"Through the Weeping Glass"

Thanks to my friend Laura Lindgren, publisher of Blast Books and producer of the soon-to-be-released 2012 Mütter Museum calendar, I've got the inside scoop on the premiere next month of the new short film by the Quay Brothers! "Through the Weeping Glass: On the Consolations of Life Everlasting (Limbos & Afterbreezes in the Mütter Museum)" is the first film to be made in the U.S. by the internationally recognized American-born filmmakers who have lived in London since the 1970s. The 31-minute movie is a "reflective hybrid documentary on the collections of books, instruments, and medical anomalies at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Mütter Museum." It's got a powerful musical score by composer Timothy Nelson and a resonant voice-over by Derek Jacobi. You can have a seat at one of the premieres - here are the details:

Philadelphia
September 22, 6:30pm
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Buy tickets

New York
September 24, 8pm
The Museum of Modern Art (features a moderated discussion with the Quay Brothers, who will be present)
Buy tickets

Los Angeles
September 27, 8pm
Cary Grant Theater, SONY Pictures Studios, hosted by the Museum of Jurassic Technology
Buy tickets

Hurry, tickets are going fast. But if you cannot make it, do not despair! "Through the Weeping Glass" will subsequently be made available on DVD.

Mütter movie

Identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay are turning their lens toward the contents of the Mütter Museum!* After making more than 24 short and full-length animated films known for their gloomy beauty (1st image, still from Street of Crocodiles), the Brothers Quay are creating a film for a symposium held jointly by the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. The film is being financed by a grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, although the filmmakers have financed other projects by making music videos and TV commercials. The Quay Brothers (3rd image) have taken museum-related commissions over the years from the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the London-based British Museum and Wellcome Collection. While the Quays have been based in London for 40 years, their newest project brings them back to their hometown of Philadelphia. Their 1st visit to the Mütter Museum was during a field trip for a drawing class at what was then called the Philadelphia College of Art. Then they examined the Chevalier Jackson Collection of Objects Swallowed and Inhaled, the 139 skulls in the Hyrtl Collection, and the other exhibits (2nd image, wax models of eye injuries). Timothy remarks, “It’s an open cemetery where the beloved have an afterlife in jars, between wet specimens. The graveyard is kinder to us.” The documentary they are currently working on will include the ossified skeleton of Harry Eastlack, which was shot in a dreamy re-enactment of a visit by his sister, and a Viennese head model used to practice eye surgeries, which they outfitted with sheep eyes provided by a butcher. Fittingly, they describe their films as "dark fairy tales with elements of grotesquerie and the pathological.” They never enter a film through the front door or the back door, they say of their creative process. “More often, we use the trapdoor."

*Thanks to follower Jana Marie Miller for this news!

Stomach growls

Let's turn inside today and consider the fact that our stomachs "growl."

Dr. Michael Picco, a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic, explains that stomach growling can typically be chalked up to normal digestion. It does not occur only when we are hungry, but also after eating or between meals when food is passing through our intestines. Appetite is controlled by the release of hormone-like substances which cause the brain's hypothalamus to stimulate our desire to eat. A message sent to our stomach and intestines triggers muscle contractions and the release of digestive fluid, which produce the noise as we prepare to eat. The response is triggered by hunger - but can also be stimulated by the thought, sight, or smell of food. Only if stomach noise is excessive and accompanied by bloating, cramping, diarrhea, or excess gas, is it a possible sign of an underlying disorder.

Physiologist Mark A.W. Andrews of the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine says that the reason stomach growling is associated more with hunger than digestion is that it is typically louder when the stomach and intestines are empty and their contents don't muffle the noise. The science behind the noise itself is that the walls of the gastrointestinal tract - a hollow tube that runs from mouth to anus - are layered with smooth muscle. When activated, they squeeze the tract's contents to mix and propel food, gas, and fluids through the system, generating the rumbling. The squeezing (peristalsis) involves a ring of contraction that moves down the tract a few inches at a time. Though the rate and force of peristalsis typically increases in the presence of food, he explains, activity also increases after the stomach and small intestines have been empty for approximately 2 hours. They may continue for 10 to 20 minutes once initiated, and then repeat every 1-2 hours until the next meal is ingested.

The word that the ancient Greeks came up with for the growling of the stomach was an attempt to put the sound into words and is the origin for the medical term:

bor·bo·ryg·mus
n. pl. bor·bo·ryg·mi (-mī')
A rumbling noise produced by the movement of gas through the intestines.
[New Latin, from Greek borborugmos, of imitative origin.]

Several bodily noises in English - belch, growl, gurgle, hiccup, rumble, slurp, snort - are also onomatopeiac.

I've illustrated this post with a photograph of the giant colon (1st image) on display at Philadelphia's Mütter Museum. The colon belonged to a sideshow performer who was billed as the "Balloon Man" and the "Human Windbag" because his severe constipation distended his belly and gave it an unusual shape that people would pay to see. He died at age 29 in 1892, and an autopsy revealed that he had accumulated 40lbs of feces. His colon - now stuffed with paper, as I recall - measures 8' in length and 27" in circumference. The x-ray (2nd image) shows the megacolon of a living 55-year-old patient, which measures approximately 10cm in maximum diameter. The arrows point to pseudopolyps and the condition required emergency surgery.

Conjoined twins

Sculpture by Deborah Costandine. Photo by Jim Ziv.

Last week I heard from a woman who is in graduate school training to become an art therapist. She made the sculpture of cephalopagus conjoined twins above, which was purchased in 2007 by Northwestern University. For a look at the skeletal structure of a similar pair of twins, visit the Mütter Museum's virtual display of cephalothoracopagus twins. Human conjoined twins who share a head do not survive, as opposed to craniopagus twins - joined at the head - who can and do live well into adulthood, whether or not they are separated. Rarer are symmetrical dicephalus twins, who each have a head on a shared body. Separation for them would cause more disability than it would resolve and - if the twins have a single heart - is not even an option.

Gretchen Worden's portrait

This portrait of Gretchen Worden (1947-2004) was revealed at the 150th anniversary celebration of the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia on Jan. 9th. Gretchen directed the museum for 29 years and the painting will be officially installed in the gallery that has been named in her honor. The instrument she is depicted holding is a lithotrite, which was passed through the urethra to crush bladder stones. Also in the portrait are the skeletons of the giant and the dwarf that she curated. In her book Mütter Museum, Gretchen wrote:

In most museums you go to look at objects. In the Mütter Museum, sometimes the objects seem to be looking at you. And, sometimes, the objects seem to be you.

Laura Lindgren - publisher, editor, art director, and designer of the Mütter Museum books and calendars - describes the moment the portrait was revealed:

Missing from the unveiling, naturally, was Gretchen--or was she? As the burgundy drape descended from the portrait and the audience gasped in astonishment, a wine glass toppled over from a table in the center of the rotunda and smashed on the floor. "Mazeltov!" shouted Paul Stridick, a friend of Gretchen since 1975. And J. Bazzel confirmed: yes, it was a glass of "the cheap house red"--always her preference.

Ironically, an unpublished essay about Gretchen that I wrote shortly after her death ends with the following words: She put those of us with similar interests in touch, introduced pairs of conjoined twins to each other. “We’re not a museum about the dead,” she reminded, “we’re a museum about the living.” The work of the living continues and the examples of the dead remain in that jewel of a museum that she promoted so tirelessly, but Gretchen has left the building…or has she?

William Wegman

Contemporary artist William Wegman does some nutty things with his Weimaraners, but my favorite photographs are these two, taken at my favorite museum in 2000. They are reproduced and discussed in Gretchen Worden's book Mütter Museum and have been in past calendars. My friend Cris's Mom Dorothy will be giving me the 2009 Mütter Museum calendar as soon as I see her this holiday season!