The Modern Museum

Around the world the museum is a monument, an institution like the library and the postal system, denoting a level of societal achievement.  It can lend a small town in Nebraska a place in a travel guide.  It can elevate a nation into history.  A museum-goer may carry a small ball of pride and harbor a pinch of superiority at the time well spent.

The museum is a collection of objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical interest arranged and displayed in accordance with a logical method and made available for public viewing through exhibits. The word ‘museum’ is of Greek origin, and meant a space dedicated to the muses - "a place where man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs."  (Abridged definition taken from both Wikipedia and Dr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders)  To that end it was a place to mediate upon the world and practice the arts.  The first museum may have been an Athenian institute created by Plato or merely a hill in Athens upon which an old man sat and sang until there he died, was buried, and thus created a sanctuary.  And in that dual origin story we find both the beauty and the problem with the museum.  What is a museum meant to do?

Consider the museums of your lifetime.  Though they may preserve beautiful paintings or historic carvings or awe inspiring fossils the museum can be a drool, potentially depressing archive of the past ensconced in a pristine and grand manner.  Like a mortuary of human and natural spectacles, some sort of continual funeral without a burial in sight, the museum preserves the past in an antiseptic manner.   Perhaps inevitably so.  Perhaps there is no other way.

Walking the halls we hover somewhere out of time, induced to drowsiness by the atmosphere, as if a magical spell poured in through the vents, a potion that frays the fabric of time until we stumble about in a waking dream state.   Like Rip Van Winkle we doze off and awake to find years have passed except in the case of the museum the years roll backward upon the rails not forward.

In this state we are not taken away on flights of fancy, but instead we are led down a road of rigorous delineation of the world as if everything has its proper place.  Here the world is separated and catalogued.  The museum portrays a world of progress from age to age and culture to culture that ticks along like clockwork.  All the chaos and uncertainty and ambiguity of the world becomes domesticated in these halls.  It’s as if we wish to enclose Nature and History in a series of labelled Ziplock bags, as if we believe a stately institutionalized palace could hold them in all their wonder.

All this certainty lends authenticity and authority.  Who can argue with the art masters,  the scientific pioneers, and the world explorers when all in one place?  Who can question the answers of learned experts, recorded voice-overs, brochures, and captions neatly printed on foam core and mounted with the utmost attention to tidiness?

Somehow this is the world we are more at home in though it is something fabricated, only a model of the world as it is.  We can lounge in the well ordered and catalogued room with sharp distinctions.  We breath easily in the home that works along well governed laws with no alternate answers.

The question is:  Is it Real?

Next up:  The Cabinets of Curiosity, the original manifestation of the museum.  And don’t worry this is going somewhere culinary and delicious.

In the Search of Wonder

This year We are about to embark upon a long tale.  It has many twists to it, and at times will appear confusing and even ridiculous, but the terminus will warrant the journey.  It must begin somewhere which is here for lack of a better starting point.

“Whenever we encounter some truly novel phenomenon, one that reinvents the margins of our world, an old hankering is awakened. At such moments we are like explorers of an unknown dimension: everything appears fresh to our eyes, each idea seems unprecedented, virgin, strange. In the face of this newly made universe, we may be tempted to exclaim, ‘It cannot be!,’ yet our protests soon lie buried under an avalanche of wonder.”

-       Dr. Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology

There are things we do not understand in the World.  We approach them with anxiety unaware of what will happen.  We prepare ourselves for the Unknown and that ‘avalanche of wonder’.

There are those who seek this ‘Wonder’.  In their adventures they blaze a trail for others to follow.  This may result in an epic tale such as The World Travels of Marco Polo or a universal theory of relativity as with Albert Einstein.  Or as in the case of Auguste Escoffier it may be an enduring approach to all things culinary: recipes, kitchen organization, the creation of the chef profession.  All of which have transformed our world today.  Whatever our specialty may be, we adore those who embark upon the ‘margins of our world’ and elicit that state when ‘everything appears fresh to our eyes’.  It may be said that Chef Nordo Lefesczki, despite his crank and quack, is one such pioneer currently blazing his trail with the Carnal Food Movement.

There are those who record the Wonder.  When such Luminaries exist there must be a way to record and share the achievements.  It may be as simple as a university physics book or a painting that now hangs in the Louvre, an index of World Records or an urban myth that travels the globe on the lips.  In the case of Chef Nordo it is a Cabinet of Curiosities set to appear in Seattle in May of 2012.  For a few short weeks a selection of the Cabinet’s exhibits will be open to the public.  This is an extremely rare opportunity, one that people wait for, a once in a lifetime affair.

As we all know, food is a precious and overlooked necessity to life.  And it is Chef Nordo’s goal to rekindle the wonder of the world of food in everyone through his crafts of cooking and storytelling.  It could be said this Cabinet includes every idea, fact, myth, and imaginative spark ever to be inspired by our food.  Café Nordo is the stage for Chef Nordo’s stories.  The Cabinet of Curiosities is the repository of all that knowledge.

Someone must keep this knowledge alive.  Here, it is stored.

Down a rabbit hole.  Swept away by a tornado.  Tumbled into Slumberland. 

Visited by the spirits of Past, Present, and Future.

This is the only way to describe what Nordo has in store for us in his next and most outlandish endeavor yet.  Stay tuned as we explore this Cabinet of Curiosities in anticipation of its Grand Opening in Seattle 2012.