KS Day 6 - Botany, Biology, and Bars
Today started with a trip to a hip college coffee shop called The Bourgeois Pig, which was one of my favorite business names I’ve encountered. The cafe lived up to the name with sleek brick exterior, artsy interiors, and great craft coffee drinks. It was a perfect place to start my day.
Fueled up by vaguely socialist coffee, I made my way to check out the top notch museums on the University of Kansas campus. KU is massive, and an institution within the midwest for both academics and athletics. Notable alumni include: Wilt Chamberlain, Paul Rudd, Bob Dole, Scott Bakula, and Inigo Montoya himself, Mandy Patinkin (which would make for a very unusual dinner party) as well as a handful of Nobel laureates, MacArthur Fellows, and first round draft picks.
With all the clout the University has within the region, they were able to found some pretty darn impressive museums. I started with the Spencer Art Museum, which had an incredible special exhibit called Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World which explored different ways artists old and new have used plants as subjects, inspiration, and even material in an exploration of the role humans play in the natural world. It was a beautiful blend of art and science.
The exhibit began in a wide open lobby bookended by massive installations by the artist Sandy Winters. To the left, she had a piece entitled Long Day’s Journey Into Night which feature images of plant/animal/machine hybrids swirling through a blend of collage, paint and drawings on plywood, aluminum, and black paper. The piece was both very creepy yet oddly beautiful as the art and the medium worked together to suggest a weird future synergy between the natural and the artificial. To the right was a piece entitled The Signal and the Noise which featured a gorgeously dreamlike mix of paintings and woodblock prints of small strange mechanical scenes superimposed across an immersive forest scene. I really hadn’t seen anything quite like her work before, but together the two pieces really shaped the tone of the room, enveloping you in the strange and unusual possibilities of plant-like forms.
Between the two Winters installations, the lobby was filled with super creative contemporary art which used really original mediums and styles to bring real and imagined plants to new life. Highlights included: a spooky series of photos by Anaïs Tondeur of radiated plants that have grown up in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the years since the nuclear meltdown; pretty but seemingly innocuous photos by Eduardo Kac of a petunia that was actually a plant hybrid that had been spliced with the artist’s own DNA as a conceptual piece about the interplay of humans meddling with nature; extraordinary carvings of flowers and animals also by Eduardo Kac made out of seed packets; a triptych of schematic drawings for mechanical flowers by Justin Amrhein; dense and elegant still-lifes of endangered plants and animals by Isabella Kirkland; and immaculately crafted models of what a post-human world would look like with crumbling architecture being reclaimed by different plants built and photographed by Lori Nix.
For sheer strangeness, I loved these two giant prints by an Indian artist named Rohini Devasher entitled Chimera and Archetype. The vaguely disturbing creations were made by using images of animals in the former and exotic plants in the latter and reassembling the familiar images into recognizably plant shaped organisms that were at once hugely off-putting but oddly familiar.
One last pleasant surprise in this stretch of gallery was an impressively tall photographic print by Jim Richardson of the entire complex root structure of common wheat grass which simply and perfectly encapsulates the idiom of there being more beneath the surface:
I took a brief break from the botany to do a quick pass through the museum’s collection of contemporary works on paper. These included lithographs, woodcuts, watercolors, posters, comics, and even cute sculptures of teeny tiny chairs. Each piece was so strange and vibrant in its own way, proof that sometimes great art comes in small packages.
My favorite pieces here included: a screen print by Brian Sailer entitled Daddy Likes the Lawn Neat and Trim which has the hazy feel of of faded photograph or a childhood memory; a piece by Chris Duncan called the Sound of Paper featuring a working record complete with album and sleeve art all entirely made on printed paper (!); a funny, minimalist piece by Cary Leibowitz entitled “I have a crush on you/ thanks” which captures a lot of personality and emotions associated with middle school romance with just two rectangles; a charmingly strange woodcut of Adam, Eve, and a skeleton by Nancy Palmeri fantastically titled "Always Wear a Clean Fig Leaf”; a trippy optical illusion of a woodcut by the excellently named artist Carl Fudge; and a bizarre but cute childlike print by Chris Johanson of a parade of abstract forms, bugs, and a person sweetly calling out “Can I say something nice to you about something nice that someone told me?”
After this brief diversion through the works on paper, it was back to Big Botany. The next room featured a truly amazing series by an artist named Andrew Raftery (that was also the name of one of my friends from high school band who might have been the only kid in town paler than I am) called Autobiography of a Garden on 12 Engraved Plates. The series features different scenes from a year spent tending a garden all rendered in jaw-dropping detail across twelve transferware plates. I have no clue how the artist was able to get such rich, fully realized images onto dinnerware, but it was incredible with each plate looking like a portal into a different worlds.
The next series was a sweet collection of works by Laurence Aegerter called Healing Plants for Hurt Landscapes in which the artist took photos of natural and man-made disasters and layered on different plants known for their medicinal properties thus creating new more hopeful images of soothing beauty where once there was pain and destruction.
The next gallery was surprisingly fascinating, bringing together dozens of drawings from early books on plant biology and morphology. Because there was no means of simply photographing the plants at the times these books were written, the drawings had to strive for a scientific level of accuracy so that they could be used for teaching and learning. It was a really wonderful mix of art, science, and history, providing both lovely art and insight into older ways of disseminating knowledge.
After the old books, there was a gallery of plant photographs ranging from sleek contemporary prints to some of the earliest cyanotypes from plant lovers of the past. I was mostly just impressed by how strange you can make anything, even as normal as a leaf, look if you get zoom right up to it or mess with the lighting.
Next up was botanical works on paper, capturing both fantastical etchings of fairytale forests and more modern abstract collages of different printmaking techniques. In both cases, the attention to details was just bonkers.
Lastly (for this floor) were some plant inspired pieces from more varied mediums. Highlights here included some William Morris designed wallpaper that really was beautiful even if it would look insane to have in your house and Grateful Dead posters with weirdly sperm-like interpretations of the natural world which I still liked a lot more than their music.
Perhaps the most unusual piece was a nondescript print by Katie Paterson called Future Library Certificate. The piece serves as a certificate for a larger more involved project combining art, literature, ecology, and technology. The Future Library consists of one thousand trees planted in Nordmarka, Norway which will be harvested in one hundred years and used to print a series of 100 never before published novels. Certificates like this one can be purchased to help support the century-long project and entitle buyers to copies of every set of books made from these trees. Until 2114 when the project reaches its close, every spring a different writer will bestow their commissioned manuscript to the Future Library Trust in special ceremonies held in Nordmarka. I have no idea if they’ll be able to sustain the whole project for 94 more years but I do love that they’re trying.
Finished with the first floor of the museum, I made my way to the second floor and was greet by some dazzling Chihuly’s in the stairwell:
The second floor began with a special exhibition called the Object Speaks, which arranged various art objects from around the world to highlight different cultures’ artistic styles, craftsmanship, and use of materials. So often these pieces would be separated into different galleries either by geography or time, but here seeing each sculpture side by side made it more clear how universal certain themes are with death, glory, and beauty perhaps the most constant.
One of the most bizarre pieces which seemed to bring all of these themes together was the super creepy but gorgeously carved Et Toujours! Et Jamais! by Pierre Eugene Emile Hebert in which a spooky skeleton caresses a nude woman.
Not all the pieces were sculptural, and along the walls were various paintings and drawings highlighting how even traditional art can be used as object for religious, personal, political, or aesthetic purposes.
Somewhere in between the sculptures and the paintings was a giant plexiglass Pop Art foot by Tom Wesselmann. I can’t tell if I love it or hate it, but it certainly made an impression.
Next up was the museum’s modern and contemporary wing which was arranged salon style to engulf the viewer and overwhelm their senses. It was a truly fantastic collection, so I may have gone overboard with my highlights but in a way it helps recreate actually walking through the dizzying gallery. My favorites included: a beautifully textured abstract piece by Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick; a seemingly playful sculpture called the Impending Future Bus by Randy Regier which evokes children’s toys and the 1950’s aesthetic idea of the future while the decision to fill the bus with all dark skinned passengers minus one light skinned guy all the way in the back hints at the racial tensions and failures of the 20th century; a pop art explosion of Japanese and American cartoon imagery by Roger Shimomura; a collage of abstract paint and sampled renaissance imagery called Geo by Ivan Fortushniak; a striking sculpture by George Segal called Girl on a Chair featuring a stark plaster half-torso on bright red wooden chair tucked into a shadowbox; Harvey Dinnerstein’s moody somber painting of an otherworldly boat ride entitled Nocturnal Passage; a funny and vibrant surrealist piece by JP Mika of himself painting scenes of urban Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo as they leap right off the canvas; some slice of life domestic scenes from contemporary Haitian artists Max Gerbier and Wilson Bigaud; a dreamy symbolist piece by Rockwell Kent called Man, the Abyss; a wonderfully bizarre painting by Irving Norman of businessman/ car hybrids zooming endlessly on an infinite highway; some silkscreens and sculptures by Andy Warhol; an impressively gross pile of porcelain babies by Xu Hongbo called Clones 07-4; a hauntingly lonely religious scene by Rafael Coronel called Santa Loca; an insanely detailed scale model of the artist’s two-story London townhouse complete with sleek miniature furniture by Yinka Shonibare; a gleefully silly absurdist piece by Pop-Art pioneer Peter Saul of a businessman slowly dissociating into a series of pipes and a toilet in a satirical psychologically rich child’s scrawl; a glossy, polychrome fiberglass chair futuristically designed by Wendell Castle; a luminous Cubist pastoral scene by Albert Bloch called Winter; a charming realist urban scene of a young woman playing hopscotch alone in Brooklyn by Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi; a mysterious impressionist scene by Paul Wonner of a nude woman holding flowers and staring into a mirror; a playfully strange painting by Robert Vickrey called Gulls and Gliders of a young boy sending a toy glider over a rocky cliff; an elegant glass arrangement by my boy Dale Chihuly; lovely impressionist landscape scenes by Anna Boberg and Nellie Knopf; a simple soothing, ceramic sculpture of a feminine form by Alexander Archipenko entitled Meditation; a serene landscape scene by Bertram Hartman (what a name) that is low key super weird thanks to its combination of nude women and flamingos; and lastly a pleasantly expressive diptych by Georgia O’Keeffe of solitary leaves floating on the breeze.
After making my way through the huge salon gallery, the next collection was a special focus on miniature sculptures and crafts from artists from Asia. It was at least 1/10th the size of the previous gallery but lacked none of the richness or diversity of artistic styles.
Accompanying these small sculptures was an incredible painting by Chinese artist Du Kun called the Zen Temple of Techno which features the likeness of a contemporary electronic musician, Julia Govor, done in the style of traditional Buddhist temples in a gorgeous blending of old and new.
Next up was the Spencer’s European art collection, which featured works from medieval times (not the restaurant) up through the 19th century. The thing that really made these pieces for me was the combination of absolutely stunning landscapes with truly bizarre interpretations of the human body (and at least one far too giant fish).
The paintings were accompanied by equally impressive three dimensional works including metal engravings, ceramics, mosaics, crafts, and sculptures:
From there, I managed to circle back into more of The Object Speaks with more amazing sculptural pieces. Highlights for me here included: a beautiful jar covered in sweetly goofy dinosaurs by William Pacheco; a shockingly rich and detailed game table of unknown European origin featuring beautifully carved and inlaid wood from around the world; a meditative sculpture and video combo respectively entitled Heaven II by Sueharu Fukami made of glimmering, angular, porcelain and The Moon by U Sunok featuring a peaceful loop of the lunar cycle projected in miniature and reflected by the sculpture the below; the incredible and precarious Translated Vase by Korean artist, Yeesookyung who took discarded fragments from other ceramicists and melded them together into something bigger, stranger, and more oddly beautiful than whatever they would have been originally; an interactive musical sculpture by Harry Bertoia, which seems like a simple abstract pattern until you realize that visitors are encouraged to gently tap the brass rods so that they clang together to make a gently soothing sound like a windchime; and lastly the jaw dropping illusion of Wendell Castle’s Hanging in the Balance which features what appears to be a brass chair balancing on a pillow, but the pillow is actually made entirely of wood meticulously carved to deceive the eye.
Next was a small but gorgeous special exhibit called This Land, which featured American Art related in some way to the West. The landscapes were particularly magnificent, but it was also really cool to see canonical American greats like Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Hart Benton next to more contemporary and abstract pieces still wrestling with ideas of national identity. It’s also cool to have abstract pieces here, since the abstract expressionist movement borrowed heavily from Native American art and quilting which were largely ignored due to the race and genders of the associated artist so its nice to have those roots thematically acknowledged. Also just as a fun aside, Thomas Hart Benton was Jackson Pollock’s teacher and one of the guys playing an instrument in the fourth piece on the top row was modeled after him.
After this gallery, I had to take a quick bathroom break so I asked the security guard for directions and they were very discreet about things:
Up next was another gallery of pieces from Big Botany featuring more mind-blowing plant art. Highlights here included: two incredible pieces by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey where through a complex photosynthetic process they implanted photo-negatives of Dakota access pipeline protestors onto developing seed grass so the grass grew into the shades of the photographic image in cool interplay of nature honoring people honoring nature; a gorgeously strange and lavishly detailed painting of Christ being taken down from the cross painted by Dutch master’s workshop; and an insanely creative staged photo called the King of Weeds by Richard Selesnick and Nicholas Kahn featuring a man bedecked in moss and flowers to embody a spirit of the fields.
Next was some really cool black and white works one paper. I particularly liked these surreal visual journals of stray images from days in the artist’s life called the Herkimer Suite by José Antonio Suárez Londoño and a quietly powerful portrait of MLK by John Woodrow Wilson.
Last but far from least was a fascinating gallery celebrating contemporary quilt making by male artists. Beyond just shaking up gender expectations, each quilt was also in some way paying homage to the artist’s family and ancestral roots to real celebrate the diverse backgrounds of a pretty overlooked group of artist. The ability to recreate full portraits as well as incredibly intricate patterns just blew me away and I really had no clue just how much was possible within the medium.
Naturally my favorite piece was the most aggressive thing I’ve ever seen in soft fabric, a piece called I’m Fed Up by Marvin Crum:
Complimenting the quilts was a beautiful marble bust by Kehinde Wiley called St. Francis of Adelaide calling to mind Renaissance art but with distinctly contemporary Black models. Even without the positive politically-charged overtones, it’s just such a damn pretty piece of art.
Outside the museum was a sleek and funky experimental piece by Mathias Kessler called After Nature, which features a green where the plants are hooked up to a complex series of sensors that analyze their need for water, food, or sunlight and a computer program in the center generates a robot voice that tells you how to give the plants what they need. It’s kind of creepy that computer software is able to do this, but it’s also so cool to be able to literally give voice to the voiceless.
After the museum, I enjoyed some fresh air and impressive stone architecture on the University’s surprisingly green and lovely campus.
I was trying to find my next university museum, but I ended up getting lost and walking through various campus buildings. Sometimes the best things in life come from getting lost though and I don’t think I will ever be able to read the name of this antique steam whistle I stumbled across without laughing:
On a slightly creepier note, I also stumbled into a room filled with vintage Jayhawk merchandise which really ran the full gamut from adorable to hellish:
Finally my wandering took me the KU Naturally History Museum, which really blew me away perhaps for some unfair reasons. As a state that prominently fought against evolution being taught in schools, Kansas doesn’t exactly have the most stellar reputation as a place of science at least among us snobby New Englanders, but naturally painting with broad strokes leads you to overlook a lot of hardworking intellectuals and scientists throughout the state. I can now pretty confidently say that this is one of the finest science museums I’ve been to in the country and it was a valuable lesson in not making assumptions.
All that being said, I am sorry in advance that I began with the Museum’s exhibit called Bugtown which featured a hugely impressive but also exceptionally gross collection of exotic bugs from around the world. The diversity of shapes, colors, and impressive natural adaptations in these creepy crawlies was really something to behold, and the fact that they make up such a big part of life on earth does make them valuable to study and understand, but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s just something about ‘em that makes me go “Yuck”. One’s mind can only be opened so much I suppose, and I apologize in advance to my mum for this next batch of pictures:
On the other end of the spectrum, the next room featured a magnificently beautiful hanging garden that combined fossils of prehistoric plants, such as clubmosses and ferns, with their living relatives putting a really pretty gloss on a fascinating tale of evolutionary adaptation. I think it really shows how much creative curation can give stereotypically boring topics like plant biology a real wow factor that actually makes you excited to learn more and see what it’s all about.
Next up was an expansive hall of fossils. We began in the early cenozoic with early plant and shell fossils gradually evolving into beastly sea monsters. I had no idea that in prehistoric times Kansas was largely underwater despite being currently landlocked, so a pretty shocking number of these fossils were actually discovered locally!
I then skipped ahead a couple million years for a hall of mammal fossils featuring early relatives of hippos, horses, elephants, bears, and more! It’s really cool that while prehistoric lizards went from being massive behemoths to their mostly tiny modern counterparts, a lot of the mammals we now think of as pretty hulking once started out as teeny little critters scurrying around in the underbrush to hide from terrifying dinos and they didn’t start bulking up until the coast was clear. While, it’s good for humans that mammals were able to grow and evolve, I do think it would have been super cute if we still had little mini-elephants running around.
The most shocking thing to me in this exhibit though was the fact that any animal was ever just walking around with over ten feet of horns on their head. While I’m sure it was very intimidating, it also must have been deeply inconvenient and these guys must have been poking each other literally all the time.
A lot of the fossil displays were also accompanied by models and paintings, imagining what these primordial worlds may have looked like in full color and I was a big fan of how creepy the artists were willing to go. Land Before Time this was not:
Next I leapt back into the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, which were peak Dinosaurs roaming the Earth times. Here I was impressed as always by the sheer size of things like Triceratops heads and Pterodactyl wings, but I was also just delighted by how goofy ancient turtles looked which was a pleasant discovery I hadn’t quite experienced in similar fossil galleries:
Next was a hall of fossils that give hints into the lives of these big fellas, including fossilized footprints, teeth, poo, and even one particularly giant tree stump. While none of these incomplete pictures, can tell you what a full animal or plant looked like they can tell scientists all sorts of things about what they ate, how they socialized, and what the world was like so long ago.
Traveling upstairs to the next floor of exhibits, the stairwell was decked out with incredible award-winning nature photographs from around the world. I loved that these pieces really captured the majesty of nature without sacrificing how plain silly it can be sometimes.
The next exhibit was a neat bit of much more recent history documenting the University’s efforts to preserve twelve grotesques masterfully carved in 1900 by Joseph Roblado Frazee that used to adorn the roof of the building. The gargoyles, while fantastically crafted, feature just a hilariously strange mix of exotic animals that were never really meant to squat. Naturally I loved them.
The rest of the floor was dominated by one of the crown jewels of the museum collection: The Panorama. First created in 1892 by explorer and naturalist Lewis Lindsay Dych, the Panorama feature an immersive 360 degree display intended to fit all the world’s ecosystems under one roof. Still stunning 120 years later, at the time it was first unveiled it was downright revolutionary, showing many people for the very first time the sheer diversity of life and landscapes on earth and taking great care to create tableus that showed animals how they actually live in their natural habitat which had never actually been done before let alone at this scale. It’s really a special piece, a perfect blend of art and science, and it’s so easy to just sort of get lost wandering from scene to scene.
Going up to the next floor of galleries, I admired the museum’s commitment to freaking you out with this spooky prehistoric sea creature that looks like something straight out mythology:
The special exhibit was all about current (now two year old, whoops I’m a slow writer) breakthroughs in evolutionary science and it was just insane to learn about.
The first display was slightly terrifying because it was about how HIV is able to evolve at alarmingly rapid rates because of the way the virus reproduces. A single virus can reproduce over a billion times in a single day, and if all those copies are also reproducing at that rate the exponential accumulation is staggering. Moreover HIV reproduces “sloppily” encoding thousands of genetic mutations in each future generation. It’s this aspect that has made the virus so resistant to treatment, because no matter how well a vaccine works usually one of these thousands of variants just happens to be resistant by chance and then within hours it’s able to reproduce a million more treatment resistant viruses enacting out natural selection at freakish speeds. Thankfully, because of herculean work done to combat this virus, scientists have been able to learn so much about genetics in real time and even if this particular virus remains elusive to treat that knowledge is a powerful tool against such similar dangerous microbes.
On a much lighter note, the next display featured an important discovery that has helped provide proof for one of my favorite evolutionary theories. Scientists have long thought that because of evidence from carbon dating and the similarity between bone structures, our current aquatic mammals like whales and dolphins are actually descended from former land mammals that adapted to life at sea over millions of years. Were this to be true, there should have been evidence of a “transitional whale”, a whale like creature that still spent time on land (which is insane to imagine). Hard evidence of this missing link remained elusive however until in 2001 a Paleontologist named Philip Gingerich discovered the fossilized ankle of a creature called Rodhocetus near modern day Pakistan. Analysis of the bones suggested that it could be used mainly for paddling to keep the hefty creature afloat and swimming but was also well suited for waddling on land thus providing physical evidence that these theoretical land leviathans really did strut their stuff on land and sea.
The next display was about the incredible ways different species interact and co-evolve. This was illustrated by a sophisticated symbiotic web featuring ants that have actually developed a way of essentially farming and cultivating crops of fungi. The ants bring leaves to feed the fungus, which the fungus then breaks into nutrient rich food for the ants. Like human farmers, the ants also protect their crop from pests that would do their fungus harm. Bacteria growing on the ants produce antibodies that attack the pests, and in this way the bacteria, the ants, and the fungus have evolved in such a way as to exist in a mutually beneficial harmony. It’s wild that such complex interactions are happening at such small scales.
I moved on from the Evolution displays to a gallery of incredible high resolution photographs which revealed hidden worlds of the animal kingdom by bringing great focus on microbes, insects, and the inner workings of different species via dyed x-rays. It’s funny how things you might see every day look like alien creatures when you see them from these up close and personal angles.
Next was an artfully arranged display of petri dishes filled with different molds and fungi to highlight the diversity and various uses of life forms that are often written off as gross and harmful:
Next was the museum’s Bee Tree, a living Bee Colony housed in an artificial tree with windows cut into revealing all the various processes that bees put into building and maintaining a hive. Honey bees are the official state insect of Kansas, and I was absolutely floored to learn that between the honey they make and the plants they pollinate, bees are integrally connected to nearly a full third of all food consumed by humans. It’s just wild how important these little workers are to life as we know it.
Next up was the Hall of Biodiversity which focuses on highlighting all the not-so-prehistoric varieties of lifeforms all over the world. The taxidermy is a little creepy to be sure, but the sheer breadth of the exhibit is unbelievable. The world is just so much bigger than just us humans.
The most interesting specimens to me were a platypus which had scissor marks on the bill after a British scientist saw it for the firm time and tried to disprove the “hoax” by cutting off what he assumed was a sewn on bill (can you really blame him?) and an unusual cottontail rabbit with benign tumors that may have contributed to common myths about “horned rabbits” that pop up throughout the plains.
The museum even had some live animal displays mostly consisting of terrariums for local snakes (sorry Dad) and lizards. It was hugely impressive and slightly terrifying how well these critters were able to camouflage into their surroundings.
And last but not least was a collection of pieces documenting human history in the Great Plains with some incredible early pottery from different Native American tribes in the regions.
Unrelated to the museum’s fantastic collection, I was also delighted by some wonderful overheard comments from other visitors. At one point, I yawned (because some time had passed since my morning coffee) and a little girl turned to her mom and said, “Momma, that guy’s tired” with a noticeable tone of shock. Then later in the gift shop I heard a bemused mom say to the cashier after seeing her son’s choice of stuffed animals, “I guess we’re buying snakes now”.
Walking back to my car, I really liked the the aesthetics of the University’s Spooner Library and their motto, “Whoso findeth wisdom, findeth life”
After a pretty full day exploring, I got some dinner and drinks at the local staple Free State Brewing Company. This lively brewpub has a real friendly atmosphere and from what I can tell is pretty equally regarded for their food and their brews. For my entree, I got chicken and pasta and pesto, and I thought the chicken and accompanying focaccia bread were really excellent even if the pesto might have been a little dominant for my personal tastes. They’re also not an Italian restaurant so based on how well they did the chicken, I’m assuming if I’d gone with a heartier more traditional pub food I would not have been disappointed so that’s a little bit what I get for making an odd request at 5 pm. The beer however hand was uniformly great. I got a flight of their oatmeal stout, golden ale, a seasonal blood orange radler, and an amber ale that claims to be the first beer brewed in Kansas, the Ad Astra. The lighter beers were refreshing, the stout was creamy and tasty, and the Ad Astra took the cake with a rich full bodied malty flavor and easy drinkability.
It was actually a very warm summer day, one of my first on the road, so to celebrate (the flight might have influenced me) I got some dessert at one of Lawrence’s favorite local ice cream parlors: Sylas And Maddy’s Homemade Ice Cream. Everything their is made from scratch, and it’s truly an embarrassment of ice cream riches with over 60 flavors ranging from all the classics to more out there offerings like Key Lime Pie and Green Apple Sherbert. I went with a twist on a classic called the Peanut Butter Freak which featured freckled peanut butter, chocolate, and crushed Reese’s Peanut Butter cups in a homemade waffle cone. It was one of the finest ice creams I’ve ever had and the perfect addition to a warm summer’s day. Even better, at the bottom of every waffle cone is a surprise malt ball! I was really living, man.
After taking a brief ice cream induced nap, I ventured back out for evening coffee and writing at a hip spot called the Java Break which must be a godsend to college students thanks to late hours, a cozy welcoming space, delicious coffee and baked goods, and a fully stocked cereal bar for when you just need some cinnamon toast crunch to get you through to finals.
Re-energized, I made my way to a fun local sports bar called Conroy’s Pub for the night’s open mic. I accidentally showed up way too early so I was very happy when suddenly other comics (and a surprisingly good amount of normal people) started filling and it turned out to be a really great mic.
Perhaps because we both shared an out of towner bond, my favorite comic of the night was a guy traveling through from Ann Arbor named Erich Laux who was a sharp writer and a gifted story-teller who really made me laugh with his travel stories. My favorites lines included: “I was in Germany and people got mad at me for the Trump election. Like they've never elected a terrible leader” and “I spent 10 days in Brazil and got into two car accidents and I never drove once”
Other highlights:
Peter (the host, I did a bad job catching last names sadly) People say you dance you like you fuck. For me that’s a Square dance because there’s always 7 other people and a guy yelling at you in a loud speaker
Malachi Schwartz- The very hungry caterpillar has some plot holes in the middle
Harry Proctor- I know I'm too high and standing too long in the grocery store if I've seen the same person pass me three times.
Tanashi- I like to put my finger over the negative sign on my bank account so I can say “yay I have $140.”
Mikey Pokorny- Do you think horses have real names? And they just get annoyed at the weird shit we call them.
Cody Liddenburger- My mom said she had ovarian cancer and my aunt said "Oh, I don't like that"
My own set was a lot of fun because I got heckled every step of the way for my bit about why I don’t like mayonnaise by a drunk white who refused to hear any ill spoken about her favorite condiment. Because it was more of a small crowd though, I was able to riff and roll with her comments so it actually did feel more loose and fun then disruptive. This is not to endorse heckling all the time, but once and a while it’s good to have someone keeping me on my toes and forcing me to really live in the moment and not just go through the motions on stage. When I wasn’t besmirching, the good name of mayo everything else seemed to land pretty well and I had a lot of fun chatting and hanging out with the other comics throughout the night. There’s no better way to end the night than that.
Favorite Random Sightings: Game Nut (I don’t know if it’s hunting or board games but this guy’s still a nut); Unusual Treasures (refreshingly honest); Sushi with Gusto (the thing most sushi lacks); Waxman Candles (i would trust a wax man on candles)
Regional Observations: Maybe I just didn’t get to see the other towns I visited on a weekend, but Lawrence is definitely the liveliest KS city I’ve been to thus far.
Album’s Listened To: Waiting for Columbus by Little Feat (an excellent live album with some horrifying album art)
Peoples Favorite Jokes (from the web):
Cop: I’m arresting you for illegally downloading the entire Wikipedia.
Man: Wait! I can explain everything.
Song of the Day:
I never knew that 90% of Little Feat had played with Frank Zappa which probably explains why they were one of the first country-ish bands I really enjoyed