Archive for September 2011

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Madison Can Support The Best Artistic Talent

September 26, 2011

I’ve followed the Madison music scene for almost 35 years, and this is what I’ve learned: The scene rises and falls, rises and falls, but the baseline never advances and success is never built upon. Invariably the best talent packs up and moves on. In a cover story for Isthmus, I make the case this can change:

Let’s imagine another reality, a parallel universe where the Madison scene is so stimulating, so remunerative, so stone-cold happening that [sax player Patrick] Breiner felt compelled to stay. Imagine if the same could be said for Carl Johns, Nate Palan, Joy Dragland, Leo Sidran, Nika Roza Danilova, Alicia Smith and a long line of other inspired performers who packed up and left?

And what about Butch Vig, for crying out loud?

That’s the case I want to make here — that Madison can attract and hold the best artistic talent if it finally starts seeing music, and the arts in general, as an industry cluster that can bring wealth, jobs and renown to the city. Surprisingly similar, in other words, to the papermaking cluster in the Fox River Valley, the printing cluster in Milwaukee and the biotechnology cluster in Madison.

But here’s the catch: To turn an “art” into an “industry,” Madison needs a change in attitude and a change in strategy. I saw just this sort of thinking in Austin, Texas, almost a quarter-century ago.

In 1988 I worked for The Capital Times. The paper sent me down to Austin to figure out why another famous university town with a state capitol and a glorified tradition of progressivism and eccentricity had vaulted ahead of Madison in population growth and high-tech development.

I heard something in Austin that I never heard in Madison. City leaders and the go-getters in the chamber of commerce loved their music scene (outlaw country was still in full flower) and saw it in utterly pragmatic terms: It was a moneymaker and a draw for the creative class. The Austin chamber had a staff member dedicated to furthering the Austin music scene, doing everything from advocating for the city’s entertainment district, to pulling together the legal, marketing, financial services and recording infrastructure for musicians.

“It’s all part of our effort to diversify the economy,” a chamber exec told me.

I hope the story prompts a smarter discussion on how to promote the arts in Madison. To read more, please go here.

As for my bona fides: Well, I’m just a fan who sees a lot of music. Here’s a link to my 2010 year-end music wrap up. Links to summary stories for earlier years  can also be found there.

Categories: Development, Music, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

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New Media And The Capitol Protests

September 18, 2011

I like writing about media. This piece for Wisconsin Interest, the triannual political journal I help edit, examines how new media  drove the Capitol protests and its coverage. The piece begins:

The revolution came to Madison in February, but not the one you think.

Sure, Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to roll back a half-century of labor legislation and the ferocious liberal backlash were earthshaking events. But the outcome of this epic struggle awaits a last act.

No such uncertainty marks the digital revolution. New media played a crucial role in both organizing the Capitol protests and in covering them. The digital future arrived on the wings of text messages, cell-phone photos, flip-camera videos, Facebook posts and Twitter tweets.

Several thousand words later, I end by saying that while  the mechanics of politics has been transformed by new media, the nature of the our politics hasn’t been changed at all.

The rise of social media has had little impact on the polarization of American politics. No middle-of- the-road, “third way” movement has been texted into public consciousness.

If anything, the new technology has been deployed in the revival of a grand old creedal fight. Surging conservatives are rolling back 50 years of liberal Democratic programs in Wisconsin and even challenging the Progressive and New Deal shibboleths of earlier generations. New media has been conspicuously agnostic in this war, equally available to the left and right.

The irony is that the epochal rise of digital media may wind up triggering Gutenberg-like changes in our culture and economy, in the transmission and creation of news, and in the very nature of our intimate communications. But in the substance of our politics — well, not so much. At least for now.

To read the full report,  please go here.

Categories: Media, Politics, Wisconsin Interest

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10 Years Ago

September 9, 2011

I was touring the White House with my wife and youngest daughter on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists began crashing planes. I chronicled my experiences for Isthmus, where I was editor. Liberty was on my mind. I wrote:

For anyone who loves civil liberties, these are scary times. Our Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure has already been compromised by 30 years of deprecations from the War on Drugs and past terrorism scares. Check your civil liberties at the metal detector. The palpable horror of the Sept. 11 assault will only create a greater demand for the authorities to control and command our lives.

But absolute security and a free society are incompatible. Our liberty is threatened as much by a thousand pinpricks to our privacy and free movement as it is by a terrorist’s bomb.

You can read the column here. Readers hated it. You can read their imprecations here. I responded:

 One of the defining characteristics of Americans is an unabashed belief in personal liberty (the wildly radical “pursuit of happiness” proclaimed by Jefferson). Beginning with the oppressive Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, history shows that the most frontal assaults on liberty occur during times of national emergency. I offer no apology for sticking up for civil liberties.

Of course, the terrorism of Sept. 11 was a hellish, fiendish deed. A thousand writers have said it better than I ever could. My comments were deliberately confined to my firsthand observations, small and large, about security in Washington before and during the Pentagon bombing and how civil liberties may suffer in the aftermath. That’s it. I offered no profundities. My modest contribution is as a guy who’s already bothered by the excessive security measures of our age. My fear is that things will get worse — our privacy will shrink, our autonomy will be curtailed. All in the name of protecting us.

Categories: Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

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Looking Beyond Overture

September 7, 2011

Regionalism is a concept honored in theory and seldom in practice among local governments in Dane County. Turf protection almost always trumps cooperation. In this column for Isthmus, I argue that a unified financing and perhaps common operation of the area’s big event facilities–the Overture Center, Monona Terrace and the Alliant Energy Center–makes a lot of sense.

In particular, I warn that the single-minded attention on Overture’s problems comes at the expense of Alliant. I write:

Among the area’s top-tier event facilities, the county-owned Alliant stands alone. This includes the unrivaled breadth of its facilities — the 10,000-seat Coliseum and the Exhibition Hall are augmented with an arena, the Willow Island outdoor venue and nine farm buildings — and also its financing.

Unlike Monona Terrace and Overture, Alliant receives no direct public subsidy. County officials expect it to pay its own way. But times have been tough. The big concerts of years past (everyone from Sinatra to Elvis to Bowie) have largely disappeared, while the facility is still suffering the loss of UW Hockey to the Kohl Center.

According to executive director Bill DiCarlo, Alliant has been digging into its $2 million reserve fund to balance the operational budget in recent years. He expects his deficit to exceed $250,000 this year. But observers say that DiCarlo runs a tight ship, and under normal circumstances Alliant could be expected to tough it out until the economy picks up.

But these aren’t normal times. Alliant needs an infusion of capital now to satisfy the space needs of World Dairy Expo. It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of World Dairy Expo to the Wisconsin economy. The yearly confab — ranked among the top 35 trade shows in the entire country — fills local hotels with more than 65,000 visitors from 90-plus countries.

The immediate economic boost for local hotels, restaurant and entertainment venues exceeds $14 million for the five-day event. But the deeper payoff is the business generated for Wisconsin agribusinesses like ABS bovine genetics in DeForest and BouMatic milking systems in Madison. More than 750 exhibitors will be on hand when the 44th show convenes on Oct. 4.

Just one problem. The expo has a huge waiting list of vendors because Alliant has nowhere near enough space to house them. “We could double the size of the Exhibition Hall and fill it with our waiting list,” says expo general manager Mark Clarke. “That’s an awful lot of money not coming into the community.”

To read the full column, please go here.

Categories: Development, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

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