“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
Wisconsinite here-- how did you find out about House on the Rock of all places? Was it less obscure 22 years ago? Now whenever I bring it up with people and find out they haven't been there, I say "the place with the carousel from American Gods" and about 90% of the time they know right away what I'm talking about.
I think it was a lot more obscure back then. But then, I moved to Wisconsin in 1992 and lived there for two decades. I saw the signs nearby for The House on the Rock, and decided to go and look, urged on by fellow Wisconsinite, Maggie Thompson, from the Comics Buyers Guide.
If my followers aren’t familiar with House on the Rock, the huge carousel isn’t even the most interesting part. It’s part house, part museum, part “how are there so many mechanical musical instruments??? WHY IS THERE A WHOLE ROOM OF WEIRD PIPE ORGANS?!” and toured in 3 distinct parts; the outer grounds are also *amazing.* I got to take my mum’s DSLR one visit, and some of the photos I took remain among the best photos I’ve ever taken.
The outside is normal enough (but absolutely gorgeous)
But then you get to the part where there’s a window in the *floor* because the cantilevered building is stretching something like 50 feet without support under it? And you can feel it moving and swaying as you’re walking out there. And because this is the Driftless Region of Wisconsin (so unglaciated), you’re just out over the top of the forest below…
and it’s called the infinity room because it uses the visual concepts behind vanishing points to give the optical illusion of going on forever.
Then there’s the decor, which is pretty but also “what is this supposed to be? just glass balls in a table??”
though another photo of that table is a play with depth of field I have to say I’m fair proud of:
But I mentioned it being part museum, right? That includes a showcase of weapons that *should not exist,* why did anyone ever make these?
And then there’s a section full of what are designed to look like storefronts on a a town’s main street, filled with all sorts of things, like fancy china and silver serving things…
And the multi-story tall model of a whale and a giant squid…
Oh, and the room with all the pipe organs also has this AMAZING clock
And there’s more, of course. The carousel is fairly famous, and you can google better photos of that than I was able to get with the gear I had. (and I have no photos without folks recognizable faces in them, and I’m trying to avoid that as much as I can). But there’s other amazing things too, like the most impressive dollhouse I’ve ever seen…
And also amazing stained glass, and so much more but tumblr only allows so many photos, so here’s my favorite photo of the stained glass:
If you’re ever in the southwest corner of Wisconsin (near Spring Green) and you have a couple of days to do tourist stuff, I can’t recommend House on the Rock enough. I’ve been 3 times and could go back again and see things I missed. (If you’re there in summer, also look up American Player’s Theatre and go see a lovely play, they’re amazing at Shakespeare.) And I guess if you’re into architecture, you could go by Taliesin (Frank Lloyd Wright’s home) which is near enough to Alex Jordan’s House on the Rock. (No. HotR is NOT Wright, and people seem to want to think it is??? But it isn’t.)
still so fucking weird to go from real life, where a cis man being flamboyant/effeminate/camp is judged like 70+% by how he speaks and carries himself, to online queer communities, which often seem to have no concept of male gender non-conformity that doesn’t involve wearing a skirt
i promise you, a man can be fem to the point of being in danger while wearing literally exactly the same thing as a hypermasculine guy. a boring basic black suit. a t shirt and jeans. a UNIFORM. gender conformity is not only about what you wear
None of you have watched that heartbreaking scene in The Birdcage where Albert gives up wearing everything he likes to try and blend in for their son’s conservative prospective in-laws and is so awkward and uncomfortable that no one says much until finally he says, defeated, “I know what you’re thinking - dressed like this, I’m even more obvious, aren’t I?” and it shows.
Here, have your queer heart broken:
This is what I’m talking about. This is still literally how it is in most places in the Midwest if you’re trying to “pass” for straight/cis/whatever.
I cannot begin to describe how hard I cried when I saw this scene the first time and how confused my conservative family was as to why I was crying.
It’s so funny how literally the way a man holds his wrists is an indication of femininity but also people think it’s all about makeup and clothing. But we’re also at a point that if you have a suit that is any color other than black, dark grey, or navy, it’s flamboyant.
Men’s sartorial stylings are so rigidly controlled it’s painful. Tim Gunn here is at the very absolute bleeding edge of “acceptably masculine” here for most cishet men, just for some noticible stripes, patterns, and purple, and that’s before he even moves. This is how restricted it is.
But Trixie Mattel (out of drag here) wearing standard masculine garb is could still be deemed unacceptably feminine for body language alone.
This is why we talk about “toxic masculinity” – the idea that any expression of emotion besides anger or even wearing colorful clothes is non-masculine and therefore restricted is horrifying. It sucks! Men should be allowed to express themselves outside of a tiny box of acceptable behavior, because they’re, y'know, people, and people have a wide range of expression in the way they like to look and move and act.
I honestly feel like it’s gotten worse over the last couple decades, too. If you look at men’s fashions from the 70s and even into the 80s, there’s a lot of style choices that look pretty cringe to us, but…. you also see a lot more color and pattern in suits than you do now. I’m not sure when this started to shift, or if it’s tied in to the increasing lack of color in all consumer products, but it sucks.
Not the way I figured it would turn out, but I learned something here.
This is called Trophic Cascade in ecology.
This was controversial when they released the wolves, as I recall. There were complaints about the wolves being dangerous to tourists, that they would actually damage the park and kill so much wildlife no one would want to go anymore.
Last year I wrote about what happened at Pride when a couple of kids didn’t understand why us older folx were so bitter about Reagan.
This year, I have something a little softer.
Someone who looked a little older than me came up to the booth wearing a pink t-shirt proclaiming him one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Francisco chapter. As I was ringing him up, I asked if he’d been involved for a while.
“Yes,” he said, “for a bit,” in that way us middle-aged people do when we’re sort of wincing and feeling old.
“Okay, well,” I said, sitting at my register in my queer booth full of queer clothes and patches and pins, topless in public for the first time. (I had pasties on for my own comfort bc I was working, but I live in the city of the Naked Bike Ride, and I took full advantage). My baby brother and both of my partners ran around behind me, my brother wearing a loose tank top that makes his scars visible.
“I need to tell you that you all helped keep me alive.”
He blinked at me as I continued, “I was a kid in high school in the early 90s. I lived in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania, and what you all were doing was so loud and so out there that even I heard about your work. It was one of the things that kept me alive. So thank you, and please thank the rest of the Sisters.”
I heard about them through people in my parents’ church complaining about them, and then I sought more information through the beginning of the internet, through newspapers, through anything I could find. I found the cover of Newsweek that one of the Sisters was on. I read about their “exorcism” of fundamentalist preachers whose books sat on the shelf in my parents’ basement and probably still do. I saw how loud and colorful and unapologetically queer they were.
The knowledge that someone was out there, so full of defiant joy, refusing the shame that people kept trying to put on them? Oh, that kept me alive. I saw them, and I knew I could make it through. I wrapped my hands around that knowledge, and I held on so tight.
It took me a long time - a long, long time - to unwind most of it for myself and get to the point where my fat butch ass was sitting bare-chested in the July breeze, looking up at him as he held out his arms and said “you’re actually giving me chills.” I answered, “I mean every word. You helped keep me alive. So thank you.”
I never know what to say when people come up to me in public and tell me that I helped them or changed their life in some way. I appreciate it, and I genuinely love the people who apologized for “fanpersoning” at me last weekend, I just never know what to say. I’m incredibly grateful that the Sister I spoke to was incredibly gracious, saying “usually we give blessings, but I feel like you blessed me.” Another member of the party let me pet their tiny dog, who was not very interested in me, and that’s okay. It was an overwhelming day. Then, they moved on.
Me? I’m still sitting with the fact that I looked last weekend into the faces of people who didn’t know they were holding my head above water, and that I got to tell them the work they do matters. It’s a rare thing to get to tell someone, “You saved me,” and I’m treasuring it.
Last weekend, I wore my new battle vest with nothing underneath it, unless it was too hot, and then I just sat in my chair, chatting and ringing ppl out with my skin free to the air. I decided last year that top surgery isn’t for me, but that also I’m going to love this body unapologetically, and it’s no less a transmasculine body because the soft new dark hair on my belly isn’t accompanied by pink scars along my ribs.
I didn’t get here on my own. I got here because someone else cut through the undergrowth ahead of me so I could take another step forward. Here I am, decades later, still taking step after step, one at a time, and trying to lay paving stones behind me.
Last weekend was another step along that way, another step through unwinding the fear and shame and sadness that my parents and their church built into me. Another step out of hating myself for hiding parts of myself for so long, for acting out in other ways to distract people from my queerness, for feeling so much guilt when other people tell me I’m brave, because I know how much of myself I hid for how long because I was a coward, because I was afraid.
“Palpatine was preserved by arid planetary dirt until his Sith powers regenerated him” is a better explanation for his return than the fan-insulting Ass Pull perpetrated by a several-hundred-million-dollar movie.
How he got to the arid planetary dirt from the bottom of an energy shaft on the soon-to-explode Death Star II would need a bit more work, but since hand-waving seems to be the order of the day in this franchise, just watch my fingers…
[image description: a photo of op from the hips up. op is a slim 20s white person with long wavy brown hair. they wear dark colored pants and no shirt, and have top surgery scars. they hold an arming sword over their shoulder. end image description.]
Via @WritersGuildF at Twitter. (Not that this’ll help NBCUniversal, particularly when the LA City Department of Urban Forestry comes after them…)
This move, it seems likely, is damage control aimed at attempting to mitigate the situation before LA-based TV news crews show up.
(BTW: images in other threads here and on Twitter apparently confirm that Universal also did this illegal trimming three years ago, and the trees were in the process of trying to recover from it.)
ETA: this from @DanSigner at Twitter, showing images of the trees in previous years.
…For those interested in looking at the images more closely: this is the north end of Barham Blvd., the Toluca Lake-ish end, outside Universal’s Sheinberg building (Google Maps link here). If you use Street View to move up and down the road here, the tree images will change—check the right-hand bottom of the images to see the dates the photos were taken.
For those curious about why my dander’s up about this: leaving aside the casual spite of lopping trees at the wrong time of year so as to make picketers suffer (and let’s not forget the sudden construction / ripping-up of sidewalks elsewhere on the lot): the Universal / Universal City area was very much part of my personal “stomping grounds” when I was living and working in LA. Hanna-Barbera was just off the other end of Barham, north on Cahuenga, and I was up and down this road all the time, since friends and co-workers lived nearby. And trees there have enough trouble prospering without this bullshit.
