North Dakota Day 1 - Movie Memorabilia, Museums, and Missile Silos
Today I started out by getting some good coffee at the intensely named Young Blood Coffee. Contrary to the gory name, it had a really cute and homey aesthetic inside to complement the excellent coffee.
After getting my morning caffeine fix, I made my way to one of spots I was most excited to see in the whole state: the Fargo Morehead Visitor Center. Why was I so excited to see a small town visitor center? Because they had the original wood-chipper where Steve Buscemi was fictionally disposed of in the movie Fargo, one of my all time favorites. Despite being linked to a shocking bit of film violence, the wood-chipper has become such a popular tourist site that they’ve added a mannequin leg with a gym sock on it to better bring the film to life. I think it’s so funny that there must have at some point been a town council meeting about whether or not to put a leg in the wood-chipper which is adorably surreal. Adding to the surreal nature of the visitor center, they also sold Wood-Chipper brand wine and there were cute local paintings of a body being put in a wood-chipper on the walls. It was delightfully dark, but I was happy to see the town embrace the movie that put them on most people’s map rather than trying to distance themselves from it.
After getting my Coen Brothers fanboy out, I drove an hour and half north to the wonderfully named town of Grand Forks for my next few stops of the day. One of my fellow tuba players from my college band grew up in North Dakota, and he recommended that if I visited Grand Forks I had to go to Grand Junction Grilled Subs because that was where all the cool kids in high school went for lunch whenever they had a half day. I got the appeal because they hit that sweet spot of being quick and tasty but noticeably higher quality than any fast food sub shops. I went with a chicken parmesan sub on delicious grilled french bread. It was a great lunch, and it was nice to finally feel like a cool high school kid.
After lunch, my next stop in Grand Forks was the North Dakota Museum of Art which was a gorgeous red brick building nestled into the University of North Dakota campus. It wasn’t the biggest museum in the world, but it sure cut a pretty picture:
The main exhibit while I was visiting was a collection stunning photographs by the artist Lynn Geesaman. Geesaman had degrees in math and physics from Wellesley, and she only got into photography later in life. Her mathematical background shows through in the geometric compositions of her works which look like amazing modernist paintings almost more than photographs. It also doesn’t hurt that she found insanely beautiful gardens to document which would have looked great even if she didn’t have such a unique artistic eye.
These pictures of long stretches of trees in particular really blew me away because they had a super, surreal dreamy quality to them. I don’t know how she was able to achieve such a gauzy misty texture, but the way that colors and shapes blend together was really phenomenal.
I don’t know enough about physics or optics to know exactly how she did this, but Lynn first achieved acclaim for ability to create the illusion three-dimensionality in her early black-and-white photographs by using a technique called chiaroscuro which refers to the manipulation of light and shadow. There is just so much depth and texture to these photographs you feel like you could just get sucked right into them. Such an amazing talent.
The other primary exhibit up while I was there was a permanent installation called Barton’s Place, which is a full recreation of the late artist Barton Lidice Bene’s New York apartment which he left to the museum. Barton was an influential conceptual artist and a vocal AIDS activist. He became famous for using found objects to sculpt elaborate visual puns and metaphors and creating small reliquaries to friends, loved ones, and celebrities. He achieved a great deal of notoriety in the 90s (well in to his third decade as a professional artist) for creating art that featured his own blood. Barton had been living with AIDS since 1986, and he wanted to interrogate the stigma surrounding AIDS with art that was at once silly and confrontational. His first gallery showing of this series was called Lethal Weapons and featured pieces that used his blood in various creative ways. Pieces included a child’s squirt gun that had a syringe filled with blood sticking out of it, a vial of holy water mixed with his blood, and syringe that had had been outfitted with the wings and tail from a model airplane set. Each piece was odd and unique, and sometime quite funny, but also served as very real reminders of a disease that had killed millions and would eventually kill the artist. Visitors were often deeply uncomfortable with these pieces causing galleries and museums to have to constantly disinfect the spaces to ease people’s minds even though every piece was housed in homemade glass cases and any risk was incredibly minimal. That discomfort and response was in a way a big part of the project. Barton knew this would make people uncomfortable, but discomfort with AIDS and discomfort with queerness had led to the abysmal handling of the crisis and the continued stigmatization of those living with HIV/AIDS and he wanted to push past that. I really admired that for all the panic these pieces caused (you can see them and other pieces of his here on the website of an Arts/HIV organization that Barton was on the board of for years) many of these pieces had a real playfulness to them, and I think that mixture of humor and hope in the face of death and disease were more encompassing of the actual humanity at the center of HIV/AIDS narratives.
I hadn’t known much about Barton before visiting the museum, but I was happy to learn about his story and knowing that so many of his works utilized found objects made seeing his apartment make a lot more sense. Every inch of this tiny recreated New York apartment was filled with oddities, antiques, and art from Barton’s travels. He was a particular aficionado and admirer of traditional African art and ancient sculptures sit side by side with kitsch and taxidermy showing the sheer joy he took in finding and collecting things. It’s a wild space that feels like a macro-sized version of one of his assemblages, and it was a real treat to peek inside and see what treasures you could find.
I liked that nestled amongst the eclectic collections was Barton’s little home studio with some small weird pieces up on the wall. You get the feeling like he was just always fascinated with objects and how you could use them in different ways. None of these pieces or pieces to be are necessarily my favorites of his, but I like the insight into his mind of him literally just mounting things up on the wall to see what they’ll look like. It’s a fun peek inside the absurd creative process.
After Barton’s Place, there was supposed to be another room of Lynn Geesaman’s photographs, but they were still setting it up and not all of the pieces had been hung up yet so they were just sitting on the ground leaned up against the wall. Seeing beautiful works of art just casually on the floor was super surreal so it just made me that little bit happier to see them.
There was one more Lynn Geesaman piece tucked into the stairwell and I liked that this photo of trees was right under windows looking out over trees so for a hot second you can’t tell what’s real or not.
While not technically part of an exhibit, the museum’s gift shop had some fantastic glass and ceramic pieces for sale that really showed off the craftsmanship and talent of local artists and artisans and made for fun window shopping because even if I had the money for it beautiful, fragile glassware isn’t exactly the best thing to keep in your car for a multi-week road trip.
After the main exhibits, I went down to the museum’s cafe to get a nice coffee for the next leg of my day’s travels. One advantage of being part of an art museum was that art on the walls was of a particularly high quality.
My favorite part though was that all the seating had this wild gnome art like it came out of some German fairytale. I have no clue why this is, but I loved it very much.
Outside the museum, I walked around the peaceful, green campus (it was summer so not a lot of students bustling ‘round). I came across this cute abstract family and their very geometric home, a sculpture fittingly called Green Family at Home by a Hungarian steel sculptor named Richard Szeitz, and it’s gentle weirdness made smile.
The next big stop of the day was a giant tonal 180 as I drove out to see some of the last remaining fully preserved Minute Man Missile launching sites. The Minute Man project was born from Cold War anxiety in 1962 as a defense system against potential nuclear strike from the Soviet Union. Following the Mutually Assured Destruction brand of defense, the Minute Man missiles were hundreds of lightweight nuclear missiles planted throughout the plains and prairies and Montana, Missouri, Wyoming, and the Dakotas that could be launched within minutes (like their namesake Revolutionary War soldiers) if Russia decided to try anything frisky. The fact that at the height of the Cold War there were over 1000 nuclear weapons buried throughout the heartland and ready to be launched at a moment’s notice is deeply chilling, and it’s hard to fathom just how many times we’ve been on the verge a mass nuclear holocaust since essentially 1945. I started out by visiting a missile silo that was spookily nondescript for something that once held weapons of mass destruction. It was just tucked into a field I was driving by, totally blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. When I took the picture on the left, I did get excited thinking that the top of the missile just poked out of the earth like a shark’s fin, but it turned out to just be a vent. Nowadays this particular silo has been filled in with concrete, but some of the decommissioned missile silos have been repurposed as junk storage facilities and one was even turned into an Air BnB that sounds absolyely nuts.
My next stop was the best preserved historic Minute Man launch center and facility in the country (I say historic because there are actually at least 400 still functional Minute Man sites throughout the country): The Oscar-Zero Minuteman Missile Alert Facility and November-33 Launch Site in Cooperstown. The facility was operational from 1965-1997, and in 2009 the State Historical opened it up to the public as the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site. Visitors get to take a tour of the topside facility where the site’s personnel spent their daily lives as well as the underground launch control station. My tour was just my guide, one other visitor, and me. My guide was a sweetly awkward local college interning at the site, and the other guy was apparently a missile tourist who was really interested in missile sites around the country and was doing a road trip to see a bunch of them. We were an interesting crew. At the start of the tour, I was primarily blown away by how the designers of the late 70s and early 80s really seemed to put their all into making every room, even at a nuclear weapons facility, look exactly like the waiting room at a suburban dentist’s office:
Truly the thing that stood out the most in the topside facility was just how mundane it all was, nuclear warfare in wood paneling and beige wallpaper. Looking at the staff bedrooms, it feels more like you’re in an old college dorm or a motel rather than a military site. The only giveaway of the site’s real purpose is that all the closets had gun racks so that firearms were never too far away in the case of an emergency.
Adding to the motel vibes, the site had a very continental breakfast style dining area and a kitchen with four chefs doing their best to turn military rations into fine dining. As well as serving topside crew, cooks had to bring food down to the soldiers in the launch command center which meant passing multiple security checkpoints and having to remember changing codes to get in. This put them at some of the highest military security clearance cooks in the world, which is a wild concept.
I like that cheese is always spelled “chz” highly efficient
A big highlight for me was all the vintage ads and art adding dorky character to the facility. Again the waiting room vibes were really strong, and there was such an artificially suburban Leave It to Beaver aesthetic for a place that could in theory wipe out major Russian cities at the press of a button. It was deeply surreal, but very indicative of Cold War America really wanting to pretend that everything was fine despite massive evidence to the contrary.
Next up was the security station where armed military personnel kept constant vigilance over the grounds. The station was equipped with charmingly antiquated computers that must have been top of the line at the time, and a simple low tech solution to make sure there were no accidental discharges while officers cleaned their guns. They just stuck the guns into big heavy barrels so that even if a stray shot got off it wouldn’t go anywhere. It seemed a little silly, but even if there was a pretty low likelihood of trained soldiers just letting off random rounds by accident I guess I understand the appeal of not wanting to take any chance at all with nuclear warheads in the general vicinity. Contrary to the film Red Dawn (which is shockingly not a documentary), the security teams rarely had to deal with anything more extreme than animals wandering onto the grounds and tripping an alarm, and the craziest intruders came in the form of some camels that had escaped from a nearby zoo and ended up on one of the Minute Man stations in South Dakota. That must have been an absolute shock to both the soldier and the camels.
I highly doubt that the Children’s Television Workshop approved of this, but I do understand that with a facility named Oscar-Zero it must have just been too tempting not to use a particularly grouchy mascot for some of the guide materials on the tour:
With that, we started making our way underground to the actual Launch Control Center. There was only one elevator so in the meantime we waited in this particularly drab mustard colored corridor. The idea of people getting bored waiting for the elevator to take them to the missile launch center really reinforces the mundanity of it all, that something crazy and exciting for visitors and history buffs was just some people’s 9 to 5.
Riding the elevator down to the underground control center was a great experience straight out of science fiction and it was all deeply surreal.
The science fiction-y feel of it all was heightened by the fact that the command center was behind giant metal blast doors so that even if somehow people captured the top side facility it would be nearly impossible to get to the missile commands if they locked themselves in. They were the most heavy duty doors I think I’ve ever seen.
The launch center was a treasure trove of vintage technology with various early computers, communication systems, weather monitors, and of course devices for targeting and launching missiles. Two soldiers would lock themselves in here for 24 hour, 36, or 40 hour shifts, and they would have to be on constant vigilance, monitoring weather conditions, communicating with other launch centers, running drills, and generally being alert in the eventuality that World War III was about to start. It seems all at once highly stressful and mind-numbingly dull, and I loved a particularly fitting description put in a 1963 article in the Saturday Evening Post saying, "....the job required a reliable, stable, intelligent officer who could be counted on to fire the Minuteman in the chaos of nuclear combat—and not before. But the more intelligent the man, the quicker he would be bored by the capsule routine." What a nice way of saying, the military needed people smart but not so smart they figured out what a shit gig they were were signing up for. That being said, some officers very smartly used their downtime locked in the launch center to study for master’s degrees so clearly some people are much more efficient at handling boredom than others, and maybe being locked underground for a day or two is a great motivator for finishing your homework on time.
I was delighted to learn that pop culture had not led me astray and it was in fact true that in order to launch any missiles the two soldiers in the station really did have to turn their two keys simultaneously. It really is a pretty brilliant failsafe mechanism stopping any one person from having too much power to do frightening damage, and proof that sometimes just because a solution is simple doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good one.
The most mind-blowing thing to me though was a note on the refrigerator saying to label food or it was fair game. It’s the kind of thing that is pretty common in any shared office space, but this is so far removed from a normal office space that it seemed crazy to think that even with the fate of the world in your hands you still have to worry about your dumb co-worker eating your snacks. It’s extra wild to think that for the most part it was only just two guys in there at a time, so the absolute gall of someone sitting in a locked missile command center with you for hours and then eating your food without asking is unfathomable. There’s definitely a golden sitcom here waiting to be made.
Other big highlights for me came in the form of artwork doodled and painted by soldiers who clearly were bored out of their goddamn minds. Some of it was actually quite good though, and I liked that a recurring theme seemed to be drawing cartoon characters in air force uniforms.
The official, not previously copy-written, mascot of the facility was a Viking because they were warriors of the North and this was a pretty northern war facility. Hilariously though, the original mascot was a sugar beet because it was local, but I guess people like it simply wasn’t intimidating or masculine enough so they voted to change it. I’m not sure they made the right call…
In the closet of the launch command center, they had some classic uniforms hanging up. I’m not sure if there’s a reason behind them going with a onesie type article of clothing (maybe efficiency?) but I was happy that they went with that decision. Also my photo is disappointingly blurry, but the artwork on the patches was really great.
Going back up to the topside facility, the question of how people managed to work this job without going insane was answered a little bit with a visit to the entertainment center complete with ping pong, foosball, and all the hottest VHS tapes you could possibly want. I wish I got a better inventory of their viewing options because I’m sure it’s a crazy snapshot of 80s pop cultural sensibilities but alas I’ll just have to imagine soldiers passing the time at a nuclear launch site eagerly watching such box office hits of the decade as Twins starring Arnold Schwartzegger and Danny DeVito (which was the fifth highest grossing movie the year, a wild fact I learned making this dumb joke. Truly the world was a really different place not all that long ago).
Walking around outside the facility, they sadly didn’t have any actual missiles to look at, but the giant launch door was an imposing sight all on its own. Also you get a great view of just how wide open all the land around the base is, which never gets any less crazy no matter how much time I spend in the plains.
After my visit to Oscar-Zero, I made my way back to Fargo (just a short 1.5 hour drive) and started walking around it’s really cool downtown area. I was particularly fond of the grand retro signage of their local arthouse theater (where my tinder date from the night before was learning how to be a projectionist), and I was just a teensy bit sad I didn’t have time to stop in and take in a film. It looks like they were playing First Reformed, an excellent religious and environmentalist riff on writer-director Paul Schrader’s own legendary Taxi Driver (with heavy nods to Bergman), that would have been fun to watch on a big screen.
Instead of supporting indie cinema, my destination was much more gloriously self indulgent. I went to the amazing local burger chain, JL Beers for some good beef and beer like a good Mid-Westerner. I actually was so thoroughly engrossed in my burger that I didn’t photograph it, so the picture below is a random stock photo from the internet that does capture the inherent beauty of their patties. The burgers are massive, flavorful, and all under $10 which really puts the high-end $15+ burgers popular on the East Coast to shame. I had to get a burger called the Mount Mushmore complete with a heaping helping of sautéed mushrooms. It was perfect. For beer, I went with a local Irish Red from Drekker Breweng Company called the Broken Rudder which was a good malty, easy drinking beer, an excellent complement to the meal.
From there, I made my way to a great bar called Dempsey’s Public House (with truly dangerous rum specials) where tonight’s open mic would be happening. I got there a little too early, and I was worried I was in the wrong place because there was a small local jazz combo playing for a sweet group of older folks. There was one younger Black guy in the crowd and he cut a rug with all the old white ladies, dancing up an adorable storm and it was such a warm introduction to the night, which the bartender assured me would have comedy eventually.
And indeed, there was comedy! This was a fantastic intro to the Fargo scene which, for such a small town, was one of the finest local scenes I came across. Comedians were strong writers, people will were willing to go along with more out there material, and in true mid-west fashion everyone was still somehow actually nice and friendly. I had a great time, and after every mic this week I would just end up hanging out and chatting with local comics which made me feel really welcomed immediately.
My favorite comic of the night was a guy named John Narum, who in addition to being a really talented comic had had actually also been on America’s Got Talent for his Yo-Yo skills. I didn’t know this, because I went up before him and I told a joke that slightly makes funs of yo-yos and it got the most uproarious reaction it ever got because everyone was just waiting for his response. He didn’t disappoint and before going into his set, he called me out and then just did some really cool yo-yo tricks. It was awesome, and a fun sign that there were no hard feelings over a very silly joke that happened to have been weirdly relevant in this one bar in North Dakota. His whole set was great, but my favorite bit was “A guy asked me if I was a Mexican and I said, Nah I'm Filipino. He said, ‘Good we don't like them around here.’ So I said, ‘that must be really hard... to hate a race you can't identify’”
Other highlights:
David Standel- I got too drunk and drove home which I'm ashamed of especially since I walked to the bar
Christian Leach- *he did a pretty solid impression of Steve Irwin encountering the shocking people you might find at Walmart*
Mark Wang- Have you ever been to a drinking fountain? Either nothing happens or even worse, a lot happens
Barb Allen- I decided to embrace the body positivity movement and I stripped down naked in front of the full length mirror. I'm not welcome in that furniture store anymore
Kendall Carey- I like wearing birkenstocks in public because it tells guys right away I don't shave my pubes.
Chase Raeder- Don't snort suppositories. You're gonna have a shitty time
Minus, my unintentional yo-yo faux pas (a phrase I really never imagined writing), my own set went over really well and I don’t think I really could have asked for a finer introduction to the scene or a better end to my first full day in the state.
Favorite Random Sightings: Happy Joe's Pizza (sounds right to me); Chainsaw Dave (I love how little specificity there is as to what he does with the chainsaw); A very nerdy license place designed with Tetris blocks all around the license; and an anti-abortion billboard that said “A nation that kills its own children is a nation without hope” seemingly totally unaware of the irony that it was only a few miles from a military base
Regional Observations: The actual town of Fargo is so barely featured in the film of the same name, that I really wasn’t prepared for what a cool, bustling, little city it was. 10/10 would recommend, not in fact a snowy wasteland
Albums Listened To: XXX by Danny Brown (some unrelenting rap equal parts hilarious and harrowing); Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco (probably their most iconic album) The Yardbirds Ultimate [Disc 2] by the Yardbirds (some classic 60s blues rock from the band that launched the most famous British guitarists in classic rock); Yellow Moon by the Neville Brothers (great New Orleans funk)
Joke of the Day:
A guy is 86 years old and loves to fish. He was sitting in his boat the other day when he heard a voice say,
"Pick me up."
He looked around and couldn't see any one. He thought he was dreaming when he heard the voice say again,
"Pick me up." He looked in the water and there, floating on the top was a frog.
The man said, "Are you talking to me?"
The frog said, "Yes, I'm talking to you. Pick me up. Then, kiss me and I'll turn into the most beautiful woman you have ever seen. I'll make sure that all your friends are envious and jealous because you will have me as your bride."
The man looked at the frog for a short time, reached over, picked it up carefully, and placed it in his front breast pocket.
Then the frog said, "What, are you nuts? Didn't you hear what I said? I said kiss me and I will be your beautiful bride."
He opened his pocket, looked at the frog and said,
"Nah, at my age I'd rather have a talking frog."
Songs of the Day:
the beat he’s rapping over feels like it’s right off a Tom Waits album
a real pretty version
some fun footage of baby Jeff Beck
Such a sweet voice doesn’t look like it should come out of such a big man