bioephemera | August 6, 2008Leave the Shame Behind
oil on linen over panel
Chris Peters, 2007
Following up on my previous post, Chris Peters' memento mori-flavored show, "The End and After," opens this Saturday at Copro/Nason Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.
The Lovers
oil on linen over panel
Chris Peters, 2007
Peters follows in the tradition of Renaissance anatomical illustrators, who portrayed the human skeleton in lifelike, even emotional poses, laden with symbolism. For hundreds of years after Vesalius, skeletons and "muscle men" continued to be drawn in attitudes of contemplation, regret, and even prayer, with results…
bioephemera | August 4, 2008
Hans Baldung Grien, Death and the Maiden, 1518-20
Via Morbid Anatomy, I discovered that artist Saul Chernock has written an interesting mini-essay on historical portrayals of "the Undead, images of beings that hover between the realms of life and death."
Daniel Hopfer, Death and the Devil Surprising Two Women, circa 1500-10
Many of the woodcuts, engravings, and paintings he collected for this post juxtapose death and sex in ways that, according to Chernock, "provide an interesting counterpoint to the contemporary Zombie whose appetites have essentially been neutered. I suppose we should…
bioephemera | August 4, 2008
Skeletal street art, via Street Anatomy
Here's a gem from the Belmont Citizen-Herald, via the July 21, 2008 New Yorker:
"A Creely Road resident reported someone wrote an anatomically correct term on his fence in spray paint."
Yikes!
Now, i'm not saying that fences are the best place to practice one's anatomical vocabulary. Especially when the fence does not belong to you. But I wonder if the term on the fence really was anatomically correct? Because I don't see a lot of clinical graffiti, myself.
I presume that in this case, "anatomically correct" is just a euphemism for "obscene," and…
bioephemera | July 31, 2008
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before this turtle is acclaimed as a "hero":
A box turtle, outfitted with GPS, was being tracked by the National Park Service for research purposes. On July 14th, the turtle, located in Rock Creek Park, was found in a marijuana field just south of the Maryland line.
U.S. Park Police set up surveillance and discovered a suspect caring for the plants. The suspect, identified as 19-year-old Isiah Johnson of Chevy Chase, Maryland has been arrested.
bioephemera | July 31, 2008On Tuesday, The Kaiser Family Foundation hosted a panel on "The Health Blogosphere: What it Means for Policy Debates and Journalism," starting with a twenty-minute keynote from HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt (yes, he has a blog). The webcast is here.
My favorite quote, from Tom Rosenstiel at the Project for Excellence in Journalism:
Blogs are like muffins. They range from everything from bran to chocolate cake. They're more of a shape than they are defining a particular type of content, and I think that the point that they put you in the conversation, and tonally there's a similarity, and…
bioephemera | July 30, 2008Following up on last month's buzz about the Internet killing literacy, this NYT article baldly states,
Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author's vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.
Yes, internet reading is nonlinear. Yes, it may be tied to some disturbing trends in youth literacy (the article cites the same National Endowment for the Arts data and Atlantic…
bioephemera | July 30, 2008Between meaning and material (h.H.R.)
Watercolor, gouache, graphite and marker on Arches paper
32 x 32 inches
Christopher Reiger, 2007
My friend Christopher Reiger is appearing in several group shows this summer, so I thought it was a good time to spotlight his work. Above is one of my favorite pieces, between meaning and material (h.H.R.).
I actually got to know Christopher online through his writing - he maintains a blog, Hungry Hyaena. He's written a number of provocative essays on the changing relationship between humans and nature, drawing on his extensive personal experience as an…
bioephemera | July 29, 2008This morning, Hasbro finally intimidated Facebook and Scrabulous into suspending the popular word game app. I love Scrabulous, and I'm mad as heck - not least because in my current game, I'd scored a whopping three Bingos (words in which you use all 7 letters) and was routing the usually dominant competition (my staffer).
Scrabulous is an online pseudo-Scrabble - a godsend for those of us who can't meet to play real games in meatspace, but can squeeze in a word here and there over the course of the week. But Hasbro, the company which has the rights to most of your typical-American-childhood…
bioephemera | July 28, 2008Photo by Kevin Ambrose
Apparently dozens of DC ducks are dying, right in front of traumatized tourists:
National Mall visitors watched park police wade through the water collecting more than 20 lifeless birds Saturday afternoon. The latest incident comes just two weeks after 17 other ducks mysteriously died at the reflecting pool. The Environmental Protection Agency and FBI (web) agents have tested the water and the air around the pool, but so far there is no word on what's causing the ducks to die.
The National Park Service says the deaths are a natural event that is triggered by wildlife…
bioephemera | July 26, 200894%DRUNKARD
This seems like a good thing to post on Saturday morning! Apparently I've more than made up for my sober college days. (Seriously - I learned everything on that quiz in the last 10 months. Whee!)
via Grrlscientist.
bioephemera | July 25, 2008
Silent Dredge, 2008
Tiffany Bozic
Currently showing at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery: "A Complicated Dominion: Nature and New Political Narratives," featuring the work of Tiffany Bozic, among others:
Our dominion is complicated and comes with profound responsibility. Humankind has become adept at leveraging natural resources and scientific advances to not only ensure our survival, but also to support and spread various political agendas. Along the road we have developed life-enhancing technologies and become more widely informed about the necessity of our participation in…
bioephemera | July 24, 2008For those of you frustrated with the "Top 100" book meme in my previous post, here's a post summarizing six alternate "Top 100" lists. You may find one you're happier with! Or at least, one lacking The Da Vinci Code. Hallelujah!
bioephemera | July 24, 2008Woo hoo! I've been tagged with a book meme!
The rules: boldface the books on this list that you've read, and italicize books you started but never finished.
Okay. . .
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte~
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee~
6 The Bible - I think I've read over 75% of this, so I'm going with it. The begats don't count.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte~8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens~…
bioephemera | July 23, 2008
I'd never bowdlerize any author's work, but wordlerizing is a lot of fun. Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle is an easy way to create pretty frequency-based word clouds from plain text.
I entered the text of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and this is what I got. No surprise, "species" is the dominant word. But I like the appearance of "will" as a dominant word as well, suggesting the inexorable drive of evolution. . .
I also Wordlerized Watson and Crick's seminal Nature paper, "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", and got this pretty vertical column:
In…
bioephemera | July 23, 2008Today FAS put up an online public archive of documents produced by the Office of Technology Assessment.
As you may know, the OTA was a legislative office authorized in 1972 to produce comprehensive nonpartisan reports for Congress on a variety of scientific topics. It was defunded and closed in 1995, and the bulky paper reports it produced have been rather hard to find. Although these reports no longer represent the state of the science, they are remarkable, often prescient time capsules - a fascinating look at how teams of experts tried to predict the trajectory of new technologies we now…
bioephemera | July 22, 2008Can anyone out there fill me in on what happened to the Athanasius Kircher Society website? It went down, then promised to be back up, and now seems permananently down . . . which is a tragedy, because it was one of the best wonderkammers on the web.
bioephemera | July 22, 2008
Eppendorf's new ad campaign features this inexcusable yet mesmerizingly cheesy boy-band ode to something called "epMotion." Even though they are individually reminiscent of various best-forgotten members of N'Sync and Color Me Badd, the crooners satisfy the needs of a lab-coated blonde graduate student with too many 96-well plates. Girl, it's time to automate!
(Ringtones, mp3s, and screenshots available on demand. . . )
bioephemera | July 22, 2008
This octopus has 96 arms. That's just not right!
See PinkTentacle for more on this bizarre critter, and another 85-armed specimen. Euw! via Ectoplasmosis and lots of places.
bioephemera | July 21, 2008
Vintage public health posters like this one are remarkable not only for their skilled design, but also for the varied ways they remain remarkably timely or seem bizarrely dated.
For example, compare the playful-yet-kinda-creepy "keep your teeth clean" poster above, as opposed to the very different meaning of "clean" in the anti-VD poster below. I think alarmist STD posters like this one and its contemporaries would have some difficulty getting approved today.
The National Library of Medicine has many more vintage posters here - or visit this Newsweek gallery for a quick tour.
bioephemera | July 18, 2008If you think that one inanimate shark is as good as another, your understanding of the art market is, as they say, dead in the water. Mr. Saunders's piece just didn't have the same quality or cache. (Although Mr. Saunders did claim his shark was more handsome.) Most important, it's not just about the work of art; rather, the value placed on a particular work derives from how it feels to own that art. Most art dealers know that art buying is all about what tier of buyers you aspire to join.
From The New York Sun's amusing review of Don Thompson's upcoming book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark:…