A wonderful post by my friend Sally, in which she visits an old-time saloon in a small Montana town, left behind to vanish almost completely when the railroad abandoned its tracks, to report a cow on the road separated by a fence from its bawling calf.
It took only a few seconds for me to figure out what function this alcove most likely used to serve. But a few years from now, there will be young adults who have no memory of pay phones.
But definitely “a” Milwaukee Lion 🙂
I shot these photos over the weekend in the big cat house at the Milwaukee County Zoo. Pretty amazing how close you can get to the animals in modern zoos! Maybe too close? Although the King of the Beasts was too aloof to acknowledge the presence of mere humans, I found the jaguar’s cool, assessing eye contact with me sort of thrilling and unnerving simultaneously. Just how thick is that glass?
Sunlight reflecting off of an office building’s pinkish windows was the source of these awesome “shadows” cast down on the street and loading docks below.
One of my very first blog posts a few years ago was a similar photograph, which I titled “Light Shadows” (below). You don’t see these shimmering spots of light every day. The sky has to be clear, and the sun in the right position. Even then, they aren’t always as distinctly defined as they were on these two days. It’s fun to see when everything aligns to put on this show.
I had an appointment in an older downtown Milwaukee office building yesterday and stopped in the women’s room on my way out. While washing my hands, I noticed this old machine for dispensing “feminine hygiene” products hanging on the wall.
Meds Tampons were a Modess product available from the 1930s till sometime in the 1970s, according to the Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health, which apparently actually was a museum once but is now a website maintained by the man who single-handedly ran the museum until it became too much work in addition to his job—and, more to the point, why shouldn’t there be a museum about such a significant topic?
Anyway, it’s odd to realize that this machine was presumably installed a minimum of 40 years ago. And here it is, still.
Kind of off topic here, but related in both its possible inappropriateness (i.e., connection to sexuality) and its connection to the idea of “history.” When I was in college I watched Last Tango in Paris in a film class. What has always stuck with me from that movie (no pun intended) was the moment at the very end, when Marlon Brando takes his chewing gum out of his mouth and presses it to the underside of the balcony railing outside the apartment window just before he dies after his mistress (girlfriend? anonymous sex partner? rape victim?) shoots him.
Of all the overwhelming images in that film, seriously, that was the only one that made a deep enough impression that I can still picture it vividly all these years later.
Why? Because to me that piece of gum is a witness. A testimony to the fact that—like “Kilroy“—Paul (Brando’s character) was here. That gum is the one thing to save him from the nothingness he seemed to crave before. It’s the only thing to ensure that his existence won’t be entirely erased. Remaining behind in the world is this chewing gum that was once in his mouth, taken with his fingers and placed intentionally beneath the railing by him in those final seconds of life.
Sticking that gum under the railing is kind of disgusting and could be viewed as a final act of aggression/rape in Paul’s relationship with Jeanne. The tango was such a good metaphor for what was going on with those two. It’s such a highly sexual dance form, but the two partners basically never acknowledge each other. That connection as a motif was probably made explicit in the film; it certainly seems obvious to me now, in retrospect, but I don’t know if I realized it then. Doubtful. I was a political science major and didn’t really develop a grasp of literary/artistic intellectual concepts like “metaphor” until well into my studies for the Ph.D. in English.
In any case, my 20-year-old self’s experience of that final image was visceral and intuitive. It was like Paul was redeeming himself as a human being. Where he was kind of dead before, numbed by his wife’s suicide, he has finally—in death—become aware of life’s value.
By leaving his chewing gum behind as an artifact of his time on earth, he has also left his “mark” on history. A declaration that he was here. That he was alive.
Very existential reflections/ramblings today, and all prompted by an old tampon dispenser hanging in an even older (marble walls!) women’s room 🙂
Sometimes the field of history is classified as a social science discipline, but I think it belongs firmly in the humanities. After all, the whole point of history is to hold up a mirror that makes us aware of ourselves as humans. Who are we? Why are we here? What is the purpose of life?
MGIC reflecting the Plaza East at sunset in downtown Milwaukee.
A couple years ago—hard to believe I’ve been blogging that long!—I wrote a post on the Little Free Library phenomenon. (Here’s the link to that post if you’d like to read it: https://katherinewikoff.com/2012/06/29/little-free-library/)
I’ve been meaning to follow up that post with another documenting the many, varied library boxes in my neighborhood. But the tiny book houses have been proliferating like mushrooms after weeks of heavy rain. Far too many to photograph all at once—and WAY too many to include in one blog post.
So instead I’ve decided just to post photos of individual Little Free Library boxes here and there. Maybe you’ve never seen these boxes before, or maybe you have but would like some additional inspiration before taking the plunge and installing one in your own front yard. Either way, I hope you’ll enjoy the photos 🙂
This Little Free Library echoes several key architectural features of the home that it stands in front of—the gables, the brick, the chimney, etc. The entire front lower section, including the bump out, serves as the door for the box. (You can see the hinge along the left side and the knob handle just to the right of the window.)
Although Lake Michigan in this photo looks similar to a photo in a post about two months ago, the two days couldn’t have been more different.
Whereas that photo (below) was snapped on a cool, blustery day (complete with a cargo ship that had been mysteriously anchored offshore all that week) . . .
. . . today’s photo actually depicts a more typical summer day in Milwaukee. Temperatures were in the low 70s, the sky was overcast, and there was no breeze at all. You can see in the photo of McKinley Marina below how still everything was.
That’s the suburb of St. Francis out there in the distance, jutting into Lake Michigan .
The schooner in the first photo on this page is the Denis Sullivan (the S/V prefix stands for “Sailing Vessel”), a reproduction of a 19-century Lake Michigan ship that is docked— moored? berthed? I’m a little unclear on the finer points of difference in those terms’ definitions 🙂 —at Discovery World down on Milwaukee’s lakefront. You can sail on the Denis Sullivan for $45, with special deals for members and for families.
![100_1549[1]](https://katherinewikoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/100_15491.jpg)
![100_1548[1]](https://katherinewikoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/100_15481.jpg)
Katherine Wikoff 