NM Day 3- Folk Art, Funkiness, and "Flowers"
Today I left Albuquerque to spend the day in Santa Fe, but first I decided to fuel up at the nearby Bad Ass Coffee in Bernalillo. They specialize in Hawaiian coffees. I got an almond joy flavored iced coffee, because that's what I always got at my favorite coffee place back home. It wasn't exactly the same, but it was still really good. I think the most Bad Ass part of the place though was the mural on the drive thru of an incredibly stoned looking donkey enjoying some fun in the sun.
My first stop after arriving in Santa Fe was the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. The museum is dedicated to both the life and works of O'Keeffe and houses the largest single collection of her paintings right in the heart of the state where she drew so much inspiration.
The museum began with a short video about Georgia's life, which was really well done and useful for contextualizing the paintings that were to come. I had seen a lot of O'Keeffe paintings throughout my endless parade of this country's art museums, and while I always found them impressive I never realized quite how unprecedented her works were in the time she initially painted them. When she first reached widespread acclaim and attention around the 1920s, abstract expressionism was just beginning to emerge and dominate the American art world and O'Keeffe's paintings both were a part of and wholly unique from this movement. Her uncanny ability to create highly zoomed paintings of flowers and other natural objects to the point of abstraction formed a bridge between realist and abstract art that no artists before and very few after have been able to replicate. Her talents helped cement America's place at the forefront of changing trends in international art, and also launched her to a new level of celebrity (even becoming a bit of a fashion icon with her handmade austere black wardrobe) which was both a benefit to her professionally and also a hindrance to her personally. While Georgia personally always wanted to be judged more for her artistic merit than for her gender, it cannot be overstated how much she opened the door for other female artists in the largely male dominated art world. The other bit of context that I got from the video that I had never fully appreciated was that Georgia also lived for a long freakin' time. She was born 1887 and died in 1986 so she basically got to oversee, contribute to, and later influence nearly every art movement of the 20th century which is truly incredible.
After the video most of the galleries were arranged chronologically through O'Keeffe's life, but the museum chose to open with a wow factor, showcasing O'Keeffe's most famous motif. She herself claimed that the interpretation of her flowers as resembling vaginas was incorrect and only made because she was a woman. I get that as some of the paintings are so clearly flowers but other paintings remind me of Norm Macdonald's response to the idea that cigarette mascot Joe Camel had a certain phallic shape to him, "I can't even see the camel". Yonic or not, all the paintings in this gallery were a stunning intro to the museum and O'Keeffe, showcasing her unique vision and attention to brushwork and color.
The next gallery showcased Georgia's earliest works starting with flower paintings from 1903 when she was just 16 years old! It's crazy that she already had so much raw talent at such a young age, and it was fun getting to trace her evolution from total realism to more and more abstract representations, across different media, up until her first purely abstract drawings that initially caught the attention of her future patron and husband Alfred Stieglitz and launched her professional art career.
After meeting Stieglitz, O'Keeffe moved to New York and within a short time her mature style began to emerge.
My favorites from this period in her career are an underrated batch of paintings more concerned with man-made structures than natural ones. The way O'Keeffe brings the same modernist not-quite-abstract touch to cities, suburbs, and Southwestern village really catches me in the way that she is able to take the things I saw everyday growing up (minus the adobes) and make them look totally new and sort of wondrous.
Coinciding with her New York paintings were some photographs by her then husband, frequently but not always of his wife and muse. I've always loved his photographs because they have a really painterly quality to them, and high contrast black and white always seems to check a box in my brain that this is "art" for whatever reason. Even though he was over 20 years her senior, they seemed to have a really loving and supportive personal and professional relationship, always advocating for each other's works. I do remember reading though that Georgia understandably chafed a little at the popularity a series of nudes he took of her achieved, because while they were great photos it sort of her set back a bit in her goals of being taken seriously purely as an artist without her gender always being the center of attention. I feel like being married artists must lead to a lot of strange fights like that. "I said you could take nude photos of me, I didn't say they could be wildly successful!"
Starting in the late 1920s, Georgia began spending more time in her own studio and ranch in Abiquiú, New Mexico, and she would move there full time after Stieglitz's death in 1944. Here she began adding a new motif of skulls and bones to her works that adds a touch of wry macabre to her already impressive repertoire. I love that her juxtaposition of bones and flowers combines classical symbols of life and death, but I feel like if you asked Georgia about that she would just tell you that's what she saw outside. It's not that I don't think she thought about the symbolism, but from every interview I've read with her she was a very classic artist in that she felt like if she had to tell you what it was there wasn't any point.
My favorite of these New Mexico pieces was simply entitled Pelvis IV, and I love it because I can just picture Georgia standing out in the dessert holding this big ol' cow pelvis to idea and spinning around until she got the framing just to her liking. I honestly don't know if I like that image more or the one she actually painted, but I do just keep coming back to this one and finding something so oddly beautiful about creepy frame around a lovely sky.
From there, they had a gallery of some of her last works that echo her earliest works in that they are again much more experimental with different media but are also wholly unique in that they now enter the world of pure abstraction. Hints of natural shapes still persist but these to me show Georgia at her most opaque, though on a technical level she was still at the top of her game with some her most striking color combinations yet. It's especially impressive that she was not only still creating but innovating considering she was well past 70 years old at the time she made these!
Lastly there was a small exhibit of the current featured artist named Sam Scott, who's abstract prints certainly reveal a debt to Georgia. Personally, I thought they were nice to look at but none of them hit me the same way the majority of her pieces did. Still I'm glad that the museum chooses to highlight contemporary artists because I think it heightens the experience of looking at Georgia's works by seeing directly the influence they continue to have on modern art. I do wonder if she would like all of the featured artists that passed through the museum though, because while she did teach and mentor young artists of her day she was also notoriously blunt and never really pulled punches with her criticism. She really was an incredible figure, and I definitely walked away from the museum feeling even more holistically impressed by her as a person and an artist, and it was an added level of surrealism to step out of the museum and feel like I was actually walking into one of her paintings with the adobe buildings and red rocks in the distance.
After the museum, I really enjoyed just walking around downtown Santa Fe because it doesn't look like any other major city I've been to thus far. For one thing, it doesn't really feel like a city in the traditional sense because the vast majority of the buildings are designed in the traditional Pueblo style and as such don't get particularly tall. Albuquerque by comparison has some adobe buildings, but also much more urban sprawl. That being said, Santa Fe still very alive with bustling shops and a mix of college students and sightseers on every street. For me personally, the thing that stuck out the most was the wide array of public art displays, which for sure were intended to attract the tourists toward certain businesses but as a tourist myself I didn't mind being strung along by such eye-catching displays.
My next stop was to see the famous spiral staircase of Loretto Chapel. The story goes that original builder of this small Catholic church died before completing it, so the only way to get to the choir loft was via a ladder. This was deemed unacceptable for the nuns of the choir because someone might see up their holy robes while they were climbing, so they needed to either add a staircase or go without sopranos. The problem was that there wasn't enough room in what was completed of the chapel to add a traditional staircase without completely ruining the Catholic feng shui of the place, so the nuns took their dilemma to the big man upstairs. Their prayers were answered when a mysterious drifter offered to build them a staircase, and all he asked for in return was privacy, some water, and a place to leave his donkey. Three months later he disappeared without saying a word, leaving this apparently miraculous staircase. I have no idea how much of that story is totally true, but the indisputable fact is that the staircase in question is a woodworking marvel. It makes two 360-degree rotations without any central supports, and the whole thing was built without any nails! Whether it's an act of god or incredible carpentry, it's a pretty breathtaking sight to behold.
The rest of the chapel, thanks to some really lovely stained glass, complimented the staircase nicely and you can see why it's become one of the most popular wedding spots in Santa Fe.
After the chapel, I sort of stumbled into another impressive church when I saw a sign on the road for a life sized Stations of the Cross Garden. The garden is outside the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi and features sculptures by Gib Singleton. The sculptures were very impressive pieces of art but they did really bring home the violence at the center of the Christ story, so I'm not sure I could really call them pleasant to look at in the traditional sense. There was still something oddly powerful about the emotions and intensity the artist was able to convey in an interestingly impressionistic style that you don't usually see in religious art.
I figured that since I was there already, I'd take a peek inside the cathedral. It was much larger and grander in comparison to Laredo Chapel, but I think the thing that impressed me most was seeing a priest just talking and being really sweet to an older couple and their adult son with Down Syndrome. I've been critical of religion before, and I probably will be again, but I know that with my own cousin with special needs his family's church was totally accepting and provided his mom with a sense of community that was really invaluable for her. This is just to say that I never mean to paint with too wide a brush, and while personally and historically I've got my issues with organized religion, I do wanna acknowledge that it has still done a lot of good for a lot of people. And the buildings are objectively very pretty.
After two churches, I was ready to grab some lunch but while I was walking to the restaurant I have to say I was taken aback by this real estate agency's commitment to security.
I had lunch at a cozy Mexican restaurant called the Palacio Cafe. I ordered the smothered Chicharron and bean burrito, and way they said smothered they did not disappoint on the cheese factor. I'd never had chicharron before, which is a kind fried pork belly dish similar to if pork rinds were actually really good. It took a few bites to get used to a burrito with a bit of a crunch, but the taste, enhanced by the house green chile sauce, eventually totally won me over. And I suppose if we're being honest, it's pretty hard not to like anything with that much cheese on top.
With a full belly I set sail for the Museum of International Folk Art, which celebrates diversity and creativity all over the world with galleries featuring examples of traditional and untrained art from hundreds of different countries.
The first exhibit was all about something called Tramp Art, which is a style of wood working generally done using discarded materials such as fruit crates or cigar boxes and made from simple repetitive triangular notches. Contrary to the popular opinion that led to the name, Tramp Art was not uniquely practiced by hobos and travelers, but was in fact a commonly practiced hobby amongst people of all classes across just about every continent. The repetitive motion of the notch making was relaxing and truly skilled craftsmen were able to make all sorts of impressively complex structures and domestic items out of these carefully layered triangles.
My favorite pieces were for sheer size and scope two elaborate chests that seem to defy all laws of gravity; for style a little religious shrine with stained glass inlaid in the wood and a Noah's Ark figurine with Yoruba influences; and for lovable weirdness another shrine with a secret Jesus compartment underneath a wooden foot for some reason and a picture frame that I have positively no clue how they got into a glass bottle. Considering I had never heard of tramp art before coming to this museum I was very impressed by how much I got sucked into and blown away by this weird fun corner of the world.
Included in this gallery, though not technically tramp art, was a display of cigar box guitars, fully functional musical instruments (even complete with a cigar box electric amplifier!) made entirely out found commercial materials. I would have loved to see them in action.
Up next was an exhibit on contemporary folk art from Peru that sought to stress the various art traditions and the role of community in preserving those traditions and that history even during times of incredible social change. I loved all the different facets of history that were drawn on, with symbols from Incan mythology alongside symbols of Western capitalism and colonialism. Many of the works referenced an internal armed struggle, that I knew little about beforehand, between The Shining Path, a radical guerrilla branch of the Peruvian Communist party, and the Peruvian government that raged across the country throughout the 80s and 90s claiming tens of thousands of lives. The Shining Path lost a great deal of their influence and almost all of their leadership after the turn of the 21st century but they still turn up every once in a while and commit some awful act of terrorism, even as recently as 2017. It was definitely humbling to realize how little I know about what's happening in the world at large, and also to see how even in the midst of active war-zones people are still able to find and make beautiful things.
This being a celebration of folk art, the (relatively) straightforward paintings were also accompanied by some more uniquely Peruvian art forms. One room was all about showcasing traditional clothing, ranging from ceremonial garb to day-to-day wear. I loved that the displays highlighted some more contemporary artists' punk rock flair via designs featuring a blend of socio-political slogans, distinctly modern art patterns, and recycled materials to replicate and augment traditional weaving.
The punk aesthetics continued with a wall of prints highlighting street art, protest posters, and DIY zines. As someone who grew up idolizing Joe Strummer and getting bounced around mosh pits at the Middle East in Cambridge (I was so tiny), I found this display very aesthetically exciting and totally endearing in that youth in revolt appears to be a truly universal experience.
Up next was a more traditional but not at all less exciting display of contemporary Peruvian weaving and textiles. What these artists and artisans were able to do was absolutely mind blowing, featuring a lively and vibrant array of colors and styles that combined so many different art traditions, literally weaving together mythological figures, surrealist influences, optical illusions, color theory, and abstractions. It was so impressive, and the idea that this kind of artwork is so frequently ignored by the larger art world or worse labeled as "unskilled' is infuriating to me.
The pieces that blew my mind the most were these trippy rugs where the patterns are an optical illusion that create a sense that the rug is waving or unfurling even when it's lying perfectly flat.
The last room in this exhibition featured a display of retablos, a traditional style of Catholic devotional folk-art comprised of paintings and sculptures encased in elaborate small wooden altar pieces. The form initially originates in Mexico, but spread across different areas in Latin America gaining a resurgence in popularity particularly in Peru starting in the 1940s. I loved this room, because the retablos featured incredible colors, ceramics, and woodworking making them totally holistic feats of talent and creativity. My photos are pretty zoomed in so they don't quite do justice to the fact that perhaps the most impressive thing about these pieces was that they are tiny so the attention to detail is unreal. Before you click on the photos though to see that incredible detail I should probably warn you that while some of the artists chose to continue in the traditional of loving devotional religious scenes others chose to subvert that tradition making retablos showing atrocities committee in the name of religion. I love the subversive nature of those particular retablos but the scenes are occasionally quite graphic.
My favorite retablo though was this one of a delightfully surreal and creepy mask shop, which makes a nod to ceremonial masks but also calls out the duplicitous and corrupt nature of some of Peru's politicians. If you can combine political satire with a Fish-man, you know I'm gonna love it.
After the Peru exhibit, I took an elevator down to the basement to check out Lloyd's Treasure Chest, a gallery of works from the museum's vast storage archive. The treasure chest contained some impressive pieces ranging from American scrap metal dandies to Syrian blown glass lanterns to Javanese mellophones with all kinds of wild items in between. A highlight for me though was the very solid pun of a more-than-slightly-stereotypical wooden Native American that was also a chest of drawers entitled the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
My very favorite piece in the treasure chest though was this lifesize model of a dapper wolf and a stylish cow seemingly putting aside any predator/prey hostilities to enjoy a pleasant date and some gentle hand holding. It was very sweet and totally unexplained.
Last but not least was the museum's piece de resistance, the Girard Wing exhibit entitled Multiple Visions: A Common Bond. This positively massive collections sprawls across an entire wing of the museum and features over 10,000 toys, figurines, effigies, dolls, and other small works of art from over 100 countries and every continent but Antarctica. This incredible collection all at one time belonged to the celebrated architect and interior designer Alexander Girard, who not only donated the collection to the museum but personally designed each display in the exhibition to make it as eye-catching and awe-inspiring as he could. By comprising the exhibit almost entirely out of items initially intended for children, Girard and the museum intend to show a simple playful common bond among cultures and to hopefully inspire the same childlike wonder in visitors as the items did for their original owners.
The whole exhibit was thoroughly wonderful though some of the highlights for me were: a toy Chinese village complete with gondolas; a charmingly horrific display of different toys representing Heaven and Hell; an amazing skeleton band comprised of different Dia de los Muertes figures; some clay figures featuring the craziest looking horses I've ever seen; and a display of Mexican town square during a musical celebration of some sort where if you look closely you can see that even the animals are participating in the music making. Truth be told my preference for toys that macabre and/or musical honestly hasn't really changed much since childhood. I also think that as much as I love these displays nothing can quite capture the actual immersion of seeing all these things and then some spilling out across a single room.
After the folk art, my last stop before saying goodbye to Santa Fe was a special installation called the House of Eternal Returns by an arts collective known as Meow Wolf. Both the Atlas Obscura and my good buddy, Chris, highly recommended this place but intentionally kept what it was exactly vague so I didn't know what I was getting into other than that it would be totally interactive and feature works from over 100 artists. I was a little trepidatious at first, but as soon as I saw a giant robot smelling a flower in the parking lot I was much more comforted.
Once inside, even the pre-exhibit admissions counter and gift shop featured some funky art that made me feel like I was entering the Chuck E. Cheese of the future, which in some ways is kind of spot on and also in other ways doesn't prepare you at all for what's about to come. Again at the front desk, they weren't particularly specific about what you were getting into but they just said that while there is a loose story you can follow, there's no wrong way to enjoy the exhibit. Then they told me to have fun and handed me some 3-D glasses (again with no explanation) and I was on my way.
Upon first entering things, don't seem too wildly insane and you just see a strange Victorian house shrouded in darkness. In the mailbox are a few cryptic clues at what the story might be. I'll be honest there were a lot of kids running around who were super into trying to solve the mystery, and I didn't want to accidentally take any clues away from them so I sort of skipped the narrative element of the exhibit (though I read later that Game of Thrones' George R.R. Martin helped develop it in some capacity so I'm sure it's amazing), and I more focused on just trying to explore every weird nook and cranny and really enjoy the art element of things. That being said, because for what's coming some context is probably helpful, the general gist of things is that the Grandfather of the family who's house it is has been involved in some science experiment that seems to have trapped the house in a sort of state in between several dimensions. The clues help you figure out if the grandfather was working for good or evil, and there's plenty of mysterious organizations who people may or may not be working for, so it does seem like a fun mystery element, kind of like a more sci-fi or fantasy based escape the room. I ventured inside the house...
And was totally delighted to discover that there are secret passages everywhere! The one on the left is a passageway through the refrigerator in the kitchen and the one to the right was in one of the children's bedrooms. You show me one secret passage, I'm gonna be happy, but learning that they were all over the place had me beaming from ear to ear with a barely restrained childlike glee. I decided to go through one...
and boom! The real magic of the place unfurls! I have no idea just how big the whole installation is but there are whole worlds and ecosystems that you see with each new room. And my phone died pretty early on so these photos are only a teeny fraction of the wonder this place has in store. There are giant creatures, neon forests, more passageways, tunnels, paintings, sculptures, videos, an entire arcade, puzzles, challenges, and even a room with a giant wooly mammoth skeleton that's ribcage is actually a xylophone that you can play. It's off the walls bonkers and I loved every second of it. I've never seen something so wildly imaginative that could be enjoyed so fully on so many different levels. There were really little kids running around just enjoying it on a pure sound and color level like an intergalactic jungle gym, older kids and adults really trying to solve the mystery at the heart of all these worlds, and other folks like me just marveling at the artistry and the architectural designs that somehow keep the whole thing from falling in on itself. It was nothing short of magic, and I really don't think I can explain it better than that. If you're in the area, you have to see it. It's as simple as that.
After thoroughly tuckering myself out monkeying around the multiverse, I made the drive back to Albuquerque to get ready for the night's open mic. I reenergized by again going to Satellite coffee partly because their coffee really wowed me last time and partly because they're basically the only coffeeshop that's open past 5 in the whole city. I got more of a regular iced coffee than their super caffeinated version, but it still had enough juice to keep me going for the night.
The open mic tonight was at Red Door Brewing Co., a very hip downtown microbrewery with a sleek interior and a really friendly staff that knows their beer. Wonderfully and also dangerously, their flights are gigantic so you get a good sampling of their wares but you're also drinking nearly three pints for the price of two which is a deal I could not pass up. Luckily I was going to be there for a while, and I also ordered some homemade chips and salsa (both delicious) so that helped me dampen the alcoholic content and also make friends at the bar because I was still too full from that cheesy cheesy burrito to eat all those chips on my own. My mom always used to send me to the first day at a new school with a box of cookies or brownies, and while it's a flagrant I bribe I can't say it wasn't an effective tactic that apparently rubbed off on me. My flight consisted of a vanilla cream ale, a lager, a red ale, a strong scotch ale, the milk stout, and the Russian imperial stout. The imperial stout was almost too heavy even for me, so the creamier milk stout most won me over with the scotch ale and red ale being very close runners up.
The open mic was a lot of fun, and it was really nice to see so many friendly faces from earlier mics this week. Albuquerque continued to impress me with both the levels of comedy chops and supportiveness in their scene and I had a great time getting to share in that if only for a short while. Perhaps the most exciting part for me of this mic though was the fact that one of my favorite comics I met in New Orleans, Johnny Azari, happened to walk right into the mic about halfway through. He was in the middle of an actual getting paid to do comedy tour with a few shows in New Mexico, but he had the night off so he figured he'd do some time and get drinks with some of the comics he'd met earlier. He actually remembered me too which was flattering, since as a pro he really didn't have to, but I think something about witnessing a black out drunk guy swallow swords together probably bonds people of all ability levels together in a way few things do.
Unsurprisingly, Johnny was probably the strongest comic of the night and he just totally owned the stage from the second he walked on. When I described my favorite set of his NoLa, I talked about how well written his jokes are to be at once wildly offensive and easily enjoyed, because of the way they mess with your expectations. Take his opening: "You're a very attractive crowd, and I don't say that lightly. Most of the country looks like a burlap sack fucked potatoes. You laugh but I have to sleep with them? Why? Because I'm on a one man campaign to rid the gene pool of Toby Keith fans. Anyway, I'm married now..." So many zigs and zags, and again the stage presence to pull it off which really does go a long way. And all of this was totally new material than I had heard in New Orleans, so I was even more impressed than I already would have been.
My favorite individual joke of the night was an incredibly funny story from Holly Byrd about being too shy to tell her family that she had cancer and was starting chemo (she's in remission now just FYI!) but her family saw her rapid weight loss and threw her an intervention because they thought she had started taking meth and "it turns out if they think you're on meth, they don't believe you when you tell them you're not". I abbreviated things due to my own memory, but her telling it was masterful and I like the sweetness of an almost sitcom-y family misunderstanding mixed with the heavier topics of cancer and meth addiction. It's not exactly a simple story to balance tonally in a way that it feels funny throughout, but she made it look easy.
It was a solid night of comedy throughout though, but between the beer and catching up with old friends I'm sure I missed some gems. Some other highlights I did catch though:
Patrick Harrison: I saw that movie Red Sparrow where Jennifer Lawrence is trained as a Russian spy to seduce men. Isn't all the training she needs just, "Be Jennifer Lawrence"
Jack Tapestry: You guys know that moment right after a hooker takes a shit on your chest and you think "uh oh, this is gonna cost me another $60"
Alaina- Whenever someone says "We treated our slaves like family", I really wouldn't want to be a part of their family.
My own set went surprisingly well, given that I went up near the end of the night. I credit the audience for sticking around and actually still being invested, and also all the familiar faces because I think it gave me a bit of an energy boost of actually really wanting to well moreso than usual. I actually bypassed the usual opener and riffed a little bit about Boston because the host, an excellent Kevin Baca, mentioned that in my intro, and I think that little spontaneity actually helped me grab the audience's attention better than whatever joke I was going to do would have. Honestly in a lot of shows, especially the later you go up, getting the crowd's attention is really more than half the battle, because it doesn't matter how good your material is nobody's going to laugh if they're not actually listening to it. So I was fortunate that I got that attention early, and I think that's why my prepared jokes did a little bit better than usual even though I actually trotted out some of my darker material mainly because I had a hunch Johnny would get a kick out of that, and my gambit paid off. I ended the set feeling proud of how I did, and I hung out and chatted with the other comics for a while. My secret plan to impress Johnny must have worked, because he offered me a spot opening for him at one of his Albuquerque shows, but I wasn't going to be around still on that day. He asked where I was going to be and when I said Carlsbad, he surprised me by saying "Awesome! I did a cool show at a brewery their and the owner's good people, I'll see if I can get you something while you're there." I wasn't sure if the gig would actually happen or not (it did!), but it was just a gigantic ego boost that a comic I really respected was willing to vouch for me. I think comics have a reputation as a disagreeable lot, but I've been consistently overwhelmed at the kindness and camaraderie that emerges among people who professionally don't take anything too seriously. It's for sure been one of the biggest things that consistently makes this trip worth it.
Favorite Random Sightings: Full Metal Jacket Firearms (I think they missed the point of the movie); A giant billboard for a casino with an old couple and the slogan "We love the seafood and rib buffet!"; Gnar Chow (no clue); Santa Fe Soap Ranch; Alfonso Sucks; Aaah Dentist (I think it's intended to be an "open you mouth and say aaah" aah but I like the idea that it's a children screaming aah"
Regional Observations: I honestly would have thought that some of Georgia O'Keeffe's landscape paintings of the mesas and red rocks were more of her classic style of "not actually a vagina but come on" but nope having seen them now they really do look like that and it's totally bizarre.
Albums Listened To: Rise and Shine by Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars (my ex wrote a really amazing paper about these guys our freshman year, and she actually got to meet them and hangout after a concert in Cambridge. The band name is not just a name, and these guys were all refugees and some of them survived horrible horrible things, and the fact that they now just make super chill reggae and try to make people happy is truly wonderful); The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie (This is a top to bottom great album); The River by the Snails; The River by Bruce Springsteen (what a massive double album. I really like it, but I feel like Bruce was going through some things when he made it)
People's Favorite Jokes:
"Bro, I haven't told a joke in ten years" - one of the more surprising barista responses I've gotten
Songs of the Day:
It’s real hard to not smile at how much fun they’re clearly having
This has always been one of my favorite Bowie songs but just wait for the reveal of the Bassist’s facial hair. Holy crap
Clarence is just beating the hell out of that tambourine
Bonus Educational Content: