Grammy Museum

We bridge widely varying worlds in today’s Special Collections.  First, we visit the amazing Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, California, a museum that deals with the fame and big money of today’s popular music.  Everybody knows the televised spectacle that is the Grammy Awards: high fashion, hip-hop performances, Taylor Swift and Beyonce belting out their ballads.  It’s only a week or two before the Super Bowl and shares much of the hoopla and hype.  The Grammy Museum covers the awards ceremony but does much more as well.  It also displays recording technology, teaches visitors about country music’s roots, and gives kids a hands-on experience making and mixing their own karaoke hits. For all things having to do with today’s modern music, the Grammy Museum will teach you all you ever wanted to listen to and know. Website: www.grammymuseum.org

The Telephone Museum

Our second segment is worlds away from the glamour and glitz of L.A. pop music.  The Telephone Museum is located in a beautiful barn in rural Maine, deals with aspects of phone technology that have mostly faded away, and incorporates a kind of sentimental but highly informed affection for the landlines of about 30 years ago.  Though today’s cellphones involve satellites in space, the landlines of a few decades back were also incredibly complex in their own way.  Switching boxes, intricate routers, fiber cables, actual phonebooks— all were part of a widespread communications system as amazing and complicated as anything we have today.  The Telephone Museum tells the story of all the crucial, fascinating innovations that went into all the talk, talk, talk that connected the world a few years back. Website: www.thetelephonemuseum.org