strange days

I want to talk about two quite unusual places I have been so far in LA,
the first is the Upright Citizen Brigade Theatre in Franklin Avenue, south of Sunset.
http://www.ucbtheatre.com/
It is a kind of improvisation theatre that, I think, started up in New York. It is a word-oriented kind of theatre, many comedian and stand up comedian have started from this sort of experience, one name for all John Belushi. The theatre is very small, about 100 seats, the stage also very small, the audience and the performers are all young with about 80% I would say under the age of 30. The great majority of performers are young male that want to become professional comedian and train in that direction. It is a collective performance. About six actors get to the stage, and ask for a word from the public. Then they start a number of scenes, one of them begins and the other support. They come back to the same scene two or three times and develop the story. The evening I was in there were two groups, one quite bad that seemed like a bunch of guys half drunk and having fun telling made up stories from their past, the second group was quite good, and you could not believe that something so elaborated was , it is really incredible that all you see is not at all prepared but 95% improvised there and then.

The second place, unique to LA is the Museum of Jurassic Technology, on Venice Bld. in Culver city. http://www.mjt.org/
hard to describe, the creation of David Hildebran Wilson, it opened in 1989, and it is a mix of various things, a cabinet of curiosity, a set of different collection, a museum of natural history, and one of popular culture. But it is more and less than all of those things, because in it, you are exiting the realm of positive knowledge to enter in a sort of machine that reflects on knowledge and the museum. As an authoritative voice tells you , over a German original, about a fantastic theory of memory and reality as cones and planes, you start to wonder if what you hear and see is actually true and to what extent. Have these scientists ever existed? And the charts about trailer homes parks around the world are they reliable or they just serves the purpose to convey ethnographical character to the collection? You are exhausted and you end at the Russian themed tea-room serving tea from a samovar. When you exit in the bright California daylight you feel like you understand Alice a little more.