School at Dume Point

The Aquarium at Long Beach makes for the perfect rendezvous with Flo's childhood friend Helene and her mathematician boyfriend Martial. Helene is a Long Beach local. Martial is over from Paris, where he teaches theoretical maths (I've always admired people who can reason on different plane, the theoretical rather than applied mathematicians out there). Flo and I know a thing or two about long-distance relationships, but still, Paris-LA is quite a commute. Lucky coincidence that they're both in LA while we're there ourselves. 

For Jas and Iris, it's another fine day at school, becoming acquainted with the sea life of the Pacific, stroking the amazing skins of sharks and manta rays ("for real..!"), making recordings of their own whale sounds, watching the feeding of the eels (the diver reminds me of the statue of Laocoon and his sons in the Vatican, all entangled with snakes) and witnessing in 3D the effects of rising sea levels on the world's coastal communities.

Playing tag with the sea lions

Later we do a field trip to see the tidal pools by cliffs of Dume Point. I love this about the cities of California. Nature comes right up to your doorstep. Sometimes it even lets itself in. 

Jas catches a starfish while we watch the seagulls catch crabs and mussels to smash on the rocks. There's evidence that one of them got taken down by a large dog, judging from the tracks in the sand. These lessons come alive along this beach: CSI Los Angeles.

School in LA also takes in the Olympian heights of the Getty, perched atop LA like a pantheon, looking like a small city with its own train and restaurants (or, less charitably, like a giant hospital complex, as Flo puts it). 

The Getty wears it's high culture heart on its sleeve. It's especially conspicuous here on teh West Coast, which is so new world against the Old Masters on display. It's a glorious collection. But like Getty's "Roman" villa, it all seems so C20th. Exactly what you might expect I suppose from a tycoon who was a protagonist of the American Century, competing with the East Coast institutions and other magnates to outdo each other on amassing the greatest cultural capital. 

If not for the LA cityscape below, I might be in the modern wings of the Louvre or the National Gallery, the Met or even MoMA in NYC. All of them wonderful, but still cleaving to a dated sense of mission. If you want a good sense of what's happening now, or a well curated sense of the past, seek out private collections and smaller establishments like Maison Particuliere in Brussels or Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. Here you will find startling juxtapositions and contrasts. And I don't mean in separate wings.

Amazing setting for the Getty, though. As we leave, I find myself wondering, again, what are museums for? Maybe they're the secular churches of our age, providing religion for atheists. They are certainly good for schooling, and can be terrific fun. 

Especially when the Kids Room is as playful and theatrical as the Getty's. Jas and Iris illustrate a larger than life illuminated manuscript, luxuriate in a make-believe Louis XV canopy bed. But then we dash off to find cultural artefacts like you can't find in London, Paris or New York, laid out like a gallery along PCH, Hollywood Boulevard, Rodeo Drive.

Sonogram of the song of the grey whale... and of Iris!

Living in an illuminated manuscript