CO Day 6 - Metal, Meteorology, and Mighty Fine Comedy
Today I started out by going back to Sonder Coffee and Tea partly because it was so close to my Air BnB but mostly because they had some of the most purely tasty coffee drinks in town. I didn’t go for a fancy one like last time and just got a simple but great iced coffee.
With caffeine flowing through my veins, I bid Denver a fond farewell after spending the better part of the week there. My first stop of the day was a unique and special public art installation in Fort Collins called the Swetsville Zoo.
The Swetsville Zoo like a real zoo features dozens of animals, but unlike a real zoo they are whimsically sculpted out of pieces of scrap metal. The zoo is the brainchild of artist Bill Swets, who started the project on his family farm in 1985 as something to do while struggling with insomnia. Swets had no formal arts training but he made a little bird out of scrap metal and it really captured his imagination. He kept having ideas for more and more whimsical creatures, and he would shape and weld whatever metal he had around to bring these visions to life. Soon his little menagerie grew into a 200 sculpture strong park, beautifully curated amongst the lush greeneries of the farm. As an interesting historical sidenote, the farm also happens to be one of the only sites on US soil ever bombed by a foreign power as it was hit by one of the few balloon bombs sent by the Japanese military over the Pacific Gulf Stream during WWII that actually made it all the way over. The zoo was filled with every kind of animal real and imaginary that you could think of as well as science fiction machinery and all kinds of round little metal men going about their business. It was deeply odd but sort of magical, and I can see why it’s been a popular family tourist site in the area these past 30 years.
My favorite pieces tended to feature the little men because they had such remarkably expressive faces for just being hunks of junk. My personal highlights were: a Humpty Dumpty-esque scene; two jolly fisherman; a biker on one hell of a chopper; a grumpy looking gunslinger; a chubby guy inexplicably saying “Monica, Monica who?”'; a big goofy dog made from the back of a bus; a teeny fisherman with a disproportionately hefty equipment; a spidery Volkswagon; and a man taking his dinosaur for a walk.
After the zoo, I made my way to Boulder, a major Colorado city I hadn’t been to yet and the home of tonight’s comedy show. I started out by getting some good local coffee at a classy cafe called Ozo Coffee Roasters which has a reputation as one of the best roasters in the city which I felt like they more than lived up to.
Fueled up, my next stop was the Dairy Arts Center. Rather than having anything to do with milk or cream, it is in fact the largest multi-disciplinary arts center in the city and the name derives from the site previously housing a milk processing facility. They pride themselves on offering a space to showcase all genres of art with galleries for stationary pieces and a big theater for film and performance pieces. It’s also a really sleek and pretty building with lots of glass and wood giving everything a cool glow.
All the galleries up while I was there were interested in intersections between art and nature, but despite similar themes the different artists’ approaches were all radically different. The first gallery really blew me away, and it featured collaborative works by the artistic team of Roger Asay and Rebecca Davis. The exhibition was entitled Wood & Stone, Substance & Spirit, and it featured beautiful sculptural pieces utilizing raw, unaltered stones and wood arranged in striking enigmatic tableaus. From a distance they look like abstract paintings, but when you get up close and realize it’s all sticks and stones barely touched by the artists’ hands it’s like a magic trick that focuses your attention on how nature can be amorphous and uniform all at once. Each stone is individual and unique, but they can be arranged by colors to create perfectly crisp, solid rectangles. Most of these collages are relatively simple but strangely fascinating. While these pieces let their simplicity highlight the natural elements, they are joined by more wildly complex sculptural pieces featuring carefully cut twigs in branches arranged in totem like sculptures that improbably stand up tall highlighting the artistic capabilities of their creators.
To me, the most breathtaking examples of these sculptures were perfect spheres made from Juniper branches. I have no earthly idea how they manage to hold together, but it was just stunning.
The next gallery featured photographs by David Bahr of forest fires both controlled and wild. The artist is an award-winning nature photographer who became drawn to the many contradictions of a burning forest. On the one hand, the fires can be terrifying and destructive but they are also a necessary part of the life cycle of large forests bringing renewal and nutrients. I’m not sure how the artist managed to get so near to these bursts of heat and energy, but I’ve never seen such close up, high quality still images of fire in the wild. The blend of shocking red and orange flames, green leaves, and misty smoke and dust is so hauntingly gorgeous.
For whatever reason, this picture of just flames really sucked me in, and I just couldn’t look away. Something about the image is like capturing chaos frozen in time.
While the other galleries all used nature directly, Marietta Leis’ Melting used solid colors and irregular framing techniques to reduce nature to its most elemental forms. The pieces were inspired by melting ice flows viewed from Antarctic boat tours, and while they’re abstract they really capture the essence of the frozen subject matter.
My next stop was to Boulder’s Flatiron Cliffs to see the Mesa Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. If that sounds awfully fancy and official, it is, but they also have free galleries for tourists and traveling comedians to check out so you don’t have to have a degree in atmospheric science to visit. Even if they didn’t allow visitors though, it would have been totally worth visiting if only to see the incredible Anasazi-inspired architecture designed by internationally celebrated Architect I.M. Pei. This thoroughly modernist building completed in 1967 was his first major solo outing and helped rocket him to world-acclaim. While the design is really artistically beautiful, it’s also surprisingly functional and thematically rich. The elements of design borrowed from cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde were intended to let the building blend in with and not disturb the nature around it, almost making the laboratory seem to spring from the Earth like the nearby sandstone cliffs. He even used special hammering techniques and dyes to give the concrete of the buildings the exact same color and texture of the Flatiron cliffs.
The more Modernist cubist influences might seem much less practical, but there was a method to Pei’s madness and the maze-like structure complete with long open walkways between towers was actually designed to encourage (and let’s be honest, force) interactions and encounters among scientific colleagues aiding an environment of community and collaboration. Type-A researchers who might otherwise be inclined to just work long hours alone in their lab or office are given no choice by the building but to move around and meet their colleagues if only in passing. It’s pretty brilliant, and I would never have considered that the shape of a building could increase or decrease the incentive for teamwork. Plus standing in the central area between all the towers and just taking in all the ways the sleek geometric lines of the building create beautiful frames for the surrounding nature is incredibly powerful.
To make the interaction between the buildings and the nature less subtle, there was also a stunningly green garden terrace area that must be the best possible lunch spot for scientists in the spring and summer seasons.
Inside the building, the first gallery, unsurprisingly, was about all that wild architecture giving visitors a breakdown of all things I just gushed over and showcasing the man behind it all with what must have been his most adorable headshot:
My favorite part of this introductory gallery though was the zoomed out scale model which gives you a bird’s eye view of the lab and surrounding regions that might otherwise not be possible without a small aircraft.
After discussing the building itself, it was time to dive into what they actually do there. The Lab has been one of the leading centers for research on climate, weather, pollution, and even space in the country since it opened its doors in 1967, research that is unfortunately only becoming more and more relevant. The first exhibit was dedicated to the all the complex relationships between the sun and Earth that shape our every days. Some of things the sun does are obvious like providing heat and light, but other connections are less well known like the effects of magnetism and storms on the sun on our own planet. It’s easy to think of the sun as a monolith, a single ever present ball of light, but in reality its surface is dynamic going through as many changes in “weather” as we do. This was illustrated by simply breathtaking photos taken with specialized cameras of both the surface of the sun directly and some of the incredible indirect effect of our star on Earth. It might seem like common knowledge that it’s not a good idea to look directly at the sun, but thank goodness these researchers didn’t take that to heart.
You can tell the building was designed in the 60s because encompassing all these galleries was a wonderfully Yellow Submarine-esque mural depicting atmospheric forces in the most psychedelic way possible, man.
The second floor galleries were largely dedicated to the effects of climate change. It’s a shame that they even have to feel like they need to prove it’s a real thing, but prove it they do with deeply unsettling facts and figures about water tables, ozone layers, global temperatures, melting ice caps, and dying green lands. It’s devastating news, but admirably the gallery is far from defeatist ending with simple calls to action of what can be done going forward to mitigate the damage already done and also adaptations that can be made at every societal level to make things better going forward.
The next galleries were much more light-hearted, providing visitors interactive pieces and experiments that they could play with to help learn about clouds. It reminded me a lot of the Museum of Science in Boston which was a big part of my childhood, so I big dumb nostalgic smile on my face fanning clouds, making twisters, and creating weather patterns.
Lastly one of the most fascinating items on display was a plaster cast of an ice core drilled from Greenland. Based on the bands of Ice in the core, Scientists are able to glean information about temperature, CO2 levels, and atmospheric conditions going back over 16,000 years. The deeper they drill the further back those icy timelines go. It’s pretty incredibly how what looks like just a big chunk of ice can actually tell a pretty rich and full historic story if you know how to read it.
After checking out all the galleries, I let the scientists go back to work, and just did some little hikes around the Flatirons. The researchers really couldn’t have asked for a prettier location.
After all that science, I was feeling pretty hungry so I made my way to Boulder’s Avery Brewing Company taproom for a delicious fried chicken sandwich on cheesy sourdough with a side of heavenly mashed potatoes. It was deliciously hearty pub food, complimented by a flight of tasty local brews. I got the Radler (a house lager blended with fresh lemonade), the Cloud 9 (a wheat beer with orange and vanilla flavor), and a coffee stout. The stout was obviously my favorite, but I gotta admit the lighter fare had real refreshing summer vibes and excellent flavor profiles.
The night’s comedy was hosted at the super cute Trident Booksellers and Cafe (which is weirdly enough the name of one my favorite coffeshop/bookstores in Boston). The host, the super funny Ursula Mains, had seen me at an earlier mic in the week and asked if Id like to do her show, so I jumped at this great opportunity. It was my first booked showcase in a while though, so I was a little nervous because I’d be doing more time on a lineup of much more seasoned local and traveling comics. My nerves were calmed though by just how damn nice and funny all the other comics were before the show even started. It also didn’t hurt that we were doing the show on the venue’s back patio and it was the perfect summer evening weather for such a thing.
The audience filled in nicely with a small but happy crowd, and every comic knocked it out of the park. Because they were all so good, I’ll just share a line or two from everyone that particularly cracked me up because I wouldn’t be able to pick a favorite.
Ursula Mains- I'll be your absent minded host. “Hell hath no fury,” said someone with a lisp
Erik von Reicher (from Kansas)- I met a woman named Furby but she was in her late 20s so she had that name before the toy came out! (he also did a parody song of Love by Nat King Cole called Lust which besides being super clever was also a showcase of his shockingly good singing voice)
Patrick Scott- Smoking resin is like running out of food and then licking the dirty dishes
Tobias Livingston- Whole Foods is now sponsoring MMA all cage free fighters. Autism runs in my family… well not so much runs as rocks back and forth a lot
Anthony Bartolo- I used to have a serious gambling problem. I recently gambled on a liberal arts degree. A hoarder broke up with me and now she's dating a UPS delivery guy. He has something I don't… Boxes
My own set went really well which was a huge confidence boost, since I didn’t embarrass myself in front of all these great comics. I got to do just a little under ten minutes, which let me tell a couple longer stories I don’t usually do which, and it was nice knowing the punchlines still hit even though they were a little out of practice. After the show, I just hung out on the pation chatting with the comics, sharing stories, and getting some really good advice from Tobias and Anthony and some solid Kansas recommendations for my upcoming week from Eric. It was already basically a perfect night, but then Ursula came back out after squaring things with the venue and I actually got paid in both a little gas money and bagels. I was over the moon (if this sounds sarcastic, you have no idea how good those bagels were).
Favorite Random Sightings: Split Rail Fence Company (I question the structural integrity of these fences); "Breakfast in and dinner too” (what a jovially unimpressive motto); Colorado Can o’ Bliss (you know this dispensary was so proud of this pun); Snarf Sandwiches (makes me think of ThunderCats)
Regional Observations: Given the huge True Crime boom, I’m really happy to report that Boulder hasn’t tried to do anything too overtly touristy with the Jon-Benet Ramsey house.
Albums Listened To: God’s Favorite Customer by Father John Misty (a great return to form after the ambitious but overextended Pure Comedy); Vampire Weekend by Vampire Weekend (just A-Punk); Van Morrison at the Movies by Van Morrison (a solid collection of Van songs that were prominently featured in various films); Vaudeville Villain by Viktor Vaughn (one of MF Doom’s many aliases, an amazing and weird time traveling crime saga)
People’s Favorite Jokes: none today but one from the web-
I was at a museum, and I asked a worker there if we were allowed to take pictures.
He told me “no, they have to stay on the walls.”
Songs of the Day:
weirdly mesmerizing
very catchy
Feat. a weird Irish Language breakdown
the wordplay here is just ridiculous