Middlebury Alums

a collective blog for keeping in touch. If you'd like to author, contact Josh or Miranda, or comment on a post! Thanks

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

My Trip to California (plus sentimental ramblings) by Chris

On a smoggy Saturday in April, Allinson Ken Lazo, still working for Collins, Collins, Muir & Stewart in LA, but pining for France, and myself, until two weeks prior operating lift #7 atop Aspen Mtn. but temporarily inhabiting Ken's couch, made a visit to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Venice Beach.

Incongruously stitched in among the anonymous mexican restaraunts, dry cleaners, carpet stores and stucco apartment complexes of this stretch of Venice Boulevard, the Museum of Jurassic Technology's forgettable little facade and solid door hid a strange collection of objects and helped me turn the corner from hating LA to finding it oddly liberating. Spotlighted within the darkened interior, exhibits ranged from theoretical explanations of memory, dubious fruit stone "carvings," and documentation of trailer home life to microminiature sculpture, letters by quack scientists to real scientists at Mt. Wilson Observatory, and a memorial to the dogs of the Soviet space program. In threading this line between the fake, the absurd, the intriguing, and the revelatory, the museum's most lasting effect was to make me reevaluate the idea of the museum itself. I found myself ready to write on and on about it, but then Ken found a book--a Pulitzer Prize winning book-- entirely devoted to the museum. So I doubt I could improve on that. We'll just have to read it I guess--I still haven't gotten my hands on it yet.

But cutting the bullshit short, yes, the Museum is a place worth visiting. Preferably with as little info as I've given you--maybe even less, but now I'm loathe to delete so we'll leave it as is. I'll make a disclaimer--reactions are often mixed. Miz Liz Shapiro, who we took along on our second field trip the following Thursday, was a bit less impressed than Ken or I. Maybe it was a visit that required the extended hermitage atop an Echo Park hill and ample brain marination in advance that I had received at the white clapboard stronghold where Ken was living.

In the afterglow of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, helped along by that insipid, but absolutely irresistible emotion: nostalgia (to which this blog probably owes some level of debt as well, I might add...) I changed my outlook on LA. Yes, it's kind of a shitshow, yes, almost all Angelenos are slaves to the automobile, yes that highly touted California sunshine comes out kind of gray when fighting through the grimy smog, but precisely because it's a shitshow, because there's no worrying about messing things up or offending someone, some weirdo like the guy who came up with the Museum of Jurassic Technology has perfect freedom to experiment and do his own thing.

Places like Western Colorado and San Francisco, where Liz, Ken and I went to visit the proprietress of this blog that following weekend, are almost too perfect. One is overwhelmed and even maybe intimidated by the order and beauty. Like when I'm trying to do drawings or paintings in Carbondale, I feel compulsively drawn outdoors, into nature. It's kind of like "What the fuck? Are you going really going to draw some sad sack, New Yorky scene when you got this outside your door?" In some hole like LA there are none of those expectations.

As I mentioned, we did make it up to the "promised land" and visited Miranda. It was Idyllic. Delores Park to be specific. What a wonderful civic vision to see all these people just hanging out. A peaceful public gathering for no other reason than it's nice out and we've got the time. Besides Delores, Liz and I went to SFMOMA and saw a picture of mindclamp and we did some touristy stuff--SF is a great tourist town, unlike LA. Then it was time to disband--Ken back south, Liz back east, Miranda back to the desk, me on to the the family.

In all I was roughly five weeks in California. The trip actually started out with Coachella--ridiculous, but not sure I'd do it again--and it ended up, after a jaunt up to my grandmother's in Chico (north of Sacramento), with my cousin in Oakland. Now I'm working as laborer on a sod farm up on Missouri Heights, with plenty of time to think, and for a short time I'll be a wilderness guide for Wilderness Workshop in Carbondale guiding artists into proposed wilderness areas to document their beauty. But it feels a bit like treading water. I'm torn about what to do. I feel I'd like to be near some of you and be in a bigger place--sometimes I even still woolgather about your idea of Berlin, Josh--but I also feel like Carbondale is blooming and I shouldn't miss it. I think mostly I'm still terrified of getting stuck on auto pilot going somewhere I don't want to go.

I'd love for this blog not to die out. I love hearing about your exploits--I apologize for the somewhat drunken manner this update careened about with little or no rationality. Where are you guys geographically?, mentally?, ____-ally? I envy some of you for jobs that seem like they will go somewhere interesting or people you just can't resist and have no other choice but to follow. I need some clarity like that.

Hope all is swell!

--chris


p.s. having started the entry mid-trip, it is dated Apr. 27th, but most of it is from today: Saturday, Jun 19th, 2010

1 comment:

  1. Chris I miss marinating our brains together

    ReplyDelete