No. 59 – Photoset Challenge – The Milwaukee Edition!

22 May

I went to Milwaukee this weekend for a day trip, just to travel somewhere.  It was… nice.  Milwaukee just felt like a very large town, to me.  It was very nice, don’t get more wrong.  The lakefront is beautiful, and I really enjoyed the historic district by the lakefront.  Standing on the Holton-Kinnicinnick (how the fuck do you spell that) bridge looking back at the city, I could really see its history…  The new skyscrapers, the flatter parts next to the river, the industrial parks in the west.  It was a good trip.  Maybe it would have been more memorable if I had gone with someone, but I don’t really like to travel with people…

Let me tell you, I was totally thrilled by the architecture.  I mean, holy shit Milwaukee has some GORGEOUS architecture.  And I love to photograph architecture…

Like this?  What the fuck is this?  It is an amazing building.  I have so many photos of it from so many angles, and none of them quite captured the stunning detail.  This building is decadent okay.  Wow.

I really enjoyed this building.

Okay oh my God I’m listening to Asian hip hop right now, because someone whose blog I adore loves this guy, Jin.  Wow.  I don’t actually listen to hip hop right so this is just weird.  But I really liked on of his albums.  It’s just that I switched to another one, and it’s more traditional hip hop-y.  So.  Yeah.

Also I’m supposed to be reading about North Korea right now.

Haha.

Ha.

Do you know how much I’ve read about North Korea this quarter?  It is RIDICULOUS.

I liked the shadows here, and that weird grime trail coming out of his mouth.  It reminds me of this line in the Aeneid about this guy, Madness (or Fury or something?) and his bloody mouth as he sits in the temple of Janus with his hands bound behind his back with 100 knots.

Goddamn I love that book.

Portrait of a local.

Next to the PNC building.

Oh dude, he is rapping in Cantonese, okay that is cool.

So Milwaukee’s got it covered.  It’s got gorgeous classical architecture and kick-ass modern buildings, too.  And I loved them both very much.

Like this one?  Check this the fuck out, okay.  Check it.

The art museum.  I didn’t go in because I was too lazy and I have this aversion to museums when it’s my first time in a city.  For example, I refused to go to the Louvre when I was in Paris the first time.  The second time I went under duress, and I liked it.

Actually, I was first forced to go to the Musée d’Orsay on my second trip, where I first saw the impressionists.  Before Paris, I really didn’t like art museums.  I thought they were boring and a waste of time when I could be out in the city, living the culture, rather than looking at its revered relics.  I thought, why look at the carefully framed and plexiglassed past when you could go out and trip on the cobblestones and feel the stone bridges cool beneath your hands.

And then we went to the Musée d’Orsay and I’m not sure what happened.  I looked at the Impressionist paintings, at the ridges of paint from their brushes, at the crazy detail and emotional images they could make with daubs of paint, at the reverently uncareful brushstrokes… And I suppose I fell in love with them.  I suppose I fell in love with how much they loved their subjects, which were just ordinary folks and haystacks for fuck’s sake.  I fell in love how they painted them in a seemingly slapdash way that belief how much they treasured the quotidian and the mundane.

But yes, I did not go in, although the museum had an exhibit on French posters, like the ones by Toulouse-Lautrec.

The little fountain thing outside of the museum.  Did I post that photoset with the people dancing in the park here in Chicago?  I need to, if I didn’t, because it was beautiful.  But that was when I first photographed falling water.  And I think maybe it’s going to become a bit of an obsession.

A closer shot of the museum.

Folks before the lake.  I was sitting on a bench when I took this, and there I promptly fell asleep for about half an hour.  I don’t sleep much…

Continued into another post because damn I took a lot of pictures.

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