On my way home from up north, I made a quick stop at a liquor store to get some beer from the northwestern part of the state that is unavailable in Madison. Some of these brands were seen on store shelves down south in the past but no longer while others have always only been sold in their home region.
While it would be nice and convenient to have these brands at my local liquor store, I have really come to appreciate that some things are not at my fingertips and that they simply require travel to experience. I like regional variation. It’s fun and alluring to go somewhere and find different beers, different foods, etc. than I get in Madison.
I had hoped to stop in at Valkyrie Brewing but my schedule precluded a visit. Same goes for the Northwoods Brewpub. Still, the prospect of Northwoods’ rye ale and Valkyrie’s smoked Oktoberfest make fall treks up north all the more alluring.
Rather than jumping on the interstate as soon as I could, I took some back roads to Osseo where I would catch I-94. I drove through the small town of Cleghorn which is just a short jaunt east of the former site of Hadleyville, which I detailed in a previous entry. Cleghorn is surely home to a few hundred people at most and has one crossroads with no stoplights.
Up until recently, it didn’t even have a tavern, to the best of my knowledge. The main part of town is simply an abandoned building and a store which is now a bar. Here’s that abandoned building.
This was just one of those trips where I decided that I would pull over if I drove by anything that even remotely piqued my interest.
I have a weird affection for Cleghorn despite never having actually done much beyond driving through it. It’s like a ghost town for me because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human being there. I’ve seen cars drive through it, seen them parked outside of places knowing there are living, breathing persons inside but I have never seen them.
It is like a little game I play. I take the back roads to drive through the town to see if there are actually any people around.
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My initial plan had been to spend another day up north but things were changed when I recalled that I had a ticket to see the 1977 Italian horror film, Suspiria, on the big screen. But it was not to simply be a film screening. Claudio Simonetti's Goblin would be performing the soundtrack live! Simonetti was in the original line-up of Goblin that composed the music for the film back in ’77.
That’s not Madison as my phone is not capable of taking decent photographs under concert conditions and, sadly, I haven’t found any online.
It had been a while since I’d seen the original Suspiria and it was just a lot of fun to watch it with all of the super blood red reds and other brilliant colors that it’s known for. What a treat to have a live score!
After the movie was done, the band continued performing for another hour and a half or so. They seemed very enthusiastic – happy to be playing in front of an audience. Bassist Cecilia Nappo was bopping all around her part of the stage and Claudio Simonetti almost seemed content to play into the wee hours. He was proud of his music and thrilled to play for people.
This was a couple days before Halloween but the students were out in full force that night, lining up at bars and fully costumed. I had no problems except for the fact that the last bus had left 15 minutes or so after I stepped out of the theatre. Hopefully the new network redesign and the introduction of BRT will keep this from happening in the future.
A bit of the show is on Youtube.
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The next day I indulged in more seasonal film goodness by going to see From Beyond.
Director Stuart Gordon was a Chicago native but he attended UW-Madison and became heavily involved in the theater scene. He founded Broom Street Theater in 1969 and it is still around today. I suspect most people know him as the guy that adapted a couple H.P. Lovecraft stories for the big screen including From Beyond.
It's a fairly typical mid-80s horror film with plenty of body horror. Like Suspiria, I hadn’t seen it in ages and I just had a blast watching it on the big screen.
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The Halloween theme carried on after the holiday itself had come and gone. For starters, my friends and I began a game of the Alien role-playing game.
It is based on the film franchise with plenty of references to the movies. I played Leah Davis, the pilot of a freighter ship named the USCSS Montero. My crew and I are on a delivery run and were put into cryogenic suspension as the voyage to our destination would take quite a while.
We awoke to discover that we were nowhere near the planet that was to take our delivery. Instead, the ship’s computer had re-routed us to intercept a scientific research vessel called the Cronus that had been missing for nearly 75 years. Our mission to deliver a shipment of Helium-3 had been changed by our corporate masters at Weyland-Yutani to recovering data from the Cronus' computers, rescuing any remaining crew, and towing the ship back to dock, if possible.
We found the Cronus in bad shape. No breathable air, no lights, and lots of destruction and dried blood. Although the ship’s synthetic (i.e. – robot) was mostly functional.
I got a bit anxious and nervous while playing it. One of the characters from my ship had a motion sensor and detected something for just a moment before we found the remaining crew of the Cronus in cryo suspension. So, there’s an unknown presence on the loose, we had to wait a while for the other crew to awaken from their slumbers, and the synthetic on the Cronus isn’t quite right and won’t answer all of our questions. It was only a matter of time before something bad happens.
Will we make it back to the Montero before all hell broke loose?
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The final seasonal thing that I did was to make a visit to Exquisite Corpse, Madison’s home of surreal taxidermy, with a friend.
Exquisite Corpse was opened by Marcia Field last year after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. She died back in August. Originally from Chicago just like Stuart Gordon, Field moved to Madison in 2001 and it sounds like she always had something of a morbid curiosity which she parlayed into a love of taxidermy some 10-12 years ago, it seems. I can’t find an exact year.
This one is called “Sacred Heart” and she described it as a homage to her first pacemaker which she had implanted while she was in her 40s.
Most of her work was influenced by her illness, her awareness of how fleeting life is.
This one is “The Ascension or Tenth Life” and features a cat atop a Catholic Last Rites kit.
Here are some chipmunk bones in tiny vials set as earrings.
This one is still personal, I suppose, but also political – “Goebbels’ Wet Dream or The Exterminator”.
A commentary on anti-Semitism featuring a muskrat, a Zyklon B can, et al. It illustrates how the Nazis would portray Jews at rats in their propaganda. Note the 2 volumes of MAUS by Art Spiegelman on the right.
For a mere $40 you can have what looks to be preserved cow eyes as a paperweight, I suppose.
There was a trio of taxidermy dioramas by guest artist Angela Webster. Here’s “Lab Rat Revenge”. Poor cat trapped and at the mercy of a rat!
A very neat exhibit.
Since our visit was on a gallery night, other denizens of the artist spaces there also had their works on display. We stopped in at Mary Made It Studio down the hall.
We found the artist, Mary Gill, chatting away with another aesthete. Originally from Trinidad, her life there remains a huge influence on her art.
I really liked this once entitled “The Gate of No Return” which succinctly depicts the slave passage to Trinidad and the aftermath of slavery.
If I had a few thousand dollars to spend on art, I would have bought it.
She also had this wonderful triptych that was about 10’ long and depicted various Trinidadians talking to their loved ones who were incarcerated and awaiting trial. Ms. Gill described how these facilities have a scheme to charge the incarcerated and their families which makes it profitable to keep people locked up instead of giving them their day in court.
Ms. Gill was extremely friendly and very willing to discuss her art. I am looking into buying prints…
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Lastly, I want to note that I cooked some bigos recently. This is Polish hunter’s stew. I didn’t do it up all proper and instead made a down & dirty batch. I used kielbasa that I bought at Andy’s Deli in Chicago plus beef, half a head of cabbage that needed to be eaten, onion, and sauerkraut.
When I had everything browned and all of the ingredients ready to be combined for a long simmer, I realized that we didn’t have any kraut. I scoured the refrigerator 3 or 4 times as I would have sworn that I had bought some on my last trip to the supermarket. But no. So I made an emergency run to the store for kraut.
It turned out rather well, I thought. Hearty fare for chilly evenings.
Bonus photo. Here’s a non-taxidermy diorama I stumbled upon while on a bike ride. It was next to a building whose peeling paint had revealed a ghost sign underneath.
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