NM Day 2- Basalt, Balloons, and Blue Corn
Today started with a trip to Prismatic Coffee. As the name suggests, the cafe was very colorful and futuristic looking. The coffee was also very good, but not quite as memorable as the sweet digs.
I got this one from google which is why I think it looks way better than usual
Once caffeinated, my first stop of the day was the Albuquerque Museum, which is both an art museum and a history museum so it's pretty expansive but it does a pretty amazing job nailing both facets. Things started off on a good foot in both directions with a sculpture garden out front with a pretty impressive collection of New Mexican residents ranging from cocky conquistadors to pioneers struggling with big ol' animals on the wagon train to 1950s couples sneaking a quick kiss in the park.
My favorite sculpture was a poignant piece by Bob Haozous (who also made the big cloud sculpture in Tulsa) entitled Border Crossing. One side is an idyllic cartoonish landscape of clouds and desert, while the other side is a dark metallic mismatch of barbed wire and military symbols. The two sides were linked by a door with a charmingly ironic heart shaped lock, capturing the sad disparities between expectations and realities that comes from the politicizing of borders. I think a kind of brilliant touch is that it doesn't specify which side of the border is which though showing that both sides can view the other as a either a beautiful paradise or a dangerous war zone while neither view gets the full picture.
The first exhibit in the museum was a lobby gallery showcasing the works of the current Artist in Residence, Paul Sarkisian. Sarkisian just turned 90 this year (!) and has been consistently making new and innovative art since the early 50s, going through different phases ranging from completely photorealistic to highly abstract. The current phase was really interesting because it initially looks like pretty standard abstract color grid, but the wood has been treated with special chemicals and polyurethane resin so that the colors actually change as you walk by depending on how the lights hit the piece. It was sort of magical.
The main special exhibit at the Albuquerque museum was called Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design and focused on contemporary design and fashion art from all over Africa. I'd actually seen this traveling exhibit before at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, so while it's an absolutely incredible exhibit I sort of breezed by it this time around. Still it's a big traveling exhibit, so it's interesting to see how the different curators at the two museums I saw it at highlighted different items in the collection, and I noticed new things this time around. The blending of traditional African design and crafts with more contemporary fashion and furniture trends was still as stunning and innovative as the last time.
My personal favorites this time around were still the elaborately staged photographs by Belgian-Beninese artist, Fabrice Monteiro. Using stilts and incredibly elaborate costumes, Monteiro created haunting visions of a world where Goddesses reclaim the Earth after an environmental disaster. Other highlights include a series of photographs by Kenyan artist Tahir Carl Karmali who altered old-fashioned styled portraits with imagery of technology to create powerful and whimsical visions of Afro-futurism; some subversive high heeled shoes by South African designer Leanie van der Vyver that look like relatively typical high fashion shoes, but are actually designed so that the foothole runs in the opposite direction as the rest of the shoe making them almost impossible and very painful to walk in as a statement on how fashion prioritizes the presentation of women's bodies over the actual wellbeing of the bodies; and some satirical woodcuts by South African cartoonist Anton Kannemeyer that created and ABCs of Africa that couched political commentary in the guise of a children's book.
The next exhibit collected prints having to do with political protest. It wasn't a big exhibit, but it had some pretty impressive works including one of Warhol's Mao posters, chilling photos of white supremacist counterprotests to Civil Rights marches which makes it painfully apparent that there's a lot of crappy people out there now who are gonna really look like they've been on the wrong side of history in the future, and prints by Ester Hernández and Leonard Baskin that really beautifully rendered portraits of people from ethnic groups that had been largely left out of "high" art.
The most memorable piece for better or for worse was a print by Nick Abdalla called Pin the Dick on Dick. It's definitely a neat little piece of satire, but also not exactly something you can unsee. On the one hand there's that uncanny valley effect where it's so close to looking like a normal person that it's sort of unsettling that it doesn't but on the other hand I'm greatly relieved that I didn't have to see a more realistic drawing of Nixon's Tricky Dick.
The main art exhibit was called Common Grounds: Art in New Mexico and was an amazing showcase of over 2000 years of artistic tradition in the region. It was also very consciously curated by themes and stylistic choices as opposed to chronologically so that contemporary works were put right alongside 1000 year old works by Pueblo Indians. It was a cool reminder that people are people and have always been people using art to try understand and deal with the same basic struggles even if the particulars change from time to time. Because of it's own complex history as a nexus of Southwestern, Spanish, and later American and European peoples, New Mexico has a uniquely diverse blend of artists and styles that feed into each other in incredible ways. Pieces ranged from pre-Columbian Puebloan jewelry and pottery to Spanish colonial religious art to more contemporary works including some pretty big names like Georgia O'Keeffe. It was such a cool experience turning each corner and not knowing what to expect.
While I really loved this entire exhibit some of the highlights for me included: a vibrantly impressionistic rendering of a mundane scene of customers smoking and gossiping at a chili restaurant by Fred Gardner; some science fiction looking paintings by Raymond Johnson that are actually different views from New Mexico's own Carlsbad Cavern; an incredibly detailed rendering of a rundown Rt. 66 Tourist called Starky's Trading Post by Tim Prythero; an nightmarishly literal representation of Jesus' body as the Kingdom of Heaven called El Cuerpo de Christo by Paul Pletka; a whimsical sculpture by Luis Tapia of a Mexican altar in the form of a Ford Dashboard with nothing but wide open desert road ahead of it; a playful blending of ancient and contemporary pop culture by Jason Garcia in the form of a ceramic comic book called Tewa Tales of Suspense No. 34; a beautiful painting by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith entitled Who Leads Who Follows that shows a traditional Native American dress with cartoon-like figures walking all around it; a spoOOOooky sculpture by Horacio Valdez of a Skeleton riding in a cart (I cannot express how surprising it was walking into a room with this guy in unexpectedly in the center of it); a ceramic pot fired by Diego Romero with a cartoon etching at the bottom telling the story of the knot bearers of the Pueblo Revolt who secretly (look at the sweat flying from their brows to see how much pressure they were under) carried ropes with knots tied into them to different members of the Pueblo settlements with the knots corresponding to how many days until the revolution was going to happen; a mesmerizing sculpture by Larry Bell that captured and refracted light in captivating ways; a deceptively simple piece by Robert M. Ellis that captured the view of Taos Pueblo from a studio window using a playful blending of stark drawing, lush painting, and collaged pictures of chairs and ketchup all while looking like it's seemingly unfinished to make the viewer question every detail; and lastly a painting of Herman Melville and Buffalo Bill Cody by Ray Martin Abeyta that initially appears to be a very classic old portrait until you notice that the two historical figures are throwing up East Side/West Side gang signs to representing their respective regions in the country and humorously shooting a very modern wrinkle through US history.
Perhaps my favorite piece though was an oil painting by Judy Chicago called Woe Man that shows a dignified by despairing old face (intentionally of indiscriminate gender) looking up towards the heavens. The thing that makes it really amazing though is that it isn't actually a painting so much as a fully three-dimensional painted sculpture made from carefully built up and cast paper that gives every single wrinkle a shocking amount of literal and emotional depth.
After all that art, the next gallery was focused on local history and was fittingly named Only In Albuquerque. The gallery begins with a circular courtyard that branches off into four interconnected galleries about different aspects of life in Albuquerque throughout the ages. The courtyard was no slouch though immersing visitors in a stunning panoramic photo of that big New Mexico sky while the tiles on the ground capture the different waterways and plant life throughout the state.
The first section of the Albuquerque gallery was all about natural history, highlighting the wealth of pretty, shiny things that come out of the New Mexico ground ranging from abalone shells to arrow heads made from petrified wood with a whole lot of turquoise in between. I was really interested in learning that while Native American tribes were documented for making some turquoise jewelry traditionally, the practice actually gained prominence when Rt. 66 came through Albuquerque and people realized there was a lot of money to be made selling "authentic" Native American artifacts to gullible tourists.
After the natural wonder came some displays celebrating more man-made wonders to come out of the ABQ. These included the invention of the Altair 8800 the first commercially successful personal computer, which many consider the seed that started the trend toward smaller and smaller computers, and an astronaut by the name of Col. Sid Guitierrez who, besides participating in over 480 hours of space flights, helped conduct research into making space flight safer in the wake of the Challenger explosion. Not being particularly tech-savvy I knew nothing about the Altair 8800 beforehand so I found that very interesting, but the commemorative statue of Col. Guitierre in his space suit surrounded by the New Mexico farming equipment that initially inspired his interest in science and technology really tugged at the old heartstrings.
The next section featured a big step back in technological ages and focused more on the Wild West and early frontier settlers in Albuquerque. It seems like long before Breaking Bad, ABQ already had a pretty big reputation as one of the most rough and tumble places in the West. This probably wasn't helped any by the fact that very first sheriff was hanged for murder, because apparently some people have no sense of irony. I really enjoyed seeing the different objects that just captured simple day to day activities because I feel like that makes history feel more like a a real thing that happened to real people as opposed to something that just happened in books. That being said see the above thing about the sheriff makes me very glad that I'm alive now and not then. The other thing that really struck me about this section was that they highlighted the important societal roles that Asian immigrants played in Western communities. Asians and Asian-Americans have been super white-washed out of Western films and literature (with at least one notable exception of East of Eden because Steinbeck is the best) so I think a lot of people, myself included before this trip, either think they weren't there or they were only railroad workers where in reality there were plenty of Asian families running lots of different businesses all across the frontier.
The next section was all about Native Americans in Albuquerque. To this section's credit, it did not shy away from some pretty awful historical treatment including actual attempted genocides by colonialists and then later attempted cultural genocides by the Indian Schools that tried to make "assimilate" Native students into White culture. The museum buoyed these criticisms of Albuquerque's darker historical moments by highlighting times that Native Americans accomplished pretty amazing things despited having society actively working against them. These included the Navajo Code Talkers who played integral roles in the Allies' victory in WWII all the way back to the Pueblo Revolt, that entirely drove out Spanish Colonists from New Mexico for over a decade. It's always amazing that every time people have tried to crush the human spirit it finds a way to survive, I just wish people would stop figuring it out the hard way.
One fun thing that popped up in different sections was that they'd have little artifacts of notable celebrities. My favorites of these were the typewriter that Pulitzer Prize journalist Ernie Pyle used as War Correspondent and a photo of the Little Rascals on a national train tour of the country.
The history exhibit wasn't without it's fair share of art too. The highlights for me in this department were a massive family crest tapestry that some European (I want to say Scottish, but I could be way off) Immigrants managed to bring with them to Albuquerque, a sprawling impressionistic patchwork celebration of work and leisure in the city by Francis Riviera, some more innovative light bending abstract sculptures by Larry Bell, and an ornate Ballooning trophy celebrating one of Albuquerque's most famous past times and foreshadowing another of today's activities.
The next gallery was a small but fascinating look at the history of one neighborhood in Albuquerque originally called Huning's Highland and now more commonly referred to as EDo (a shortening of East Downtown). I liked that the limited focus of the exhibit far from limited the scope of what it explored, as it both celebrated a lot of local flavor but also used this one neighborhood to probe a lot of larger ideas like class, design, and affordable housing. The neighborhood initially began as essentially a small railroad town tucked into the city, the idea of Franz Huning who worked hard to get the railroad to come through Albuquerque and wanted to make sure people got behind it. The development featured dozens of Victorian style houses ranging from quaint to ornate, and tried to create an air of quiet calm and community in the midst of bustling community. The houses soon fell out of style with the wealthy though as they were far too close to one another (yuck, interaction!) and then out of the price range of just about everyone else when the Great Depression happened. The neighborhood remained afloat with the advent of the interstate and soon little tourist traps and roadside businesses sprung up among the mansions, keeping the area relevant if hardly trendy. That changed relatively recently however now that millennial are graduating college and don't want to/can't afford to live in the city proper and all that close quartered housing is becoming popular enough, with the addition of big lofts driving the migration even more (though I'm sure some residents would less enthusiastically call it more of a gentrification than a revitalization). I liked that the exhibit used cars as a through-line between the changing demographics of the neighborhood as initially the upper-crusty types would go motoring, where they would just drive around for fun and to show off the fact that they had a car and were therefor better than you, and then the interstate travelers would stop and go, and now the millennials are all commuting, because while there is a a public transit system in Albuquerque, it's not as far reaching or as reliable as what I'm used to in Boston. Since Boston and NYC were the cities I spent the most time in for most of my life, I don't think I ever fully appreciated how rare and special a good train system is even if occasionally you do have to see a crazy guy masturbating on it.
The next gallery was all about art from the US-Mexico Border, and was a powerful mix of aesthetics and commentary. I liked that it showcased and celebrated artists from both sides of the border, across a variety of different media. There was one wall of photographs alternating intimate portraits of people with stunning panoramas by Delilah Montoya, that combined capture the mess of contradictions that is the border. The landscapes show an area that is at once desolate, garbage-strewn, and also filled with intense natural beauty, and the portraits show a people who are at once lively and joyful and also in constant fear. The photo of the family with the armed guard just looming above them is absolutely haunting.
Across another wall, some pretty symbolically rich sculptures were arranged. One sculpture series by Magarita Cabrarera featured sculpted cacti made in collaboration with recent immigrants in community run workshops by the artist by sewing together old border patrol uniforms and placing them in traditional Mexican pottery in an act of defiance and reclamation. The other series was of sleek elegant black ceramics by Jami Porter Lara with curious rounded points at the end of each vessel to call to mind both traditional ceramic drinking vessels and also the hundreds of discarded plastic water bottles that lie by the border because they were the best way to get clean drinking water over to the other side. They sucker you in by being really pretty, but then force you to confront some harsh realities that people are experiencing just to survive.
Next up came a series of paintings and prints that combine powerful portraits of Mexican culture with the striking recurring motif of barbed wire. The look of barbed wire is so simple but immediately jarring and loaded with connotations that I can see why it in particular shows up across several artists' works. My favorite piece here was a print by Luis Jiminez called El Buen Pastor that serves as touching portrait of of Esquiel Hernandez, an innocent shepherd who was gunned down by border patrol while tending his flock because "he fit the profile of a drug smuggler". I was particularly struck by the way his head is framed by a circle that could either be a halo or crosshairs depending on how you look at it.
My favorite pieces of the whole gallery were a piece by Adrian Esparza called Lost in Translation that truly seems like a work of impossible magic because he meticulously unwinds thread from a traditional serape (small and hanging to the left) and then weaves it into an abstract explosion of shapes and explosions literally connecting "high" contemporary art with "low" folk craftwork with a single thread, and a big yellow ballon with a spooky design sort of resembling an eye and sort of resembling a dartboard that was part of an installation called Repellent Fense by a brazen art collective called PostCommodity that systematically installed 26 of these balloons (based on balloons that are used by farmers to scare away birds) all across a stretch of the US-Mexico border to create not-quite-the-wall certain presidents had in mind.
Here's what the Repellent Fence actually looked like in its full incarnation courtesy of the internet:
Last but not least was a small hallway gallery back to the Lobby featuring archival silver gelatin photographs that capture life in the region in gorgeous high contrast black and white. I like that these old photos show how much has changed, but also how much is universal like babies struggling to stand still for photos and people never being quite sure what to do with their hands.
Also in the lobby, which I somehow missed the first time, was an incredible sculpture by Luis Jiminez of a Native American riding a horse, riding a bull with the tongue in cheek title Progress. The sculpture is made of spray painted fiberglass with lights on the inside giving everything a super unnatural sheen and the animals terrifying glowing eyes. I loved it but I have no idea how I could have possibly walked by the first time.
Last but not least, there was a little outdoor sculpture courtyard sort of tucked into a little nook by the lobby. The courtyard had some great contemporary sculptures, including one I really liked by Paul Suttman that made a three dimensional representation of a Braque still life and then just covered it in far too many apples, but honestly I just liked the way the space used a mix of classic adobe and modernist architectural flourishes to create a really cool (temperature and aesthetically) and relaxing area with lots of natural light.
A little more than three hours later, I went back outside and realized there were even more sculptures outside ranging from more classic and historic pieces to some surreal giant heads and abstract shapes though my favorite was naturally a very grumpy looking pig.
At this point, I was positively starving so I went to one of the most highly recommended lunch spots in ABQ, Golden Crown Bakery. This place was out of this world good. They're a bakery so they make all their bread in house, they have excellent coffee, and pastries for dessert, and on top of all that the service was fun and friendly as could be. It was hard to narrow down all the tasty looking options, but I eventually settled on the make your own pizza option because it was the most bang for your buck and I was a hungry boy. The I got a mushroom pizza, but the thing Golden Crown does that I've never seen before and will now never forget is that they give you the option of getting a New Mexico blue corn pizza crust that gives everything a hearty tortilla flavor with just a hint of crunch that perfectly compliments the cheesy goodness. If that wasn't enough, everything came with a free choice of homemade biscochito, a traditional Mexican cookie, so I chose the chocolate biscochito and it was a hell of a way to finish an already excellent lunch.
After lunch, I decided to get some exercise and enjoy a beautiful day so I went to Petroglyph National Monument. The park consists of several dormant volcanoes dotted with thousands of chunks of basalt and other volcanic rocks that give it a uniquely Mordor-y appearance. I chose to hike up the smallest of the peaks, Boca Negra, which given my limited hiking experience still looked fairly intimidating from the bottom.
The intimidation was all for nought though as the path winded gently up the little volcanic mound making the mile hike very easy going. While I might have been slightly winded from the mild hiking, it was really the views from the top that took my breath away. You got a 360 degree view over the city and surrounding peaks, and it was just stunning. The other interesting thing at the top was something that seemed like a haphazard pile of rocks, that a guide at the top explained was actually a very deliberately placed formation used by ancient peoples to hide behind and camouflage themselves while hunting deer.
Now at this point some of you are probably thinking, "it's called Petroglyph National Monument, where are the damn petroglyphs already?" Well hold your horses, because in this area the trail up to the peak did not disappoint with rock drawings a-plenty. Archeologists believe that some of the drawings may date back as far as 3000 years, though they suspect that many of them were made between 1300-1600 AD. The trail I took had over a dozen of these little drawings and it was a fun way of keeping you on your toes while you were hiking because you never knew where one was gonna pop up. The full significance of these drawings to the people that made them is not well known, and it's possible that they were anything from idle doodles to sacred religious artifacts. Many of the drawings have sort of abstract shapes and lines that likely held rich symbolic meaning at some point that is largely unknown currently, but other drawings were much more clearly representational and it was fun seeing familiar things like people, dogs, and turtles popping up. I'm really glad the National Parks Service had the foresight to preserve and protect these bits of history, because I feel like if you weren't a part of the culture that created them or actively looking for petroglyphs they'd sadly be pretty easy to miss.
My next stop for the day was the Anderson Abruzzo International Balloon Museum (see I told you there would be more balloon-related content). The museum is named after Maxie Anderson and Ben Abruzzo, two ballooning pioneers who set distance records, sailed across the both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and helped establish Albuquerque as the unofficial Ballooning capital of the US. I knew none of that going in, but I enjoyed the globe shaped children's fountain outside, and the pleasant balloon like shape of the building so I had a good feeling about the place.
I have to admit that walking through the front door cold without knowing what to expect was one of the most dazzling experiences I've ever had as the fairly nondescript entryway suddenly opened up into a wide open room filled with the most intricately designed, colorful, and massive balloons I have ever seen ranging from a full sized zeppelin to one shaped like Carmen Miranda. It was really nothing short of magical.
The first exhibit was fittingly all about the first balloons, featuring scale models of the Montgolfier Brother's original hot air balloon as well as at from the late 18th century depicting balloon flight and earlier model where the basket was more boat shaped. I think today in the age of airplanes, we sort of take flight for granted and hot air balloons seem more like a thing you use in Wes Anderson movies to be cute and hip, but when they first entered the scene man had never bested gravity before and the cultural shockwaves were huge. People had dreamt of flight forever and now it was possible, I can't even imagine living in a world where one day nobody could fly and the next day it was a reality. That's insane! That being said, balloons are still the goofiest and most whimsical method of flying and the history of ballooning does nothing to disapprove this. For example the first passengers to ever be in a balloon were a duck, a sheep, and a rooster which sounds like the beginning to a children's joke. Also the first heat sources were wool, straw, rotten meat, and old shoes. And best of all when they trying to decide who would test the first manned flight, the king of France proposed using prisoners so that if they died it wouldn't be a big deal, but the Montgolfier brothers talked him out of it because they figured that if it worked it would be far too much fun for them. It's all just so damn whimsical, and frankly I can't believe I'm describing real life and not a Roald Dahl book.
The next gallery was hilariously entitled Balloons in War, which traces the less than hilarious uses of balloons in the early stages of aerial warfare. The first example of this was the Balloon Corps (probably the least tough sounding branch of the military) founded by the Union Army during the Civil War, which to me was surprisingly early in history. I think these were mainly used for scouting though at that point, because maneuvering balloons was difficult enough without also trying to shoot people and drop bombs out of them. This changed in WWI when German zeppelins ruled over the sky, which was also the peak of all balloon related warfare as after that airplanes became the dominant force in the sky. It was not the end of balloon related warfare however as Japan in WWII had schoolchildren (!) assemble small bombs called Fu-gos that they attempted to send to the US unmanned by using balloons and the jet stream to cause terror all along the west coast. Fortunately they miscalculated and most of the Fu-gos didn't even reach America and only one actually caused any casualties (6 in Oregon) and even that only happened because it landed unexploded and a curious kids decided to poke it to see what it was. Despite it's relative lack of success as a military endeavor, this remained the only enemy casualty on US soil all the way up 9/11.
After the war balloons came the science balloons, as balloons have been used in science for hundreds of years and have contributed incredibly to our knowledge of weather and space, giving us our first insights into cosmic rays, atmospheric conditions, and the ability of space suits to survive that high up. The notable vessels they had were one of these pods used by NASA to test astronauts endurance of high altitudes, and another pod used by the notable scientists at Red Bull to lift a man up to the stratosphere to perform the first free fall jump from space in a legitimately scientifically ground breaking publicity stunt they did.
The next chunk of the museum was all about ballooning for leisure and sport. This is where Albuquerque really earns it's ballooning reputation, as they have an annual weeklong Balloon Festival complete with one of the most famous Balloon Races in the world. This was fun to learn about because I always assumed balloon races were all about speed, but really they have a bit of an obstacle course vibe to them as you're also judged for your ability to just pilot a balloon and make it to certain targets along the route. I also really love that the whole tradition started because a local radio personality named Dick McKee wanted to throw a big party for the 50th anniversary of the radio station and he was out drinking with a friend who owned a hot air balloon and that sparked their idea to top the largest gathering of balloons in one place that had happened up until that point. They ended up having so much that they did it again the next year, and the year after, and the year after that, and now it's just a tradition. It happens in October every year, and honestly it makes me really want to back to Albuquerque just to see it.
If you were wondering just how big the average balloon was when fully expanded I found this particular visual both helpful and shocking.
The next gallery, or Ballooning Hall of Fame, was all about the record setting balloons including the first balloons to cross the Atlantic, to cross the Pacific, and to circumnavigate the globe. This last seemingly impossible task wasn't accomplished until 1999 by the Breitling Orbiter 3 and it is still yet to be replicated. I'm not sure if the people that completed these enormous feats of skill, intellect, and endurance were more dreamers or madmen or some combination of the two but it's hard not to be impressed by how much both planning and improvising goes into taking a simple balloon that far through so many different weather conditions. I can hear my mom saying write about now into reading this "but why?", and I'm not sure there is a reason and for sure lots of people died trying to do similar tasks which does seem silly, but I think there is something oddly inspiring about showing what humans are capable of in extreme conditions even if they are goofy manufactured extreme conditions. And who knows, there could be some bizarre shortage of airplane parts in a apocalyptic future and we'll need to rely on balloons so it's good to know what they're capable of. God, I hope the next Mad Max takes place entirely with hot air balloons.
Speaking of air missions that didn't go so hot, the next exhibit was all about S. A. Andrée's doomed attempt to be the first person to reach the North Pole by Balloon. Salomon August Andrée was a Swedish engineer, physicist, and explorer who became obsessed with the idea of ballooning to the North Pole because in the late 19th century both ballooning and polar exploration were all the rage in popular consciousness, and it would be a huge coup for Sweden's civic pride if he could pull off his grand stunt. Unfortunately when he and his companions, an engineer with the incredible name Knut Fraenkel and a photographer named Nils Strindberg, took off in 1897 just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. He had planned to steer the balloon with devices he developed called drag ropes, that were essentially long strips of rope that would catch the creating and uneven distribution of drag and thereby causing the balloon to turn. It's unclear if this system would have ever worked though because the drag ropes instantly got snagged on the water and fell out of the balloon mere minutes after departing, causing the explorers to lose both their only proposed means of steering their vessel and also a whole bunch of weight from the heavy ropes which caused the balloon to rise to the unprecedented height of 700 meters. The lower air pressure caused the balloon to lose hydrogen at an alarming rate and unexpected rain caused the balloon to become covered in ice and heavy and between these two setbacks its crashed after only 10 hours. From there nobody was sure what happened for 33 years. It was assumed the men had died, but nobody had seen or heard anything about them until a 1930 Polar exhibition stumbled across their boat and soon the bodies of the three men. Fortunately they had a photographer with them and all three men had kept pretty extensive journals so there was some explanation of their time on the ice where they hunted walruses, seals, and polar bears and tried to survive the cole without having packed fur coats. It's unclear exactly how the men died, but the prevailing theories is that it was polar bear related in that they either didn't cook their polar bear meat properly and got food poisoning or they were mauled outright, but the bodies were cremated soon after they were returned to Sweden so the real answer will never be known. A movie about the failed journey called Flight of the Eagle came out in 1982, though it leaned a little more heavily into the supposed romance between Andrée and a married woman back in Sweden name Gurli Linder. I haven't seen it, but it has Max von Sydow in the Andrée role which is very exciting to me because of his tremendous work in the McKenzie Brothers' masterpiece Strange Brew.
My favorite thing about this exhibit though was this darkly darkly comic picture taken by Strindberg of the other two men looking so small next to the big ballon lying flat on the ice. The only real caption that seems fitting is "Well... Shit"
I can't judge the poor explorers too harshly though, because the next exhibit had a balloon flying simulator where I learned very quickly that I would have found away to die much faster than they did. I accidentally used up all my fuel in under a minute and just sort of had to let the wind take me until I crashed. It was a fun game, and it for sure gave me a great deal more respect for how unintuitive piloting something that can only technically move up and down is.
The last gallery was more balloon adjacent than directly about balloons, focused on different meteorological phenomena occur. This was targeted at a slightly younger demographic though I found some of the facts interesting if familiar. The thing that really struck me though was the incredible time lapsed photos of clouds, and other more intense forms of weather such as tornadoes. It's both incredible and horrifying that something like that can occur. I can see how people, before scientific explanations, might have thought something like that was the Wrath of God.
Last but not least, I naturally had to go up to an area called the Balloon Lounge which offered some pretty great views out into the fields where come October they'll start launching those bad boys. Until then, it's a place where people can fly drones which I think is silly without all the grandeur and wonder of ballooning but maybe that's just me being a grump.
After all that hiking and learning new things, I thought I'd give my brain and body a break by heading to Broken Trail Brewery and Distillery because it combines two of my favorite things in one place. This ended up being a perfect little find, because it was cozy, it was cheap, and the beer and spirits were real good. I was one of the only people there for happy hour pricing (Massachusetts really needs to have happy hour), so I think the bartender who was about my age and very bored was grateful for the company, and we ended up chatting for a while which in hindsight might have been a clever and very effective ploy to get me to drink more but I do think she was being genuinely friendly. We talked about comedy, how gross it is that people put eggs in cocktails (it actually can be very good if you don't think about it, but thinking about it is decidedly gross), and how she thought it was funny I was so excited about the balloons whereas she sort of takes it for granted having grown up in Albuquerque and seeing them every year. It's funny how even the most magical thing can become mundane over time, and I wonder what parts of Boston would be exciting for someone else that I might not even notice anymore. As for drinks, at my bartender's suggestion I tried the Black IPA which she said was a good IPA for people who don't like IPAs and I have to admit she had me there because it had more of a dark ale flavor than an overly hoppy one and I found it to be really satisfying. She said their best seller though was Pepe the Mule, a bottled Moscow mule made with house made vodka and housemade ginger beer. I'm not a big vodka guy, but I love ginger beer so I figured if that's what was popular it was worth a shot, and honestly it knocked my socks off. The vodka is light and inoffensive, while the ginger ale does the heavy lifting with a refreshing dark ginger flavor and just a hint of lime. I was very tempted to buy a few bottles, but my bartender was bored and wanted to make a cocktail. Fortunately her favorite to make was also my favorite to make, so a whiskey sour was the obvious choice which also gave me a chance to test their house whiskey which I also really enjoyed. They really nailed both the distillery and brewery parts of their business.
I paced myself well with conversation so I wasn't really tipsy, but all that drinking did make me a sleepy so I went to the only coffee shop that was opened late, Satellite Coffee. It was very spacious and made for a great place to sit down and write for a bit. They also had something called a Black Velvet, which they described as an "UBER caffeinated" vanilla iced coffee so that was really just what the doctor ordered.
After re-energizing for a bit I went to a famous roadside diner called the Owl Cafe, which, while serving very good food, is probably most known for their very uniquely owl shaped building with big neon lights. That was absolutely what drew me in there. I ordered something called the Dr's Order which was sandwich featuring dry rubbed, Dr. Pepper braised beef brisket covered in BBQ sauce on a nice baguette. I would have been grossed out, if not at least skeptical, by the good Doctor's presence in this sandwich but luckily my time in the south had taught me that not only is cola braised barbecue a thing, but a very good thing at that, so I was excited to see it again. It was a deliciously tender brisket with a great BBQ flavor only strengthened by the additional 23 flavors in Dr. Pepper. Unfortunately for whatever reason in the intervening time, my phone has lost any photos of this tasty meal so we will have to content ourselves with this excellent photo I found on google of the Owl in all its glory.
After dinner, there were no open mics to speak of (alas also in the intervening time a Tuesday night open mic has sprung up in Albuquerque, and looks quite fun, but we were but ships in the night) so I went to crash at my air bnb for the night. My host this night happened to be deaf and when I got there he was celebrating a long day of work with a friend of his who was also deaf by knocking back a few beers. They were so friendly and very impressed that my limited knowledge of American Sign Language included the very important words "poop" and "fart" (they actually were very useful to know when taking care of the bathroom needs of young kids with autism but I also for sure initially learnt them just to be funny). They offered me some beers and we just sat around cracking jokes and chatting without actually saying a word, and it was a surreal and wonderful experience. They showed me some YouTube clips of a deaf comedian named Levi Anderson, and it made me think about how interesting and difficult though not impossible translating comedy from any language let alone sign language must be because so much depends on timing, phrasing, and syntax that goes beyond just literally getting the words right. Professional translators would know how to do this, but I'd love to hear how they do it. It also made realize that even at professional comedy shows I've been to, I've never seen a sign language interpreter and it seems like a pretty glaring oversight that makes a sizable chunk of potential comedy fans feel left out and also costs any theater potential business. Sadly I feel like the latter rather than the former would be a more likely reason for theaters to start actually changing their policies, because phrasing things in terms of inclusivity maybe makes people want to change, but phrasing things in terms of them losing money almost always does. I was really glad I got to meet and hang out with those guys, because it was a blast and also just because when you spend as much time alone as I do it can become sort of easy to get isolated or lost in my own head so getting the jolt of having to communicate a little bit differently sort of helped wake me up a bit and reinforce the idea of connecting and empathizing with people that really is at the heart of (i think) comedy and also this whole dang trip.
Favorite Random Sightings: Crepe Crepe (wonder what they sell); Pawn City: The Guns are Back!; Little Red Hamburger Hut
Regional Observations: All the coffee shops here have the option of agave syrup as a sweetener and it tastes so much better than boring old sugar.
Albums Listened To: Ridiculous by Norm Macdonald (not a standup album but more in the tradition of old-timey radio sketches just way dirtier. Sort of hit and miss, but the hits are really great); Right on Time by Hepcat (so laid back)
People's Favorite Jokes:
nothing today but here's one from the good old internet:
Boy: The principal is so dumb!
Girl: Do you know who I am?
Boy: No...
Girl: I am the principal's daughter!
Boy: Do you know who I am?
Girl: No...
Boy: Good! *Walks away*
Songs of the Day: