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.

The University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology

Posted on September 4, 2015 by admin

Visit the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, as I did on the afternoon of August 25, and you’ll probably end up in awe of this fellow.It’s the head and chest of Cedar Man, who stands about two stories tall in the museum’s Great Hall. He has arms and legs, but they were in shadow.

The museum says: “Carved welcome figures on the Northwest Coast have traditionally been raised on village beaches to greet visitors. Joe David carved this one for a different purpose: to protest logging operations on this birthplace of Meares Island, part of the ancestral territories of the Tla-o-qui-aht and Ahousaht peoples of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations.”

Meares Island is off the west coast of Vancouver Island in Clayoquot Sound. This was the first I’d heard of it. The protest was in 1984, and eventually the Indians won the day, and the ancient trees on the island still stand. The museum bought Cedar Man from Joe David in 1987.

All together the UBC Museum of Anthropology houses 38,000 ethnographic objects — which I suppose includes artwork like Cedar Man, made in living memory — plus 535,000 archaeological objects. The ethnological collections include over 15,000 objects from Asia, almost 12,000 from North America (including over 7,100 from B.C. First Nations), about 4,300 from South and Central America, 4,000 from the Pacific islands and over 2,300 from Africa.

An overwhelming amount of stuff, in other words, and not just from the Pacific Northwest, though that’s a heavy emphasis. The mass of carvings in the Great Hall, which includes an array of other Northwest Coast totem poles, house poles (carved structural elements), masks, and more, is only the beginning.

The face is pretty much universal.

The museum goes off in a number of directions, branching into various displays. An entire room is devoted to a sculpture called “The Raven and the First Men” by Bill Reid, which used to be on the Canadian $20 bill.

In other galleries, all stuffed to the gills with items from around the world, I encountered the work of Kwakwaka’wakw carver Willie Seaweed (ca. 1873-1967), which the museum calls “one of the great 20th-century artists of the Northwest Coast.” Among other things, he made ritual items for potlatches while they were illegal in Canada (1884-1951).

I was surprised to find a room devoted to European ceramics, but there it was in the Koerner Ceramics Gallery. I’m not up on European ceramics, so I’d never heard of the likes of Bellarmine or Bartmann jugs, which have bearded faces at the base of the neck, and seemed to have been the last word in jugs in the 16th and 17th centuries, and mostly made in western Germany.
Other galleries sported plenty of other things from around the world. Such as a familiar image of Buddha, though its origin is uncertain (either China or Japan).
A puppet from China, though it reminded me of the ones from the East Indies.
Here’s my own favorite from the UBC, a recent work — the last 30 years or so — from Papua New Guinea, many of whose inhabitants are inordinately fond of The Phantom, who appears on their battle shields like this one.
A great example of cross-cultural WTF. More examples are here.

The Toledo Museum of Art

Posted on August 4, 2015 by admin

Libbey Inc.’s web site asserts that “the Libbey® brand name is one of the most recognized brand names in consumer housewares in the United States and among the leading brand names in glass tableware. Our products are sold in major retail channels of distribution in the United States and Canada, including mass merchants, department stores and specialty housewares stores.”

Maybe so. But I didn’t know about the Toledo-based glass giant until recently. Corning, I knew. But somehow not Libbey. So I wasn’t sure about the references I saw on Saturday to Libbey and the Libbey Foundation at the Toledo Museum of Art. Having no hand-held Internet access, I couldn’t check (and on the whole, that’s just as well). I guessed that maybe it had something to do with canned food.

Wrong company, wrong spelling, and in fact, Libby’s just a brand, not a company any more. The glass company notes: “Libbey has its roots in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of the New England Glass Company which was founded in 1818. William L. Libbey took over the company in 1878 and renamed it the New England Glass Works, Wm. L. Libbey & Sons Props. In 1888, facing growing competition, Edward Drummond Libbey moved the company to Toledo, Ohio. The Northwest Ohio area offered abundant natural gas resources and access to large deposits of high-quality sand. Toledo also had a network of railroad and steamship lines, making it an ideal location for the company. In 1892, the name was changed to The Libbey Glass Company.”

Why is this important to the Toledo Museum of Art? Let the museum take it from here: “1901 — Edward Drummond Libbey, founder, is elected first president of the board of trustees of the newly founded Toledo Museum of Art. The Museum begins humbly with 120 charter members, temporary exhibitions in rented rooms in the Gardner Building in downtown Toledo, and no permanent art collection.”

By gar, if New York and Chicago and Pittsburgh and Cleveland could have first-rate art museums, so could Toledo. Libbey not only founded the museum, he lived long enough to donate a lot more money to it and set it on a course of expansion, including $1 million in his will in the 1920s, back when that meant fat Coolidge dollars. In our time, the museum holds about 30,000 items and has 35 galleries. It would easily be at home in a larger city.

Only this part looks like a museum of 100 years ago, with its Ionic columns and such (and in fact it was designed by Edward B. Green and Harry W. Wachter in 1912). Other structures forming the museum include newer designs by Frank Gehry — but without his trademark curls — and the postmodern Glass Pavilion by the Tokyo architects Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates.

All together, it’s the kind of museum that can’t reasonably be seen in one go. So we looked at things until we felt like we weren’t seeing them any more (ah, here’s another room with paintings on the wall…) To begin with, we took in a good bit of the more recent works. I recognized this artist right away.
“Beuys Voice” (1990) by Nam June Paik, which a sign told us is new to the museum. I saw a larger, but distinctly similar work of his, in Arkansas last year. I like the hat.

And of course it’s good to have a Henry Moore or two lying around (“Reclining Figure,” 1953-54).
And a Frank Stella hanging around (“La Penna di hu,” finished in 2009).
I rarely see artwork by Beninese artists. Never, that I can think of. This piece, “Made in Porto-Novo (MIP),” is by a fellow named Romuald Hazoume. It’s made of found objects — pieces of metal, mostly, stapled together — with sound coming from within.
We also spent time among paintings of recent and earlier centuries. These do not photograph so well at the hands of an amateur like me, but I did do some details. Such as the face from “Portait of a Freedom Fighter” (1984), Julian Schnabel.
“London Visitors” (1874), James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot.
We couldn’t leave with checking out the ancient art. Nice collection, including the likes of this second-century AD statue.
And an 18th-century copy of “Laocoön and His Sons.”
I made full use of the opportunity to tell Lilly the story of Laocoön calling out the Trojan Horse as, well, a Trojan Horse, throwing the spear, and being offed for his temerity by sea serpents, a circumstance that the Trojans fatally misinterpreted.

Even if there’s nothing else in Toledo worth seeing — and I know there is — the museum was definitely worth a few miles’ detour.

The Ann Arbor-Toledo Overnighter

Posted on August 3, 2015 by admin

I can now, with complete confidence, tell the world I’ve been to Toledo. The one in Ohio, that is. As we crossed the Michigan-Ohio border late on Saturday morning, and the signs for Toledo were abundant, Lilly asked me about the name. It sounded familar, she said. I said it was the same as the city in Spain, except for pronunciation.

Ah, she answered with sudden recognition. We studied about places in Spain in Spanish class, and that was one of them, she said. Why is this town named after that one? Was there some connection?

None that I knew about, I answered. Someone in the settlement’s early days thought it would be a good name, and it stuck. There are North American towns with even less connection to their name-givers, such as every Canton. (According to the Canton, Ill. C of C, for instance, “the city was founded by Isaac Swan in 1825, he named it thus, from a notion he entertained that its location was the antipodes of Canton, China.”)

On Friday morning, Lilly and I set out for Ann Arbor, Mich. She’s entertaining the notion of applying to the University of Michigan, so we both thought this would a good thing to do. Since Ann Arbor is roughly five hours’ drive from metro Chicago, if traffic isn’t too bad, there and back on the same day wasn’t a reasonable option.

So we timed the drive to get a look at campus and environs on Friday afternoon, both on foot and in the car. The central campus is large and pleasantly collegiate. Sidewalks and green grass repose under mature trees in full summer green, and among buildings mostly dating from before modernism. Ivy on some of the walls inspired a discussion about just exactly what people talk about when they talk about the Ivy League. Any school can grow ivy, I told Lilly, but only a few are in the Ivy League (most of which I could name, but not all). Yet there are plenty of other schools just as good as the Ivies.

The campus wasn’t overly crowded, it being summer, but it was well enough populated. I’d been there before, but it was more than 10 years ago, maybe as long ago as 1999, to attend a real estate conference that the university holds every fall. I went at least twice, but digging through my papers to figure out just when is more trouble that I care to take.

One on of those visits, I got a good look at campus, including the of U-M Museum of Art, which had the virtue of being open and being free. Nice collection, too, as I dimly recall. I’ve read that the museum’s expanded significantly in more recent years. We arrived too late to see that or the intriguing-sounding Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments (which has the first commercial Moog synthesizer, among other things), or the Matthaei Botanical Gardens. Actually we were too tired for that last one, open till sunset, which is quite late this time of the year in the western part of the Eastern Time Zone.

What’s Toledo got to do with this? Toledo’s only a short drive south of Ann Arbor, and I determined that it was barely out of our way in returning home. So as trip organizer, I tacked on a few hours in Toledo on Saturday. Why did I want to go? It’s a distinctive place I’d never been — not counting driving by a few times — yet not really that far away. That’s almost all the encouragement I needed, since that’s the way I think. Also, I’d read that the Toledo Museum of Art is first-rate. And so it is, accessible for a nominal fee: $5 to park. Otherwise, no admission. Behemoth art museums in certain larger cities could learn a thing or two from that.

The Menil Collection

Posted on July 27, 2015 by admin

On the morning of July 11, Ann and I drove into the heart of greater Houston, starting near Hobby Airport and stopping en route at a doughnut shop (Shipley, which has good doughnuts and is genuinely regional), post office, and Half Price Books, all located previously by using that marvel of the age, Google maps. But not, I want to say, using any GPS gizmo or other cheaters’ device in the car, since we had none. Later generations — people alive now, probably — might marvel at that, since they won’t know how to get from point A to B, C, or D without a machine telling them how.

As an adult visitor, I’ve more-or-less bypassed Houston over the years. It could have easily been a much more familiar city if, say, I’d gone to Rice. Or if family or old friends lived there instead of San Antonio, Austin and Dallas. So driving through was both new and oddly familiar. The neighborhoods and the houses and shops feel like Texas, but the greenery’s different, so I’d find myself walking along noticing bushes I couldn’t quite place or drooping leaves that didn’t look quite right or flowers new to my eye. Something like wandering around in Australia, but not quite as weird.

Around 11, as the sun was high and hot, we arrived at The Menil Collection. Perfect time to spend in an air conditioned building looking at art-stuff. I wanted to see one of Houston’s renowned museums, but not an overwhelmingly large one, since I had other plans for the afternoon. The museum also had a locational advantage, with easy access to the highway I wanted to take out of town. It also has a large collection of surrealists.

Nothing like some surrealists to brighten your day. I’m impressed by the raw weirdness of them. How did they think of that? John and Dominique de Menil, the oil millionaires who founded the museum, seem to have an early and abiding interest in the likes of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy. Plus a few Dalis and Miros, among others. Oddly enough, but fitting, there’s also a room devoted to objects that various surrealists owned that reportedly inspired the artists. Exotic curiosities, that is. I didn’t make any notes, but I’m pretty sure I saw a shrunken head or two and a spiny suit of pseudo-armor.

According to the museum literature, the de Menils were also taken with Cubism and neoplastic abstraction, but we must have missed most of those. Or maybe most of them were off display, since I understand that the museum rotates its 17,000 objects with some vigor. We did happen on a nice collection of ancient Greek and Roman objects and afterward some African art, housing in a gallery looking out on an enclosed and inaccessible (to us) garden.

The museum itself is a spacious, light-filled space, except for some of the intentionally darkened galleries. Renzo Piano designed the structure. Seems like he gets all sorts of plum jobs. This one dates from the mid-1980s. The Texas State Historical Association describes it well: “The main museum building is on a tract of nine city blocks purchased by the Menils in the Montrose section of Houston. In accord with Mrs. Menil’s desire for a building that was ‘small on the outside and big on the inside…’ At forty feet by 142 feet and a maximum height of forty-five feet, the building dominates the neighborhood without overwhelming it, due in large part to its grey wood siding, white trim, and black canvas awnings.

“Renzo Piano, perhaps best known for his high-tech Pompidou Center project in Paris, produced an equally innovative if less visually startling technical miracle for the Menil Collection. Working with engineer Peter Rice he achieved an interior illuminated by natural light that passes through glass and is deflected by a series of 300 ferro-cement ‘leaves,’ thus protecting the works of art from direct sunlight. A series of glass-enclosed interior gardens enhances the natural ambiance of the galleries.” Some good images of the place are here.

Next, we walked over to the Rothko Chapel, which is part of the Menil Collection as well. It’s a short distance to the east, tucked in among the houses and trees of an otherwise well-established middle-class neighborhood. You expect certain things from a chapel, and the Rothko Chapel, with its enormous black Rothkos staring back at you from all around the interior walls, is a marvel at contradicting your expectations. Even so, its form is still clearly that of chapel, without overt religious symbols. But you can also imagine that these big black shapes are fragments of the Void, or something just as unnerving, staring right back at you. Quite a thing for the artist to pull off.

Ann, being 12, wasn’t quite so impressed. She appreciated the air conditioning. The Rothkos, not so much.

Here’s an example of art-speak. Whoever wrote the Wiki description of the Rothko Chapel said this: “The Chapel is the culmination of six years of Rothko’s life and represents his gradually growing concern for the transcendent. For some, to witness these paintings is to submit one’s self to a spiritual experience, which, through its transcendence of subject matter, approximates that of consciousness itself. It forces one to approach the limits of experience and awakens one to the awareness of one’s own existence. For others, the Chapel houses fourteen large paintings whose dark, nearly impenetrable surfaces represent hermeticism and contemplation.”

Submit one’s self to a spiritual experience, eh? Approximates that of consciousness itself? Abstract expressionism is notorious for evoking the kind of reaction Ann had: Why is this rectangle of color art? Why is it hanging here? Is this a joke? I don’t feel that way. The colors are interesting, especially when you start to eye the texture. You know, color is the subject. Look closely and it’s more than a Pantone monocolor; there’s more than one shade. I’m glad people paint this way. But I don’t see the need to discuss the genre with the artistic equivalent of technobabble.

Further away, but not too far, is the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, also part of the Menil (now, I’ve read, simply called the BFC). Sad to say, there’s no Byzantine fresco there. After some years in place, it’s been returned to its home in Cyprus. Now the building will house temporary installations. The one occupying the space now is “The Infinity Machine.” A pretentious title, maybe, but it was intriguing. That made up for missing the fresco.

The installation was a rotating mobile about two stories high, going all the way up to the high ceiling (the room is large: about 116,000 cubic feet). It consisted of dozens of antique mirrors hanging by cords of varying lengths. Some mirrors were hanging high, some low. Some were large, some hand-held mirrors. A mechanism turned the mobile so that the mirrors rotated around the room about twice a minute. The was room was mostly dim, but changing lights from the side illuminated the whirling mirrors in endlessly alternating patterns.

You sat on a bench along the wall and watched. You could, in theory, go over to the mirrors and maybe be hit by some as they passed by, since there was nothing to separate you from them except an admonition from the sole guard in the room not to do that.

There’s an audio component as well: sound files made by converting data gathered by various spacecraft as they’ve explored the outer planets and their moons. Don’t ask me how that’s done, it’s beyond my understanding. Something NASA calls Spooky Sounds, but that’s not quite right. Anyway, together with the motion of the mirrors and the dance of the light, the installation is quite a show. The artists are a married couple from British Columbia, Janet Cardiff and George Bures. More about it here, include a video that’s better than nothing, but hardly does it justice.

The Bishop’s Palace, Galveston

Posted on July 20, 2015 by admin

Late last year, Congress passed a joint resolution along these lines: “Whereas the United States has conferred honorary citizenship on 7 other occasions during its history, and honorary citizenship is and should remain an extraordinary honor not lightly conferred nor frequently granted;

[In case you’re wondering, I’ll save you a trip to Wiki. The others are Winston Churchill, Raoul Wallenberg, William and Hannah Penn, Mother Teresa, Casimir Pulaski and Lafayette.]

“Whereas Bernardo de Gaalvez y Madrid, Viscount of Galveston and Count of Gaalvez, was a hero of the Revolutionary War who risked his life for the freedom of the United States people and provided supplies, intelligence, and strong military support to the war effort…

“Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Bernardo de Gaalvez y Madrid, Viscount of Galveston and Count of Gaalvez, is proclaimed posthumously to be an honorary citizen of the United States.”

I didn’t know about that resolution until after Ann and I went to Galveston earlier this month, and I looked up Bernardo de Gaalvez y Madrid, Viceroy of New Spain, to add to my vague knowledge of the man for whom Galveston is named.

To my way of thinking, the first place to go in Galveston (after lunch, if you happen to arrive at lunchtime), is the Bishop’s Palace. That’s just what we did.

The name is a spot of Texas hyperbole. Palace, it isn’t. But it is a excellent example of a large (19,000 SF) Victorian mansion, built in the 1890s for a successful attorney and his wife, Walter and Josephine Gresham, who tapped local architect Nicholas J. Clayton to design it. (Clayton seems to have been very busy in the pre-1900 heyday of Galveston, but things were never the same after that.)
The Handbook of Texas Online describes Clayton’s work as “exuberant in shape, color, texture, and detail. He excelled at decorative brick and iron work… What made Clayton’s architecture so distinctive in late nineteenth-century Texas was the underlying compositional and proportional order with which he structured the display of picturesque shapes and rich ornament.”

That’s a fitting description for the Bishop’s Palace, which was a sturdy mansion too. It survived the Hurricane of 1900, one of the few structures in the area to do so, and sheltered a lot of survivors. The bishop in the name is Bishop Christopher E. Byrne, who lived there in 20th century, after the Roman Catholic Diocese of Galveston bought the mansion in 1923. Only in 2013 did the Church sell the structure to the Galveston Historical Foundation.

The interior has more stained glass than most Victorian mansions I’ve seen. Many of those were added by the bishop, who insisted that one of the rooms be converted into a chapel, which it remains. For instance, a stained-glass St. Peter’s there to greet you.

As usual, a house like this has some interesting period detail, such as the fact that the lights were built for gas as well as for that new light source, electricity, in case it worked out. Or the bathtub in the main second-floor bathroom.
Note the three faucets. Our guide, an informative woman whose main job is teaching Texas History — everyone in the state takes it in 7th grade, or at least used to — told us that one was for hot water, one for cold, and one for rainwater from a cistern. It was thought to be good for one’s hair.

The Greshams had the means to be international travelers in the days before Europe on $5 a Day, and that meant steamer trunks. I don’t think I’d ever seen trunks of the time plastered with luggage labels, but Bishop’s Palace had some on display.
Next door to the Bishop’s Palace is Sacred Heart Catholic Church. This building dates from the early 1900s, because the 1900 hurricane knocked down the original.

The church wasn’t open for a look inside. But the next-door location must have been convenient for the bishop. You know, in case he ever needed to tune up his crosier or something.

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.

The House on the Rock

Posted on June 1, 2015 by admin

Here’s a list of some of the things we saw at The House on the Rock on Saturday. It’s only a partial list, and most of the categories represent a large number of individual items: books, Tiffany-style lamps, dolls, Japanese dolls, Japanese lanterns, musical instruments, self-playing musical instruments, stained-glass windows, stained-glass panels, paperweights, stuffed birds, antique guns, dueling pistol sets, rifles, coin banks, model trains, suits of armor, swords, faux crowns, Fabergé-like eggs, 19th-century doctor, barber, and pharmacy equipment, scrimshaw, model ships, nautical equipment and ephemera, cash registers, model airplanes, bottles, mounted newspapers, brewery equipment, cheese vats, bells, doll houses, cannons, and circus miniatures.

The House on the Rock is also home to an enormous calliope; what’s asserted to be the largest carousel in the world (and it could well be); and a 200-foot-long model of a sea monster, about three stories high, poised in mid-fight with an enormous squid.

The self-playing musical instruments were many, some small and maybe from the golden age of such devices, the late 19th century (it’s always a maybe at The House when it comes to authenticity), and others were room-sized and created for The House. Most were operated by nicely designed gold-colored tokens that were available for four for a dollar. I kept one as a souvenir, and used a handful of others to play the automatic tunes.

All of these items are housed in a complex of buildings built on hill in rural Wisconsin. It’s a successful tourist trap, quasi-museum, psuedo-antique gallery with some possibly valuable items mixed in, a remarkable piece of outsider architecture, a monument to a highly energized eccentric collector named Alex Jordan Jr. who might have his own cable show were he living in our time, and most of all a mass agglomeration of stuff acquired according to the idiosyncratic lights of Mr. Jordan, dead now more than 25 years, but maintained as all of these things (and a viable business) by a successor he picked. I’ve never been any place like it before.

Actually, I have. Once or twice a year, I have a phantasmagoria dream, usually involving my passage through a street or a cityscape or a tunnel among a constantly shifting complex succession of images and things. Usually these are good dreams, but sometimes there’s an edge of anxiety, such as the time I passed through the phantasmagoria trying to remember where I’d parked my car (I woke relieved to realize my car was in my driveway). The House was no dream, but as you walk through, it’s for sure a complex succession of images and things.

Back on August 4, 2007, when we visited Taliesin, which is a few miles away, we talked about a return trip to The House on the Rock someday. That day turned out to be May 30, 2015. Yuriko, Yuika, Ann and I set out by car for Madison on the afternoon of the day before. We spent the night in a motel there, and the next morning drove the 50 or so miles to Spring Green, Wis., and then the few more miles to The House.

On the 29th, we arrived in Madison in time for dinner. I picked La Taguara on Washington Ave., a Venezuelan restaurant I discovered via online search. I’ve been to many kinds of restaurants, but this was a first for me, and everyone else. I can report that it satisfied our need for a good dinner, as well as my periodic urge for food novelty. I had the Pabellon a caballo, which the menu called the Venezuelan “national dish”: black beans, white cheese, shredded beef, rice, deep-fried sweet plantain pieces, and an arepa — flatbread made of ground maize dough — along with a fried egg. We had fried yucca for an appetizer, and I had passion fruit juice to drink.

Since it was still light after dinner, we made our way to downtown Madison by car, and eventually on foot to Monona Terrace, a meeting and convention facility that happens to have a rooftop terrace with a fine view of Lake Monona. The last time I was there, ice covered part of the lake. A late May view is a lot more pleasant. The opposite direction from the lake included an equally fine view of the capitol catching the day’s dying light.

After leaving The House on the Rock in mid-afternoon on the 30th, I drove a slightly out-of-the-way route back home, by way of Mount Horeb, New Glarus, Monroe, and Beloit (everyone else was napping). I did a driveby look at New Glarus, a town founded by Swiss settlers, and which includes the Swiss Historical Village, an open-air museum and something else in Wisconsin to see someday.

But on this trip, everything besides The House on the Rock was just a bonus. That was the focus of the 27-hour, 400-mile trip. It didn’t disappoint.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Museums