Post # 8

 I went to the Mmuseumm, which is an art museum that was built into the bottom of an elevator shaft in a building on Cortlandt Alley.  The entire thing is the size of the footprint of a normal sized elevator so it is at capacity when there are three people there.  The whole thing is a tiny square room that is lined with glass cases, each one has several shelves inside holding an array of strange things that I never really though might exist.  The items that are usually on display are pretty strange things that you wouldn't normally see in an art museum like MoMA or the Met.  I've been there twice and each time I saw things that shocked and horrified me, I saw things that made me laugh, and I saw things that I was totally in awe of.  This time there were things like a plastic spoon from Honduras that was filled with some kind of treat and wrapped in plastic and ready to be sold I'd imagine.  There was a collection of peep show coins, which I found funny and at the same time pretty scummy and gross.  The first time I went there was two years ago and there was an exhibit of voice mail message transcripts from Al Goldstien, they were all pretty funny, most of them were absolutely ridiculous and generally inappropriate.  Last time I was there they had an exhibit of things that were made by prison inmates.  Again most of that stuff was pretty offensive there was a lot of neo-Nazi and white power stuff that was mostly carved into bars of soap.  The craftsman ship and detail of a lot of it was really impressive but the content was so off putting that it was very difficult to appreciate the time and effort that was put into it.  Some of the stuff was more light-hearted and funny like a post cart saying “San Quentin, wish you were here.”  The obscurity of most of the things in the museum and the strangeness of the museum itself really go quite well together and although there is pretty much always something that is pretty repulsive there the over all experience is a good one, because you get a refreshing sense of how strange people can be and the breadth of what people are making out there in the world.