Texas Day 1- Murders, Munsters, and Monstrous Mitts
Today started with a trip to the Brew Junkie Coffee in the small town of Roanoke, Texas. I'm always surprised at how many towns named Roanoke pop up all over the place, because it's not like the first one went so great. My coffee choice did however end up being pretty great. While the seating was all very laid back and modern, the actual coffee bar was a beautiful old-timey coffee counter with big granite and wood shining so nicely in the artificial lights. The coffee itself was excellent and it was a nice place to sit and do some writing for a little bit to start the day.
My next stop was in the much bigger town of Fort Worth to see probably the most architecturally insane city park I've ever seen. The Forth Worth Water Gardens are a little modern art oasis right in the middle of downtown designed by Philip Johnson. The park is totally free to the public, and it really must be seen to be believed. The largest water feature is called the active pool and it is a swirling vortex of concrete steps and terraces with water rushing down them. It makes for a really neat optical illusion because if you stare down the middle you really feel like it could keep going down for ever. You're also totally allowed to walk down the steps to get closer to the center, so it's a fully immersive experience. It feels like something from outer space just casually transported to a city center. I loved it, but I suppose if you have vertigo you might want to just skip to the other features.
There were two other pools in the Water Gardens and two non water features. The first pool was a direct counterpoint to the swirling chaos of the active pool, and it was called the quiet pool. This pool featured a serene, almost impossibly blue meditation pool surrounded by towering cypress trees that get reflected back up by the pool's surface for a really cool effect. The last pool was called the aerating pool, and it seems like it would be the perfect place to take kids on a hot summer day. It features multiple spray fountains creating a fine mist and dozens of mini-rainbows. The two non-water features were a big stone amphitheater and something called the Mountain which was a series of steps making a big abstract climbing structure. A few of the steps even had little gardens in between them which I didn't super capture in my photo, but I really enjoyed hopping from step to step like a billy goat even if I got embarrassingly winded by how steep it was.
I had planned to get an early lunch in Fort Worth, because I knew I was going to be spending most of the day in Dallas so I wanted to try to get a little more out of the fairly major city since I knew I wouldn't be able to come back later in the week. Unfortunately I got caught behind the longest train I have ever seen in my life. I honestly sat waiting for the train to pass for well over ten minutes before I decided to bail and head to Dallas. Luckily I got to pass by this very cool public sculpture of a man with a briefcase, or I suppose more accurately the absence of a man with a briefcase. This in turn reminded me of one of my favorite jokes from the Simpsons where Lisa tells someone at a jazz club to listen to the notes the musician is not playing, to which the patron angrily yells "I can do that home!"
I was driving through so I couldn't take a picture and this one comes from Google which is why it's cropped so weird but you get the idea.
The large scale public art continued when I got to Dallas when I got greeted by the utterly charming Traveling Man. While I only saw this one, entitled Walking Tall, the Traveling Man is the subject of three sculptures around the Deep Ellum neighborhood. The creation of artist Brad Oldham, this friendly (not so) little robot is meant to honor the railway history of the town with his shining metal construction and folktale backstory that the man was once a regular locomotive that had been buried under an elm tree but he came alive when someone spilled gin on the roots of the tree. As you can in the family photo I accidentally captured, the warmth and sweetness of this funky sculpture just ends up spreading to anyone who sees it.
My next stop was an odd one, but oddly fascinating. Tucked in a hallway of Baylor University Medical center is Dr. Adrian E. Flatt's humongous collection of brass casts of hands. Dr. Flatt's collection began when he, as an orthopedic surgeon specializing in hand surgeries, began taking molds of his patient's hands to plan out surgeries. Soon he saw the educational merit in this and began taking molds of his fellow surgeon's hands to debunk the myth that there is any one "typical" surgeon's hand. With the collection now expanding, he then began tracking down more and more famous hands and the collection has some pretty shockingly big names.
There were world leaders, including several presidents (with Lincoln being the coolest one in my opinion), Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher, who's hands appeared to be as frail and crooked as her morals. As much as I dislike Thatcher in just about every way, I suppose if it weren't for terrible treatment of the working class we never would have gotten The Clash and that would have been a bit of a bummer for me personally.
There were scientists including astronauts (the most muscular scientists), surgeons, and Jonas Salk, who invented the polio vaccine and perhaps even more nobly refused to patent it, placing human health above personal profit. He's just amazing, even if his hands look pretty normal. The coolest display here though was of two hand surgeon's hands performing hand surgery on the cast of a teeny baby hand. It was the one display that while being a fascinating medical display would also be most reasonably called a true work of art as well.
He had different musicians including Louie Armstrong and Chopin. Even if there may not have been a "typical" surgeon's hands, I did notice that every professional pianist did tend to have long slender fingers but I don't know if that's more a result of playing piano for years shaping the hands than some hands being better shaped for piano.
There were other famous entertainers who had pretty cool hands even if that wasn't what they were necessarily known for. The ones I was most excited for were Paul Newman, Katherine Hepburn, and the fabulous Ethel Merman whose hands were almost as large as her voice.
And for artists who were known for their handiwork (god I'm sorry), they had Charles Schultz, Walt Disney, Norman Rockwell, and one of my all time favorites, Dr. Seuss, which I would have thought would be more furry and striped.
There were muscular hands of athletes like Troy Aitken and Wilt Chamberlain. I love that they put Wilt's sizable digits right next to a famous jockey's for maximum contrast. They actually had a photo of the two of them hanging out which was pretty adorable.
The crown jewel of the collection and hands down the most impressive hands were those of none other than Andre the Giant. These things were absolutely massive. I'm fairly certain that if he put his palm on my face, he could touch his thumb to his pinky around the back of my head. My brother is a huge wrestling nerd, and the Princess Bride is one of my sister's and my favorite movies, so the real life BFG was a big, warmly remembered presence in the Palana household growing up.
Lastly, rounding out the collection was also a big case of hands cast from people born with different birth defects and disabilities to show all the fascinating ways hands can deviate from the norm. I liked seeing these, because one, it's important from a medical perspective, and two, because well not everyone is born with two perfectly fine hands and those different hands deserve to be cast and showed off too. Genetics and birth is such a goddamn statistical crap shoot of so many things that can go just a little bit off and make huge changes, that I think most people, myself included, really take it for granted how insane that anyone at all is ever born with all their parts how they're supposed to be.
After working up an appetite looking at all those hands, I decided to get my hands on some lunch. I figured I might as well start diving right into the Tex-Mex cuisine because this is the place to do it. I decided to check out a local chain called Velvet Taco which had really interesting modern fusion tacos which you could mix and match and get as many as you felt like all for about 3 bucks a pop. I got the Rotisserie chicken with white queso, roast corn pico, cilantro, and smoked poblano salsa on a corn tortilla and an Annatto shredded pork with avocado crema, house shred, grilled pineapple, pickled onion, queso fresco, and cilantro on a hibiscus corn tortilla. Both the tacos were tremendous. I think the pork was particularly great but there was just a little too much going on in the taco, so as a whole the rotisserie chicken gets the slight edge. The corn pico and white queso were also a perfect combo.
After lunch, I wanted to get some more coffee for the day but I found another piece of public art that really caught my eye. This piece just called Eye by artist Tony Tasset, and it stands 30 feet feet tall and is just on the lawn outside of an of office building. It's absolutely horrifying and I love it.
When I finally tore myself away from that freakish eye, I ended up getting coffee at a really popular local chain called Ascension Coffee. They had a very stylish and modern aesthetic, and while they were maybe a tad over-priced (a theme for a lot of big cities in and out of Texas) they did make a mean coffee. I got a Kyoto style cold brew because it was made with these funky machines (see below). I'm not really sure how they work, what the connection is with Kyoto, or why it's any different than other cold brews but I did enjoy it quite a bit despite the lingering questions (that could surely be answered by a quick google search, but who has time for that?).
My next stop was the Sixth Floor Museum on the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald is thought to have shot President Kennedy from. I was going there because it was the only one of Dallas' several cool museums that was open on a Monday, and also because it seemed like just an amazing museum about a fascinating piece of history. Unfortunately this combo of being the most interesting and most open museum around, meant just about every tourist in Dallas was waiting in that line for me. Because the museum wasn't initially ever intended to be a museum, just a book depository where nobody would kill a world leader from, it's not exactly very big so they can only allow so many people up at a time. By the time I was able to buy a ticket, they told me the next available time I could actually come up wouldn't be for another hour.
Naturally I did what any 23 year guy with a free hour in Dallas would do, I drove a half hour away to see a house that a couple has spent 9 years of life painstakingly resemble the mansion from the show The Munsters. It's a very odd labor of love to a show that is decidedly a just fine Addams family knock off, but the attention to detail is astonishing. The house is only open to public around Halloween (obviously), but apparently they've worked on also recreating the interior of every room shown on the sitcom. I guess if you have to have a hobby, there's a lot worse ways to spend your time.
After my brief jaunt to 1313 Mockingbird Lane, I went back to see where the course of American history changed forever. The Sixth Floor Museum was really a pretty amazing collection of historical and cultural artifacts tied to this one monumental event. Unfortunately they didn't allow photography so we're going to see what stuck in the three months between me being there and actually writing about (I took notes, relax). But here's a nice picture of what the building looks like now.
The museum started with a brief overview of the work going into the 60s to just set the tone, which I think was good because the world was going absolutely bonkers. Cold war tensions were rising, satellites were in orbit, rock and roll was starting to explode, there were racial tensions, there were gender tensions, the mob was a thing, a LOT of young men were dead or traumatized from Korea (not to mention WWII), and no one was talking about it; in short, it was an insane beast of political, international and cultural turmoil for anyone to have to be put in charge of. This big front loading of scene setting was aided by lots of cool vintage news footage, music posters, , and memorabilia from 50s and 60s TV and movies which was really fun.
From there, they went into the 1960 election, and while it's hard to believe now that there was ever a chance that someone as charismatic as Kennedy could possibly lose to the blatantly creepy Richard Nixon, it was a super tight race. Being young and Catholic were really big things, Jack would have to overcome but he also ran a super smart campaign which helped a lot. Pairing up with LBJ gave him a great deal more political experience to lean on (not unlike when Obama picked Biden though I imagine with fewer hookers around), and he also was really the first presidential candidate to lean into new media and take advantage of it. Part of the reason Nixon looks so bad in those televised debates is because he thought it would look weak to put on make up, as opposed to just what you're supposed to do when you're on national TV. Not Jack, he listened to people around him, and he created and sold an image to go with his very progressive politics and it worked, and really created modern campaigning as we know it today for better and for worse.
Now the JFK Library and Museum in Boston is possibly my mom's favorite place on this earth, so I have been several times in my life and I feel like I know a decent amount about Boston's Golden boy, but when this museum started talking about his presidency up to the assassination I realized something that had never quite clicked for me in the slightly more glowing hometown exhibits: JFK pissed a lot of people off. I did not realize how many enemies he made politically, essentially right from the start of his presidency. A lot of the things he did that upset the status quo, in hindsight were very good things like cracking down on organized crime and trying to expand civil rights, but old mobbed up and racist politicians were not happy about it. Some of the things like the Bay of Pigs, more justifiably upset other politicians who felt that it showed he was inexperienced. And sometimes he just couldn't win either way, like when it came to Russia with the liberal politicians feeling he was too aggressive and hawkish for continuing the arms race and Conservatives feeling he was far too weak and lenient for not challenging them further. Up until, he really knocked it out of the park with his handling of the Cuban Missile crisis, he didn't have many allies outside of his cabinet, and the people that really hated him weren't even thrilled about that. This definitely provided a little more insight into the overall climate that could have led to the assassination.
Another thing that I suppose I knew but never really considered was why the space race was such a big deal. It's usually (and now I believe correctly) identified as one of Kennedy's finest accomplishments, but in a lot of ways it struck me as very expensive pissing match between world powers. But today in this museum, the obvious finally clicked for me, that it wasn't so much about just getting to space, there was the very real fear that if you could get to space you might be able to drop nuclear weapons from space. That fear makes it more clear to me why we really had to compete with Russia and do everything so quickly, though I do think ultimately the hopes of exploration actually are a better reason for space travel just not something that demanded the same immediacy. It was also a brilliant marketing move, in the vein of bread and circuses, because giving Americans something to hope for with space travel was a much needed distraction from a lot of the more horrifying aspects of the Cold War and life in general around that time.
After all this interesting ground work was laid, we got into the nitty gritty of what went down on November 22, 1963. This started naturally with a loop of the most infamous footage of the event, the Zapruder film, as well as some archival news footage. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to see the president literally die on National TV (okay I guess he really died in the hospital later, but whatever).
By the corner window where Oswald's famous shot was fired, they had completely recreated the homemade sniper's nest which was equal parts crazy cool and very chilling. From there the rest of the museum was more about the aftermath of the assassination. They covered the man hunt for Oswald, the investigation of the forensic evidence, Oswald's assassination, and then the long history of conspiracy theories. I thought the stuff about Oswald was really interesting, because regardless of if you believe any conspiracy theories, we'll never know exactly what happened with him and what was going through his head because he never got to testify. The museum had his actual wedding ring that he left on the kitchen table for his wife on the morning before the shooting, which to me suggests that he probably knew he wasn't coming back. I also loved the stuff about the Warren Commission and the investigation of the evidence because it just totally had the opposite effect as intended, by creating way more suspicions than it cleared up even leading into another later investigation into their investigation which is bananas. Seeing some of the original models of the crime scene with little ribbon bullet trails was also so interesting, and you have to wonder if forensic science hadn't been such a new field back then if that might have cleared up at least some of the lingering questions.
The character in all this who struck me as the most fascinating was Jack Ruby. I had always assumed he was somehow involved in politics, but nope he was just some Dallas strip club owner. Nobody's really sure what his motives were for killing Oswald, but all three of the most probably theories are crazy in their own way which I love. The motive he gave is that he was so distraught over Kennedy's death that he wanted to do what he could to spare Jackie from having to testify and look at the man who killed her husband. The popular theory is that Ruby was in debt to the mob over his shady businesses (which is almost certainly true even if it wasn't the motive) and they put Ruby up to killing Oswald to keep him from testifying and possibly implicating them. And the the third theory posited by some people who knew Ruby personally, is that he was just a sleazy attention seeker who honestly thought he would be celebrated as a hero and it would be great for his strip club business. I think there's plausibility in all three, but the one he actually gave is definitely the least likely and really the other two aren't mutually exclusive. The coolest thing about the little section on Ruby was a big blow up of the Pulitzer Prize winning photo by Bob Jackson, improbably snapped at the exact moment Oswald was getting shot. It's an iconic photo, but I'm blown away at how dynamic it is every time I look at it. The look of shock and not knowing what to do with your hands of everyone around Oswald is so very human, and Ruby's pose is so comically like a Dick Tracy villain that I really do think whether he was acting alone or for the mob he was definitely trying to play up a part for the attention of it.
Regarding all the conspiracy theories, I'm not sure where I fall on anything but I feel like we absolutely didn't get the full picture. I think things were absolutely covered up, but I don't know if they were covered up because of government involvement, government incompetence, or just trying to keep everyday Americans calm in the event that it was due to Soviet involvement. I think the answer is probably in the grey area of some combination of all three, because it's not like the CIA, the Soviet Union, or the Mob (the three biggest suspects in conspiracies) were all totally separate entities, and there's definitely evidence of the CIA working with the mob in other instances and Soviets playing espionage games all over the place so we'll never get the whole picture, but the real answer probably wouldn't be as satisfying or fun as coming up with theories and trying to crack it. I do think the odds of Oswald acting entirely alone are crazy slim (even if he just had another nutty accomplice) and I really liked the bluntness of a quote by Jesse Ventura of all people "Why are they all lone nuts? That can't be". The Body isn't exactly the most well-trusted historical analyst, and the dangerous power of a lone nut can't be underestimated, but the odds that every assassination attempt in American history was just some weird loner seems a little improbable.
After all this history, I thought it was only reasonable that I go back to middle school. By this I mean that I went to the super hipster-y Public School themed restaurant PS214. It was such an odd theme for a restaurant, but honestly I kinda loved the ridiculous kitschiness of the decorations inclduing walls of typewriters, American flags made from Pencil Sharpeners, massive hanging flash cards, and a composition book themed menu.
Like a lot of these over-the-top themed restaurants, the food was wildly over-priced but I made the wise decision of getting there during happy hour when everything was much better for a comedian on a budget. I got the chorizo mac and cheese which also came with kale, sea salt, potato chips, and vinegar crumbles. It was really good pasta with a mix of penne and farfalle cuts to capture and trap the cheese in beautiful ways. The chorizo, while not exactly the same as that good Portuguese stuff from Rhode Island, was pretty tasty adding just the right amount of kick to the mix. To wash it down, I got a beer from Green Flash Brewing in San Diego called the GFB Blonde which was a very tasty, light, easy drinking beer (even if it wasn't a local brew, that was on me for not looking the beers up before I ordered).
From there it was on to the open mic which was at a place called Hat Tricks. I was excited because I was gonna get to meet up with Lawrence Rosales, who hosted the Loony Bin mic in OKC and was one of the most polished and professional comics I've seen at any mics so far. He had prepped me for this mic, by saying that the bar would be a bit "a bit rough but the comics are real cool". This proved to really hit the nail on the head, because while there was a decent sized crowd you really had to earn your laughs from them, but across the board the comics were all solid.
I got there a little too early, but that ended up being nice because I got to have a few beers and chat with Lawrence and his wife about mics in the area, and his experiences doing a recent stint up in Kansas. It's so rare that I get to see a familiar face in a new state, that it always really puts a positive spin on a night.
Lawrence was probably my favorite comic of the night, but I think my favorite line came from a guy named John Manbaby (I can't be spelling that right), a larger older Black comic who had some of the best stage presence I've seen in a while which always stands out extra hard in a tough room. The joke was "One of my daughters is super light skinned, so I've got a white baby which is tough. If she runs away from me in the store, I can't chase after her. You saw what they did to Harambe"
Other Highlights:
Jamie Gravy- I don't trust people who wear open toed shoes anywhere in public.
Lawrence- You just want your credit good enough that you can get a good deal at rent-a-center.
Ryan (didn't catch a last name)- We had one food truck growing up. He was called the Ice Cream man.
Christina Romero- I actually lost my virginity five miles down the road from here. That's why I was late.
My own set went about as well as it could have. I didn't crush it, but I managed to land a few punchlines pretty well which felt like something I could be proud of. Getting on stage though, part of the odd vibe made way more sense to me, because when you're in the crowd the comics could barely be heard over ambient sports bar noise, but when you're standing on stage you sounded really loud and it was very disorienting. Must have just been an acoustical quirk of the building, but it makes you realize how just little things can throw you off if you're not able to adapt to new surroundings on the fly.
After my set, I hung out with some of the other comics for a bit which was really nice and they were a lot more complimentary of my set than I would have guessed from the audience reactions so that was a nice little confidence booster before I had to leave for the night.
Favorite Random Sightings: Mr. Jim's Pizza; Mule Barn; Time to Pre-Emmerge (no freaking clue what this sign meant); A giant billboard for a lawyer proudly proclaiming, "We Sue Sex Offenders!" (sort of makes you more worried about sex offenders than less, also is suing them the outcome you want?); A dentist's billboard saying "We make sexy teeth!"
Regional Observations: The parking meters in Dallas are verrry expensive
Albums Listened To: Quazars: Born on a Gangster Star by Shabazz Palaces (this is my preferred one of the double album because it's a lot jazzier); Quebec by Ween (probably their darkest album, but it holds together very well); The Question by the Slackers (probably their masterpiece, so much more lyrically and musically mature than just about anything that came out of the 90s ska scene); Question the Answers by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones
People's Favorite Jokes:
"My existence" (I get a lot of baristas say "my life" but I think the grander scope of this one is a little more poetic)
Songs of the Day:
So well done and weird
I initially thought the title was a poop joke because it’s Ween, but then I realized that they’re from Pennsylvania and I think they’re referencing Hershey. It could be both though
I can say that I don’t know what I’m doing, but I can’t say I have the time. Story of my life on the road
Oh they’re such babies. So lovable
Bonus Video inspired by the Hand Collection: