pedestrian saga

Saturday I saw Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibit at the California Science Center, but I sure didn’t see it coming. I remember a few years back hearing about its controversial stint in Germany. Several news outlets reported on its recent arrival here, but they flew under my radar. Maybe I should start reading the Sunday paper, huh?

The exhibit features real human corpses that have been dissected and preserved through plastination. Because the bodies are dynamically posed and creatively sculpted, the result is a fascinating hybrid of anatomical science and art. Instructive in the "this-is-your-lung-and-this-is-your-lung-on-cigarettes" kind of way. Yet provoking emotion and opinion and contemplation as art will do. To help along my meditation on what it means to be alive and to die, banners throughout the gallery proclaimed the ideas of illustrious philosophers.

It’s also an amusing social experiment. Put a diverse bunch of mortal humans in a room with wildly souped-up dead bodies stripped to various degrees of subcutaneous nudity, and see what happens! Watch their reactions and interactions. Eavesdrop on their nervous remarks when they’re confronted with such taboo flesh. Too much fun – I think I’ll have to go back for a second round.

I remember: a family densely weaved of nothing but glo-red veins; a man running, his muscles flapping madly in the wind; a soccer goalie catching the ball in one hand and all of his major internal organs in the other; the strong, thick uterine walls of the beautiful pregnant model; lots of male sex organs dangling below pelves, and the external female sex organs, detached, lying passively beneath a glass case. I remember the nerves were like twine, and peering through the void before the Achilles tendon gave me a bit of vertigo. I now visualize more clearly my own intestinal tract in continued efforts to digest food normally.

Thanks to Steve for making it happen with his simple request to visit the Science Center. I was happy to see the place busier than ever before, and with many renovations completed since I worked there a couple years ago.

There is a song that never fails to lift me up from whatever degree of the doldrums I happen to find myself in = "Like Humans Do" by David Byrne. Its happy beat and exquisite poetry instantly have me embracing – even celebrating – my own mediocrity. One shiver and suddenly I’m overpowered by the urge to don a giant pink fuzzy suit – I bust out in a dorky dance; I belt out the words with tone-deaf abandon! There is simple wisdom within – just keep breathing, "wiggle while you work (anybody can!)" – all perfectly packaged. Inevitably it leaves me in a better mental state than the one in which it found me. So Look into the Eyeball, I say, (and maybe try reversing the song order to hear this one after the considerably less gleeful [but beautiful in its own way] "Broken Things") – and tell me, how do you feel now?

Commercial radio makes me want to pull over to the shoulder of the road, get out of the car and bang my head on some pavement. For a while, NPR and the locally-produced programming on KCRW were a balm, helping me cope with all the discomforts of driving. All good things are only good in moderation, I guess, because lately with the excessive driving at all hours of the day I’ve started imagining Morning Becomes Eclectic’s Nic Harcourt to be an arrogant bastard and I’ve begun to hear the same damn news story over (Morning Edition) and over (top-of-the-hour news break) and over again (Marketplace or Day to Day version). And the rhythms of the sponsorship and station identification scripts have become way too familiar…

When I heard that Sandra Tsing Loh’s Loh Life show was canceled in the wake of an obscenity scandal, I puffed up all indignant and grumbled about those KCRW bosses – they think they’re so big and important but they’re just chicken! The Loh Life was consistently beautiful radio – it was driveway listening, so engrossing that I’d kill the car but stay sitting there in the driveway to hear it through to the end. Now I read this moving lament for Bob Edwards of NPR’s Morning Edition. Although I don’t personally feel such attachment to any of the NPR news hosts, that report has only managed to fuel my public radio backlash. Not very logical my grumpiness…I’m sure it’s all my car’s fault.

For Valentine’s Day, I was treated to a performance of Puccini’s opera La Boheme, all dolled up by Baz Luhrmann a la Moulin Rouge. It was Friday the 13th, and I went down to Bob’s museum in the afternoon to peek at the interesting Noguchi ceramics exhibit. He met me after work and we had a lovely dinner under the heat lamps at the restaurant on the Music Center plaza before heading into the Ahmanson theatre.

I’m afraid my review of the show will be rather superficial – I claim to be no connoisseur of opera or theatre. The singing sure was pretty and Baz’s stage colors were, well, sparkly and bright. There seemed to be a bit of a disconnect between the adaptation and the source material – the translation, for example, of the 19th century Italian into 1950s hipster speak for the supertitles was a bit exaggerated, but then again this is operatic melodrama and Baz Luhrmann were talking about. Overall, a good time!