And so we return and begin again.
Oh, there’s a lot to go through, like the creepy coolth of dessicated, plastinated corpses when arranged with surgical precision by a gentle German huckster, and what it’s like to crack an egg into a bubbling hot pot of soon tofu, and then there was the Con, but I want to just take a moment here and now to register my disbelief at something we saw on the drive back from San Diego to LA, and it wasn’t the $2.25 a gallon we were paying for regular unleaded. I get out of the car to stretch my legs and what I hear is somebody telling me to call now, because operators are standing by. It was the gas pump. There was a little screen on the gas pump over the screen you use when you’re paying for gas with a credit card. It was a television screen. It was playing commercials to a steady stream of momentarily captive audiences.
And then came the Fox News update.
We have no shame. None whatsoever.
Huckster? Huhwha? I love that guy, I can't wait to see the exhibit. The process he's developed makes for vastly superior teaching resources in anatomy, and the Koerperwelten exhibit is a brilliant way to reach a public that might never otherwise see what wonderful machines we are.
Uh, that sounds combative, which I didn't mean. After all, I haven't seen the exhibit. But now I'm on tenterhooks waiting to hear what you saw and what you thought of it.
FOXNews and a gas pump. Sounds about right to me.
By the way, satire is dead. In fact, it's gettin' kinda gamey, p-u.
*grin* Welcome to "America's Finest City!"
Oh, heck, sennoma, you have to get a lot more combative before my goat's got. —The exhibit was astoundingly cool, but. The flesh and muscles had enough of a dessicated, plastic—plastinated!—appearance that they didn't read as "bodies," and that left me musing about the ubiquity of wetness and slime coating and covering and sloughing off horror-movie monster-Others. But there were enough variations in skeletons and facial expressions (!) and body types and postures to remind you that each one of these exhibits had at one time been a walking, talking, living, breathing person; the one that had been sliced vertically into about five thick sections had tattoos on his arms, which raised my hair no end.
But those poses raised the dread specter of showmanship and hucksterism, if gently. Sometimes it was pointed, like the lung-blackened smoker with a cigarette jauntily pinched between a couple of upraised fingers; sometimes it was just plain off, like the white fedora on the man whose muscles had been clipped and spread out from his body like hundreds of beef-jerky wings. Sometimes it was just distressing: the pregnant woman, reclining like some odalisque, which was just wrong. But—showmanship in the cause of education is nothing to be mocked or sneered at. What biology needs right now is a Carl Sagan or a Richard Feynman: somebody to light up the science with wonder and delight, and make all the ill fraidycrats look as dull and witless and boring as they really are. Herr Doktor Gunther von Hagens ain't in that league, not by a long shot, but that doesn't mean the exhibit isn't worthwhile: the hand, stripped of everything but its blood vessels and floating in a lucite box; the peeled man, carrying his skin in one arm, posed near the famous Rennaissance-era woodcut that was his inspiration; the basketball player; the giant, his skin and muscles and ligaments stretched to twice their length, his bones floating; the running man; the blood-vessel family—any one of those is worth the price of admission.
And I could just be crankier than usual because they misquoted Hamlet, and cited him as an English poet. That might not even be Herr Doktor's fault.
Kip, I went to see Body World when it came to Singapore back in January. I posted about it here. But then a week later the Straits Times had an article about how the bodies of many of the exhibitees were those of executed Chinese prisoners, which somehow von Hagen negotiated to obtain. Belle had a little post about it here, but the link to the S-T article has expired. It rather changes the mood of the piece when you find out that the standards of consent for donating your body to art might be rather low.