I found this while browsing the online version of CRATE journal (www.crate.ucr.edu/home.html) and decided it was worthy of sharing. Craig, thank you for reminding me how much I treasure language.
Paris has any number of them. From the Cathedral of Notre Dame to Saint Chapelle, from the Louvre to the Luxembourg Gardens, the problem in Paris is finding spaces lacking wonder, spaces that cry out "I am common." Likewise, New York has the observation deck of the Empire State Building, the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Station, Central Park, and perhaps one day soon the Ground Zero Memorial at Daniel Libeskind's new World Trade Center. Jerusalem has the Old City, with its Western Wall for Jews, Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Christians, and Dome of the Rock for Muslims. San Francisco, our Paris to the north, has many sites of wonder and sublimity, but what about Los Angeles? Where is L.A.'s Golden Gate Bridge, barely visible above a fog bank? Where is our Coit Tower or City Lights Bookstore? Where are our sacred spaces? Does Los Angeles have a soul?
The rap against LA., endlessly replayed in story, song and film from Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard to Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One to the Eagle's "Hotel California" to Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle," is that L.A. is a soulless vampire ever ready to devour another starry-eyed, fresh-faced ingenue. L.A. is commonly depicted as circus or cemetery, carnival or simulacrum, as always self-ironizing but never souled. The metanarrative of Los Angeles seems fairly consistent--a chimeric patina of fairy faux-Land just barely hiding the bleak reality of noir-Land beneath its surface. And while there are plenty of simulated, macabre sites of hopelessness and despair in the Southland, as any lucky visitor to the jaw-dropping Forest Lawn Cemetery and Theme Park in Glendale already knows, L.A. is also more of a spiritual place than the sum of its movie-engendered cliches would have us believe. Of course, I am biased, having grown up wandering the used bookstores of Hollywood, visiting the revival movie theaters scattered across town, and urban exploring the back alleys of downtown L.A. Reading lists can be stultifying, but for the novice here are some of my favorite spaces of wonder, joy, or the sacred with which to begin an investigation into spiritual Los Angeles: the Bradbury Building, the Movie Palaces of Broadway, Huntington Gardens on a rainy day, the Chinese Theater for a matinee, Ferndale, Union Station, the view of all of Los Angeles from the Getty Center on a clear afternoon, the Japanese Pavilion at LACMA, Frank Gehry's Disney Hall, the Watts Towers, and a double bill at the Silent Movie Theatre followed by a late night bowl of matzah-ball soup at Canter's Deli. But for me, one place outshines all of these other potential contenders for the title of L.A.'s spiritual center: David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology (MOJT).
The MOJT, created and curated by David Wilson, is, at 9341 Venice Boulevard, a jewel hidden behind a nondescript storefront in a culturally hybridized section of Culver City, surrounded to the west by an Indian Sweets and Spices (great for delicious and cheap vegetarian lunches) and to the east by a Thai Restaurant (good for a Thai iced coffee break) and an ever-crowded In-N-Out Burger, with the cool neighborhood bar "Carbon" across the street. This meta-museum is something of a tribute to the museums of our youth, as well as to those Ur-museums, the Wunderkammern or Cabinets of Curiosities, which predated the Cartesian scientific museums of the Modern era.
The Wunderkammern, as Barbara Maria Stafford explains, were "Encyclopedic collections of fantastic and useful objects--minerals, shells, bizarre animal specimens, marvels of human art and science, clever machines, amazing toys--assembled in overflowing rooms [...] and teeming cabinets [... , and] constituted a luxurious diversion for the European elite of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries"(6). Yet while the Wunderkammern were the predecessors to the Modern scientific and natural history museums, they were also decidedly anti-Cartesian and anti-Enlightenment spaces. As Descartes himself made clear, the Cabinets of Curiosity were threats to rationality, for they brought about astonishment, and "[w]hat we commonly call being astonished [...] is an excess of wonder which can never be otherwise than bad"(qtd. in Weschler 89). As Lawrence Weschler, author of the preeminent book on Wilson's MOJT, points out, this sense of wonder associated with the Wunderkammern thus "afforded a steady undertow to any simple, straightforward advances in positivist certainty"(89). In one of the thematically central exhibits of the MOJT, Wilson emphasizes the threat that the MOJT, as a modern reincarnation of the Wunderkammern, presents to scientific, rational thought. In a case reading "Out of order," an unidentified scientific apparatus hovers over a turntable with five glass dishes, each heaping with a colored powder. The dishes are captioned "POSSESSION," "DELUSION," "PARANOIA," "SCHIZOPHRENIA," and "REASON," but the apparatus has shattered the dish marked "REASON," leaving behind a scatter of glass shards and powder.
Entering the MOJT, it takes time to adjust to the darkness and hushed, strange sounds of the museum, but once one's eyes adjust to the distinctly dim light, the motto of the museum clearly situates it in the stream of the Wunderkammern: "The learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar; guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life." But if that were not enough, the strangeness, diversity, and sheer eclecticism of the collection of exhibits hidden throughout the darkened, moody, labyrinthine museum is enough to convince me that the MOJT is a tribute to the half-remembered and half-created dream museums of our childhood, spaces more about the experience of transcendence and wonder than objective scientific inquiry or enlightenment.
On display in the MOJT is an amazing variety of items bridging the aesthetic gap from the absurd to the uncanny, from the macabre to the wonderful, a range of exhibits truly fitting for a city of Los Angeles' amazing variety: a model of Noah's Ark mounted on two moving pistons (the Ark being the world's first museum of natural history); an exhibit entitled "Garden of Eden on Wheels," including beautiful models of Los Angeles area mobile homes and trailer parks; a group of horns and antlers, with a horn possibly taken from the head of Mary Davis of Saughall; a fruitstone carving, supposedly depicting an intricate miniature landscape invisible to the naked eye; microminiature sculptures on the heads of needles created by one Hagop Sandaldjian; magician Ricky Jay's collection of decaying dice; an exhibit of beautiful vitrines depicting folk remedies entitled "Tell the Bees . . . Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition"; a jewel-like theatre and Russian tea room, serving tea from a samovar along with tea cookies; and so on.
One of the key exhibits of the MOJT, and one of my favorites, depicts the lifecycle of the Cameroonian Stink Ant (Megaloponera foetens), which on occasion is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus. It is subsequently driven by the growth of the fungus to climb to the top of the rain forest, grip its plant, and then die. The fungus breaks through the ant's head, in a horn-like spike, eventually raining down spores on other unsuspecting ants, which, infected, repeat the cycle. When asked about the stink ant, Wilson pointed out that the exhibit could be read in two ways--as imparting pure information, and as metaphor. After all, one of the mottoes of the museum is "Ut Translatio Natura"--Nature as Metaphor. As Wilson explains, "[T]here've been times in my own life when I felt exactly like that ant--impelled, as if possessed, to do things that defy all common sense"(qtd. in Weschler 63). And if Wilson, like the Cameroonian Stink Ant, was impelled by some mysterious fungus to give up his life to build his improbable museum, perhaps he hopes that his museum can likewise infect us, his visitors, impelling us to pursue our own personal quixotic quests.
Like Wilson, I too was infected by some strange spore during my childhood trips to museums, those secular cathedrals of my youth. I can relate to his love of museums, which perhaps accounts for the waves of love and awe I felt during my first visit to the MOJT. Just as I loved my childhood trips to the Natural History Museum more for the mystery of those darkened, labyrinthine rooms than for any sense that I was gaining knowledge, entering the moody light of the MOJT recreated the sacred feelings I felt in those childhood museums, or that I felt when I entered the dim stained-glass light of Notre Dame or St. Chapelle. Entering the MOJT felt like a psychic return to the womb, working on me like a magical Proustian madeleine cookie, returning me to my earliest childhood memories of trips to the museums, used book stores, gem shops, movie theatres, and antique shops of L.A.
It seems no coincidence, then, that Proust's madeleine cookies are on display at the MOJT. Next to an exhibit documenting Geoffrey Sonnabend's arcane theory of memory and forgetting is a small exhibit of madeleine cookies that can be smelled through a tube, alongside text from Proust's famous novel, Remembrance of Things Past, that novel of memories spurred by the accidental recreation of a childhood sensory experience, the eating of a madeleine soaked in tea. And so, just as that cookie brought back memories for Proust's alter-ego, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, with its moody lighting, with its strange hushed sounds and musty smells, brought back spiritual memories of childhood for me, and perhaps for many others. In this sense, the MOJT is something like L.A.'s tribute to memory while simultaneously being our central memento mori, or reminder of death and forgetting. It is thus a fitting tribute to L.A., the land that both collects the past (what is L.A., if not a freakish collection of past styles, fads, and rituals) and constantly attempts to forget or erase it.
Walter Benjamin, in "Unpacking My Library," argues that collecting is not essentially about organized, logical thought, but rather is an emotional, irrational attempt to ward off the loss of forgetting, the loss of death: "Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories"(60). Like Benjamin's collector, David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology is a chaotic place that seems to develop its own alternative logic and order upon return visits. This is perhaps because it is a pre-Enlightenment space. Like Los Angeles itself, it has not been designed in a logical manner, but rather has grown in an organic and random way. This is as it should be. On my last visit to the museum, I entered a room I had entered a dozen times before, when suddenly I realized that there was a new doorway. Imagine my sense of wonder and joy as I entered that doorway, only to find two beautiful new exhibits, made all the more wonderful because I just happened onto them. This is a microcosm of my experience of Los Angeles, a space that is always changing and, for the openhearted wanderer, a place that is always off ering the gift of surprise.
