Curious Museums of LA

I've found a new website to haunt: http://www.rentfoodbroke.com/.  Take a wild guess what it's about. They have an awesome calendar with events around the city that cost $0 to $10.  It's pretty awesome.  It drew my attention to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.  I had heard about this place before, and it's only a $5 suggested donation, so my friend Pra and I went to check it out this weekend.

Pra enjoying a snack before going in.

The museum has an unassuming facade on Venice Boulevard in Culver City, so I was sort of surprised when it was PACKED inside.  I was bumping asses and elbows with all sorts of strangers.  Fun.

As far as the content of the museum, I am hard pressed to capture it all.  My best advice for all five of my readers (don't think I didn't notice my two new followers!) is to go experience it yourself.  Except that you can't because you all live in other states.  So since you're begging for it I'll give you my two cents (I'm not that broke).

Readers of Neal Stephenson, China Mieville, and Neil Gaiman would love this place.  MJT poses as a historical and educational facility, but it's pretty much all fantasy.  The exhibits and collections supposedly date from the Jurassic through the present.

I have no idea what this is supposed to be, but Athanasius Kircher designed it.

An exhibit devoted to Athanasius Kircher, some sort of medieval super-genius included a giant magnetic sundial of some sort, lots of models like those in a 7th grade science fair showing things like water systems of Earth with holograms projected on them, and-most importantly, a 3D movie translated from German.

Caption to an engraving

There were micro-mosaics you viewed through a microscope (duh) of floral arrangements created from fragments of butterfly wings.  There were lots of random engravings and paintings and whatnot.
There was a pretty awesome reading room, where Pra and I wrote some book spine poetry.  I got the idea from Rainn Wilson's website, Soul Pancake (http://www.soulpancake.com/post/1519/book-spine-poem.html).  Our poem was not very awesome, and the picture was not very clear, but I will include it anyway:

For a handful of feathers,
the gold of Troy,
British biscuit tins
Time Detectives
Q.E.D.
zone
gladiators at Pompeii

I was pretty upset when I realized we'd skipped right past a book called "Catapulting" but oh well.

There was also an entire section devoted to archaic remedies, with some really weird visuals.  My favorite was a model of a child with a duck's bill in it's mouth.  Apparently the duck's cold breath was supposed to cure thrush or something.  Ew.  In this area I discovered this gem, "Mouse pie when eaten with regularity serves as a remedy for children who stammer." 

 One section had handheld viewing glasses, which made only the most minimal differences to the vectographs on display.  

Another room was devoted to collections found in Los Angeles trailers, complete with scale models of mobile homes.  


After a while my brain lost it's ability to try to make sense of anything I was looking at; I could only sit back and let the experience hit me in waves.  I'm pretty sure that's part of the point.  We try to so hard to be adults, to get things right, that we forget to play.  We have so little sense of wonder anymore that we need places like the Museum of Jurassic Technology to get us out of our heads.


Upstairs behind a door marked, "Fairly safely venture" Pra and I played cat's cradle for ten minutes.  Peppered throughout the museum were phone receivers and buttons, 90% of which did nothing.  I can only assume it was 100% intentional.  And to finish our visit we enjoyed tea and cookies in the tea room!  Actually I didn't eat any cookies; they had no gluten-free refreshments.  The nerve.


Like my visit to the Psychiatry: an Industry of Death Museum, I left MJT feeling bewildered.  This time though I felt more bemused at my confusion, rather than depressed and in need of a drink.  I am not sure what I was supposed to get from it, but maybe that's not the point.