Dead-On Anatomic Art

This smoking shelter is located on the campus of a local community college. I love the artwork...

Haphazardly Hunting Hieronymus

We visited the wonderful Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York today. As with any museum of this stature, there is way too much stuff to see, even with a dozen visits.

My secret master plan for handling big art museum overload: chop the impossible down to something I can actually do. In my case, that means hunting for Hieronymus Bosch. I can't see everything in the museum, but I can darned well see all of their Bosch collection. Other than than, I just wander around randomly until I get tired.

It's a humble plan, but it's my plan.

Why Bosch? Beats me. I ran across some of his quirky and troubling work during my formative years, and it appealed to me oddly. His works are rare enough world-wide, with only 25 currently attributed to him. They are so rare on this side of the Atlantic that finding any of them is often an interesting challenge all by itself.

Finding anything at the Met also turned out to be a real challenge. Besides being huge, its hallways are convoluted enough that the best docent advice I got was to walk in some general direction for a while, and then to ask someone else. It was rare that any of the specific directions I got from them turned out to be helpful.

For a while, it was tricky finding a docent who had even heard of Bosch. Finally, though, I found two of them on the second floor. Both, however, told me that the Met had no actual Bosch -- just one that was "painted in the style of Bosch".

Our Bosch-ward course through the museum was probably pretty similar to the classic 3-dimensional drunkard's walk. However, our wanderings finally led us to the room of the imitation Bosch, which was titled Christ's Descent into Hell.

This painting was accompanied by the following blurb:

The panel was painted during a Bosch revival in the sixteenth century, when the artist's fiery scenes of hell were enormously popular throughout Europe, and especially in Italy, where they were prized for their nightmarish and visionary qualities.

However, we were delighted to find, just two paintings away, an actual Bosch, titled Adoration of the Magi.


Not one of his more bizarre works, but pretty swell nonetheless. Its blurb:

Long thought to be a later pastiche, this Adoration of the Magi can now be placed among Bosch's earliest autograph works ca. 1470-75. The salient features of its underdrawing, the tunnel-like perspective, and certain of the rather wooden figure types with sensitively rendered faces are closely related to Bosch's Ecce Homo in the Städel Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, of approximately the same date.

Thus endeth my current round of Hunt for Hieronymus. My cumulative Bosch-score for the U. S. now shows New York in a tie with Washington, D.C., with one H-point apiece. Given the current planetary paucity of Bosch's, I may be running out of U. S. cities that actually have one. However, I'll keep an eye out for him on my next trips to Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

Buy Art Instead

I spotted this bumper sticker a few weeks ago at a fiddle festival in Port Townsend, WA, and grabbed a quick snapshot with my new iPhone 3GS.


As a radiologist, I'm a real sucker for anatomic art. I wish I could find out more about this bumper sticker -- however, I can't find anything about "Pindellopia" on Bing or The Google.

Hmmmm....

Anatomically Explicit Cake

The Cake Wrecks site posted some swell anatomically explicit cakes last week. Unlike the treats made by some bakeries, these are actually safe for work. At least my work.

These cake decorators are welcome to make a birthday cake for me anytime. That is, assuming they can find enough gray icing to make a proper radiology cake...

(via Anita Anderson)

Happy Halloween!

One of my co-workers is a Jedi of balloon art. She graciously allowed me to post one of her latest works:

I spend a lot of my work time looking at skeletons, and appreciate the extra details she put into the lumbar spine and sacroiliac joints (as seen from behind).

Forensic Cake Pathology

A friend just tipped me off to the Cake Wrecks blog, whose byline says it all:  

When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong.

The latest posting has a medical theme:  a cake baked in the ironic shape of an insulin pen.  

It would be swell if the right shape could cancel out things like calories.  Alas, a pile of insulin-shaped sugar is still just a pile of sugar.

Jen's cake post mortems are a hoot to read. For more interesting cake pathology, check out other faves from this site, including Naked Mohawk-Baby Carrot Jockeys, Sexual Harassment Cake, The First Censored Cake Wreck, and the Creepy Baby Cake. Follow the construction of the latter cake in the video below:



(hat tip to Anita Anderson)

A Bakery Hannibal Lecter Would Love

My spouse and I just finished watching the excellent second season of Dexter. Only minutes later, by interesting coincidence, I ran into this gruesome but fascinating post on the "Body Bakery" in Ratchaburi, Thailand.



This bakery is the studio of Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom. Therein he sculpts amazingly realistic (and highly edible) replicas of dismembered human body parts out of bread. These are then packaged as food items and sold in the showroom of his gallery.

It's been pretty hard to gross me out since cadaver lab back in med school, but civilians may find Unarrom's work a bit disturbing. The Shape and Colour blog conveys this unease quite articulately.

(via Movin' Meat)

Jazz and the Art of Medical Presentations

As an ivory tower radiologist, I give and receive a lot of presentations. Over the years, I've really learned to really, really hate presentations that suck. For inspiration and tips on how to avoid presentation suckage myself, I frequently visit Garr Reynolds' excellent Presentation Zen site. Being a musician myself, I found his posting on Jazz and the Art of Connecting particularly interesting. In this post, Reynolds (who paid his way through college playing jazz) shares quotes from jazz greats that are relevant to non-musical presentations. Here's one:

Dizzy Gillespie: It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

Amen. I'm frequently asked to cram way too much information into way too little time, e.g. 4 years of radiology residency into a 75 minute talk. Instead, I spend the time giving my audience a handful of concepts that they can then apply to many different situations.

Leonard Bernstein, on making jazz interesting:

In his book, The Joy of Music, Bernstein maintains that predictability is a key to making jazz interesting. Consider these two extremes:

1. if the audience can predict every note that you're going to play, it will be boring.

2. if they can't predict a single note, it will also be boring because the music now appears completely random.

A good lecture avoids these extremes. We've all seen way too many lectures read verbatim from a stack of PowerPoint bullet-point slides. (Tip: learn how to set off your own pager to help escape this special circle of PowerPoint hell.)

Handouts can be a similar pitfall if they follow the lecture too closely. Most performers instinctively avoid this like the plague. As a musician, I've learned to love the limelight, and am loath to share any of it with any handout -- even one of the excellent ones I create. My personal tactic is to put my handout on the web, and give the audience a URL to download it at the end of my talk.

Sign on wall in Preservation Hall, New Orleans jazz club:

• Traditional request: $2
  
• Others: $5
  
• The Saints: $10

It's easy to overdo even a great tune. I know how this feels -- at some meetings, I'm asked give the same freaking presentation to 9 different audiences. Viewing this as a jazz gig helps to keep me from going nuts. Even though I play the same tune (i.e same concepts and slide set) for each group, I do my best to customize the talk for each group in real-time, based on audience interaction.

Customizing a talk on the fly can be challenging, especially with large groups. Therefore, I use straw polls and audience response systems (ARS) as often as I can. For non-threatening questions, I use the flesh histogram technique, i.e. have them raise their hands. For other questions, I use the ARS, and their replies are summarized anonymously on-screen in a large graph. I find these graphs to be a great diagnostic tool for gauging their comprehension of a topic. Rather than rolling along monolithically through a slide set, I can add or subtract riffs until the ARS shows me that the audience understands a concept.

Charlie Parker: Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.

It took me a while to learn to speak at large radiology meetings with an unclenched sphincter. The key, as usual, was lots and lots of practice. In this respect, music gave me a huge advantage over fellow faculty. Weekly musical gigs quickly gave me an order of magnitude more experience working in front of crowds. It has also helped me to practice many different variations of a tune, a talk or a topic. Once you've done that, the appropriate notes or words seem to pop out just when you need them on stage. At that point, as Bird said, you really can forget all that bullshit and just play.

Berne Building Bashed by Brobdingnagian Bupkis

Apparently art can indeed change the world.

A Swiss children's home in Berne was abruptly changed on July 31st when a large piece of art dropped from the sky and broke one of its windows.

The Guardian has the whole "scoop": "Giant dog turd wreaks havoc at Swiss museum".


Just for scale, the brown objects above are the size of a house.

As Orac notes in his Respectful Insolence blog , you can't make shit like this up.

Biggest X-ray Ever

The biggest radiographs I've ever personally handled have been 14 x 51 inch (0.36 x 1.3 m) films of an entire human spine.

However, these are pretty small potatoes compared to some of the work by photographer Nick Veasey, who has X-rayed backhoes and entire buses full of people. Check out this shot of a Boeing 777 and hangar, which may be the largest radiograph ever taken.

Besides these enormous objects, his online portfolio also includes a lot of other cool stuff, such as bats, spiders and the perennial male favorite: looking inside ladies underwear.

(via Movin' Meat)

Ron Mueck: Hyper-Realist Sculptor

A succinct summary of my radiology day job: "applied anatomist".

Perhaps because of this, I have a special affinity for art well-depicting the endlessly fascinating human body. The sculpture of Ron Mueck is a notable example of this. The impact of his works comes from not only their breath-taking realism, but also from the creative way he uses scale to give fresh and unexpected views of our particular primate group.

( via Daring Fireball)

Leaving Las Vegas

It's been a fun few days at TAM6, but I'm glad to be on my way home.

I have to say that McCarran International Airport (at least the D terminal) has some of the coolest (and most appropriate) airport art I've ever seen. These three desert creatures, partially buried in the floor, are especially swell.

Muto: Animated Street Art

A polymathic physician friend (family practitioner/software magnate/science fiction writer) with excellent taste sent me a link to the following wonderful bit of animated street art.

The bits of anatomy whizzing by in it are all I need to make a specious claim of radiologic relevance...

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

The Face of Leonardo Da Vinci

Here is a very short and very intriguing video clip from the always excellent TED conference. Illustrator Siegfried Woldhek has drawn over 1100 faces in his career, giving him some expertise in the area of facial features.



(via Neil Gaiman's Journal)