TULSA, OK?
The mid-way stop on our span of the country was Tulsa, Oaklahoma, and if I had been pondering the top-drawer problems troubling the major cities in my life, this was a different kind of town. You could certainly smell a whiff of old oil money - perhaps that's why it reminded me of Bakersfield more than anything else - but one look told me that, for better or worse, it wasn't suffering from the rapacious real estate speculation that's become synonymous with city life to me in the last decade.
We hung out with these DJ kids who talked a lot about trying to create a scene in town, throwing parties, making things happen, but by their telling, this was a hefty challenge in this particular (quote: "old white Republican") cultural environment. They lived in a ramshackle old brick building which they claimed had once been a coffin factory, in a formerly blighted downtown area called the Pearl District (it was no longer the crack street it had evidently been in previous decades - but it was a far cry from Bushwick, or that boutique explosion I'd just seen in the center of the Bywater).
The ground floor of the coffin factory had been converted into a sizable venue space where beautifully-painted papier mache skeletons still hung around from the Dia de Los Muertos party they had thrown there most recently, and there was a gigantic backyard with a fire pit that I coveted. The wifi password in the building was "frontline105", 105 being the street address, and them not-so-jokingly referring to Tulsa as "the front line in the culture wars", considering themselves generals, I suppose.
They took us trespassing up on the rooftops above Cain's Ballroom, high above the city with a dollhouse skyline beyond.
And then, to an incredibly eerie totem, directly in front of the tallest building in Tulsa - which is a near-exact half-scale version of a New York WTC Tower - featuring planes haphazardly falling from the sky on one side, and on the other, rows of human figures who could be viewed as falling, whose outline looks like a strange kind of explosion cloud against the backdrop of the tower. Giant metal door-knocker fixtures on either side reverberate a crashing steely clang when rung, which sent chills down my spine as I backed away into the strange acoustic circle of the Center of the Universe.
On our way out of town, we stopped in to the Woody Guthrie museum, because I am a fan of his written-word style, really more than his music -- I was hoping they would have a lot of stuff like his New Year's resolutions on display. Unfortunately they offered precious few examples of his far-out painted letters or scribbles in lyric sheet margins, but of course, I snapped to attention reading about a topic that will probably always haunt me - how he expressed his feelings for two different women.
...And then, it was back to riding in the car, car, west, west, west.
We hung out with these DJ kids who talked a lot about trying to create a scene in town, throwing parties, making things happen, but by their telling, this was a hefty challenge in this particular (quote: "old white Republican") cultural environment. They lived in a ramshackle old brick building which they claimed had once been a coffin factory, in a formerly blighted downtown area called the Pearl District (it was no longer the crack street it had evidently been in previous decades - but it was a far cry from Bushwick, or that boutique explosion I'd just seen in the center of the Bywater).
The ground floor of the coffin factory had been converted into a sizable venue space where beautifully-painted papier mache skeletons still hung around from the Dia de Los Muertos party they had thrown there most recently, and there was a gigantic backyard with a fire pit that I coveted. The wifi password in the building was "frontline105", 105 being the street address, and them not-so-jokingly referring to Tulsa as "the front line in the culture wars", considering themselves generals, I suppose.
They took us trespassing up on the rooftops above Cain's Ballroom, high above the city with a dollhouse skyline beyond.
And then, to an incredibly eerie totem, directly in front of the tallest building in Tulsa - which is a near-exact half-scale version of a New York WTC Tower - featuring planes haphazardly falling from the sky on one side, and on the other, rows of human figures who could be viewed as falling, whose outline looks like a strange kind of explosion cloud against the backdrop of the tower. Giant metal door-knocker fixtures on either side reverberate a crashing steely clang when rung, which sent chills down my spine as I backed away into the strange acoustic circle of the Center of the Universe.
On our way out of town, we stopped in to the Woody Guthrie museum, because I am a fan of his written-word style, really more than his music -- I was hoping they would have a lot of stuff like his New Year's resolutions on display. Unfortunately they offered precious few examples of his far-out painted letters or scribbles in lyric sheet margins, but of course, I snapped to attention reading about a topic that will probably always haunt me - how he expressed his feelings for two different women.
...And then, it was back to riding in the car, car, west, west, west.