i never travel far, without a little big star

to be honest, madison really ain't half bad.

they have two nepalese restaurants, the onion is freely distributed around town, and the architecture sometimes stops you in your tracks. minneapolis made me hear distant strains of the replacements. paul westerberg wanted me to kiss him on the bus, but milwaukee, wisconsin schlamieled and schlamazeled the blue collar world of laverne, shirley and the cunninghams.

wisconsin is also home to house on a rock and frank lloyd wright's taliesin. if taliesin is all about the clean lines and modernism of frank lloyd wright, house on a rock is about the chaos of an active imagination. it's too bizarre to describe because it's one of those things that leaves you speechless from the enormity of it all. a lot like the way that the grand canyon can't be described because it's just so friggin huge. no amount of prose, pictures or poetry can convey the big. the huge. the giant.

it's hard to even know where to start with house on a rock. i don't know if it's the giant collection of self playing instruments, all spread out throughout the house as stringed quartets or traditional japanese arrangements, with fully costumed mannequins wielding them day and night. maybe it's the 'infinity room' with its forced perspective hallway made entirely of glass walls, which cantilevers away from the house and over a cliff face for 200 feet. when you get to the end of the hallway, there is a window in the floor, looking directly down, over the forest, hundreds of yards below. it's what you would imagine a ufo sees, as it sits perfectly still above the earth.

taliesin, frank lloyd wright's family home, where he often experimented on various bits of architecture, is a quick drive down the road from house on a rock. it's beautiful. the frank lloyd wright foundation desperately tries to maintain the integrity of the house despite its lack of irrigation and the threat of nature taking over the very structure of the building. they point out the various parts of the ground where a tree encroaches on the house, shoving walls aside. money is raised to move water away from the building, so that the earth doesn't collapse away. despite his insistence on the integration of nature in his buildings, he neglected to account for the fact that nature needs room to grow and erode. either that, or he just didn't care, as long as it looked fantastic.

the frank lloyd wright unitarian meeting house, located in madison, wisconsin, is also experiencing the same battles as taliesin is. its copper roof needs replacing because water has degraded it. every day, the church gives a small tour of the building for a small donation. everything in the building is based upon triangles. it's a variation on the same geometric shapes as buckminster fuller loves, and you can understand why it's so elegant.

the hostel in madison is nice. it's run by a friendly guy named lee, who mans the desk and has good advice on where to eat and how to get to places. fortunately, it wasn't tourist season yet, so the hostel had a bunk open for me. this was definitely a hostel for the college kids. they mostly kept to themselves, but were friendly enough. it's sort of weird for there to be so many people in the room, but such little communication between each other. it's sort of monastic, with its voluntary vow of silence. in the hush of my young bunkmates, i shut my eyes in exhaustion and fell asleep, dreaming of triangle men.

triangle wins.

<05.17.04>

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