Counting Down The Days...

Next weekend is the 24th Annual Bug Fair at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles!


The Bug Fair has been a favorite annual tradition for me and my clan for the last 6 years. We like to get there early to avoid the crowds and we always stay late to explore the rest of the museum, which is open and operates like any other day at the museum.

The first floor of the museum is filled to the brim with live and preserved insect specimens, entomology books and supplies, and even bug related products, like fresh honey and silk.

(Insect display from last year. Photo by Jon Dragonette)

The museum also hosts a bug cook-off which I have to say, I've never actually participated in. At the 2006 Bug Fair, my best friend tried some Cajun Crickets and Popcorn Ants, and she said the Crickets were fishy and that the ants tasted like butter at first, then followed by an intense bitter after taste.

(Photographic evidence of Marie's Pop Corn Ants)

Since I'd rather wear and stare at my bugs then eat them (thankyouverymuch), I'm not exactly sure about the details of the cook off, but the Natural History Museum's website has the low down on the entire event.

If you decide to go, don't forget to check out the Pavilion of Wings too!

See you there!

Museum of Witchcraft

tour the museum

founder Cecil Williamson

Your Museum Makes You the Coolest

 

There is one thing that New York has that I am unquestionably jealous of...

THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

The AMNH is hands down the best Natural History museum in the United States.

They are well funded, have the best special exhibits, and jaw-dropping dioramas. 

A couple of years ago I stayed at a friends apartment on 82nd and Columbus and I went to the AMNH every morning for a few hours for 5 days straight and that STILL wasn't enough time to see everything! I only got through the 1st two floors AND I was rushing.

Right now at the AMNH, there is an exhibit on a golden cloth from Madagascar made of undyed silk, which took four years and some 80 people to produce.

 

Oh and it was made by over ONE MILLION GOLDEN ORB SPIDERS. 

Other then the amazing Spider Silk exhibit, there is also an all new Space Show narrated by Whoopi fucking Goldberg. Like I said, they're the best.

The Eye of the Needle and the Museum of Jurassic Technology

Founded in 1989 by Diana and David Hildebrand Wilson, the Museum of Jurassic Technology houses an array of artistic and scientific exhibits which evokes the cabinets of curiosities that were the 18th century predecessors of modern natural history museums.



What appears from the outside to be a tiny, defunct store front is in actuallity a rather large labryinth-like myriad of exhibits.

From microscopic collages made entirely from individual butterfly wing scales and stereographic X-ray photographs of flowers, to a collection of decomposing antique dice once owned by magician Ricky Jay, a small room dedicated to unusual letters and theories received by the Mount Wilson Observatory, and my personal favorite the collection of micro-miniature sculptures and paintings done by Hagop Sandaldjian (1931-1990).



Born in Egypt and later settling with his wife and children in Armenia, Hagop was a highly regarded violin soloist with the Yerevan National Orchestra. He was also a conductor and taught at two music colleges as well as at the state conservetory. It wasn't untill the late 1970's that Hagop began to explore the art of microminiature sculpture.

Through these tiny tedious sculputures, Hagop found an art form parallel to music in its extremes of commitment, passion, and extravagance channeled into controlled, precise movement.



Born of obsessive devotion, an idividual sculpture could take as many as fourteen months to finish. Each sculpted micron represented not only endless hours of toil, but agony laden peril, as his work could be easily destroyed or lost. An unexpected sneeze of misdirected breath could blow away months of work. In view of the fact that even his pulse could cause an accident, Hagop trained himself to apply his decisive strokes only between heartbeats.



Hagop and his family immigrated to the United States in 1980 and for the next decade untill the time of his death, he produced a collection of 33 miniatures. Inhabiting the margins between dream and reality, these figures of impossible dimensions appear at once banal and elusive, meticulously crafted and dreamily insubstantial. Straddling the line between science, craft, art and novelty, his work befuddles our ability to make such distinctions, and in so doing, opens a space for wonder.




{photos: saschapohflepp & MJT}
{various text: MJT}