NC Day 4- Two Art Museums, Three Billboards, and Tons of Tubas
I started today out by driving through Chapel Hill to Durham. One of my favorite professors from college got his start at Chapel Hill so I wanted to drive through the campus. It was cool seeing where someone I considered a mentor really began his career. I had gotten a late start to the day, so I didn't stop to take any pictures, I just drove through but I was glad I did.
I made it to Durham and went to Elmo's Diner for lunch. Elmo's is a local staple and located on 9th street which is a big shopping area in downtown Durham, that my dad's friends had recommended checking out so it was handy two birds one stone situation.
For lunch, I got their Salmon Fillet Square Meal, which came with a really nice broiled and marinated salmon, two sides and a biscuit all for $12. The two sides I got were mashed potatoes and peas and carrots. It was a great hearty meal that was super filling, tasty, and felt a lot healthier than the fried food I'd been eating.
After lunch, I went to a cafe called Triangle Coffee House. I really liked the coffee and ambience, and had a fun time joking around with the cashiers.
Properly caffeinated, I went to probably one of the museums I was most excited to see: The V & E Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection. I had never seen so many tubas in one place, it was amazing. There were tubas on the ceiling. And lots of them. I played the tuba for more than 8 years, and this was a truly a beautiful sight.
Vincent (the V of V & E Simonetti, and a former Tuba player for the North Carolina symphony) gave me and a few guests a free tour of his 300+ tuba collection, telling us general historical fun facts and also highlighting particularly rare or special tubas. Some interesting things I learned were that tubas are the only instrument where they know they exact patent date of it, tubas are a family of instruments that are conical instead of cylandrical not just one instrument, and the Conn brand started after a bar fight where Charles Conn got punched in the face and couldn't play his cornet so he developed his own mouthpiece and it became so popular that he started developing and selling musical instruments full time. I loved that.
After the tubas, I drove around Duke's campus which was really pretty and still really green. I went to their art museum the Nasher. I said I was student, and I guess they just assumed I meant Duke so I got free admission which was a pretty auspicious start. It might have also just been free, but I like feeling like I'm crafty.
The first exhibit I saw was on American art from 1960-1990 that was viewed as revolutionary or contradictory toward art norms in some way. I really liked even though I'm not crazy about Abstract Expressionism all the time (which there was a lot) because I always kind of geek out a bit when art and history converge a bit and I get to see how art movements develop and unfold in social contexts. My favorites were all sort of surrealist and vaguely Freudian. The three that stuck to me the most were a painting called Portrait of the Artist and a Vacuum by Kerry James Marshall which shows both a wry sense of humor with a statement about racial identity, a painting called At the Office by David Humphrey which takes a Dali-esque kind of approach to office drudgery and sexual undertones, and a painting whose name and artist I forgot to record which super imposes imagery of a giant abstract shape, a naked woman and office furniture to make a disorientating and intriguing whole. As is usually the case with art, I can't really place why I liked these ones most, I think it has something to do with the sense of winking sarcasm combined with genuine skill I choose to see in these three paintings.
The other free exhibit in the Nasher was their permanent collection which featured a much more varied array of art ranging from ancient Meso-american and Asian artifacts all the way to contemporary works. It was a lot to take in with each new room essentially transporting you to another time and place, but it was a really amazing collection.
The modern art train kept a-rolling as I drove from Durham to Greensboro where the open mic would be. Greensboro's a really hip town with lots of microbreweries and art galleries popping up all over.
I started by going out to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, which specializes in Modern and Contemporary art. The whole first floor was closed while they were working on an installation so admission was reduced. The second floor had plenty to offer though. The only exhibit that I wasn't allowed to take photographs in was an exhibition of works by an artist named Louise Fishman. She was apparently highly influential and instrumental in breaking down gender barriers in the Abstract Expressionist movement. I didn't know enough previously about abstract expressionism to realize that it had been a male dominated movement, but in hindsight that does certainly check out with my encounters with it in different art museums. Most super abstract paintings like these kind of blend together for me, but I did like her work and her ability to capture moods, movements, and textures. In particular, I really liked her painting Angry Picture which I found a pretty decent picture of on google.
My favorite exhibit on the second floor was called Isichapuitu by Kukuli Velarde, which was comprised of small ceramic sculptures inspired by a mixture of Mexican art and Peruvian myths. The little creatures represented in the pots are supposed to be vessels representing the souls of women, a translation of the gallery's Peruvian title. While the myth states that the containers are vessels of death, Velarde considers hers vessels of life, each one representing in some way different aspects of life good, bad, beautiful, and ugly. I loved this little gallery, because it was funny, creepy, and immensely creative and personal which is probably my favorite combination of things art can be.
The concept of the last gallery on the floor was really cool, and it was taking a look at how different artists across different mediums and art movements choose to represent the passage of time. I tended to like the paintings in this gallery, but some of the sculptures and photographs were really very good as well. It was also just kinda cool in general to see a gallery organized around one theme instead of a time or an artist, and just looking at all the different ways people can represent the same thing.
After art museum #2 (not to say the Tubas weren't beautiful works of art), I got dinner and drinks at what I believe is one of the newest breweries in Greensboro, Little Brother Brewing. I picked them over the other breweries largely because they had a beer called Brothers Don't Shake Hands Brothers Gotta Brew, which is a great reference to the film Tommy Boy. I got a flight of the Tommy Boy Beer (a Dunkel), a stout, a hefeweizen, and a farmhouse ale. The stout and dunkel were solid and enjoyable, but surprisingly my favorite had to be the hefeweizen. It was just so smooth and flavorful. The farmhouse while probably my least favorite wasn't that bad, just fruitier than I generally like in a beer.
For food, I got the turk nachos which had soujouk (spicy beef sausage from the Middle Eastern Deli down the street) on pita cheeps with cheese and salsa. It was incredible. The day my college stand-up club used to have our weekly meetings always happened to line up with pita chip day in that dorm's cafeteria, and I developed a love for crunchy pita chips that honestly might have been what sustained my earliest fumbling attempts at performing live comedy.
After dinner, I got coffee at a book store/cafe called Scuppernong Books. I really liked the vibe in there and the coffee was really good, but it was getting close to the time of the night's open mic so I didn't get to stay too long.
The open mic was at a small intimate club called the Idiot Box. It was in the basement of a really cool coffee place called Geeksboro which also had drinks, ice cream, and free play video games. It made for a great place to hang out in between signing up for the mic and actually performing, and I had a bowl of ice cream which always makes any kind of waiting better.
Besides being my favorite name for a comedy club so far, the Idiot Box was probably my favorite mic of the week. The room had enough seats to fit a pretty decently sized crowd but still kinda forced people to be close to one another which I actually think is weirdly good for comedy. It's a social act, and I think people feel more uncomfortable laughing the more they feel like they're sitting by themselves. The host, Steve Lesser, was also a super nice and funny guy who created a really good energy on and off stage.
I thought all in all it was a really fun and solid night of comedy, but y favorite comics of the night were probably two guys named Alex Garretson and Ryan Higgins. They both had sort of absurdist sensibilities with Alex leaning a little darker and Ryan leaning a little sillier, but both managing to be really funny. My favorite line of Alex's utilized a very well timed pause that might not be as effective in writing: "It's really hard to go down on girls when you have braces because... they never let me." Ryan did a really a funny extended bit about why having glasses sucks, and then also had a line that cracked me up "I'm such a momma's boy, that when kids used to call me a momma's boy I didn't realize for years that that was meant as an insult"
Probably my favorite single line of the night came from a guy named Dehaj Hendricks (sp?) who just walked out and said with incredible confidence "Fuck fresh air... That shit killed MLK."
My own set felt like it went really well. I did a totally different set I did any other time this week even bringing out a really old joke I hadn't done in a while because it fit a theme that other comics had touched upon in the night. It's fun doing loose sets like that, because I feel like it's a good reminder to get out of my own head and really engage with the audience which I think I did better this night than I have in shows past. It was just a really enjoyable night.
After the mic, I went to a later showing of the movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri because I'd been wanting to see it for a while and there was a movie theater right across the street from the mic and the showing started ten minutes after the mic ended so it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. I was literally the only person in the theater so I was able to laugh as loudly as I wanted, which my cousins would absolutely say I would've have done anyways even if it was really crowded.
The movie is written and directed by Martin McDonagh, an Irish playwright who my dad and I really like and whose other two movies In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths are some of my favorites (with In Bruges being the much better movie overall, but Seven Psychopaths just being really fun with an amazing Christopher Walken performance). This movie though absolutely blew me away. I tried to know as little about it as possible going in, so it's meandering plot was filled with pleasant surprises and the whole thing was just absolutely packed with empathy with McDonagh avoiding neat heroes and villains and just refusing to let anyone be anything else but human. It was very Irish too despite taking place in Missouri, as the plot is exceedingly dark but most of the dialogue is laugh out loud funny. All Irish humor and literature seems to come from very dark places for some strange reason. All the performances were excellent too, but Frances McDormand, who I always love anyways, is in rare form, and I highly recommend this movie if that isn't obvious by now. In a weird coincidence too, as I was sitting down to watch it, my dad texted me to say he'd just seen it with my mom and he loved it. If I'd been home, I would have wanted to see it with him, so it was just a fun bit of parallel thinking that in a weird way we saw it together anyway.
Favorite Random Sightings: Beggars and Choosers Antiques, Chopt, A barber shop with a sign that said "Guaranteed Shorter Hair!" (I laughed out loud when I saw it and i think it might be a perfect advertisement)
Regional Observations: Up North when someone has a ridiculous amount of political bumper stickers, I think they tend to be conservative, but the further south I go crazy amounts of bumper stickers tend to lean liberal. I think being in the minority opinion wherever you are makes you want to yell louder, even with your car. Or maybe contrarians really love bumper stickers? Who's to say?
Albums Listened To: Live in 1995 by the Slackers; Live in Boston by the Slackers (featuring Jesse Wagner from the Aggrolites, and yes of course I was there); Live in Hafenklang, Hamburg by Vic Ruggiero
People's Favorite Jokes:
A little boy over hears his friend's swearing for the first time so he goes running home and asks his dad "What does shit mean?" The flustered dad lies and says it means "Food". The next day he hears somebody say "Ass" so he goes home and asks his mom what it means. She lies and says "Adult". The next day he hears someone say Fuck for the first time so he asks his dad what it means, and he says "It means getting dressed". The next day his parents are having a dinner party, and the guests arrive while they're getting ready so the son walks to the door and greets them by saying "You asses come on in. The shit's on the table, and my parents are upstairs fucking"
Songs of the Day:
This is kinda cheating, because I technically didn't hear it today, but it combines Vic improvising a medley from his solo live album and him playing with Jesse from the Slackers live album and the initial song is about fathers and sons so it feels like this video more thematically captures the day. Plus this is my damn blog and there's no real rules
