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:

RB

Ray Bradbury was my great-gradmother Kitty's cousin, which made him related to me somehow, 3rd cousin, cousin twice removed. We were both born in "Green Town" we both thought libraries were world openers. I also know that he missed his wife and I hope that they found each other in the whatever's next.

I know he knew I was a writer. The autograph pictured was to me for my first year of an arts based high school I was accepted to for writing. This autograph is in "Green Shadows, White Whale" which is the story of him writing the screenplay for Moby Dick, directed by John Huston.

Unfortunately, that is all we knew about each other, that we were both writers.

Here is a great letter from him, in the fantastic blog Letters of Note, about the importance of libraries.  It reveals something very interesting about writing Fahrenheit  451.

click here.

Perfect Dome of Sound

The desert is a mysterious place with a lot of arrows, filled with paradox, where New Age meets Good News in strange ways. It is lonely beautiful, alien, harsh, and surreal. This is why I love it so.


On Easter we headed to Integratron to celebrate a birthday six months late. An auspicious day to celebrate birth, re-birth and prolongation of life. 5 of us ventured out into the desert to see if we could live just a bit longer. The Integratron compound is a place with many lounging spaces and a colorful hammock village, and a mirror to reflect upon once your experience ends. We hammocked until it was time to get our sound bath, taking advantage of the bright desert light for photographs.

I had read a little about the story behind this place summarized in my last post. This exposition was told to us as we were laying face up on yoga mats interrupted by odd interjections of laughter by our host. I decided that if I continued to listen to him I would laugh too and no one else was laughing, they were listening intently excited for the healing properties that would enter us through the symphony of quartz bowls that would soon be played.

Our experience was through a pop up sound bath, which you share the experience with strangers, well those who are not in your group. They do not do pop up sound baths often because of two things and they said these rules as a warning, that if this happened, they would re-think ever doing a sound bath again and only do sound baths in group form.

1) Turn off your cell phone
2) no snoring, because it ruins other people's experiences by interrupting the pure sound of the quartz bowls.

My friend and I have differing views on whether or not you can help sleeping or snoring, but I feel like if it is going to ruin others experiences, I don't want to be that person. The ruiner. Not other people feel that way. Like the bear shaped man who fell into a similarly bear-like slumber during our session.

Determined to not be that person, hell, I don't even know that I snore, I found another way to experience integratron, with my eyes open. I stared up in the skylight and as those bowls rang out and filled my body that needed saving with sound it shook my right side. I watched the clouds drift by changing shape, turn into lines and dots, pull and compress.

I am not sure that I will live 50 more years, those things we can never tell, but I may remember at 130 what happened to me on Easter 2012. What I did leave with was a higher sensitivity to sound, voices, water trickling, shuffling of feet on the rocks of the parking lot louder. When we ate lunch at Pappy and Harriets and when a child lost their shit because they were leaving, it was one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard and when I was at home listening to music as I fell asleep, it was one of the most beautiful things ever.

Forever Young

A long time ago, but within the last 50 years, a man who happened to be a tesla scientist was kidnapped and given a mathematical equation by the Venutians to help save the human race. This equation formed a blueprint, a blue print for a perfect dome of sound. The sound played in this space would fill the human body prolonging that human's life by 50 years.

I will now live until I am 130 years old.

To Be Continued......

Photos of this place I love

At first I was using google + as a place to store my memories a photo diary of sorts, an experiment a la Super Sad True Love Story, but what good is sharing if no one is there to see. So I have moved that part to a spin off blog called This Ugly Beautiful City. Which probably also takes care of my coffee table book, but also puts my photos up for me to see them better and pick from them.

Just indulge me while I fancy myself a visual historian of this place I love.