Here's a couple of myths about L.A. that I'd like to sink once and for all. One: It's all style, no substance. Two: Everything costs money, and a lot of it.
The first myth's easy to shoot down. There's a wealth of world-class museums all over the Southland; you just have to go out and look. And every one of these places offers free admission at least once a month (here's the list I use); so much for the second myth!
Aki and I took Eric to the Natural History Museum on its "free Tuesday," to check out its collection of bones, rocks, feathers, and corpses before he headed back to Boston for his last semester as an undergraduate. And we couldn't have picked a better museum buddy. Who else can tell witty anecdotes about coelacanths, or explain the difference between an Allosaur and a T-Rex?
Besides having a killer SLR (all these photos are his!), Eric has some kind of magic rapport with Aki. They're like peas in a pod. It's no wonder, since two of Aki's favorite subjects were also Eric's back in the day: dinosaurs and trains. And one of the cool things about the NHM is you get to see a little of both.
The skeleton of a Tyrannosaurs Rex is impressive pretty much any day of the week, especially for a toddler who roars and points at the tiny little T-Rexes printed on his pajamas. The Triceratops was always my favorite, though: It kept to itself but could bring out the big guns when push came to shove!
Both beasts blow you away in the NHM's entry hall. The immediate aftermath is kind of depressing, from an adult's point of view: a series of displays filled with stuffed, lifeless samples of animals that still walk the earth ("like Cain in Kung Fu"). I don't think Aki saw it that way, though. The sight of a full-sized elephant and giraffe practically made him leap out of his stroller!
On the upper floor, you can even see real! Live! Paleontologists! Carving away at fresh bones in preparation for a new gallery. Almost like performance art, like that guy who went about his daily business in a glass box at a museum, except paleontologists are a little more exciting (although they don't wear fedoras).
I read a (Momus?) blog post ages ago about how museums, chronically underfunded as they are, become unintentional collections of graphic design and typographical styles. I visited the Smithsonian in 2000, and so much of the explanatory text looked like it came out of a textbook from the early 1980s.
There's that layer to the NHM, too, if you feel like getting all pomo about it: New wings get thrown up with the newest, slickest color palettes and fonts, but turn the corner and you find placards in old school serifs and seventies earth tones.
It all added to the charm and nostalgia of the trip, since there was that feeling of being in "my Dad's shoes." (Plus, my folks brought me to the NHM when I wasn't much older than Aki.) But there's also the sense of decades of historians, archivists, and curators being the caretakers of nothing less than our civilization itself.
Trips likes this aren't supposed to be time-killers, after all: The point is to lay the groundwork for a lifetime of curiosity. I wouldn't hate it if some of Eric's perspicacity and recall rub off on Aki. For Eric and me, spending time with Aki at the NHM reminded us just how miraculous our one and only world is, how fragile, lovely, and full of endless wonder.
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