A Calendar for ’16

Posted on September 15, 2015 by admin

Something to note for the day: Lost in Space premiered on CBS, the Tiffany Network, 50 years ago today (and it’s been nearly 18 years since Jupiter II started its ill-fated voyage). My thoughts on the matter are here. But I left out another thing to like: those hip themes (first and second season, and then the third) by Johnny Williams, who clearly had potential as a composer. Also, there’s this.

Calendars for next year have started appearing. The first one to land on my desk was the “2016 Journey Through America” calendar, a sample that informs me that my company logo and promotional message can go at the bottom. It’s not a bad calendar. The holidays and other days are basic North American ones — U.S. and Canadian civic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim — and the images are the usual high-resolution pretty pics of various places. The only real oddity of a date is National Tartan Day, April 6.

Maybe the calendar makers couldn’t decide on whether to focus on highly famed American sites or photogenic but obscure ones, since it includes both for the monthly pictures. Maybe they just decided to split the difference. Overexposed places represented in the calendar include the Statue of Liberty, Miami Beach, Monument Valley and Yosemite. But it also includes a snow scene in Geneva, Neb.; a covered bridge in Wakefield, Mich.; a sunflower field in Limon, Colo.; and a small dam in Whippany, NJ.

The EMP Museum

Posted on September 9, 2015 by admin

By chance today I saw about 10 minutes of Pompeii, a movie that apparently came out last year. The scene pitted gladiators vs. Roman soldiers, and clearly the gladiators were the put-upon salt-of-the-earth hero and his friends, while the soldiers fought for a cartoon Roman upper-class twit bad guy. I watched anyway. Nothing like a little implausible sword play to liven your afternoon. It didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that overall the movie was very stupid indeed.

But maybe I should have watched the end. According to Marc Savlov in the Austin Chronicle: “We all know what happens in the end and, to his credit, Anderson [the director] totally nails the vulcanization of Pompeii. You want it? You got it: flaming chariot melees, massive tsunamis, and a downright hellacious pyroclastic flowgasm that makes the ones in Dante’s Peak look like so many Etch-a-Sketch doodlings (all of it shot in well-above-average 3-D). Pompeii delivers the goods – well, at least during its final 20 minutes.”

It took me a while to remember what EMP stands for in the EMP Museum in Seattle, which I visited on the afternoon of August 28. That evening I said (jokingly) that I’d gone to the Electromagnetic Pulse Museum, because I’d forgotten it stands for Experience Music Project.

The EMP is at Seattle Center, just north of downtown. Seattle Center was the site of the 1962 world’s fair, interestingly known as the Century 21 Exposition. EMP didn’t come along until near the actual beginning of the 21st century, back in 2000, as the creation of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and right-angle averse starchitect Frank Gehry.

It’s a colorful 140,000-square foot blob of a building, roundly hated by many. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t inspire much admiration in me either. I’ve seen plenty uglier buildings, following my own visceral and idiosyncratic standard for ugliness, which is uninformed by theory. Most parking garages are worse. So are many brutalist and otherwise concrete-based structures. EMP just seemed like Gehry being Gehry.

I understand it was a technical marvel to build, with more than 21,000 exterior aluminum and stainless steel shingles all uniquely shaped and designed to fit together like pieces of a puzzle, and an interior defined by strange irregular shapes and held up by 280 steel ribs. I found myself looking up at the interior with more admiration than the exterior. The engineers needed a terrific amount of computing power to design and put the thing together, which somehow seems fitting, considering that a software philanthropist paid for it.

Here’s an odd assertion from the museum: “If [the building’s] 400 tons of structural steel were stretched into the lightest banjo string, it would extend one-fourth of the way to Venus.” That must mean the average distance, since the true distance from the Earth to Venus changes every moment. Or maybe it means the distance between the orbits of Earth and Venus.

Wonder how many ping-pong balls it would take to fill it. Someone at the museum needs to figure that out.

Richard Seven wrote in the Seattle Times in 2010: “A smashed guitar, in honor of Seattle’s Jimi Hendrix and his rebellious style, was the inspiration and template. But the real collision was between one of the world’s most relentlessly anti-box architects, an unfathomable task of trying to freeze the rock ‘n’ roll process, and a wealthy private client who embraced the costs and advances in computing and engineering that allowed a building like that to even stand…

“When he toured the building just before it opened in the summer of 2000, Gehry told reporters, ‘It’s supposed to be unusual. Nobody has seen this before or will see it again. Nobody will build another one.’ ” Probably so.

As a museum, EMP is devoted to pop culture. Though “music” is in the name — and Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana each have their own galleries — that’s only part of the equation. One of the current exhibits, for instance, is “Star Wars and the Power of Costume,” which sounds like a display of costumes from that franchise. It cost extra, so I took a pass.

I didn’t miss “What’s Up Doc? The Animation of Chuck Jones.” That alone was almost worth the inflated price of admission to EMP. Besides original sketches and drawings, storyboards, production backgrounds, animation cels, photographs, and a fair amount to read, there was the opportunity to see cartoons on big screens, such as “What’s Opera, Doc?”, one of the Roadrunner cartoons — I forget which, not that it matters — and “One Froggy Evening,” which I probably hadn’t seen in more than 30 years, and which I didn’t fully appreciate when young. Especially the notion of a frog singing tunes from the 1890s.

The museum features some impressively large installations. One is made of guitars. A lot of guitars, arrayed upward in a kind of mass cone of guitars (and banjos and keyboards and other musical instruments) two stories high. The work is called “IF VI WAS IX,” and it was put together by a Seattle artist who goes by the single name Trimpin.

It’s more than just a cone of instruments. EMP notes that “short stretches of music were played into a computer then organized by Trimpin into a continuous electronic composition, with notes assigned to specific instruments. Customized robotic guitars play one string at a time. Six guitars work together to create the sound of one chord—a mechanical metaphor for how musical styles and traditions continue to influence one another.”

Nearby is the “Sky Church” room, whose main feature is a 33’ x 60’ HD LED screen that projects images on (from?) an enormous wall. The 65-foot ceiling is illuminated with parasols that seem to float overhead, and the space is well equipped with special-effects lighting. Technically impressive.

The perfect venue for, say, the restored color version of A Trip to the Moon. Or “Steamboat Willie.” Or “Duck Amuck.” Or the “Thriller” music video. Or any of many possibilities. All short, all worth seeing on a vast screen. Maybe shorts like these play at the Sky Church, but the day I was there, the venue seemed mostly to pump out music videos for people under 30.

I’ve read that the full name of the museum used to be the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (with the clunky initials EMP|SFM), but some years ago, the science fiction aspect was demoted. The museum still covers science fiction, as well as the horror genre, but in two galleries in the basement.

Not bad displays. I enjoyed seeing an assortment of SF movie and TV show props, such as the original Terminator’s leather jacket and I forget what else (no Lost In Space Robot, though), and playing with at least one of the interactive features: a large globe that would take on the likeness of each of the Solar System’s planets, along with the Moon (and Titan?), at the touch of a button.

Oddly enough, I got more out of the horror exhibit than the SF one. Besides static displays and props and the like, the horror gallery included a number of alcoves in which you can watch well-made short films on various renowned horror movies. These proved interesting, even though I don’t much care one way or the other about the genre.

Because of these shorts, I’m now inspired to watch two horror movies I’ve never gotten around to: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Exorcist. The former was on TCM late Sunday night, but I didn’t want to stay up late to watch it; such is middle age. I did see the haunting green credits, however, and I’ll get around to the whole thing before long.

There’s also a first-floor gallery devoted to the fantasy genre, but by the time I got there, I was a little tired of the museum. At least I happened to see the costume that Mandy Patinkin wore as Inigo Montoya.

As mentioned, two Seattle musical acts, Jimi Hindrix and Nirvana, had their own galleries. Of the two, I spent more time in the Hindrix room, despite being too young when he was alive to fully appreciate his talents, since he was common enough on the radio well into the 1970s. As for Nirvana, I was too old to appreciate them when they were around, and in fact out of the country during their heyday. I remember hearing about Kurt Cobain’s suicide right after I arrived in Hong Kong in April 1994, and my first thought was, Who?

Both galleries apparently change from time to time, rather than being generic tributes to the artists. The Hendrix exhibit I saw was “Wild Blue Angel: Hendrix Abroad, 1966-1970.” It detailed his travels as a successful musician. As the museum explains: “At the height of his fame, Jimi Hendrix performed more than 500 times in 15 countries and recorded 130 songs in 16 studios. He was a musical nomad, his life an endless series of venues, recording sessions, flights, and hotels.”

His passport was on display. I got a kick out of that. Even better, while the original was behind glass, you could leaf through a replica, which I did. The dude got around.

Thursday Oddments

Posted on August 20, 2015 by admin

Back to publishing around August 30. I might have a few new things to post about by then.

Distinctly cool last night, down toward 60 F., following heavy rains the night before, and cooler than usual today. That sometimes happens this time of the year. It’s to remind us of the long slide into ever colder temps, beginning soon.

Another marker of the passing of summer: peewee football players in our nearby park. For a while, baseball will be played and practiced there, too, but not for long.

I noticed the other day that Lilly has hung Ecuadorean and Panamanian flags on the wall in her room. She didn’t mention bringing them back, but I suppose she did. An interest in flags is no surprise.

She also brought back this picture from the tourist equator. Something to recall the summer of ’15 by.
Naturally, I’m reminded of this picture (winter of ’94).

One of these days, Lilly will probably make it to the tourist prime meridian. I’ve less sure I’ll ever stand on the tourist equator. Enough to have crossed the actual line a few times.

I watched Kelly’s Heroes (1970) on DVD the other day. Interesting movie: not quite a black comedy, nor anti-war movie, nor straight up war movie, but including elements of all those in a mostly successful blend. The stellar cast had a lot to do with that: Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, Carroll O’Connor, even Don Rickles, all pretty much in their prime, though you could argue that Eastwood’s prime went on for a long time, petering out only around the time of his discussion with an empty chair.

Donald Sutherland’s character, never called anything but Sgt. “Oddball,” was the funniest of the lot, once you got past the palpable anachronism of him being a hippy tank commander in the U.S. Army of 1944. Pre-Archie Bunker Carroll O’Connor was the least effective, but he sure did chew the scenery in his relatively few scenes as an Army general.

Among the minor characters were a number of familiar faces, such as a barely pre-Murray Slaughter Gavin MacLeod, and an actor named Jeff Morris as Pfc. “Cowboy.” Turns out he later played Bob, the owner of Bob’s Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers.

Dire Straits 1985

Posted on August 9, 2015 by admin

Thirty years ago Dire Straits played at TPAC in Nashville, and I was there. By a lucky chance. I went to a record store on Elliston Place in Nashville (gone now, certainly) that was selling their tickets, later than I probably should have, and when I got to the desk they had exactly one left. I think a few people ahead of me had declined to buy it, because they were looking for two. So I got it.

I’m pretty sure “Sultans of Swing” introduced me to the band in early 1979, as it did many North Americans. Though overplayed, I still can listen to the song and imagine a dark, rainy South London of 40-odd years ago. Not many popular songs evoke place as well as it does. Dire Straits was one of the few records I paid money for in high school. There’s no filler on that album, and by the time you get to “Wild West End” and “Lions,” talk about evoking a place and (in retrospect) time.

Later, I grew especially fond of the long, melancholic tracks on Love Over Gold. Maybe it helps to be not particularly melancholic to appreciate such things.

“I want my — I want my MTV…” the 1985 concert started, with a single spotlight flitting around the stage, not pointing at anyone, I think, as the intro to that song crescendoed. With the loud guitar solo, the stage lit up, revealing the band, who took it from there. I’m glad I got to see them.

Waterloo and All That

Posted on June 18, 2015 by admin

Been quite a week for multi-centenary anniversaries. After Magna Carta earlier this week came Waterloo today, so famous you don’t even need to call it the Battle of Waterloo. It was the occasion for a lot of showy commemorations in the UK and Belgium (and what are they doing in France? Calling it jeudi, probably).

I guess everyone was busy with other things during the centennial, so the bicentennial got star treatment. The Daily Mail has a fine collection of photos for the commemorations. The pics made me wonder: will the fellow who’s playing Napoleon, according to the caption a French lawyer named Franck Samson, be sent to St. Helena for a while now? You know, to buttress the re-enactment’s authenticity.

The Daily Mail again (man, they know how to use the Internet): pictures of St. Helena. Apparently the island’s going to get a real airport soon, so that the not-so-frequent royal mail ship from Cape Town will be a thing of the past.

One more thing about Waterloo re-enactments: I wonder who played Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher? That’s a pretty important part, after all. An elderly German with a taste for re-enactment, no doubt, made up to look like his horse had fallen on him.

As I look around, I find more things inspired by Waterloo. That’s one of the time-eating dangers of the Internet, but also its prime joy. The song that helped propel Abba to a higher income than the GDP of Sweden (or something like that) was named “Waterloo,” of course, but there’s also a song lost to time of the same title, recorded by Stonewall Jackson in 1959, which hit the country charts just after Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans.” It was the golden age of battle-themed honky-tonk music, clearly.

Stonewall Jackson’s song includes the following deathless lyrics. Punctuated as I hear it.

Little general, Napoleon of France
Tried to conquer, the world but lost his pants.
Met defeat, known as Bonaparte’s retreat.
And that’s when Napoleon met his Waterloo.

Incidentally, at 82, Stonewall Jackson — reportedly not a stage name, and I believe it — is still with us. That’s good to know.

Heavy Rain, Then Sudden Fireworks

Posted on June 16, 2015 by admin

After posting yesterday, we had more fierce rain, until it finally petered out around 9 pm. At about 9:50, I started hearing pop-pop-pop-BOOM-pop-crackle-bang-pop-pop. As in, fireworks. Private fireworks, not a large public display, as people shoot off on the Fourth of July or New Year’s, neither of which was yesterday. Is that really fireworks, I wondered, or some kind of bizarre thunder? What’s going here?

Soon I figured out that the Blackhawks must have won the Stanley Cup. Pull up Google News and sure enough, they had. Then I heard some yelling in the street by some happy knuckleheads, something that almost never happens in the suburbs. I don’t remember that happening the last time Hawks won, or the time before, but maybe I wasn’t paying attention.

I do remember fireworks and — possibly — distant gunshots when the Bulls won one of their championships in 1997. I figured it was a good time to stay home, which we did. Anyway, it’s been a long time since I got news via fireworks. Odd how things come to one’s attention sometimes.

Or not. I didn’t hear until yesterday that Ronnie Gilbert had died. Time to look at the Weavers’ 1951 videos, made for Snader Telescriptions. Been a while since I’d seen them, and before the age of YouTube, I never had.

Oddly enough, I found out that Blaze Starr — a different sort of entertainer — had died almost as soon as the news was out, by a mention in an email, of all things. That was a case of, she was still alive? (But I knew Ronnie Gilbert was; now there’s only one original Weaver left.)

Maybe I need to pay more attention to this constantly updated Roll of Death, which could also be called the Death Never Takes a Holiday List. If I had, I’d have known about not only Ronnie Gilbert, but also Tiffany Two.

Busy June Weekend 1989

Posted on June 7, 2015 by admin

I have evidence that I went to a Major League Baseball game 26 years ago, and the next day saw a famed Broadway musical on tour in Chicago, at a famed venue. But I can’t really drag much of either experience out of the twisty byways of memory when I think about them now. I can make some logical reconstructions, though.

I went to one or maybe two Cubs games a year in the late 1980s at Wrigley Field, and one Sox game at the old Comiskey Park. Each time I went with some PR people that I knew. Enjoyable, and I’m glad that I got to go, especially to Comiskey, since it was demolished in 1991.

Still, I have no particular memory of the June 10, 1989 game. Data about the game is easy enough to look up, though. The Cardinals took it 6-0 and the game lasted about two and a half hours starting at 3:05 pm (night games, played at Wrigley since August 8, 1988, were still pretty rare). The temp at the start time was 62 F. and it was windy. One of those annoying early June days in Chicago when it isn’t quite as warm as June should be. We had a few of those last week.

Joe Magrane pitched for the Cardinals and Greg Maddux and others pitched for the Cubs. I was one of more than 38,000 in attendance. I probably ate a hot dog and drank a beer, but not even the most insanely complete compilation of baseball stats can tell me for sure.

The ticket, Terrace Aisle 235, Row 13, Seat 101, cost all of $7. In current money, that’s $13.36, according to the handy BLS CPI inflation calculator. So I checked the official ticketing site of the Cubs today to look up an equivalent game and its ticket prices — June 13, 2015, when the Cubs are playing the Reds. It’s too much trouble to pin down the exact current price for that specific seat, but no need to anyway. All of the Terrace Reserved seats range from $41 to $59. What’s your excuse, MLB?

The next day I went to the splendid Auditorium Theatre for a matinee of Les Miserables. My girlfriend at the time wanted to go, so I took her. I remember bits and pieces of some remarkable stagecraft — barricades, seems like — but not much else besides a feeling of not caring for it all that much. Tickets were $30, which is the equivalent of $57.24 now, up in the balcony.

It’s a little harder to make a direct comparison to today’s prices, since Les Miserables isn’t playing at the Auditorium Theatre in 2015. Currently the Royal Ballet is doing Don Quixote there; tickets range from about $36 to $146 for the matinee on the 14th. The cheap seats are of course in the balcony, and at a discount to 1989, but then again, I suspect a big-deal Broadway show like Les Mis would command the same, and probably more, than back then. Just a hunch.

Over the years I’ve discovered that big-deal Broadway musicals aren’t really to my taste. Les Mis was probably part of that discovery. I’d rather see a regular play in a small theater. I’m pretty much in agreement with the reviewer Tom Boeker, who wrote in The Reader in 1989: “At last, two years after it opened in New York, it’s come to Chicago. It’s an event, a spectacle, a dress occasion, an opera, and a musical. It’s Les Miserables!

“I don’t know. I don’t get it… So you can see Les Miserables has everything: sentiment, revolution, and romance with a capital R for Romanticism. If you were going to see only one musical in your life, you might as well see this one and get the bloody thing over with. To inflate a quote from the film short Hardware Wars, ‘You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll kiss 40 bucks good-bye.’ “

The House on the Rock, Section 3: Willy Wonka’s Brewery, The Million-Piece Circus Playset, and More Dolls Than a Man Can Stand

Posted on June 4, 2015 by admin

At some point during our walk through the third and final section of The House on the Rock last weekend, I thought, if Willy Wonka had brewed beer instead of made candy, it would look like this place.

As a tourist attraction, The House provokes strong responses. For fun, I looked at TripAdvisor’s reviews after visiting the place. Currently there are 761 reviews, with the preponderance of them rating it “excellent” or “very good” — 563 reviews. A sizable minority, however, rate it “terrible” or “poor”: 96 reviews. Those are the ones to look at (all sic).

“The displays are a collection of crap found at a flea market circus or the back of and old man’s shed that never thows a thing away. After 30 minutes my small family was looking desperately for a door for some fresh outside air.”

“there is so much junk in this place i can only imagine the dust, dirt, pollen, etc. dripping from bits and pieces of old lamps, caliopes, industrial waste metals, mannequins, fabric, wooden broken instruments – fakery of all kinds. it is impossible to clean and has been around for 50 years – horrible. and this is called a man’s ‘collection’. it is hoarding on an unimaginable scale. the lighting is low, the whole ‘decor’ garish and tasteless. what have you really seen at the end of 3 hours?: junk; junk on a big scale.”

“My parents and I thought we were coming to see an architectural delight. Wrong-o. This haphazard maze of low-ceilings, moldy carpet, dank rooms, and low lighting brings back images of ‘inappropriate parties from the seventies’ said one local.”

“This place was like a slow death.”

That’s enough of that. Neat freaks and people who hate clutter — which I see as the normal condition of the Western world after the Industrial Revolution — aren’t going to like The House on the Rock. But I will say that by the third section, I was getting a little testy myself. Not because I objected in some fundamental sense to the agglomeration of stuff, or the irregular lighting, or the bizarre randomness of it all, but because I was feeling the overload. I often feel the same way at large museums during the third or even fourth hours of a visit.

Still, there were things to see. In the third section, The House reaches its peak of lunatic accumulation; or maybe it seemed that way because I was tired.

That’s the centerpiece lighting of an enormous room full of enormous stuff: The Organ Room. The pathway snakes along past huge brewing vats, big bells, a large ship’s propeller, spiral staircases to nowhere, large machines of unknown import, and what The House calls a “perpetual motion clock,” all of 45 feet high, which I didn’t notice was moving. Also according to The House, this room includes “three of the greatest organ consoles ever built, one with 15 manuals and hundreds of stops.” I don’t remember seeing those. But I was missing a lot by this point.

My overall impression of the room was of an industrial nightmare, a little like being trapped in Metropolis, with you as the little human surrounded by huge metal contrivances. Or it could have been a factory set designed for a Batman movie. Add artificial fog, and you’d have a steampunk acid-trip factory floor in which Batman could fight his enemies. Or it could have been the set for a Willie Wonka reboot in which Mr. Wonka is a brewer and drunkards get their comeuppance with the assistance of DT-inspired Oompah-Loompahs.

So the place had a sinister edge. Even so, the mass of metal wowed sometimes. Then near the end of the Organ Room were some cannons. And a machine gun. Don’t ask why, it’s a futile exercise.

Suddenly, you come to Inspiration Point, a restaurant (not in operation) with large windows and temporary access to the outside world. This was a considerable relief. It also offered a view of the Infinity Room, behind some trees, but more importantly, a respite from the sensory overload.

The last leg of the third section was essentially a walk-through. Which is too bad, since it had its interests, though I wouldn’t have spent that much time in the Doll House Building — which came after Inspiration Point — even if I’d had more energy. Just a matter of personal preference.

Alex Jordan, on the other hand, clearly loved him some dolls. The room might as well have been called Dolls, More Dolls, and Even More Dolls. Should a grown man enjoy such a fascination with dolls? Sure, why not, most people would say, but not really believe it, since the prevailing attitude is that boys and certainly men aren’t supposed to be interested in dolls. I feel that way myself, though I know it’s arbitrary.

The dolls then gave way to room after room of circus miniatures — a lot of miniatures. Circus figures under the big top, certainly, but also figures doing just about everything imaginable and behind-the-scenes associated with a mobile circus, such as feeding the animals (pictured; each figure is about three inches tall) and performers changing costumes. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a depiction of men cleaning up elephant dung. There were model circus trains and (something I’d never heard of) models of circus boats, as might have plied the Mississippi or the Ohio. Famed three-ring circuses and long-forgotten one-ring affairs were both represented.

Old or recreations? I don’t think it matters. A great deal of artisan effort went into these. That alone ought to demonstrate that The House, whatever its flaws, is no mere repository of junk. You don’t have to be all that keen on circuses to be impressed by a million artfully done circus figures (the number The House claims) or even many thousands. All you have to do is pay attention.

Alas, I didn’t have much energy for paying as much attention as the circus figures deserved, and on we went, now wanting the experience to be over. After the little circus figures were big circus figures: a sizable circus wagon hanging from the ceiling, populated by a 40-piece mechanical band. Below them was an 80-piece mechanical orchestra (pictured; those are life-sized figures). The House claims that 37 miles of electrical wiring and 2,300 pneumatic motors make them play. I used a token and made them play. I was still interested enough for that.

But that’s not all. Maybe hallucinations were creeping in by this point, or more likely experiences with hallucination-like qualities. But I have photographic evidence I saw a small display called The Barnyard Serenaders (behind glass, a few inches tall).

After the Circus Building: Asian art, armor, and more weapons, including an artificial leg with a place to conceal a derringer (talk about concealed carry). The fake crowns of the crowned heads of Europe were unimpressively fake. Finally — well, almost — we passed by the doll carousels. “So many [dolls] to display that if one were to display them on a towering, 6-tier lighted, revolving carousel, there would still be hundreds of dolls left over,” a post card from The House says. “Solution? Build a second doll carousel.”

I’ll hand it to Alex Jordan: a doll carousel, much less a six-tiered one, is something I’d never seen, or encountered as an idea or even a wisp of a notion. I didn’t look at them much, however. I wanted out. Enough’s enough, especially a place who’s motto could be, Too Much is Never Enough.

At the exit you find a Japanese garden.

A pretty little one, too, but we didn’t linger.

There’s a fine arts dissertation waiting to be written about The Rock on the House — a massive, kinetic entity that questions the importance of authenticity and blurs the lines between art and artless, and probably smashes a few paradigms along the way. But I doubt that any academic is going to take it up as a subject. They say they want to smash paradigms, but they don’t really.

It is what it is: sprawling, cluttered, dingy in places. Sometimes fake, sometimes authentic, often hard to tell which. Does it contradict itself? Very well, then, it contradicts itself. It’s large and contains multitudes.

The House on the Rock, Section 2: Monsters of the Deep, Automatic Orchestras & The Congress of Animals Carousel

Posted on June 3, 2015 by admin

The House on the Rock is popular. A lot of people were there on Saturday, but since it’s so large, it seldom seemed crowded. One thing I noticed was a distinct lack of spoken German, Japanese, French and other popular non-English tourist languages, though we did cross paths with a Russian-language tour group (very likely from Chicago, not Russia) and I thought I heard a German couple.

Go to the Art Institute of Chicago or a Frank Lloyd Wright structure or even some popular site on Route 66 and you’re going to hear those languages. The House on the Rock is missing a marketing opportunity to international travelers. All it needs to do is persuade German guidebook editors to include it; JTB to offer guided tours that visit the attraction; and maybe trickiest of all, some prominent French public intellectual (I hear there are such) to pronounce it the most authentic American thing since Jerry Lewis. Then tourists with their euros and yen would show up in quantity.

The first rooms of the second section start off modestly enough, by The House on the Rock standards: paperweights, stuffed birds, antique guns and coin banks. One of the smaller animatronics of this section — labeled only, “The Dying Drunkard, British RR Station 1870” — featured an old man lying in a bed. It’s perhaps two feet high.

Insert a token and his arms move up and down, and various apparitions emerge from under his bed, inside the grandfather clock, and out of the closet. A ghost, a demon, and a skeleton, I think. Or maybe Death himself. That was all it did. If it really does date from 1870, it probably took a penny or a ha’penny to operate originally. Entertainment for Victorians.

At this point, I noticed that even the bathrooms include displays of stuff. The first men’s room in the second section includes model trains. I understand that the women’s room includes glassware and small statues. Other bathrooms were similarly adorned, and the small cafeteria near end of the second sector sports large advertising banners for Carter the Great. I had to look him up later.

Next is the Streets of Yesterday. It’s probably the most conventional display, and assortment of artifacts, at The House on the Rock. It’s a display-oriented re-creation of a 19th-century street, complete with various businesses and their equipment: doctor, dry goods merchant, livery stable, apothecary, and so on. I’ve seen the approach in a number of other places, including the Museum of Science and Industry and the Henry Ford Museum. It’s nicely done in The House — especially amusing are the signs that promise opium and worm cakes and the like for sale — but it isn’t the kind of eccentricity the place does so well.

Not to worry: at the end of the street is a two-story calliope. The “Colossal Gigantic Calliope GLADIATOR” by name.

Don’t be fooled. Those figures are life-sized, and they move when the thing plays.
Soon afterward you come to the Heritage of the Sea. It’s no museum with nautical equipment or displays about brave ocean voyagers along the lines (say) of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. It’s an enormous room that’s home to an enormous diorama of a sea monster — a whale-like creature — posed in a mid-fight with a partly submerged squid, though its creepy squid eyes are visible. Neither of the figures are particularly well illuminated, and there’s no sense of rhyme or reason about the damned things. Alex Jordan wanted giant monsters of the deep, and so it was done. The whale’s about three stories high, and as The House web site points out, “longer than the Statue of Liberty is tall.”

Pictures were hard to take because of the dark, and simply because the diorama was so big. But I tried. The mouth of the Leviathan reaches above the second level of the building.

I was so flabbergasted by the thing at first that I forgot to read the sign describing it, which might have told me what the figures were made of and who actually built it. Or maybe I wouldn’t have learned those things. No matter. I’d started to notice by this time that, except for the Alex Jordan Center, The House on the Rock isn’t particular keen on exposition. Some things are labeled, some not. Some labels only have the name of the object, a few provide more information. Curated, the place isn’t.

That was especially the case for the model ships in the room. Along the walls of fighting-sea-monsters room are walkways that slowly spiral upward and around the monsters, so that you can view them from many angles, and eventually look down on them. Also on display along with walkways are numerous model ships and nautical gear and other items in glass cases.

Many famed ships are represented, and so labeled: Bounty, Victory, Constitution, Mayflower, Santa Maria, Golden Hind, both the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, and the Titanic, helpfully complete with an iceberg at its side. The USS Wisconsin is depicted, and it occurred to me that if Harry Truman had been from Wisconsin, that’s where the formal surrender might have taken place on September 2, 1945, instead of the USS Missouri (both are museum ships these days). Some ship models I had to guess at: I think I saw Bismarck and Yamato, to name two Axis vessels. Other ships are unlabeled and it’s hard to guess their identity.

But wait, there’s more. Of course there is. After the nautical display, I seem to remember a display of cars and model cars and a “Rube Goldberg machine” and other things leading up to a small cafeteria decorated by re-created Burma Shave ad signs and the aforementioned Carter the Great.

Beyond that are a series of music rooms. Amazing contraptions, these. For the cost of a token, most of them spring to life for a few minutes and play mostly late 19th-century tunes. Unless the music is piped in — which one source I’ve read asserts. That wouldn’t be out of character with the maybe-fake maybe-real dynamic of The House on the Rock, but on the other hand, it doesn’t matter much. The effect is remarkable anyway.

The Blue Room, whose walls are dark blue, but which looks mostly gold-colored, features an automatic orchestra.

The Blue Danube, at two stories, fittingly enough plays “The Blue Danube”

Other automatic music rooms include the Red Room, which (besides instruments that play “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies”) includes a canopied sleigh drawn by a flying lion and a tiger; Miss Kitty Dubois’ Boudoir, a New Orleans fantasia room that plays Boots Randolph’s “Yakety Sax”; and the Franz Joseph, a mechanical orchestra nearly 30 feet tall.

My favorite room-sized automatic music device is The Mikado. To quote from the postcard featuring it: “At the heart of this astounding music machine pulses a Mortier pipe organ with 118 keys. The Mikado features two imposing and life-like Japanese figures, playing kettle drum and flute.”

“They are accompanied by crashing cymbals, rattling snares, jingling temple bells and tambourines. The installation is lit by a constellation of red, hooded hanging lanterns.” Yes, indeed.

By this time, you’d think second section would be over. No! There’s more! Such as The Spirit of Aviation, with model aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling, plus an impressive collection of Seven-Up memorabilia in the same room. Why? Just because.

Finally, section two does end, at The Carousel. It’s another behemoth machine that Jordan and his staff built over the course of a decade. Is it a real carousel? According to the Chicago Tribune, it “actually turns on rollers because, as built, it was too heavy to turn on a central axle, the way true carousels do.” Ah, but again, who cares? If not a carousel, it’s a monster of a lighted whirligig.

The House on the Rock asserts that it has over 20,000 lights, 182 chandeliers and 269 handcrafted carousel animals (none of which are horses), along with other figures here and there, including naked or near-naked women (if you look closely enough, you begin to see a fair number of those at The House). The carousel is 35 tall, 30 feet wide, and weighs 36 tons. The dark figures you see hovering over it are winged figures — angels? Fallen angels? Mythical winged people? Weird scenes inside the gold mine.

The thing isn’t for riding. It’s for watching it go round and round. Somehow that emphasizes how tired you are by that point.

The House on the Rock, Section 1: Alex Jordan’s Odd Man Cave

Posted on June 2, 2015 by admin

The Alex Jordan Center is the first building of The House on the Rock you encounter after the ticketing building. Reached by a walkway through an “Asian garden” (an odd mix of Chinese and Japanese elements), the center is essentially a museum devoted to The House creator, Alex Jordan Jr. (1914-1989), with information about him and his lifelong obsession with building the complex, and filling it with stuff.

There’s more information on the walls of the Alex Jordan Center than is easily available elsewhere, especially online (as Wiki puts it, “published information on Jordan’s life is scarce”). Much of what’s written about the place follows the Roadside America school of reportage: Wow, what a wacky place! Look how wacky it is! Can you believe how wacky this place is?

The House on the Rock is wacky. Ah, but so much more. My impression is that Alex Jordan was something of a ne’er-do-well whose parents supported him until he lucked into a way to support his obsessions: charging people admission to see his stuff (that, and maybe farm subsidies). Once it got up and going, the place grow’d like Topsy. Except not quite: Jordan spurred the growth. Whatever the character of his obsessions, he also clearly wasn’t stupid. I was astonished to learn that he oversaw the design and construction of some of the automatic music machines, which look as fantastically complex as any of the Disney animatronics.

Here’s a smaller example of a kind of animatronics I’d never heard of before, one of which, with information, is in the Alex Jordan Center: “In the early 1980s, Alex traded with California collector John Daniel for a collection of Baranger motions…

“Baranger motions are mechanical animations manufactured by the Baranger Company of South Pasadena, California between 1925 and 1959. The animations were rented to jewelry stores as window displays; they were shipped to the stores periodically on a rotating basis so that there was always something of interest in the store window… The House on the Rock has the world’s largest collection of Barangers on display and in storage.” (The Pollack Advertising Museum in Mesa, Ariz., reportedly has more.) The pictured eggman, a Humpty Dumpty Baranger, is only one of 14 in existence, according to one source.

Jordan must have also had a dash of P.T. Barnum in him. Why else would you have a three-story sea monster built for the world to see? On the other hand, I was happy to learn that The House on the Rock doesn’t particularly gouge its visitors. Admission for three adults and one child, bought at a discount on line, was less than $90, and certainly worth it. The gift shop was tourist-priced, but not excessive. One small example: postcards were a quarter each. I seem to remember that cards of Taliesin were more, maybe a dollar. The place doesn’t charge Buc-ee’s prices, in other words.

The House on the Rock is formally divided into three parts. The first part begins after leaving the Alex Jordan Center, and includes the original structure: a dimly lit collection of rooms snaking around the side of the hill. At least, that’s what it felt like. Without a map, or an aerial view of the complex, it’s hard for a casual visitor to tell how it’s all put together. Not that that matters. Once you’re into the groove of the place, passing through twisting corridors and crossing pedestrian bridges and climbing staircases and wandering along footpaths through mildly claustrophobic tunnels, and even taking in an occasional view of the outside, it’s just one thing after another. Quite literally.

The first section was also the only part of the complex that remotely resembles living quarters, featuring (among other things) a simple kitchen looking about 40 years old. Other rooms included pieces of furniture, such as couches and tables, and one has a large fireplace: elements of an elaborate man cave, to use a term more recent than The House. With some stress on cave. Rock formed the basis of most of the walls, the ceilings were low, and much of the color scheme involved brown.

Most of the rooms weren’t so ordinary. Jordan’s fascination with collecting dolls, especially Japanese dolls, and Tiffany lamps, or Tiffany-like lamps, is apparent in many places.

The first section also included a handful of the automatic music machines that would show up in such quantity later in the complex. This looks like a painting of such a device — in fact, an homage to a famous painting I can’t quite place — but actually the device is behind a hole in the wall made to look like a frame. Insert a token and it makes music.

At one point the tour trail takes you outside to enjoy the view. Even though last Saturday was overcast and rainy, I saw the appeal of the vista, off into the rolling green hills of southern Wisconsin.

The signature room of the first section is the Infinity Room. In its terse way, The House on the Rock web site says, “The 14th room of the House, completed in 1985, this engineering marvel extends 218 feet out over the scenic valley and 156 feet above the forests [sic] floor. The Infinity Room has 3,264 windows for walls that treat guests to a truly spectacular view.”

I wasn’t able to take a picture of the Infinity Room exterior that wasn’t obscured by trees, but there are some images on line.

Looking toward to end of the room, you see this.

As far as you can go into the room, you see this.

Dead ahead from there is a window in the floor that allows you to look down toward the tops of the trees. I can only hope that Jordan hired competent engineers to cantilever the thing safely, and that inspectors from Iowa County periodically take a look at it. The room’s been up for 30 years, so presumably it’s fairly sound. Still, Yuriko was unnerved by entering the room, and didn’t stay long, and she wasn’t the only one. Another woman visitor voiced her disquiet and turned around mid-way to the end point. Her young daughter went on (as did mine). The lure of infinity wasn’t to be missed.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Entertainment