Watched last night, not chosen by me: 2 TV shows from 1956.

Things I asked Grok:

"How to Get Behind the Scenes at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin?... The writer gets a room of her own at the architect’s former home in the Wisconsin hills. A weekend workshop offers ample time to explore the grounds."

A NYT travel article. The author, Elain Glusac, takes a baking workshop.

When I read "A weekend workshop offers ample time to explore the grounds," I thought they were saying there's not all that much to see in this part of Wisconsin, but, calming down, I think it just means that you won't be in the baking class constantly, and there will be blocks of time when you can walk around the private property that is part of Taliesin. I don't think they are saying it wouldn't be a good idea to base yourself in this area — Spring Green — for a longer time.

Indeed, they don't even mention the American Players Theater, which is right down the road. This season's tickets go on sale today — here! Of course, there are many hikes beyond the private Taliesin grounds. And probably nearly everyone needs to get a look at the House on the Rock.

Back to the NYT article:

The Frank Lloyd Wright house for sale in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.

I bet you didn’t wake up today and think you were going to be moving to Mount Pleasant, WI but there is a Frank Lloyd Wright home that according to the listing is on the market for the first time ever for $725,000 with your name on it. pic.twitter.com/Tj3znspuYD

— Zillow Gone Wild 🏡 (@zillowgonewild) September 15, 2022

For more views of the place, go here.

Click around and dream or talk about water leaks and how awful it would be to live in Wisconsin.

Just 5 TikToks for you today, but I've been highly selective, and I think it will be a challenge to identify your favorite.

1. The lizard's charming feast.

2. Staying in the hotel that is Frank Lloyd Wright's only skyscraper.

3. At the 7-Ele-en, a flattened "slice of heaven."

4. Just seeking a definition of "woman."

5. What is a vacation? What is a weekend?

"... Madison may soon act to preserve a limited view of Lake Mendota from the lone Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home Downtown — a home that can barely be seen by the public.

The Wisconsin State Journal reports. 

The city, which has rarely if ever acted to preserve the view from a private property, may change its Downtown height map and reduce the allowable height of adjacent properties to preserve the view to the lake from the top floor of the three-story home, which Wright designed for his lifelong friend Robert Lamp and which originally captured views of lakes Monona and Mendota and the Capitol.

The owner of the Lamp House, which is now surrounded by other homes and much taller buildings, contends the view isn’t worth saving and that doing so could preclude a larger redevelopment that could involve moving the landmark out from the middle of the block to a more visible spot, while providing additional housing Downtown and boosting the property tax base....

The owner is Apex Property Management, which seems to be more interested in a proposal Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy to move the building "as part of a larger redevelopment." Obviously, that owner doesn't want restrictions on development. The chairman of the company, Bruce Bosben, says:

“I think it it is irresponsible to curtail development of Downtown real estate merely to preserve a view from a private house... There is no other such view preserved in Madison.”

 But:

"We may imagine specific unlived lives for ourselves, as artists, or teachers, or tech bros; I have a lawyer friend whose alternate self owns a bar in Red Hook."

"Or we may just be drawn to possibility itself, as in the poem 'The Road Not Taken': when Robert Frost tells us that choosing one path over the other made 'all the difference,' it doesn’t matter what the difference is... In the Iliad, Achilles chooses between two clearly defined fates, designed by the gods and foretold in advance: he can either fight and die at Troy or live a long, boring life.... But the world in which we live isn’t so neatly organized. Achilles didn’t have to wonder if he should have been pre-med or pre-law; we make such decisions knowing that they might shape our lives.... As Sartre says, we are who we are. But isn’t the negative space in a portrait part of that portrait? In the sense that our unled lives have been imagined by us, and are part of us, they are real; to know what someone isn’t—what she might have been, what she’s dreamed of being—this is to know someone intimately. " 

From "What If You Could Do It All Over?/The uncanny allure of our unlived lives" by Joshua Rothman (in The New Yorker).

This is a subject I raised a few days back, on the blog here. Do you have a "road not taken" point in your past — a particular moment? Do you question your fixation on that moment or do you find present-day meaning in the way that is preserved in your mind? It's not that there was a fork in the road, but that your life in its entirety is a fork, and you still have that fork.

ADDED: I have a post from 2007 called "The Road Not Taken." It's about a day I spent as a docent in a Frank Lloyd Wright gatehouse that has the inscription over the fireplace: "Taken the road less traveled by/That has made all the difference." (The precise Frost line is "I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.")

"Don’t set your mind on things you don’t possess as if they were yours, but count the blessings you actually possess and think how much you would desire them..."

"... if they weren’t already yours. But watch yourself, that you don’t value these things to the point of being troubled if you should lose them." 

Wrote Marcus Aurelius, quoted in "The Daily Stoic," an audiobook accompanying me as I take a walk — away from all TV sets and computers. 

We're having a frabjous Indian Summer right now here in Wisconsin, USA.

"Want to Flee the City for Suburbia? Think Again/The 20th century is full of examples of the false promise of suburban living."

I clicked on that headline in the NYT. It's a column by Annalee Newitz, a science journalist and author of the "Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age."

The 20th century offers object lessons in why fleeing cities for suburban and exurban settings can backfire — even if it seems like a good idea at first. In the early 1900s, many large cities were suffering from the side-effects of rapid industrialization: they were polluted, full of high-density housing with bad sanitation. Crime flourished.... There were disease outbreaks, too... In response, a new wave of utopian thinkers proposed moving to... “the garden city”... As the craze for these British-style garden cities grew in the States, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote about building a uniquely American version. ... Wright argued that the Usonian city wouldn’t be a flight from modernity.... Brand-new inventions like telephones, radio and automobiles meant everyone’s work could be done remotely....

Great! What's the problem? Why isn't this the answer today, when the ability to work remotely is much more well-developed?

20th century suburbia was not "Utopia." There were racially exclusionary policies, the houses were more expensive in reality than in theory, and people needed cars. That's the basis of Newitz's warning about "the false promise of suburban living." She concludes:

Ultimately, the garden city future is a false Utopia. The answer to our current problems isn’t to run away from the metropolis. Instead, we need to build better social support systems for people in cities so that urban life becomes healthier, safer and more sustainable.

Some designers expressed Utopian ideas, but that doesn't mean it had to be Utopia to be worth doing at all. You have to live somewhere, and the alternative is also not Utopia. There's a lot that Newitz isn't saying here. Underlying her conclusions is, I think, a recognition that the cities are in decline — perhaps even approaching a death spiral. For the good of the city and all the people who don't have the means to leave, the more well-off people are encouraged to stay. If they go, the place will collapse. So please, city people with the means to relocate, stay here, keep paying taxes and give your  wealth to the noble cause of making "urban life... healthier, safer and more sustainable."

Neither the city nor suburbia is Utopia, but what happens when the city is virulently dystopian? How long are people supposed to tough it out? Perhaps Newitz's point is only a small one: Don't imagine suburbia to be any better than it is. You're always trading one set of benefits and problems for another.

But you're always taking your own selfish interests into account even as you want to support the good of the group. In a real disaster, of course, you will run. Is the disaster here yet... and when is it too late to run?

But don't you want to be optimistic? Ironically, if you're optimistic about the cities at this point, you're more like the theorists of suburbia, who dreamed of Utopia.

Jack White uses the House on the Rock in a music video.

The House on the Rock is a fantastic Wisconsin tourist attraction in Spring Green. Also in Spring Green is Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin, which is the height of elite, revered architecture. The House on the Rock is the bad-taste, pop-culture counterpart.

From Wikipedia:

[T]he inspiration for the house [allegedly arose] in a meeting between Alex Jordan Jr. and Frank Lloyd Wright, at some unspecified time between 1914 and 1923. Jordan Sr. supposedly drove with [his friend Sid] Boyum to Taliesin to show Wright the plans for a building, the Villa Maria in Madison. Jordan worshipped the famous architect and hoped for his approval. Wright looked at the plans and told Jordan: "I wouldn't hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop. You're not capable." Fuming, on the drive back on Highway 23, Jordan pointed to a spire of rock and told Boyum: "I'm going to put up a Japanese house on one of those pinnacle rocks and advertise it."

If you keep reading over there, you'll see this is very unlikely to be true. Wright was 50 and Jordan was 9 when that conversation would have happened. The story is, however, stylistically consistent with the House on the Rock, which is exuberant bullshit.

At the Bird on a Wire Café...

... you can hang on all night.

"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."

Scribbed Albert Einstein in German on hotel letterhead, making a document in lieu of a tip for a bellboy. The paper sold at auction yesterday for $1.5 million (NYT).

People love their Einstein quotes. Einstein is the one person we all recognize as GENIUS!!! so we imagine — kind of absurdly — that anything that popped out of his noggin is genuisish.

"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."

He wrote that at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. I wonder if he was trying to crank out something that the Japanese bellboy would see as wise — some Japanese-sounding wisdom.

IN THE COMMENTS: Leslie Graves said:

The Imperial Hotel! Presumably, he was in the version of it that lasted from 1922-1967, and that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a man who did not live a calm and modest life.

Yes, the article says 1922.

There are lots of cool details at the new Alumni Park at the UW campus.

Take a closer look:

"That gazebo out in the water looks stupid."

Said Meade, when I asked him what he thought of the plan for a park over John Nolen Drive here in Madison.



I can't reproduce my response verbatim. I'll just say it contained the phrase "It's Frank Lloyd Wright!" about 10 times. The "gazebo" part of the new design is a boathouse Wright conceived long ago and getting that thing built has been a long-time dream of some people here in Madison...



... and I'm one of the dreamers.

It's Frank Lloyd Wright! I don't care if it looks stupid. It's our stupid. It's Frank Lloyd Wright stupid...

Excerpt from the new Supreme Court opinion about the copyrightability of a cheerleader's uniforms.

Breyer dissented, if that helps.

Here's another excerpt:

... Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of old shoes, though beautifully executed and copyrightable as a painting, would not qualify for a shoe design copyright... Courts have similarly denied copyright protection to obects that begin as three-dimensional designs, such as measuring spoons shaped like heart-tipped arrows, candleholders shaped like sailboats, and wire spokes on a wheel cover. None of these designs could qualify for copyright protection that would prevent others from selling spoons, candleholders, or wheel covers with the same design. Why not? Because in each case the design is not separable from the utilitarian aspects of the object to which it relates.... [S]poons, candleholders, and wheel covers are useful objects, as are the old shoes depicted in Van Gogh’s painting....

[A] copyright on Van Gogh’s painting would prevent others from reproducing that painting, but it would not prevent others from reproducing and selling the comfortable old shoes that the painting depicts...

Consider Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-mades” series, the functional mass-produced objects he designated as art.... What design features could not be imaginatively reproduced on a painter’s canvas? Indeed, great industrial design may well include design that is inseparable from the useful article—where, as Frank Lloyd Wright put it, “form and function are one.”... Where they are one, the designer may be able to obtain 15 years of protection through a design patent.... But, if they are one, Congress did not intend a century or more of copyright protection....

Consider designs 074, 078, and 0815. They certainly look like cheerleader uniforms. That is to say, they look like pictures of cheerleader uniforms, just like Van Gogh’s old shoes look like shoes. I do not see how one could see them otherwise....

Were I to accept the majority’s invitation to “imaginatively remov[e]” the chevrons and stripes as they are arranged on the neckline, waistline, sleeves, and skirt of each uniform, and apply them on a “painter’s canvas,” that painting would be of a cheerleader’s dress....  Hence, each design is not physically separate, nor is it conceptually separate, from the useful article it depicts, namely, a cheerleader’s dress. They cannot be copyrighted.

UNESCO — with its "World Heritage" site designation — honors Le Corbusier and snubs Frank Lloyd Wright.

The test is “outstanding universal value” to humanity, and as The Washington Post presents it...

Among the nearly two-dozen new sites inscribed on the list are Canada’s Mistaken Point, rough Newfoundland cliffs studded with some of the oldest evidence of complex organisms — fossils of spindly living things that date back 565 million years.

Included as a single “site,” too, are 17 works by renowned Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier.... UNESCO called the structures “works of creative genius” in an announcement on Sunday, which “attest to the internationalization of architectural practice across the planet.”

The announcements came with celebrations concentrated in pockets around the globe. A group gathered in the fishing village of Portugal Cove South, in Newfoundland, to await with baited breath the decision regarding Mistaken Point....

Among those that failed to make the grade in 2016 was the U.S. contribution of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, including the Fallingwater building in Pennsylvania. Somewhat complicating matters is the fact that the United States no longer has a vote in UNESCO; as...  the United States ceased contributing roughly $80 million a year after Palestine joined in 2011. In 2013, per the organization’s rules, the United States lost voting status. 

There's only one comment over there at WaPo: "Please tell us more about the fishermen with 'baited breath.' Do they lean over the side and attract the little fishes?"

It's very funny to see the old "baited breath" mistake happening in the context of fish. We don't use the word "bated" other than in "bated breath" so "baited breath" is a mistake far too easy to make... unless you follow Orwell's good advice and "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." But the other Englishman, Shakespeare, pulls us in the opposite direction, having left all those fresh phrases in print that have aged into our present-day figures of speech — like "bated breath," which is something Shylock (the Jew!) says in "The Merchant of Venice":

Shall I bend low and in a bondman's key,
With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this;
“Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn'd me such a day; another time
You call'd me dog; and for these courtesies
I'll lend you thus much moneys”?

By the way, a "bondman" is a slave. Here's the word used in the 1866 poem by William Cullen Bryant, "The Death of Slavery":

O THOU great Wrong, that, through the slow-paced years,
   Didst hold thy millions fettered, and didst wield
   The scourge that drove the laborer to the field,
And look with stony eye on human tears,
          Thy cruel reign is o'er;
          Thy bondmen crouch no more
In terror at the menace of thine eye;
   For He who marks the bounds of guilty power,
Long-suffering, hath heard the captive's cry,
   And touched his shackles at the appointed hour,
And lo! they fall, and he whose limbs they galled
Stands in his native manhood, disenthralled....

Another Frank Lloyd Wright house is discovered in Madison.

The house is right there where we've always seen it, on West Lawn Avenue, but it's just been figured out that it is "the 16th known example of the American System-Built House, a short-lived venture by Wright meant to provide affordable housing through predesigned homes built with factory-cut materials."

A full-page ad for American System-Built homes that Hamilton finally tracked down in the March 25, 1917, edition of the State Journal was the “missing link.”...

“Less cost – that is one amazing feature of the American System, that these beautiful homes, all Frank Lloyd Wright designs, of guaranteed materials and price, can be built for less money than the ordinary house of similar size and materials,” the ad stated.

We put in many hours of hard spectating at yesterday's Ironman Wisconsin in Madison.

The swimming began in Lake Monona at 7 a.m. and we biked out there to see what we could:



The paddle boarders had a nice view, and so did the people who got a higher sight line from Monona Terrace:



The swimmers got their bikes up in those ramps and came out the other end onto the street that goes along next to the bike trail that is our usual bike trail, so we biked alongside them — us on the trail and them in the street — until they had to make a sharp turn at Wingra Creek...



... and we went along our way, completing the 20+-mile Capital City trail. Stowing our bikes at home, we set out on foot, walking over towards Lake Mendota to catch the Ironmen and -women in their running phase, up on Observatory looking out toward Picnic Point...



... then down at Library Mall...



... and later, out by the stadium...



What an exerting day in Madison it was for us! My iPhone app counted 6.45 miles of walking on top of that 20+ miles of biking. True, I didn't swim, but I did take a shower.

"The two earliest statements as to [the origin of the term 'Yankee'] were published in 1789..."

"... Thomas Anburey, a British officer who served under Burgoyne in the War of Independence, in his Travels II. 50 derives Yankee from Cherokee eankke slave, coward, which he says was applied to the inhabitants of New England by the Virginians for not assisting them in a war with the Cherokees; William Gordon in Hist. Amer. War states that it was a favourite word with farmer Jonathan Hastings of Cambridge, Mass., c1713, who used it in the sense of 'excellent.' Appearing next in order of date (1822) is the statement which has been most widely accepted, viz. that the word has been evolved from North American Indian corruptions of the word English through Yengees to Yankees (Heckewelder, Indian Nations iii. ed. 1876, p. 77); compare Yengees n.

Says the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary, in its entry for "Yankee," which sends us to "Yengee," where we see this quote from an 1819  history of the Indians: "When the Yengeese arrived at Machtitschwanne, they looked about everywhere for good spots of land." If it's Yengeese — with an "e" on the end — one might imagine the singular as "Yengoose," that is, if you're amused by invented false notions about words. In that form of play, the etymology of Yankee could be: that which has been yanked — a prick. As for the delightful word "Machtitschwanne," that's just another way to spell Massachusetts.

But to stick with the uprightly historical, Yankee is a word of uncertain origin, perhaps meaning slave or coward, perhaps excellent, and perhaps English. That's the OED. Wikipedia's entry for Yankee claims that "linguists" reject all the theories that the word comes from any Native American language.

Here's Wikipedia's article "Names for United States citizens," dealing with the pesky old problem of the inaccuracy of the term "Americans," which, taken literally, could refer to everyone on the continents of North and South America. That's nothing that could confuse anyone grounded in the real world, but the question of alternative terms remains amusing (or even important to someone looking to take offense at microagressions).

Several single-word English alternatives for "American" have been suggested over time, including "Usonian", popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the nonce term "United-Statesian". The writer H. L. Mencken collected a number of proposals from between 1789 and 1939, finding terms including "Columbian", "Columbard", "Fredonian", "Frede", "Unisian", "United Statesian", "Colonican", "Appalacian", "USian", "Washingtonian", "Usonian", "Uessian", "U-S-ian", "Uesican", and "United Stater".

"Yankee" is one more alternative, but only non-Americans see it as referring to all Americans, rather than only to non-Southerners. (I was going to say "only to non-Northerners," but it was only yesterday that were were talking about the notion that, in the U.S., "the North" consists of little more than Minnesota.)

Why am I writing about this today? It's a complete sidetrack from the subject you'll see in the next post.

As close as we get to Philippe Petit in Madison, Wisconsin.

Now, nobody else do that. You won't look as good, and your movie won't be as good, so there's really no point. Officially, I disapprove, but I disapprove more of the local media giving this thing air, especially if it means that in the end we get some stupid fencing or netting blocking the view.

Meanwhile, long ago...

"I took the human being, at five feet eight and one-half inches tall, like myself, as the human scale."

"If I had been taller, the scale might have been different."