Sing the Absurd
If you're like us you dig weird stuff. Art in surprising places, people wearing wrestling masks in the street, that weird person who claims -- on the side of their van -- that they've given birth to Val Kilmer's love child, and if you see him, will you let him know? Yeah. It's all good.
Which makes it worth the trip down to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. The Museum is situated unobtrusively in the middle of Venice Boulevard. Once inside, it's windowless and stuffy (so the trip might have to wait till things cool off a little), and full of exhibits that may not be true or even work correctly. This bump and whir and lights don't on. Things howl when you get too close to them and recite boring litanies in monotonous voices. It's all quite puzzling if you're actually trying to make sense out of it. Once you realize that it's not supposed to make sense, it becomes a wonderful place, full of secrets and surprises.
You think, oh a fake museum in a city of false fronts and lawns piped in from Colorado. No surprise there. But the Museum is about as far away from the slick nature of Los Angeles facades as you can get. While Los Angeles is all about obscuring the ugly truth with something pretty, the Museum is about a kind of weirdness that makes you turn inward and examine your own mind.
The museum is placed in a historical context in Lawrence Wechsler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Curiosities, a book that characterizes it as being part of a long tradition of false oddities, dating back to medieval times.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology may not be the place to go to honor history or art per se, but it is a place unique in its ability to illuminate the curious nature of the human imagination.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology, 9341 Venice Boulevard, Culver City, CA
If you're like us you dig weird stuff. Art in surprising places, people wearing wrestling masks in the street, that weird person who claims -- on the side of their van -- that they've given birth to Val Kilmer's love child, and if you see him, will you let him know? Yeah. It's all good.
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