WY Day 3 - Pop-Art, Polaroids, and Performing Solo
I started today by getting coffee at a cute little bakery in the small college town of Lander fittingly called the Lander Bake Shop. All their baked goods are made from scratch daily and they use locally roasted coffee so you can you get a tasty start to your morning that also helps perk up the small town economy.
I took that freshly caffeinated energy and began driving all the way across the state to the capital of Cheyenne, which is in the opposite corner from Yellowstone. I stopped about halfway for a nice lunch in Rawlins. The most recommended restaurant in town was Anong’s Thai Cuisine, and even though I would never have associated Southern Wyoming with authentic Thai food I was pleasantly surprised. They had a huge variety of Thai dishes coked by a kitchen staff trained by the owner, Anong, who emigrated from Thailand in the 90s. Everything looked fantastic, but as soon as I saw Sesame chicken on the menu I just had a huge hankering for it. It might have been the most traditional dish on the menu, but god dang did it hit the spot. It didn’t hurt that crispy chicken was layered over a bed of wide rice noodles and stir-fried veggies in a delicious savory brown sauce. I washed it all down with some sweet Thai iced coffee that would help me keep going for the next leg of the day. It was as good a Thai lunch as I’ve had anywhere, and if you throw in some low prices and great service it was really a perfect stop.
After lunch, I walked around the town which wasn’t particularly big but featured some great views of rolling green hills and impressive architecture including a gorgeous brick and bronze art deco courthouse:
The most stunning surprise I walked by was the George Ferris Mansion, a striking, amazingly maintained Queen Anne style brick building with a turret and gazebo for extra fanciness. It was turned into a bed and breakfast for a while, but now it’s actually up for sale if you’ve got a spare $900,000 lying around.
A big reason I stopped by Rawlins, besides its convenient location on the way to Cheyenne was because it is home to the Frontier Prison Museum. Operating from 1901 until 1981, this sandstone fortress was built to combat the outlaw problem that had arisen in post-Civil War Wyoming. It had no running water nor electricity, and it housed over 13,500 of the rowdiest horse thieves, murderers, and train robbers in all the Wild West. Unfortunately, they only had guided tours and you couldn’t just walk around the old prison on your own (probably for safety reasons), but that didn’t really fit into my time frame if I wanted to make the night’s open mic so I had to miss out. Luckily, it was still a pretty enchanting building to just walk around and admire from afar, like a spooky old castle. As an added bonus there was a phenomenal mural by local artist, Sarah Johansson, of a couple cow pokes passing through the underbrush of nearby Aspen Alley. In a beautiful stroke of magical realism, the artist chose to capture the forest during all four seasons at once leading to one heck of a panorama.
The cool art continued at my next stop for the day, the University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie. Designed by acclaimed architect, Antoine Predock, the Centennial Complex (which houses both the art museum and the University’s American Heritage center) features a five story copper cone that dramatically surges up the city’s skyline to call to mind the many Mountain peaks that dominate the state. It’s a pretty fantastic piece of work that really draws your eye and your imagination.
Luckily the museum completely lived up to the high bar set by its architecture, and for a free college art museum it had a really top notch collection. Things started off on a high note with a piece right next to the welcome desk called Waiting by Chinese ceramic sculptor Wanxin Zhang. It combined incredible realism around the facial features with surreal map-like textures on the clothes of the map all of which were impressively improbable to make out of clay. I was just glad I though twice before I asked him for directions.
The first exhibit I visited was a really cool intersection of art and science by Gerald Lang and Jennifer Anne Tucker. The artists borrowed butterfly and moth samples from the personal collection of a doctor named Jordan Finkelstein and scanned them to make ultra-high resolution digital photographs. It’s interesting that by simply changing the context of these displays from a science museum to an art museum your eye starts to notice even more how pronounced the natural colors and patterns are within the insects’ wings. It’s incredible just how much variety nature contains, and the artists’ use of technology to really bring out the the depth of contrast and texture is really inspired and leads to a spellbinding final product.
The next gallery took full advantage of the museum’s position as part of a university by curating 4 small exhibitions based upon courses being offered with faculty members given their pick from the museum’s impressive permanent collection. The first of these exhibitions was based around a Classics class about Ancient Greek tragedies, and the professor selected works that interpreted themes of heroism. The pieces, featuring cowboys, gladiators, and samurais, really show off how archetypes from the Greek tragedies appear across different times and cultures, while also being pretty great works of art on their own.
I also really liked how some pieces portrayed classic heroes slightly less romantically than others:
what a goober
The next class based exhibition was from a science class about energy resources and featured two of the more impressively strange pieces in the gallery. There was a giant semicircular piece by Carol Prusa called Chaosmos that was filled with small fiberoptic lights and featured a breathtakingly intricate abstract silverpoint pattern of spiraling energy fields on its surface (click here for better lighting). While that piece captured the theme of energy with the galactic of an impossibly expanding universe, Cybele Young went for small and sleek with an richly detailed but tiny sculpture of a little purse with a light fixture illuminating its contents adding a sense of playful whimsy to the commonplace ways we use electrical energy everyday.
The next class was a Women and Gender Studies course where the faculty member chose pieces capturing different ways are viewed in public spaces. This collection featured some of the more shocking pieces but also some of the more famous artists that I’d heard of in the gallery. They had a grotesque but vibrant scene by outsider art legend Red Grooms and a rowdy street scene etching by virtuosic queer artist, Paul Cadmus which both really blew me away for their blending of insane levels of detail with absurdist exaggerations. I was also pretty impressed by a finely etched burlesque scene by Reginald Marsh and a fiery lithograph by Willie Cole. While all the pieces varied greatly in their representations of women, I think they all served to show just how piercing and pervasive the male gaze can be.
And the Last class featured was an Art Class called Text, Image, and Narrative, and featured all pieces that combine words and pictures in really interesting ways. Perhaps because these pieces were selected for an art class, the thing that really struck me about all these was how much they showed off different art making practices. There was hand lettering incorporated in drawings, photography, silk screening, etching, lithography, and even art book-making that really showed the array of techniques that artists have at their disposal to get whatever story no matter how surreal or abstract they want to tell out of their heads. While I’m a sucker for pop-art collages, the last three here really impressed me the most because they incorporated poetry and imagery which I just thought was a really lovely way of celebrating different techniques for representing the beauty of language and image simultaneously.
The next gallery was a pretty incredible surprise bringing in over 100 polaroids and silver gelatin print photographs taken by Andy Warhol and gifted to the University of Wyoming as part of an effort by the Andy Warhol Foundation to support art education in universities across the country. Walking into the space and being completely immersed in Warhol’s weird world of glitz and art parties from 1960s-1980s New York was totally surreal. Andy’s one of those artists who I really thought was overrated before I started this trip and ended up seeing hundreds of art museums, but I’ve really come around on him, so it was cool seeing an oddly personal side of his highly curated persona. Some of the photos were clearly staged and posed, while others were more spontaneous and candid, so you really get a sense of both his obsessive visual eye and his more playful fun-loving sides all at once.
Of course being a Warhol exhibit, his obsession with celebrity shone through as well some portraits of a really eclectic mix including: a hilariously posed Sly Stallone, a handsome Wayne Gretsky, a super young John C. McGinley (of Scrubs and Office Space fame), and of course the Big Man in Red himself.
While the celebrity stuff (especially Stallone) was fun and more classic Warhol, I was really more impressed with his sweet and candid portraits of various friends’ kids because there’s a childlike purity and authenticity that punches through the layers of irony and artifice that he’s more known for:
Another highlight for their verve and energy were a series of Black and White candids he took at various parties. You get the vibe that he would just impishly (or voyeuristically) just float through his guests snapping photos whenever something caught his eye. There’s a wonderful incompleteness or oddness to many of these pieces like he was trying to get the shot before his subjects totally noticed. I also just like how much you can tell how drunk people are just from their eyes, and boy are some of these folks gone (bottom right corner I’m looking at you).
Lastly, for good measure, there was one larger and more vibrant classic silkscreen print of an archival photo of a Native American Mother and Child rendered in Day-Glo pop art colors.
The next gallery was a really odd one featuring the works of contemporary artist, John Lodge. Lodge is all about artistic products that expose the interface between the artistic process and the materials used. He favors what he calls a stochastic process that involves a combination of planning and randomness. These include making intensely planned out grids of paper dots and then trying to squeeze out the same amount of gesso ink onto each dot but due to various forces such as gravity, surface tension, and human error each dot gets colored totally uniquely. The finished product thus contains both structure and randomness like a more opaquely mathematical Jackson Pollock. Other examples include using a specialized machine to suspend a glob of ink near a piece of paper and letting the ambient air drive the patterning or using sound vibrations or computer technologies to instill random vibrations through inky globules. Everything is very minimalist, and not necessarily everyone’s aesthetic cup of tea looking very mechanical though also chaotic. For me personally, I didn’t think everything was visually appealing to me, but conceptually everything was really fascinating.
I was most impressed for just size by his three dimensional pieces called Stochastic Strata Structures which featured a random order of black and white printed paperswhich all on top of one another create weirdly hypnotic patterns of lightness and darkness that tower over the viewer.
Next up was probably my favorite of all the galleries featuring the works of incredible contemporary Chippewa artist, David Bradley. Where Jon Lodge’s works tended towards monochromatic, Bradley’s pieces offered an explosion of color using pop-art, surrealism, and satire of fine art to deal with themes of Native American representation, culture, and displacement. He tackled some really heavy themes with a light and charming touch, blending abstraction, traditional symbols, and his own cartoony dream imagery.
My favorites included: an homage to Henri Rousseau’s 1897 Sleeping Gypsy featuring a native man and a mountain lion sleeping on a hill while cloud cowboys and a Kachina moon look on from above; a Native American family (headed by the Lone Ranger) doing their best Last Supper Impression; a painting called Native Thought featuring a man with a traditional clay fired vase for a head and a beautiful Santa Fe sunset in the background; a literalization of the phrase It’s Not Over Until the Fat Lady Sings (an initially humorous but actually deeply sad image in the context of Native supremacy of the country being over): a beautiful adobe brick homage to Magritte’s Son of Man; a lively diner scene featuring swinging and dancing characters enjoying some bar band and commercialized Native wares; a piece called End of the Trail featuring Tonto and the Lone Ranger arguing in front of a Hollywood being taken over by giant corporations while death rides across the sky; and lastly a scene packed with an improbably dense cast of varied characters celebrating the 50th anniversary of the opening of Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.
Lastly, besides the dazzling two-dimensional works there were also some incredible bronze sculptures including busts of the Lone Ranger and Tonto and a more grounded piece showing a really sweet embrace between a loving Native American couple that was so quietly beautiful.
After the last exhibit, I finally made it all the way to Cheyenne. I immediately went to get a delicious cup of coffee from a super cool coffee shop located in a historic theater called the Paramount Cafe. It was such a lovely venue, with a mean cup of Joe to boot.
After getting coffee, I explored a little bit checking out a really cool indie record shop called Ernie November where I impulsively picked up the latest Parquet Courts to re-up my punk credentials.
After shopping around, I made my way to the Historic Depot Plaza, a fantastically preserved Union Pacific Train Depot turned shopping plaza and museum. The museum was closed by the time I got there, but it was pretty neat just walking around and taking it all in.
The night’s open mic was in a fun local craft brewery in this depot plaza called Accomplice Beer Company. It was a bustling sports bar and brewery that seemed like it was the place to be after work on a Wednesday. They had a fancy system where all the beer was self serve. You just grabbed a little plastic card that you’d swipe when you started pouring from any of the taps and it would keep track of how many ounces you’d poured and you’d be charged at the end based off what was on the card. It was a neat way of really illustrating how little self control you may or may not have. I tried to limit myself and only got one pint of their rich and tasty Slumber Car Porter which had a high abv to go with its bold flavor. The bar couldn’t have been cooler, the mic… eh not so much.
I’ve been to mics before where there was little to no audience, but this was the first open mic I ever went to where there were lots of patrons but zero other performers. The host seemed surprised but excited to see me, but then they got a rush of new customers while he was setting up and he had to help out with bartending duties (the cocktails were not self-serve for some crazy reason) meaning that ostensibly I was the host as well as the sole performer. I introduced myself and tried to drum up interest in other people performing, before launching into an awkward seven minutes of comedy. It wasn’t a total bomb, and I got a few chuckles out of people as they came to pour their beers and I got to practice some crowd work, but I found out that it was basically only the people at the taps who could hear me as I was a comical distance away from all the other patrons and the mic didn’t carry. I found this out when a sweet waitress tried to be encouraging and told me “You were funny when I could hear you”. So as far as most of the people knew there wasn’t even really a mic at all.
Imagine a little Joe just under the TV at the very end of the bar
I was feeling a little discouraged, and I didn’t want to have done no real mics this week so I looked at what was happening just over the Colorado border and found out there was a mic that night in Fort Collins at a nice and dorky gaming bar called Dungeons and Drafts. It was like night and day, as Fort Collins is a bit more of a populated college town (literally about 100,000 more people), and there were lots of comics at the bar creating a warm and welcoming atmosphere. It didn’t hurt that it was just a pretty cool place, with good food and an expansive beer collection. I got some delicious maple bacon glazed chicken wings to snack on and I washed it down with a might powerful local barrel aged stout called the Wood Knot from Jessup Farm Barrel House. While I was eating and drinking, an older drunker man started telling me his life story, and while he was very kind I struggled not to laugh because he had the exact accent of a lot of throw away South Park characters ( For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBrx63A9-tk). I knew the show took place in Colorado, but I never imagined anyone really talked like that.
As for the mic, it was really solid and a fun introduction to the comedy scenes Colorado had to offer besides Denver. My favorite comic of the night was a guy named Patrick Bonner who had jokes that were just the right ratio of silly to clever for my taste. My favorite line of his was “I've found I can avoid any food by paying attention to certain adjective like supreme or extreme. Those are the names we give America’s enemies”
Other Highlights:
Paul Ramirez (the host) - making out with guys when you’re drunk is the most feminist thing you can do.
Sean Ferguson- It's not that my dad didn't teach me how to shave he's just such an asshole that he taught me wrong on purpose
Justin Pryor - belligerent bitches alway have total confidence (this one was really all in the act out, but it was much funnier than it looks on paper)
Demetrius Parker- I've got the rhythm but I don't have the time
Sam -Life takes on a different meaning when you're balding…by which I mean no meaning. My life is over. How do I get carded? Is this the hairline of a 19 year old.
Maybe it was the adrenaline rush of coming off such a weird and uncomfortable open mic only an hour earlier, but something kicked in for my set and I was super loose and confident in a way I’m not all the time. My planned jokes all landed and I even had some ad libs that actually worked so it was exactly the confidence boost I needed. It just goes to show you that you can’t let one bad set or show ruin your self esteem or even your night. You learn, you grow, and you keep on going.
Favorite Random Sightings: Road signs saying“63% of deaths were unbuckled” (I think they just mean in cars otherwise it’s gotta be something like 90%); Johnny Behind the Rocks Trail (an insane name); Dirty Boyz Sanitation (somehow I’m skeptical of their cleanliness); Marv’s Place Pawn Shop (I feel like Marv is such a stereotypical pawn shop owner name
Regional Observations: I learned that those weird sharply diagonal rock formations you might remember from pictures earlier in the week actually occur naturally and weren’t just caused by the splitting of rocks to make highways. Weird
Albums Listened To: Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (50 years later and this one still doesn’t sound like anything else); Truth and Soul by Fishbone (a genre blending rush of youthful 80s energy, they should have been huge); Try for the Sun Discs 3 and 1 (my ipod puts them out of order for whatever reason) by Donovan (a sizable best for the Scottish troubadour)
People’s Favorite Jokes: Here’s one from the web
I was observing two men that were working for the public works department. One would dig a hole and the other would follow behind him and fill the hole in.
After a while I had to ask, "Why do you dig a hole, only to have your partner follow behind and fill it up again?"
The hole digger wiped his brow and sighed, "Well, I suppose it probably looks odd because we're normally a three-person team. But today the lad who plants the trees called in sick.
Songs of the Day:
I can’t imagine the crowd had any clue what they were in for
just wild
A nice showcase of his voice and playing
fun vintage clips of groovy London