Tag Archives: American Folklore Society

A Touch of Tulsa

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Conferences can take you to places you never had any ambition to visit otherwise. I have to admit, Tulsa, Oklahoma was not one of my top destinations around the U.S., but since the annual American Folklore Society meetings were held there last week (and as a steadfast folklorist I try never to miss AFS), It was the place to be.

Besides the 1921 tragedy of the Greenwood neighborhood, which I learned a lot more about, and as the home of the Woody Guthrie Center, which I visited, I didn’t really know what to expect of Tulsa. I was pleasantly surprised by its very walkable downtown, Art Deco flourishes, and very nice eating establishments.

Of course, one has to steal moments away from the conference paper sessions, forums, meetings and presentations to explore the city at all. It’s all too tempting to stay inside the hotel and not see anything past the meeting rooms and hallways, with occasional forays to forage for sustenance. But, having traveled all that way, I was determined to get out and about.

A highlight of the “out and about” was a visit to the Philbrook Museum, thanks to a friend of a friend who is a Tulsa native and drove us there, since it is a ways from downtown. This stately mansion formerly the home of the Phillips family (as in, Phillips Petroleum) houses three stories of a very eclectic art collection inside, and beautiful gardens outside. On the way there and back we saw many lovely neighborhoods, parks, and the riverside, all of which I wished I had time to explore.

In conclusion, I might need to visit Tulsa again someday to see the things I missed. Meanwhile, here are some photos of what I did see and do!

Downtown Tulsa boasts a number of snappy Art Deco buildings, which are lit up at night.
Tulsa is also chock full of murals, many of them more colorful than this one on the side of the Woody Guthrie Center. But this one is quite striking.
Folklorists always have to document what they are eating. My friend Lucy and I had a Caribbean feast for late lunch/early dinner at Sisserou’s.
For some reason I did not fully understand even after I read the explanation, the Bob Dylan Center is also in Tulsa, right next to the Woody Guthrie Center. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…? I liked their use of archival boxes in one display.
Autumn splendor in the Philbrook garden. Lots of butterflies and bees in the almost too warm weather.
Least the spendor of the house, museum and gardens prove too much, a humble log cabin has been reconstructed on the grounds of the Philbrook as well. With an artistic twist, of course. If you look closely, you’ll see this “fireplace” is totally constructed from books! And the ceiling is festooned with recycled glass lighting fixtures. “Chinking” is fabric treated with some sort of glue/acrylic. Super cool use of repurposed materials!
The final night of the conference, we were invited to a Native American stomp dance which took place in the cavernous space which is the ballroom. You are not allowed to dance unless invited by a community member, so we just observed, but it was interesting to watch the community using the ballroom for this event, which is traditionally, we were told, done out of doors.

Minneapolis, A Breath of Fresh Air

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When folklorists go to our annual American Folklore Society meetings each autumn, most of us try to avoid that melancholy post-conference refrain, “I never got out of the hotel the whole time.”  Even in the midst of snow storms in Alaska or pouring rain in San Antonio, we find excuses to cut out of a conference session or two to experience some of whatever city we are meeting in.   It is our professional duty, after all, to get a taste (literally, since most of the excursions involve sampling the local cuisine) of the city we are visiting, to honor its history and ethnic make-up, and to then compare notes of our adventures.

This year, we met in Minneapolis.  Despite the fact that we had met there back in the mid-1980s, I had little memory or preconceived notion of the city.  Consequently, I built in a pre-meeting day to explore and embarked on other forays during stolen hours.

My old friend Jean and I made our way via public transportation to visit another friend and colleague, Macey, in her eclectic neighborhood of Powderhorn Park.   Why this neighborhood did not make it to the “local guide” that fellow folklorists had compiled for the meetings escapes me, because it was a fascinating mixture of ethnic businesses, a lovely park with a small lake or large pond which sparkled in the warm fall light, and rows of tidy houses and gardens.  We had a fine walk around, and ate lunch in a sort of Latino mall featuring taco, tamale, and torta stands and small stores with clothing, jewelry, teas and spices, and miscellaneous other items.

Just down the street was Ingebretsen’s Scandinavian store, actually three stores adjacent to one another, with housewares, foodstuffs (including as many different herring products as I had ever seen in one place before and a fine selection of cod roe), and other goods.  The same street had a Caribbean cafe, Halal meat markets, and other wonders. After some shopping, we bid Macey goodbye and returned to hotel life, which already seemed sterile and boring after our glimpse into Minneapolis Life Beyond.

Shorter jaunts outside the confines of the hotel included one afternoon exploring the waterfront along the river and canal with my friend Hanna. Features of this area include the bones of old mill machinery, grand views of St. Anthony Falls, which are featured in the photo at the header of this entry, as well as the  historic Pillsbury A Mill across the river in St. Paul, and some other splendid architecture, old and new.

As for the best food adventure, the prize goes to a homey Tibetan restaurant that my food-savvy friends Lucy and Sue and I discovered on a mission to “Eat Street” (a stretch of Nicollet Avenue not too far from the hotel).   The walk was a mile and half or more back, but we only briefly considered hailing a taxi.  Besides the dumplings, homemade noodles and steamed bread with spicy beef we had to work off, we were in no hurry to return to the confines of hotel life.  The fresh Minneapolis evening air, and the exhilarating feeling of discovery, buoyed us on.   Another city, another AFS conference, another set of adventures.  On to Buffalo next year!

 

Miami’s World of Water

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Miami – the very name conjures pastel colors, heat, and water, water everywhere. Many people (I would say “many Americans,” but since American popular culture has permeated the globe, it is safe to keep it general) who have not been to Miami in person have a vision of it through TV shows. For me, this was the classic, Miami Vice, which aired during my graduate school years. (It was one of the reasons one of my best friends in grad school, Hanna, convinced me to invest in a VCR, then a new concept in delayed TV viewing.) Exotic, stylish, and wet were the impressions I took away from my media encounters.

A recent trip to Miami for the annual American Folklore Society meetings did not disappoint, especially in the water department. During a pre-conference stay in Miami Beach, I explored the Art Deco area of South Beach, a series of sherbert toned, wedding cake tiered confections with a slightly seedy side, still emerging from a somewhat shady past, now a tourist magnet. The beach beckons, peeking around a string of ocean-side hotels, accessible by skirting a gift shop offering Art Deco themed paraphernalia. When I encountered the beach itself in the morning after a hard rain, it was strewn with dark seaweed and devoid of beachcombers. Ocean Boulevard, one block up, was the home of the morning action – breakfast-munching, coffee-drinking and watching the world go by in open cafes.

20161019_111301The day before the conference started in earnest, a large group of us went on a tour to the Everglades. About a half hour west, the city is left behind and you enter another world, a flat infinite vista of what looks like prairie but is actually, more or less, just a thin veneer of vegetation growing over a vast wetland, punctuated by the occasional limestone hillock. We climbed aboard airboats and donned noise blocking headphones, and set off into this realm with some guides from the Miccosukee Indian tribe, whose home this has been for centuries. Cozy in speeding suspension over the liquid landscape, we admired the water lilies, dragonflies and blue expanses of water in between, but we were also warned that this is the realm of some nasty creatures: alligators, snapping turtles, and disease-bearing mosquitoes to name a few.


Finally, the conference started, but the contact to water did not end. Our hotel backed up to the Miami River, the shortest navigable river in the U.S., which empties into the Everglades.  Although we were mostly entombed in conference rooms, the river was not be to denied. Coffee, lunch, and happy hour breaks were taken in the hotel’s back patio by the riverside, and if your head just became too full of information, you could zone out on the steps, watch pleasure boats slide by, and dream of joining them to points unknown up the river. The last day of the conference, our conference artist in residence, Losang Samten, a Philadelphia-based Tibetan mandala maker, dismantled his colorful creation and we joined him in offering it to the river. A fit ending to a week spent exploring, and being surrounded by, the many waters of Miami.