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museum of a museum
Friday, October 12 2001
I was in the office for a few hours today and happened to be there when word of the latest anthrax attack hit the newswires. This attack had happened in New York City, a scant 20 block to the north in Midtown at the offices of NBC, a media company. New York is full of media companies. In fact, I work at a media company. People in my office didn't know how exactly to react. They stood silently around televisions in little clusters trying to assess the risk. The VPN was down and I couldn't log onto any of the machines back in Santa Monica, so I said fuck it and went home.
Later I realized something about these anthrax-contaminated letters that news anchors have been receiving. They're a lot like emails contaminated with viral attachments and seem almost to be inspired by them. But the contagions are not the sort that fuck up your computer and cause you embarrassment. They're the kind that require you to immediately go out and buy some Norton Antivirus for your own mortal body. It's called Cipro, and I wish I had stock in the company that makes it.
In the evening, Gretchen and I went on another of our Friday night dates. We rode the subway up to 79th Street in Manhattan and went to the American Museum of Natural History. It's on the edge of Central Park in a part of the city that could almost pass for Charlottesville if you didn't see the distant skyscrapers poking up above the trees.
In the front atrium is a scene of everyday interspecial interaction set in the Jurassic, with Allosaurus attacking a Diplodocus mother in the process of defending her child. Of course, no dinosaurs actually looked this way, not even back in the Jurassic. These were fully articulated skeletons made from bones cast from a special lightweight material that permitted the massive beasts to rear up on their hindlegs and depict the modern idea of the agile dinosaur, not the ponderous swamp monsters I remember from the paleontology books of my childhood.
Beyond the rearing dinosaur skeletons, after we made our "donation" to the easy-going guy at the desk, we wandered into one of the diorama chambers, this one devoted to the depiction of wildlife on the African plain. It's been awhile since I've been to a natural history museum and either my feelings have shifted or I've forgotten how these places are. I was immediately struck by the sheer carnage. All the meticulously-reconstructed dead animals in all the diversity, slaughtered where they'd stood and then raised again in ideal nuclear families with a Mommy, a Daddy, and two kids, it was most striking not for what it was trying to show us, but instead for what it was saying about the standards of the time when it was created. As Gretchen commented, it wasn't just a museum we were looking at, but a museum of a museum. Still, the overwhelming diversity and abundance, no matter how perfectly lifelike the resurrections, was a little too much to take. So we hurried as quickly as we could for the genomics exhibit, where we were offered a crash course in the information technology of the cell. I used to study this stuff in college and none of it was news to me, but Gretchen seemed to be learning a lot. She really liked the movie sequences where we zoomed into the cells of an eye to progressively tinier and tinier scales until we could at last see the nucleotide rungs on the DNA ladder.
On the way out, we passed by the reptile and amphibian dioramas and got a good look at the back of scaled-up model of a Surinam Toad in the process of giving birth. Her babies were emerging from huge boils in her back, where the eggs she'd laid weeks before had embedded into her skin. It was horrifying, like something from an unusually creative space alien invasion movie.
After we were run out of the museum at closing time, we went to a nearby Italian restaurant called Carnival and dined indoors because it was ever so slightly too cold out on the street (where most of the other diners were). Our Pakistani waiter got off with an awkward start when he tried to interest us in a bottle of imported Peregrino water. This particular pitch probably works better these days than it used to, what with everyone terrorized about anthrax in the water supply. But New York tapwater, even in this day and age, is a risk we're willing to take. (By contrast, no one in his right mind drinks "mysteriously warm from the coldwater tap" unfiltered Los Angeles water. They didn't do so even back in the quaintly-tranquil Gary Condit/Shark-Attack Era.)
Next strike against our dining experience was the table bread, a low-grade semi-stale loaf of the white variety, pre-decorated with some sort of green oily substance.
Then, of course, there was the unclassy nickel-and-diming evident on the menu, telling us that there would be a four dollar surcharge if we wanted to share a single entree instead of buying one for each of us.
But the food, at least, was excellent. I had the black pasta with shrimp. Black pasta, I learned today, is colored with squid ink. I wonder what crazy mind first came up with this idea? The ink seems to impart no flavor whatsoever.
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