Those pictures remind me (unsurprisingly) of the KKK chapter in Jon Ronson's Them. Hate-filled and comically pathetic: extremely compatible traits!
I was just about to say that! I love it when he tries on the hood.
What's the connection between Floyd Briggs and the Klan?
They're both recognizably rural America, both completely nuts, and entirely different in their (sybil vane, where have you gone?) moral valence.
I'm having sort of the opposite response, that what I can see of the town doesn't look like what I'd call rural in a kneejerk way, and googling let me see that it's home to a public liberal arts university, which is cool. I forget already if this sort of thing is Halfordismo-approved.
Thorn, every inch of Oklahoma is rural.
Undisturbed Peace at Maryland Hunt Club ...my guess is that far more blacks are killed, hurt, and oppressed in metropoles with UMC white communities than by country bumpkins.
And these rich folks won't flaunt their racism quite as openly.
every inch of Oklahoma is rural
Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings in Oklahoma:
Bartlesville
Price Tower Office & Apartment Building (1952)
Harold Price Jr. House (1953)
Tulsa
Richard Lloyd Jones House (1929)
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Moby, you're in Seattle now or soon? Lunch, or a drink after dinner?
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Floyd Briggs is a fun, admirable guy who is playing you city slickers perfectly. He didn't have to wear those overalls out for his TV interview -- it was a deliberate choice.
Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings in Oklahoma
Frank Lloyd Wright was the Prairie School. Prairie ain't rural?
I suppose I should find those KKK clods pitiable and/or contemptible, but they just disgust and infuriate me. Contra the Internet, you, violent and violence-ambitious white supremacists, are not necessarily the reason that the rest of us can't have nice things, you just suck.
And your abuses of the cross will be repaid, you assholes.
IDK -- half of my students talk just like this guy, right down to the apologies for "language." They're not all ijits, and not all racists, either.
(Some of them are both, yeah. But I can tell you from direct personal experience that there are racists and idiots in the North as well.)
Also, overalls are pretty fucking comfortable. Just saying.
What was with the crucifix? Has the Klan embraced popery?
Who measures urbanity by FLW structures? His most famous building is damn near in a state park.
13: I'm just leaving the airport. Can't do drinks after dinner tonight or lunch tomorrow. Friday I think I can do one or the other. I can have drinks before dinner tonight, but I have a meeting for dinner at 7.
I'm surprised to hear FW is his most famous building. I'd have put Robie above it, also famous urban structures such as Imperial Hotel, Guggenheim or Larkin Building.
It took me a second to realize Alaska Air didn't have Che on the tail of its planes.
Anecdotally, I'd believe FW as the most famous. It's the only one I can visualize other than the Guggenheim, and I went to school ten blocks from the Guggenheim.
Can't visualize the Robie House, which made his name in Europe just off the drawings, and which you must have walked by a hundred times?
I just want to adopt the little girl in those pictures to take her away from that fucked up life.
There's a homeless woman that is often begging downtown with her baby girl in a stroller. I have to change my path to avoid her because it takes everything in me not to grab the baby and run.
I've toured it, and walked past it a hundred times, but it never interested me enough to stick in my head as an image. I recognize a picture, but if I were trying to get across "Robie House" in a game of Pictionary, I'd be helpless.
I don't think anyone other than Buffalonians, architects, and buffs has any awareness of Larkin, and the Imperial Hotel is only a notch ahead. Not existing anymore is a burden.
Guggenheim and Robie are certainly in the same neighborhood, and maybe I've just succumbed to local hype. Come to think of it, some of my reason for raising FW above Guggenheim is that most critics view the former as simply better, but we're talking about fame, not quality.
It occurs to me that he worked in so many places that you'd be hard pressed to go anyplace in the States and get answers from passersby that wouldn't be skewed local. I guess he didn't do much in the Northwest? I'd love to see one of those FB maps showing what buildings people in various states consider his most iconic. I bet you'd get multiple states identifying at least 6*, and maybe more.
*The aforementioned 4 extant ones, plus Hollyhock and Taliesin West. I suspect Taliesin East or Johnson Wax might get MN or one of the Dakotas as well.
Any of those work for me. I am not particularly familiar with convention center restaurants, except the strangely persistent Cyberdog, but you can't go a mile either up or down hill without going through food & drink zones. I'd mildly recommend Pike Place market for good food and entertaining people watching.
Clew might know the answer to 28.3's question.
IDK -- half of my students talk just like this guy, right down to the apologies for "language." They're not all ijits, and not all racists, either.
I can relate to this, even though this guy isn't quite kin to Texas.
I'm as proud of FW as any local, but et's not forget the Walter Rudin House, which is probably more notable due to its occupant.
28.last: Minnesotans can of course claim the only Frank Lloyd Wright–designed gas station.
33: My dad stopped there on his last cross-country drive.
Frank Lloyd Wright is OK, but it's his son who designed the most badass house in the world.
It's true that Robie suffers from the fact that its most spectacular view, looking north at it from some distance, so as to catch the extreme horizontal quality evident from the drawings, has been impossible for most of its later fame. A large building has usually been right across the street: Woodward Court and now the Business School.
Richard Nickel and Aaron Sorkin took the iconic image of the Southern side on a cold day in the fifties, before Woodward Court was built, from just North of Ida Noyes. Two images, time lapsed, spliced together.
My wife's dorm room in Woodward faced North, and she could see the extent of the roof from it. Also hit it with a jello cube thrown from the window.
30: I don't know of any without searching.
Analysis textbook Rudin?
My brother used to work the gardens at Taliesin East, and I toured it one time, and there was some weird-ass Cult of Frank shit going on there.
Also, FLW made his ceilings way too low. He claimed they were "human scale", but what they really were was claustrophobic.
He was a little guy. At around his height, I find them perfectly comfortable.
I'm now overlooking a Ferris wheel and a Public Storage building.
Which is to say Pikes Market is very convenient for me.
overlooking a Ferris wheel
That seems difficult. Is it particularly unobtrusive?
Because of the giant public storage building, yes.
The Peak is Pike's. The market is only named for a road. Also called the sanitary market.
Turns out there are a score of Usonian houses in Seattle.
There's a woman with a sign reading "I need a fat bitch."
On the wheel? At the conference?
Id like lunch more than drinking, being an utter lightweight.
I think Friday would work for lunch.
I'm now overlooking a Ferris wheel
Moby is Charles Kinbote?
The video in the OP has apparently been taken down. Can someone recap what it was?
Cletus in overalls explaining how he stopped a high speed chase by standing like Superman in front of a motorcycle, full of colorful turns of phrase.
I'm not hearing the colorful turns of phrase. Probably because that's exactly how about two-thirds of my relatives talk.
He did say "I'm not very aerodynamic." I thought that was kind of cute.
Instead of a six dollar bagel or a useless hair dryer, why don't hotels have combs in the room. They could have a little jar of the blue stuff barbers have.
52: Sounds good. I have the email for this pseud at gmail. Looking forward to meeting you.
He was a little guy. At around his height, I find them perfectly comfortable.
Yeah, this was the deal at FW as well: the Kaufmanns were wee people. One of his fairly major houses was for distinctly tall clients, and there the lowest ceiling is between 7-0 and 7-6 (and, as is always the case, the highest ceilings are far higher than a typical house (even a typical custom house - at least before the arrival of the McMansion and its 2 story foyer)).
54 could be my cousin, but he's 1600 miles to the northeast.
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Stuck at the office, doing the work that everybody else neglected to finish in time for tomorrow's big deadline.
Just finished the remaining third of a bottle of 5-hour Energy that I found under some papers on the corner of my desk. So what's that good for--another 1.65 hours of energy? Will an opened-and-partially-empty bottle of that stuff go bad after a period of many months? Looks like it was past its expiration date last October anyway.
It's gonna be a long night.
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I think that stuff is for topical use.
Off-topical use is OK as long as you use the pause/play buttons, right?
MAE, since you'll be dead soon, let me say that we've really enjoyed your contributions to the blog.
If you have a commute involving a Pike Street, protesters have stopped traffic. It's getting really loud with the honking.
I had dinner in a building with at least three separate Starbucks and the guy next to me at the bar says he works for Microsoft. I think I have Seattle figured.
Pretty much. There used to be some other stuff, but it's on hiatus for the duration of the boom.
My Dad lived in Seattle in the early 70s and loved it, but left because he thought it was failing economically as a city; Boeing had laid off a ton of people and as per him there were signs up that said "will the last person to leave Seattle please turn off the light." Whoops.
The FLW subthread is weird. For one thing, Fallingwater is by far his most famous building, and I doubt many people who aren't highly knowledgeable about architecture could even name any other buildings he designed. I'm not sure I could have before I took a class on architectural history in grad school (maybe the Guggenheim).
Aside from that, though, there's no question that Wright hated cities, and his vision of architecture was aggressively and explicitly anti-urban. The "Broadacre City" wasn't a city at all in any normal sense of the term, but more of a vision for suburban sprawl. Even his buildings that happen to be in urban settings tend to evince a deliberate effort to reject the implications of that; the Guggenheim developed out of a design originally intended for a parking garage in Arizona. The number of FLW buildings in a given state says nothing whatsoever about its level of urbanism.
That said, Inner Coastal Elitist ogged is just being a snob about Oklahoma. There are parts of OKC and Tulsa that are plenty urban by the standards of the US as a whole, and then there's the whole issue of "rural" versus "small town" for the less populous parts of the state. I wouldn't describe the video in 54 as taking place in a rural area, but then of course I wouldn't.
Mr. Briggs reminds me of plenty of people that live in rural California, for that matter. I thought he was charming.
The Guggenheim may not be as famous a name and I doubt most people could tell you it was designed by FLW but I would be almost certain it is one of the few buildings with a shape that is instantly recognisable to the average American.
The Guggenheim may not be as famous a name and I doubt most people could tell you it was designed by FLW but I would be almost certain it is one of the few buildings with a shape that is instantly recognisable to the average American.
If I were very clever those comments would have been off-set to form a slow spiral down the page.
The FLW subthread is weird. For one thing, Fallingwater is by far his most famous building, and I doubt many people who aren't highly knowledgeable about architecture could even name any other buildings he designed. I'm not sure I could have before I took a class on architectural history in grad school (maybe the Guggenheim).
Agreed. I couldn't have named a single FLW building other than Fallingwater before reading this thread. I didn't even know he did the Guggenheim. And I'm a pretty cultured sort of person in general.
This is reminding me slightly of the criterion I came up with for "is an artist famous" on another thread a few years back, viz: "Can the average person, on seeing (or hearing or whatever) their most famous work, identify the artist? Can the average person, on being given the artist's name, identify a single one of their works?"
So FLW qualifies as famous, but only just.
I didn't know the Guggenheim actually was a repurposed parking garage design, rather than just looking like one.
Our department just built the "Robie House" LEGO set as some kind of team-building/what-to-do-with-your-hands exercise. And then we found 5 shares of BABA.
Definitely agreed with Ajay on FLW. FWIW, I could also name the Guggenheim and Taliesin (East, I think), but only because I've visited them.
Wright is no Soleri, that's for sure.
I mean, I'm pretty sure I've seen a couple of documentaries about him, and I still couldn't name Robie.
Our department just built the "Robie House" LEGO set as some kind of team-building/what-to-do-with-your-hands exercise.
Your sexual harrassment refresher sounds like more fun than Moby's.
Taliesin East is also famous on account of the mass murder that took place there. When I visited, the cultist tour guide simply refereed to that incident as "the fire," and commented on its impact on subsequent architectural features.
Rural America, You Fucking Loon: About those pix, I think Marx nailed it in the Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie has subjeted the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
And whether one believes that by "Idiotismus", Marx meant the same thing that we currently mean by "idiocy" or instead "isolation", these pictures illustrate quite clearly that rural America has been failed by contemporary bourgeoisie.
Might be Bob but syntax doesn't match perfectly.
There's a Frank Lloyd Wright church in San Pedro, I think. I've driven by it. Otherwise, I think I'd only recognize Fallingwater and the Guggenheim.
There's a Frank Lloyd Wright church in San Pedro
I thought that was Taliesin.
I thought the guy in the video was great. Quite unironically. Brave, self-mocking, decent. Reminded my of my Swedish fishing companions. Of course, I don't find his accent funnier than any other USAnian one, which must help.
Also, the discussion of Robie House makes clear that there is a UChicago cluster among the commenters (I was vaguely aware that LB had been there, but had not paid it much mind).
I was an undergraduate there in the mid 1970s, having been brainwashed (similar to the experience of many others who enrolled in the institution) by my father and various aunts and uncles that it was the best school in the country.* So I have some questions for UC alums**:
1) When did you attend?
2) If you received a degree, when, at what level and in what field? If you did not receive a degree, please elaborate (see 3).
3) What are your current feelings about your experience?
4) Would you encourage or let your kids go there?
I'll start.
I transferred in in 1974 (I graduated from HS young, and my parents insisted I live at home but go straight to the local college for a year, after which I could transfer elsewhere).
I received a BA in math in 1978 (took a year off between 1974 & 1978).
My experience: It took me a while to see past the familial brainwashing (I should have listened to my mother who was largely drowned out by my father on this issue many others); by the early 1980s, I had concluded that it was a miserable place to be an undergraduate. I believe that the most useful, perhaps only useful, lesson I learned from the experience had to do with the limits of reason and rationality in dealing with and understanding the world.
4) My children are in their 20s. I had one apply to UC, after getting in early decision elsewhere, to see if we could get a better financial aid package, but I never wanted either of my kids to attend (in re FinAid: it did not work). He has done his (STEM) postdoc there, something I feel ambivalent about.
*Note to Moby: I said "similar". I don't believe many others were brainwashed by any of my relatives. Rather, their own!
**Loosely defined to include those who ever matriculated at UC but for one reason or another did not receive a degree.
87: thanks, but the alumni office already pesters me often enough.
I had no idea there were a couple of FLW buildings near me. I'll scheme my way down to University Heights for a look this summer.
I lived 2 blocks away from the one in Whitefish, when I lived there. It was a bank then, and I'd have driven by it a bunch of times, but never given it a second look. Having my account at the credit union, after all.
The comment about Marx, the manifesto, & idiocy was me.
Sorry.
I believe that the most useful, perhaps only useful, lesson I learned from the experience had to do with the limits of reason and rationality in dealing with and understanding the world.
That's an important lesson!
a) that was fast.
b) IRL, we have the same eman tsal. I doubt that we are related.
Or rather, IRL, my last name backwards is the same as the handle you use for comments here.
Last two years of my undergrad degree - I transferred in from MIT. I was there from fall quarter '89 through summer quarter '92.
AB Medieval Studies, which was a bullshit interdisciplinary program. I took the most incoherent conceivable mix of classes. It wasn't all that distinguishable from not having a major.
I agree that it was a miserable place, and I thought the administration treated the students badly. The actual classes were good, and the faculty was excellent, but I did not enjoy the experience.
No on encourage, yes on let, except that I'd probably get vehement about discouraging a possible economics major from going there. But I haven't got one of those at the moment -- at 13 and 15, they're both fairly STEM focused.
Besides, it's not like you leave any information here that would help the alumni office find you. (This comment suggests a distinct lack of nostalgia for the experience).
I certainly have no nostalgia for getting phone calls and letters asking me for money. (I enjoyed my time there but could easily have enjoyed it a lot more (IYKWIM) and probably gotten a lot more out of it.)
And one that UChicago is unusually well designed to teach (by bad example)!
This comment-linking habit of yours seems as if it must be tedious to carry out. (Also, house style calls for the italicization of text quoted from other comments.)
A.M. '81, on coursework 77-78. But I lived in the community and worked for the University from 78 to 83, and lived the life. My wife is AB 77, D Ph 83. My daughter is finishing her first year at UTEP. Much of my wife's family, and it seems like a majority of my friends are former students there.
I've always been in love with the place, even though like everyone I bear scars. Going there at the age of 25 was maybe the most important choice I've ever made and led directly to most aspects of the rest of my life.
Apparently what I'm thinking of is in Palos Verdes, not San Pedro, and designed by FLW's son. The important thing is that I've driven by it. Without stooping.
Started in '96. Graduated ... eventually with a degree in physics. I was miserable, but that would've been true anywhere, maybe more so. I do feel quite ill treated by the administration; there was likely nothing they could've done to make me successful then, but when my grades plummetted their only interventions were to try to get me to go away. The student counseling service was completely useless.
And yes, the economics undergraduates I interacted with learned some ridiculous things.
Since we're talking about degrees, I just found a prime example of what's-wrong-with-America-and-why-we're-all-doomed over at Fortune magazine. They list the supposed 10 best and worst graduate degrees to get, and if the list is to be believed, it's possible to get a Masters degree in "Leadership".
I didn't know that, Eggplant. We probably have friends in common. As I've said before, my parents wouldn't let me apply even though/because it's where my nerd camp best friend was going to go. He suffered, as did I where I was, but I was better off in a lot of ways even though he's more academically successful.
We probably have friends in common.
I doubt it!
87: I'm in meetings nearly all day.
Right now, the topic is freezing urine.
a) Thanks for the style tip. I'll try to follow the conventions (when in Rome and so on...)
b) It is a bit tedious, but I hate having to page back & look for a comment # in order to find a comment that has been referenced, and then try to remember (increasingly difficult with time) the number of the comment that I was reading. I imagine that at least some others share this feeling. It's one of the many little ways that I try to make the world a better place ;)
Right-clicking on "link to this comment" beneath the one I am referencing, left-clicking on "copy link location" in the pop-up menu, and pasting it into the appropriate html tag is worth it if only to raise my own opinion of myself.
We probably have friends in common
Like me!
Huh. I grew up just four miles from a FLW house, the S. A. Foster House and Stable. I had no idea it was there.
104: Fine, I don't have friends either, if you must know. Except heebie, who's the best!
I was miserable, but that would've been true anywhere, maybe more so.
Yeah, that's what I usually say about U of C, too (AB '03). But I do still have two close friends from that time, or at least as close as I can manage long-distance. And for at least a few quarters--well, at least one--I was really quite happy and productive. I came out of the experience fairly well-positioned for the future; my big mistake, really, was in picking a grad school.
I do feel quite ill treated by the administration; there was likely nothing they could've done to make me successful then, but when my grades plummetted their only interventions were to try to get me to go away.
It's interesting how much more bitterness I feel towards my grad school alma mater for their lack of interest in my fairly clear downward spiral than I do towards U of C, which was also, institutionally, fairly blasé about my depression. Moral luck, I suppose--my undergrad turned out okay, more or less, whereas my grad school experience ... did not; and so only the latter seems particularly blameworthy.
In any case, Eggplant, very sorry to hear that. (Or hear it again, since you've probably already mentioned it.)
If a man is wearing jeans and a sport coat, he is European.
If a man is wearing jeans and a sport coat
What I wore to meetup; seems indigenous enough.
110: Exactly; we might have people we think look familiar but can't place in common.
111.last: Thanks. I've made enough poor decisions since that I'm no longer actuely bothered by my undergraduate experience.
78 gets it so fucking right.
There's an FLW house not too far away from me that is owned/managed by the art museum. I should really check that out at some point. Growing up, we lived just a block from a very classical Prairie School house that was not FLW, but was just as nice.
I have pretty unequivocally positive feelings about my undergrad experience at the U of C. Decidedly mixed ones about my grad school experience elsewhere. And in the last several months my relationship with the U of C has become much more complicated and ambivalent.
114: These are all people committing science.
The guy in front of me is working in slides for a different conference.
Also, the discussion of Robie House makes clear that there is a UChicago cluster among the commenters
I wasn't one of the commenters on it above, but I was obsessed with the Robie House as a teenager. My family toured it on a vacation when I was in middle school, and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I didn't go to U of C.
I'm thinking of pulling the fire alarm if this person doesn't wrap up in five minutes.
She's showing vacation pictures, for science.
122: I recently sat through a seminar ostensibly about health care in Cuba. It was vacation pictures with a mangled history lesson.
Was the history lesson able to access adequate care in time?
Yes, since it was mangled in the US in a roomful of MDs, it got the best of care.
If we were on schedule, we'd still be a half hour from the part where I get to stand up and have wine.
The next time I have to give a ten minute talk, I'm going to put a very small "1 of 68" on the first slide regardless of how many I have.
If I ever have a half hour talk, the first slide will say "1 of 15." The 16th slide will say, "Part 2, 1 of 68."
How many of them will be vacation photos?
I don't really take pictures often.
I saw someone do a similar joke at a conference where the first slide said 1 of 30, the second said 2 of 40, the third 3 of 100, etc.
Like The Book of Sand, but with powerpoint.
The Powerpoint of Sand is the scariest horror movie.
