, quarts, pints, and half-pints. All the different brands, row upon row. The choices were overwhelming. I’d never thought about it before.
Have you seen Moscow on the Hudson? In this 1984 film, Robin Williams plays a Russian circus performer who defects during a visit to Bloomingdale’s department store in New York while his troupe is touring the U.S. One of the store’s security guards gives Williams a place to stay temporarily, taking him home to the Harlem apartment he shares with his parents, sister, and grandfather.
Williams’ first trip to an American grocery store reminded me of Daphne’s experience. Or, what I really mean to say is, it made me realize that Daphne’s experience was not unique.
First he asks where the coffee line is. During the Soviet era, according to one of my professors who had lived in Russia, you had to stand in three lines to buy something at a grocery store: the first, to select your purchase; the second, to pay for your purchase; and the third, to pick up your purchase.
Second . . . well, just take a look at this clip 🙂
How stressed are we by our arrays of choices without even knowing it? Or is it possible we actually aren’t stressed out? Have the incredible variety and bounty available to us led us to develop an ability to tune out extraneous information?
Maybe it takes the astonishment of newcomers to open our eyes to the freedom and wealth Americans take for granted.
I stopped in this morning to see the Grohmann Museum’s new exhibit.
Although it opened May 27, I’ve only been in the building since then during hours when the gallery is closed. Last week was finals, and between holing up to grade over the weekend while also prepping to lead my Great Books event Wednesday evening (we talked about Annie Baker’s The Flick, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), I just haven’t been around much in the daytime.
First of all, by the way (and just because . . .), here’s a photo I took of the Grohmann’s entrance atrium as I left the building around 9:00 Wednesday evening after dropping my laptop and other materials at my office when Great Books ended. The “gloaming” twilight made everything more striking somehow than it is during the day. The general public is never inside the museum at night except during Gallery Night, and then all the inside lights are on, meaning you’d never be able to see this exact view anyway, with the bluish-purple evening light illuminating the staircase through the arc of glass walls. So I thought I’d share 🙂
Okay, back to the new exhibit. It’s called “Milwaukee’s Industrial Landscapes: Paintings by Michael Newhall” and it runs May 27–August 21.
The showpiece of the exhibit is a massive 9-panel panorama of Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood. It takes up a whole wall by itself! I couldn’t resist taking a “panorama of the panorama” just to see what it would look like. It’s pretty cool! (You can click on the photo to enlarge it to full screen.)
And then there’s also this other painting I liked that struck me as really different and intriguing.
You may be able to experience what I’m getting at if you click on the photo of the painting above to enlarge it. (Don’t double click, for you’ll get an enlargement so huge you can see the canvas weave, which is sort of fun but also way too big for the point I’m making 🙂 ) Or you can just look at the smaller section enlarged below (or even click on it to get a larger version of just this portion of the painting, if you like.)
Look at how crisp the detail of the two houses is compared to the trailing tree branches in the foreground and the factory building in the background. It’s like this painting somehow approximates the shallow depth of field you might see in a photograph taken with a telephoto lens. I’ve never noticed a painting do this before (possibly because I just don’t visit enough galleries and museums), and I really like the effect this technique has on the painting.
Or maybe I should say on the viewer’s experience of this painting.
When I focus my gaze on the chimneys of the yellow house, suddenly the foreground and middle ground elements seem to come closer to me while the cocoa-colored factory in the background simultaneously recedes and rushes forward. Your mind’s eye recognizes the building’s distance while also perceiving its abnormally close presence and mass. It’s a very odd, disconcerting sensation of almost physical movement.
Can you feel it, too?
‘The Lilac Tree’ features a natural field recording of a Blackbird in full song. Recorded 17 May 2016, Saham Hills, Norfolk, England.
Source: The Lilac Tree
(Note from me: Sounds like R2D2 here and there😄)
At first glance this probably looks like my usual abstract, geometrical whatever type of photo. (It surprises me to realize I even have a “usual” type of photo . . . )
But look again.
Can you see it? That delicate little spiral framework of a spider’s web?
No matter how impregnable or sterile our human “fortresses” may seem, life really does find a way to”break through” and continue functioning—thriving, even!—despite our best efforts at control.
(Below, from Jurassic Park, an exchange that ends with one of my favorite movie lines ever 🙂 )
It’s been a nose-to-the-grindstone kind of day. Reading lots of student drafts in my two sections of film studies and compiling/composing feedback for the debate teams in my freshman studies class. I got to work shortly after 8:00 this morning and will be reading and commenting on student work into the evening. Fellow teachers know what I’m talking about.
While walking from one building to another under a cheerful blue sky in the cool breeze coming off Lake Michigan this afternoon, though, I did take time out to snap some pics of MSOE’s Campus Center, the former Blatz Brewery Bottle House. This building (an example of Streamline Moderne architecture) is one of my favorites, as I’ve mentioned before, here and here, for example 🙂
So when I saw the sky reflected in the line of windows that sweep along the front of the structure, what else could I do?
That’s the German-English Academy Building most prominently reflected in that bottom row of windows, by the way. Wikipedia article (short one) here.
When the spring rains come, the litter of magnolia petals and crab apple blossoms somehow reminds me of the Ezra Pound poem, “In a Station of the Metro”:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
That image! Like a painting, a flash of insight, a glimpse of the eternal.
Dog paths strewn with fallen pink crab apple blossoms (beneath wet, black boughs)
Katherine Wikoff 