Museum
of Jurassic Technology |
CULVER CITY,
CALIFORNIA—
Mark and
I went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology the other day. We had no idea
what to expect, partly because "Jurassic" and "Technology"
appear to have no meaning when juxtaposed, and partly because Tison Lacey,
who suggested we visit, told us nothing more than the address. "Don't
even look at the museum's Web site before you go," she said, and
we didn't.
The Museum
of Jurassic Technology lurks behind an unassuming windowless store front
on Venice Boulevard in Culver City. The door is locked, even when the
Museum is open. To get inside, you have to ring a doorbell.
Mice on toast, mouse pie: Cures for anything from whooping cough
to stammering
"Garden of Eden on Wheels," an exhibition that "illuminates
the history of those who have heeded the call to mobility"
"Goose-necked Man," the progeny of bird and human, from
Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum Historia, Bologna, 1658
Gallery of manuscripts
Inhaling a duck's cold breath cures children "afflicted with
thrush and other fungeous mouth or throat disorders"
Doug Harvey, Keeper of the Permanent Collection, with an artifact
from the Mount Wilson Observatory |
I rang, and
almost immediately, the door opened. A young woman admitted us to an anteroom
that seemed pitch-black after the bright sunlight outside. By the time
my eyes adjusted to the dimness, we had paid four dollars apiece and signed
a guest book. We proceeded into the Museum proper.
We watched
an introductory slide show, and we listened to its accompanying narration.
We looked at the skeleton of a European mole, carefully displayed on black
velvet. We peered into a diorama illustrating the unlikely life cycle
of the Cameroonian stink ant and another depicting research on a rain
forest bat that can fly through walls. We stared at a wall displaying
moose antlers, deer antlers, and a horn that once grew from the head of
a woman named Mary Davis.
Curiouser
and curiouser, I thought as I continued my migration through the tenebrous
labyrinth. The museum was larger inside than out, and the more I listened
and read and strained my eyes to see, the less I understood. Mark and
I wandered through halls dedicated to an opera singer named Madelena Delani
and a neurophysiologist named Geoffrey Sonnabend. We listened to every
word of Madelena's life story and Geoffrey's theories about the illusion
of memory, and still no light dawned.
Baffled,
we wandered on, peering in one gallery at pages of arcane manuscripts,
and in another at three-dimensional models of superstitious customs. The
room reserved for temporary exhibits was filled with dioramas of travel
trailers, and another cubicle housed sculptures so unbelievably small
that microscopes were positioned to allow visitors to see them. The howl
of an American grey fox echoed in another chamber, and the gurgle of water
recycling through a model of South America's Iguazu Falls followed us
everywhere.
We wandered
and listened and peered, and I kept wondering. What is this place?
What's true? What's false? My mind, caught off guard by images from a
world I never knew existed, struggled to label and evaluate and categorize
and... finally, I gave up. I suspended judgment. I let go and slid down
the rabbit hole. Like Alice, I found myself in an unexpected wonderland.
"In
its original sense," reads a Museum brochure, "The term museum
meant a spot dedicated to the muses — a place where man's mind could attain
a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs." The Museum of Jurassic
Technology is such a place, a separate reality that imbues its visitors
with the means to look at mundane ordinariness with a new sense of wonder.
The Museum
of
Jurassic Technology
9341 Venice Boulevard
Culver City, California 90232-2621
(310) 836-6131
The Museum is online at www.mjt.org
A
Separate Reality
