Museum of Interesting Things

In the words of Denny Daniel, the founder and curator of the Museum of Interesting Things, the museum "is a traveling interactive demonstration/exhibition of antiques and inventions inspiring innovation and creativity—learning from the past to create a better future." My mom and I recently took a "tour" of the museum via the New York Adventure Club.

I use the word tour loosely, however, since when it's not traveling, the museum is located in Daniel's East Village apartment. My mom and I have always loved interesting things (who doesn't?) and we spent a great many weekends perusing thrift stores and flea markets while I was growing up in Ohio. I think living in New York is preferable to Ohio in almost every way, with one exception being that the thrifting/flea situation here is dismal. It's not that there aren't treasures, but they're almost all laughably expensive. I used to run an online shop while I still lived in Ohio for second-hand gems, and part of my motivation to start selling my interesting finds was the fear that I'd end up like Daniel—with piles and piles and piles of stuff.

I shut down my shop when I moved to New York and sold all of my inventory before I left, but I still miss spending hours sorting through trash to find treasure. I will always identify with people like Daniel, and his enthusiasm for all of the objects he showed us was infectious. I love joyful, genuine people and Daniel was knowledgeable, talkative and infinitely curious. He has phonographs, cameras, stereoscopes, magic lanterns, camera obscuras, 8-tracks, record players, stacks of tvs, film reels and countless other collections, not all of which are currently housed in his apartment.

He has the Moviola film-editing machine that Tim Burton used to edit dailies of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, a Nickelodeon on which we watched A Trip to the Moon, a collection of World's Fair memorabilia, a piece of the Enigma code-breaker machine and is a self-proclaimed expert on carrier pigeons and organ grinder monkeys.

But the most interesting of all the interesting things was something he called "Bones and Ribs," a bootleg gramophone recording from Soviet-era Russia that was pressed onto x-ray film, in this case a skull x-ray. I pride myself on knowing a little about a lot of weird things, but this was something I might never knew existed if it hadn't been for Denny Daniel and his collection.