New Urbanism, Mifflin, and the Downtown Plan’s impact on student housing in Madison
For a few brief months this winter it looked like the balance of power in the UW-Madison campus area housing markets might be tipping ever so slightly toward the students. Upon hearing that Pat McCaughey of McCaughey Properties planned to build a four-story apartment complex on the 400 block of State Street, a small group of students mobilized, creating an organization and Facebook page to protest the plan.
In an ingenious bit of PR strategy, the organization named themselves “Save Mifflin,” a title which brought to mind Matthew Broderick cruising to Chicago in a convertible Ferrari and an undergraduate career full of Saturdays, each year punctuated by the eponymous daylong block party in the sun. Unsurprisingly, the group caught fire. By the time McCaughey’s proposal reached the City Plan commission, almost 6,000 students had indicated that they would be “attending” that meeting – an indication that turned out to be largely meaningless, as the Save Mifflin page was meant only to inform. The members of the organization made the mistake of writing directly on the Facebook page that there was no need for the average student to actually attend the City Plan commission meeting; that simply indicating support by clicking attend would be sufficient.
From Sarah Witman’s Arts Corner on Spotify
Online program eliminates ‘guilty pleasure’ from vocabulary
On a related topic, right now my No. 4 most played song on iTunes is “Hot” by Avril Lavigne. It’s not the first thing I’d bring up around someone I want to impress, but I’m comfortable with that fact. It’s gotten right around 60 plays, and I can’t wait to blast it even more times on my Spotify account so all the world can witness my undying love for the pop-punk princess; kind of like how Arts Etc. Content Editor Lin Weeks’ man-crush on Jay Z should be announced to Facebook friends any day now, thanks to Spotify.
Well, yeah, that’s fair.
Interview with Electron
E: Well, I’m part of a larger real life superhero kind of movement, everybody’s going out around America doing the same thing. I’m a reserve member of a team in Milwaukee -
LW: What does that mean? Reserve member.
E: Basically, I’m not in Milwaukee, so if they ever need me for some specific reason, or if they need advice or something they call me up. I’ve pretty much been to every meeting. Every now and then I can’t get over there. But, you pretty much just try to help people however you can. I do homeless handouts, neighborhood watches, different things like that.
LW: So what does that entail, a neighborhood watch, for instance?
E: Usually we walk around, we just check out things. I had a couple – or I had a – hero here from Milwaukee, Charade. We found a [lowers voice] heroin syringe by the Union down there. Called it in, and a couple police came down and disposed of it, stuff like that. The only reason was, you know, there were a bunch of kids running around, otherwise we probably just would have smashed it somehow, somewhere, or taken it to the police station ourselves. But like I said we don’t really have the gear for things like that. Read more…
Electron: Madison’s real-life superhero
Wednesday’s Badger Herald, pg. 11 (it takes a couple clicks to get there; props to Eric Weigmann and Matt Hintz for the page design and photos, respectively.)
His costume is at once impressively frightening yet clearly homemade. The fiberglass mask, which covers his entire face save for two black mesh eyes and a vertical slit of a mouth, has been spray-painted white and emblazoned with his yellow insignia. The body armor on his upper torso was bought online and originally intended for mountain bikers. A Maglite, zip ties and a road flare are carefully fitted into a utility belt around his waist. On his feet are black skate shoes with yellow accents.
Electron, who arrived at the interview in costume and did not reveal his identity, has two main duties, both self-assigned. The first, which makes up the bulk of his work in Madison, is hand-delivering food to the homeless “pretty much whenever I can get money” from donations or from his own paychecks. Electron described his employment situation as “between jobs.”
Sloan — Unkind
Colson Whitehead on the World Series of Poker
I liked this for a lot of reasons, but especially for the descriptions of Las Vegas.
Occasional dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia
The past couple of years, the Rio had been the home of the WSOP. The Rio shared the slab-architecture of the new megacasinos, rejecting the weary kitsch of old Vegas — the miniature cityscape of New York New York, the Paris’ Eiffel Tower replica. So corny! But really, what could the Rio have been shaped like — a 20-story toucan? The lightly enforced Brazilian theme disappeared altogether once you got to the convention hall, where the World Series had been underway for five weeks with lower-stake Hold ‘em events, Seven Card Razz, and the like. The declivity of the Hall of Legends was festooned with huge banners featuring the blown-up faces of game greats — a grim-looking Erick Lindgren, Scotty Nguyen, last year’s champ Jonathan Duhamel — then it was into the rotunda, where you could buy snacks, beef jerky, and WSOP merch. Smack in the middle of the rotunda was a WSOP display, featuring a TV monitor that replayed last year’s Final Table on a loop day and night. When I went to register the morning of my start, at 6 (I hadn’t been sleeping well, I had been sleeping quite poorly), the announcer’s voice echoed in the empty halls. Nobody there at that hour. Everybody’d seen it already anyway.
A review of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom”
In my reading, the primary concern of “Freedom,” the latest novel by Jonathan Franzen, is: what subject matters are deserving of discussion? Should the middle class consume pop-culture? Should the upper class talk about genocide and war? Do individual species of birds deserve as much attention as birds in general, or nature in general, or human population increase? Should Franzen himself be writing this particular book? Are these questions even reasonable ones to ask, or is the very act of asking them implicit to an unforgivably elitist world view? Or maybe is it okay to ask these questions of art but not of life? What about politics?
I’ve touched on these issues a little in my own criticism and I’ll admit, as soon as I identified this as a theme – something that Franzen was going to address head-on, rather than just raising the question for consumers through his own choices (which is the typical and uncomplicated decision of nearly all narrative art; to do otherwise necessarily exposes the artists work to metaphysical complications, Franzen not excepted) – I realized that though I’d enjoy the book, if only for that reason, I’d simultaneously become almost incapable of evaluating it on any other line. And that’s what happened. So I can’t say for sure whether “Freedom” was a “good” book, though I’m fairly sure it was entertaining enough on its surface, because that’s the point: should it have been? Read more…
