22 November, 2022

The Corona Diaries Vol. 66: An Excursion of One Who Longs to Penetrate the Horizon (Plus movies!)

(late August 2022)

(Watch the prelude.)

With the mornings growing a bit cooler, there’s now a layer of fog hanging over the soybean field at the Voit farm when I get there to wait for my bus.

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My most recent hike was out at Goose Lake Wildlife Area which lies about 12 miles east of Madison. I’d never been there before and I ended up driving out to the first parking lot I came across. It was on the west side of the grounds. Exiting my car I saw no trail and instead a sign about partridge hunting. This part of the wildlife area was completely wooded.

I took a short walk into the trees and stopped at one point whereupon a couple of leaves fell on my head. Looking around, I saw that there was a hint of autumn about me as a smattering of yellow had begun to pepper the otherwise green landscape.

I wandered just a little deeper in before turning back as I was not dressed for a walk in the woods. Where was the path? Hopping in my car, I drove back to the county road and then east maybe an eighth of mile to the wildlife area's other entrance. There were two or three cars in the gravel lot given over to parking here and I met a couple gentlemen later out on the trail who were spending a quiet morning with their hounds.

The terrain was rather open as I walked north in the furrow cut into the grass by the ranger's vehicle. Filling the air were bird calls that I didn’t recognize and I frequently caught flashes of yellow out of the corners of my eyes. Every once in a while I spied a lemony spot on a nearby branch and I was lucky enough to get a couple decent photographs of these birds taking a breather. Methinks they were American goldfinches.

Over to the west was what I thought was the eponymous lake but it turns out to have been Mud Lake. 

Goose Lake was off to the east, hidden by marshland and lots of cattails.

Along the path I ran into the occasional branch where green was yielding to yellow or red. Another reminder that autumn would be upon us ere long.

The northern section of the wildlife area is more wooded.

The path eventually turned to the east where I exited the woods and entered a meadow through which ran high tension wires.

Walking underneath them, I could hear the hum of a gajillion volts as they shot through the wires above me. It was vaguely disconcerting and I felt a bit like I was in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Would a deer step out from the grass and whisper “Judy”?

No, we’re not going to talk about Judy.

What a shame to mar the land with these towers and wires. But I suppose they're a necessary evil as we choose to live 24/7 at the beck and call of electronic gadgets that subdue necessities - or just distract our monkey brains like a shiny object lying on the ground before us.

I rather liked Goose Lake Wildlife Area. While it’s fairly sizeable, the trails aren’t particularly lengthy. I got a nice walk in but it was not an all-day affair. There are a couple of moderately steep hills but nothing outrageous. A return trip is in order.

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While I haven’t cooked anything particularly extravagant lately, we have eaten well.
 
One day there was chicken in the refrigerator that needed to get cooked and my Frau had said that she had a hankering for okra. Curiously enough, there was a cache of okra in the freezer buried beneath some naan and a bag of falafel. And so I consulted that South American cookbook I mentioned several entries ago and found a chicken and okra dish which I figured would fit the bill. If I recall correctly, the recipe came from Brazil.

You may recall an earlier entry in which I described cooking Sichuan chicken with peanuts. After having made it, I found myself with a surfeit of Shaoxing wine, Sichuan peppercorns, and Chinkiang vinegar so I thought that I should start using them lest they sit and gather dust for several years before being unceremoniously thrown out. I headed down to our local Asian grocer to get a few things such as bok choy so I could throw together something resembling a stir fry.

Walking down an aisle full of coolers and freezers, I ducked my head into a section that has one of those curtains of vinyl strips that keeps the cool air in yet allowing for ease of access from without. I found a selection of sausages including a few from Mekong Meats up north in Mosinee, which is in the center of Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is home to fair number of Hmong and I assume that Mekong Meats is a Hmong butcher.

Hmong is, to my understanding, a Chinese ethnic sub-group. I believe that Hmong people started coming here in the mid-1970s, mainly from Laos where they threw their lot in with American/Western forces during the various Southeast Asian wars that were fought in the 1950s-1970s. For some reason, the bulk of them seem to have been settled in the Upper Midwest with Minnesota and Wisconsin at the top and Michigan bringing up the rear with several thousand Hmong living there.

When I lived up north, the Hmong immigrants hadn’t been there all that long and the first generation of Hmong Americans was still young so there didn’t seem to have been a lot of integration into mainstream American culture in those communities. The wife of a high school teacher of mine told me of having to deal with some instances where large families would pack themselves into small apartments in violation of local ordinances. I recall hearing a joke about how Hmong families would show up at an area school that had a dog(?) as its mascot thinking it was a restaurant.

This was the era of protests by white Wisconsinites against Ojibwe tribal members who were taking to Wisconsin lakes to spearfish after a court found that a couple treaties dating back to the first half of the 19th century guaranteed the right of the tribes to engage in this practice. Things were often heated as protesters hurled racial slurs at the spearfishers and, at times, the protests turned violent with the whites throwing rocks at the Ojibwe and even assaulting them.

While by no means was everyone I encountered up north a racist, there was certainly an abundance of racism on display whether it be against Hmong, Native Americans, or black people in Milwaukee.

I moved to Madison and, as the 21st century got underway, hadn’t heard much about racial animosity leveled at the Hmong up north so I figured that generations born here had become American, so to speak.

Then in 2004 came an incident in the northwest part of the state involving a Hmong American named Chai Vang who killed 6 and wounded 2 on a hunting trip. He claimed self-defense and accused the white people who confronted him of having called him racial slurs.

Three years later the body of a Hmong man from Green Bay named Cha Vang was found in the woods in the far northeastern part of the state. His killer, James Nichols, supposedly had a history of making racially disparaging remarks against the Hmong.

I presume that the racial tensions persists today but I get the impression that succeeding generations of Hmong have integrated themselves into society just as immigrants from across the globe have done here for ages.

OK, lecture over. The sausage looked tasty and I bought a package of the pork ginger stuff. Each package was 2.5lbs so we ate the sausage for a week or more.

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I've watched quite a few movies this month. Part of the reason for this was, I suspect, being too sore to do anything after building the deck and moving concrete slabs around that weigh a few hundred pounds each, triggering the use of long dormant muscles that Henry Gray himself didn't know of. Maybe the odd rainy day as well. Whatever the reasons, here’s a lightning round of What I Watched in August.

Low budget psychological horror that I found to be creepy and fun. It felt rather uncanny which instilled a sense of unease throughout. I just wish there were more scenes at the abandoned amusement park and less of that guy hitting on our heroine.



A feature-length stop animation film decades in the making. A guy who looks like he was pulled from the trenches of World War I makes a decent into a hell a la Dante and encounters madness. A crazy scene of surgery at an abattoir will never leave me. Dark, grotesque - does the guy traverse a hideous landscape or the foetid interior world of a madman??



I expected a neo-noir and got more of a perverted cautionary tale of a girl eaten by the fashion industry before being eaten by other models. That, um, “love scene” was a sure a surprise. No. A shock. A good, severe, grotesquerie.



I liked this a lot - a disturbing, creepy, decent into madness - until the end. The violence felt unnecessary. Not out of character but cliched, I guess. It’s like Rear Window but decidedly unhinged.



A neat Phildickian premise of an assassin who does her work by inhabiting the minds of others from Brandon Cronenberg, son of David. Plenty weird and disturbing but a bit too sadistic.



So, was she a mermaid/Lorelei type of creature? I thought it was neat how the film compared Berlin's reconstruction & its reckoning with its past to human relationships. Plus, groß Gunther!



I liked this flick. It features a pair of 20-something expats in London struggling to mature, to find direction in life. I just didn’t like it that much. Maybe the trials and tribulations of people half my age just don’t move me like they did when I was in my 20s. Or perhaps there was a stylistic something that increased the Verfremdungseffekt, as Brecht might have said. Great use of music, though.


That my Super Movies of August rundown. Now onto the bonus photo.

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Bonus photo time! More turkeys! I saw this gaggle on my walk to work one recent morning.

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