VALLEY WEEKEND : CULTURE COMES TO SUBURBIA

The suburb where I grew up had no cultural institutions--not even a library or a movie theater. But it had something almost as good, a train that a child could safely and affordably ride into the heart of Philadelphia.

The City of Brotherly Love was (and is) full of marvelous museums. One of my two favorites was the Franklin Institute, devoted to science and featuring a glowing, beating heart as big as a Buick that you could walk through.

The other was the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That’s the one that looks like the Parthenon--the one whose steps Rocky Balboa runs up as he trains for the big fight in Sylvester Stallone’s Joe Palooka-as-Cinderella movie.

I, too, would run up the museum’s steps and head for the favorite painting of my grade-school days. Later, I would learn to love the quiet genius of Thomas Eakins, who painted turn-of-the-century skullers dipping their oars into the very Schuylkill River that flowed behind the museum.

But at 10 I craved something stronger. I headed straight for Peter Paul Rubens’ Baroque masterpiece, “Prometheus Bound.” There I stood transfixed, as a giant raptor tore the liver from the helpless, writhing Titan, punished for all eternity for stealing fire from the gods to benefit humankind.

What was not to love about “Prometheus Bound,” especially for a 10-year-old? It was as big as a movie screen, and as subtle as a car wreck or a DC comic. Indeed, a few years ago, when I took my 10-year-old niece to see the painting I admired most at her age, she was clearly impressed. She stood mesmerized, just as I had been the first time I turned a corner and was stunned by the painting’s gaudy power. Finally, she spoke. “Aunt Patty,” she said approvingly, “that’s really gross.”

Museums taught me early that the world is very rich. They helped make me hungry. They are a vital part of the cultural life of any region, and we in the Valley don’t have enough of them. Recently we lost one. The satellite of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Burbank’s Media City Center officially closed its doors Dec. 31.

A museum-in-a-mall was a brilliant idea, and, for too brief a time, the small facility allowed people, including the short people called children, to take a break from shopping and to think about whales and their relatives, the strange beasts that got stuck in the La Brea tar pits and other matters more nourishing for the soul than the price of sneakers.

Who knows how many children went through that museum and thought, in whatever language they speak in their heads: “Narwhals are neat. I’m going to learn everything I can about them, and some day I’ll be a marine biologist.” The closing of the museum, as modest as it was, means one less place to dream the dreams that transform lives, especially for children whose homes are not full of books, computers and other reminders that the world is full of options. It is a loss for all of us.

There is, however, some good news on the local museum front. On April 21, the Skirball Cultural Center in Sepulveda Pass will open to the public. Affiliated with Hebrew Union College, the center “is not a Holocaust museum,” staffer Jerod Gunsberg explains. “It’s a celebration of the Jewish American experience.”

The first such museum in the country, the Skirball is technically a Westside institution, but no one will have readier access to it than Valley residents. Multimedia and interactive exhibits on everything from the cycles of Jewish-American life to the accomplishments of American Jews since World War II will form its core.

There will also be a research center, lectures, arts programs, even a kosher restaurant. The eatery will be dairy, but innovative, Gunsberg promises: “Not lox and bagels. Grilled ahi with couscous, things like that.”

The new $733-million Getty Center, with its decentralized galleries, spectacular gardens and unrivaled resources, will open in fall 1997. Already dominating a hillside off the San Diego Freeway, just south of the Valley, it may indeed become our Louvre, our Prado, the world-class museum Los Angeles has not yet had.

Meanwhile, what we in the Valley do already have is the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Griffith Park, and I, for one, am grateful. The West is an idea so complex and so central to our culture that a dozen museums couldn’t do it justice.

But the Autry keeps trying, intelligently illuminating more and more of a West wild and wide enough to include everything from the lore of the Mexican vaquero to the emergence of a contemporary body of cowboy and cowgirl poetry.

1995 was an important year for the Autry. It marked the opening of its research center, with a special emphasis on the West of the imagination--the one we know from pulp fiction, movies and advertising. The Autry originated two groundbreaking shows in 1995--one on the West of Walt Disney, the other the current show on women painters of the West, curated by Patricia Trenton (through Jan. 28).

The museum also took a quiet step toward correcting the misconception that it is a vanity collection of Gene Autry’s chaps and spurs when it changed its name from the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum to the Autry Museum of Western Heritage.

The new year at the Autry already looks promising. Most intriguing is a show scheduled to open May 25 called “Inventing Custer: Legends of the Little Bighorn” that will explore how the historic Custer and the battle he so dramatically lost came to be mythologized. It is the sort of thing that the Autry does best.

Traveling shows on baseball’s Pacific Coast League (opening Feb. 17) and Frederic Remington, a hateful and greatly gifted man (opening Sept. 14), are also of special interest.

Now if the Autry only had a gigantic painting of Prometheus with his liver being ripped out