The Occidental Weekly (Free subscription) | yesterday
Museums as we know them today may be a fairly modern invention, but they are rooted in antiquity. From the ancient Library at Alexandria to the private collections of Royals, museums have developed over the millennia into more than opulent displays of grandeur and nobility.
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 10/03/2009
An enchanting compendium of curiosities Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World by Joscelyn Godwin 304pp, Thames & Hudson, £40 Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), having been neglected for centuries, has become something of a fashionable figure in recent times. Joscelyn Godwin, the author of this beautifully produced book, relates how a symposium on the 400th anniversary of Kircher's birth was...
Museum 2.0 (Free subscription) | 09/30/2009
A few weeks ago, I gathered a group of creative folks in San Francisco and asked them, "what makes a social venue feel welcoming and friendly to you?" To my surprise, secrecy and exclusivity were at the top of the list. One effused about the bar Bourbon and Branch , where you need a secret code word to gain entry. A woman gushed about Wild Side West's hidden backyard garden area, which includes...
The Economist (Free subscription) | 09/10/2009
A Los Angeles museum filled with curio and mystery THERE is something uniquely disorienting about the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Amid the gritty sprawl of Los Angeles, tucked behind a nondescript storefront on Venice Boulevard, a dark maze of rooms houses a “repository of relics and artefacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological...
io9 (Free subscription) | 09/06/2009
Laika's space suit. Mosaics made from butterfly wings. Superstitions brought to life. Find out what mesmerizing objects are in the strangest museum on Earth and marvel at a collection of artifacts... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
GottaBook (Free subscription) | 09/04/2009
It has been a smoky, hot week here in Los Angeles. I'm lucky not to be affected directly by the flames, though thinking of all the folks I know (and all the people I don't know) who have been impacted still takes up mental space. Ash, unfortunately, takes up lung space, too. I mention this here on Poetry Friday because I want to send you off GottaBook to read my friend Sara Wilson Etienne 's blog entry...
see sara. see sara write. (Free subscription) | 09/03/2009
As I write this, the historic Mt. Wilson Observatory is in danger of being overtaken by fire. The “Station fire” has been burning for more than a week in southern California and it’s been an exceptionally terrible fire, consuming houses, leading to the death of firefighters, and turning the afternoon light a very wrong color [...]
Metroblogging Los Angeles (Free subscription) | 08/31/2009
Although the fires threaten the Mt. Wilson Observatory, the Museum of Jurassic Technology displays the epistmological questions, theories of God's location, and Martian dreams sent on hotel stationery, postcards, and sloppily typed letters to Hale and the astronomers of the Observatory in the exhibit, No One May Ever Have The Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory.
tryharder (Free subscription) | 08/12/2009
pics:tryharder The Museum of Jurassic Technology "In his 1995 book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, author Lawrence Weschler portrays the museum, and David Wilson's curatorial role, as a work of conceptual art . Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2001. .." more
Gold & Silver Stars (Free subscription) | 08/05/2009
The Vena Cava designers have a blog http://vivavenacava.blogspot.com/ ....the most recent entry is their list of things to do in LA this week on their visit - I started looking a the list for accuracy (just kidding) but seriously that list is long don't know if you could get it all done in a week or even two for that matter. Take a look: Rose Bowl Flee Market HMS Bounty Lucy’s El Adobe La Brea...
Bad at Sports (Free subscription) | 06/29/2009
If you’re a fan of The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, you should definitely visit the website for the Museum in a Shoebox. Located at 15 Old Street in Old Town, the Museum in a Shoebox currently features Polaroids from the Sky: Clouds through the Ages, described as a major exhibition presenting the science [...]
LAist (Free subscription) | 05/05/2009
Now this is a perfect Cinco de Mayo. / Photo by Ca-los! via LAist's flickr pool. What are you doing today? Cinco de Mayo related or not? Add to our list in the comments section below. LEYKIS DE MAYO When we think of Cinco de Mayo, we immediately think Former talk radio host Tom Leykis , don’t you? Well, el hombre is hosting his Cinco de Mayo booztacular starting at 5 pm tonight at J Lounge downtown....
The Sound of Young America (Free subscription) | 03/16/2009
Would that every museum could do a podcast. Your Podthinker wouldn't mind a shot of content from, say, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Computer History Museum or the Liberace Museum sent to his iPod on a regular basis. Since those organizations inexplicably don't seem to podcast as yet — come on, people, it's 2009 already! — the neatest podcasting museum at present is The International...
(Roughly) Daily (Free subscription) | 01/18/2009
The (very) young Eugene O’Neill Lest readers imagine that the word-a-day posting of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary featured in last Wednesday’s missive is the only wonder on offer from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, consider Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities. Room 26 is a blog featuring digitized images of holdings in the Library’s collections–...
Harriet (Free subscription) | 01/04/2009
"Garden of Eden on Wheels" at the Museum of Jurassic Technology Apologies for the silence. I’ve holed myself in LA. And another apology for committing a blogging faux-pas. It’s always obnoxious when a blogger writes a post just to say that she hasn’t written for awhile. Who cares, right? Just get on with the program! I’m in the pit of LA and I’m trying to finish...
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