FL Day 7 - Prisons, Patti's, and Prancing Through Treetops
I started my day in Florida's state capital by going to Lucky Goat Coffee Company. I read that their cold brew coffee was the best in the city. The local College magazine said that I would say "Wow" at least 10 times. I thought that was a little over the top, but I think I may have let out a single "wow" when I got their Tally-cino which was the famous cold-brew blended with vanilla and cream. It really was one of the best tasting coffees I'd had so far.
With coffee acquired, I then set about seeing a lot of Tallahassee's hidden gems from the Atlas Obscura. I started by going Litchgate on High Road. Hidden away in the middle of a forrest, Litchgate was founded by a former literature professor at Florida State University, Laura Jepson, after she fell in love with the Ancient live oak at the center of the property. Jepson added a small cottage, a labyrinth, and Shakespeare themed garden. It's a perfect little fairy-tale getaway from the hustle and bustle surrounding it, and in particular the sprawling, massive nature of the main tree juxtaposed with the more humble cottage really reminds of the Womping Willow and Shrieking Shack from Harry Potter.
My next stop was seeing the Library Oak Tree Fort Sculpture. The historic oak tree outside the Library was over 160 years old when the town determined to be unsafe, so local chainsaw artist John Birch (a wonderfully fitting last name) recycled the old tree into a sculpture complete with active children and books to celebrate its place in front of the library. It was a beautiful solution for the town.
Up next came the George Firestone Building, a former prison designed by M. Leo Elliot in the Art Deco style. Although it has an unfortunate history of Civil Rights abuses, it is a truly lovely building. I thought the windows in particular were really impressive. Sadly though, it might not stay up for long as there are talks of tearing it down to make room for new business.
On the way to my next stop, I drove by the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory home of the world's largest magnetic research facility where they do their best to answer noted scientists, the Insane Clown Posse's, question "Magnets, how do they work?". The lab is the home to a record breaking 45-tesla magnet, and apparently spends 8 million dollars a year on their electricity bill. They do public tours once a month, but they also have a virtual tour on their website which is kinda cool. The videos are a teensy bit dry, but they are pretty cool.
After that I went to the Tallahassee Museum, where I was faced with a difficult decision. I could get regular admission and wander around the park's collection of wildlife, nature trails, and historic buildings, or I could spend a little bit more money and go on a zip-lining course around the tree tops. I went with the zip-lining course because I had seen a decent number of historic buildings on this trip so far, and this seemed liked it would give me a good look at the wildlife and also a much more novel experience. Isn't that what this whole thing is all about? I have never been zip-lining before, but they gave you a basic tutorial beforehand and guide stayed with you on the ground level the whole time to make sure you were being safe. I will say the harness you had to wear reminds me of the line in Ulysses where Buck Mulligan describes the Atlantic as "the scrotumtightening sea" which about the most pretentious way you can say it rode up in the crotch. As you can tell from my face as I started on this treetop adventure, I was nothing but confidence.
The zip-lining course was not actually all zip-lining but a series of obstacles through the tree tops. These included hopping from platform to platform, an sort of suspended skateboarding thing, climbing, rickety bridges, and then the actual zip-lines, some which extended for several meters between trees. I took the medium difficult course because apparently I was too tall to take the course for children which is actually a first. I think I actually held my own, generally completing things faster than the two other people who were going at the same time as me. A few of the obstacles, particularly the ones that required movement up hill, made it painfully clear how out of shape I am, but every actual zip-line made up for these with an exhilarating rush of excitement. I had a blast and I think I got some pretty damn good views of the flora and fauna around me from way on high.
Back on the ground floor, I did get to wander around the museum grounds a bit which was pretty cool. I saw some wild hogs (not the midlife crisis motorcycle moment), dinosaur sculptures, and a big gator skull so rest assured I was pretty happy with the place.
After the museum, I made my way across the panhandle to Pensacola. Much like the Jersey Shore the so-called Floribama Shore is now also the subject of an MTV reality that highlights he worst subculture in the region. Also like the Jersey shore, there's a lot of really lovely areas and cool shops not represented as well on the TV show.
My first stop in Pensacola was the Pensacola Museum of Art. Housed in the former city jail (today was good day for artsy jails), the museum isn't particularly large but it had some really great exhibits. They also still had metal doors with bars which gave it a unique kind of charm.
The largest special exhibit was one of my favorite ones I've seen so far. It featured the works of an artist named Katrina Andry. She created really amazing and impressively large woodcuts using a technique called "color reduction wood block" in which the entire image was carved in layers from a single block of wood with a new layer for each color used. These created really fascinating and uniquely textured prints. The images itself was just as cool as the technique used to make them. There were two different series of prints. The first one was entitled Depose and Dispose (Of) and featured images of half-human/half-animal characters eating and posing suggestively in natural environments. The intention was to look at how animal stereotypes are used to portray people of color as primitive. The second series was entitled the Promise of the Rainbow that Never Came and featured images of black bodies falling into water and transforming into eels, as an allusion to the brutal Middle Passage of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the thousands of Africans who jumped ship rather than be kept in bondage. This series featured mylar coating on some of the water drops to give them a shimmering quality, and I thought these pieces in particular were really powerful and beautiful. In the back of the exhibit, they had some of the actual woodblocks Andry used to make the prints and they were both super impressive.
The other major exhibit was called Crossing Boundaries and featured works by local artists that were all interested in the intersection of technology and art and the future of sustainable clean energy. There was a lot of variety and works in several different media. My favorite was a piece was called Tide Curtain and featured blue curtain cut into strips and attached to little motors that raise and lower the curtains according the tides. The goal was to show the interconnectedness of the natural world by having the amount of light let into the room dictated by the tides, but I just thought it looked really cool.
Lastly, there was really bizarre and shocking scultpure called "What Would Your Grandmother Think" by an artist named Andrew Adamson. It's ceramic but it looks to me like it was carved out of bubble gum.
After the museum, I walked around downtown Pensacola, There was a really nice park and lots of nice little shops. I got some coffee at classy little spot called Fosko Coffee Barre. They had an old timey espresso, and the people there were all really friendly. I got something called an Angelino which was 4 honey espresso shots shaken over ice with a splash of half and half. It tasted amazing and had one of the highest concentrated doses of caffeine I'd encountered in a while.
Positively buzzing, I made my way to Joe Patti's Seafood Market which looked oddly majestic in the setting sun:
The market is a local staple and was absolutely bustling, offering a huge selection of fresh seafood from the Florida Gulf as well as some imported from all up and down the East coast. As well as the seafood market, there was also a deli, speciality market, cafe, and sushi restaurant making it a real one stop shop for all kinds of good food. I decided to sample the sushi, because I was hungry and I knew it would all be fresh. I ordered a plate of shrimp dumplings and a Joe Patti Special Roll, which came with shrimp, avocado, krabstick, cucumber, eel, and grilled salmon on top. Everything was delicious but the salmon in particular stood out as particularly tasty. It also never ceases to amaze me how gigantic gulf shrimp can get.
After dinner, I crossed into the Bama portion of the Floribama coast, so I could go to a rare (more for me than in general) Sunday night open mic in Mobile at a place called the Evening Muse. I was a bit early for the mic though so I ended going to the only cafe opened late called Carpe Diem Coffee and Tea Company. It's kind of gross that I got more coffee after the four shots of espresso in Pensacola, but they had a Kahlua and Cream flavored Ice coffee so I felt like I should probably try that. It was pretty delicious, and the whole place had a really cozy and homy vibe so it mad for a great place to sit and write for a bit.
When the time came, I made way down to the Evening Muse for the mic. It was a really hip bar with cool posters and paintings everywhere, a great beer selection, and a surprisingly solid crowd for a Sunday night. The open mic itself was a lot of fun. The crowd wasn't huge, but they were really supportive which was nice, and all the comics I met were super friendly which was a good introduction to the Alabama scene. The host was British man named the Guvnor, and I wish I had gotten more of a chance to talk to him because I am fascinated as to how he ended up in Mobile from Britain. Mystery or not, he was nice guy and a great host, even getting in one of my favorite lines of the night "Mobile is a lot like New Orleans, except New Orleans is the party you throw when your parents are out of town and Mobile is like a party with your parents"
Two of my favorite comics of the night did more conceptual acts that would be hard to try to fully capture and do justice to in writing. One of them was a guy named Truman Beesly who did an absolutely insane high energy set involving singing and shell-based prop comedy. It was an unexplainable whirlwind of manic energy but I laughed hard the whole time so there must have been a method to the madness. The other was more conceptual guy was named Ryan Adams, who was a black comic who did a set making fun of stereotypical Black comics by talking about he was trying to Black up his act. It was really funny, and he had a nice twist of social commentary at the end by saying "I'm not sure if y'all are laughing because I'm funny or because you don't like Black people".
My favorite line of the night came from a guy who went by the stage name MC Old Fart, who was an older white man dressed like a 90s rapper who both actually knew a ton about rap history and then also had a surprisingly tight flow when he did a funny rap as part of his act which elevated the schtick quite a bit. The line I really liked was: "I hit a bear with my car the other day. Yeah, a big hairy gay guy just walked out into the street"
My own set went pretty well. I started strong, sagged a little in the middle when I tried the new bit I'd been working on, but then ended well when I went back to my tried and true stuff. It was a younger crowd, but they seemed to like lighter sillier stuff than anything too dark or controversial. It all made for a really fun night, and I ended up hanging out at the bar for a while afterwards just chatting with the other comics. MC Old Fart in particular was a super nice guy, and he talked about doing comedy and hitchhiking around in the 60s and 70s "before Ted Bundy went and ruined that for everyone". It was really cool to hear about how comedy's changed over the years from someone who actually lived through it. He also got a few big auditions for shows back then but never quite landed any, and it was refreshing to hear him talk about that with zero bitterness because he felt like he gave it his best shot and he knew that just getting the audition meant that he had done something right.
While we chatting and drinking, a drunk guy at the bar, who wasn't there for the comedy but the karaoke that would be happening later, kind of jumped in on the conversation. He talked about how much money he made on bitcoin and how his friend that was even richer than him owned an original painting by Hitler. It was a lot, but he seemed like a nice guy.
After that, I retired to my Air BnB and prepared for my first full day deep in the heart of Dixie.
Favorite Random Sightings: Hungry Howie's; Hobbit Bar and Grill; Tan Shadows; Yogurt Mountain
Regional Observations: I think of all the states I've been to Florida has some of the starkest contrasts in wealth distribution. I think this is most notable in the more resort areas, but there is some real poverty in the state frequently just down the road from golf courses and theme parks which is pretty jarring.
Albums Listened To: New Roman Times by Camper Van Beethoven (a weird little concept album that marked their first new album after a 14 year hiatus); New Skin for the Old Ceremony by Leonard Cohen (a beautiful dirty little album); The New Way Out by the Doped Up Dollies (a badass group of Boston women); New West Records on Air at World Cafe by Various Artists; New Year's Day 7" by the Slackers (special release single of the boys covering the U2 song New Years Day)
People's Favorite Jokes:
I know a good knock knock joke, but you have to start it (this is one of my college roommates' favorite jokes, if you don't get it right away try doing it with another person)
Florida Superlatives:
Favorite Coffee: Drunken Monkey Coffee Bar in Orlando
Favorite Bar: Funky Buddha Lounge and Brewery in Boca Raton
Favorite Restaurant: Al's Finger Licking Good Barbecue in Tampa
Favorite Beer: Dr Gourdon Freeman from Funky Buddha
Favorite Dessert: Mammamia Gelato Italiano in Miami
Favorite Attraction: The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, though if your not a Dali nut like me I'd say the Ringling Museum in Sarasota has the most bang for your buck.
General Impression of the Florida Comedy Scene: Because I only saw two mics, I'm not sure how much I can generalize but it seemed like a pretty diverse and welcoming scene. The thing that stood out to me the most was I felt like while all the comedians leaned fairly liberal they were probably working with some of the most politically divided crowds I'd seen in a while so that makes for an interesting challenge coming up as a new comic to navigate.
Songs of the Day:
