The Museum of Jurassic Technology

April 9, 2016 11:05 PM

[PREVIOUSLY ON METAFILTER]
The Museum of Jurassic Technology contains strange exhibits that test one's sense of authenticity. It has been the subject of a radio documentary and a book.
posted by not_on_display (45 comments total)

A true anecdote:

[black box] "yip yip wooo yip arrroo yip yip"

/furrowed brow

/look inside box thru view slit

/see projected videotape reel of stuffed canid, maybe a fox. "yip yip wooo yip arrroo yip yip"

[spoilers redacted]

Best thing in LA. Last time I was at the Museum was before Johnny and Dee Dee died, so I can't evaluate it with regard to Hollywood Forever.
posted by mwhybark at 11:25 PM on April 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Is 13 years long enough between visits to the MJT? Or too long?
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:34 PM on April 9, 2016

oh hai
posted by juv3nal at 11:34 PM on April 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

My favorite exhibit is the letters to Mt. Wilson Observatory.

Ricky Jay's dice are gross.
posted by carsonb at 11:45 PM on April 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

About 15 years ago, one of the undergrads where I work was The blossoming Bat Girl -- she had bat tunnel-vision and her goal as an undergrad was to study and write her senior thesis about the variety of bats' noses. No species has the same nose, I think. She was gonna look at 'em all. She was one day going to be the preeminent Bat Scientist.

A few weeks after meeting her, I ran into mjt.org and saw that exhibit of the bats that flew through solid matter, so I showed Bat Girl. She read it with fascination and gravity, and got to the part about Don Griffin, and said, "Oh, yeah, he's like, THE Bat Guy. And I don't think any of this ever happened, ever."

A couple years later, as she was working on her Bat Thesis, I found Don Griffin's undergrad senior thesis from the 1930's, while rummaging through a forgotten-about storage cabinet in the bowels of our building. I let her borrow it for a little while. She was thrilled.

So anyway I thought about that recently, and decided that the MeFites of now would appreciate a look at something that was weird and wonderful on the web and on MeFi thirteen years ago -- and still exists.

No bats were harmed in the re-posting of this FPP
posted by not_on_display at 12:15 AM on April 10, 2016 [15 favorites]

One of my favorite things in LA. Love Sonnabend/theory of obliscence.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 12:36 AM on April 10, 2016

My favorite exhibit is the letters to Mt. Wilson Observatory.

My teeshirt is worn to tatters. This demonstrates something with regard to human knowledge.
posted by mwhybark at 12:53 AM on April 10, 2016

For years now, I take Lawrence Weschler's book with me during summer holidays. It has become a ritual. I've heard many enthusiastisc stories of people who actually went to the museum. Still, I do not dare to go there. Too afraid that my image of a perfect museum will be shattered when I actually go there...
posted by ouke at 1:26 AM on April 10, 2016

For years, I made sure that one of the first dates I went on with someone was to the MJT--the theory was that if someone wasn't into it, they weren't long-term dating material and by knowing early I could avoid a lot of wasted time and heartache.

Once, I met someone and we just never quite found the time to make it out there. We're married now, and have been for a few years, and frankly I'm kind of worried at this point about what would happen if we went...
posted by Krawczak at 1:52 AM on April 10, 2016 [14 favorites]

It makes me a little sad that people are now unlikely to have the experience I had when I first went, with no idea what the place was. I went with my girlfriend, and we thought it would be about dinosaurs. It turned out to be something very different, and as lovely as it all was, we wondered if it was run by crazy people or a cult of something. We eventually learned that the stuff that seems most unlikely is sometimes true, or truer than you'd think. If I can't have my ashes sprinkled at the Haunted Mansion, I want them sprinkled here.

Many years ago David Bowie was on the Leno-era Tonight Show, and he started to enthuse about the Jurassic's exhibit dedicated to the Cameroonian stink ant. Bowie was headed into the punchline about how the spore erupts from the ant's head to rain down on the next unlucky ant and start the process all over again when Leno got impatient and made some lame joke and changed the subject, thus depriving America of hearing David Bowie tell them about the Cameroonian stink ant. Jesus Christ, I don't miss Leno almost as much as I do miss Bowie.

Anybody who loves MTJ must (MUST!) make a pilgrimage to the VELASLAVASAY PANORAMA. Seriously, it's weird and beautiful and you will never want to leave. I beg you to go.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:35 AM on April 10, 2016 [12 favorites]

Love just the raw weirdness of this, the unabashed deadpan of it. I wish it would open an east-coast satellite, say in Baltimore.
posted by newdaddy at 3:04 AM on April 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

It is still great, we were just there a month ago. The darkness, the beautiful music playing softly, the Russian tea garden on the roof, everything works. I love the miniature trailers, the tribute to the Russian cosmonaut dogs, and the melancholy and scary beliefs in "tell the bees". It is like being inside a symbolist poem. Long may it remain the same.
posted by mermayd at 5:01 AM on April 10, 2016 [6 favorites]

I too married someone who took me to the MJT first (without telling me anything about it.) From the name, I expected something with great big pillars like the Tar Pits but then we arrived at this weird store front in the middle of nowhere...

Ursula Hitler: Thanks for the Bowie anecdote. I noticed "Cabinet of Wonder" was listed among his favorite books.
posted by johngoren at 5:07 AM on April 10, 2016

I live on the wrong coast. Should I order the Museum of Jurassic Technology View-Master Set from the gift shop?
posted by mrbeefy at 5:16 AM on April 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

Johngoren, hearing Bowie start that story on the Tonight Show was just weird. At that point the MJT felt like this little secret thing I shared with my girlfriend, I think it was well before the book and stuff. It almost seemed like we were the only people in LA who knew about the place, and we had no idea how it stayed open. And suddenly there it was being talked about, on the Tonight Show. By Bowie!

And then Jay Leno rushed in to ruin the moment with hacky jokes, because that is all he ever does.

The place is still fascinating, when you have some idea of what's going on there. But nothing compares to going there when we thought it might be a front for the Sonnabend cult or something.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:44 AM on April 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

Loved the place.
posted by Repack Rider at 5:47 AM on April 10, 2016

Ursula: I can imagine!!

Thanks for the tip on the Panorama.

Yeah, when we first walked into the place I found it troubling before I started to see what was going on. The cones!
posted by johngoren at 6:05 AM on April 10, 2016

A friend of mine was going to visit LA and asked what she should do while she was there, so I told her, but then she went to Disneyland instead.

We're still friends, though. KIND OF.
posted by ernielundquist at 6:34 AM on April 10, 2016

A couple years later, as she was working on her Bat Thesis, I found Don Griffin's undergrad senior thesis from the 1930's, while rummaging through a forgotten-about storage cabinet in the bowels of our building. I let her borrow it for a little while. She was thrilled.

But did she become the preeminent Bat Scientist?!?!
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:49 AM on April 10, 2016

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is one of my favorite things in the world. It just so happens I read Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders a few weeks ago (I'd been wanting to read it since it first came out, but only got around to because it's on David Bowie's top 100 books list).

I'm so lucky to have visited there in one of my rare trips to LA. My friend, who is quite the cynic, was asking lots of questions to try to trip the staff, but they were exemplary and never faltered.
posted by maggiemaggie at 7:49 AM on April 10, 2016

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a wonder of LA, and as Krawczak says, an excellent first date filter.

I wrote a song about Laika, and took the Tsiolkovsky quote from their Russian Cosmonaut Dogs exhibit as part of the lyrics and the title. The Life of Perfect Creatures
posted by chimaera at 7:57 AM on April 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned its House of Leaves quality; rooms branching out of rooms so that the museum is much larger on the inside than it appears from the entrance.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 8:19 AM on April 10, 2016 [4 favorites]

Learned of it recently by watching a Werner Herzog interview there. Now I have to go to LA sometime..?
posted by joeyh at 8:30 AM on April 10, 2016

Still, I do not dare to go there. Too afraid that my image of a perfect museum will be shattered when I actually go there...

Don't worry, you will not be disappointed. I yearned to visit the museum for more than a decade (after reading about it first in Harper's and then in Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders).

It is my favorite museum in the world. (Not to say it's better than, say, the Munch Museum in Olso. Comparing the MJT with other museums is like comparing apples with Pluto.)

I had to go to Los Angeles about eight times, six years in a row. (Why so negative about L.A.? The usual reasons, like traffic.) When I returned to Denver from my daughter's college graduation, my first thought was "Thank God I don't have to go back to L.A. again!"

P.S. I do want to go back to L.A. again, for several reasons, the top two reasons being The Museum of Jurassic Technology and LACMA. And new art galleries. And the outdoor grafitti/art everywhere. And the great Mexican food. Not Venice Beach, where I have been too many times, and not central Hollywood, where I have never been.
posted by kozad at 9:03 AM on April 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is one of my favorite things about LA (among a pile of favorites). It's the question about what is true and what is not that I find most interesting and engaging.

Perhaps it's time for a MeFi meetup there!
posted by rednikki at 9:36 AM on April 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

Visited it a few years ago. Superb place.
Look an LA local with me, who hadn't heard of it, and was amazed.
posted by doctornemo at 9:39 AM on April 10, 2016

I have lived right by the MJT for over 10 years and have never been...Even reading this post I have no idea what it is or what to expect. The outside of it is windowless and looks like a strip club. Everyone tells me "you have to experience it for yourself" with a wry smile. The whole thing feels like an inside joke that is a little off-putting. I grew up in DC where my father took me to the Smithsonian every weekend as a kid so I feel like I might react badly to an ironic museum. Also the beach is like 3.5 miles the other way.
posted by jnnla at 10:25 AM on April 10, 2016

The whole thing feels like an inside joke that is a little off-putting.

It's not really an inside joke, but it certainly is the sort of thing that you have to experience for yourself.

It exists in that fantastic liminal place where facts and bullshit, high and low art, and the banal and the weird all sort of commingle and turn into... the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
posted by chimaera at 10:31 AM on April 10, 2016 [4 favorites]

It exists in that fantastic liminal place where facts and bullshit, high and low art, and the banal and the weird all sort of commingle and turn into...

LA? I haven't been to the MJT - didn't even know of it until this thread - but that description perfectly matches my experiences of the town itself and why I love the place while simultaneously understanding why others hate it. And why, I suspect, it'll never spawn an East Coast sister.

If I ever get the chance, I'll go. Here's hoping.
posted by Devonian at 10:45 AM on April 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

/see projected videotape reel of stuffed canid

wait! it was actually a taxidermied animal and the video was arranged such that it could only be seen from a certain angle and appeared to be playing inside the animal's head. it did not show another stuffed animal.
posted by mwhybark at 11:10 AM on April 10, 2016

The Venn diagram between the Smithsonians and the MJT is basically the word "museum," which is not a bad thing at all. But they are not trying to be the same, and I love that there is space in museums for both elephant dioramas and puffs of air scented with madeleines. I don't think everyone has to love or even like the MJT, but I'm glad it exists.


I have fond memories of sipping tea and petting the borzoi at a MeFi meetup at the MJT (a year and a half ago?! inconceivable!) and would be very much in favor of a return trip soon.
posted by jetlagaddict at 11:20 AM on April 10, 2016

I'm sitting at a coffee shop about 5-10 mins away from the MJT right now and suddenly I'm intensely tempted to take a sudden impromptu trip there. Are they even open on Sundays? Anyway, I love MJT. It's like walking through a secret, and then you get up to the lovely rooftop garden and it's almost like you've stepped into another world, Narnia-style.
posted by yasaman at 11:42 AM on April 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

About 12 years ago I was a freshman in college and most of the dorms had cleared out for Spring Break. So a friend who had also stayed behind and I decided to spend the week exploring tourist LA. We went to the beach, saw a taping of the Tonight Show (originally we wanted to go to The Price is Right, but got stuck in traffic in the early morning hours and by the time we arrived it was too late). All those sorts of things. Then my friend's sister suggested we check out the MJT and wouldn't tell us anything else. I was expecting a museum, but I'm not sure if the MJT really fits into that. I still don't know exactly what it was I saw. And the more I try to pin it down the more confused I get.
posted by downtohisturtles at 11:48 AM on April 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

Jnnla, to call it an ironic museum is an over-simplification. There is plenty of genuinely marvelous stuff there, like the micro-miniature sculptures of Hagop Sandaldjian, so small that they literally fit in the eye of a needle. The exhibits are wondrous and beautiful, and you're left wondering which parts are true and which parts are a glorious fiction. But as I said, if you dig into it you find that a lot of the stuff that seems like it has to be bullshit is true.

It is partially an ironic commentary about museums, but it is also a true cabinet of wonders. It feels very much like a place out of a dream. This ain't no wiseguy, inside joke-y Church of the Subgenius stuff. It's just so great, and after you've gone you'll regret that you didn't go sooner.

If you won't take my word for it, trust Bowie.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:25 PM on April 10, 2016 [5 favorites]

jnnla, it's not an ironic museum. It's more a cabinet of curiosities.

It's one guy's collection of things that interest him. Some of them are legitimate artifacts but usually not traditionally significant ones, some take poetic license, and some are purely artistic.
posted by ernielundquist at 1:29 PM on April 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

If you go to the MJT, you should also try to go to the kinda sister organization, the Center For Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), which is directly next door and somewhat deliberately inconspicuous (“We’d rather people forgot about us”) (previously).

From their about page:

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research and education organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface, and in finding new meanings in the intentional and incidental forms that we individually and collectively create. We believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription, that can be read to better understand who we are, and what we are doing.

They're currently exhibiting LOS ALAMOS ROLODEX: DOING BUSINESS WITH THE NATIONAL LAB 1967-1978:

The Center for Land Use Interpretation acquired a set of seven rolodexes from the dispersed collection of former Los Alamos National Laboratory employee Ed Grothus, who operated a salvage company of lab cast-offs known as The Black Hole. The rolodexes contain many thousands of business cards kept by some unknown office in the lab over the 1960s and 1970s — the peak of the arms race and its technological development.

posted by jjwiseman at 1:36 PM on April 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

If it's been awhile since you've gone to the MJT, you should definitely go again. In the past 15 years or so they've added the wonderful Tula tea room, more exhibits on the second floor, and an amazing rooftop garden on the third floor with songbirds and a cat columbarium.
posted by jjwiseman at 1:39 PM on April 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

And I guess since the Velaslavasay panorama and CLUI have been mentioned, to add to the network of organizations that are either directly inspired by the MJT or merely friendly with and of like mind, there is the Institute For Figuring (IFF), a "non-profit that pioneers creative new methods for engaging the public about scientific and mathematical issues." I'm not sure how active they are currently, but back in the day it was the kind of place where you could go to a fun talk on origami by a guy who had consulted on the design of solar panels for satellites, and see Werner Herzog in attendance.
posted by jjwiseman at 1:59 PM on April 10, 2016

Loved the place.
posted by Repack Rider

Surprised yet not surprised to see one of my heroes from this world praising the MJT over here in this world. *waves* Hi! I'm still dirty from my ride today! Take me down Repak one day!

/fanboy
posted by carsonb at 2:01 PM on April 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

yasaman: "Anyway, I love MJT. It's like walking through a secret, and then you get up to the lovely rooftop garden and it's almost like you've stepped into another world, Narnia-style."

The MJT is a wonderful place. I really think yasaman captures the most remarkable part of the experience, namely the contrast between the museum and its roof. After the dim, winding corridors you emerge into the beautiful rooftop columbarium. It feels like an epiphany -- like seeing the light of god after navigating the labyrinthine dungeons of hell.

I do have to take issue with it as a first date filter. My partner accompanied me when we went a few years ago, and it really freaked her out. She was so sure there was something wrong with the tea in the teahouse that she refused to drink it. Honestly, the MJT is a genuinely unsettling place (much more so than your average haunted house) and is not for everyone, even those we love for their many wonderful, non-MJT qualities.
posted by crazy with stars at 3:46 PM on April 10, 2016

Even more previousier
posted by euphorb at 8:51 PM on April 10, 2016

looking back on the older thread, I feel compelled to call out this comment: For example, the awesome pronged ant is unfortunately a hoax.

it's based on enough real (warning for myrmecophobics, entomophobics in general) that I don't think there's any way it counts as a hoax.
posted by juv3nal at 9:23 PM on April 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

Thanks, juv3nal, that bugged me too but I probably wouldn't have posted a callout.
posted by jjwiseman at 10:39 PM on April 10, 2016

Do sign up for their email list. I have been to one of their musical offerings with strange foreign instruments. I really should get to another one because I have such vivid memories of the plates swirled with nuts, berries, and seeds laid out for snacks, the tea room getting warmer as the evening wore on from all of the bodies perched on long benches knee to knee, the candle smoke licking the walls. Even if you don't know what kind of music it is, or what it means at all, go for the experience. Which, I suppose, is what the MJT is all about.
posted by sweetmarie at 8:56 AM on April 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Thanks, juv3nal, that bugged me too

i see what you did there
posted by not_on_display at 1:45 PM on April 11, 2016 [1 favorite]