This Belongs in a Museum
Bringing you museum-approved grammatical errors and typos since 2010.
Oh, and sorry - I DO NOT FOLLOW BACK!
Once upon a time Lynyrd Skynyrd sang about “Sweet Home Alabama”, but I bet they didn’t know about the town called Sweet Home. Yep, such a place exists in Oregon and it’s the sweet home of White’s Metal Detectors, one of the earliest manufacturers of metal detectors. Next to the factory and offices is a little museum full of things unearthed by the company’s metal detectors as well as some of their earliest models, which date back to the 1950s. The diverse assortment of treasures discovered with White’s instruments include items from a Spanish fleet that sank off the coast of Florida in the 1700s that were found by Ken White, president of the company as well as various coins, bullets, cannonballs, and bottles. Besides a personal tour of the museum (by appointment only of course), there is also a demonstration room and test garden. Personally, I’m not a fan of the device, just from my experience of flying, and once having to take every single thing out of my suitcase to be inspected because, you know, I really look like a danger to society. I actually take that back…I’m totally a danger to society in that I’m a bitch. Scan away!
In America, today is the deadline for filing your taxes with the IRS. I don’t know if there is a tax museum, but trust me, even an accountant doesn’t want to go to that shit. So the next best thing is a taxidermy museum. We’ve covered it here before many, many times…you might remember this (squirrel dioramas) or maybe that (the world’s largest collection of stuffed dogs). Well, apparently there is a dead frog circus at the Wistariahurst Museum, a historic house museum once owned by a prominent silk manufacturer and his family, in Holyoke. Over the years the museum’s most popular object has been moved around quite a bit, from prominent rooms to tucked away corners of the house…and even hidden away in storage until the public demanded it be put back on public display where it currently sits in the visitors’ center. A dead frog circus is exactly what it sounds like: a diorama of four dozen taxidermic frogs posed in a circus scene. Some drive chariots pulled by mice and rats (and some even ride an endangered spotted turtle), while others trapeze above and play music. It dates back to 1927 when it was created by naturalist Burlingham Schurr, though no one is sure why, which makes it even more intriguing. According to the curator, most visitors convince themselves that they are not real frogs, but they are real, more real than a freakin’ reality show.
Because I’m a poor asshole, I usually cannot afford to go to a hair salon. I end up badly cutting my hair into uneven bangs or have my mom (a beauty school dropout) give me a trim. But if I lived in Le Havre, France and was a man I would totally go to Le Salon des Navigateurs where 76 year old barbershop owner, Daniel LeCompte, dresses as a sailor and curates a mini-museum dedicated to hairdressing techniques. The Sailors’ Salon, opened in 1960 in the Saint-François neighborhood of city, has a collection of objects related to sailing history (of course) and a hair-raising accumulation of barbershop objects and mementoes from LeCompte’s father, who also happened to be a hairdresser. Customers don’t seem to mind getting a haircut while sitting next to a mannequin, so props to them! And don’t worry…you don’t need to be a man with a desperate need for a shave or cut, LeCompte and his wife welcome all visitors and will show you around their museum for FREE!!! This is a perfect time for an awful hairdressers’ pun - “going to this museum is like a hairway to heaven.”
When traveling to Tokyo you’ll probably be bringing a lot of excessive baggage (figuratively or literally) with you. What better way to rid yourself of it than with a trip to the Ace World Luggage Museum (after you needlessly purchase some self-help books of course). Owned by Japan’s Ace luggage company (the world’s first producer of nylons bags in case you keep track of that sort of thing), the museum is located on the seventh floor of their corporate headquarters in the Asakusa district in Tokyo. The collection includes 600 examples of handbags, travel bags and trunks made not just from leather, but all different kinds of animal skin. So if you’re a member of PETA or something, look away! Besides the trunk covered with the black skins of 12 saltwater crocodiles, every endangered species is on display - antelope, zebra, hippopotamus, seal, elephant, buffalo, shark, eel and even aardvark. There are also a number of non-dead animal historic pieces in the museum, like a navy blue Panam flight bag made in the 1960s, a grey aluminum box with an orange Bakelite handle designed by the famous explorer and traveler Richard Halliburton and an even larger box that used by the Apollo 11 crew to store moon-rocks during their space journey. Most hotels keep luggage before you check in (or after you check out) but if there is a problem, I’m sure this museum wouldn’t mind storing it for you…or selling you another piece. And in case you’re keeping track, yes, we have been to another handbag museum before.
Exactly 45 years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was only 39 years old. Today the site is part of a 4 acre complex of buildings that make up the National Civil Rights Museum. The motel is connected by underground tunnel to the Young and Morrow Buildings, where James Earl Ray initially confessed (and later recanted) to shooting King. Another component, Canipe’s Amusement Store, is next door to the rooming house where the alleged murder weapon (along with Ray’s fingerprints) was found. The museum traces the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the 17th century to the present day. A temporary exhibit called Freedom’s Sisters dedicated to African American women who fought for equality, like Ida B. Wells and Myrlie Evers-Williams, is now on display through the rest of 2013. Interesting to note the motel’s owner’s wife suffered a stroke hours after King’s assassination, and died 5 days later. I did not know that.
I don’t know if there is a continuous loop of elevator music playing at the Elevator Historical Society’s museum, but there should be. With a view of Manhattan, an island full of skyscrapers that could not exist without the invention of up-and-down travel, the museum in Long Island City (supposedly the heart of the lift industry, I bet you didn’t know that) has a random collection to rival all other random collections. In a room that resembles an elevator there are ID plaques, car ceilings and button plates, various industrial tools, thousands of operator manuals, obscure mechanical parts and random pop culture items. It all comes from a lifetime of hoarding, quite literally. Founder and curator Pat Carrajat, who opened the museum two years ago, started collecting elevator paraphernalia in 1955 when he was just 11 years old. He ended up working in elevator maintenance and repair. Anyway, visitors can see the earliest elevator push button from 1895 along with an early elevator hand brake from 1890, plus a very random autographed photo of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in an elevator (of course!). The museum is located in the same spot where New York City Elevator Number 1 was recorded. Carrajat’s dream is to move to a larger location in the next year or two, ideally a two-story building with high ceilings, so he can offer rides on an antique elevator. Right now the museum is open by appointment only, and ironically can only be reached by climbing a flight of stairs. But if you mention that you can’t walk or something, Carrajat will gladly share the location of the building’s secret elevator.
Lovely illustrations by jenniferquinnart of the Manchester Museum, a place where I spent a lot of time during my Museum Studies programme either writing, studying, napping due to jet lag, going on a behind-the-scenes tour or just killing a bit of time. With the exception of the Art Institute of Chicago, this is a museum I probably know the best. These images take me right back.
When I visited Deutschland (or Germany for non-Germans) a few years back, I noticed their obsession with recycling. Everywhere you looked there was some kind of receptacle for a specific kind of material; blue for paper, yellow for plastic and metals, red for food and plant waste, etc. Glass is even sorted by colour. Anyway, it comes as no surpise to me that Germans are now transforming old flour sacks into art, or at least recognising their historical value. Yep, that’s right. The first Sunday of every month in Ahrensburg, the Flour Art Museum is open to the public. With nearly 3,000 bags from 122 countries in the exhibit, the museum starts with wheat around the world then moves the “myths” of the different cultures, like the story of the Old Wives Mill. In the Symbol Room, the international language of flour-sack symbols is discussed, where visitors learn about the popular motifs of locomotives and lions, and why a camel from Morocco means the same as a dragon in China. Ever heard of a Kleiekotzer? It literally translates to “bran puker”, it was a gargoyle-like mask found in old corn mills that “puked” the separated bran out of its mouth. I WANT ONE! The museum ends with the White Room, a feast for senses, and the Sackotheque, an archive of all the sacks arranged systematically according to their English names of their country of origin. I bet you’re wondering how this all started. Well, back in 1998 owner Volkmar Wywiol (who happens to make industrial baking products for a living) stumbled upon an empty flour sack on the beach in Dubai and thought about its connection with our international cultural heritage. And with that, another random museum was born. And the best part? There’s a book (of course) and if you happen to be a hoarder of old flour sacks, the museum wants it to be part of their collection. So send yours in today!!!
Who would expect a pop-up museum in a former prison, but that’s exactly what you’ll find at the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia. In operation from 1829 to 1971 and home to famous criminals like Al Capone, the facility reopened in 1994 with guided tours and special events like a recreation of Bastille Day. Presented from March 23 through April 1, Eastern State’s first pop-up museum exhibits 120 rarely displayed hand-made weapons, many of them created by former prisoners, like a set of mini cutlery carved out of tiny bones stolen from a bowl of soup and a wallet made of interwoven cigarette packs. as well as a pile of inmate-written magazines. Other items include the original 8-pound key for the prison’s door, an old mugshot book and the prison’s death ledger from 1829 to 1935, which records more than 1,000 deaths. Surprisingly, murders and suicides didn’t top the list, the number one cause was actually tuberculosis. It goes well with a special hands-on tour where visitors are given keys to the cellblocks and retrace the steps of escape attempts across the bowels of the penitentiary complex. The idea of having a temporary museum is nothing new here, as there have been a number of interesting, critically acclaimed art exhibits over the years. A colony of cats once lived on the property when it closed, so artist Linda Brenner sculpted 39 cat sculptures “purposefully made of a material that slowly dissolves over time to represent the inevitable natural decay that faces all living things.” Artist Dayton Castleman installed hundreds of feet of red piping to symbolize the escape routes used by prisoners. Around the prison full of empty lock-ups, visitors can see how artists have transformed the spaces. One cell block is scattered with dioramas depicting various moments from the prison’s history, another has numerous televisions showing old prison films. This is definitely a creative way to readapt and bring life to an old building, especially for a historic site, where it is easy to become stagnant and boring. Even though I don’t think going to a prison is your typical school field trip experience. Why didn’t my teacher take me here? And can you imagine the permission slips?
This has probably been the fastest March I’ve ever lived through in my life. The more time you waste, the more you lose…or something like that. Anyway, I’m sure time moves pretty slow in Spillville, Iowa. It’s home to the Bily Clocks Museum, an old brick building dedicated to the clock collection created by two Bohemian bachelor farmer brothers. With nothing better to do, they carved clocks every winter for over 50 years. Most of the items are huge, made of different woods like walnut, butternut, maple and oak and fully animate with figures and built-in music boxes. One such piece, the Apostle Clock, built between 1915 and 1916, has the Twelve Apostles appear on the hour. Even though they never traveled farther than 35 miles from home, their clocks have advanced themes, like The Seven Stages of Man from Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Father Time hanging out with Quaker activist Elizabeth Fry, philosopher Emanuel Kant, and playwright Henrik Ibsen. During the period of 1923-1927, the Bily Brothers added their masterpiece to the collection, the American Pioneer History Clock, which is over eight feet high and weighs more than 500 pounds. It’s a memorial to the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s historic flight. Henry Ford offered the brothers over a million dollars for the clock in 1928. They respectfully declined and later bequeathed their works to the city of Spillville with the stipulation it must never be sold or separated. The second floor has an exhibit dedicated to the famous Czech composer, Antonin Dvorak, who happened to live in the building with his family during the summer of 1893. And that’s all I got, folks…I’ve run out of time.
