WY Day 7/ CO Day 0 - Casper, Cool Art, and Colorado Capitals
I started my last day in Wyoming by getting some nice cold coffee and warm conversation at a place called Crux Coffee in Lander, which was started as a place to provide jobs for students at the nearby Catholic College while creating a fun meeting spot for the rest of the community. It all makes for a very positive environment, and a pretty great place to start your day.
Fueled up, I made a small 2 and half hour drive down a decent chunk of the state to the town of Casper, where there was one last cool museum I wanted to see before I left. I was pretty hungry so I stopped at a popular brunch spot called Eggington’s. The name made me laugh the first time I saw it and every time since because it sounds like what a bully might call a nerd in a 50s movie, but their reputation as a great local spot preceded them and I had to actually wait a hot minute to be seated. The wait wasn’t so bad because the staff was super friendly and their was free coffee which I appreciated. Their reputation proved to be no fluke either as I was given one of the most perfect burgers I’ve ever eaten. It was real angus beef with crispy applewood smoked bacon, lettuce tomato, fresh avocado, and lots and lots of cheese on top. It wasn’t anything super fancy, but the execution was all a perfect 10. When every ingredient is so top notch, you don’t really need any extra pizzazz.
After my big ol’ bruncheon, I made my way to the Nicolaysen Art Museum, one of the most highly regarded contemporary art museums in the state. It’s housed in beautiful red brick former bus station which gives it a sense of historical charm right from the get go and it’s free on Sundays so I sort of lucked out by missing them on my first pass through town.
The first gallery was a special exhibit of giant photo-realist painting by Justin Hayward (not the one from the Moody Blues) of rodeo scenes. Rodeos were never a big part of my life growing up, and they’ve never particularly interested me but these paintings really blew me away. His popping colors and heightened reality create a sense of drama, beauty, and poetry in a setting I might never have truly appreciated otherwise. Hayward is a professor at Casper College, so it’s a pretty incredible display of local talent to start the visit with.
The next (and largest) gallery was selections from the museum’s permanent collection. As a curatorial effort to make visitors more aware of how and why art makes us feels things, every piece in this gallery was selected for its vibrant use of color. It really made for a transportive and surreal viewing experience to be greeted with just dazzling and vivid hues at every turn. Color is such a fundamental element in most art that its easy to take for granted the way it conveys moods, emotions, colors, and ideas, so it was cool for this exhibit to really push that front and center and invite you to think more deeply about each piece.
My favorites of these prismatic paintings were: Rupert Conrad’s soft and hazy Memories of Mexico which capture a gauzy childlike nostalgia; Conrad’s ominously beautiful Drying Sails that makes brighr light colors more menacing than I’ve ever seen before; James Boyle’s dream-like dizzying Descent from the Cross which uses its colors blend a more abstract sense of life and death into a familiar image; and Suzy Smith’s simple yet surreal still life humorously called Blue Eggs which does deceptively incredible things with reflections.
The next gallery was a small exhibit of some of the museum’s pieces by modern European masters. It was not a large exhibit, but there were Picasso’s, Matisse’s, and more big names so it still packed quite a punch.
Being the weirdo I am, my favorites here were all the surrealist pieces including two by my dude Salvador Dali which would not have been out of place in the color exhibit for the way they create a sense of unreality and one wonderfully bizarre lithograph by Francis Bacon that seems likes its kind of judging you.
Probably my favorite of the special exhibits was a series called Trees by Ricki Klages. The series comprised of a combination of large color-saturated landscapes of forests and smaller pieces framed in little goldleaf houses with one mage containing the namesake trees and another seemingly unrelated image. The larger pieces showcase her virtuosic ability to capture hyperrealist scenery that feel like they’re leaping off the canvas, and the houses have a beautifully surreal quality to them that showcases the variety of styles she can work in while also forcing your brain to work a little to try to grasp the dream logic linking the two images. I’m not sure it’s always possible to make that connection, but I think the sensory experience of engaging with the piece is wholly worthwhile nonetheless.
The next gallery was fascinating insight into the early twentieth century New York art scene in the form of character studies by the German-American artist Carl Link. These hundred or so little windows into humanity may have been sketches, but they were not lacking any richness or detail and they truly incredible pieces from an uncannily talented draftsmen.
That being said, some were more flattering than others, and I couldn’t stop laughing at this unholy offspring of Dick Cheney, Mrs. Doubtfire and a turkey:
Next up was a small collection of pieces by Western masters, an American answer to the similar European gallery. It is interesting how different the art being made at the same time was, and I can only assume that the destruction of WWI was huge factor in the relative darkness of the European stuff as opposed to the more bucolic Americana of greats like Russell and Remington (though they weren’t always without satirical bite, it just wasn’t as formally strange).
Speaking of formally strange, I’ll be honest I didn’t fully understand the next exhibit and installation piece called Retool for Warm Winter Nights by Andy Kincaid. The piece was a sort of dystopian reimagining of the pioneers’ journey with a blend of sculpture (including some impressively creepy snakes), found objects, video, photography, and paintings. I didn’t necessarily “get” it as a complete whole, but certain elements definitely did leap out to me as aesthetically interesting or technically impressive.
The last major special exhibition featured a series of fine-art prints by Ginnie Madsen called Impressions. With her use of the printmaking process, Madsen takes pieces that could already stand alone as gorgeous landscape pantings and distills them to their hypnotic, absorbing essences. Here use of clean simple forms and bold colors makes for some absolutely stunning works that are hard to not get lost in.
In the hallway back to the main lobby, there was a series of sculptural pieces inspired by literature and poetry. My favorite included: abstract, sweetly lyrical representations of billowing winds by Rossi Brownwell; a cute mythological scene made from amazingly colored ceramics of a fox holding court for the birds of the forest by Brandon White; and a lovely tribute to the magic of reading a good book in the form of a sculpture made of a magical swirl of pages by Jordan Vanetti.
As I was getting ready to leave, I decided to look up and noticed that I almost missed a fantastically grumpy Chinese dragon that had been built for a parade and was now guarding the museum with his surly stare:
Lastly in the back corner of the lobby, there was this massive improbable clock that, while very impressive in its construction, would not look even a little bit out of place in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
With that last museum down, I got some good coffee at the Metro Coffee Company to fuel me up for the four hour drive to Denver.
I made it to the mile high city in time to sign up for an open mic at a fun combination coffee shop, bike shop, bar called the Denver Bike Cafe. I was a little early even so I sat in the more cafe portion and got some more coffee to recover from the four drive and do a little bit of writing.
I transitioned over to the bar area where I got an excellent local stout called the Dark Galaxie from Denver’s Cerebral Brewing. It was rich and velvety with a pleasant but not overwhelming chocolatey-ness. While I nursed my beer, I said hi to the host, a really great and very funny guy, named Zach Welch who gave me some nice pointers on mics to hit up in the scene (Denver’s got a pretty big comedy scene, so where I was just trying to find mics in Wyoming, here I had to figure out which ones were best).
I also bumped into three traveling comics from the Orange County area whom I had met in Fort Collins earlier in the week: Marty Wurst, Dakota Freeman, and Jason Rodriguez. It was comforting seeing familiar faces and having fellow out of towners to talk to, and it helped that they were all super friendly, funny, easy to talk to guys. I wish I had known them while I was in CA!
Perhaps because I’d had such a leisurely comedy week in Wyoming and because it was also a Sunday night, I was expecting this to be a quieter mic, but the list filled up fast and there were definitely over 50 comics there! It was exciting to be surrounded by all that energy, and the mic was high energy and a lot of fun.
The most exciting thing that happened was something I always thought was just a thing that happened on TV: we had a pretty big name comic drop in on the mic! Adam Cayton-Holland is a Denver local who made good, popping up on Conan, writing a successful memoir, and getting his own TruTv show Those Who Can’t with his comedy partners. He was unsurprisingly the best comic of the night, telling a really funny story about the Wu-Tang Clan laughing at him when he was a teenager because he tried to sound cool by telling him that his neighborhood in Denver has the same name as the neighborhood most of them grew up in on Staten Island. It’s too long to be condensed to a single line, but he also told a joke about this real news story about a school superintendent who got fired because he repeatedly took dumps on his school’s track. This prompted Adam to say with righteous indignation “And none of the news anchors called him the Pooperintendent! It was just sitting there!”
Other highlights:
Zach Welch- Fraternity porn is just a bunch of bros putting gross things in their mouth and pretending to like it. It’s like an olive garden commercial
Sammy Anser- (he did an incredible DMX impression)
Nate Earl- this outfit makes me look I like I pee sitting down
Sam Gates- You can't argue with people who worship the sun
Evan Johnson- how do you expect to get tickled if you can't tickle yourself?
Bee Casper- I didn't have nine abortions so I could mother you
Ben Duncan- I was a pastor's kid so I had a religious exemption for swimming with a shirt on
Josiah Patrick - background checks on white guys sNging to but trenchcoat
Wes Williams - I tried to give myself a pep talk in the mirror but it just came out as “Who’s a good boy? Yes, you are. You’re my good boy”
Ed Rubel- My dad said I was his hero which is an arrogant thing for a dad to say. You know what inspires me, people I've made
Katie - Someone told me there’s a skinny girl inside you so I said “There's a sense of humor inside you”
James Draper-I have friend who's a communist but he's really good at monopoly
Dakota Freeman- do you think old lady's safe words are bingo?
My own set went pretty well. I think I struggled for a second to get people’s attentions since I hadn’t performed in such a big room in a while, but once I had it things started clicking and I got some good laughs which was a nice confidence boost and a happy introduction to the Denver scene.
Favorite Random Sightings: Pony Expresso (so many people must be upset about that pronunciation); An unintentionally threatening mattress ad that said “We don't rest until you do”; a very grossly named convenience store called Gob n Grub; and an insane billboard that just said”As regulations grow freedom dies” (I have no idea who put that up)
Regional Observations: Some of the highways in Wyoming are paved in red and it’s very whimsical
Albums Listened To: Twenty Dozen by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band (some energetic New Orleans jazz); Twin Fantasy Mirror to Mirror by Car Seat Headrest (a mellow double album feature a reissue and a reimagining of the band’s very first album); Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me Soundtrack by Various Artists (this was really weird to drive to, but even if the film is easily the weakest Twin Peaks installment the soundtrack is pretty fantastic)
People’s Favorite Jokes: didn’t get one today so here’s One from the webs:
A wife was in bed with her lover when she heard her husband’s key in the door. “Stay where you are,” she said. “He’s so drunk he won’t even notice you’re in bed with me.”
the husband lurched into bed, but a few minutes later, through a drunken haze, he saw six feet sticking out at the end of the bed.
He turned to his wife: “Hey, there are six feet in this bed. There should only be four. What’s going on?”
“You’re so drunk you miscounted,” said the wife. Get out of bed and try again. You can see better from over there.
The husband climbed out of bed and counted. One, two, three, four. Damn, you’re right.
Wyoming Superlatives:
Favorite Coffee- Coal Creek Coffee Company in Laramie for pure coffee but the Beta Coffeehouse in Cody does have fantastic burrito
Favorite Restaurant - Eggington’s in Casper
Favorite Bar: The Backwards Distillery Taproom in Mills
Favorite Beer: Zonker Stout from Snake River Brewing in Jackson
Favorite Natural Attraction: Yellowstone not only lives up to the hype but far surpasses it
Favorite Man-Made Attraction: The Buffalo Bill Center for the West in Cody
General Impression of the WY Comedy Scene: When I find it, I’ll let you know
Songs of the Day:
damn that’s funky
a big sad dance party
good luck making sense of this one