Camping! Huzzah! Fires, mosquitos, Bushmills, sun, fun, spiders! You’re all jealous that you couldn’t go camping and cuddle with me and mr jarbaby in our fabulous Coleman Tent.
ADMIT IT!
Anyway, aside from the two mullets drinking Schlitz outside a rusted mobile home that said “Packer Country”, the best thing I saw this weekend was a geographical/artistic/architectural oddity known as:
The House On The Rock
What the holy living crap IS this place? I can’t even begin to describe it but to say it is the constructive history of one man’s journey into absolute, dickstroking madness.
I loved the tour of this place, as it started out beautifully, a house built into a rock, with huge fireplaces, cushy bachelor pad couches, low ceilings…and then…we proceed to a replica of a 1900s dentist office complete with tools of torture and rows of fake teeth, a 200 ft sperm whale wrestling with an equally big squid…a demonic doll collection, the largest carousel in the world with horrific mannequin angels nailed to the ceiling and ‘horses’ that are half woman half chicken…calliopes, padded ceilings, weaponry, a car covered in elephants sitting right next to a Dusenberg, a complete circus in 1/20th scale and orchestras that play themselves…it was crazy.
CRAZY man! Like Twin Peaks/Blue Velvet Crazy. I’ve never spent $20 better.
Then we went, bought some cheese curds and bud light and discussed the acid trip we’d just walked through.
My favorite bits were the human-less symphonies. Before we went grampa told us to make SURE we bought tokens to play them because “There’s too many cheap bastards walking through that place who don’t want to spend a quarter to see something they’ve never seen before.”
You DID stop in the bathroom about halfway through and check out all the glass bottles on the walls, didn’t you?
Of course, but amongst the glass bottles, what stood out the most to me was the: BIOHAZARDAROUS WASTE NEEDLE DISPOSAL CONTAINER right next to the soap.
Fascinating. How much shooting up of heroin/insulin/morphine is going on in this place that we actually need a biohazard unit?
again…crazy. And the infinity room? Forget about it. I want to live there.
jarbaby
That place scared the crap out of me. I felt like I was in one of those Sci-Fi short stories where the guy drives into town and the sign says Welcome to Podunk, population 204. He has lunch, drives out of town, but can’t find the right road. He stops and asks for directions and everyone is really creepy about it and he can’t get a straight answer. He keeps driving and driving around and can’t find his way out! The last thing you see is someone with a can of paint and paintbrush changing the population sign from “204” to a “205,” and the brush marks on the sign indicate this has happened a LOT.
We decided we’d seen enough and wanted to get back to our cars and hit the road. We kept walking and walking, following the exit signs, none of which ever led to a valid exit. There is one way out of this place, and it’s through 27 miles of exhibits, everyone crawling along like ants in front of them. Cripes I thought we wouldn’t escape with our lives!
AIGH! FLASHBACK! FLASHBACK!
It is a mortifying display of moreness, isn’t it? I’ve only been there once (I say “only” like there is a chance in Hell that I am ever going to go back). Not my cup of tea. It didn’t help that the wifey and I visited when our son was very small, and the place does not allow strollers, so I had to lug him around in a rented backpack carrier designed by the Marquis de Sade.
All I could think the whole time was “Where does all this crap come from?” There must have been 20 miniature circuses and a hundred dollhouses and countless shelves of I don’t even know what. And none of it is labeled in any manner. It’s like some insane museum curator threw all his stuff into a dark warren of rooms and died before he could organize any of it (which I hear isn’t far from the truth).
Anyway, despite its appalling sensory overload weirdness, it is something that everyone in the upper midwest should visit once. Just so you can understand the glassy-eyed horror that previous visitors all share.
Bring a pair of comfy shoes and leave your good taste at the door.
I’m going to carve this into the wood above our front door.
And yes, Cranky…it’s scary. By the end, we were actually pushing old ladies over, scrambling to find a true and viable exit. I felt like I was trapped in an Escher drawing and the ceilings were getting smaller. It didn’t help that the whole place is so dark and musty smelling and that the tour group from “Thirty Days Till The Grave” were waltzing along in front of us, arguing over whether the gigantic fiberglass whale was once alive and now ‘stuffed’.
And I’d also like to add that I found it fascinating how the tour, which is like being strapped onto the boat in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, forces you through two food courts and two gift shops. You have no choice…YOU MUST WALK BY THE PIZZA.
Wonderful! And if the giant sea monster doesn’t give you nightmares…couple it with blaring, tinny calliopes playing BOLERO that you can hear from five different points on the tour.
another old lady comment…after returning from the Infinity Room “that will look nice when they finish it”
This sounds like the American version of the Far East acid trip that is the Tiger Balm Gardens in Singapore (which I hear they unfortunately “cleaned up” in recent years). Statues of mice and other small animals alternately being Disneyesque and then fucking and chopping each other’s heads off with knives.
Jill
Oh man… this is a place I MUST go see. Even if it’s by myself because the Tzeroling would get bored and/or scared by the end of Hour 1 and Mrs. O probably wouldn’t go near the place for half the proceeds or more.
And that Infinity Room… Sweet Jesus God, it’s either going to cure my vertigo or make it so bad I’ll be scared to stand up. But I gotta go there.
Eat before you go in. Go early as you can in the morning, and take a sinus medicine or asprin before entering. Eat sometime during the tour. Plan on it taking about eight hours. Originaly it was the house without the needle, and the the better older parts. It took you about four hours to go through what was a quarter of what now exists. Now you race your ass through there as fast as you can to get out in eight hours. They went for quantity, instead of quality in the last ten years.
Your only a few miles from Taliesien at that point.
Eat before you go in. Go early as you can in the morning, and take a sinus medicine or asprin before entering. Eat sometime during the tour. Plan on it taking about eight hours. Originaly it was the house without the needle, and the the better older parts. It took you about four hours to go through what was a quarter of what now exists. Now you race your ass through there as fast as you can to get out in eight hours. They went for quantity, instead of quality in the last ten years.
Your only a few miles from Taliesien at that point.
Eat before you go in. Go early as you can in the morning, and take a sinus medicine or asprin before entering. Eat sometime during the tour. Plan on it taking about eight hours. Originaly it was the house without the needle, and the the better older parts. It took you about four hours to go through what was a quarter of what now exists. Now you race your ass through there as fast as you can to get out in eight hours. They went for quantity, instead of quality in the last ten years.
Your only a few miles from Taliesien at that point.
Eight hours? I only checked out the link briefly, but the place didn’t really look big enough for an eight hour tour (now I’m trying to keep that damn Gilligan’s Island song out of my head). Does it really go that far back into the rock? 16 buildings? I only saw one in the picture.
I will say, though, that despite the hefty admission, I will go see it if I’m ever in that part of the country. I think. These are not ringing endorsements I’m reading.
[sub]I definitely need to check out those Tiger Balm Gardens in Singapore, though. Very cool.[/sub]
After you have visited the place you can only conclude that old Frank Lloyd W. was a fine judge of talent, at least in the case of Mr. Jordan, Sr…
The place induces a sense of psychosis. I have heard a rumor that the House On The Rock has been used as a sort of final exam for some mental hospitals. If the patient goes through the place and finds in perfectly pleasant and normal, he goes back in for another session of electro-shock.
Flyboy, the house itself doesn’t take long. It’s the multiple airline hangers crammed full of shit, shit, and more shit that takes so much time. And it’s not like it’s one nice big warehouse that you can move through freely. Everything is a divided up so you have to go through it in a linear fashion. It’s like a rat’s maze.
AAA lost all credibility with me after that fiasco. My husband is a Frank Lloyd Wright devotee, so we were only in the area to see Taliesin. Then I note that the AAA guide recommends this place–also a house! Interesting architecturally! right close by. I think it even had a little “Especially recommended by AAA” star beside it in the tourbook.
Bottle of Smoke, no strollers? Really? Forcing someone to bodily carry their kid 12 miles rises to the level of Human Rights Violation, I think. Someone call the UN.
whimpers, sucks on thumb and curls up with blankie on office floor trying to soothe herself through the nightmare memories of this place
When I lived in Madison in college there were rumors that the owner/designer would take the tour so he could enjoy watching people look at the house (early 80’s, he wasn’t dead yet). Anyone meet him? He was the creepy old perv, goosing young women. The women would complain, only to be told there was nothing to be done, since he owned the place.
I always thought that explained a lot about the designs, ie half woman/half chickens and manequin angels with big glued -on nipples hanging from the ceiling.
For what it’s worth, I first went in the 60’s when it was just the house. It was beautiful. He must have been sane at one time.
