Denver: architecture and art

Most of H's family live in the exurban sprawl that joins Denver to other cities along the "front range" of the Rocky Mountains. As a result, I've been to Colorado numerous times over the past decade and a half, but never really gotten a chance to visit Denver as a city. My impression is that Denver is old, and urban, enough to still have some cool neighborhoods, but I've never seen them.

The one small bit of urban culture I've been able to fit in, both two years ago and also on this trip, is a trip to the Denver Art Museum. It is one of the cooler pieces of architecture I've seen in recent years. This time, I didn't take any pictures of the outside because I took a lot during our last visit in 2008 — imagine an angular spaceship with a long prow designed for breaking through space-ice or some such (the Wikipedia link above has a nice picture).

The angular addition is fairly new; I actually happened to read a review in the New Yorker a few months before our 2008 trip, which helped propel me there in the first place. The reviewer really liked the external features of the building, but complained that the odd shapes of the interior did not really lend themselves well to displaying much of the art.

The interior stairway is quite striking:



And many of the rooms actually provide a lot of wall space for hanging paintings — this one was awaiting installation, and gives you a sense of the space:


When I visited in 2008, I had to agree with the New Yorker reviewer. However, since then, I think they've gotten much better about finding art — especially installations — that work exceptionally well with the space. For example, these oversized kitchen knives, descending upon a doorway:


There was also an awesome installation that took up one odd-shaped room on the fourth floor:


The vein-like lines are, upon closer inspection, highways of various widths. They crawl all over the walls and ceiling:


And, my favorite part of the piece, tucked away in a corner that is not at all visible from the entrance to the room, a heart-like metropolis:


Another favorite installation was this red and gray installation of foxes and dinner tables:


Which was below a stairway and which you could walk through:


Finally, here's a couple of other cool buildings right around the museum. This one is, I think, the central Denver public library. It totally looks like it's made out of kids' building blocks:


And this one is, I think, high-end condos, built by the same architect as kind of a companion piece to the museum addition:

Gentrification: the second tier, as farce

Hipsters frequently play a vanguard role in gentrification. Sure, they seem harmless at first: the spiky-haired performance artist who just wants to deconstruct patriarchal settler colonialism, the quiet, intense bearded fellow who is obsessed with producing the finest artisanal small-batch sugared breakfast cereal, etc. But before you know it, the slightly run-down, funky neighborhood with cheap rents where they can follow their dream is filled up with trendy nightclubs, destination food spots and luxury condominiums.

This is what makes the "Old Market" neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska seem so odd. In the big stretch of land between where we know people we can stay with (roughly, the part of the country east of the Mississippi, with an outposts just west of the river in eastern Iowa) and where H's family lives (the front range in Colorado), we needed to stop for the night in a hotel. We splurged on a semi-fancy hotel near downtown Omaha because, between long rides in the car, we wanted to stay someplace where we could get out and take a nice walk and find some good food, without having to get back in the car. I'm generally against gentrification of urban cores, but if you're travelling through a city where you don't know anyone, it does make for a more pleasant evening than staying in a hotel just off the interstate and driving across the mega-parking-lot to TGI Friday's for dinner.

We did find a decent place to eat — the Upstream Brewing Company, where I had a delicious saison seasoned with black and pink peppercorns, with a hit of ginger. And the food wasn't bad either: H and I split a 10-oz. steak with a perfectly tiny amount of a tasty crème fraîche sauce, and the kids' meals were very reasonably priced — something like five bucks for a burger, fries, juice and root-beer float for dessert.

But the walking-around-the-Old-Market part was just a little bizarre. It was like the city fathers of Omaha had decided to just import New-York- or San-Francisco-style gentrification and plunk it down on a place that was, well, empty. It was a Disneyland theme park version of urban gentrification. I mean, there was still the "Old Mattress Factory Bar and Grill," which was in a building which I have no reason to doubt used to be a mattress factory at one point, but it pretty much looked like it had transitioned directly from one to the other. There was an artists' cooperative gallery, but all the art was mediocre-to-mildly-interesting stuff clearly designed for people looking to decorate their "luxury downtown condominiums" which were, in fact, being advertised as "Downtown Living." There was no trace of hipsterdom, just a strange attempt to seem vaguely like the new face of the Mission district (in fact, I overheard a conversation in which a woman was describing how she had moved to Omaha from San Francisco, though she still "split her time" between the two cities).

There was even less trace of there having ever been any poor or working-class people living in the area. In fact, the powers that be seemed so completely sure of their domination of the place that they had clearly not even invested in the massive police state required for true urban gentrification. When I walked from the hotel to some "Downtown Food Market" in the morning to find something for breakfast, there was a homeless man sleeping in plain view on the side of one of the (otherwise empty) plazas.

Gamelan

One of the few things I really enjoyed in college was playing in a Javanese gamelan ensemble. One of the colleges I went to, a small college in the Midwest of all places, actually had a full gamelan (made out of metal from a decommissioned ship, no less), and every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon during the two years I was there I crammed into a tiny room in the music building along with a bunch of other hippie-ish students, stepped carefully over the instruments which were packed in about as tightly as possible, and banged on loud pieces of metal for an hour or two (you can actually see a video of us performing with dancers on YouTube — well, you can see the dancers, and hear the gamelan orchestra, in which I would have been playing.

Anyway, since we were driving by, I thought I'd take the kids in to see the instruments, especially as S is now taking drum lessons and in general, likes to bang on things. The college has since built a much larger music building, so the instruments are laid out with much more space — safe to let a couple of kids around:

Midwest retail

For whatever reason, yesterday as we were driving through Wisconsin and Iowa, a lot of retail signs caught my fancy. Because, I mean, who could turn down eating at "Beef & Etc."?


And, let's just cut to the chase about what brings white people into Mexican restaurants:


The most impressive range of services was available at this laundromat in La Crosse:


And what could improve a meal like "pleasoning"


We went looking for creemees on the road in Iowa, and found their strangely colorful cousin, the "Flavor Burst," in Elkader:


And finally, I just couldn't resist taking a picture of this huge plastic strawberry in Strawberry Point (IA):

Wisconsin

Yesterday, we left Chicago for a trip through Wisconsin. First, we drove up to Madison, where H had spent several years in the early 90's pursuing an advanced degree in Sociology, otherwise known as "The Painful Elaboration of the Obvious." We visited the UW Sociology building, which had this lovely decor on the walls, "Man: Creator of Order and Disorder":


S practiced his TA section-leading skills:


After spending the bulk of the day in Madison, we drove up to the far north of the state to visit one of our friends, a former union organizer sister who now has a large organic garden and does some other odd jobs. Today, we went out on a canoe:


S found a big stick, and practiced his "Red Guard" stance:


For equity's sake, here's a picture of the older sister:


After an hour or so on the lake, we went hiking/tick gathering, and found this fascinating micro-ecosystem in a truck tire rut: