KY Day 2- Folk Art, Forests, and Funnies
I started the day with some coffee from Cup of Commonwealth in Lexington. The coffee was really good, it was great environment right across from Thoroughbred Park, and the customers and baristas got super into trading jokes which was such a fun and pleasant way of starting the day. Plus they had this ridiculous magazine:
Fueled up I went to the University of Kentucky Art Museum. It wasn't very big, but the exhibits were all really exceptional. The largest exhibition was entitled Breach and showcased sculptures, paintings, and multimedia works by Alison Saar. The work was inspired by parallels between the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and Hurricane Katrina, particularly in the unequal relief efforts given to whites and people of color. The works tended to really emphasize African American bodies, dance, poetry, and real and metaphorical floods. It was really incredible how well she worked across such varied mediums, and I found her paintings on lines to be really staggering.
The Saar exhibit took up the entire first floor, but the second floor had a number of smaller but still pretty impressive exhibits. My favorite was a series of photographs and accompanying essay and/or poems by artist named Teju Cole. Photography can be a pretty hit or miss art form for me, in that I don't really know enough about it to recognize skillfulness unless something is either exceptionally aesthetic, interesting, or funny to me. Fortunately these photos, usually just named for where they were taken were really breathtaking, and his writing was really smart, charming, and naturally funny. I can barely write or take photographs (please see all of the above and below) so I personally think it's a little unfair how equally great he is at both.
There was another photography exhibit of works by a team of artists named Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber. They staged really intricate and ornate sets for the photos, giving them a very whimsical painterly feel. My favorite was this one called Library.
The last gallery on the second floor was on Abstract Paintings. I feel like with abstract art it either strikes you or it doesn't. Sometimes reading the artist's intentions or story helps, but I feel like it's all pretty subconscious. For whatever reason, these are the four that I liked the most.
After working up quite the appetite from appreciating all that art, I decided to celebrate Taco Tuesday at Local Taco. On Tuesdays, if you buy three tacos the fourth one is free, so I could not resist. I ordered a beef brisket, BBQ Pork, Tequila Lime Chicken, and the weekly special Chicken Tikka Masala. The beef brisket was probably the simplest, with just a little bit of sauce, onions, and meat but the meat was so damn tender and flavorful that it was still probably the best one. The tequila lime chicken was the most refreshing, with a very light tangy flavor and some fresh lettuce, tomato, and salsa. The chicken tikka masala was a pleasant surprise, because I didn't necessarily trust a taco place to nail an Indian specialty, but it was very good, with just rice chicken, and the sauce. I'm sure real Indian food connoisseurs might be less impressed than I was, but to my unrefined palette it tasted like the genuine article. The BBQ pork was probably my least favorite, but only because it came with cole slaw which I don't generally enjoy. The actual pork and the bourbon BBQ sauce were delicious though. I was little disappointed by my choice of side though. I ordered beer and bacon braised brussels sprouts. I like all those things individually but somehow all combined, it just got kinda mushy and didn't do much for me. All in all though, it was a wonderful taco Tuesday, the holiest of holidays.
After lunch, I drove to the Kentucky Folk Art Museum in Morehead. It's a free museum, and definitely worth the visit. All the artists were self taught, and each artist's selection was accompanied by a slightly more in depth biography than you tend to see in most museums. Many of the artists overcame poverty, racial discrimination, mental illness, or a combination of various other hardships, finding solace in their art and gradually becoming local and occasionally internationally recognized. Many of the works were incredibly beautiful, a few were deeply disturbing, and not infrequently were they both at the same time. I think it's better to just let the works speak for themselves though, but I will highlight two works that really blew me away: A meticulously painted dresser bedecked with angelic and hellish visions entitled Eternity by Ronald Cooper and painting called A Dream by Mazie Thomas.
On the way back from the museum, I took the scenic route through Daniel Boone National Forest and took in some scenic views of lakes, mountains, and trees.
While I was driving to the first open mic of the night, I saw a sign for a place in Lexington called Clawdaddies which promised authentic Maine Lobster Rolls. Between this claim and restaurant name, I had to make a stop. The roll was adorably teeny tiny, but the bread, lobster, and minimal mayonnaise were all perfectly done, and the seasoning gave the Maine staple a nice little Southern twist.
The first open mic of the night was at a duel cafe and bicycle shop called Broomwagon. It was a hip space with good coffee and good food. I ordered an ice coffee with bourbon honey (there is bourbon everything here) and some tortilla chips hummus both of which made for perfect pre-show snacks. I was a little too early to the mic, so I ended up hanging out with two comics from Cincinnati, Justin Adkins and Luke Fagenbush, who were also a little early. They were really nice guys. We traded some favorite bits from favorite comics and tried to figure out a few newjokes we were working on before the mic started. In the end only three other comics and the host, Joe Cooper, ended up coming by and there weren't many customers, so we just kept it pretty informal and essentially had a small group workshop.
The first comic was an older woman named Kathy who did a raunchy set about the recent outpouring of sexual assault allegations against celebrities. It was a lot of "back in my day we just sort of put up with it" but it was more clever and smartly rooted in her own personal experiences than most similar arguments of that type. In the workshopping portion, one of the comics very correctly said "It works but literally nobody but you could say any of those things, Kathy." The next comic, Ruda Torval, did a really funny improvised character bit where he performed as a hack Latin-American comic with a very thick accent who then did flawless impressions. It was very Andy Kaufman-esque in a good way. I went up after that and did a set of all new bits that I had either never performed or only performed once. It went pretty well despite being rough, which gave me confidence in the premises at least if not the wordings, and it was kind of freeing to do something where I had no idea how it was gonna go. Justin went next, and worked on trying out some newer phrasings of jokes I'd heard last night, as well as a very funny bit about the confederate flag: "I saw a lot of flags in his yard and the only one I recognized was the confederate flag. That didn't give me a whole lot of confidence in the other flags. It's a gateway flag." Luke went after him and did a lot of good self deprecating bits. My favorite was about how he wanted to win a fight, but the only way he could do it was by trying to get a group of children to attack him first. Closing out the night was a woman named Didi Rainbows. I think she decided last minute that she would go up because she only told a few jokes, but then she started talking about the one woman show she working on about the historical basis of Aunt Jemima and it just sounded incredible. Didi's clearly a gifted actress, and she closed out the mic on a really positive note by saying how much it meant to her to just see people pursuing creativity and laughter. It was really uplifting.
The next mic was very different. It was at a bar called the Chevy Chase Inn, and it was the rowdiest crowd I've seen yet. They were not there for the comedy, they just wanted to drink and talk to their friends and did not care that there was a show going on in the slightest. The crowd was not reflective of the comedians though, who were uniformly pretty excellent despite the less than attentive audience, which nice for me to see but I felt bad that they were all doing such good stuff and nobody was listening.
The mic was hosted by Josh Sardam from Willie's, who continued to be a riot of a host and really well equipped to deal with a crowd that boisterous because he wasn't afraid to give as good as he got. Between Willie's and Broomwagon, I had seen just about every comic there perform before but they got more time and their acts only got better with the extra breathing room. The one comic I hadn't seen before who also happened to be the headliner and probably the best of the night was a woman named Leslie Battle. My favorite bit of hers was about how seemingly innocent song lyrics have really weird messages. My favorite example was from the song My Guy by the Supremes where she pointed out that the lines "No Muscle-bound man could take my hand from my guy/ no handsome face could ever take the place of my guy" implies that her guy is weak and has an ugly face.
My own set went fine. I didn't get no laughs which is an accomplishment in a room like that. Josh said he thought I was too nice because I just kinda barreled on with my jokes instead of giving some of the rowdiness back to the crowd. It was a good lesson.
The most surreal part of the night though was easily when one older guy from Alabama seemed to just mysteriously procure a sausage, and started waving it around while yelling "Roll Tide". It was odd.
Favorite Line of the Night: Madison Pohl- Do you ever see a word misspelled so many times you start to ask yourself, "Am I the only person who doesn't know how to spell business?" *Pause* I guess I'm the only looser here
Favorite Random Sightings: Chino Dada; Doughdaddies; Old Hooker Bar and Grill
Regional Observation: I love seeing roadside advertisements written on the sides of barns.
Albums Listened To: Joe's Garage Acts I, II, and III by Frank Zappa (I actually just recently read an article where someone said this album was unlistenable because the humor was too immature, and I'll admit it's definitely puerile, but I feel like they forget that it's part of a musical about censorship so to some extent it was at least serving a thematic purpose. And regardless of the immature lyrics, the music is just incredible); John Barleycorn Must Die by Traffic; The John Lennon Collection (just Watching the Wheels); Joshua Redman by Joshua Redman; Joyce Manor by Joyce Manor (I like them but they are very much over-hyped. I've heard people call them saviors of punk rock which is just bologna); Judith by Judy Collins
People's Favorite Jokes:
What do you call a bunch of rabbits jumping backwards in line? A receding hare line
What does a mermaid use to clean her clothes? Tide
What do you call a potato on the radio? A commentater
What does the sun use to do his dishes? Dawn
Songs of the Day:
One that's pretty weird and one that's a more accessible kind of weird
