Things In My Cabinet: A Distant Voice in the Darkness

How awesome is this? Via Favim.

The Museum of Joy might one day be a place, and when it is, it ought to be the kind of place where a man can lose one voice and find another and a dream can turn into a book you can pull down from a shelf. Until I can find enough bits of green paper to buy a piece of land and build that place, however, this blog will have to do. And today this blog, at least, will have that man and that dream in it.

The man who lost one voice and found another is Roger Ebert. Now, I used to be a big movie buff; I wanted to be a director from the age of twelve until sometime in my first year of college when I realized that making movies involved working with other people, at which point I decided to be something else instead. (The jury is still out on what, exactly.) So I read a lot of film books. I had some book of Ebert's that included his rating for practically every movie ever made, and I went through and carefully starred every one I'd seen. I read screenplays, and reviews, and everything William Goldman had ever written. (That includes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, for those of you not in the know. And if you don't know about those, there's something terribly terribly wrong with you and you should go away right now and watch them.) I decided the only film critic I "respected" was Ebert and the rest were hacks. (Gimme a break, I was 17.) Then I started studying nineteenth-century art history and basically stopped watching movies in the theater because I was too broke and stopped renting DVDs because our lovely local video store shut down and have pretty much just wandered around on my streaming Netflix for the last two years. Which is to say I didn't follow with any particular closeness the doings of Mr. Ebert. Until today somebody I'm friends with on Facebook posted this lovely, lovely quote: 

P is for Petrichor

"Magic Street" by Leonid Afremov. This guy, while kind of a
one-trick pony compositionally, nevertheless paints in
exactly the way I saw things in my head as a child.

"Petrichor" is the scent of rain on dry earth. Is this an inspiration for a museum? Absolutely. What would a museum of joy have in it but the smell of the rain, the sound that snow makes as it silences the night, the pulped sunlight taste of fresh nectarines, the pleasure of a tiny wind-up toy? What makes these things joyous is that they can't be kept. They are absolutely and completely transient. That fragrance, that particular musty sharp hot smell rising up from the dirt, the loveliness of it - gone within minutes, sometimes seconds. The snow, the way it almost creaks but doesn't quite, how it disappears the horizon and turns the world into the quaint close dome of an ornament - if you're lucky, a few hours. The nectarine might linger on the tongue but you can only take so many bites. The toy - well, if you're anything like me, a great part of the joy is the longing for the toy, either before it is yours or long afterwards, when you are remembering it, and wondering what happened to it, and if anything so wonderful actually even existed and maybe you made it up, or read it in a book, or had it in a dream.

A is for Academy of Sciences

Image credit: Cal Academy of Sciences Research Archives

Welcome to the A-Z Challenge Entry for A on the Museum of Joy! This month, I'll be writing about 26 inspirations for the Museum of Joy, one for every letter of the alphabet. To be fair, this entry is actually about the California Academy of Sciences, but I've got something else lined up for letter C, and living in San Francisco there's no need to refer to what state you're in. When I was a kid, it was just The Museum with Dinosaurs.

My family moved to San Francisco just before I turned 2 and just after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. We were pretty poor, apparently, although I had no idea because I was a toddler and we lived at the edge of Golden Gate Park, which is still one of the coolest places in the world that a kid can possibly have at her doorstep. (Although the Inner Sunset, our neighborhood, is a whole bunch ritzier now, there still remains a shop that was for me a magical cave at the age of 2, which we called The Badge Shop because it sold dozens of tiny enameled pins and other treasures. It's really called "Oriental Import Co" or something, and it looks exactly the same. You can still buy a really great pin for five bucks, too.) Back then, a member ship at the Academy of Sciences was affordable. As this article says, a family membership was $25 in 1996, and this is even earlier. Now it's $500. Poor kids like me don't get to go any more, but then there's a lot less to see these days....