Deja Vu All Over Again.

You know, the thing about moving back to the city of your youth and early twenties is that you forget that you aren't twenty and yet you are constantly reminded that you AREN'T twenty. Quite frankly, I don't know how to get anywhere, but when I get in my car and drive around I listen to the same college radio station that I listened to when I did know how to get around, and since everything on the radio sounds like the Gang of Four or the Slits or the Bush Tetras, it seems that the soundtrack hasn't changed and that I'm going someplace I know how to go. And then I'm somewhere and it doesn't add up in the map in my brain, some parts of town butt up against other parts of town, like I can see Century City from my house, but I can drive to Culver City in two minutes by turning left onto La Cienega - and the two are not supposed to be close. Or I've forgotten whole stretches of neighborhoods and so things are farther apart than they should be. And dear lord, recruiters call me up all the time and ask me to accept jobs that are hours of driving away and they think I'm crazy when I say that's too far, but often they tell me that it's really close and I don't really know for sure so I say, Okay. And then I end up driving through Compton thinking "I sure wouldn't want to have an Unreliable Car driving here. I wanna get Strait Outta Compton!"
And speaking of that Deja Vu all over again, it was time to take the peebs to Hancock Park, locally known as the La Brea Tar Pits. Or the Tar Pits Tar Pits, because La Brea means tar pit. The Giant Sloths are an age old favorite. Here they are graced by the peeb nation.

The tar pits have these really great statues all over the place of saber toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. Here saber-toothed tigers are depicted fighting on Wilshire Boulevard.


They've built a fancy Museum-On-A-Hill to educate the public about Fossils and Dinosaurs and Woolly Mammoths and Saber-Toothed Tigers. The entire place smells of tar, which drives the peebs wild, so imagine what it did to Saber-Toothed Tigers.

The great thing about all these prehistoric animal names is that they are bloodily descriptive - just the thing to interest children. A kind of fabulous ferocity of the slightly weird. A Woolly Mammoth is like an elephant but with hair and bigger tusks - and you know what tusks mean (aside from the obvious phallic Freudian meaning) but they mean something fierce. Giant Sloths, they are the obviously fantastical prey, slow moving tons of meat. The mere idea of a Saber-Toothed Tiger is enough to send any young boy into a frenzy, never mind that fact that they remind me of Victorian Gentlemen with handlebar moustaches.

But in this weird kind of California\LA kind of way, we were treated to statues and dioramas when we were young of these fabulous creatures and the are still there today, (like the dioramas at the NY Natural History Museum) with much the same text on the (new) signs. Most of the way we think scientifically about prehistoric creatures has changed significantly in the past twenty years. And so the scientific depictions of dinosaurs have changed, T-Rex has been re-assembled so that he is not so erect.

And here we have a picture of the lakeside diorama depicting a couple of mammoths watching another mammoth sink into the oozing lake of tar. The text describing this to visitors says "A family of Mammoths watch helplessly as the Mother Mammoth sinks into the tar."



What kind of weird anthropomorphizing shit is that? "Helplessly" Mammoths had kinship relationships and we should have anthropologists studying them as well? While they've found Mammoth bones in excavating the tar pits, they didn't find Mommy Mammoth bones. This is just the hopelessly sloppy, emotional thinking that is endemic to our educational system, and I don't think visitors reading the signs think that they are post-modern ironic constructs about meta-structures. And we are right next to the art museum, so they could be written by someone like Stephen Prina or Jenny Holzer trying to fuck with us. But I doubt it.

So while I, like many before me, THRILL to the thought of a Saber-Toothed Tiger in all it's hyphenated glory, I would like the educational sign writers to be a tad more educational. It's their job to be precise, it's my job to be hyperbolic.