Tucked away in New Canaan, Connecticut, is architect Philip Johnson’s famous Glass House (1949). It and several other buildings—including the Painting Gallery (1965) and Sculpture Gallery (1970)—are located on 47 beautiful acres.

Because of our firm’s ongoing research into mid-century modern architecture for an upcoming Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture exhibit, this location was of particular interest to me.

The house itself remains completely original. (Here’s Andy Warhol visiting in 1964; you can see that little has changed since then—including the  Poussin painting and the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs, table, and couch.)

Coincidently, artist Bernard Perlin was a guest of Philip Johnson’s in the 1950s.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Today’s roundup of odds and ends (mostly “odds”) comes entirely from Fortean Times—the world’s foremost authority on “strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents.” Or, as I prefer to call it, The Greatest Magazine Ever. Here we go…

Neelesh A. Patankar, professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been hard at work doing precisely what one would expect of someone in such an esteemed position: “using the right kind of texture and chemistry to prevent bubbling during boiling.”

From the Things that Go Bump in the Night file: A North Carolina woman learns that what she thought might be a poltergeist is in fact her ex-boyfriend—from 12 years ago—living in her attic.

Fancy a six-inch gastropod in your salad? Giant Spanish slugs are invading the UK, “threatening to wipe out local species with new diseases and ­parasites or by simply devouring them.”

Think that 32,000-piece Ravensburger puzzle you got for Christmas is hard? Try piecing together 6 hundred million scraps of paper. And when it’s all said and done, we may not want to know what’s on those scraps.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

I totally need a smoke right now.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

Yesterday was John Cage’s 100th birthday. Not that one; this one.

One of my favorite pieces of his is the 1947 “Music for Marcel Duchamp.” It’s written for prepared piano, which means that the instrument has been temporarily altered in such a way that it produces different tones.

Here it is, performed by renowned Cage authority (and 1973 Rogers High School valedictorian!) Stephen Drury:

[audio:https://helveticka.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/02-Music-for-Marcel-Duchamp.mp3|titles=02 Music for Marcel Duchamp]

By the way, the album it comes from—In a Landscape—is a beautifully played and thoughtfully programmed introduction to Cage’s earlier work. For $10, you really can’t go wrong.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  comments(1)

Archaeologists found a 2,500-year-old brain in the UK. It has “the consistency of tofu,” and “none of the distinctive smell so often associated with dead corpses.”

A British crime writer admitted to using pseudonyms to pen glowing reviews of his work. Other writers are outraged. But then, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise.

It’s raining balls in Leicester.

And finally, great strides have been made toward a better understanding of spontaneous human combustion—using pork bellies marinated in acetone, naturally.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

So I was walking in San Francisco’s Chinatown a couple of weeks ago, and came across this guy camped out near the entrance to Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral. As you can see, he’s playing an erhu—a Chinese two-string fiddle. (This gives you a pretty good idea of what it sounds like.)

Anyway, what moved me to take his picture wasn’t the erhu itself—it was Chinatown, after all—but the music: “Auld Lang Syne” followed by “Oh! Susanna.” For reals.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Academics don’t write to be read; they write to be published, says Barton Swaim. As to why their writing is so uniformly awful, well…

Academics in the humanities and the social sciences, it’s sometimes suggested, too often wish to give their fields the legitimacy and public authority of science, and so write in highly technical, jargon-laced prose. Academics in the hard sciences, for their part, are too concerned with factual correctness to worry about making their productions agreeable, even to co-specialists. Then, of course, there is the really uncharitable interpretation: Many academics simply haven’t got anything useful to say, but if they say it in a sufficiently complicated fashion and use all the vogue terms, they’ll get credit for having said something without saying anything worth defending.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment