Wisconsin Journal

Number 3

13 September 1997



I seem to be falling behind on reporting. This number is about

excursions that took place three weeks ago.  At this rate, I'll

wrap up about Christmas of 1999.



The first weekend I arrived, we checked out a couple of nearby events.

On Saturday, Kaye, Sarah and I went to the Dane County Farmers' Market

(Dane being Madison's county).  This market takes place on the quadrangle

that surrounds the state capitol.  It is extremely crowded, and Kaye has

taken to shopping at the Hillsdale Farmers' Market on Wednesdays, which

has about a third as many booths, but about the same selection.



The tomatoes and the sweet corn here are wonderful.  The warm, humid nights

here are excellent for developing flavor.  (Did you know that the tomato

originated in the tropics, and is perenniel in its native habitat?)

Products that don't commonly show up at the Beaverton Farmers' Market

back in Oregon include trout (fresh and smoked), venison and popcorn.

(Popcorn farmers were selling microwave pouches of their own popcorn.)

Lots of peppers, beans, melons, honey and cheese, too.  Kaye and I

tastes three or four aged cheddars from local producers, and found that

all had a bitter aftertaste.  We are still Tillamook Vintage White bigots.



(Big news this weekend is Wisconsin's counter-attack against a series

of ads by the California Dairy Board poking fun at Wisconsin cheese.

California has recently surpassed Wisonsin as the leading producer of

dairy products, and couldn't resist tweaking some noses, I guess.  Anyway,

Wisconsin is sending both the governor, Tommy Thompson, and "Alice in

Dairyland" (state dairy princess??) to a reception in North Hollywood

that features Wisconsin cheese, bratwurst and beer. (I'm still trying

to figure out the fourth major food group in Wisconsin.))



Before and after going to the market, we checked out State Street a little,

which is the main drag between the captiol and campus.  Lots of restaurants,

and two places to buy cheeseheads.  We also checked out the gift shop

at the Wisconsin State Historical museum, which just happens to have

*baskets*.  We seem to have acquired 18+ baskets in less than a month

in the state.



Sunday we headed out towards Spring Green, which is the site of Frank

Lloyd Wright's midwestern home, Taliesin.  (It's two Welsh words tali/esin,

but I forget what they mean.)  We didn't visit it this trip; instead,

we visited The House on the Rock, which is a little south of Taliesin,

because it closes for the season earlier. On the way there, we stopped

at a farmstand just outside Spring Green.  It had a mini-zoo out back

with animals to look at--various kinds of deer and birds, mostly.

The goat pen was the most interesting.  You could buy corn to feed

them. But rather than just handing them the corn, there was a series

of little buckets on pulleys that you could use to move the corn to

a series of three platforms connected by ramps.  The set-up gave you

an idea of what good climber and balancers the goats were; the highest

platform was probably 20 feet up.  Bought some vegetables and cheese

curds and were on our way.



Also on the way out and back we saw several stands from a local fast

food chain whose featured item is "Butter Burgers". Just in case the

hamburger patty isn't quite greasy enough for you, I guess.



Back to The House on the Rock (THOTR). I'm not sure if I'll be able to

describe the experience adequately.  The simple explanation is that

it is a house, some exhibits and some gardens.  The impression you get

is that you've wandered into some enormous Hollywood set made for

the dream sequence in a 1960's pyschological thriller.  Alfred Hitchcock

meets "Casino Royale"?  You know something's up as you follow the

driveway up to the parking area, and see 15-foot tall urns at regular

intervals along the way, complete with giant cement lizards glued

to them that look like something out of an M.C. Escher print.



THOTR had relatively modest beginnings. A Madisonian, named Alex Jordan,

found a 60-foot pillar of sandstone, and decided to build a house

in and around the top of it.  The pillar provides walls to some of

the rooms, and much of the construction is with other natural rock.

The ceilings in most places are quite low, and the lighting is

subdued, so I felt like I was walking around a cave.  The house was

begun in the early 1940s, with Jordan carrying much of the stone

and mortar up rope ladders himself.  He built it originally as a

retreat for himself, but he soon was attracting so many curiosity seekers

that he started charging admission and using the proceeds to fund

expansions.  The house ended up with 14 rooms, plus more in a

carraige house.  There are lots of low ceilings and horizontal lines

inside, so I sure there was some influence from Wright.  Jordan liked

teak, stained glass, fireplaces and carpeted ceilings. I think he liked

to cook in the fireplaces, since all of them seemed to be decorated with

cast-iron cookware, and one even had an electric cooking element set

into the hearth. He apparently worked without plans, and the house

and the rest of the buildings have a feeling of being accreted more

than designed.



The most amazing part of the house is the "Infinity Room", added in

the 1980's, I think.  Imagine you built a 200-foot, five-sided

steel and glass spire.  Okay.  Now turn it on its side, and cantilever

it out from the house by resting it on an adjacent sandstone pillar.

Probably 140 feet of projects unsupported from the pillar.  The

steel framing itself forms a grid into which the windows are set,

and the grid shrinks towards the apex, giving a forced perspective

that makes the room appear even longer than it is.  Near the pointy

end, there is a coffee table built up from the floor with a glass top.

The surprise is that the table lets you look right through the floor

into the valley below.  Great conversation stopper for acrophobes like

me.  The whole thing bounces as people walk back and forth, further

enhancing the experience.  (Though according to a placard, the design

was approved by structural engineers, and wouldn't fail even if you

filled it with people standing shoulder to shoulder.)



So once Jordan had the house built, and was still getting admission money,

he started collecting "things" and putting up buildings to display them.

What did he collect?  What didn't he collect.  I saw medicine bottles,

doll houses, Burma Shave signs (Don't stick your elbow/out too far./

It may go home/in another car!), model ships, armor, Chinese carvings,

Navaho art, stuffed toys, a car covered with ceramic tile and Santa

Claus figures. Sarah's favorite collection was little animated displays

that used to appear in jewelry store windows.  Some of them had buttons

to push to get them going--she wanted to push every one of them (and did).

One of my favorites was in the firearms collection--a wooden leg with

a cut-away for a small derringer pistol. While some of the items are

obviously rare or valuable, I wouldn't actually characterize the collections

as a museum, since few items were labeled, and there was very little

interpretive material with them. The displays are everywhere, including

the restrooms.  Imagine trying to get your bladder to relax with a

diorama of stuffed wolverines watching.



At some Jordan started manufacturing his own artifacts.  I doubt the

Crown Jewels display was the real thing, and some of the armor in

later exhibits was clearly modern reproductions.  (I'm not even

sure if "reproduction" is the right term--the armor wasn't constructed

in the same way as antique armor.)  He built a giant model of a canon.

In a huge, 3-story exhibit area, called Heritage of the Sea, he had

built a 200-foot-long model of a whale fighting a giant squid.  He

wasn't that big on anatomical correctness, however.  For example, the

whale has fangs.  Must be one of those vampire whales.



Sometimes he used items he had collected in constructing new things.

He built the world's largest carousel, with 20,000 lights and 269

figures (none horses, though the walls of the room are decorated with

carousel horses).  For some reason, he thought it would add atmosphere

to hang life-size angels from the ceiling, too.  The angels are department

store mannequins with wings nailed to their backs.  He turned a room

the size of a high-school gymnasium into a giant organ you can walk through.

Most of the ranks of pipes seem to be salvaged from other pipe organs,

but other attachments, like giant pneumatic gongs, seem to have been

produced just for this organ.  There were three consols in the middle

of the room, with 33 separate keyboards amongst them, and probably over

a thousand stops, total.  I didn't see anything about whether this

organ ever actually gets played, or if it was currently operational.

There were clearly parts of the room that were purely decorative, such

as the giant electrical coils that purportedly powered the whole thing.

You wind your way through the room on balconies and ramps, and the

whole impression is Phantom of the Opera in Dr. Frankenstein's Laboratory.

Luke thought it would be a great place for a laser-tag game.



Okay. I couldn't report on THOTR without mentioning Jordan's fascination

with automated musical instruments.  You've all surely seen nickelodeons

with fancy attachments such as xylophones and tambourines.  And Jordan

liked to collect those.  But I saw automatons with glass jugs, cowbells,

saxophones and timpani.  That variety didn't seem to satisfy him,

so he started constructing music machines that used actual instruments:

trumpets, bassoons, flutes, violins, celli, harps, guitars, mandolins and more.



The contraptions he constructed to play them are amazing in their own

right.  For example, the mechanism for a cello had four bows (one for

each string), dozens of servos to do the fingering, plus four "pluckers"

for pizzicato passages.  Brass and woodwinds had odd-shaped boxes and

belows in place of the mouthpieces, presumable with some special kind

of reed or reeds inside. You can buy tokens and have most of these

things play.  However, a lot of them seem in poor repair, and in some

cases I saw (and heard) that a particular music machine had a taped

accompaniment played through speakers.  One room had a full orchestra

of mannekins (must of got a deal on those) holding instruments with

player mechanisms attached.  While the musicians lifted their instruments

when they played, and mechanisms activated in time to the music,

I'm not sure in that particular case the mechanisms had ever actually

worked.  There seems to be too few actuators on the clarinets, for

example, to even play a scale.  I'd really like to know more about

the engineering that went into the music machines.



All-in-all, we were heartily impressed, and are certain no comparable

attraction exists in the country.  It would be too scary if their were

two minds like that.



The ride back to Madison was less fantastic.  We drove into Dodgeville

(home of Land's End), but all the shops were closed, including the

Land's End "Inlet" store.  We also detoured off the main road to

Drive through Mt. Horeb, which features a Norwegian theme.  The main

street has been named the "Trollway" and there about 20 troll carvings

in yards and in front of businesses along it.  Mt. Horeb is also the

home of MOMA (Museum of Mustard Art), but it was closed.  We'll have

to go back to get our "Poupon U." penants and T-shirts. I'll report

when we do.