Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (8 page)

Diana, for her part, tells the story of how one day in 1984, just before she got pregnant and around the time she was waiting to hear whether she'd been admitted to graduate school, she'd just finished a Tai Chi class when David drove over to get her. Upon pulling up, he waited for her to board the car, at which point he passed her a slip of paper upon which he'd scrawled the simple phrase, “Museum of Jurassic Technology.”

“What's this?” Diana asked him. “Your life's work?”

And he just smiled.

F
OR
ITS
FIRST
SEVERAL
YEARS
, the Museum of Jurassic Technology existed in the form of “loans from the Collection” extended to scattered galleries, museums, and community centers—it had no physical base of its own. Then one day, about seven years ago, while driving home
from his other life's professional studio in Culver City, David noticed that a nearby storefront he'd had his eye on for some time had suddenly gone vacant. (Before that it had served as a fireworks factory, a sheepskin outlet, and, most recently, as an overflow storeroom for the neighboring forensics lab.) David signed a lease on the spot, taking over the 1,500 square feet. (“When we first moved in,” he recalls, “we had to clear out thousands of little blocks of wax with samples from people's bodies embedded inside.”) Within a few months he'd reunited his museum's traveling diaspora, mounted his first exhibition, and without the slightest flash or ceremony, simply hung the banner out and opened up for business.

Passersby, on occasion, would wander in. Many would wander right back out. But some would stay and linger. David tells the story of one fellow who spent a long time in the back amidst the exhibits and then, emerging, spent almost as long a time studying the pencil sharpener on his desk. “It was just a regular pencil sharpener,” David assures me, “it wasn't meant to be an exhibit. But he couldn't get enough of it.” And he tells another story about an old Jamaican gentleman named John Thomas who also spent a long time in the back and then came out crying. “He said, ‘I realize this is a museum but to me it's more like a church.' ” David seems equally—and almost equivalently—moved by both stories. (In a way, they're the same story.) Occasionally visitors are moved to offer more substantial financial contributions to the museum, and along a wall in the foyer there's an engraved honor roll acknowledging the support of these patrons in much the same spirit of
parody mingled with reverence that characterizes most everything else about the museum. Other visitors began volunteering their services to sit at the desk or else to help fabricate the new installations. In talking about the museum, David continually defers authorship: he is always talking about “our” goals and what “we” are planning to do next. In part this is one of his typical self-effacing gambits; but it's also true that the museum has generated a community—or anyway, that it's no longer so much about what's going on “inside” David as about what's going on
“between” him and the world.
³

That it continues to persist at all from month to month is by no means the least of its marvels. “The museum exists against all odds,” David once commented to me. “Nothing supports this venture—it is woven from thin air. We apply for grants, and we've gotten a few, but most grants-dispensing agencies frankly don't know what to make of us. We don't fit into the traditional categories.” (I've seen some of those applications and I'm not sure I'd know what to make of them either: as I say, David never breaks irony, and in these applications he always presents the museum as a straightforward public-educational institution much like any other—only, with some really odd enthusiasms and a penchant, shall we say, as one of its reviewers once parsed the matter with exquisite delicacy, for presenting “phenomena known to science, if known at all, because of their appearance in the museum itself.”) The museum's annual budget currently hovers around $50,000 (rent is $1,800 a month, and no one receives a salary), and though David originally poured a significant portion of his own outside income
into the museum, there's been less and less of that, in part because as the years passed he spent more and more time on the museum itself, and in part because his exquisitely sophisticated battery of specializations has now largely been superseded by the film industry's relentless computerization. Have there been moments, I recently asked him, when he and his family have actually been at the poorhouse door? “Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “Moments like now.”

“I have no idea how we got this far or how we can possibly go on,” Diana told me one day. Technically she's the museum's treasurer and keeper of accounts, though she admits that in that official capacity she's often reduced to giggling fits. “I've just developed this faery-faith in last-minute providence. At the outset of each month, there's no way we're going to make it through, but something always comes up—a small bequest, a grant unexpectedly approved, a slight uptick in admissions. Actually, we're just about reaching the point where admissions may soon be covering the rent. But David keeps pushing the limit. Last year he took his other company into bankruptcy and doubled the size of the museum
on the same day
—and the crazy thing is,
I wanted him to do it!
He was right to do it. And we got lucky, because almost immediately after that my car got stolen, so we were able to pour the $6,750 settlement from that into the museum.”

She was silent for a moment. “But it's strange, because less than a decade ago we were on the cusp of the upper middle class. The other day our daughter DanRae asked me, ‘Mommy, are we poor?' I told her, ‘Yes, but not without hope.' ”

DanRae, incidentally, seems far from anxious. Nine years old, she's as blithely self-confident and unabashed as her parents are tortuously shy and deferential. She's also
big.
“Beats me,” David laughs when asked about the disparity. “Sometimes, maybe, it's just that two negatives make a positive.” (Her given name is Daniela Rae. “The ‘Rae' is after Diana's dad, Raymond, who died when she was still a young girl,” David explains. “The ‘Daniela' is for Joseph McDaniels, the gynecologist who told Diane she'd never be able to bear children. Wonderful man. Just proved to be wrong in that one particular instance.”) I've heard stories about how five years ago DanRae used to curl up for long naps on the floor of the museum's darkened back alcoves. Nowadays she bounds around like she owns the place. When asked at school what her father does, she simply replies, “Oh, he's got a museum.” And she often brings classmates over for tours. One day she escorted me around, pointing out which exhibits were really cool and which other ones were, frankly, pretty boring. She squeezed through the glass partition and into the
deprong mori
showcase to show me a particularly nifty bug from out of a drawer in Bernard Maston's portable study desk. In the Madalena Delani room, she pointed into the glass case at one of the diva's pearl bracelets and confided, “That was my necklace when I was a baby.” For her, the museum is the most natural thing in the world.

O
NE
OF
MY
FAVORITE
EXHIBITS
at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the “
FRUIT
-
STONE
CARVING
,” consists of a simple glass box hanging from the wall at eye level. Inside,
atop a thin spike pedestal and under perfect illumination, is displayed—well, some kind of fruit pit, I guess. It's about the size of a dime, and it seems like it's been somewhat haphazardly gouged out. It's hard to tell: there's no magnifying device. There is a tiny square mirror attached to the tip of another thin spindle, this one jutting out from the wall, and it affords a view of the back of the hollowed pit. The nearby wall caption reads as follows:

Maybe. As I say, it's hard to tell: it looks like an ordinary pit. It would be nice if there were a magnifying device, though, what with the Iguazú Falls eyepiece around the corner, with its phantom catoptric bridge, I'm not sure that even then one would credit the evidence of one's own eyes.

That was certainly the case with another recent show at the museum, consisting of thirty cylindrical acrylic display cases each of which contained a single needle mounted beneath a twenty-five-power magnifying device. The wall captions alleged that suspended within or alongside the eyes of each of the needles were thirty microminiature sculptures. And sure enough, gazing through the eyepieces, one could spy variously: Little Red Riding Hood; a determined-looking Napoleon; Donald Duck (with orange bill, blue jacket, and yellow-webbed feet); a waving John Paul II in full papal regalia; Snow White and all seven of her dwarfs (microminiature dwarfs, that is). There was even one of Christ himself stretched out upon a golden cross. One of the displays gave its name to the entire show. It was titled “A Wish upon a Piece of Hair,” and the accompanying caption claimed that the artist had etched the wish onto a strand of his own hair. A hair was
there, and it distinctly read, “May all your dreams come true.”

Drawing of Hagop Sandaldjian's microminiature sculpture of Pope John Paul II
(
illustration credit 1.4
)

According to the wall legends, these were all the work of a single Soviet-Armenian émigré violin instructor, by the improbable name of Hagop Sandaldjian, who'd painstakingly crafted them under a microscope out of motes of dust, specks of lint, and wisps of hair, using tools he'd fashioned himself (mostly exquisitely sharpened needles tipped with abrasive ruby and diamond dusts), and then colored them by applying minute amounts of paint in microscopic suspension with paintbrushes consisting of a single hair. When I asked David about Sandaldjian, he assured me that he must have been “a very calm man.” In fact he claimed to have known him briefly, having first heard of his existence from a visitor to the museum. He explained how he'd thereupon taken to visiting Sandaldjian at his home in the Montebello section of East L.A., but how, no sooner had he contrived a plan for showing the sculptures at the Jurassic than, calling Sandaldjian to tell him so, he received word from his son that the master had died not ten days prior. Of course, they went ahead with the show anyway.

That show was no longer up but it had been replaced, as it were, by another equally mind-boggling display, this one supposedly documenting recent achievements in microtechnology. “
NANOTECHNOLOGY
,” announced the wall panel, “Machines in the Microscopic Realm”—and an array of microscopes mounted along a long table proceeded to afford visitors glimpses of what indeed appeared to be precisely what their captions alleged: a wobble motor, a microspring, micro-machined intermeshing
gears (“gear tooth approx. the size of a red blood cell”), an electrostatic motor, and even a micro wind tunnel. The captions credited these achievements to various inventors with names like “Yu Chong Tai, California Institute of Technology,” and “A. Bruno Frazier, Georgia Institute of Technology”—but, as I say, you could never be sure.