Fairly Painless

I feel like my audition for the afternoon hosts's job went pretty damn well. Special thanks to Kristin Czubkowski from the Capital Times and Jesse Russell from Dane101 for coming up, sharing their stories and easing the burden on a freshman afternoon show host.

And now we play the waiting game. It's out of my hands, and it's in the management's.

I hate the waiting game.

If you're morbidly curious, here, finally are a few clips from the experience.

Different Hats

If you had asked me to draw an ideal road map for my career three years ago, I probably would have started with a dot that said, "Graduate College" then progressed through a series of jobs in the media to pump up my resume and ended with a dot that read, "Get a radio show where I can shoot my mouth off indiscriminately." I also probably would have added a few more steps after that, something to the affect of "lose the rest of my hair," "get fat and happy" and then "retire."

Yet here I am three years later, and I've got an outside shot at crossing that big end goal off my list. It's a little overwhelming...

...No, I didn't mean the "lose the rest of my hair" goal, though I suppose I'm within striking distance if this week doesn't go well. What I mean is I'm getting two one afternoons this week to audition as an afternoon talk show host on AM1670 WTDY in Madison. If I can pull it off, and it's a big if, it would be a huge step up and perhaps a once in a lifetime opportunity.

The two previous afternoon hosts, Prebil and Murph, departed WTDY for a pretty sweet gig in Minneapolis a couple weeks ago, and since then, listeners have heard a parade of varying drive-time personalities while the management has worked behind the scenes to fill the spot permanently. I consider myself a betting man, but I would just as soon keep my money to myself as far as who they will settle on to fill the slots.

Yet somehow, I like to think through cunning and conniving, I'm in the running. Now it's just a matter of not blowing it.

So I'm going to try to approach the audition the same way I approach the blog -- with a grain of salt, but also with a healthy curiosity and holding nothing so sacred it can't be laughed at. It's been almost two years since I hosted the last edition of "Slightly Off Kilter," my contribution to the world of college radio. College Broadcasting Incorporated sat up and took notice when they named our show 2007's best regularly scheduled program in the nation.

So Monday and Thursday this week, from 3:00 to 6:00, I'll be hanging up my reporter's hat and switching the safety off for a bit. Hopefully, after two years on the coat tree, my Host's Hat hasn't collected so much dust that I can't turn a few heads on the commercial radio scene.

For the most part, I'll keep the topics lighthearted, but nothing's off limits. And it's a call-in show, so I look forward to being told how wrong I am by everyone that can operate a touch-tone.

Tune in. It'll be something, anyway!

***Monday morning edit -- Change in plans, and I'm only hosting for sure on Monday now. Thursday could still be in the mix, but things are very fluid***

Mifflin Day Miracle?

And almost 365 turns of the world later, we're here again -- poised on the eve of another Mifflin Street Block Party with no accord reached between police and partiers.

Yet.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I love this event. When I was a student, I laid plans for the day weeks in advance. I had to make sure I had room to sleep however many guests I was expecting, there had to be a guaranteed source of meat to grill and beer to drink, and, if there was time, it helped to have a destination in mind on the street itself.

But that, to me, has always been the glorious part of the block party. Sure, it's nice to know someone and have a porch or balcony to stand on. But if not, there's always the option of wandering up and down the block seeing the sights, pausing to take in a good band and sparking random friendships with people you'll never see again.

I honestly think Mifflin Day is more magical than Christmas.

Unfortunately, those good vibes have been on the decline in recent years because of rising arrests, increasing noise citations and the resulting decline in the number of bands. If somebody doesn't do something, one of the most unique traditions in Madison is going to become what outsiders have always said it was anyway. Take away the music and the high spirits, and you're left with a bunch of people standing around drinking in front yards, eyeing the police suspiciously.

It would be a "drunkfest," to quote a wise man I worked with once.

The Wisconsin Union Directorate tried, heroically, to step up to the plate and organize the event. And by organize, I don't mean "suck the fun out of," which some argue is what happened to Halloween. They wanted to work with the city to get a street use permit and noise permits, thus cutting down on arrests and citations, and set up a music stage with a line-up.

I'm told the chancellor's office pulled the plug on that pretty quickly, wanting no association with the block party. Never mind that it takes place only a few blocks from campus. Never mind that 80 percent of the revelers are UW students or alumni. Never mind that some of my favorite college memories will be forever rooted in that scrubbly excuse for grass that grows between the houses and the street on Mifflin.

This is the new, re-imagined University of Wisconsin, damnit! IF there's drinking that takes place, we certainly didn't sanction it!

So since Bascom Hall has torpedoed WUD's effort to work with the city, now the students themselves are pulling together to get the permits needed to make it a "legitimate event" in the eyes of police and city officials. They face an uphill battle with less than three weeks until the event takes place May 2, but they've got neighborhood Alder Mike Verveer backing them up.

Verveer is a Mifflin lifer, like I hope to be one day, having never missed a block party since his freshman year in college. His streak's considerably longer than mine (this will be number six for me). He understands what the block party can be, and what it's become. I think he would move heaven and earth to bring the music back to Mifflin.

I applaud Verveer and the students both for their efforts, and now the onus is on city officials. It's certainly an unusual notion to give a group of people with no organizational affiliation street and noise permits, but it's not without precedent.

It's certainly late in the game to get a process like this started, but nobody counted on WUD getting the rug ripped out from under them. The very fact that a group has coalesced to take up WUD's fight is proof they have the capability and the resolve to make this work.

The City of Madison needs to recognize this and do everything to expedite the permitting process. What we need now is a Mifflin Day Miracle.

Fruits of Our Labor

After several delays, we've finally put together a master cut of our rookie piece for Wis-Kino's 48 hour film kabaret last March. It seems like a lot of blood, sweat and tears for a five minute piece to end up on Youtube, but damn was it fun! Enjoy!

When I See It

In response to a few observations I posted on the blog last week, my friend and mentor Tim Morrissey said a few nice things about me at his blog, "The Way Things R." They're intimidating things, flattering things, the kind of things that paint me as a civil, sensitive, responsible adult.

Thankfully, my pals at Dane101 have offered me a chance to associate with something so vile and repugnant (I hope), my name will be free from those kinds of connotations for months to come.

Justice Potter Stewart once wrote in a Supreme Court opinion about obscenity, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it." This has always just struck me as a really long-winded spiel to go off on, when all he needed to say was, "the Aristocrats."

If you're unfamiliar with the Aristocrats joke, it's basically carte blanche to say the most outrageous things imaginable under the guise of telling a joke. Put less succinctly at Dane101, "The concept and set up of the joke is fairly simple as it typically starts with a man or a family walking into a talent agent's office and pitching an act. The next part is the difficult part as the comedian launches into a lengthy description of the most offensive act the dark recesses of his or her mind can dream up. The act typically includes quite a bit of cursing and a whole lot of sexual deviance. The goal is to make it to the punchline which is always the same. The agent asks "What the heck do you call an act like that?" and the comedian says with much flourish "I call it 'The Aristocrats'."

Like Stewart, I know it when I see it too, and I even have a respectably unhealthy appreciation for the obscene, which is why I'm thrilled that Jesse Russell at Dane101 asked me to be part of a local spin on the old topic. I'll be part of a panel of judges with Scott Gordon from The Onion's Decider and Katjusa Cisar from 77Square, and up to a dozen local comedians will take a stab at making us wince.

Bring it on.

And if you think listening to a dozen different versions of the Aristocrats joke would wear thin after a while, you've obviously never seen the documentary bearing the same name. I think this is going to be an absolute scream, and I hope to see a good turn out.

Just make sure you don't plan on eating shortly before or after the performance.

And in all seriousness, Tim, thanks for the kind words.

Deuce ex Machina

I won't say the race for Madison's district two city council seat has gotten more dull since the field of candidates was narrowed down from five to two. While the much-anticipated defeat of Dennis deNure sapped its entertainment value somewhat, things have only heated up between the victors in February's primary, incumbent Brenda Konkel and challenger Bridget Maniaci.

My personal attention has been wrenched elsewhere. There have been a lot of work and life things popping up -- things that are afoot and could eventually mean exciting things for me and the blog alike.

But I also got so caught up in reading other media's coverage of the Rumble in the Deuce, I forgot to do some of my own. Hands down, this race caught the most attention out of any of the city council races, as you can tell not only by picking up a local paper, but by perusing Konkel and Maniaci's donor lists as well.

There have been big name endorsements. Konkel comes in packing the Progressive Dane Mod Squad, plus a big nod from Wisconsin Assemblyman Mark Pocan, while Maniaci has amassed a trifecta of mayoral magnificence with endorsements from Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and former mayors Paul Soglin and Joe Sensenbrenner. The Cieslewicz endorsement was predictable and could have even been damaging to Maniaci's campaign, had it not been for the nod from Soglin, which surprised a lot of people and leant her campaign the scrapper image Konkel had previously had a monopoly on.

There has been a glut of newspaper coverage, complete with an even split in endorsements as the Capital Times pushed Konkel and the Wisconsin State Journal backed Maniaci. The student papers both swung for Maniaci, which was not terribly surprising.

There has certainly been an explosion of yard signs, popping up like teal and purple springtime flowers as the snow disappeared. More unexpected were the pair of billboards, commissioned by the Madison Professional Police Officers Association, urging residents of the Deuce to vote for Maniaci.

For her part, Maniaci says she was just as surprised as everyone else about the billboards. When the MPPOA endorsed her, she says it involved a lengthy phone call during which the question was posed, "How do you feel about billboards?"

"I kind of stopped and said, 'Okay I guess,'" Maniaci told me. "I just didn't want my picture on it. But that was all I heard about it for a while."

Lo and behold, within a few weeks time the pictureless billboards sprouted up without another mention from the police union, a situation Maniaci says hasn't yet ceased to strike her as "surreal."

There are a lot of factors to consider when it comes to analyzing support and predicting who will come out on top. It's easy to just go ahead and use yard signs as an indicator of expected vote totals, so I will.

After all, I think the yard sign count runs pretty parallel to the race as I've observed it. In the weeks just before and after the primary election, Konkel's purple yard signs were by far the most prevalent, particularly in the more eastern portion of the deuce -- likely leftovers from one of her previous runs at the seat.

But as the Maniaci campaign has picked up steam, her aqua plaquards have exploded across the deuce. Just last week, a Maniaci sign has appeared in front of every property along the left side of Gorham Street between Brearly and Paterson Streets. All the buildings are larger apartment complexes, and I'm willing to stake money on my hypothesis that Maniaci has picked up the support of an enthusiastic landlord and not staged a coup in the 900 block of Gorham, but anything's possible.

Most streets, however, are much more evenly divided. A walk down Sherman Avenue or Blair Street will demonstrate how this race has pitted neighbor against neighbor, with clusters and rows of purple pitted against the encroaching aquamarine, or whatever that damn color is.

It is aquamarine, right? I was one of those kids with the 12-crayon box.

If I had to call the race based solely on yard sign support, I'd say it's a dead heat right now, which does not bode well for the incumbent. After the primary, a lot was riding on which way Adam Walsh and Sherman Hackbarth's supporters broke, and it seems like they've scattered willy-nilly.

Both campaigns have fielded massive teams of volunteers. Both have flooded front porches and mailboxes with literature, to the point where I'm seriously questioning the environmental cred of each.

Konkel has stood her ground and defined herself, wisely, as a fighter and city hall troublemaker. Maniaci has rooted herself strongly in the discontent of a few, then used that to expand into what's become a solid base of support.

It's going to be a fight to the finish -- as a wise albeit dead man once said, "That's a good place to end." Now I just need to figure out who the heck to vote for.

Corpse-back Riding

I hate obligatory remembrances as much as the next guy, but they serve their purpose. So yes, it was a year ago today that UW-student Brittany Zimmermann was murdered in her Doty Street apartment.

And here's where obligatory remembrances serve their purpose. I have typed or spoken some version of that phrase, "UW-student Brittany Zimmermann, murdered in her Doty Street apartment," literally hundreds of times in the past year -- maybe more. As a news reporter and anchor, I've made mention of the event so many times that... well, I don't want to say it lost its meaning to me, but over time, the bitter anger I felt over her death had begun to abate.

But the first anniversary of this tragedy gave me all new sources of that stinging clean, white-hot rage that first welled up inside me and inspired me to start blogging.

I didn't know Brittany personally, but I felt her loss as a Badger alum, a member of the community and a guy with a little sister Brittany's age living within blocks of the murder scene. The outrage I felt stemmed from a combination of shock, alarm that the system could fail this woman so completely and disappointment in our local officials for their lies, half-truths and complete unwillingness to disclose answers about the debacle.

These are all distressing, ugly feelings to have, and with time, it becomes easier and healthier to let them fade away. It's more comfortable to remember "Brittany Zimmermann, who was murdered in her Doty Street apartment," than it is to fathom the full human scale of the tragedy.

So it was with considerable chagrin that I approached my first assignment of the day -- covering the Brittany Zimmermann remembrance under the bell tower atop Bascom Hill. I certainly recognize the news value in the event and the interest we as members of the public have in peering into it, but nothing will ever stop me from feeling like a voyeur when I'm literally going out of my way to watch other people suffer.

But I have a job to do as a journalist, and self-hating reporter or not, I'm comfortable with myself if I cover these sorts of events in as sensitive a manner as possible, clutching my humanity and decency close. Reporter or not, I'm a human being first, and while it may cost me some so-called "competitive edge," as a matter of principle I won't ever do anything I wouldn't want done to my family if I was the one in the ground.

Apparently, though, two people left their humanity and their decency at home in recognition of Brittany's death.

A Madison Police press release in the week leading up to the anniversary made it clear that Brittany's family did not want to deal with the media, and those members of the media with a soul respected that. My assignment at the remembrance today was to roll some nat sound and then talk to a few students and get their take on the atmosphere around campus.

When I arrived, the family was gathered around the base of the bell tower. Nearby, posses from the university and police administration hovered respectfully. Keeping a 20-yard perimeter around them was a small ensemble of media, mostly newspaper photographers and television crews, all respectfully silent.

The ceremony began as a color guard approached the tower, and the bell began to sound, once for each of the years in Zimmermann's short life. All in all, it was very nice, until the tool bag with a camera and a long lens moved in for the kill.

While I can find a lot of stones to throw at our Modern American Mediascape, I'm often the first to take offense when someone accuses the media of being too pushy. I maintain that, like with any line of work, 99 percent of reporters are decent people doing their job the best they can that know where the line is and will go to extremes to avoid crossing it.

But there's one in every crowd, and as a former newspaper photographer, I can tell you exactly what tool bag was trying to do with his long lens. Faced with a row of sobbing family members, he had to move to within five feet to get a sharp picture of his subject, framed from the eyebrows to the chin, of tears running down the subject's cheek. The depth of field in a shot like that is so shallow, the other family members are reduced to fuzzy cardboard cutouts, but the tears pop off the paper like gems.

It's a layout editor's wet dream.

And he didn't just shoot a few photos. That bell tolled 21 times, and from clangs two through fifteen, he was crouched up and down that row of mourning family members, shutter clicking like a machine gun until police spokesman Joel Despain tapped him on the shoulder and gave him a look that said the only thing that needed shooting was tool bag with the long lens.

I didn't recognize tool bag with the long lens, so I can't call him or the publication he represents out yet. But while the rest of the media kept a respectful distance, he was in there milking that family's grief for all it was worth, and it cast all of us as a whole in a poor light.

But as inappropriate as his behavior was, there was someone else at that remembrance even more hollow as a human being.

In hindsight, I should not have been surprised to see county executive candidate Nancy Mistele there. She's staked her entire campaign on faulting incumbent Kathleen Falk for the tragedy, sometimes fairly, but usually in ways that make me nauseous. Without the murder on Doty Street, Mistele's campaign platform would be bereft of all but one knotty plank -- some rural residents' regressive, irrational fear of bringing commuter rail to Dane County, but that's another issue entirely and couldn't win her 30 percent of the vote.

No one has managed to wring more personal benefit from this innocent young girl's death than Mistele. If there weren't laws against such a thing, she would probably try to dig up Brittany Zimmermann's body and ride it straight into the county executive's office like a sled.

Yet there she was atop Bascom Hill, surrounded by her posse of county officials which included, I was sad to note, Supervisor Ronn Ferrell, who's always struck me as a decent guy otherwise.

I bit my tongue until it went numb and walked the other way when the bell stopped tolling. Had I been a little more in control, I'd have stuck a live mic in her face and asked, "Seriously? What the hell? Have you just foresworn decency in your pursuit of this office or what?" I really wish I had now.

I heard later from another reporter that he did meander over to her and, without rolling tape, asked what brought her out. My source tells me she gave him a calculated lip quiver and sniffled, "I'm just out here for Brittany."

Every decent person on top of that hill today spent half an hour in the place they least wanted to be at that particular moment. Brittany's family was suffering the most visibly, but rest assured Lori Berquam and her crew had nice warm offices within a hundred paces, the police officials present would have traded their badges to have a killer off the streets, and most of the media were so busy hating themselves they'd just as soon have been working for the Rocky Mountain News.

But it was a red-letter day for Nancy Mistele, for whom the afternoon's biggest tragedy was that none of Brittany's family wanted to have their picture taken with her for campaign literature.