Some Notes: On My Return From Milwaukee

Some notes: On my return from Milwaukee.

I know a pair of magicmakers up north who treasure their city as much as I do mine. We have a playful rivalry, but it's all in good fun. What surprised me was just the difference in impression I received from one city to the other.

Milwaukee still feels like a 19th century city. The buildings are big, but not oppressively big. There's a lot of use of the older buildings, and the theatre we toured, the Riverside, was restored time and again to the way it looked in 1928. The Brewers had apparantly won something significant that night, and the local drunks cheerfully waved at us while commenting on how nice the event was.

Clearly, there is something horribly wrong with the place.

Let's start with those wizards in question. Did you know you can get an arts grant in Milwaukee for sorcery? It has to do with Joseph Zilber's master plan. A plan that also involved restoring the city back to how it was in the 20's. And speaking of crazed fucknuttery...It's one thing to have a chapel dedicated to Joan of Arc. Another to have a replica of Joan's chapel on campus...BUT TO MOVE THE CHAPEL FROM FRANCE TO MILWAUKEE?!? Seriously? I walked into the chapel at Marquette to see if this was true. The teenage girl's voice imploring me to repent sealed it. I had to use all my effort to refrain from killing the nearest englishman.

Milwaukee is a place where the most oppressive feeling of haunting I have ever experienced came from a theater where NOBODY DIED. No murders, no rapacious orgies involving goats and Pabst Blue Ribbon, but which has children's voices on the empty fourth floor balcony, and a room-sized wooden refrigerator of great menace.

I know there is a fae contingent out there, but the few I know live out in the more wooded areas. In the city, I think there's too much beer and sausage to maintain a stable faerie population.

While there, I was introduced to the concepts of ghostlights and fear cages. Ghostlights are an early solution to dimming back in the day. If you wanted to dim a light, a corressponding light elsewhere had to brighten. Ghot rooms were full of such lights, rising and falling at the whims of those who needed control. The city feels like a ghost room. It rises and falls, never becoming too bright or too dim, with some faraway cousin providing the balance.

Fear cages also deal with electricty. In areas with strong magnetic fields, some sense within our bodies activates the fight or flight response. The problem is, we don't often rely on this sense. Other senses are then used to provide context. So the rattling of the washing machine becomes a sinister voice, the flashing of the flourescent light is manipulated by spectral powers, and the breeze of the wind against your ear contains malicious intent. You provide your own context for the fear you experience, all based on a pile of wires. A lot of 'supernatural experience' can be explained that way.

Except for the headless girl in the wooden refrigerator. Totally real.