Today we visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology on Venice Blvd., a very quirky place as the name might imply. It is a museum that perhaps pokes a little fun at the idea of museums. The exhibits are old school curiosity collections, some of which are fascinating and others that seem completely pointless. Its all very dark in there with lots of twists and turns, like a cramped labyrinth. I had to use my cell phone screen to illuminate some of the items. The first exhibit is a model of Noahs Ark, which is described as the worlds first natural history museum. One exhibit was micro-miniature art by an old gentleman who made human figures that fit inside of the eyes of needles and beautiful mosaics out of microscopic diatoms. The microscopes were all lined up for people to look through. Another exhibit was old models and drawings of what futurists of the past thought spacecraft would look like, for example, a torpedo-shaped ship fitted out with parlour furniture. Of the seemingly pointless variety was a collection of old chemical sublimation graphs. Another was the history of a bridge in Argentina that never got built. Upstairs was a garden aviary with doves and a guy playing a bowed violin-like instrument that had wooden buttons along the neck. Im always pestering folks with questions, so the guy explained to me that it employed 3 main strings and several sympathetic (resonator) strings for each of the 3. It is a Swedish instrument but the design has been in use for a thousand years. He said it goes well with bag pipes. His tunes reminded me of some of Greigs incidental music to Peer Gynt. There is also a tea room and the whole vibe up there weirdly got me in the mood to regale Carolyn with tales from, of all things, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. She gamely pretended to be interested. In the gift shop they have View-Masters with 3D reels of the exhibits. I dont know what I saw but I know I saw something. Gonna go again.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 06:07:29 +0000
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