Vote for the Dane County Farmers' Market (and my photo) at the Huffington Post

We didn't take Little Oscar to the Wednesday Farmers' Market, for fear that he would get trod underfoot. Instead, we left him watching a picture of where we were going. It's my photo from a few weeks ago that the Huffington Post used this week in its story about the top ten farmers' markets in the country. They asked readers to vote on their favorite, and when Oscar tuned in, the Dane County Farmers' Market was rated Number One. He voted early and often to try to keep it there. You can cast your vote here.

Bridging the rodent-human gap only goes so far before giving way to the startle response

We went for a walk along Lake Mendota last night and stopped by Allen Centennial Gardens on the UW campus. We came across this curious bunny on the little lawn where weddings are held behind the pergola. He held his ground and did not run right off the way rabbits usually do. Instead, he looked right at us and even hopped a bit closer for a better look. It was as if he wanted to make friends. Until instinct took over. Then he took off in a leaping, elongated blur.

Lura at La Fête de Marquette

Singing the music of Cape Verde at La Fête de Marquette Saturday night. View Large On Black.

Art Fair on the Square

A single perspective doesn't seem to do justice to what happens when tens of thousands of people meet hundreds of artists and craftspeople on a warm summer weekend. I set the D90 on Multiple Exposure Saturday and let it pursue a more Cubist vision (view large on black.)

Beautiful weather made for great crowds over the weekend (not nearly as hot and humid as mid-July is most years), but according to early reports, the economic weather made for soft sales, and artists are struggling.

"They're struggling. They're having a really hard time this year," said Art Fair on the Square organizer Katie Symansky-Hunter. "In the past they've sold out at certain shows, and haven't been able to make it to other shows. And I've talked to some artists whose income has been cut in half this year."

Organizers said that the Art Fair on the Square has typically been one of their vendors' bright spots of the year.

We won't know till the final sales are tallied if enough visitors opened their wallets to make that true this year.

They're back!

The Japanese beetles are back -- fewer than in previous years and a bit later, but back, nevertheless. Kind of pretty -- if they just weren't so voracious.

By the rockets' red glare

There's something about fireworks that makes children of us all, raptly looking skyward in wonder and amazement. This was the scene at Blackhawk Country Club in Shorewood Hills Saturday night, but it was repeated in countless neighborhoods and communities around the country.

How to top "The 1812 Overture"? How about the Clyde Stubblefield Band at the Monona Terrace?

When Wednesday night's Concert on the Square was rescheduled for Thursday night due to weather concerns, it dropped on top of the previously scheduled Community Care Concert by the Clyde Stubblefield Band on the Monona Terrace rooftop. A double treat for Madison music lovers -- two great concerts in different downtown open air venues on the same night. On one stage, Maestro Andrew Sewell, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, "The 1812 Overture" with full cannon support -- on the other, Madison's Maestro of the funk beat with his band. It doesn't get better than that.

We had not meant to go to the Concert on the Square last night. It seemed a bit too cold, cloudy and gloomy. But it warmed up and then late in the day, the sun started breaking through, and we decided at the last minute to go after all. Too late to find a parking space downtown, and anyhow, we had told ourselves this year we would bike to the Concerts, so we hit the Southwest Bike Path a little after the concert started. Arrived during the intermission, stayed for the second half, the one with the "1812 Overture" pyrotechnics. The light on our ride was extraordinary -- bright, warm lighting breaking under the dark, low-hanging cloud cover. (This is along the path between West Washington and Brittingham Park.)

Grand Central towers skyward -- luxury rental units in the heart of the UW campus

The real estate development boom of the last few years left Madison with a glut of unsold homes and condos when it cooled, but there is one kind of new development that is still doing well -- luxury rental housing for students near campus. The new $20-million-plus Grand Central development is mostly rented for the fall semester. It's the most expensive residential development launched in Dane County the last two years. Rents start at $1,195 for a one-bedroom and top out at $3,175 for a four-bedroom with a den. Residents can also reserve the 13th-floor party deck. "Developers have found students are willing to pay those higher rents for apartments with all the amenities," UW facilities planner Gary Brown tells The Capital Times.

Big box for the arts lays off two more staffers

The Overture Center for the Arts laid off two more staffers -- their VP of marketing and their publicity coordinator -- in addition to the 15 positions cut in December.

All that remains of St. Raphael's Cathedral is a bit of the wall, a patch of grass and some new graffiti

And memories. I'm not Catholic, and I don't think I've ever been in the church, although I used to walk past it on the way home from school back in the day. I liked what Jack Holzhueter, a retired researcher and writer for the Wisconsin Historical Society, presented at a forum on the building's fate after the fire.

St. Raphael is the only church in Madison integrally tied to the city's original plat of development, he wrote. Like other great buildings and public spaces in cities around the world, St. Raphael was adopted by the community, which loves the building and looks to it for a sense of neighborhood.

"Thus, Madisonians and residents of the greater metropolitan area have come to 'own' St. Raphael's, though the vast majority of them have never set foot into the place. The diocese may own the structure; the clergy, religious and parishioners may imbue it with spiritual and sentimental attachments, but the wider public puts it into a context of place and space. The wider public endows it with its status as a landmark," Holzhueter wrote.

Unfortunately, this landmark never achieved offficial landmark designation (a last minute effort last year was too little, too late), and so the Diocese was free to tear it down. They took down the steeple last June, and then demolition of the burned-out shell of St. Raphael's Cathedral started last July. Now all that remains of the former cathedral of the Madison Diocese are some remnants of limestone wall, a raggedy grass lawn where a cathedral loved by many once stood, and a new coat of graffiti. (In the background is the roof line of the rectory that used to be adjacent to the cathedral.) The Diocese has announced they plan to build a new cathedral at some point, but because of economic conditions they have not started a fund-raising campaign yet.

A lot of film critics hated it, but "Away We Go" was a sellout its second night in Madison

It must have had great word-of-mouth. The movies we go to usually aren't sellouts, but we were lucky we bought our tickets online. Otherwise we would never have made it into the sold-out 7:15 showing Saturday night at Sundance Cinemas Madison. We enjoyed it, the public mostly liked it, Roger loved it, The Onion liked it -- but many critics absolutely hated it.

"Away We Go" belongs to that tiny genre of movies that also includes David O. Russell's 1996 screwball classic, "Flirting with Disaster," in which a young couple copes with the anxieties that come with getting ready to become parents by undertaking a road trip on the flimsiest of pretexts. In "Flirting with Disaster," the adopted Ben Stiller is trying to find his birth parents so he'll know what genetic heritage he's passing on. In "Away We Go," John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are looking for a place to make a home for their child. The former is wackier and more surreal. "Away We Go" begins with some wonderfully cutting social satire but goes on to conclude with real depth of feeling. Maya Rudolph's performance is amazing.

The website Metacritic.com is an aggregator that's great for getting a snapshot of critical opinion by assigning numerical values to critics' review (and moviegoers' comments) -- an imperfect, subjective process, but it's good at capturing patterns. In this case, the public seems to like the movie much more than the critics, judging from the average score, a mediocre 57. But this isn't one of those homogeneous responses in which most critics share the same lukewarm critical reaction. This is one of those movies that people either like a lot or dislike a lot. There's no real middle ground, except for the misleading numerical average.

Many of the critics who disliked the movie didn't seem to be reviewing the movie at all. They misrepresented the protagonists as slackers and anti-social narcissists. They interpreted social comedy as mean-spiritedness. They scarcely talked about the performances. Instead, they seemed to be settling scores with the movie's creators -- director Sam Mendes and screenwriters Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida, accusing the former of being a snotty foreigner and the latter two of being solipsistic slackers. Knocking the movie was their way of attacking one or another, or all, of its creators. It seemed to be a relexive, emotional response.

Hard to tell what triggered such fury, but the NYT's A.O. Scott was typical. The normally even-tempered reviewer became spiteful and nasty.

To observe that they inhabit no recognizable American social reality is only to say that this is a film by Sam Mendes, a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean. The vague, secondhand ideas about the blight of the suburbs that sloshed around “American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road” are now complemented by an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth.
[ ... ]
But you should also understand that you are not welcome. Does it sound as if I hate this movie? Don’t be silly. But don’t be fooled. This movie does not like you.

The reviewers who liked the film also seemed to be participating in a referendum about is creators. In a rare swipe at another critic, Roger Ebert referenced Scott's words in his own conclusion.

I submit that Eggers and Vida are admirable people. If their characters find they are superior to many people, well, maybe they are. “This movie does not like you,” sniffs Tony Scott of the New York Times. Perhaps with good reason.

Art makes the world more vivid

Artist Jeremy Kraemer of Madison painting in Wingra Park. View Large.

Little Oscar and I have been catching up on our short fiction reading in The New Yorker

Summertime is a good time to catch up on our short fiction reading. We browse through old copies of The New Yorker that pile up around the house and look for short stories we missed the first time around when we were too busy with the latest Seymour Hersh and other nonfiction. A raccoon was involved in this one, and a new pair of shoes at the end. It was called "Wakefield" and was in the Jan. 14, 2008 issue (yes, some of the stacks are pretty high). It's Doctorow's retelling (re-imagining, really) of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story of the same title, an account of what Hawthorne characterized as a "long whim-wham." The Doctorow story struck us as the more fully developed; the Hawthorne version was sketchier, more of a speculative idea for a story than an actual story. Doctorow's tale is a story of a disappearance that turns into a furtive, raccoon-like nocturnal existence, which combines elements of Kafka and Cheever, and which follows its protagonist on a quest as deranged and surreal as Cheever's "The Swimmer" undertook so memorably years ago.

Quite a performance by Charlie Gibson last night

You have to hand it to Charlie Gibson, the ABC anchor who hosted ABC's healthcare town hall in the White House last night. First there was the deft way he elbowed aside his former GMA colleague Diane Sawyer and turned her into a highly-paid "mike girl" who did little but walk the microphone around and hand it to members of the studio audience. No question about who was in charge. Then there was the selection of the audience itself, filled with just enough ordinary people to provide cover for the ringers like the head of the AMA and the CEO of Aetna.

There was the way that the usual right wing talking points -- we can't afford it, government bureaucrats interfering with our freedom of choice, unfair government competition with private enterprise, letting the market do its job -- dominated Gibson's questions. Nothing wrong with the questions in and of themselves -- the event was set up to give President Obama an opportunity to respond to questions like this, which he did well -- up to a point.

What was remarkable was the way Gibson asked the questions. He seemed personally aggrieved all night long, and he displayed a sour, aggressive disposition. Early on, asking about the affordability of healthcare reform, his tone was irritably dismissive and skeptical. As the night went on, he got edgier and edgier. He seemed to be taking all this talk of reform as a personal attack. By the time they were talking about the "public option," Gibson was visibly upset and wagging an angry finger in the face of the President of the United States.

It was hard not to interpret Gibson's tone and body language as saying something like this:

If the rabble who can't afford healthcare are given access they'll swamp the system and that might affect my medical care. I want things to stay the way they are and the market to sort things out.

Gibson's style seemed so over the top that it made Obama's urbane, reasonable remarks sound all the more intelligent and public-spirited. So why wasn't I feeling better about the night?

Because it seemed like a charade, an exercise in futility. Forget the vague and unspecified "public option." Without single-payer, any reform isn't worth the paper it's written on. By taking single-payer off the table, Barack Obama is in danger of making the same mistake Hillary Clinton made 16 years ago. The Democrats still haven't learned anything. They're still trying to negotiate a compromise with the beneficiaries of a corrupt and broken system, one that makes Wall Street seem like a paragon of virtue and efficiency. I'm worried that it won't work, and that we'll miss a great opportunity.

There are many ways to structure single-payer. It's implemented in many different ways in other industrialized nations. Some of them include a role for insurance companies and other market mechanisms, and some don't. Fine. Compromise on those. But if you give up on single-payer right out of the gate, you risk building a house of cards that will eventually collapse of its own weight. Calling it reform doesn't change that.