HeLa Cells

Ok so I just learned about the coolest thing the other day. It’s been in the news a lot lately so maybe some of you have heard about it. They are HeLa cells. Ok, so there was this African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks who went to John Hopkins in 1951 because she had cervical cancer. She died soon after, but while she was there, the doctor took some cells from her tumor, without her knowledge or permission, cause that is what people did those days. Anyways these cells, for some reason, don’t die, so they’ve been replicated and used in so many scientific tests and discoveries it’s ridiculous. Cells from this woman helped develop the polio vaccine. They went into space. They’ve been used for research in gene mapping, cloning, and in vitro fertilization. These cells are still around. You can buy them online. Anyways there’s this great video about it you should be able to watch here
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6320043n&tag=morephotovideo

It was on CBS Sunday morning, one of my favorite shows. Anyways, they talk to Henrietta’s family, who have never been compensated or anything. In fact, one of her sons had bypass surgery, and doesn’t have health care, and now is in tons of debt.
There is also a new book out about it. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. There’s an interview with the author of the book at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html

Anyways I just think it’s a really fascinating story.

Body Parts as Art

I believe we saw some of these images in the Mutter museum, but I just wanted to look at them a little closer. The “Artist” is Frederik Ruysch who was a Dutch anatomist and botanist in the 17oos. Yes, these are drawings of actual dioramas made from real fetal skeletons and an assortment of other body parts. Pretty crazy if you ask me.

Woody Allen

So I’ve been watching a bunch of Woody Allen movies lately, and every one I see I feel like I could talk about for this class, because they are often disturbing or bizarre at parts. However, I’m going to go with one released in 1972: “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask." If you haven’t seen it, it consists of series of short, unrelated segments each supposedly answering a question about sex, such as “Do aphrodisiacs work?” or “What is sodomy?” It was apparently inspired by a book by the same name written by a physician, David Rueben. The book was one of the first sex manuals, and, published in 1969, became a No. 1 bestseller in 51 countries. Rueben has since revised the book, saying he’s had to change 96% of his original information. There is an interesting article about this at http://www.cnn.com/books/news/9902/11/sex/

Anyways back to the movie, which was ridiculous, taboo, and sometimes struck me as outright offensive. Here are some key moments.

Giant attacking breast, from “Are the Findings of Doctors and Clinics Who Do Sexual Research and Experiments Accurate?”

Man/animal love. This is from the segment “What is Sodomy.” This section makes me wildly uncomfortable.

That’s Woody Allen dressed up as a sperm, from “What happens during ejaculation.”

Anyways if you haven’t seen it I encourage it. Let me know what you think.

Gallows Humor, but not really

I've been wanting to do something music related. I just learned about this really cool Ravel piece called Gaspard de La Nuit. It is a piano piece in three movements each based on a poem by French poet Aloysius Betrand. It's the middle movement Le Gibet (The Gallows) the particularly interests me. Here is the poem on which the music is based.

Le Gibet (The Gallows)

Ah! Could what I hear be the yelping of the cold night wind, or the hanged man giving forth a sigh

on the gallows fork.

Could it be some cricket singing, crouched in the moss and the sterile ivy that the forest wears out of

pity?

Could it be some fly on the hunt, blowing its horn around those ears deaf to the fanfare of tally-hos?

Could it be some beetle plucking, in its uneven flight a bloody hair from its bald skull?

Or could it be some spider embroidering a half yard of muslin as a tie for that strangled neck?

It is the bell tolling to the walls of a city under the horizon, and the carcass of a hanged man

reddened by the setting sun.

The piece is just so eerie. One of the most interesting parts is a repeated figure throughout the whole piece that sounds like a bell tolling, or maybe the hanged man swaying, if you want to look at it that way. Take a listen.

Anatomy Rocks

The Mütter Museum had some images that I've seen before, when I took a class that discussed early anatomy texts, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about that. One of the first anatomy textbooks was De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) by Andreas Vesalius, published in the mid 1500s. Here are some cool images from it.

This next one is a famous one I like quite a lot. The words on the podium things say "Genius lives forever. All else is mortal"

And here is Mr. Vesalius himself.

Rent-a-family

I've heard about this in a couple of different places. New companies are renting out family, that is strangers pretending to be family, to people in Japan, who for some reason or another don't get sufficient meaningful time with their own families. People can also rent bosses or colleagues, or people to boost attendance at their wedding. Apparently, business is booming. I find this both fascinating and creepy. The family unit is not what it used to be. Will such things spread to other parts of the world?

Here are a couple articles about it.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19920513&slug=1491524

http://www.ibtimes.co.in/articles/20090608/wedding-japan-recession.htm

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/53953,news-comment,news-politics,the-fear-behind-japan-flourishing-rent-a-friend-business-psychology

Unnatural life

Mummys are cool, but equally cool is the living dead. Seeing all these posts about death and the dead made me think about one of the most terrifying themes in literature, people giving inanimate things life. Frankenstein is obviously a good example. Another one that less people are familiar with is the story of the Golem, a legend that takes place in the 1600s. Basically the story is that the Rabbi of Prague, using mysticism, creates a Golem to protect the Jewish community from anti-semitism, but the Golem eventually gets out of control and has to be destroyed. There was an German silent film made about the legend in 1920 called Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How he came into the World). Here’s a picture from the film.

I dunno, whenever read these stories I can help thinking about our technological age, computers, robots, and how this fictional fear of unnatural life doesn’t actually seem quite so ridiculous. MIT is apparently working on personal robots with a human-like range of expressions. Is that creepy to anyone else?
-Lauren

Lady Gaga

I'm not sure I really like Lady Gaga, but I do find her a little bit fascinating. I think this video in particular is appropriate for discussions of the grotesque. First there's the opening music, reminiscent of a cheesy haunted house. Her costumes mix the sexual with the bizarre (note the lizard-lady getup in particular), as do her dance moves. And finally, there's the priceless apocalyptic image with the skeleton at the end. This video is full of images of the grotesque, ugly, and otherworldly, yet is also feels like farce. It is hard to know what to make of it.
-Lauren

Ancient Texts

Hey All,
After, reflecting on some of the reading and just the class in general, I want to share something I learned in another class about the ways in which early bookmakers and scribes creatively produced versions of the most famous book of all time: the Bible. These images speak more to the layout of the page rather than the structure of the book itself, and they may be a bit small here, but I hope you'll find them interesting. The first image is a page of a polyglot bible, which contains the same text written in 5 different languages. Next is a page of a mesorah, which is a biblical text surrounded by various interpretations and arranged just so to fit as much on the page as possible. On the bottom is another example of a creative biblical text. You might not be able to see, but the lines of the bizarre creatures are Hebrew letters. I find these images inspiring both visually and substantively.
-Lauren