A Piercing Experience

LAST WEEKEND, I finally decided to get my ears pierced. It was something I had been promised in exchange for good grades by my parents many (many many many many) years ago, and they never bothered to make an appointment and gradually I just stopped asking.

Since it was something I had always wanted, it was time.

So I went to Yelp, hoping that would narrow down my options. But the thing about reviews is that there could be a slew of positive feedback, and then you come across someone with a negative experience, and it puts doubt in your mind, and that’s it. Over. On to the next place. There were too many options, and since my friends had all had their ears pierced long before coming out to LA, I couldn’t rely on their first hand accounts.

In my hometown of Bend, Oregon, there wouldn’t have been so many options. If you type “piercing” into Yelp for Bend, you get six results - one of which is a Claire’s. The same search for Los Angeles yields 151 results. Narrowing it down to Marina del Rey still gets 29 results. In a city that has everything, usually in multiples, how do you choose?

I ended up at Ink Monkey Tattoo, just down a ways on Lincoln. It did not have as many reviews as other places I was considering, but I had seen it before and though it did not look like a place I would normally go, it was somewhat familiar. It was out of my comfort zone and a little scary. I almost didn’t go in.

Sometimes you can’t rely on the experiences of others, you have to go out and make your own. That is what I find so exciting (and at the same time frustrating) about this city. There is an endless supply of options. And, besides just getting my ears pierced, I got something else out of it as well. I already knew tattoo artists were that: artists, but I never realized how much art goes into piercing as well. Jason, the piercer, was very proud of all his work, telling me about the cheek piercing he did on the woman who had walked into the store after me and making sure I knew about his gallery on the shop’s website - and he was definitely not telling me because he thought I would be a repeat customer.

Even though my ears were the most basic request you could make, he took his time to make sure they were perfect. Its comforting that I won’t have to go through the process of finding a place if I ever decide to get another piercing. But as Jason pointed out, that’s pretty unlikely. He’s probably right, but you never know how this city will change you.

-- Allie Flinn

Photo by amaltya via  Flickr

Venice West: The End of the Line

ON THE subject of Venice, and what it symbolized in Lawrence Lipton's piece we read earlier this week, I thought you all might like to take a look at this scrolling/mural video that KCET Departures produced. It's a fascinating virtual walk through the history and present-day scene of Venice, West.

Click here to view.

-- L.G.

A True Museum for LA

JUST A couple of miles east of the Pacific on Venice Boulevard, lies a hidden gem to Los Angeles called The Museum of Jurassic Technology.  This museum, founded by David Hildebrand Wilson in ’87, goes by unnoticed by most, but those who stumble across it quickly find themselves in no ordinary place.  As with the microminiature art sculptures that you must look through a microscope to see, the artifacts housed by the museum all contain unusual qualities.  In this dimly lit, claustrophobic labyrinth, viewers walk backwards in time and discover more about wonder than they do of the artifacts themselves.

David Wilson had no ordinary goals when he founded The Museum of Jurassic Technology.  In fact, he was steeped in wisdom about the evolution of museums, which explains why the museum functions as it does.  Through his studies, Wilson learned that museums were places dedicated to the muses in the ancient world.  As explained on The Museum of Jurassic Technology website, a museum is “a place where man’s mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs.”  When society’s creative endeavors fell mute in the Middle Ages, so did the power of the museum.  It wasn’t until around the 16^th century when man picked museums back up as a way to preserve human culture.

 Nowadays, most museums are based off the traditions established by 16^th century museums, not antique museums like the great Alexandria.  Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology fights that tendency, holding reverence to both the traditions of ancient museums but also in the artifacts they valued.  Visitors to The Museum of Jurassic Technology are supposed to feel most comfortable near the entrance where the contemporary exhibits are located, but will become less comfortable and familiar with the content that lies deeper in the labyrinth.  As described by one of Wilson’s idols, “the learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar - guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life”.  Perhaps the most interested facet of the museum is the myth that half of the objects are faked.  The thought is that Wilson intentionally left this ambiguous so that visitors would constantly question which artifacts could be regarded as authentic.  This inspires a certain skepticism in viewers that works perfectly with Wilson’s philosophical interest in the pursuit of wisdom.

-- Carey Uhl

Photo Credit 1: Rikomatic on Flickr

Photos 2 & 3: Ricky Jay

Untangling L.A.

I KNOW you're all blissfully decompressing on Spring Break, but I wanted to let you know that your blog got a mention on the KCET blog by writer D. J. Waldie (about whom I've spoken about  in class).

Here's a little snip:

Whatever the reasons, Los Angeles has resisted embracing its "vast accumulation of individual stories" in favor of a small store of familiar tropes: noir city, La La Land, fifty suburbs in search of a city, city of broken dreams, and the best worst place in the world.

These pages - UpDaily, 1st and Spring, Departures, SoCal, and The Back Forty among them - have been finding and telling other stories of Los Angeles since 2008. And their "vast accumulation" is only a part of what a lengthening roll of online storytellers bring to readers every day. So many storytellers, that it would be an almost impossible task even to survey them all.

And here's your closeup:

But I'd like to offer you one more - the students in Loyola Marymount University's journalism course, Telling L.A.'s Story.

Their encounters with Los Angeles (and the problems of story telling here) have the uneasy shock of first discovery. Their stories also have some of the rough edges expected of student writers. Their sympathies are not yet fully given, as they and the city continue a romance that could end badly.

A blog of million stories - including theirs - is not a mere accumulation, however.

Stories are the measure of a city's grandeur, the nerve fibers of its being, and its memories. The more stories we have and from as many tellers as can be recruited, the more we will redress this city's greatest lack: its failure to know itself.

 Keep digging, keep looking, keep thinking, keep writing.

Kudos to you all!
Onward.

-- L.G. 

photos: Union Station Passenger Terminal, Downtown
credit: L.G.

Motel/Moytel

A "Moytel?"
Well, can someone explain?
Chinatown, 2012

L.G.
photo: L.G.