And I'm not talking the usual fare - art exhibits of The Great Dutch Masters, edu-mack-ay-shu-all science presentations, blahdee blahdee blah.
I'm talking the Culture of Weirdness.
It is my mandate and mission to research, seek out and present any havens of oddities that we might stumble upon during any of our various family vacations.
behold the backyard shed-cum-mausoleum
where the owner/creator of this awesomeness is preserved on ice
And as if this marvel wasn’t enough for one town, Lucas is also home to The Grassroots Folk Art Museum. The day we were there, we were lucky enough to have the lovely Marionette as our personal docent, and whoo lordy, the stories she could tell. There was rock carving sculptures; there were jewelry pieces with cameos made out of dessicated chewing gum. There were sculptures made entirely out of aluminum beer can pulltabs.
In St. Louis, I dragged my men folk to the Bowling Museum. Don’t get me wrong here; I am in no way a bowling officiando. I enjoy a few frames as much as the next person, but I’m not fanatical.
But the curators of this museum certainly are. And they do not disappoint in the weirdness of lauding all the untold glories of Ten Pin.
The piece de resistance, however, is their gallery of womens’ champions, where a series of sizable oil-based portraits dangle from the ceiling. There must have been about 100 of them; their cat’s-eye bespectacled grandma faces follow you everywhere.
After this last glut of ‘culture’ tucked under their belts, the vonB’s thought there were forever sated .
Silly billies. The Culture Minister of Weirdness never rests.
Enter Venice Beach’s “Museum of Jurassic Technology”. This gem caught my eye while I was doing a quick read-through of a Southern California tour guide. The write up stated that the museum had nothing to do with either dinosaurs or technology.
Once inside, the tone goes from reasonably normal to uncomfortably awkward with lightening fast speed. We knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore when we quickly perused the mini-brochure given to us when we paid our donation fee:
“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.”
“Like a coat of two colors, the Museum serves dual functions. On the one hand, the Museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. On the other hand, the Museum serves the general public by providing the visitor a hands-on experience of ‘life in the Jurassic’.”
Rather than exhibit their wares under ‘conventional’ museum conditions, all displays here are surrounded by near blackout conditions, with small diode-like light sources highlighting the wares. Dark, thick, velvet curtains cover the walls to muffle any ambient noise, and great care is taken to ‘frame’ some of the smaller pieces. Most everything is interactive, and there are slideshows going almost non-stop in the various nooks and crannies around the convoluted floorplan. I cannot be certain that the ghosts of Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price are not lurking about. Althought it's been 2 weeks, I am still trying to process all of the sensory overload we experienced. It was exciting, enthralling, unnerving and puzzling all at once. Some of the highlights included:
