Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum

[jere7my]

Like Eminem (apparently), I chose to celebrate my birthday at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum. It's visually and aurally intense; the air constantly vibrates with bells and music and buzzers and recorded voices, and wherever you look, walls to ceiling, your visual field is saturated with posters, neon, airplanes, clocks, clowns, animatronics, gizmos, gumball machines, and games.

Marvin Yagoda has collected a century of coin-operated machines, from penny peep shows to Dance Dance Revolution, crammed them together in a single warehouse, and festooned the walls with old posters for magicians ("Carter condemned to death for witchcraft, cheats the gallows!"), marionettes, Rube Goldberg machines, and any brightly-colored sign he could find with the name "Marvin" in it. Most of the machines work: for a quarter you can watch the prison door open and see the hanged man hang; for a dime you can see a country girl totally naked in bed (unfortunately, the lights are off); for fifty cents the creepily lifelike Dr. Brain will answer your heart's desire.

Kendra and I, each armed with a roll of quarters, spent about two hours there this afternoon. I successfully kept my hand steady by the barking dog that leapt out of the trapdoor and drooled on me, played an excellent Lord of the Rings pinball machine a few times, experienced my first real force-feedback video games (F-Zero and a JetSki game; the latter was bloody hard to hang on to, and bruised my bottom), tried to win a goodie with a Claw game, and watched The Disgusting Spectacle (a roughly carved white face inserting a roughly carved white finger into one nostril). Kendra was told by the fortune teller that she's too mean, was insulted by Bart Simpson for not being good at pinball, watched the jerky horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, and enjoyed the plush doll puppets dancing the polka. Most impressive were:

• A large, animated farm scene built by the Butcher of Alcatraz with wood and paperclips and rubber bands, to expiate his sins. The windmill turns; the farmer bales hay; the wife beheads a goose. There are seventy moving parts, the sign proudly proclaims.



• The Cardiff Giant—or, rather, P.T. Barnum's copy of the Cardiff Giant. A fake of a fake, in other words. (The Cardiff Giant was a huge stone figure, artificially aged and buried in the earth in 1868 to fool fundamentalists into thinking they'd found a fossilized giant, a la Goliath. The creator, George Hull, made a lot of money with this hoax, so P.T. Barnum decided to get in on the act and make his own replica. Hull sued Barnum, but dropped the charges when it was pointed out to him that hoaxing a hoax isn't really all that illegal.)



• A complete orchestra, custom-built for Marvin and set to automatically play any of 3,000 songs via the magic of MIDI. The accordian keys depress themselves, robot fingers fret and pluck the guitar and banjo, mallets play the xylophone, the player piano plays along, puppets dance.

Our ears ringing and our pockets lighter, Kendra and I returned home, where I opened my excellent presents: CDs by Tom Petty, R.E.M., and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band; the 5th set of MST3K DVDs (with Boggy Creek II!); The Lord of Castle Black; and a car charger for my iPod, among other things. We popped out to Mihi for sushi (dragon roll and softshell crab roll), then returned home to watch The Sopranos.

Excellent birthday all around. Must call Our Friend In Hawaii now, to exchange felicitations.

Comments

[zorblak.livejournal.com]

Sounds fabulous! If I'm ever in Michigan with nothing to do, I'll have to check it out! Of course, the odds of my ever being in Michigan are pretty slim, and even slimmer (though not by a large margin, given how often I've visited you guys so far) now that the only two people I know in Michigan are moving out. But if I ever am.....