pop-culture for the people

Hello all, here it is, a brand new quarter.  I’m three weeks into my last quarter of my second year of vet school, so really I should have been writing this article a week or two ago.  Better late than never, I guess.  Winter quarter 2nd year is reportedly the worst quarter of the entire 4 years of vet school, so I’m really glad I have that behind me, and that I did not fail any classes.  I’ve started playing Polo too (real Polo, involving horses) and I’m real excited about that.  It’s a lot of fun!

In continuing the pathology theme of this year, some of the following might gross you out.  I’ll see if I can find some great pictures, so be forewarned.  I’m going to start with some vocabulary, so that ya’ll can appreciate this new language I’m learning.

Nocturia: increased frequency of urinating at night, there is also noctalbuminuria which is an excess of albumin in the urine secreted at night.

Sialolith: a salivary calculus

Ptyalism: excess secretion of saliva

Broiler chickens have been selected to reach market weight in 6 weeks.  This means that they go from cute adorable little chick to the roast chicken in the grocery store in a very short amount of time.  So what happens if you allowed a broiler to keep eating all it wants past six weeks?  It keeps growing until its legs can no longer support its own weight.  Pretty freaky eh?  So then if you want to keep your broiler comfortably alive longer than six weeks, for breeding for instance, or maybe vaccine research, you have to restrict feed intake.  Of course then you get into trouble with animal rights folks, cuz you’re restricting feed.  Hmmm, kinda a catch 22 huh?

I saw a radiograph of a cat that had been accidentally shot by a crossbow.  The arrow went from between the head and shoulder, through the thorax and abdomen and out near a hind leg.  It managed to not hit anything significant and the cat lived.  I have a feeling it lost a number of its 9 lives though.

Here comes the funky pathology section: Path facoid #1  A hernia is basically a hole where it shouldn’t be.  Ask Hollywood about his inguinal hernia sometime.  Anyway, animals (and people) can get diaphragmatic hernias in trauma and occasionally as a mistake during development.  If it’s severe, the small intestines and parts of the liver can poke through the hole in the diaphragm and enter the thoracic cavity and crowd the lungs.  I’m sure it’s very uncomfortable to breath.  Anyway, there is a type of developmental abnormality that is called a peritoneal-pericardial hernia where there is a defect where the pericardium (the sack around the heart) communicates with the abdominal cavity leading to intestines coiling around the heart but not around the lungs.  It looks very weird on radiograph, but unfortunately I have none to show you.

Path factoid #2  If sheep eat skunk cabbage during a narrow window of time during pregnancy, the lamb is a Cyclops.

Path factoid #3  Some abnormalities in development can lead to prolonged pregnancy.  There was a case where a cow carried a live calf for 17 months.  Cows normally carry their calves for 9 months, just like people, so imagine carrying a baby for twice as long as normal.  There are also developmental abnormalities that result in a fully formed sheep, but it lacks a head.  Even the ears form, but nothing beyond that.  It also happens in humans, and there are plenty of pictures on the web, but I will not reproduce them here.  Human medicine makes me queasy.

End of funky path section Everybody knows how you get Salmonella from eating raw eggs, right?  Well, it turns out that the chance of having Salmonella IN the egg itself (not on the outside) is about 1:300,000.  And when it does occur, there are usually less than 40 actual organisms in the egg.  Considering you have millions of individual bacteria in your mouth right now, that is a very small amount, and for a healthy person poses very little risk.  The problem comes when you let that raw egg sit at room temperature for a while, and then those 40 bacteria turn into 40,000.  Then you get food poisoning.  Anyway, my point is simply that undercooked chicken meat poses a bigger threat (a MUCH higher proportion of raw chicken meat is contaminated with Salmonella than raw eggs) than eating freshly made raw cookie dough, which I have been doing most of my life with no ill-effect (knock on wood).

So cook your meat, and eat your cookie dough fresh!

Oh, and in one case in SoCal where a larger than normal percentage of raw eggs in one particular farm were found to contain Salmonella (like 1:10), it turned out that their neighboring sewage treatment plant was failing to chorinate the sewage and was dumping Salmonella contaminated water into a local stream that ran by the chicken farm.  Which was then contaminating the eggs, and being fed to people.  Yummy!

That’s all for now, folks.  I’ll see ya in June!

-hathyr

Michael Chabon, genius writer of Wonder Boys and Pulitzer winner for The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,  responds to an article in the New York Times Book Review weakly condemning comic books and rock & roll on the same wobbly pretenses.
Read on, lovers of both:

In its issue of 14 August 2003, The New York Review of Books ran a review, by David Hajdu, of three graphic novels, one by Daniel Clowes and two by Joe Sacco.

David Hajdu is a smart man who wrote an acclaimed book about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and their circle in the folk-rock world of the early-to-mid sixties.

But as delighted and gratified as I was to find the wondrous Ghost World being (somewhat belatedly) reviewed in the august pages of TNYRoB, I felt that Hajdu’s consideration of comic books—not to mention that of rock and roll—left something to be desired.

I wrote a letter to the editors, expressing my dismay. It was never published, possibly because it was simply too long. But my outrage did seem to have the positive effect of bringing me to attention of the magazine’s editors. They asked me if I would be interested in reviewing books for them, which I have since undertaken with great pleasure to do.

Here is the letter itself:

To the editors:

David Hajdu’s enthusiasm for the work of Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes is understandable, and welcome—as is the NYR’s giving review-space to comic books. But Hajdu’s review is so mistaken, in its premises and in its particulars, that I feel I must risk ingratitude and complain.

For brevity’s sake, I will skip taking Hajdu to task for his shaky grasp of comic-book technique and terminology (“Ghost World… is drawn in black-and-white brush lines”), unsophisticated analysis of comics grammar (“All comic book panels are cinematic; they look like cleaned up and primped versions of the storyboards that directors use as guidelines for film production”) and debatable statements about history of comics (claiming, for example, that Joe Sacco’s attention to the backgrounds of his panels makes him an anomaly among “bylined” artists). Instead I will concentrate primarily on the controlling analogy of Hajdu’s review, namely, the lowbrow, high-testosterone blood-brother fraternity between comic books and rock and roll. In this false, or at best flawed, analogy are expressed all of Hajdu’s underlying biases and misguided assumptions.

“Comic books, the rock and roll of literature,” he begins, “have always been a disreputable form of junk art for adolescents of body or mind… Hyperenergetic, crude, sexually regressive and politically simplistic, comics, like rock (and, in recent years, hip hop) give fluent voice to their audience’s basest and most cynical impulses.”

But are comic books the rock and roll of literature?

If there is a kinship between the two forms, it lies not in any shared politics, simplistic or otherwise. Rock and roll politics have, on the whole, tended to affect a subversive, antiestablishment pose, while for the first twenty-five years of their history, a period during which they evolved most of the conventions that still make people like Hajdu feel compelled, in public, to condescend to them, comic books preached—with some notable exceptions—absolute conformity, respect for authority, law and order. Comic book superheroes remained the paramount champions of the status quo well into the 1970s.

As for the forms’ sharing a quality of being “sexually regressive”—well, what does that phrase mean, really? Is it the opposite of being “sexually progressive”: showing (at least) a tolerance for “deviation,” a regard for the rights and the pleasure of women, a willingness to experiment? On this score, true, comics have until recent years stood solidly in the rearguard—but surely the same could not be said for rock and roll? From Little Richard on, rock and roll music has been, by this limited definition, as progressive as anyone could wish. But perhaps by “sexually regressive” Hajdu means something more akin merely to “sexist and misogynist,” a charge which can with justice be leveled at both comics (home of Invisible Girl and Shrinking Violet) and rock and roll (see the Rolling Stones “Stupid Girl” inter alia). How illuminating a point of comparison is that, though, when the same charge could be leveled at every other form of popular art, from the dime novel to the Hollywood film, that has evolved here over the past century or so?

Now, what about Hajdu’s claim that, “comics, like rock… give fluent voice to their audience’s basest and most cynical impulses”? Jeez! How can he say such a thing? Even if a search of the record bins of rock history turns up base and cynical impulses aplenty, from the studied barbarism of Kiss to the manufactured bubblegum of the 1910 Fruitgum Company, surely these impulses do not strike one, as Hajdu’s assertion seems to imply, as among the music’s most salient characteristics! Has he never known the exaltation of listening to, say, Pet Sounds or the first Clash album? As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.

Okay, then. What about trashiness—Haidu’s “junk art”—a quality that might be defined as “tending to invite parental revilement.” Here, too, the difference is more important than the similarity. “Trashiness,” starts from without—it’s a judgment passed by the larger, higher culture on the smaller and lower-down. But rock and roll, almost from the first, discovered to its pleasure (and ours) that it could embrace its own trashiness, revel in it. Comics, because they never attained the monstrous level of financial success that rock and roll has long enjoyed, have always struggled to keep up an appearance of decency, of wholesomeness, of being, somehow, good for you, like Wonder Bread. In the early days comics regularly featured prominent banners reassuring parents that the contents had been reviewed by advisory boards of social workers, clergymen and prominent educators. Try to imagine something like that on the label of “Good Golly Miss Molly” or “Hound Dog”!

The strongest resemblance between rock and roll and comics (as, in fairness, Hajdu suggests) lies in the matter of intended audience. Comic books, at least initially, were written for children, but by the 1960s the average age of the comic book reader had crept up very close to that of the average consumer of rock and roll product. Still there remained a crucial difference between the forms. Though both were packaged and marketed by adults, rock and roll music was, almost from the first, played and sung (and presently written) by people who, at least at the time of their first success, were themselves generally teenagers, or barely out of their teens. It was not until the late sixties and early seventies—after thirty years of existence—that comics, some comics, began to be created by people not much older than the people who were reading them.

It was at this moment, as the first generation of comic book readers was growing up to become the second generation of artists and writers, that there began to emerge the rock-historic phenomena that provide Hajdu with the most maddening claim in his review: that the contemporary graphic novel (a phrase which Hajdu always carefully isolates with one of the many pairs of ironizing quotation marks that he carries around in his utility belt) is “essentially the visual equivalent of the rock opera.” Essentially, that is to say (according to Hajdu), “bombastic,” “pretentious,” “laden with pulp mythology and inchoate mysticism,” “grandiose,” and “overloaded.”

Let’s ignore, though it pains me to do so, the injustice done by Hajdu—traveling over well-worn ground—to the innovative and still-fresh work done in their heyday by talented bands such as Yes, the Who (generally credited with inventing the rock opera), the Soft Machine, and even the two groups that Hajdu singles out for condemnation, Genesis and King Crimson. The point is that the current boom—one might even dare to call it a golden age—in the graphic novel bears no resemblance whatsoever to rock’s Age of Prog. Comic books did indeed go through a period during which, at their worst, they partook of much of the same trippy pretense and overblown, pseudomythological grandiosity of the worst of the prog-rock era. This psychotropic period, not surprisingly, coincided exactly with that of, say, Rick Wakeman’s overblown Journey to the Center of the Earth [actually I like that record a lot—MC]and brought us, at its worst, the turgid spaced-out agonies of the Silver Surfer.

Had Hajdu made even a cursory survey of recent graphic novels he might easily have turned up Rucka and Lieber’s Whiteout, Craig Thompson’s Goodbye, Chunky Rice, Raymond Briggs’ Ethel and Ernest, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Ben Katchor’s The Jew of New York, Frank Miller’s 300, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, and many more—and almost nothing in the way of “faux mythology and mysticism suitable to Seventies rock.”

What lies at bottom of Hajdu’s ridiculing, as hopelessly pretentious, of the whole idea of quote-unquote graphic novels, is the way that they are “printed between hard covers or glossy soft-cover” on “heavy paper stock.” It’s the very aspiration of comics, to be more than they have been, that makes Hajdu smile. As if, somehow, the medium were—as if any medium could be!—inherently unworthy, déclassé, incapable of genuine art. In arguing for the built-in unworthiness of comics, Hajdu not only shows disrespect to artists, such as Will Eisner, whose work he has claimed to admire; he also commits the grievous error—an error one would have expected the NYR to know better than to make—of confusing a medium with one of its genres, as if all dance were to be condemned on the basis of the Macarena, or all painting treated with the gloves of irony because of a few thousand black-velvet Elvises. It is cruel, and fundamentally adolescent, to mock someone for the way he aspires endlessly to the good opinion that you have decided, a priori, never to grant him.

yet another ART FOR MONKEYS article:
Pick Up Sticks - The Andy Goldsworthy Story
by Aperturius

When I was about seven or eight, my neighbor friend Tim and I tried to make a snow tunnel.  It couldn’t have been more than six feet in length and was horribly constructed, but we spent hours on it until we were soaked to the bone.  Kids do stupid things like this.  We make (and the less intelligent among us sometimes eat) mud pies and dig holes to the center of the earth – mine went down about three feet – and make stones into neat little piles.  Why?  Well, why not?  We were kids; we didn’t have anything better to do.  And when I was a kid, video games were still very rudimentary.  Punching holes in the sides of buildings and eating bathtubs in Rampage on my Atari could only entertain me for three hours – four, tops.  Then it was time to get my hands dirty.

Now imagine yourself at forty years old, performing the same childish tasks outside…for a living.  Meet Andy Goldsworthy.  I think that instead of firefighters, astronauts, or Ashlee Simpson, Goldsworthy should be every child’s true hero.  He gets to do what all kids do, and he is paid for it.  Paid WELL.  Museums and galleries all over the world are clamoring to get Andy to come to their location, look at some trees and rocks, and throw something together.  Andy recently constructed a piece on the terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, two twenty-foot spires of round river stones delicately balanced, caged in by a skeleton of split logs.  From above, they look like giant nipples of the gods.  Storm King, a gallery/commune in upstate NY for artists who like to frolic in nature, commissioned Goldsworthy to build a stone wall which marks the boundary of nothing.  It simply meanders, making S-curves around trees, sinking into a pond, and continuing on the other side.

The stone wall Andy built is one of the few pieces he has made that is permanent. A very indifferent Mother Nature destroys nearly everything else.  When your favorite art materials are leaves and dirt, your creations don’t tend to last long.  So what’s the point?  Why make art if it’s just going to be destroyed?  I’d like to see the Louvre take the Mona Lisa out of its humidity-controlled, bullet-proof case and throw it out on the lawn for a while, but it’s not gonna happen.  This whole idea of “non-permanent” art is quite new, and it brings about more of those fun artistic conundrums.  If the work isn’t meant to last, how are people expected to view it?  Viewers must either be told of the artwork and make their way to it before it’s destroyed, or the artist must take photographs of it to show people later.  Goldsworthy usually does the latter.  He has a whole room full of slides, documentation of every single work he’s done, whether it’s good or bad.  The only way to see the bulk of his work is to buy his books full of glossy, full-color photographs.

So…do the photographs themselves then count as art?  If Goldsworthy takes a picture of one of his sculptures and then the sculpture is destroyed, does the photo take its place?  Wait a minute…can Goldsworthy’s sculptures even be called sculptures??  What the hell do we call this stuff?  What part of the whole process is the actual art?

To 99% of you, the above paragraph is complete nonsense.  “Who cares?” you’re telling yourselves, and you’re right.  What you see above is the jungle of semantics that artists and art critics love hacking themselves into the middle of.  Trust me, you don’t wanna go in there, because you’ll never get out.  Whenever something new is created and becomes popular, it must immediately be defined.  Goldsworthy’s work has never been easy to classify, which means, of course, that many of his professors in art school considered him a failure.

While other art students at Bradford Art College in England spent hours in their little cubicles, Andy preferred to travel to a local beach, arranging rocks and making drawings in the sand with sticks, until the tide washed his art away.  He brought his works back to professors in the form of photographs, only to be ridiculed.  If Goldsworthy had been a weaker man – if, for instance, he hadn’t spent his youth sticking his hands inside sheep to assist in lamb birth – he might have acquiesced and joined his counterparts in the cubicles.  But he had a vision and a way of working he wasn’t about to desert just because some stuffed shirt threatened him with a failing grade.

To learn more about Goldsworthy and his work, rent the film Rivers and Tides, which is a documentary of the artist wandering around in the countryside and risking his fingers for art.  The guy has the ugliest fingertips on the planet, due to many crushing encounters with boulders.  There’s nothing confrontational about Andy’s work, unless you consider it a comment on the destruction of nature by man, which it is nothing of the sort.  He just likes being a kid, and the rest of us who are stuck in our mundane 9-5 desk jobs like to cheer him on.