Memorial Day weekend.

Madison.

The long weekend, and now it's back to work. That said, it was one hell of a busy three-day weekend, loaded with all sorts of fun activities.

Saturday
Saturday morning was my first morning working at the DCFM, the farmers' market on the square. Aside from being a beautiful and sunny day, it was a useful learning experience¹:

• Apparently, I know enough of the vendors well enough that no one thought it unusual that I was walking around with the farmers setting up their stands at quarter past six in the morning. I don't know if I should be bothered by this or not. At the very least, it coincides with the fact that Sharon and I tend to get all sorts of free stuff, goodies in short supply hidden under the counter (as it were), etc.²
  
  
• I assume this to be more or less unique to this particular market - due to its size, location, and the fact that everyone mentions it to tourists and out-of-towners - but I noticed very distinct waves of shoppers throughout the morning. A less extreme example of this must occur everywhere, but here's what I witnessed (and, honestly, had sort of expected):
  
  
  1. The first wave.³ Since the market is so large, and so well established, there's a distinct hierarchy based on seniority. The longer a vendor's been coming to the market - along with several other factors - the better a location they get. After enough time, they get a fixed location, and can set up their stand at six. The remaining vendors walk around, stake out a spot, then set up half an hour later.
     
     The shoppers of the first wave make their way around while vendors are still setting up. They're a scattered bunch, and include a number of vendors themselves, like Dorothy Priske. Since she and John can set up their stand earlier, she has a chance to do their shopping before the crowds arrive, an opportunity to chat with the other vendors. All of these folks know exactly what they're looking for. They know who has what, and move along with a speed that's impossible once the crowds form.
     
     
  2. The second wave. This is the wave I like to be in. Though these people may not know exactly what they're looking for, they're very open to trying new things. Though they may be specifically hunting lettuce, they'll happily taste a bit of arugula, then probably pick up some to take home. They ask questions, they're interested to know what's new this week and what'll be coming up soon. A fair number of them know that farmers by name, and want to say hello.
     
     
  3. The third wave. These folks look as if they're new to the market, and a number probably are. They don't have regular vendors they look for, but slip to the side because they've spotted red-leaf lettuce, or strawberries, or something that looks unusual. New things make them apprehensive, and you can never be sure if they'll actually try the swiss chard. Some will, while others will just set it back down and apologize. "Maybe next week," they'll say.
     
     At this point, the market has become seriously crowded. You no longer walk around the square at a normal pace, but shuffle and walk in intermittent spurts. Some stands - particularly those with cheese curds - become bottlenecks. The grazers begin to appear: the shoppers who taste samples and never buy. This rubs me the wrong way.
     
     
  4. The fourth wave. Here come the tourists. They arrive after all of the best stuff has been sold, though they're the least likely to buy any of it, anyhow. These shoppers are looking more than buying, and tend to frequent the bakeries and cheese stands, in massive hordes. Their numbers swell immensely when another tourist draw is in town: a football game, say. They're likely to be frightened by anything more exotic than lettuce⁴. It's a little depressing. Those shoppers who overslept, or haven't realized that the best goodies disappear early, get stuck here, and inevitably sigh when we have to tell them we've sold out of various items early on.
     
     By this time, the crowds can only shuffle past. Severe boredom has set in for some - usually middle-aged men, who appear to have been dragged here by their wives. The "salmon" start becoming a regular feature at this point. To explain: the market crowd moves around the square in a counterclockwise direction, just as the one-way streets that border the capitol run. Trying to go the opposite direction is a slow, tedious process of bobbing and weaving, because the rest of the crowd fills the sidewalk completely.
     
     Another irritating feature of this wave is their shock at the prices of what we're selling. I don't know how to get through to them that the seemingly cheap food at the supermarket has all sorts of hidden costs - economic, yes, but especially social, environmental. The prices you see at a local market, especially one as large as the DCFM, reflect the actual costs of providing food, of supporting the people who farm the land. They're severely underpaid as is, and to suggest that two dollars is too much for a head of lettuce reflects an uninformed worldview. I'm tempted to be angry at these people - and if it's a particular person who should know better, I am - because they say, through their actions, that my friends don't deserve a decent income, don't deserve to raise their children in a safe, comfortable environment... etc.
     
     These farmers work harder and longer than virtually anyone else walking around that market, and not a single one of them will ever be wealthy because of it.
  
  
• Being a regular at the market means I've become a good reference point. In the past, I've been asked for a second opinion for a customer at Fountain Prairie or JenEhr Family Farm. Unsure of what to buy, or what to do with it afterwards, some customers like to have a little reassurance, or maybe a different way of using it. That said, the Priskes sent along a customer to find me at the JenEhr stand, which was suprising and hilarious. A young guy - looked like a college senior or recent graduate - and his girlfriend (I'm guessing) bought one of the cured, smoked hog jowls from Fountain Prairie. John and Dorothy sent him over to me, to give him some idea of how he might be able to put it to use.
  
  He seemed pretty open to suggestions, so I'm pleased. I'm not sure how they got him to buy it in the first place. I think he'll enjoy it.
  
  
• Working with someone cool - Steve, in my case - makes the long morning feel good. It's not like we were chatting all morning long, but we managed to tag-team pretty well, keeping the table stocked, setting up and breaking the stand down with a minimum of fuss. We worked pretty well together, and that made it all run smoothly.
  
  
• Kay trusts me more than I'd expected. From the start, she put me in charge. That included setting up the stand, which seemed like a big step for my first day working with her. It worked well, I think, because I didn't set things up like she normally does on autopilot. (Which is what she wanted me to do.)
  
  She and Paul like to arrange vegetables in bands of contrasting colors that flow down the display table. (Beneath the tablecloth, we have a set of low crates to give an upper tier at the back.) It's definitely eye-catching, and a good attention-grabber. I tried to do something a little different, with a more fluid layout. Since we didn't have much asparagus, for example, it became an island surrounded by spinach and arugula. As the asparagus disappeared, we filled in that space with the other greens. Since it had never been rigidly linear, this didn't look like a mistake. We also used some colored baskets, set upside down, to lend contrast.
  
  
• Breakfast burritos from A La Cart are excellent. I wholeheartedly recommend.

The other significant thing that happened on Saturday was an eventful trip to Four Star. They've done some serious housecleaning, so I ended up buying four new DVDs: Richard Linklater's Waking Life, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Violence galore! But (with the possible exception of The Wild Bunch, which I haven't actually seen), these're films that use violence to comment on our society, rather than in your typical action flick - like X3, which I'll get to later.

We also rented Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, which was enjoyable enough as action/comedy fluff, but rather short on the usual Gilliam-ness. I can only really recall one scene - one shot - which struck me as true Gilliam: Jonathan Pryce, the French general, is greeting his assembled dinner guests, all various dignitaries and such. The camera cuts from a close-up of Pryce to the table of guests, which stretches off to infinity in a monstrously cavernous space, with a perspective that's jarring. Drain it of color, and you'd think he'd clipped this shot from Brazil.

Other than that, it was disappointing. I know there was a lot of Hollywood controversy and a lot of hands in the pot, and it feels that way. Given the premise, and Gilliam's love of fairy tales and the grotesque, there was a lot of potential. Still, if you treat it as a fantastic action film and assume some anonymous director, it's well worth a rental.

Sunday
The weather's been quite warm lately, and with any danger of frost past us, we planted our tomato and pepper seedlings in the garden. Then spent a good hour digging out quackgrass rhizomes that had crept in from the neighboring plot. The next plot over has been rototilled, so I'm pretty sure it'll erupt in quack before the end of the season. It's an insidious weed, filling the garden with its underground root network. Even the littlest piece of that root left in the soil might come back to life.

The worst part - and I'm afraid that our neighbor may run into this - is that you can't get it out if you've got plants in the garden. Tearing out the quack means you'll have to disrupt everything, so you spend the growing season shearing it off at the ground and hoping it doesn't spread.

That night was Nick and Simone's wedding reception. Like Sharon and I, they'd gotten married well before throwing the reception party, so - even though there was a brief renewal of vows - it was essentially a big party. On a farm out in southwest Wisconsin, in the middle of nowhere. Since all wedding receptions share certain cultural references, I'll just point out a few random things:

• The weather was beautiful, and I can't stop thinking about how lucky we were on that account. Thunderstorms have swept through frequently in the past few days, but not that night. We even had a good, constant breeze from the south (where we could watch a wind farm in the distance) that kept all of us in ties and jackets from keeling over in the summery heat. Once the sun set, it was lovely simply standing out in the night air.
  
  This is a danger of the outdoor wedding, especially since the planning is done so far ahead of time. I've got to believe that our good fortune was a great relief to Nick's frazzled nerves.
  
  
• Nick's parents brought an alarming quantity of palincă - Romanian plum brandy - from Bucharest. Double-distilled, it's strong stuff. It reminded me a lot of grappa, with a clean flavor with hints of vanilla and nuts, among others. Most didn't care for it, but I enjoyed a little glass.
  
  
• Nick's old roommate and her boyfriend brought a keg of homebrew from Minneapolis. It was a wheat beer, but more like a light, slightly cloudy amber ale than a hefeweizen. It was a wonderfully refreshing cool drink, with such a small amount of hop bitterness that you could probably drink it like iced tea.
  
  
• High beam headlights are a wonderful thing. There's little opportunity to use them here in Madison - and zero in Chicago - so it was a little thrill to be able to flip them on out on the back roads of Iowa County.
  
  
• Nick and Simone, of course, looked like a wonderfully happy couple. No surprise there. Now that the whole thing's past, they can settle back into a much less stressful existence, and that can only be a good thing.

Monday
Memorial Day, and what better reason for a near-impromptu grilling party? Paul Johnson's back in town, that's what.

We didn't think of it until midday Sunday, so no one was really prepared, including us. No matter. We had enough food to grill up burgers, mushrooms and sausages, along with some potatoes. Add in a salad and whatever other odds and ends other folks had - beer, mostly - and we were good to go.

Jared brought along a six-pack of his homebrew batch, and the general consensus was positive. I think it needed a little more hop backbone to it - it was a little sweet - but not bad for a first attempt. Besides, that's not his fault. I could tell from the recipe in the kit that it wouldn't seem like enough to me. But it's certainly drinkable, and good served ice-cold beside the grill, so I doubt those two cases'll last very long.

Paul also brought along a pumpkin pie, to finally fulfill his outstanding obligation to Sharon. Their bet involved some strange and insignificant bit of math arcana, and Paul, in losing, needed to bake Sharon a pie. Addington, whose house he was staying at, happened to have a can of pumpkin and a can of sweetened condensed milk at his place. Thus, they decided to bake a pie. Successfully.

After gorging ourselves and melting in the heat and humidity, a few of us decided to go see a movie. As I have no interest in seeing The Da Vinci Code⁵, we checked out X-Men: The Last Stand. I'd all read the reviews, and didn't expect much other than a dumb action flick. Expectations adequately met, I guess. It sure didn't seem like it needed the big screen, though, and that's a depressing thought. When you think you'd get as much enjoyment of the eye candy on a TV, that says something's not quite right.

It did make me think, at least. Mostly by omission, rather than by raising significant points, but here goes:

• The whole allegory of homosexuality pretty much disappeared. There was sort a token veneer of "mutant = racism" or "mutant = homosexuality", but it didn't go anywhere. The only conflict derived from it was used to further the plot. No exploration, no dawdling over characters' feelings, no philosophical discussion. It's not a necessary thing to have, but it's so ripe - in the context of the film, in the context of our current society - that it's shame it's not there.
  
  
• Same goes for character development. There wasn't any. A few miscellaneous scenes hinting at romantic rivalries spliced here and there, but there was no development along those lines. Of all the major comic book series, the ones most of us non-comics folks recognize, X-Men is the most like a soap opera. Where's the melodrama? As it was, it was hard to really care about any of the characters. Any emotional involvement had to carry over from the two previous films.
  
  A glaring example of this is Angel. He starts out so well - a young boy trying to cut the mutant wings sprouting from his back - then resurfaces for a few very brief moments as a walking cliche. Flips out when he's restrained to have the "cure" injected, then bursts out of the window and onto the winds. He swoops through the air to save his father, falling to his death. He steps into the Xavier Institute to start a new life. Who is this guy? The movie doesn't seem particularly interested in him. He's like a MacGuffin with wings.
  
  Along the same lines: pretty much all of the mutants Magneto conscripts. Names? Nah, the movie doesn't bother with those. They're mostly special effects pawns. When they die, we don't much care one way or the other.
  
  
• Corny one-liners? Either leave them out, or go whole hog. The two extremes work. Compromise doesn't. The half-assed approach to camp - just like the tepid interpersonal relationships - doesn't cut it.
  
  
• Bizarre logical conclusions. If Juggernaut is so threatening that he needs to be completely immobilized, locked into a closet, and secretly driven around 24/7 in the back of a tractor trailer, why isn't he simply given the mutant "cure"? He's a dangerous psychopath. Even in legal prisons, the law allows inmates to be forcibly medicated for the safety of guards, other inmates and themselves. Regardless of where that might stand ethically, you'd think this would have occurred to somebody at some point. At least to mention, if not act upon.
  
  And there's another unaddressed issue. Secret, mobile prisons? Come on... you can't pull this stuff from the headlines and just let it hang there!
  
  
• Oh, and the violence. So sterile and neutral. Aside from Wolverine opening up in bloody wounds - which seal up more or less instantly - you don't see much of anything. Even as Wolverine carves up dozens of people, and they immediately fall out of frame. No blood, no screams, no nothing. I guess this is more or less normal for summer action flicks, and I'm just disillusioned with that.
  
  Or maybe it's because the movie failed to address anything else, so I just started latching on to every omission I could. Before we went to see the movie, I was discussing Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which takes the complete, polar opposite tack. Violence, and its impact through the popular media, was on my mind. I think I was offended by the complete lack of blood. Even if there were some - and it were quickly passed over - I'd've been okay with it.
  
  Characters who die are simply forgotten. Major ones. Cyclops dies at the beginning of the film, and we essentially hear nothing about him until we see his tombstone at the end. It's crazy.
  
  
• And it was so short - ninety minutes or so. All of the things that this film could have used - character development, social commentary, breathing room between exploding setpieces, etc. - sure weren't trimmed for time.

* * * * *

¹And a chance to verify a few of my hunches about the whole thing. That being a primary reason behind my decision to start working at the market.

²For a more intense example, check out the "Lunchtime with the King of Ketchup" on this episode from This American Life. I can only aspire to Howard's level.

³The waves overlap and blend, of course, but the distinction is still pretty apparent when you're standing around, watching and talking through the morning.

⁴Seriously. Some of them bear a distinctly spooked expression when you try to explain that mizuna makes a great salad green. They'll pick up unfamiliar produce as though it were something potentially dangerous, like a live animal.

⁵Don't want to read the book. Don't want to see the movie. There're enough other books and films I'd like to see that have a much better claim to my time and money. It's not like I'm missing some grand cultural edifice; I mean, this is the sort of pulp drivel you'd expect to churn out for NaNoWriMo or something equally silly and amusingly self-absorbing.