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- This Week: Milwaukee's Best Side Hustles
This Week: Milwaukee's Best Side Hustles
Sarah and I are health-conscious people and so, next in line at the Culver’s drive-thru, we picked our burgers but opted to split the cheese curds and orange Fanta float. When the chipper young woman read our order back to us, it had become, “a butter burger basket with a burger on the side.” Which is delightful and, I think, a conceptualization that could only exist in Wisconsin.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about all of life’s burgers on the side. The long, sunny walk to the grocery store. The hundred-year-old book of poetry whose cover is nicer than what’s inside. Well-fitting underwear. Art, in general, is a burger on the side. It’s the extra that’s a meal in itself.
The idea comes naturally to my generation. It was us who who popularized tapas. And also side-hustling. It’s a fact every artist knows by now, that no matter how many paper-mache birdhouses you make in a month, you still need a social media presence, plus a Substack, plus, you know, a job. After all that, you’d think we’d be protective of the few minutes left in our day, but weirdly, no. We’re always looking to diversify more, splitting studio time between side projects and side-side projects.
Maybe it’s because the margins are where we can be most spontaneous, and have the most fun. They’re where we can ditch whatever notions of artistic rigor we’ve accumulated and just make something.
ASK ME ABOUT THE FANTA FLOAT
TrilobiteI wrote something about this little webzine last summer and never stopped thinking about it. Trilobite is run by Paul Vogel and Sam Helgeson, and features rotating seletions of concrete potery. It looks like an artifact from the old internet, which feels appropriate. These kinds of DIY literary endeavors are always passion projects, and I’m always happy to see when they stick around. MPL’s Special Collections The Milwaukee Public Library’s Instagram page is weirdly good, featuring 90-year-old women flipping us off and insisting that they can, in fact, read manga. Though it’s the MPLspeicalcollections page that has the meat--medieval guides to alchemy, century-old photos and illustrations, books so small you need tweezers to read them. I’m particularly fond of Toilet Tuesday, which has made a strong return this week. Discourse CoffeeLast call to get in on Discourse Coffee before they go the way of Collectivo and Stonecreek. Mark my words--two years from now, they’ll be serving egg McMuffins across eight locations in Chicago. Just kidding. From what I can tell, Discourse likes experimentation too much to give it up. Which I guess is why I consider it a side practice even though it’s, you know, a successful business that people have invested a lot of time and money into. They just released their Summer Reading menu, featuring a drink called It’s 2AM and My Roommate is Severely Dehydrated inspired (somehow?) by Lion’s Tooth book store in Bayview. It’s $13 and has dandelion jelly in it. Which is not something the world asked for but which it will gladly accept. Anja Sieger’s Whole Thing Being honest, Anja was the inspiration for this list. You already know who she is, but maybe aren’t fully aware of the extent of her ever-expanding collection of side practices. She writes and produces the Subtle Forces podcast, organizes and hosts QWERTYFEST’s Clackathon, cuts shadow puppets for locally-produced operas, is a regular on Riverwest Radio, has an upcoming solo show at Grove Gallery, all while holding two jobs at FuzzPop Workshop and The Glow Land. And more. Like, a lot more. She told me she once organized “an all-Sieger art show” at Jazz Gallery. You know, just for fun. I’m not actually sure which are the side practices and which are the main ones, and I wonder if she is either. This Saturday, you can find her at Center Street Daze selling type-written love/insult/advice/apology letters. Colin Matthes’s SubstackIf you know Colin, it’s probably from Essential Knowledge, his series of bad-on-purpose instructional drawings. I like those drawings, but to be honest, I feel a little over-exposed to them. I guess I’ve always thought an artist should improvise, and the ones who don’t risk over-identifying with a brand. Who wants to be Frank Stella? So it’s why I’m so happy to see Colin’s expository talents find new outlets. His newsletter is as earnest as his drawings, and I always look forward to seeing it in my inbox. His current series is on the ultimate side hustle, being an artist as a parent. Amanda Huff’s Posters I’ve never had much success talking to musicians. I can usually sense a relatable dork beneath the veneer of coolness, but for some reason, they seem less willing to open up than a given painter or writer. Amanda, in almost every selfie, seems unapproachably cool. But then there she is the very next day, posting her fan art of Spock and Shinji Ikari. It’s her show posters that have been catching my attention recently. They’re intentionally grungy, with wrinkled tape and Xerox lines carefully photoshopped into place. I’m sure I’d feel out of place at any of her shows, so I’m grateful to have these to look at. |  Saturday720 E Locust St, 5PM to 8PM Usable Space Toy Exchange Center Daze Fest  MondayViewpoints on Artservancy Tuesday |
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