ure, it has the lowest unemployment rate in the world or some such
exaggerated claim. Ever tried to find a job when every one else is employed?
The Dane County Job Service here doesn't even have a category for desktop
publishers/computer artists. They say we're supposed to find our own jobs
by going door to door. (I was literally told this at Job Service.) However,
if you want a $6.00/hour secretarial job, or a $4.25/hour+commission sales
position, there's plenty of those. There's nothing like being a Top Ten
University town whose employment opportunities cater to the vocational
tech college crowd.
hen there's the eyesore that sits smack dab in the middle of the city.
No, I am not talking about the capitol that is graced in gilt (guilt?)
by Miss Ass-backward. I'm talking about the Inhumanities Building at 455
South Park Street. 45,000 students on campus and they can't even give music,
art, and whatever other fields are housed in that behemoth their separate
buildings. (I won't even get into the College Sports Team vs.The Arts financial
allotment controversy; it is probably pretty obvious where I stand on that.)
The Inhumanities Building, aside from the fact that 90% of my worse times
as an adult relates to that whole Art Graduate experience, (doubling it
for when my husband attended to make it 180%), is just a BAD design. It
is as if the architect was making a mockery of the fact that the U.W. has
no place to expand, due mostly to the large lake that lies immediately
to the north, the downtown area to the east, and old residential areas
to the south. There is essentially no student parking available on campus
in any convenient location, and off-campus parking is expensive and hard
to find. So how do you construct a building for this campus? Make it big,
but with an even bigger open area in the middle. Real bright. Real university-material,
that.
nd how could I forget the Frank Lloyd Wright Convention Center? Frankie-Baby
wasn't appreciated here in his own time. As he would return to Wisconsin
from his trips in Arizona, he would turn to his wife (I forgot which one)
and tell her that they are returning to the place where the people have
long faces, referring to how they did not accept his aesthetics. (I heard
this on Public TV over 6 years ago, so don't quote me on this.) But now
that he's long gone and has proven his worth to the world, he's become
one of Wisconsin's Fave Dead Celebs along with Georgia O'Keefe. So all
the yuppies vote for the convention center, and the environmentalists vote
against it because it dredges up the lake. Not that I think dredging up
a lake isn't a good enough reason to side with the environmentalists and
vote against yuppie scum, but I voted against it on moral aesthetic grounds.
Stop Deifying Dead Artists! Artists have a hard time when they're alive,
when nobody cares. That's when they need the support, the promotion, the
publicity. Not when they're feeding worms! But I digress. The yuppies won.
Construction has been going on now for a couple years. A big traffic mess
in the middle of town, but the promise of many more $5.00/hour jobs for
the city of Madison. The irony of all this is that the convention center
now covers up a controversial mural that Madison paid lots of money to
have created by a non-resident. Not that I liked the mural much on an aesthetic
basis--it was your typical bland state art. But it is a good example of
the disposable way Madison treats its art and artists.
espite all my ranting, Madison is a pretty town. The lakes are pretty.
The greenery is pretty. The young men are pretty.
