It’s a relief to be visiting a museum again. None of this indie side-of-the-road stuff. None of this interactive bullshit. Let me learn about a thing as though it’s safely in the past. Let me be a little bored as I attempt to recoup the cost of entry. Let me be alone in a place where it feels okay to be alone.
‘The Bakersville Museum of Busking’ is in the middle of nowhere, not far at all from the center of the nation itself and therefore a ways from any place one might find a busker on the job. Winter is not kind to the lifestyle, nor are the long miles of forested highway. It seems reasonable to agree with Shitholes, then, when it says that ‘The Bakersville Museum of Busking’ is meant to provide a pure education on the subject for an audience that may be entirely uninitiated. It lacks the intent with which a beach town may host lazy exhibitions meant to press sight-seers onward, to more expensive offerings- the way a city zoo may have a collection of farm animals.
I’m startled by a man slumped over near the entrance, a sign on cardboard offering marvels for change. He is a statue, dusted over. A bad example to start, I think.
‘Why not? That seems to be the guiding question of those who serve the Wayside. Why not a plexiglass cowboy? Why not a dinosaur made of cow pies? Why not a library of motel bibles?
Why not a museum for busking?
For an answer, it’s necessary to remember a time before the internet, before streaming video- a time when ‘The Bakersville Museum of Busking’ provided the vicarious living that social media monopolizes now. ‘The Museum’ reached the height of its popularity in the late-nineties as new episodes of ‘Friends’ romanticized New York. Bored teens would visit the museum for a taste of city life and, finding it lackluster, would create personas and act out complex domestic scenarios of their own creation, relying on the exhibitions for their backdrop. By 2000 the community had manifested LARPing in a form that was somehow more tedious and dull than the original- a game so forcibly mundane that local news channels mistook it for satire.
The owners of ‘The Bakersville Museum of Busking’ are on record as failing to really understand the fad but operating intelligently enough to take advantage of it. ‘The Museum’ extended hours into the evening, offered coffees and microwaved casseroles, and provided expensive annual passes for the truly dedicated. A few members of the game would graduate to community theater but few breached Hollywood. More often than not, they had become experts in a single character rather and not in acting as an overall discipline.
September 11th marked the sudden end of this community. Attempts to respectfully incorporate the attack left a bad taste in the mouths of participants and audiences alike. Ignoring the attack pressed the parallel New York further and further into the realm of fiction. The owners attempted to re-brand some of the sets as representative of California but interest waned before ‘The OC’s’ 2003 premiere. By mid-2002, ‘The Bakersville Museum of Busking’ had returned to a state of perpetual vacancy.
Annual passes are still available to those who while away time in the corn belt but the heydays have gone and left, in their place, a dusty city as it stood before the new millennium. Go for the bathroom break and stay for the eerie nostalgia.’
True of most places, I don’t mention the hairless creature I lead about on a leash and the man at the front desk doesn’t ask. It’s a simple arrangement between people who want nothing to do with each other. Hector is happy to be warm without a sweater in the long halls of ‘The Museum,’ happy to sniff at the feet of waxy street magicians and bucket-drummers. A small corner has been devoted to the fleeting imaginary New York that once played out in the building. Strange to think that such a place could come and go from nothing. The connected world has inflated my sense of what’s permanent but some things do die, don’t they? Some things move past memory and research.
I worry a great deal about the end to all this, to this trip. It never seems to get any closer. I feel no real comfort in thinking about what life on the other side will be like. What settling down will mean.
It’s quiet in ‘The Museum,’ and peaceful until someone coughs in the hall of living statues. The instinctual fear of eyes on my back, late as it may be, will not let me rest there any longer. Hector and I press ourselves into sweaters once more and flee toward a warmer autumn in the west.
-traveler
