I finally went to the Getty Villa
I'd lived in LA for nearly 11 years without ever visiting the Getty Villa. I finally managed to get my ass over there last week.
It was fun! I enjoyed it. I think I was surprised by how small the Villa is, but upon reflection, I shouldn't have been surprised at all. It is a weird house that a guy was hoarding art in. I should not have expected it to be as large or full or dense as the Getty proper is.
It's small enough that you could see the whole thing in one trip. Maybe that makes it a better trip!
Parking costs at the Villa are fully insane. If you want to go, please be prepared to spend a whole day there, because the parking costs $25 USD. The ticket to the Villa is free, but you are paying your admission by driving and parking there. There's a bus that lets out right across the street, so use that if you can - but it leaves from downtown Santa Monica, so you'll have to plan around that. I know that getting to Santa Monica is itself an extraordinary hassle for most Angelenos, whether by car or by rail/bus.
I was lucky enough to be there while they were running an outdoor exhibit about papyrus-making. I got to help hammer some papyrus stems flat, and then draw on some completed papyrus paper. It was interesting!
I was most interested by the fact that the Getty is apparently paying $1 USD for each small sheet of completed papyrus used in this educational workshop. Papyrus is so fucking expensive!! It's hard to make! If you wanted to make a papyrus scroll today, your biggest expense would probably be the paper itself!
Anyway... if I'm ever going to read another post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, I hope to see some realistic depiction of the production process behind the mission to preserve and interpret the secret knowledge of the fallen world. Give me a Fallout where people are hammering and pressing papyrus so that they can record Dril tweets.
I don't think I'll be back to the Villa anytime soon - I feel like I have seen the whole thing. Glad to have crossed another item off my Los Angeles passport, though!!
(I'd also like to remark that one of the reasons I still feel morally squeaky-clean going to the Getty is that they have now pretty much failed in their attempt to hijack the Sepulveda corridor transit project. It was deeply immoral and corrosive to the fabric of civic society for the Getty to back the monorail. I hope that whoever in that organization was involved in trying to discourage heavy rail - which was absolutely the only serious, high-capacity, good-service-experience option for the corridor - shits their pants once a day until they are hospitalized from overshitting. I really can't overstate enough how purely evil I think this kind of rich-guy behavior is. They're lucky they didn't succeed!!)