Bull Treatise

So it becomes apparent that there is a fixation not just with place -- the proud anonymity of southeastern Wisconsin -- but also time. There is a fierce and impenetrable temporal fascination: the pre-Internet era, yes, but specifically this strange portion of it: maybe 1968 to 1995. (The Internet around, certainly, but not a world-force player.) And then...here is the spatiality again, but to a different bent: Imagine backpacking into the Wind River Range in west-central Wyoming (a wild and ferocious country, then and now) in 1982, when the most relevant topographic map still dated from the 19th century, and when you probably ate at some lonesome crossroads Mexican joint, made one last intercept through a gleaming black (or maybe blue) payphone; and Orson Welles was still just alive, also Edward Abbey and Townes Van Zandt, when Family Ties and The Cosby Show were flickering domestically well off the highway as you headed toward the great blackness...you get the picture.

(The picture attached here is of Tygh Valley on the east front of the Oregon Cascades in 2008...the beautiful morph from Cascades deep-forest [black and blue wood] to Columbia Plateau scrub steppe. Such a landscape might seem to scream, "1850"...but just as throatily it bellows, "1985.")

Music, too, figures into it...but more in the distorted, blurred tableau (Tom Waits referred to it as the smudging of wallpaper, perceived from a distance) you would pick up at the gas station, blaring from the sound system of a worked-upon car at a Rawlins roadside. And still the outlaw Grizzlies in the high country, with everything bronzed through the Corps of Discovery reaching some kind of elegiac zenith: "This is just before everything ends."

Now, things are beginning again -- and that is surely good -- but the level of scrutiny is, perhaps, too searing, too intense. Before, the catalog was in the brain, the heart, upon teletype paper. And isn't it strange to imagine the 2009 bears roaming down into the Wind Rivers from the Teton country, re-occupying land so recently vacated by progenitors violently removed and of an entirely different era? Sort of like a jazz-obsessive of the 21st century acquiring the meat of a 20th-century obsessive's collection through eBay or some shit, pouring over it maybe two or three decades after its original keeper did, only now with digital camera and euphoric Tweets and Facebook sound-files and anachronistic hipster-exuberance. When did Calvin and Hobbes become martyrs? Was it about the same time that we began applying to college, when we noticed that all our Austrian counterparts -- in addition to being doused in cologne and obsessed with The Phantom Menace -- had insatiable attachment to these witch-doctor placebo-effect terrors called "cell phones"?

Crucially, Son House died in 1988. This conception of "time," certainly of "generations" -- we assembled here are technically Generation Y, which lumps us ludicrously with the Hannah Montana crowd, though I personally remember Ronald Reagan speaking in Port Washington, Wisc., remember also Saturday Night Live hedonism under bedsheet fort-canopies (I saw Dead Poet's Society, Indian Jones & The Last Crusade, The Bear, The Brave Little Toaster -- all in the theater) -- well, I suppose this segmenting fails us, it is woeful and savage.

Washtenaw Magazine Archive

A cold one-way street lit by liquor stores and refracted houselights shining from the windows of parked cars, and not knowing where to turn you spin into a full-to-brimming parking lot that is no wider than a cinema screen. In the cracked pavement you think you can see the tendrils of Detroit reaching up into the air, weak but determined to rise from the dry underground channel and into the fresh air of Ypsilanti. You, the former driver, and current walker, go a short way between bumper-stickered Japanese cars and minivans, and jingle open the door of the former gas station, now a coffee shop operated by bearded men with patches on their sweatshirts. You converse, you purchase and sit with a cup on a low couch, and find a stack of magazines with plastic protective covers clipped over each one.

You find, here, OMNI, a 1988 issue of the science and science fiction magazine discontinued in the mid-1990s. Every other page shakes with the pen-lines and brushstrokes of a determined illustrator, who in pigment and ink imagined how things might be. Things will be, might be, space-bound, extra-planetary, sun-powered. They will be volcanic and star-borne, acrylic as well as watercolor. This was a time when computers--and so, the future--were linked with blocky, ungainly letters and numbers that looked nothing like newsprint or handwriting.

And in the earlier pages of OMNI, a reader writes in to complain about Isaac Asimov's assertion that the struggle between Communism and Capitalism is based on a trifle, a petty difference that can already be seen through.

The magazine, free of stains and oil-splotches, has been entrusted to the proper keepers. You leave it on the table knowing that it will always be archived there, as long as this shed stands and is filled with that coffee smell associated, for so many of us, with thinking and scheming.

Mid-week Assignment

It would be something else, right, to discover some old print-out depicting the Doppler track of a tornado across southern Wisconsin from, say, 1990? It could be included in a time-capsule shoebox with a faded Polaroid -- a true relic -- of a ribbon-cutting ceremony at some Brookfield Circuit City, I'd imagine. Also, naturally, the distribution of Mound-builder effigies (Thunderbird, Bear, Turtle, etc.) and perhaps lines tracing presumed trading routes between Aztalan and Cahokia. Don't forget that the Crawfish River runs under I-94 (see field notes, below). Don't forget that, starting around the turn of this century, young Gray Wolves began following the Rock River southward from established packs in the Central Forest and died on the Interstate near Johnson Creek -- which is where the Rock crosses that great new barrier.

Using GIS software, using Photoshop -- hell, using transparencies, you could overlay a hundred of these schematics and create a bewildering, chaotic, frightening geography, attaching the relevant photographs, documents, and graffiti transcriptions to the appropriate points. Red dots for the Blockbusters, green dots for the Thunderbird mounds, yellow dots for traditional Great Blue Heron rookeries, purple stipples for the tracks of 500 representative funnel-clouds, neon-green hashes for the routes of Homecoming parades in all encompassed towns, proportional circles depicting respective annual earnings at each 7-Eleven and total monthly sales of Willie Nelson Super Hits CDs at each Wal-Mart. Let's say for the period 1984-1999.

I'm not going to do this; one of you can do it and display the results here, exclusively. Be sure to include a scale bar, compass arrow, hexagram, Che Guevara stencil image, and other necessary cartographic references.

Perspective via the Florida Keys

An appropriate quote from Thomas McGuane, in his Ninety-two in the Shade (1972); here neophyte fishing-guide Thomas Skelton and his girlfriend, Miranda, observe the Key West mainland as they return from blissful night angling in the mangroves:

Twenty minutes of this night running and they were close enough to home that they could see a Greyhound bus cross the Stock Island bridge and penetrate the zygote of Cayo Hueso. Just beyond, the drive-in theater screen loomed among the trailers. Skelton stared: Appomattox Courthouse, Yankees and Rebels stately in the Key West sky. From the seaward vantage, it was the America you weep for. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee knee-deep in mobile homes surrounded by the vacant sea. Lee's horse, Traveller, materialized and vanished in the Atlantic skyway. Then Grant took Lee's hand and it was one nation indivisible, horses, heroes, tents, and munitions sunk among the mobile homes: THE END.

The Life Suspected But Never Followed At Night

The consistent streak, the one that crosses every basement where kids spend a few hours unsupervised, is (as you well know) the desire to believe in the ghost. The ghost is down here, not hard to believe it. Proof: that you can't hear anything, see anything, this means that there is something down here with me. These urges, it turns out, are bound to a love of wood: of dead, dry wood in boards, the wish that there would be more wood everywhere, that the moon would be made of wood, the sidewalk of birch planks, the ceiling of creaking boards. We all wanted there to be more wood everywhere, not as a structural element of the house, but as the surface and the core of everything. The cup, even, would be made of wood. And the ghosts of the trees would be everywhere, angry as hell. This is the time of year, at least, that wood became important. And there were the conventional, commercial things too, the stinking rubber masks on sale at the pharmacy, but these toys stuck around for too long after the season passed. The important thing was the dread embraced for a matter of days, which is probably the flipside of some uptopian urge to remake the world around you fundamentally, to introduce a cold wind into the air that necessitate a thicker coat and a hot cup in the hand.
This hot cup in the hand in a world made entirely out of wood, with people of wood as well, is the only thing that needs to be written about, sometimes.

I-94 Meditations Part II: Field Notes

A direct transcription of field notes taken on a Badger Bus ride (Madison to Milwaukee), March 14, 2006:

-Turkey Vulture (1st of season) a few miles east of Madison -- soaring high above field at the center of which appears to be a dead White-tailed Deer
-Morainal topography near Glacial Drumlin State Trail sign...about 10 miles east of Madison -->East of this, and S of I-94, landscape is more heavily wooded
-Creek [Koskonong Creek --> Lake Koskonong]
-Creek
-Wooded drumlins rising from fields and woodlots
-Exit 73: Marshall/Deerfield
-Groves of conifers S of I-94
-Still very wooded
-Lone Sandhill Crane in field
-Many of the roadside conifers, incl. those draping the near slopes of the drumlins, appear to be Cedars
-Cumulus shreds rafting across the sky
-Creek (west of Rest Area, Lake Mills) [-->Stony Brook Creek(?)]
-Creek [Rock Creek-->Crawfish River]
-Rest Area
-Aztalan Cycle Club
-Small cemetery
-Water standing in field
-Crawfish River...water in surrounding flat
-Cloud-field above mirrors army of drumlins below
-Creek [Unlabeled]
-Hwy N
-Rock River...about 1/2 again as wide as Crawfish R. ... Canada Geese in water --> roadside ditch, waterlogged, empties into Rock R. S of I-94
-Jefferson/Ft. Atkinson Exit
-Railroad tracks just west of Johnson Creek
-Drumlin topography visible from Johnson Creek stop
-Creek (flowing S) just east of Johnson Creek [Unlabeled]
-Landfill/swamp
-Creek [Johnson Creek-->Rock River]
-Hwy X
-[Unintelligible] Farms
-Abandoned farmhouse (big stump)
-Small lake (S of I-94)
-Lonesome tree (N)
-Hwy intersection
-Sullivan/Ixonia Exit
-Small gouged-out pond in farmfield (S) --> ducks
-Waukesha Co. sign --> creek
-Red-tailed Hawk descending through thick cover alongside creek (flowing parallel to I-94, S)
-Kettle Moraine S.F. (Southern unit) and Old World WI sign about 2 mi. west of Oconomowoc
-Lake (?) S of I-94
-Turkey Vulture
-Choppy open water fringing ice in first Ocon. lake S of I-94 [Lower Nemahbin Lake]
-Ascend ridge, then valley, then ascend (Hartland-Wales Exit sign, 84) toward "pass"
-N of I-94, ridge seems to confine lake
-Broad descent (we are 22 mi. west of Milwaukee)
-Town of Delafield Sports Commons
-Pewaukee Exit
-Creek
-Buck Rub Archery
-Waukesha exits
-Seems somewhat flatter here, east of Kettle Moraine ridges
-Waukesha/Pewaukee Exit - T
-Creek
-Skipper Bud's (S)
-Peterbilt Dealer (S)
-River (meandering) [Pewaukee R. flowing to Fox River]
-Habish, Habish, and Rottier (N)
-Floodplain of river has patches of standing water (near Steinhafel's)
--> river crosses I-94 [Fox River]
-New cinema being built (S)
-Prairieville Park (adventure golf) (S)
-Brookfield
-Windy outside
-Goerkes Corners (Brookfield water tower)
--> narrow wetland --> Canada Geese feeding
-Almost looks like kettle pond
-Creek [Poplar Creek --> Fox River]
-Creek
-River in parkland (S)...flooded Willows and other trees
-I-94 climbs and descends ridge near Elm Grove Rd --> ears pop
-Channelized river (near 21st St) [Honey Creek --> Menomonee River]
-Railroad tracks
-Railroad bridge near Mayfield Rd

Always Going Where There Is No Happiness To Be Found

Without knowing much about the production of compelling and convincing documents, but graced for a day with a red metal vehicle that would allow us to record impressions of a long swath of land from downtown to the far western shopping mall-- we set out to capture the narrow space between misery and possibility.


The nagging thought I have now in 2009 is that something might have changed since 2003. But let us think for a second about this: does the image above, with its flat, suffocating slab of sun-baked sidewalk, tell us that 2003 was a time of relative prosperity and stability? Was something lost between the new cracks that must microscropically radiate across these panels of pavement. What lingers is a desire to fill up the empty square.

We went to document, but still I feel our purpose was also to fill the blank realm with words. Which assumes, of course, a staying power of my own voice, a stinking fantasy that we are no longer likely to luxuriate in.

The small thought that follows is: would it have been possibly to pitch a tent there, build a campfire, and spend the night listening to the crickets, before returning to the proper center of the city with its friends and its coffee that kept us up so many nights until morning?

I-94 Meditations: Part I

A short but necessary post: Probably one sort of meditation for this kind of work is to board the Badger Bus once every few years, at least, and make sure to ride it both ways; and ensure at least one of your journeys occurs in the evening, when the Sun is bleeding over the glacial country and the billboards can be lit crimson, the woodlots made black standing bones, the cornfields husky, Milwaukee's monuments especially regal, Madison's ragged storage-unit, strip-mall outskirts especially frontier-ish, etc. etc.

As we know, you will see all the iPods, all the DVD-processing laptops, all the cell phones, building a bulwark against the strangeness out the window (McDonald's and moraine, Sandhill Crane and truck stop). Who can blame their operators? Many are college students, too young now to imagine the front cusp of their present world. When it was emerging with frightful speed but great clumsiness, when broken CDs and unspooled cassette tapes were still not only possible but expected.

The real endangered species along that Badger Bus track are the ghost outbuildings, some fearfully close to Interstate-94. Ah -- now this will become a two-part post, for I remember notes I recorded once on just such a bus-ride (an unconscious meditation), logging the physical landmarks of the journey, partly because they were superficially unremarkable, most of them. Now those notes will find their true home.

Two Maps Stapled Together

The thing I kept saying was that Berlin as a jagged cavity for muddy boots and combustible minds, that was something that ended around the year 2000, and what we get now is a place to sit and test drinking chocolates, meet gentle and lazy people, and spend our money gradually until we have to leave. The thing I kept thinking was that the few cracked, unrenovated plaster facades must still house a couple of them, a couple of those ones that we had read about in foreign language textbooks, and that the old dreadlocked punk had told me about once at a bar in Kreuzberg (the Rote Rose, which I now find out is beloved and famous). "You don't know what happened here, you cannot know what happened here." Except he was no older than forty, which means he was not referring, probably, to the demanded upheavals of the nineteen eighties (if he was talking, I mean, about something that he knew about but I, being just above twenty, did not). He must have been referring to the less dark love-in of the nineties, the time when turntables and maps of a united world circulated on the fronts of magazines that are no longer in print today. Well, if I wasn't there, I wasn't there: if there was a time when bare brick gave a backdrop for throbbing backs and triumphant screams, I did miss out on it. My entry point was mockable: in 2003, I checked into a West Berlin hostel where a DVD of the recent failed blockbuster "Pearl Harbor" was playing, and I ate that same breakfast rich in sugar and pectin that we all know so well, those of us who decided that we would expand our minds in part of the world because, so the story went, that was the birthplace of mind-expansion. And I didn't realize that I was too young to afford sit-down cuisine, I went into places and paid cash and ran the bank account empty in a matter of weeks. Because I had expected, I suppose, that a door would open eventually, strangers in tattered clothes would recognize me with a oh it's you we've been expecting for so long and the loudspeakers inside would scream a haze of past and future, and I would be welcomed into the innards of a catacombs where I would grow a beard and would never sleep on anything but the bare floor. But in truth, friends back at home had gotten closer to my clouded dreams than any of my costly vacations ever did.
But that 2003 vintage of disappointment and inadequacy is an artifact worth remembering, worth putting behind glass, a significant crystallization of the Bush years, something so many of us would forget to leave at home these days. And the sky has come down a lot since then, the majority of us are forced to rummage the budget stores at least some of the time, glaring at men in suits, all of us have telephone numbers and e-mail addresses and bank accounts, and those who do not will be unable to read this blog posting.

A Tall Order

Each step I took seemed to make me bolder, more formidable; and then I squandered it all trying to think of something fine to say.
-Elle d'Chemme


A maiden post--and a modest one, at that--to fan the flames:

To those of our generation, what is the aesthetic effect of sitting in a strangely-attractive martini bar in Boise, Idaho--surrounded, naturally, by the tawny and sere Snake River Plain, with its subterranean channels, Sagebrush, lone telephone-wire raptors, irrigation gods; also the battlements of the Boise Mountains, their promise of black ravine and hard rock--alright, but still...there in the martini bar, in the city's bustling downtown streets, Rocky Mountain hipsters and lovebirds around, your own love there on the plush sofa, too, with a plate of yam fries and a pair of cocktails; what, goddamn it, is the effect of having, somehow, Jurassic Park suddenly boldly intrude on the above-bar television, so incongruous amidst the harsh glamor of the establishment (not to mention the city grid outside, then the physiographic province surrounding and enfolding)?

The year 1993 abruptly immortalized onscreen, and memories of Tyrannosaurus cut-outs in Blockbuster lobbies, big summer yards, grade-school recess shenanigans, etc. Beautifully, and justly, the bartender made no move to switch channels. Perhaps he, too, felt odd about the whole affair, and didn't want to tamper with something more powerful than himself.

This is not nostalgia, per say. Strictly social philosophy, urban planning, ecological elegy, cultural history. All science, of course. As always. As ever.