1. Shopping at Kellner Greenhouses
LINDSEY ANDERSON, SENIOR CULTURE EDITOR
My fiancé and I recently bought our first home, and we spent most of the weekend trying to figure out what we should be doing to maintain the pretty flower beds the previous owners left behind for us. Fortunately, we decided to visit Kellner Greenhouses early Saturday morning to pick up supplies and got some great advice to boot! There’s still a decent chance we end up killing some of the flowers. But I feel a lot less confused about what to do than I did this time last week.
2. Watch “The Voice”
ALLISON GARCIA, DIGITAL EDITOR
I’ve always loved “The Voice,” but I enjoy it a smidgen more when there’s a contestant there to rep my home state. While a singer from Madison got cut in the last round, Milwaukee’s own Anna Grace made it to the competition’s live performances. She’s an extremely talented and creative singer, and the combination of her story and talent was enough to almost bring Snoop Dogg to tears (need I say more?). Tonight, she gets judged by America so I’d love to see my fellow Milwaukeeans turn out and vote. You can watch it live on NBC at 7 p.m. or on Hulu the next day.
Submit your projects for our annual Home & Design Awards!
3. Make Wild Mushroom and Asparagus Risotto
ANN CHRISTENSON, SENIOR DINING EDITOR
It’s spring and this is the best time for asparagus – and in my mind, the best time for asparagus risotto. Alton Brown has a pretty solid recipe that also includes wild mushrooms. It takes some time to cook but be patient. I’ve used reconstituted dried mushrooms in the past and it’s worked out well.
4. Listen to For the first time
CHRIS DROSNER, EXECUTIVE EDITOR
I have not been as into music lately as I once was, but I have been absolutely mainlining the new-ish album For the first time from eclectic-weird UK rock (?) ensemble Black Country, New Road. The music is like a tightly coiled spring wound up by layers on layers of instrumentation – strings, sax (or wait … is that a clarinet?) along with the traditional rock tableau. Vocalist Isaac Wood delivers themes of angst, privilege and paranoia, and it’s often hard to tell if he’s being earnest or slipping into character to mock elites. The spiritual center of the album is “Science Fair,” where a brief, maybe-embarrassing encounter with a love interest is baroquely rendered as a grand horror of dissonant noise.
5. Read The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson
ARCHER PARQUETTE, MANAGING EDITOR
Denis Johnson was a literary great, who died in 2017. His breakthrough short story collection, Jesus’ Son, is a masterwork. After his death his publishers released, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, a posthumous collection of his short stories. I was skeptical. These from-beyond-the-grave releases often seem to be a grab-bag of junk that the artist didn’t think was good enough to publish when they were alive that’s now being dumped out to scoop up a little bit more cash off of their name. But I was pleasantly surprised by The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. It’s fantastic. On first brush, I think I enjoyed it even more than Jesus’ Son. It’s classic Johnson, with tales of the down-and-out, the low-class, the slightly insane, including an insightful and moving story set in a prison ward.
