FL Day 6 - Surrealism, Sandwiches, and Sponges
Today started with a drive to the airport for a tearful goodbye to my father. Actually, because I couldn't get coffee beforehand it was more of a slack-jawed mumbling goodbye. I was gonna miss him though. We bickered here and there mostly about traffic, but I liked having the company and someone to sing along to Van Morrison with. He's a good old boy that dad of mine.
After I dropped Dad off, I got coffee at Buddy Brew, a local chain that is credited as being one of the first places to really kickstart the local coffee scene. The coffee was very good, but I think I probably liked them more for their murals and the fact that they had kept a coffee grinder in a birdcage in the bathroom.
After my coffee, my first stop was a place called Whimzeyland, because I can't resist whimsey no matter how it's spelled. Whimzeyland is the the home of two Florida artists: Todd Ramquist and Kiaralinda. Tucked away in a nondescript suburb, the house is an abrupt explosion of color, with lots of funky sculptures, mosaics, and bowling balls. Lots and lots of bowling balls. With over 500 painted bowling balls on the property, the house has become so noted for this particular aspect that they've started curating a a gallery of bowling balls donated and decorated by other artists for viewers to admire.
My personal favorite piece of whimsey was this reimagining of traditional dog/fire hydrant dynamics.
The whimsical art train continued to the Chihuly Collection in St. Petersburg. I've seen the vibrant, mesmerizing blown glass works of Dale Chihuly and his studio in almost every state I've been to so far, and I absolutely never get tired at looking at them. This was one of the largest collections of his works I've seen so far, and, according to the website, it's one of the only permanent collections that was placed in a building specifically designed for it so that the architecture and lighting interact with the art to create an immersive experience. I didn't know that going in, but the collection did have a really cool atmosphere and because of all the soft lighting to accentuate the glass it kind of reminded me of a haunted house but instead of chills and jumps around every corner it was beautiful art (not to say that haunted houses can't be beautiful works of art in their own right). I liked that the collection featured a pretty thorough survey of Chihuly's works including chandeliers, flowers, bowls, orbs, quilts, and even works with fluorescent lights. I especially liked the concept drawings he made for all his glass works, because the glass is all actually the works of many hands so it's really cool to see a few demonstrations of what he's capable of just on his own.
I should also probably mention that one of the best parts about Dale Chihuly is that he looks like a mad scientist mixed with a pirate which to me really just adds to the magic of it all.
From there, it was just a short drive down the street to the Dali Museum. The museum houses the largest collection of Dali's works in the US and is the second largest collection in the world. The majority of the works come from the personal collection of Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, a wealthy couple who fell in love with Dali's art. They actually became close friends with Salvador and Gala Dali, championing his work in academic writing, translating writings by and about him into English, and helping to fund his continued output. The whole museum is a really a labor of their love for their friend and his art.
I loved this museum so much. From the moment you walk in everything embraces the surrealist aesthetic its namesake artist, with a big spiraling staircase and big, bizarrely bulbous and amorphous glass skylight sticking out of one side of the otherwise sleek, cubic concrete walls.
I was very lucky to be there on the last day of a special exhibit about the collaborations and relationship between Dali and fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. The two were close friends and mutual inspirations on one another, and Dali helped design some of her jewelry and dresses. The exhibit did a really good job pairing a work by Dali with a work by Schiaparelli showcasing different thematic links between their works such as technical mastery, creativity, use of color, repurposing classic imagery, and subverting expectations. I've never really understood "high fashion" but I liked that, similar to Dali, Schiaparelli seemed to satirize high society even while participating in it, and this playfulness in their shared works really made for a much more fun exhibit than what I was expecting from something about couture fashion. It didn't hurt that even without knowing anything about fashion all the pieces by Schiaparelli were super impressive. I can't really imagine anyone actually wearing a lot of them, but as pieces of art they held their own pretty well against the Dalis which is really saying something.
My favorite was this dress with a lobster print on it designed by Dali. It was weird, but simple and oddly elegant. The best part though for me was the phrasing the free audio guide used in relaying this anecdote: "When Dali suggested that the model wear the dress down the runway with dollop of mayonnaise, Schiaparelli declined."
The last bit of this exhibit had works from the modern House of Schiaparelli trying to emulate the formal inventiveness and creativity of their namesake. Their was also a weird room of all mirrors filled by both Dali and Schiaparelli. Some of the quotes were printed backwards so you'd have to look in the mirrors on the opposite wall to read it. The idea was that both artists had unique ways of looking at things so this room was supposed to get you looking at things literally from different angles.
From there it was on the main exhibit featuring a massive cross section of Dali's lifework. He's one of my favorite artists because he his works have so much technical skill put into weird, dreamlike, beautiful, and frequently funny imagery and that he brought that same absurdist sensibility to basically every aspect of his life. The exhibit was arranged largely chronologically starting with paintings the young Dali made before and during his training at the prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. If there was any doubt of Dali's natural talent though prior to any training, just look at this landscape painting he made when he was only 13 years old.
Dali never finished his art school training however. He was expelled in his senior year after he refused to take a final exam because he claimed that it was impossible for any of the faculty to give him an exam on Raphael when he knew more about Raphael than any of them. Very in character. I was also a very big fan of how he chose to prove his technical skill to those who might have doubted him after his expulsion. He painted a highly realistic still life of a basket of bread called The Basket of Bread just to show that he could paint as well in the style of the Dutch masters as his own style. He went on to say in very Dali quote "Of all the paintings of bread I ever painted, this painting of bread was the best realization of my artistic vision" (or something similarly grandiose I didn't actually write it down verbatim). A lot of his early works from this period of his life were very much in the styles of painters he admired, and you can see him kind of dabbling a little bit with more modernist ideas like cubism, but he hasn't quite found his own style.
That all started to change once he stumbled into Surrealism and just sort of let his dreams take over. Once you literally turn a corner in the museum gallery, now you've got all the classic hallmarks of the Dali we know and love. Massive empty landscapes, check. Double imagery and plays with perspective, check and check. Blending of photorealism and dreamlike shapeless figures, check. There's even a few melting clocks here and there! I think my favorite thing about his paintings is how much different they look at a distance and up close. There's always so much weird stuff going on in the backgrounds, I love it.
The big highlights for me though were four of his most massive paintings and then two smaller but no less impressive ones. The massive paintings include Galacidalacidesoxiribunucleicacid (Homage to Crick and Watson) which features spiraling DNA structures on either side of an image God resurrecting Christ that blends in and out of the background; my favorite The Hallucinogenic Toreador that somehow uses repeating Venus de Milo figures to Create the image of a bullfighter (the optical illusion could take a while to see but it's pretty darn cool); The Ecumenical Council which features a whole swirling mass of religious imagery playfully being painted by a little robed Dali in the corner; and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus a monumental love letter to the religions, myths, and history of Dali's native Spain. One of the smaller works I really loved was a painting called Eggs on a Plate Without the Plate, which features two eggs on a frying pan and a third egg suspended on a string that extends up to the heaven. The egg on the string supposedly represents an embryo and umbilical chord but I like the idea that some unseen deity is just sneakily stealing fried eggs like Wile E. Coyote. The other smaller painting I loved was called Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln-Homage to Rothko, which is exactly what it sounds like a beautiful painting of Dali's wife looking out a window that at a distance becomes a portrait of Abe Lincoln.
I also want to highlight this painting called Portrait of my Dead Brother, because I think the story behind it is really interesting and helpful for understanding how Dali became the way he was. He had an older brother who was also named Salvador who died nine months before his own birth, and his parents frequently told him that they the thought he was the resurrection of their first son (because that's not gonna mess a kid up). A lot of Dali's more flamboyant personal affectations stemmed from a desire to prove to himself and to his parents that he was his own person, but he always struggled with this feeling of living in his dead brother's shadow. This cool portrait where a series of dark and light cherries make up the face of a young boy, represents that kind of shared existence because Dali claimed the light cherries were him and the dark ones his brother.
On a lighter note, I also wanted to highlight these two paintings because at first glance it might not be clear how strange they are. The one on the right is hilariously named Fountain of Milk Spreading Itself Uselessly on Three Shoes and features a woman on a pedestal shooting milk out of her breasts despite there not actually being any shoes in the painting. I just love that the title states that this is a useless exercise. The other painting is called The Hand and features a dreamlike man with a giant hand. The hand probably steals the show but upon closer inspection the man is also bleeding from the eyes and shitting himself just because. For some reason, I am the only person I ever see laughing out loud in art museums, but some of these things have got to be funny on purpose.
On the bottom floor of the museum, there was a gallery of works by local high schoolers dabbling in surrealism. To my untrained eye, the quality varied quite a bit, but some of these kids were also super talented and used more modern technologies like digital photography in ways that I think would have made Dali proud.
In the gift shop they also had a vintage rolls royce decorated with different nautical designs and featuring a diving suit in the driver's seat as an homage to the time Dali showed up to his first British museum showing in a full diving suit and almost suffocated.
Outside the Museum was the Avant Garden, complete with melting clock bench and a gigantic statue of Dali's Iconic mustache. When asked about his choice of facial hair, Dali said, "It is the most serious thing about me".
When I got back to my car, I found out that I had still had a homemade brownie left over from Shelf Indulgence, the bookstore cafe from last night, but don't worry I soon rectified this oversight.
I got lunch at a little place that came highly recommended called Bodega Comida Cantina Cafe. The bodega specializes in Latin American and Caribbean street food. There was a long line out front which made me optimistic, and the food did not disappoint. I got a pollo asada sandwich was coconut marinated chicken with mango mayonnaise and avocado on that nice pressed Cuban bread. It was one of the best sandwiches I've ever had.
After lunch, I walked around downtown St. Pete looking for a good place to get coffee. Instead I ended up getting enticed by a place called Kings because I read on their menu that they had a chocolate peanut butter bacon milk shake which I had to try. It was absolutely disgustingly unhealthy, but also completely delicious. I never would have thought to put bacon, or any meat really, into a milkshake but it worked better than i could have imagined even if some of that chocolatey peanut butter covered bacon is probably still lodged up in my arteries somewhere as I write this.
After downing that milkshake like the glutton I am, I still wanted a caffeine boost but I was also hoping to try an herbal drink called Kava that is supposed to produce anti-anxiety affects because I kept seeing signs for it but I'd never seen it in MA. I went to a place Johnny Vapors. The guy there said that you shouldn't drink Kava though if you've had any alcohol in the last twelve hours because it can have a bad combined effect on the liver. I appreciated him knowing his stuff enough to say that, and he recommended I try kratom another herbal drink that's more like a tea. Kratom is known for producing both stimulant like effects like caffeine, while also producing a mild euphoric feeling. This combined effect leads to some debate about it's safety in high doses, but it is currently still legal in the united states and at the dose I ended up drinking it was really just like a strong cup of tea and I think the euphoric feeling was probably a bit more of a placebo because I was told it was going to happen. I liked it well enough, but I don't think it's gonna replace coffee for me.
After my alternative fuel source, I drove to Tarpon Springs to see a place called Spongeorama Sponge Factory, the world's largest collection of natural sponges. I had no idea that people made actual sponges out of the animal, but I guess it's porous and fibrous so it makes sense that it would be a good material. Apparently normally they have a museum and a little movie theater that plays a documentary about the divers who go get the sponges, but those were damaged by the most recent hurricanes so I just got to walk around the shop and look at all the different kinds of sponges which was honestly really interesting. They're fascinating animals because they're really barely even alive. They're more like plants that breathe and eat. There was also a coconut painted to look like an alligators so that was pretty great.
I was told that Tarpon Springs had really incredible Greek food and seafood, but I hadn't planned for the existences of bacon milkshakes or how full they'd make me, so I unfortunately didn't have it in me to try any. Instead I soldiered on to Tallahassee to prepare myself for tomorrow's last push along the panhandle into Alabama.
When I landed at my Air BnB, I was happy to see that there was a fun Cuban ollege bar called Gordo's about a block away from me, and enough of my appetite had returned for a small beer and a late night snack. I ended up having croquetas, the big Classic Cuban staple I'd missed out on so far, and a spicy Cuban sausage slider. I forget what I had for a beer, but it hit the spot in that moment even if otherwise it wasn't particularly memorable. The slider was great, but unsurprisingly the croquetas stole the show. How can you go wrong with deep fried meat and cheese?
Favorite Random Sightings: A man wearing a T-shirt that said "Pasta Boy"; Benjamin Franklin Punctual Plumber; FuBAR; Wig Villa; Ace Whipple Pawn Shop (that is such an 80s TV cop sounding name); 1-888-455-PAIN (the font they chose really made it look like ASS-PAIN); The Mature Manure
Regional Observations: Florida is killing the decorative mailbox game. So many Manatee- shaped mailboxes and it's great.
Albums Listened To: NehruvianDOOM by NehruvianDOOM; Neil Young by Neil Young; Nevermind by Nirvana; The New Danger by Mos Def (just Ghetto Rock); The New Dark Ages by Vic Ruggiero and Kepi Ghoulie; New Day Rising by Husker Du (my cousin rally hyped this album up to me, but I didn't really get into the first time. This time I listened to it though something must have clicked because I really loved it); New Directions by the Meters; The New International Sound of Hedoism by Jaya the Cat (Just Here Come the Drums); New Morning by Bob Dylan (one of my personal favorite Dylan albums because it doesn't really sound like any of the others)
People's Favorite Jokes:
Barista: "I only know the one about the tomato that everyone knows." Me: "How does it go?" Barista: "I don't know, I haven't had my coffee yet"
Why did the mushroom get invited to the party? Because he was a fun guy
Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? Because it was dead
Songs of the Day:
I think I would like Hardcore punk more if it had more shuffle piano in it.
A great song for one of the best opening credit montages of all time. Probably my favorite movie at that.
