The photos record scenes from an excellent use of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum’s large exhibition halls after hours: Live music. (They’re not super-great – I only had my phone with me.)
A friend took me as a guest to a filming of Josh Ritter and his band for a TV show. Lots of Lovely Bones everywhere*, stuffed animals, loud (but not too loud) good music (I’d not really listened to Ritter before – hey, not bad at all), and free martinis on tap (surprisingly not watered down!) from Grey Goose. How could I not go?
(You can see the exhibit hall (North American Mammals, I think) with the activity in the distance between the bones of Mr/Ms Triceratops here.)
If you’ve never been the the Natural History Museum here before and you are in LA, please go along. It’s really very good indeed. As an incentive, you can go to the new spider pavillion and wander around with live spiders everywhere. (What’s that? That’s not an incentive? I see…Well, there’s lots to see besides rubbing shoulders with spiders, from dinosaurs, mammals and birds to wonderful gemstones and minerals…) I’m thinking of going to check it out some time, and maybe report back here on the blog about it some time.
This event is sort of typical of LA, in both good and bad ways. There are all these wonderful spaces, and isolated gatherings of interesting people within them, but if you were passing outside, the street is completely dead – everybody (to a first approximation) drove directly to the venue – so you’d never know there was a social gathering just metres away.
Same is true for the downtown area of course, which has all these wonderful bars, nightclubs and restaurants, but next to nobody walking around to or between them. Here’s hoping that there’ll be a big change down by the museums soon. The Vermont/Exposition corner near which the museum sits will have one of the stops of the new Expo line in maybe as few as two and a half years!
Back to the museum. I like the idea of such spaces being used in this way. Fits right in with the idea of mixing up science with the rest of our culture as it should be. Josh included some good evolution jokes into his between-numbers-patter as well. (Of course, if not interested in night visits to see music, you can always come learn some science by joining one of the museum’s sleepover sessions.)
-cvj
*Yes, I do mean the dinosaurs.
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Some exhibits are good in this museum. But when K and I went last summer some of them were trashed and/or falling apart. It was sad compared to the Field Museum in Chicago – we were spoiled!
I can’t be the only one who finds it somewhat hysterical that the Spider Pavilion project is sponsored by a pest extermination company (indeed one of CA’s most enduring such companies). I could surmise that sponsorship promotes a better understanding of spiders for their pest control activities, but something more provocative seems afoot. The dangerous, most venomous ones are behind the glass, reminding those who visit that should they see one of these (the actually likelihood is very minute except for black widows) they need to call an exterminator. Since so many spiders look somewhat similar, it seems to me that this will only increase exterminator business not reduce it.
I have had the misfortune in my life of being bitten by both, black widows (extremely painful [don’t walk around barefoot in your garden in the early morning hours stepping into plants and dense foilage], makes you feel like you have the flu, and looks really nasty) and a brown recluse (44 years ago when i was sixteen {seriously nasty ugly painful mess}, i retain the complete lack of sensation on my right thigh to this day). In all cases it was my intentionally putting myself in harms way, getting into their realms and messing with them when i should have known better. When you start using spaces where these live, they become encouraged to leave and move on; rarely do they fight back.
Haha, reminds me a bit of my old high school dances at the Carnegie Natural History Museum. For whatever reason the big hall of said museum was relatively affordable to rent out, so pretty much every high school in the area rented it out for a semi-formal while I was a teenager. And hey, for better or worse us Pittsburgh kids are probably the only ones to say we danced our dances underneath the shadow of the tyrannosaurus! 🙂