CO Day 3 - Pixels, Plants, and Paintings
Today I started out by continuing to explore Denver’s bustling breakfast scene by taking a visit to one of their biggest success stories, Snooze: an AM Eatery. Started in 2006 as a little breakfast diner with eccentric options and a vibrant retro flair, their combination of tasty food and friendly community engagement really caught on, and they’ve since opened multiple locations in Colorado, California, Arizona, and Texas! For my breakfast, I would have felt remiss being in Denver this long without getting an omelette so I got one of their signature three eggers with cheese, bacon, avocado, and mushrooms. It was positively delicious but not necessarily exciting to look at (an exceptional omelette still looks like an omelette), but fortunately my beverage was much more stylish. I’m not normally a big fan of starting my days with booze, but the place had such a celebrated breakfast bar that I couldn’t miss out on one of their morning cocktails. I got the Mmm Mmm Mimosa, which was house sparkling white wine, orange juice, and pomegranate liqueur for added zest. It was quite strong for before noon, but the addition of the pomegranate flavor to such an otherwise classic cocktail was so simple, but it really made the whole thing pop in an exciting new way.
After my fantastic breakfast, I was very full and happy but actually a little bit more sleepy from the champagne so I decided to correct that with some good strong coffee from Novo Coffee, a sleek Denver shop that really did the trick.
I took my newly caffeinated self to the Denver Botanic Gardens, which my friends said was a must see. The gardens sprawl out over 23 acres filled with incredibly varied greeneries and accented with some amazing contemporary art. The big featured art installation was called Pixelated by Mike Whiting. The artist created massive sculptures inspired thematically by the gardens but stylistically by retro-video games. The sculptures were both monumental and minimalist making the most of classic video games’ ability to render fantastical worlds and characters with simple boxes. By juxtaposing the simplified sculptures with the complex garden environments, the artist created a really fun blend of the artificial and the natural that was exciting to watch out for as you walked around and made you think more about just incredible everything you were seeing really was. To emphasize the idea of keeping visitors on their toes, things started out with a fantastic topsy turvy sculpture of a ghost next to a castle which is cute when you first look at it and then kind of amazing when you realize that they’re exact same shape just inverted in orientation and color. It goes to show you how even small changes in perspective can make you see totally different things.
In terms of natural beauty, I was impressed right away with some clever curation of vibrant flowers planted in a bird’s nest in sparse, bare tree which was in turn planted in a sublimely ornamental ceramic vessel. It was such a subtle and delicate balance of different contrasting features that it made for such a striking introductory image for the gardens.
Today’s weather was beautiful but it was the first day that really had the warmth to indicate that summer was coming so I had overdressed and was very excited to start in the wonderfully climate controlled indoor gardens (which were also warm but less likely to give my pasty self a sunburn). When I first walked into the main building which leads to the greenhouses, I was really wowed by the elegant glass windows and doors with gorgeous emerald stained glass accenting the entrances and highlighting the greens behind the doorways.
The lobby was also filled with a smaller art exhibit that drew on the same themes of the larger Pixel installation. The gallery was filled with lush landscapes from the artfully designed video games of Boulder-based videogame developers Serenity Forge. Each piece looks like it could have been a painting so it’s truly amazing how far these games have come since the days of 8-bit pixels.
Inside the greenhouse was an entire tropical rainforest in miniature featuring a remarkable variety of exotic trees and flowers all under a gorgeously sleek glass dome. It was like walking through another planet compared to the drier more arid mountain climate outside.
One of the most interesting families of tropical plants were the Myrmecophytes, or Ant Plants. These funky bulbous pod-shaped plants live in symbiotic relationships with colonies of ants. The plants provide food and shelter for the ants, and the ants work like gardeners helping with pollination, dispersing seeds, bringing nutrients to the plants, and even fighting off potential predators. The weird connections and evolutionary balances between totally different lifeforms is really incredible.
One really unique feature of the green houses was the fully accessible Green Roof, the first of its kind in Denver. It also serves as a test garden, where the facilities can experiment to see what kinds of different and sometimes unexpected plants are able to live and thrive in Denver’s semi-arid climate. The resulting blend of grasses, flowers, and even cacti is vivid and surprising and the addition of the panoramic views over the rest of the gardens is just icing on the cake.
Walking down from the Green Roof, I was greeted by a swirling psychedelic art installation by architectural art collective Marc Fornes and Theverymany. It fills up the stairwell and filters light through hundreds of small flowery apertures, so the colors seem to morph and pop as you walk by it and catch it from different angles. It was surreal and beautiful.
Lastly for the greenhouse complex, there was a small pavilion of especially well curated and impressive tropical plants including orchids, bromeliads, and some of my personal favorites, carnivorous pitcher plants:
Back outside, the first garden I leisurely strolled by was a gorgeously colorful path of native flowers in all their summery glory.
These flowers were accompanied by some pixel-y representatiosn of native wildlife that plays an important part in pollinating them: Bats and Birds. I was so glad this was the special installation for my visit, because these sculptures are no longer there having been replaced with another artist’s work. I’m sure whatever’s there now is fantastic, but I like that my photos are just a lucky capturing of this one point in the gardens’ history where these weird pixely creatures were everywhere.
The next few gardens were internationally inspired, starting with the wonderfully rocky Steppe garden which featured plants from Central Asian, South African, Patagonian and North American Steppes. Interestingly the climates in those varied international regions are actually really similar to Denver’s despite the actual terrain being radically different. Because of this, some of the plants looked super familiar while others were totally exotic and it was a real treat.
Next up was one of the big highlights for me personally: the Bonsai Pavilion. This featured award winning tiny trees, groomed into such whimsically wild shapes and permutations. I have no idea how gardeners are able to this, but it is simply magical to look at and for a cool added layer, the museum specifically highlighted bonsais made from tree species native to Denver so it’s internationally inspired and local all at once.
The next garden was designed by celebrated Japanese garden architect Koichi Kawana and it was called the Shofu-en Garden which translates to “Garden of Pine and Wind”. It features some dazzling water features and over one hundred pines brought in from the foothills from the Rockies arranged and trimmed in such a way that they almost resemble giant bonsais, capturing an incredible blend of strength and delicacy. It made for such a sweet and lovely stroll, serene and eye-popping all at once.
The Shofu-en was home to two pixel sculptures, a stylized wave to pay tribute to the water and a perfectly simple and graceful floating piece of a couple staring deeply into each other’s eyes.
The next stretch of gardens was very welcome to this pale, pale boy as it was a very shady collection of giant ponderosa pines and aspens from the high altitude forests up in the Rockies. These plants normally grow at elevations ranging from 8,000-10,000 ft above sea level so just getting to walk through them without having to hike a mountain was a pretty special experience. Best of all there was a pretty good chance of seeing some native wildlife:
Next up was the Alpine Rock garden which feature impressively manicured rock formation, hundreds of international species of mountain wildflowers, and at least one slightly pixelated cactus.
It was an amazing garden, so I was very happy to see that they had their best man keeping an eye on things:
Things took a turn for the desert-y with the sweltering cactus and succulent house featuring dozens of much less pixel-y cacti. These are almost always some of my favorite plants to see because they’re so distinct and unusual, and while the whole place was fantastic this towering fella particularly knocked my socks off:
The next string of gardens were curated more to let the sheer diversity, color, and beauty of different varieties of popular flowers shine. There were lilies, irises, roses, lilacs, violets, and many more, and it was astounding to think all these shapes and hues just occur naturally.
The coolest thing I happened to just capture was a rose just on the verge of blooming. I’ve never seen grown my own roses, so I’ve never seen this particular transitional phase so it was kinda otherworldly looking but weirdly lovely.
These flower gardens were accompanied by some avian pixel sculptures including a pigeon and a more chickadee-like orange guy.
They also had some more traditional garden art including a fiery Chihuly glass sculpture and a more classical stone sculpture of a reclining child, both of which just added some emotional texture to the natural wonder around them.
The last garden I visited was a water garden called the Four Towers Pool, which features beautifully ethereal aquatic plants and four striking stone towers which recirculate the park's water and let it cascade in four powerful waterfalls. It’s super mesmerizing and hard to take your eyes off of.
The last feature of the gardens was the sleek, bizarre, and wonderful Science Pyramid. It looks like a space ship just crashed into the middle of the gardens, but inside it’s super welcoming and filled with fun games for kids to play and learn about botany, conservation, and all the science that goes into designing and maintaining a garden of this size. It was definitely skewed toward a younger crowd, but if my parents had brought me their when I was kid I probably wouldn’t have ever wanted to leave.
After the Botanic Gardens, I decided to check out one of the newest and most celebrated additions to the Denver museum landscape, the Clyfford Still Museum. The name Clyfford Still was totally unfamiliar to me, and I would assume that for most people who aren’t art historians he was far from a household name. His influence however is huge and far-reaching. He was in many ways one of the founding fathers of Abstract Expressionism, moving away from figurative drawings to more abstract paintings and seeking to purely express big themes and emotions with just bold lines and color combinations nearly ten years before some of his more famous peers like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock began to go in that direction. He was also a pretty fearless advocate for artists’ rights, and, just when he was on the verge of becoming a superstar of the 50s art world, he completely severed ties with commercial galleries, because he felt that they did a disservice to both artists and their art. He felt that art should not be commercialized and that it was dangerous to value an artist solely for how much they could sell for. He also felt that selling off individual pieces as opposed to showing complete exhibitions stripped the art of their context and power and in the 60s he moved to Maryland and completely left the art world behind. He continued to paint, and occasionally allowed museums, most notably the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to exhibit his works, but he did manage the pretty unprecedented feat of maintaining control and ownership of nearly 95% of all the art he ever produced. When Still died in 1980, his will stated that, barring a few pieces he left to his wife, his works would only be bequeathed to a United States city that was willing to build a permanent museum to house the entirety of his collection and preserve them to be viewed, studied, and displayed in exactly the way he would have liked with the catalog as a whole being the focus as opposed to any individual painting. Because of these pretty air-tight stipulations, the vast majority of Still’s oeuvre was never displayed for over 30 years (!) while different cities campaigned to be the beneficiary of this monumental collection. Still’s widow Patricia turned down many offers until awarding Denver the rights to Still’s estate and her own in 2004. The museum building was designed by architect Brad Cloepfil, and it is a phenomenal piece of minimalist art in its own right, and maybe the only brutalist looking building I might actually describe as pretty in its own weird way. The architect describes his idea for the museum as being inspired by “silence”. He felt that Still would not want a flashy gravity defying contemporary museum building (see the Denver Art Museum for that) so he carefully designed a building that would almost fade away into the background and not steal any of the spotlight from the art. Instead the building is actually perfectly calibrated to let in simply incredible amounts of natural light so that museum serves to let every piece be washed in a serene glow.
Inside, the museum opens with a wide-open, welcoming lobby and a short film explaining all the useful context I just tossed up in that previous paragraph. I will say having been through the museum that I really do feel the works speak for themselves, but having that context only adds to their value especially if you’re a tourist debating whether or not you want to dedicate an afternoon to a whole museum of exclusively works by someone you may never had heard of.
As you walk up the lobby stairs to the main exhibition, the museum fittingly opens with a tone-setting self portrait by Still, which showcases the artist’s knack for striking color contrasts and bold almost surreally elongated lines while also showing an almost playful acknowledgement of his own self-seriousness and pretentiousness. I think with any prominent abstract artist you really do have to almost justify why they’re not just some guy dicking around with random paint globs, and I think by opening with such a spectacular figurative painting that also seems to immediately preempt any criticisms of the artist by showing how self-aware he was is pretty brilliant. It’s like right out the gate you’re being told to leave any preconceptions at the door and just take the artist at face value which is really all he wanted.
Most of the exhibits were then arranged chronologically because Still felt that that all of his paintings were evolutions of the same themes, and that in seeing the progress from their most literal origins the more abstract pieces gain more depth and weigh. To illustrate the through-lines in Still’s work, the museum begins with a small orientation gallery which makes a compelling case for thematic and nebulous links between radically different works by showing a stunningly realized oil painting of a lone train conductor on a snowy day in Still’s native North Dakota next to a more simplified almost impressionistic train scene next to a totally abstract piece. The abstraction looks like an outlier until you notice that the colors actually roughly map to the same locations in every piece, and they all serve as mixture of sad isolated elements and really dynamic fiery elements. Without the middle piece, you might not make those connections but seen all together you see how much Still returned to the same imagery and themes over and over again reworking them in his vision at that moment. In these three works, the museum immediately makes a case for the benefit of showcasing an artist’s whole catalog as opposed to a single piece because each piece benefits and gains something from the inclusion of the others.
With that helpful introduction out of the way, we dove into the Still’s earliest works. These included simple line drawings from 1936 when he was fresh out of Art school and a prestigious residency at that Yaddo artists’ commune in Sarasota Springs where he got to work on his craft and expose himself to other young cutting edge thinkers and artists. Already at only 22 years of age, Still expresses a really unique artistic vision that I found striking even now 80 years later. He knowingly renders rural scenes of his youth, but neither realistically nor romantically developing his own melancholy visual language that exaggerates and distills the sadness and exhaustion of farm life without sacrificing any of the stoicism or grace. For such simple pieces, they’re hard not to get sucked into, and so quickly I had gone from never having heard of the guy to being so excited to see more.
After art school, Still spent his time working industrial jobs to fund his artistic pursuits, and he worked with other artists on a project to create portraits and landscapes documenting and capturing life on the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington State. These pieces reflect his artistic growth, with the colors and lines becoming stronger and more captivating, but also a growing disillusionment with the unspoken realties of the country during WWII from his exposures to poverty, discrimination, and mechanization. While the colors get lighter, the content of these more whimsical paintings get way darker with death and destruction looming large either through overt depictions or symbolism reflecting the war-time neuroses of the era. Throughout it all though there’s something I found so engrossing about the emotional expressiveness of his weird, gaunt, farmer avatars that was at once distilled to its simplest form and also exaggerated to ridiculous extremes.
My favorite pieces here skewed darker, but had such rich, creative brushwork foreshadowing Still’s eventual dedication to the technique without the figures. These included: a female and male nude rendered in somber, unflattering hues but with such a weirdly tender dignity that shines through nonetheless; a hauntingly gorgeous allegorical scene of four starving farmers preparing for a picnic in the shadow of their agricultural machinery with death just taking a quick peek at ‘em; and a wistful powerful portrait of a man holding a broom and thinking totally unreadable thoughts.
Starting in the late 30s early 40s, Still began taking these exaggerated human forms and stretching them further and further past recognizability to get to his weighty themes of alienation, death, pain, creation, and life. He began drawing on earlier, almost primeval influences, such as natural rock formations and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to create his own sort of visual vocabulary that was not necessarily to any one time or place. This is probably my personal favorite period of Still’s career because these pieces feature the wildly creative choices of his mature abstractions and the more easily graspable emotions of his figurative pieces. They also look like things that if they were found without any context might be used by conspiracy nuts to show how the Egyptians must have been guided by aliens. They don’t look like any one else’s work which makes me glad these hard to categorize pieces are getting their due because I’m sure these would be the ones to get overlooked by a more commercial system if Still hadn’t been such a stickler.
Starting in 1939-1940, Still made the artistic leap to pure abstractions. These early pieces are small, strange, and dark featuring mostly muted earth tones as if he wasn’t totally willing to abandon the rural scenes of his figurative work even as he moved away from the figures themselves. Maybe it’s just me, but I also see more human features and faces in the shapes of these paintings than I do in some of his later abstractions but without Still here I guess we can’t really know what’s his intention versus his viewers’ subconscious which I actually do think is kinda neat.
From the mid-40s until his withdrawal to Maryland, Still developed what the museum refers to as his “mature style” which features huge frameless canvases, vivid color combinations, and enigmatic undefinable shapes. While other expressionist pioneers like Rothko and Barnett Newman became famous for doing variations on similar shapes and patterns, Still is noted amongst critics for creating more unpredictable forms with nary a straight line in sight. They’re so strange, and again huge, that it’s hard not to get sort of sucked into them as Still’s color fields masterfully draw your eyes all over the canvas while your brain tries to make sense of them. They might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but you gotta admit that even today they don’t really look like anyone’s work.
I’m sure some people might argue that the works should be able to stand on their own merit without any explanation (and I’m sure a lot of people would also say that they do!), but I found it helpful that the museum provided some insight in Still’s artistic process because it doesn’t over-explain the works, but it does give you some key things to look out for and some enlightening facts about Still’s overwhelming commitment to controlling every aspect of his art. He went to such extremes as making his own paints so the colors would be exactly what he wanted and stretching and treating his own canvases with special glues so that they would be the exact size he wanted and wouldn’t allow the colors to bleed. That level of technical knowledge about so many different aspects of the painting craft blew me away, because now it seems like no matter how unique the actual art is the materials themselves are things that are commercially available. It was also fascinating to learn that he didn’t work with traditional brushes, but instead by moving around and shaping multiple layers of colors with paring knives and trowels. That helps give him those unique shapes and a weird dreamy sense of depth like you’re seeing some colors through “cuts” in the other colors because in some ways you are.
I think it’s the nature of abstract art that no matter what you’ll probably either like things or not based entirely on gut reactions, but knowing about the process can give you at least an appreciation of things that might not appeal to you aesthetically. The piece below is, for me, a classic example of something that if I just looked at in a museum would probably do absolutely nothing for me. From an uninformed eye, it honestly looks lazy, simple, and unimpressive. But knowing more about Still's techniques, I looked more at the scrape marks within the black paint, and what looks like a flat color actually becomes a swarm of barely perceptible forms. The hints of white, gray, and that single striking swoosh of orange almost imply that all those colors are just barely below the surface of all that black and actively trying to get out. The boring single color painting then becomes a really dynamic complete piece, but I don’t think I ever would have thought twice about it let alone gone through all that analysis if I’d seen it another museum. It makes for a pretty compelling argument for the benefit of displaying Still’s art the way he wanted it.
I think a big part of my willingness to give these pieces that extra layer of reflection really does come down to the unique architecture, which with its soft gray colors, low ceilings (very uncharacteristic of most contemporary art museums), and hundreds of circular windows letting in warm natural light really creates an amazing sense of calmness that permeates throughout the galleries. For extra peaceful escapism, the museum also features two terraces neatly tucked on either end of the museum that feature surprise grass and wildflower gardens thriving within the raked concrete. The natural world was such a major influence on Still’s artistic vision, it’s really cool that the museum is able to integrate it so seamlessly into its otherwise very artificial structure.
The next gallery featured works on paper from throughout the entirety of the artist’s career. Some pieces were sketches or studies for other works, while others were complete in their own right. Some were classic portraits and landscapes, while others were abstract forms, and still others were somewhere in between. These pieces were on the smaller side but taken together, it’s an incredible testament to the breadth and range of Still’s artistic versatility.
Of the works on paper, I was weirdly drawn to a series of pieces Still did with pastels that were minimalist even by his standards. They look like scribbles, but there’s something so meticulous about them that you really do get the impression that he’s trying in this super simplified way to see what new color combos and line forms he push himself to come up with. They’re really bizarre.
Looking at a larger work like this, though, you do see the weirdly academic nature of those scribbles because he’s completely applying the ideas he worked out through those small pieces on a larger more interesting scale:
As an interesting contrast, to these studies in Abstractions there was also a beautifully impressionist painting of a lonely railway car that Still made in 1927. Even at that early stage in his career (he was only 23), you see in his representation of smoke, clouds, and motions a fixation with the capabilities of bold, irregular lines.
The last few galleries were filled with the showstoppers. These pieces were monumental in size and featured the most unusual combinations of forms and colors yet, and many of them had never been exhibited until now! They were staggering and hypnotic, and I feel like no matter how you feel about abstract art at least one of these pieces will captivate you. There’s just such weird power and energy in them like there’s elemental forces trying to burst through the canvas. I was pretty skeptical of this museum, but I guess their mission was a success because I completely fell under the spell of this art.
After the main art galleries, there were just a few small ones more about Clyfford’s life back down on the first floor. These included photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and notes he saved that give some insight into his reclusive mind:
There was also a neat section about how the art is stored and preserved to hopefully help it survive for future generations. This was interesting from a technical level, but I was more excited that it also served as a sort of bonus gallery of a handful of cool pieces that weren’t currently on view in the main collection for some reason or another.
Lastly was some of Still’s original homemade paints. That’s just some next level attention to detail.
After the museum, I went a little less high-brow by checking out a quirky 80s themed antique store (I’m sure that the fact that things from the 80s are already being considered antiques makes everyone feel a little older than they’d like) called Fifty Two 80s. It was a wonderful haven of pop-culture, kitsch, and nostalgia that was like a sugar rush of familiar imagery after all those abstract paintings. Obviously my favorit parts were chairs modeled after characters from Pee-Wee’s Place and postcards where Mr. T sends greetings from Denver because both these things capture the perfect blend of goofy and heartfelt that’s right up my wheelhouse.
After all that, I recharged with a delicious and much needed glass of coffee from the incredibly chic and classy Corvus Coffee Roasters. The coffee was good and strong, and it came in such an unnecessarily fancy glass which I got a big kick out of.
Refueled, I made my way to Denver’s premier concert venue, the Red Rocks Amphitheater, which also doubles as visually stunning state park. It’s been home to the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, a Jethro Tull concert that devolved into riots and tear gas, and even the Blues Brothers. Unfortunately I got there just as the main park and theater were closing, so I had to merely contend my self with the sweeping, bright red vistas.
For dinner, I went to an American Indian restaurant called Tocabe because they had Indian tacos and that made me very excited. I felt like a real idiot for not seeking out Native American food (not counting Mexican-American cuisine) before now, but I was happy to finally rectify this. I went with the tacos obviously, which came with beans, cheddar cheese, lettuce, two kinds of salsa, and a meat of your choice on a bed of fluffy fried bread. For my meat and salsas, I went with braised shredded bison because who knows when I would be able to get that again with sweet corn and hominy salsas so I could try to be as authentic as I could. It was fantastic. Every flavor worked in perfect harmony, and goddamn that bread was amazing and totally addicting. I wish I had stockpiled it, because it’s really unfair to have to write about it and know I’m no longer within easy access of its goodness.
The night’s open mic was at a great little dive bar called Streets of London. I accidentally got there way too early, but the beers were cheap and I got to geek out with the bartender about how The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was all about Reagan which is weirdly true.
The host was a super funny and all around great guy named Matt Cobos, and when he first got there the bar was pretty empty except for the comics, but he reassured us that he had a good feeling about tonight and almost by divine intervention an entire party of tipsy lesbians came in as part of some bar crawl their friend group was doing and they decided to stay for the whole mic. It was surreal, but it made for a wicked fun night.
My favorite comic of the night was a guy named Phil Corridor, who had a real Mitch Hedberg-esque blend of laid back delivery and tight absurdist lines. Like Mitch, he just had a way of emphasizing unexpected phrases and syllables that made the already strong joke even funnier. My favorite lines included “Denver is known as the Queen City of the Plains. We’re also known as the Grandparent City of the Plains because we really need the moisture” and “I took a 23 and Me. Turns out I’m from Taco Bell.”
Other Highlights:
Matt Cobos: My dad just passed away. You learn 2 things about your friends. Which friends care you enough to hug you. And which friends smell like crap
Billy Jo Gillespie -animals raised with love taste the most delicious
Max Beesley- Dogs love chocolate I would know. I've had a lot of dogs.
Cindy Carrington- Yes Man would be a very different movie if it was Yes Woman
Jose Macaw- you ever accidentally go to the bad part of the internet
Pat - my dad worked in a Spencer's gifts... in hell
Natalia- guys will whip out their dicks with the confidence of a cat dropping a dead bird
My own set went pretty well, though honestly the crowd was just having so much fun that could have meant I did anywhere from just okay to great but everyone was having a good enough time that it didn’t really make a difference. It’s nice ending a day with that kind of happy energy.
Favorite Random Sightings: Shoe Carnival (not necessarily the most fun sounding carnival); Bird Shop (straight to the point); Dream Merchant (seems like an improbable business model); a bumper sticker that said “Marines fight to win” (nothing wrong with supporting the marines, but nobody fights to lose); Bombastic Plastic (no clue what they do, but I love a good rhyme); That Bang Place (hilarious name for a hair salon); Cowboba Steakhouse (I hope they don’t serve beef bubble tea); Denver Clone Store (this is just crazy)
Regional Observations: Turns out higher elevations totally change your alcohol tolerance, so be careful to pace yourself lest you get too loopy too quickly.
Albums Listened To: Under Color of Official Right by Protomartyr (funky spoken wordy post punk); Underground by Thelonious Monk (a classic); The Underside of Power by Algiers (a good album that unfortunately can’t help but feel like a bit of a let down after a phenomenal title track)
People’s Favorite Jokes:
What do you call an Irish guy who just sits on the porch? Patty O’Furniture
Songs of the Day:
I love how the singer, Joe Casey, looks about 20 years older than everyone else in the band. I think it’s part of their charm
a beautiful performance and tantrum from a real troubled genius
Such a powerful voice