Collateral something-or-other: Bryan Fuller at House on the Rock

LOCATION SCOUTING #HouseOnTheRock @AmericanGodsSTZ pic.twitter.com/IeZn13vHBX

— Bryan Fuller (@BryanFuller) December 1, 2015

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Yeah, because as you know he’s not really an attraction of mine. But I had to laugh when I saw this on Twitter earlier this week. Apparently House on the Rock is included in Gaiman’s original novel, which I have not read.

House on the Rock is just — a weird place. Although tourists go there in droves. It’s an odd house, built in a beautiful location, and it is a combination of something intended as modernist architecture and filled with huge collection of very diverse, odd things. I’ve been there at least twice that I remember, possibly three times. The collection is full of toys, and dishes, and sort of middle-brow art objects like Tiffany lamps, old medical instruments, cars and carriages, dollhouses, ivory, armor, models of ships in and out of bottles — the list goes on and on. There’s no rhyme or reason to the collection, except that everything is curious on its own, the authenticity of most of it is doubtful, and altogether, it’s a fleamarket of slightly tawdry freakishness. One of the things I remember most clearly from my first visit was a collection of antique pharmaceutical items including a box of tapeworms, in a display in the “streets of yesteryear,” which was supposed to replicate an American small town.

Probably the things that most people will remember, aside from the huge carousel, are the automatons — dozens of toys that wind up, including machines of various kinds that make music and especially wind and string instruments that play classical pieces all on their own. I remember loving that part and my father being aggravated because they demanded so many quarters.

If you haven’t gone, you should. Although it’s become expensive. It seems like just the sort of thing to pique the mind of someone like Bryan Fuller. And if you become annoyed by the high degree of peculiarity, you can travel just a little way away to Spring Green and see Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, Taliesin.

~ by Servetus on December 7, 2015.