IF YOU EVER
FIND YOURSELF
IN LOS ANGELES
ON A THURSDAY
AFTERNOON,
OR DURING
THE WEEKEND
BETWEEN MIDDAY
AND 6PM, HERE
IS WHAT YOU
SHOULD DO:
Take a bus from whichever glamorous side of town the celebrity
tours have swept you, and head to a little-visited street in Culver
City, well off the tourist drag. There, wedged between a panel beater
and an abandoned real estate office, you will find a nondescript and
infrequently open building known, by the few who know about it,
as the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
Inside you will encounter exhibitions on a range of strange and
wonderful topics. There’s a section devoted to the Cameroonian stink
ant, which spouts fungal horns from its heads, and is so large its cries
can be heard by the human ear. Next is a display on a South American
bat known as the “piercing devil”, which can supposedly fly through
solid objects. These are followed by a cultural history of cat’s cradles;
a collection of “failed” dice, two of which sit under a spotlight, decaying
like rotting meat; and so on.
It won’t take long for you to start questioning the veracity of what
you’re seeing. Nothing, logic tells you, can pass through another object
- bats included. And if people really could hear ants cry, wouldn’t
you have learned about that before? Then, just when you think you’ve
figured the place out as one big joke, the waters muddy again. Ants
might not cry, but a quick google tells you they can grow fatal prongs
from their foreheads when infected with spores. The internet will also
confirm that, until the middle of the 20th century, dice were routinely
made from cellulose nitrate, which actually does decompose.
Exactly where the line lies between fact and fiction at the Museum of
Jurassic Technology is bamboozlingly unclear. Which is presumably the
point. In 2001, the museum’s creator was awarded a MacArthur ‘Genius
Grant’ for highlighting both “the remarkable potential of the human
imagination” and “the fragility of our beliefs.” The place is a rumination on
the tension between knowledge and nonsense. It’s also really, really fun.
I was reminded of the museum while putting together this issue of
Smith. The same tightrope between fantasy and reality is walked in
our story on the history of the Illuminati (page 82) – that nefarious
society that supposedly rules the world from the shadows, but which
is, of course, a hoax.
Or is it? Yes. Maybe. Sort of. It’s complicated. Like the artefacts at the
Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Illuminati myth is based on a
collection of half-truths that were designed to make us question what
we read. But then the joke took on a tinfoil hat-wearing life of its own,
and legions of conspiracy theorists now believe it to be true. In today’s
fake news-addled world you could see this as a bad thing. Or, like the
“piercing devil”, you could see it as evidence not only of the fragility of
our beliefs, but also of the whirling power of the human imagination.
CH