CO Day 2 - Animal Art, Antique Cars, and Atomic Cowboys
When I was first looking up things to do in Denver, one surprising thing kept coming up on every website: Eat Breakfast! Shockingly the home of the Denver Omelette, really takes the most important meal of the day seriously, and lots of different restaurants have evolved to offer sweet, savory, and super unique spins of all kinds of breakfast classics. Because of my habits and my budget, I’ve tended to skimp on morning meals, but I didn’t want to do Denver dirty and not partake in their favorite course so I made sure to be active in breaking my fast. My first stop was a place called the Atomic Cowboy, because that wasn’t a name I could avoid even without dozens of recommendations. The Cowboy started as a hipstery retro bar, but soon added food by the Denver Biscuit Company and Fat Sully’s NY Pizza to basically become a one stop shop for any kind of comfort food or drink you can imagine. It was too early to engage in the drinking part of things, and, while I’m not above pizza for breakfast, I wanted to do something a little more classic, so I got a Denver twist on some good ol’ fashioned Biscuits n’ Gravy. I ordered some nice iced coffee and a biscuit sandwich called the Franklin, foolishly thinking “how big could a biscuit sandwich be?” When my waiter laid down before me, the crispy doughy behemoth that would be my brunch my eyes popped out of my head. The Franklin comes with buttermilk fried chicken, bacon, and cheddar cheese all smothered in incredible mushroom gravy and smashed between a fluffy beauty of a biscuit. It was wildly indulgent, but I was instantly won over on Denver’s claim to Breakfast supremacy.
After that big breakfast, I made my way to the Denver Art Museum, which with it’s very modern geometric design by architect Daniel Libeskind, inspired by the Rocky Mountains, make it one of the more striking exteriors I’ve encountered thus far. I don’t really know if I like the design or not, but it does make the museum pretty distinct right from the get go. It doesn’t hurt that it’s also complimented by some lovely greenery, and fantastic outdoor sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and Beverly Pepper.
However you feel about the museum’s far out architecture, the collections and exhibitions within are pretty unimpeachable. The first special exhibition was one of the first large scale retrospectives of the works of contemporary Chocktaw-Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson. Gibson began as a painter mostly specializing in abstract expressionist work, but soon his creativity led to him embracing a variety of techniques both highly contemporary and highly traditional, blending beading, videography, quilting, spray painting, and sculpture into his skillful repertoire. I’d seen a few Gibson pieces pop up here and there in other museums, and always found them to stand out for their sheer uniqueness, but seeing so much of his work in one place really floored me. There are a lot of great contemporary native artists blending contemporary art trends and traditional Native Arts, but there’s something so wildly imaginative, technically impressive, and thematically rich about the way Gibson goes about it that makes him stand out as an exceptional modern artist to keep your eyes on. The first piece I ever remember seeing by him was an Everlast punching bag that he had decked out in glass beads and streaming wool in traditional patterns. It was such an instantly engrossing display of beautiful traditional craft blended with a powerful subtext of medium capturing the violence and resilience unfortunately built into that culture. It wow-ed me then, so I was thrilled to see several different punching bags he had made, each one more elaborate and incredible than the next.
As much as I loved the punching bags, I was even more impressed by the works I was less familiar with. Given how much abstract expressionist works there are it’s pleasantly shocking to see someone have a wholly new take on the genre, but Gibson pulled that impressive feat off by changing the medium of his abstractions. Some pieces used cut up canvases from failed early works, some used tanned animal hides, some used textiles, and some used more beads, but all of these media are strongly linked to the artist’s past, either personally or culturally, which grounds the abstract patterns in emotions and memories that, at least for me, hugely elevated them above similar pieces by giving the dazzling colors real thematic weight.
My favorite of these wall-hanging pieces (they’re not quite paintings nor sculptures, so I don’t know what to collectively call this series) was a beaded and sewn piece that utilizes an extremely powerful quote by James Baldwin to excellent effect:
The last series of works in the exhibition were Gibson’s Totem pieces, larger sculptures that use similar beading and sewing techniques but adorned upon larger sculptures and mannequins. These strange figures are firmly in that surreal uncanny valley where you’re not sure if you should be creeped out or not by them, but even if they’re kind of (or a lot) creepy the work on display is still insanely impressive and the more you look at them the fact that they stand up with all that extra artistic weight is pretty ridiculous in a very cool way.
The next special exhibition was a trippy interactive piece by local artist Jaime Molina entitled Past the Tangled Present. The piece dreamily combined beautiful two-dimensional wall art that flowed into a surreal forest of three dimensional cacti and boxes representing faces. Every individual element was exquisitely crafted, but the fact that visitors were encouraged to totally immerse themselves in the art environment, sit on the boxes, and really poke around in there took things to a wonderfully playful level.
My favorite part of this exceptional work was an entire small house in the shape of a face which for me was the perfect blend of symbolism and craft, both a technical marvel and something to really think about:
The next special exhibition was actually an international collaboration with the National Museum of Cambodia, and featured several different representations of the Hindu god Ganesha, the charming elephant-headed god associated with protection, wealth, and prosperity. The exhibit featured representations both ancient and very modern, with a centerpiece being a piece from the National Museum of Cambodia dating back to the 600s. While the first incarnations of Ganesha date back to India, this God and his image has grown to be worshipped all over the Asian continent and it was pretty astounding to see how the representations change over both time and geography.
My favorite piece here was more modern, sculpted by Sumant Shetty in 2017, partly because it’s a fantastic sculpture but mostly because it was the only one in the exhibit where you were allowed to rub Ganesha’s round belly for good luck which was super fun:
The next gallery was a small peek into the museum’s permanent collection with a stunning array of modernist American landscapes. These pieces featured a variety of styles almost as diverse and beautiful as the different landscapes represented. Some were minimalist and impressionist, some highly geometric, and some hyper realistic, but I thought all of them made for powerful imagery.
My personal favorites were: a very Art Deco-y but hauntingly colorful painting of New Mexico’s Acoma Pueblo and a uniquely cartoony and lovely rendering by William Sanderons of a rain front moving in.
The next exhibit was one that was probably the biggest surprise for me personally. It was dedicated to the breathtaking fashion illustrations of Denver’s Jim Howard, collecting pieces from a 40 year career working for huge fashion companies and stores like Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Franklin Simon. My preconceived notion of what fashion advertisements would entail was really all style no substance, but I was pleasantly blown away by how much each of Howard’s pieces could totally stand alone as their own work of art even if they weren’t trying to sell anything. His ability to flit between photorealism and more surreal impressionistic styles to best capture the essence of what the model and and their clothing were trying to achieve (as well as some super impressive architectural renderings in his backdrops) was nothing short of incredible to witness over the 100 pieces on display. The fact that in a video interview with the artist he was just as joyful and flamboyant as his artwork, proudly proclaiming that he was “just a born fashionista” and then laughing about how he didn’t exactly fit into his small religious Texas town growing up, just made all the work that much more endearing.
I think my favorite piece for capturing the benefit of illustration over photography was this gorgeously sketchy collage ad for Bonwit Teller which lets its incompleteness add a layer of flowy playfulness to the clothing on display that almost subliminally suggests that it could work in any setting from glamorous dinners to lazy beaches. It really utilizes the benefits of unreality to create moods and feelings that the realism of photography might not so easily achieve.
Of course no exhibit about fashion could be complete without actual examples of the clothing being sold, and this gallery did not disappoint with fun retro 1970s fashion that was just the right balance of dated and timeless to make you chuckle as well as gasp:
Above the staircase to the rest of the museum’s permanent collection was a massive Pop-Art installation called Last to Know by Matthew Brannon that featured gigantic black vinyl cutlery sloping downward in a way that was both really really silly but oddly threatening.
The rest of the permanent collection galleries were curated to highlight the over 300 different artists’ different takes on animal representations. Things started off whimsically with a humongous fiberglass blow up of a toy dinosaur by the Chinese artist Sui Jianguo. I’ve seen a lot of animal related art in my travels, and I think this was a clever introductory piece because right away it tips visitors off that just because animals are some of the oldest artistic subjects doesn’t mean you know what you’re gonna get when you go inside the galleries.
The galleries on animal art weren’t divided by time periods or geographic regions as they might more typically be curated, but instead the galleries were grouped together based on different animals. This allowed contemporary and ancient works and pieces from all over the globe to stand side by side, and it was really cool to see how anatomical and symbolic understanding of different creatures across time and cultures varied or stayed the same.
First up came different pieces about cows/bulls/oxen, enduring symbols of strength and simplicity valued by farming cultures all over the world. The art ranged from modernist American paintings (where you might not know that you’re looking at a cow if the name of the painting didn’t tell you so) to ceramic oxen from 600s China with beautifully strange stops in Renaissance Italy. For the first gallery, it was instantly more dynamic and engaging than I ever expected cows to be.
My favorite piece though was a shocking, funny, and totally bizarre piece from my girl Georgia who always seems to take familiar images and make them look completely new:
Next was a small surreal detail into representations of animal/human hybrids which, while a small chunk of the collection, was big highlight for me. My favorites were a dreamily staged photograph by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick called Melora that manages to look both historical and fantastical and a wild sculptural piece by Nick Cave (not the singer) featuring what I can only describe as a globe man see-sawing with a clown bear. It was incredible.
The most shocking hybrid though was not animal and human, but beast and machine in Alexander Morales Núñez’s massive, triumphantly gaudy painting Bicipuerca, which roughly translates to “pork bicylce”. The piece is intended as an absurdist statement of the poverty ravaging the artist's native Cuba during his childhood, forcing people to serve multiple incompatible functions and jobs, but I think I like it most as wacky tribute to unfettered imagination because you know this wasn’t something anyone asked him to paint.
For the next gallery, we moved off dry land for a showcase of some very artsy fish. My favorites included: the straight up nightmare fuel of Matthew Weinstein’s animated lounge singing fish video installation called Three Love Songs from the Bottom of the Ocean (see this fascinating monstrosity in action here); a beautifully made but stunningly inaccurate medieval map complete with sea monsters galore; and a surreal, pop-y photorealistic painting by Xiaohang Wu aptly titled Blue Fish.
The next animals up were the cats which for whatever reason thrived in Pop Art representation. I’m not sure what about cats made them so popular in this genre (maybe their mysteriousness?), but I really dug the classic rock concert posters and a weird fiber printed cartoon featuring a menacing tiger and the insane name Bananaman in Switzerland by book-art pioneer Frances Butler.
Next up was a display of animal fine print and fur clothing, which was very hoity toity. I’m not sure how wearable any of these pieces were, but they were pretty elegant in their own unusual way.
My favorite piece here was this stunningly intricate wood carved religious chest which wasn’t obviously animal related, but just added to the sense of overall ornateness for these fancy clothes:
Next up we had a serious of pieces from indigenous peoples of the Americas, from the arctic to the tropics. Pieces were either made from animal tissues or depicted important animals or both, and ranged in scale from small spiritual ceramics to massive carved Totem poles. The Denver Art Museum is pretty renowned for having one of the largest collections of Native American arts in the country so it was great getting to see some real highlights that were on the theme with the exhibit at large. It’s not obvious from my photos, but I did like that museum gave these pieces a showcase to highlight that they’re a special part of the collection, but also integrated some indigenous art throughout the other galleries to not unintentionally make their culture feel “other”.
As amazing as all the early indigenous art was, I tended to gravitate toward the more contemporary pieces of the collection. My favorites included swirling creepily colorful dance paintings by Rick Bartow; a very dignified old Coyote by Harry Fonseca; and a portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (and a goofy Siamese cat) by one of my favorite contemporary Native artists, David Bradley, done in the style of Whistler’s Mother.
The next gallery was all pieces dedicated to man’s best friend which unsurprisingly gravitated towards highlighting their loyalty and companionship. My favorites here included: Portrait of Vicki and Kent Logan by Enrique Martinez Celaya where it looks almost like the dog in the middle just refused to leave until he was included in the painting; some sculptures of wild dogs with colorful x-ray cross sections; a hilarious photo by Elliott Erwitt of a woman walking too very differently sized dogs; a dinner scene by Gaspar Munoz de Salazar from Colonial Mexico featuring very round cats and dogs; an incredibly dynamic street scene by Danish artist Gugger Petter made from woven newspapers for extra impressiveness; and adorable polka-dot dog from Japan’s queen of Pop Art Yayoi Kusama.
From there we took the skies with pieces representing birds and flights of fancy. My favorites included: Snapshots of a gawky pelican in motion by photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge; an Assyrian stone pictograph of a Bird-Headed Deity dating back to the 800s B.C.E; a gorgeous wooden chest of drawers made for a presumably very fancy child and inlaid with playful bird imagery on ever surface; and a wood carving a man lounging on one giant bird while putting his tongue in the mouth of another, as one does.
My absolute favorite piece here though was Pietro Fabris’ bonkers painting of a group of women trying to capture a bunch of birds with weird big human heads. I think it’s supposed to be an allegory, but I also suspect Pietro may have been drinking:
Up next was a small but mighty international collection of miniature animal figurines made from precious materials from around the world. There were jade birds, gold bats, and ceramic everythings imaginable. It was a nice reminder that things don’t have to be huge to be hugely impressive.
The next big animal display was all pieces depicting horses. This made for a particularly stellar showing of classic artists from the American west, though there was also a cool collection of artfully made riding equipment from all over the world. I was particularly drawn to some lyrically impressionistic horses from Japan and China. I never really thought how hugely important horses were in Asia, because I’m so used to thinking of them in terms of Western cultures, but it’s just not very accurate and it’s cool to see new views into history and culture that I hadn’t considered.
The centerpiece of this gallery though was Frank Mechau’s staggering Wild Horses, which was simple, elegant, and 51 ft. long!
The last bit of the permanent collection was all the wild and bizarre contemporary animal works, which I really loved. My favorites here included: Kiki Smith’s powerful and vulnerable sculptures of Genevieve and the May Wolf; Laura Ball’s hypnotically tangled Zanesville Mandala; Lin Tianmiao’s baffling but beautiful Initiator depicting a giant frog draping a silk cloth over a nude woman for reasons the artist has chosen to leave ambiguous; Fritz Scholder’s haunting tribute to the massacre at Wounded Knee; Daniel Richter’s vibrant, psychedelic Street Art inspired D.P. II; Yuan Guo-lei’s confrontational, alarming, funny, and impressively made 9 Freedoms; a very sweet scene of reconciliation between King Kong and Godzilla by Steff Geissbuhler; Pia Stadtbäumer’s really eerie sculptural piece of a naked boy, a raven, and some scissors; and a gorgeous abstract silver bowl with animals prancing around the edges.
The real knockout piece that made me laugh for the entirety of the time I was in its presence was Wenling Chen’s Riding to Happiness with 56 Little Pigs, which featured a couple triumphantly riding a giant pig while 56 little piggies follow behind. The image is ridiculous enough to be sublime on its own, but the thing that totally destroyed me was just how unnecessarily detailed all their buttholes are. Why on earth was that included?
Lastly for the animal exhibition was a lovely bit of fauna themed wallpaper made in 1785 by Jean-Baptiste Marie-Huet. Imagine having that bad boy on your bedroom walls?
The las special exhibit was a feature of the works by Chinese artist Xiaoze Xie. The exhibit was based around ideas of books as objects, repositories of knowledge, and occasional sources of controversy. He made a series of large scale hyper-realistic still lifes of books that had been banned in china, raising their battered bindings to things of haunting poetic beauty.
At the center of the exhibit was a display case filled entirely with pieces of media that had at various points been banned in China, which lends the whole space a deeper resonance by highlighting just how much art can mean to people and how much they’re willing to risk for it.
Walking down the stairs, I noticed all these little circles on the walls and ceiling with little LED numbers on them. It turned out to be a neat little community art project by Tatsuo Miyajima created specifically for the museum entitled ENGI. It combines technology, Buddhist teachings, and community engagement for a striking little piece about connection and individuality. Each counter is the same dimensions and they all either counts from 1 to 9 or 9 to 1, but the speed at which each one counts was determined by different community volunteers while the piece was being installed. In that way, every counter is linked by being part of the same project, but also a unique representation of the person who programmed it, which the artist views as a microcosm of engaging within a society. It’s a little out there conceptually, but sweet and soothing in practice and a nice way to spruce up walking up and down stair cases.
Naturally after absorbing all that good art, as I left I became a more beautiful butterfly:
Just across from the Denver Art Museum was the Denver Central Library, which instantly won me over with this whimsical sculpture officially called the Yearling by Donald Lipski, but more colloquially referred to as “the Tiny Horse on a Giant Chair”
I had to go into the library because I was intrigued by this little magic castle looking extension protruding from the main brick and concrete building. It was so cute and weird, I wanted to know what it’s deal was so imagine my delight to find out that it was the Kid’s ProgrammingArea and the inside is painted to look like a giant circus tent. What a sweet way to make the simple act of going to the library feel fun and sort of magical for the kids of Denver.
My next stop of the day was a favorite of the Atlas Obscura: The Forney Transportation Museum. Housed in what looks like a pretty unassuming warehouse building, the museum started as the personal antique car collection of J.D. Forney, founder of Forney Industries, but it soon began to expand in terms of scope and strangeness eventually coming to contain over 600 pieces of transportation however loosely defined, including amphibious cars, buggies, motorcycles, planes, and even entire steam locomotives. If you’re interested in transportation at all it’s a veritable treasure trove, and if you’re like me with no particularly pre-existing interests it’s such a fascinating look into the history of design, technology, and pop culture that I’m pretty sure there’s something in there that would make every person say “wow”. Naturally though, the thing that made me the most excited when I was reading about it is that for what ever reason the museum has also chosen to accentuate their amazing collection with inexplicably horrifying mannequins that look like they’re in the process of melting from having stared directly into the ark of the covenant. The very first thing that greeted me when I walked in was something that I believe was supposed to be Mark Twain (who was famously not a car). I was in heaven.
Walking into the main collection space though was truly breathtaking. Intellectually you know a room full of cars is gonna be big, but seeing them all laid out in front of you extending in every direction is really crazy to behold. The collection and the space is just so massive. Because I didn’t have any real car knowledge guiding me to what would probably be highlights for other people, I just sort of bopped along roughly chronologically taking everything in and being really impressed by designs both beautiful and occasionally goofy as hell. I started with the earliest manufactured cars dating back to 1908 Model Ts and continuing up to the Classic Car era of the 30s. It was cool to see just how fully formed a lot of these cars were given the technological limitations of the time, but also vaguely horrifying to see how few safety features there were given the common sense limitations of the times. I get that these were all luxuries at this point, and they couldn’t go that fast, and there weren’t that many on the road, but that’s no excuse for not even putting a freakin’ door on it. Plus oil lamp headlights and wooden frames seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
The cars from the 30s- 60s were probably my favorites because they were just so darn sleek. I felt like I was walking through a Dick Tracey cartoon with all the aerodynamic, Art Deco-y shapes that seemed to be the car company’s attempt at saying “Great Depression? What Great Depression? Look at how great we’re doing with our fancy cars!”. Everything was so loving maintained and restored too and these things positively gleamed. One of the cars even belonged to a young Amelia Earhart, not that you’d really be able to guess from her hellish mannequin.
One of the prized pieces of the collection is a 1921 Kissel Sport Touring, because it’s the car that started the whole museum. It was given to the founder by his children as a present, because it was the exact same model he had owned and used to woo their mother and they thought it would be a nostalgic gift. Little did they know their sweet gesture would turn into such a wild and expansive collection but I think they (and most visitors) find it slightly more endearing than crazy.
Some less traditional highlights of the collection included: a special hand-built motorized car that was horrifying built in 1949 for the use of the owner’s 6 (!) year old son; a vintage 1926 Chevron oil tank truck that doesn’t look particularly sturdy; a gorgeous classic bumper car from Denver’s Elitch Gardens Amusement Park; an old timey School Bus; a truly bizarre three wheeled Bubble car made in Germany in 1955 called Messerschmitt KR200; an 1971 snowmobile that sorta resembles a duck bill to me; an early pick up truck that I’m very scared was probably used to transport live animals; an early military vehicle with a mounted turret gun that seems like it would be awfully distracting to the driver; and a champion race car with a crazy looking motor that participated in the 30th annual Great Race, a race from LA to Indianapolis where every car had to be manufactured before WWII because some people still have a lot of whimsy in their souls.
One of the craziest things I learned at this museum was just how early we had the technology for electric cars. They had an incredible specimen called the Detroit Electric which waswas fully battery powered (!), made in 1907 (!!), and was able to get 211 miles on a single battery charge (!!!). It was hilariously marketed as “gentle for women and doctors” and it’s crazy to think that if the car had caught on more before the Great Depression wiped out the Detroit Electric Car Company the environmentalist trajectory of car manufacturing might have gone in a very different direction. Electric cars popped up here and there over the decades but they tended to be considered novelties like the 1957 Ford Skyliner (which while not fully electric in its engine did feature more electric parts than any other car at that time) and never really reached mainstream penetration until the hybrids we know today.
I think my favorite car there for sheer goofiness was this vintage 50s Woody because it just looks so sweet and dopey, a perfect encapsulation of the more innocent time that spawned it:
In between all the antique transportation, there were some neat little displays on different design features that spruced up the style of travel. I loved these as insights into people’s ideas of classiness including: sleek Deco Radios, Novelty train glasses, wildly futuristic toasters, and awesome but totally meaningless hood ornaments.
I liked that while the museum did such a good job at preserving all these old vehicles they still included for counterpoint a piece demonstrating how so many old cars ended up:
The collection was far from limited to just cars, and perhaps the coolest and certainly the largest chunk of their collection was vintage trains from history. One of their most prized possessions is Big Boy, one of if not the largest and most powerful steam locomotive ever built. The big Boy clocks in at 132 ft. long, weighing 1,250,000 lbs, and being able to reach speeds of 80mph with
6,290 horsepower. It’s huge and hugely impressive, but it needed all that power to be able to make it up and over the Wasatch mountains without having to lighten its freight load. The craziest part is that the Forney’s Big Boy is one of only 8 of the original Union Pacific fleet of these locomotives to still exist in the world!
I liked that for all the reverence of the trains themselves, the museum curatorial staff (and in some cases the original manufacturer) was still willing to add playful touches like goofy faces painted on to various surfaces and names like Aunt Peachy that just add a bit of winking fun to the proceedings.
You also got to walk around the insides of the trains and really marvel at just how complex their inner workings were and what a difficult job it must have been to be in charge of manning these behemoths:
Moving on from the trains, the museum had some beautiful vintage Denver Trolley cars which are sadly no longer a part of the city’s public transit:
The collection also went further back in time before engines existed at all with a mighty fine collection of horse drawn carriages and buggies (damned if I know the difference). Maybe it speaks to my macabre sensibilities, but my favorites here were the old timey hearses, because something about death just brought out much more ornate and elaborate designs.
Not wanting to leave any wheeled form of transport out, they even had antique wagons and baby strollers lest the younger visits feel like they’re being forgotten:
Next there was a sprawling collection of bikes, both motorized and analog. I loved how varied the designs were from super cartoony big front wheeled penny farthings to motorcycles with sheep’s wool seats and vaguely racist Native American themed logos to Tron-esque electric motorcycles to good old fashion bikes with side cars for you to put dogs wearing aviation goggles (the only acceptable use of a sidecar).
Of course my favorite part of this whole exhibit was the bug nuts models of the Wright Brothers in their bicycle shop:
Next up was some heavy duty agricultural machinery that I literally couldn’t fit into a single photograph:
After spending last week in Wyoming, I was excited to see an original Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show Wagon that looked so much more modest than I would have expected from such a flamboyant show:
From there we took to the skies, with helicopters, biplanes, jets and hang gliders galore. Did I mention that this place is gigantic?
The coolest and craziest part of the aeronautic collection was this model for experimental flying car that I don’t know how anybody ever thought was going to work (despite it looking fantastic). It’s possibly the biggest stroke of luck that any models or test pilots survived.
Looking up I was very excited that the way to the exit was guided by classic Burma Shave Road Signs, which besides being funny on their own always remind me of Tom Waits so I left with a smile on my face.
Outside of the main collection warehouse there was a super cute smaller gallery bringing together hundreds of retro toy cars, trucks, wagons, and you name it! I was never a big model guy but the precision and artistry in rendering these scale vehicles is insanely impressive:
They even built an entire little model town for the trains and cars to run around in which warmed my cold hard heart:
Lastly there was a small transportation themed art gallery featuring this gorgeous rendering of one of my belovedly stupid Woodys:
After all that extensive museum-ing, I made my way to the delightful and cozy Crema Coffee House. The weird wall art outside won me over right away, and the friendly staff, fantastic coffee, and perfectly chill atmosphere just put the place over the top. It was a great place to sit, work, recharge, and trade some jokes with the baristas.
After refueling, I made my way to the bizarre and charming, mortuary turned hip restaurant: Linger’s Eaturary. It’s very cool and chic inside, but with morbid nods to the building’s history like water jugs made out of formaldehyde bottles that made it just weird enough to be extra lovable. The big claim to fame of the building before it became a favorite local watering hole was that it was the place where Buffalo Bill’s body was embalmed! While they had an impressively eclectic menu, I was still pretty full from the massive breakfast biscuits so I kept things snacky by getting some small but incredibly delicious crispy Pork Potstickers with Sambal, Shallots, Garlic, Ginger, Lemongrass & Sweet Soy. Each potsticker was a little explosion of perfect flavors and textures, so I would love to go back and try out what a full meal from there is like. To wash it all down, I got the wildly named and wildly tasty Raspberry Kolsch from the Denver Beer Co. named Princess Yum Yum, and best of all while you waited for your meal they gave you free bowls of finely salt and peppered popcorn. Perfect bar food!
Perhaps the most special feature of this weird little Eatuary, is the rooftop deck with a bar made out of an old camper van and insanely gorgeous views out over the whole city.
While I was happily full, I did have a little time to kill before the night’s open mic so what kind of person would I be if I didn’t go try out one of Denver’s most beloved Ice Cream shops, Bonnie Brae’s. There was a line out the door for this exquisite homemade ice cream, but it couldn’t have been more worth it. I got a Denver variation of Moose tracks with fudge, peanut butter cups, and peanut brittle in a simply lovely little sugar cone that just totally knocked my socks off. I don’t think it even made it all the way back to my car. I was in heaven.
The night’s open mic was hosted in the awesome Black Buzzard Room of the local Oskar Blues Brewery. It had a great stage, and great beers, and it was pretty popular mic because lots of comics came out and it went pretty late. On the beer end, I particularly enjoyed the goofily named Old Chub Scottish Ale.
My favorite comic of the night was probably the host Janae Burroughs (though there were a lot of great comics tonight). She was super confident and sharp on stage, and people have noticed because as I’m writing this she’s on the lineup for Just for Laughs in Montreal which is a super big deal! My favorite line of hers was “I’m in long distance relationships which sonow I have the whole bed to roll around and cry in”
Other highlights:
Laura Lyons- We all have that one that got away unless you're really good at serial killing
Christy Bukely- I have single father named Todd. Heard of him?
Jeff Teis- My wife and I don’t have kids which has led to shocking number old guy saying to me "too bad you don't have kids. It must be fun to practice though"
Sarah Hargreaves- The more into dirty talk my boyfriend gets, the more offended I get
Malawi Mengez- If you really hated men you'd stop making them
Zach Welch- Delta Gamma has an anchor for a logo and I thought it was because they were too heavy to be in boats
Chanel Ali - People always mispronounce my name like did you really think my name was Channel
Steve Vanderploot- high school football players don't have to take the SATs but they should have to take another test called the CTS
Drew Talburh- white people like to be afraid
Phil Corridor- I’m too poor for Netflix so if a girl asks to Netflix and chill I have to tell her I can only provide the chill in this endeavor
Nathan Lund- found some eclipse sunglasses on the ground so now I can look at the sun whenever I want
I ended up going up pretty late so the audience was pretty tired, but really I was probably more tired so I didn’t feel like I did as good a job as I had hoped to do (comedy pet peeve, it can suck going up late at a mic but don’t complain about it, because A. everyone’s had to do it B. it’s a good learning experience and C. if you can still crush super late in the night you know you’re on to something). I was closing out my tab wishing I had done better, but, in one of many reminders that comedians get too lost in their own heads, while I was paying a really nice comic named Ursula Mains came up to me at the bar and told me she like my stuff and that she was looking to book some out of towners for a showcase she was producing later this week in Boulder. I leapt at the opportunity, and I don’t think I could have had a happier end to the day!
Favorite Random Sightings: Aw Dance (I can’t tell if it’s cute or disappointed); Calvary Baptist (I really enjoy the image of people charging to put a baby in some holy water); King Sooper (a silly named chain of gas stations); The Dirty Duck (not sure what it is); Rack Attack (less sure what it is)
Regional Observations: Maybe because I was coming from Montana and Wyoming, but Denver feels like such a massive sprawling city which I never expected. I guess I knew it was a major city, but I expected it to be a little less metropolitan I guess. Whoops
Albums Listened To: Uncanned Disc 2 by Canned Heat; Uncle Meat by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (the strangest and most musically complex of the Mothers albums, a weird gem)
People’s Favorite Jokes:
What did the Buddha say to the hot dog vendor? Just make me one with everything
Songs of the Day:
My personal favorite Canned Heat song with a damn fine bassline
Everyone’s just so in the zone. It’s an odd zone, but still
Bonus Classical Zappa:
From his last professional appearance