OK Day 5- Big Heads, Big Houses, and Big Bottles of Soda
Today started with a trip to Gray Owl coffee in Norman just outside of Oklahoma City. The coffee was very good, and the shop was very cozy, but I was definitely most impressed by their choice of decorations.
Properly fueled up and fondly remembering Jackie Chan Adventures, my first stop for the day was the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History. I had had this museum recommended to me, but I was a little on the fence because I've found that sometimes natural history museums tend to have the same general types of artifacts. Fortunately my misgivings were immediately dissuaded by the very friendly guy they had greeting you as you walked in.
"Oh hey, you guys like dinosaurs?"
The first gallery was an introductory gallery, which was more geared towards the school children visiting, but it gave a brief overview of what natural history museums have and how to learn from the exhibits. I had probably seen more natural history than most of those kids, but I still liked the introduction for two big reasons. One, they had a taxidermied echidna which I was pretty excited about because I had never seen one before and I was a big fan of egg laying mammals growing up because they're nature’s oddballs and I can relate.
And two, there was this drawing that absolutely destroyed me. I was from an exhibit about how paleontologists know what dinosaurs look like (again geared towards children). The drawing was meant to illustrate that scientists had figured out that dinosaurs kept their long necks supported with special light weight bones like birds and not with muscles because then they’d have to look like this:
It's the look of abject terror and distress in the dinosaur's eyes that really make this one for me.
The first gallery I went to after being introduced to the museum was a special exhibit on the arts of Anita, Tom, & Yatika Fields called Fluent Generations (Anita and Tom are married and Yatika is their son). I was surprised to see an art exhibit in the museum, let alone a really great one, but it's part of the museum's goal to capture living natural history as well. All three artists are from the area and share in Native American cultures from the region (Osage, Creek, Cherokee and Muscogee to be exact) so their art uniquely captures both familial and tribal relationships as well as different trends in the contemporary art world by covering multiple generations. It was also cool to see how distinct each artist was despite having all lived in the same household. None of the three even work in the same medium, but all three are truly excellent at what they do.
Tom Fields is a photographer, whose works capture day to day life of Native subjects in beautiful high definition black and white. He has a real knack for capturing single images that tell a whole story, like a Native American WWII vet proudly holding up a captured Nazi flag which touches on a bout a million interwoven themes of history and tribal identity. I like the poetic justice of the swastika being a symbol of peace in some native cultures before it was taken in a very different context by the Nazis and the capturing of that flag being a very literal reclamation of the symbol itself.
While I love the naturalism in his more candid photos, I think my favorite photo was a very clever staged one called The Last Thanksgiving, which depicts a Native family gathered around a dinner table emulating the seating placement The Last Supper which is conveniently hanging behind them. It draws both visual and metaphorical parallels to Christ's martyrdom being echoed in the martyrdom of the Native Americans in the first Thanksgiving story, who helped the settlers survive only to be gradually sacrificed to Manifest Destiny only to be celebrated one day a year and forgotten the other 364. It was powerful, but also with a light and humorous touch showing that these are real people beyond just symbols and sometimes real people really just want to eat the food in front of them even if you're trying to take an artsy photo (looking at you aunt on the far right). I love how grand and small it is all at the same time.
Anita was probably my favorite of the three Fields artists, because she was the most wildly imaginative in her art, never really sticking to just one idea or medium. Her pieces were generally textile based or ceramics (or both) with a mix of designs rooted in both tribal traditions and the bourgeoning abstract expressionist movement. In this way, she sought to take both traditionally feminine and tribal art styles into the contemporary art world. Her work had a real surrealist quality that tapped deep into idea of cultural identity, what it means to be native, what means to be a woman, all while being intensely personal and really beautiful.
My personal favorites from Anita were a dress she made with a mix of clay sculpture, jewelry and painted words and stars making for a really impressive multi-media piece; two mosaics of homemade tiles, one with little gold-leaf symbols at the center of each tile representing either important tribal symbols or personal mementos and one that when the tiles were all put together made a really lovely abstract landscapes; and a ceramic sculpture of a bucket with the Osage word hanontze written on it. The Bucket might seem like a bit of a simple outlier compared to Anita’s other more dynamic pieces, but there’s a lot of depth to that little bucket. The word hanontze means “how much does it cost” and the sculptures is meant to memorialize a moment in Anita's family lore where her grandmother and her aunt were shopping and the grandmother asked the aunt “Hanontze?” referring to a similar bucket and the clerk said in very slow English, “It’s a bucket with a lid on it” so the grandmother replied in perfect English "I know it’s a bucket with a lid on it!” I think a lot of People of color or children of immigrants will find something very relatable in that story about the constant assumptions of foreign-ness or inferiority. Obviously those assumptions (and especially their prevalence) can be hurtful to anyone but I feel like it’s gotta be even more frustrating for Native people when a white person assumes that they’re foreign or they don’t belong when literally nobody else has as much right to be here as they do.
And the last of the Fields artists, Tom and Anita’s son Yatika, is a painter whose canvases explode with swirling images and colors. Some, like his painting of a swarm of bees, have clear and distinct subjects while others are more dreamlike and Dali-esque with images and symbols popping up unexpectedly and blending together in ways more thematic than representational. My personal favorite of his paintings was of three native women’s legs marching forward framed by symmetrical bands of flowers and sky and intercrossed by two white flags. By disembodying the legs, he more intensely focuses the painting on the idea of marching and progress and the strength and resilience of the very underrepresented and vulnerable group that Native Women represent in this country. It’s really beautiful and powerful.
After that brief artistic sojourn, it was into the meat and potatoes of the natural history, which I suppose is actually a better metaphor than I intended since the exhibit does cover both animals and vegetables. But before either of those things were on Earth, there were rocks! I've never been quite as into rocks as some of my best friends (and one college roommate) are, but I found the patterns that occurred in some of the iron samples to be really striking. I also had never heard of stromatolites before, which are funny little mounds of sediment and bacteria that harden into mushroom-like rocks. They contain some of the earliest known samples of fossilized life and they're weird and funky looking so I was really into them. Plus they had a meteorite you could touch, so that was definitely out of this world (I had to do it, I'm so sorry).
Once the rocks had formed a planet, it didn't take long (just a few billion years) for life to start populating it. The Hall of Ancient Life started with the Cambrian explosion and early Devonian periods where plant and sea life started exploding. The exhibit had tons of fossils from the oceans that once covered Oklahoma, as well as some really amazing dioramas capturing all the weird monster fish that used to run this planet. My favorite fossil and dioramas both involved early bony jawed predators called Dunkleosteus, which must have been absolutely terrifying to encounter in their prime, but nowadays kind of look like dopey buck toothed sharks.
From there, the animals soon made the journey onto the brave new world of dry land. With that move came new and fascinating diversities of shapes and species. With the more complex creatures, came even more complex dioramas with whole jungles and some models that were actually animatronic to demonstrate how scientists think these beasts moved. The thing that also strikes me is how small some of these dinosaurs heads were given how massive their bodies were.
Once the dinosaurs got on land for a few million years, they eventually evolved into the really giant monsters we all know and love. If the sheer size and completeness of the fossilized dinosaurs wasn't impressive enough, the staging and curation of these fossils was really artful, creating dramatic scenes such as dinosaurs circling prey or protecting their young rather than just presenting static bones. It made for a much more immersive and mesmerizing prehistoric experience.
The crown jewel of the dinosaur collection is the monstrous 10 and a half foot tall skull of pentacerotops, which is the largest known skull in the entire world. Personally I think they missed a great opportunity to put a teeny tiny top hat on him, but given how impressive it is just on it's own I'm willing to give them a pass.
After the dinosaurs all went extinct, which Far Side enthusiasts will know was caused by cigarettes, it was time for the mammals to take over. It was really cool to see the early ancestors of things that still exist in some form today, because they really look like exaggerated, bigger and scarier versions of everyday animals. For example you'll see a bison, except his horns are 9 feet across! Oh you think pigs are cute? Check out this guy with horns above and below his mouth for maximum tusking. The world took a weird and wild road to get where we are today.
After all the ancient life, the first exhibit on the second floor was a beautiful recreation of the diverse ecosystems of Oklahoma, filled with taxidermied animals and possibly the largest indoor forrest I've ever been in.
This exhibit was filled with cool animal facts, my favorite of which was that toads and tarantulas are a team I never saw coming. Apparently toads like to hang out in tarantula burrows to hide from snakes, and the tarantulas are cool with it because the toads eat ants that might otherwise try to eat the spider's eggs. Tarantulas still kinda creep me out, but you gotta love the kind of friendship that crosses species lines. The other fact that blew my mind was that there's a kind of clam that has a muscle it sticks out that looks like a tiny fish, and when larger fish try to eat it, the clam shoots its larvae out into the fish's mouth where they'll live until they're old enough to land at the bottom of the stream and become grown up clams of their own. It is at once the grossest and most incredible example of life persisting and thriving through any means necessary.
The next exhibit was a fascinating special gallery of photographs by astronomer and photographer Stephen Strom of both Mars and Earth showing similarities and differences in geologic formations on the two planets. I don't think I'd ever seen that many photographs of Mars in one place, and they were stunning. I don't know why I assumed it was all red desert, but there was so much more diversity in the range of landscapes. There were sand dunes, mountains, river banks, lava flows, and gaseous clouds and honestly half the time I'd have to read the caption to know which one was from Mars and which one was Earth.
My favorite pair of photographs from this gallery was of ice crystals from Mars and Earth, because they were such beautiful natural formations and the fact there is even ice on Mars at all is so cool.
The last exhibit was all about the Native tribes of Oklahoma. Artifacts ranged from the earliest known prehistoric peoples up to contemporary Native American sculptures. I think the coolest artifact here was the a 10,000 year old bison skull with a little painted zig zag on it that makes it the earliest known painted object in North America! I was also a big fan of all the Native American jewelry, ancient and modern, because the intricate designs and attention to detail in those precious metals is so beautiful. They also had full scale replicas of the evolving dwellings different tribes used from easy to pack up tee pees to more permanent wooden houses.
After the museum, I got some lunch at a place called Ray's Smokehouse BBQ which was amazing. Everything about the place was fantastic. The service was so friendly and funny, the prices almost never went above $10, and the food was excellent. I got a turkey sandwich with a side of a macaroni and cheese. I've had a lot of good barbecue on this trip, but most places stick with pork, ribs, and maybe chicken so I was really excited to see some melt in your mouth tender smoked turkey slathered in good bbq sauce on a perfectly toasted bun. It was spectacular.
After lunch, my next stop was a really cool roadside soda shack on historic Route 66 called Pops Soda Ranch, with the largest modern art soda bottle outside I've ever seen. The soda statue is there to sucker you in from the side of the road, but the actual shop is also a beautiful modern designed building with big glass windows lined with sodas grouped by color glimmering in the afternoon sun.
The shop specialized in rare and exotic local sodas from around the country. Some of these were fascinatingly novel, while others, like Lester's Buffalo Wing Soda, seem like a nightmare in a glass bottle. I decided I couldn't go to Pops Soda Ranch, without making myself a six pack of cool sodas for the road. I mostly decided to pick things based on the silliest names so I got Cock n Bull Cherry Ginger Ale, Totally Gross Soda Swamp Juice, Hippo Sized Peach Soda, Dang! Root Beer, Leninade (communist themed lemonade), and then a birch beer just because I like birch beer and don't see it too often. I didn't drink all six sodas right away, but it was nice to have some novel caffeine pulses throughout the day.
After Pops, I took a big ol' drive up to Ponca City to visit the Marland Estate, a gigantic oil baron's mansion built in the style of an Italian Rennaissance villa in the middle of northern Oklahoma. It was breathtaking with beautiful sculptures and topiary leading you up the walkway to explore the mansion.
E.W. Marland, the oil tycoon behind this extravagant estate came to Ponca City after a failed law practice in Pennsylvania with little more than a he and his wife's suitcases. Within twelve years of oil prospecting, he had earned $100 million and controlled 10% of the world's oil reserves. He was the first oilman to hire geologists to study the land and use science to help identify spots that were more likely to produce oil and innovative new drilling methods for getting it. While he did use some of that wealth benevolently, providing benefits for employees and building resources for the community, he also used it to build a truly lavishly decorated mansion. Every room had it's own style of decorations featuring some of the finest traditional and modern arts of the time as well state of the art technologies. There were beautiful clocks, hidden wall safes, medieval European tapestries, art deco kitchen supplies, Rennaissance paintings, and paintings and sculpture imported from Japan and China. Even the chairs were works of art in their own right.
The thing I almost noticed by accident was that perhaps the best part of every room was looking up and seeing what new and fascinating designs were on the ceiling. Every light fixture, every painted arch or tile, was a stunning work of artistic creativity. Who even thinks to look up at a ceiling half the time, you're in a room? But I guess, Marland had the money and he didn't want any inch of available space to not knock your socks off.
Unsurprisingly the bedrooms had some of the most decadent decorations of the entire house, with fancy wall papers, meticulously matched color schemes, fine furniture, private bathrooms (a real novelty for the time period), and plenty of art hanging on the walls. One closet had beautifully embroidered Chinese silk, with whole scenes and characters, just casually draped like a towel as if it were no big deal.
The dude even had his own private spa and sauna installed in the bathroom! I like looking at this stuff, but man I can't believe people lived like this at a point in time where huge chunks of the country were standing in bread lines or running away from giant clouds of dust blocking out the sun.
The basement proved to be a real treasure trove of cool artifacts starting with twelve miniature bronze statues of Pioneer Women. Marland wanted to build a larger statue in a nearby park to commemorate the spirit of the (white) women who had helped build the west, so he commissioned twelve sculptors to make miniature models of their statue ideas. He had the models cast in Bronze and they toured the country letting Americans vote on which one should be win the prize of getting the full size treatment. I loved the different styles each artist brought to the tables, celebrating different aspects of femininity from the traditional, such as a breast feeding mother (one of the most beautiful statues even if it's slightly more reductive than some of the others) or a faithful (yet very sexualized) bride waiting for husband's return, to the more uniquely pioneering traits such as one statue of a woman with a baby cradled in her arm and a musket over her knee protecting her land or woman still holding a baby taking a musket out of her dead husband's hands to continue fighting. It was cool to see women being given such active roles in sculptures, which I think really is indicative of the kinds of new opportunities and roles the wild frontier provided for them (even if some were maybe more out of dangerous necessity than fun). I think my favorite was the most modernist one (top left) entitled "Determined" by Maurice Stern, but the most hilariously unflattering one (second from top left) was entitled "Sturdy" by Mahonri Young. For whatever reason, I didn't actually take a picture of the one that ended up winning but if you search Confidant by Bryant Baker, you'll see it was a pretty deserving entry.
The hall of strong women led to some basement rooms, including a beautifully tiled bar and kitchen, an illicit poker room, a hidden tunnel for smuggling whiskey barrels, a collection of novelty nun and monk shaped dishware, and one of the most beautiful marble bathrooms I've ever seen.
After touring inside the house, I continued walking around and exploring the exquisitely designed and maintained grounds and architecture. There are actually a number of smaller museums on the grounds too, including a history of the oil industry, a museum of Native American arts and culture, an archeology museum, and even a small Christian Boy's school, but because I got to the actual house so late the rest of the museum had already closed by the time I got there. It still made for some nice walking and sight seeing though.
I made the drive back to OKC where I met up with one of my favorite comics from last night's mic, James Curtis, for some dinner before tonight's open mic. We went to a local Indian/Pakistani restaurant called Tikka Craze. I was very unoriginal and got the classic Chicken Tikka Masala with garlic naan. The food was great, and everything was really fast and cheap which was a nice bonus.
Even better than the food though was the conversation, as James turned out be as great a guy off stage as on. We shared fun, funny, and wild road stories, and he gave me some really great advice for places to go in Texas on the next week of my trip which I really appreciated because I hadn't done nearly enough research for such a giant state.
After dinner, we went down the street to the open mic at a place called Don Quixote's. It was a fun dive-y bar tucked into a strip mall, but the beers were incredibly cheap and the company was real fun.
This was one of the newest mics in town, only a few months old, and it was hosted by one of my other favorite comics from last night, Travis Orcutt. I had been warned ahead of time that because it's Friday night at a dive bar the crowd would probably get a little rowdy, but Travis did a good job setting a strong tone, and because there were only a few comics there we all had a bit more time than usual which was nice.
My favorite moment of the night came during Madison Allen's set where he was somehow able to turn a drunk guy heckling him into that guy inviting him outside to smoke pot and try to have a threesome. It was the most shocking and surreal way, I've ever a heckler-comic exchange go, but Madison handled every curveball with great stage presence and fast thinking, because I think he must have been even more surprised than the rest of us at the turns that took.
Other Highlights:
Travis- I had a girl ask me to spit in her mouth, but I was really high so my mouth was too dry. *horrible dry throat rattle* Hold on, baby, I've got this
Willy Wilson- I know what you're thinking my name sounds like a Spider-Man character.
Jeremy Westbrook - I found out my uncle was in a gay porn..... when I bought a gay porn
James Curtis- My nephew has a soft spot for nacho cheese. He can't hold that much but he's at a good height for dipping.
My own set went pretty decently, I got to try out some new stuff and work out some older bits I hadn't done in a while with the longer set length so that was nice. I mainly just got the table of comics to laugh and one couple at the bar, because everyone else was more focused on their drinking than their listening but I take not pissing them off enough to heckle me as a win.
After the stand up, the bar went right into karaoke mode. I didn't do karaoke because I'm far too kind to inflict that upon a room of unsuspecting strangers, but I did hang out for a bit with the other comics while they did karaoke and I just drank and chatted for a little longer. Certainly not a bad way to end the night.
Favorite Random Sightings: Custom Stump Entertainment; Ninja Fit; Dumb Bag; Nerdy Nation Creations; Ditch Witch; Wisdom Tooth Center
Regional Observations: I've finally gone far enough south and west for Hardee's to make the transition to Carl's Jr.
Albums Listened To: Positive Songs for Negative People by Frank Turner; Post Pop Depression by Iggy Pop; Potemkin City Limits by Propagandhi; Prepare the Preparations by Ludo (just Whipped Cream); Preservation Acts 1 and 2 by the Kinks (an underrated gem, certainly bogged down by Ray's megalomania but also musically and thematically fascinating); Presidents of the United States of America by Presidents of the United States of America (just Peaches); Press Play for Record Store Day by Various Artists
People's Favorite Jokes:
Here's one someone sent me in an email after checking out the blog, please feel more than free to do that!
A man was walking home from work when he saw a large group of women huddled around a train track all sobbing and crying "Shultz is Dead!" They were so sad so he went to see what they were upset about. There had been a terrible train accident and a man was cut into 3 pieces and was dead. The women cried and cried. The man noticed that the dead man was cut into his head, his body and his very large dick. In fact it was the largest set of family jewels he had seen.
So he went home to his wife and he told her about the train accident. He said, 'The man was cut up badly and he had the biggest dick I've ever seen!"
His wife said, "Ohhh Schultz is dead!!"
Songs of the Day:
some aggressive positivity
I love this son. It’s not from this album but it’s the band from Post Pop Depression (featuring members of Queens of the Stone Age and Arctic Monkeys). I feel like you’re not allowed to tell Rock gods to put on a shirt, but maybe Iggy’s body has become less god like with age (and heroin)
I like when a band doesn’t take themselves too seriously
This song really makes the whole dang rock opera worth it
Bonus Shout Out: One of the funniest comics and best dudes I met way back in Richmond, Winston Hodges, just dropped his first comedy album and it's really great so check it out here!