Memory is just a construct

The Museum of Jurrassic Technology is a maze.  I cannot tell if it is a museum based on farce or fact. Art or Science. It is dark and filled with 12pt text, it is impossible to read. So I really couldn't figure it out, but sometimes there is joy in coming to your own conclusions. Maybe that is the point.

I am a sucker for a good diorama, there are rooms filled with these. Painstaking miniscule environments. I got lost in the detail, wooden model trailers, fences and glued in trees and brown grasses. There was an exhibit of all the things left behind in our nations trailer parks. What I couldn't figure out was how all these things that were left behind, handmade dolls, drugstore dish sets were even remotely jurrasic or technological.

I watched part of a movie in German dubbed in English about the mapping of memory and how memories aren't real, but simply illusions. I hear that I missed the good part about an opera singer and a waterfall.

I saw an artist who inserted miniatures into the eyes of needles a play on the bible verse.

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Mark 10:25

I walked past tempests, illustrations of sunspots, eclipses, old wives tales and old curatives and up to the tea room. I found a set of stairs that led me outside, a quiet garden courtyard, my new favorite place in LA. Worth the price of admission alone.

I apologize for the lack of photos, they won't let you take them in the museum.

Museum of Jurassic Technology
9431 Venice in Culver City
Admission: suggested $5

Next door is the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Their exhibits are free.

Riding the rails-expo line

Last friday I took the Expo line as far as it would take me. Past Venus Stationary, past the NHM and its butterfly pavilion, a garage sale where you could also get a hot dog and chips with soda and a chicken dinner, watching the neighborhood change. Wondering how this line would change it. I was on a mission to feed my soul after a hard week. I knew what I craved, the literal and figurative after a week of so much black and white. Culver City is a strange place for me, a place I worked for years, a job I hated, maybe I needed to go back to that space to remember how lucky I am. But it also holds a strange place in my heart.

I got off the train, for some reason the place wasn't familiar to me, I never realized that there was a park by the Actor's Gang, and I began to wonder where I was. There are so many things about this place that is different. No Beacon, new businesses, papered up windows. I walked west to Honey's Kettle to eat fried chicken and listen to soul music for a while and think.

I wanted to experience some parts of Culver City I hadn't experienced before, a Culver City that had nothing to do with boring client meetings and that snobby waiter at Le Dijonaise.  My visit to the Museum of Jurrasic Technology and the Center for Landuse Interpretation will be in another post, because I am afraid that this post will get too long.

Walking around Venice a boy came up to me holding a statue award saying he was the best video game player in the world. I am inclined to believe him.

Walking back to the train I befriended a couple of marketing men, who were coming back from a mad men style client lunch, they were giggly and smelled of alcohol. We joked about how the community center at the top of the Baldwin Hills overlook is always closed.  We were friends for 15 minutes. The time it took to walk from Trader Joes to the Expo Line Station and to their stop.  Sometimes it is nice to be nice to someone and never see them again.

At Pico, Sailor Moon and a couple of her friends I didn't recognize got on the train. I admired a girls jetpack made of two two liter coke bottles strapped together and painted gold.

Later I let someone who worked on the Expo buy me a drink.

brain block

Having a little writers block. There are posts swirling around my head, but I think they aren't cooked yet. The include, but are not limited to:

Riding the rails-Expo Line edition

Museums of Culver City & my new favorite place

Upcoming trip to the desert

I am still posting on this ugly beautiful city, mainly because there is no need to expound verbally.

I leave you with a song that has been on my soundtrack for this summer and I hope to be writing again soon: