Poem: The body elastic

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The body elastic

On a day too hot to walk the asphalt
of the outdoor city, we maneuver
through the cool black of museum rooms
where human cadavers — preserved
in polymer — stretch and bend in elegant
leanness, all musculature and bone.

As I examine a half-skinned woman
kneeling on one knee, her other leg bent
and poised forward, toes pointed,
I touch the wave of my clavicle involuntarily.

Her breasts thrust ahead — full, nippled,
intact, sheathing her torso like a vest,
while the rest of her is naked muscle,
ligament, ribcage, spine, and behind

her sacrum the phalanges — still
fingernailed — trickling breezily from her
backward-flowing arms, curved
like the winged Nike of Samothrace.

The pointing finger of my splayed hand
supports the jugular notch of my sternum
while I lean toward the pink beltstrap
muscles of her neck. Her head arcs back,
eyes watching into stars to join the far-flung
head of her petrified sister, the Victory.

After the exhibit we emerge from the
museum’s stone passage into a sea of heat.
Trees stand masted and green against the blue
sky, and behind them the towering skyline
of man’s intransigence, where we are attracted
irresistibly, on the tide of our humanness.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

The exhibit we saw was "Body Worlds" by Gunther von Hagens at the Museum of Science and Industry. It was a transforming experience, to see bodies at various stages of aging, and organs in states of disease and health. Please go if it comes near you. The Kneeling Woman can be found here. This page shows where Body Worlds exhibits are and will be.

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Most Provocative X-Rays Pinup Calendar

“Miss September” wears stiletto heels as she strikes a pose for the Eizo X-ray pinup calendar.

It seems there is always someone thinking up new ways to shock us. This year’s pin-up calendar features X-rayed not X-rated girls. Yes, you heard me right. Bizarre but true. This 2010 pin-up calendar is the weird brain child of a German advertising agency called Butter. The idea was to promote Eizo’s high-precision displays for medical imaging so they used X-rays to shoot the pin-up models.
The Butter Agency declares that “pin-ups are more often found in auto garages rather than in medical offices.” I’ll say. “Eizo breaks this taboo,” Butter boasts. “This pinup calendar shows absolutely every detail.”

Their ad promotion made quite a splash on the Coloribus ad archive recently. Ever since these bizarre pin-up photos have been making their rounds on the Internet like the bizarre version of a Playboy centerfold.
Apparently, this calendar is a promotion only kind of thing and is not available as an actual calendar though certainly plenty of guys have tried to procure one. When several emailed the company: “Sorry, you can’t get it here. However, we appreciate the impact it has had on Eizo’s U.S. brand recognition,” the company wrote back.
What’s next? First we have skeletal thin fashion models because of eating disorders and the beauty world’s pressure to be too thin. Now we are gonna X-ray them too for display as pin-ups?

Miss January

Miss February

Miss March

 Miss April

Miss May

 Miss June

 Miss July

 

Miss August

 Miss Sepetember

 Miss October

 Miss November

 Miss Decemeber

Strange Mummies

Inca Mummies Unexpectedly Lived with the Living

Famous Places in the reflection of bubbles

 

Beautiful view of famous places in the eye of reflection.

Creative Minds and Great Art

 Amazing and funny art of tinny people.

friendship in a mobius strip

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The best most amazingly wonderful boss I ever had was a mathematics professor named Ed. Once he tore off a strip of paper, twisted it and then joined the ends to show me what a mobius (or moebius, or moëbius) strip is. In case you don't know, as I didn't, it's a surface with only one side. That's right, if you run your finger along any surface, you'll see that there is only one. It is one of those deliciously annoying impossibilities that tells me I can't be a scientist. I just can't get my head around it, and that bothers me. If I couldn't get my head around it and it didn't bother me, I might be scientist material. (You scientists are going to correct me now.) A mobius strip is also a non-orientable surface. If you want to understand that physical concept, try this. "Orientability is a mathematical property of surfaces in Euclidian space measuring whether or not it is possible to make a consistent choice of surface normal vector at every point dot dot dot"



Whatever. So this is a mobius strip bangle.

I have this friend, a person in authority and power. This is her bracelet, which I admired on her wrist. One day many months later, she publicly scolded me very vehemently over something I thought trivial, and I didn't deserve it. After that I had to seriously consider whether I wanted her to remain in my life as a friend. It took several days and a mini vision quest of sorts to really search out my heart about her and what had happened. I decided I did want her in my life, in spite of her sometimes abrasive ways. There are many things I love about her and our relationship, so I talked with her about it, we patched things up better than before, and a few months later she came for a gathering at my house on my birthday. She handed me a gift box, and when I opened it there was the bracelet. The significance of its twisting and single surface touched me as a symbol of our friendship, one that was pliable enough to go on after a rift that almost tore us apart.

I love it so much that if a fire broke out I would grab it with the photo albums, camera and the external hard drive with all my photographs - after making sure Don is out ok.



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