Walter Trout and the Radicals
Tonight @ Shank Hall - 8 p.m.
Through workman like persistence, Walter Trout over the decades has worked his way up from being a side-player to an increasingly prominent roster of musicians—including Joe Tex, Canned Heat, John Lee Hooker and John Mayall—to become a headliner with his own band, Walter Trout and the Radicals, who do . . .
Meg Waite Clayton
Tonight @ the Brookfield Schwartz Bookshop - 7 p.m.
Meg Waite Clayton proudly embraces chick-lit conventions in her latest novel, The Wednesday Sisters, the story of five longtime friends who form a writers circle and relive stories from their decades of experiences. Clayton reads from the book tonight at 7 p.m. at the Brookfield Schwartz Bookshop location.
“Relative Spaces”
Today @ the Katie Gingrass Gallery
Sculptor Joel Hunnicutt and fellow artist Jody dePew McLeane are both obsessive and meticulous builders; the former with bits of wood, the latter through staccato strokes and layers of pastel. It is the relationship between form and material where the artists' bodies of work differ, and where the tension . . .
Dinosaurs Alive!
Today @ the Humphrey IMAX Dome Theater - 9:30 a.m. & 1:30 p.m.
Making particularly good use of IMAX technology—and wisely appealing to kids’ interest in all things large and roaring—Dinosaurs Alive! is a 35-minute documentary that mixes footage of paleontologists unearthing fossils and then state-of-the-art, computer-animated depictions of what these dinosaurs might have looked like . . .
Milwaukee-New Berlin Water Sale Could Be Near
Working out the details for an expanded service area
The request—technically an amendment to the agreement currently in place between New Berlin and Milwaukee—would allow New Berlin to bring in Lake Michigan water to an “expanded service area” or the “middle third” of the community.
Pan-Asian Experience
Potawatomi’s newest addition
The continuing expansion of the Potawatomi Bingo Casino includes more than just slot machines and gaming tables: The restaurants are also undergoing major changes. In addition to the relocated buffet and Dream Dance, there will be a food court and two new restaurants. One of the restaurants, RuYi, has...
Short Orders (Burger Joint)
Hamburger Haus
Many people miss the presence of Bella’s Fat Cat at its original location at 1233 E. Brady St. But it didn’t take long for its replacement to open. It is called the Burger Joint and has the same owner as the Dogg Haus, a short distance to the east. The Joint is as devoted to the hamburger as the Haus is to the frankfurter.
STREET OF DREAMS
Back To Brady Street Days
If it’s lucky, a city will offer one of those streets that seems to have a magnetic force field running its length, attracting not just a certain segment of the population, but nearly everyone: scenesters and trendsetters, hedonists and daters, lollygaggers and bohemians, and all those that defy a label.
Million-Dollar Condos Could Be Added to Prospect Avenue
Bauman signals it’s OK to change zoning for wealthy reside
East Side Alderman Robert Bauman has indicated that he’d OK zoning changes to allow New Land Enterprises devel oper Boris Gokhman to build a 27-story luxury condo development on the site of the historic Goll mansion at 1550 N. Prospect Ave. A New Land representative argued that the zoning change merely represents a “reallocation” of square footage currently allowed on that site.
Fake Democrats
A right-wing Republican from West Allis has been recruiting conservative candidates and promising them big money to challenge incumbent Milwaukee legislators in the Democratic primary. But former state Sen. Tom Reynolds, whose right-wing extremism is far beyond where the buses run, has not developed a sudden...
Issue of the Week: Paid Sick Days
Plus Winners and Jerks of the Week
The Paid Sick Days coali tion, led by the working women’s group 9to5 Milwaukee, collected more than 42,000 signatures in support of a referen dum that will likely be placed on the Nov. 4 ballot.
They Must Be Joking
The New Yorker’s satirical Obama cartoon
From the works of Mark Twain to Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, there have always been people who didn’t get it—or worried about the damage that would ensue when other people didn’t get it. Today in America, despite the rising influence of “The Daily Show” and The Onion...
Think You Know John McCain?
Offshore drilling won’t reduce gas prices
McCain—who has accepted more than $1 million from Big Oil donors—is hoping that voters who are outraged by the high cost of gas will support his desire to find new domestic sources of oil and natural gas.
Off the Beaten Path
Milwaukee’s small galleries
When Mike Brenner threatened last winter to close Hotcakes Gallery and leave town if funds were raised to erect a bronze statue of The Fonz, a lot of people accused him of being whiny, or worse. But at the heart of his complaint was the fact that, despite easily raising $85,000 for the Bronze Fonz, people just aren’t walking into local galleries and purchasing art, which makes it hard for those galleries to stay in business. Milwaukee loves art, though, right? Gallery Night is heavily attended, so much so that it’s sometimes hard to actually enjoy the art on the walls through the cheese-nibbling crowds. But galleries, particularly those showing emerging artists, come and go . . . |
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Sam, Bill or Harry? (Mamma Mia)
Mama sorts them out
For me, ABBA was never a guilty pleasure. It was usually a pleasure, period. Most of the group’s hits were great little soap operas sung in Berlitz lesson English to irresistible melodies with unassailable arrangements. It was pure pop for now people in the ’70s. ABBA was never as big in benighted America as elsewhere, but that began to change with the 1999 Broadway debut of one of the most lucrative musicals ever, Mamma Mia! The plot, loosely strung together through a sequence of ABBA songs, concerns a fatherless 20-year-old girl about to be married. Reading her mother’s diary, Sophie gathers that mom was never certain of who fathered her. |
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Unsung Heroine
Theater Preview
Desert land comprises a majority of Iraq’s 168,000 square miles, so it would seem to be a strange setting for an outdoor play staged in the lush wooded area of Spring Green, Wis. But it wasn’t the location that led playwright and American Players Theatre (APT) co-founder James DeVita to write Desert Queen, a drama about influential British archaeologist Gertrude Bell. The idea came a few years ago, when DeVita challenged himself to . . . .
Midsummer Night’s Magic
Theater Review
Ideally, an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the middle of summer should capture some of the magic of Shakespeare’s script. Door Shakespeare’s intimate outdoor production captures a fair amount of this magic, and does so in a way so pleasantly unexpected that it actually ends up being one of the more satisfying productions of the summer.
That Wacky Generation X (The Wackness)
Nostalgic for 1994?
For Generation X, 1994 seems to loom in memory as 1962 did for the American Graffiti gang and 1967 for the hippies. It was the year Kurt Cobain killed himself and Pearl Jam rode triumphantly onto the arena rock circuit. It’s the time of The Wackness, a modestly engaging, wacky coming of age comedy concerning a slacker doofus, his psychiatrist and the girl who initiates him into sex for two (as opposed to the more solitary variety) and the roiling emotions of first love.
None of Them Knew They Were Robots
The mysterious sounds of Wooden Robot
Local band Wooden Robot couldn’t be more mysterious. First, there’s their undeniably spooky sound: Think haunted Old World carnival or, better yet, a vodka-drenched dance party with your dead Polish-babushka grandmother. Then there are the places they usually play: dimly lit bars, crowded houses of friends and dark corners in cramped basements. The band’s performance at Turner Hall Ballroom on July 26, opening for Secret Chiefs 3 with The Demix, will mark a rare appearance in the spotlight. |
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The Heavyheads Up Their Game
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A cautious optimism has permeated Milwaukee’s once demoralized music scene. As local bands—through a mix of talent, vision and, perhaps most importantly, strategic self-promotion—begin to make a name for themselves and as radio stations and print publications make a more visible effort to cover the local scene, there’s an increasing sense that Milwaukee musicians may now actually have a shot at national exposure. That feeling is certainly driving The Heavyheads. |
Weezer
Weezer (“Red Album”) (DGC/Interscope)
Get ready to laugh, cry or do both the moment you hear Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo start rapping on the band’s third self-titled album. That he does so over a song filled with piano and choral-chanting bombast (no lie) suggests that Cuomo may have seriously lost his marbles. His hysterically loyal fan base is no doubt . . .
Barbara Stephan
I'm Awake
Milwaukee's Barbara Stephan has built a reputation as a jazz-pop vocalist with blues flavor. She must realize, however, that Diana Krall and Etta James aren't getting as much airplay as other adult-contemporary divas, so she has adapted—and pretty well, at that. At this solo album's best, when Stephan . . .
Hungry, Hungry Press Corps
Jim Cryns on Sports
Golf tournaments are undergoing more name changes than Elizabeth Taylor. The GMO, I mean the U.S. Bank Championship, has come and gone from Milwaukee. I understand golf tournaments are subject to the demands and orders from the PGA tour, but why is this town forced to compete for time against the British Open, I mean, The Open. The 2008 Arnold Palmer Invitational used to be known as the Bay Hill Classic until this year's name change. It probably doesn’t matter much as much to the General as making sure he has plenty of Ensure on hand.
A Return to Normancy
The Fairly Detached Observers
thinking is, “What if we bring Brett back, Rodgers holds the clipboard another year, and then Brett says next year, ‘OK, now I’m really done,’ and Rodgers becomes a free agent and says, ‘I’m gone, too’?”.
Ein Half-Baked Haus
So this food-expert is addressing a large audience at a dietitian conference: “The materi al we put into our stomachs is enough to have killed most of us sitting here years ago. Red meat is awful. Soft drinks erode your stomach lining. Chinese food is loaded with MSG.
Don’t Order the Turtle
In May, Randall Popkes, 41, and his son Joshua Williams, 22, were arrested in West Des Moines, Iowa, and charged with attempted safecracking at the Des Moines Golf Country Club. A security officer noted their car’s license plate as they sped away after a frustrating session in which they cut into the safe but could not open it.
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