Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Poem for Wednesday and Corning Museum of Glass

Sex Next Door
By Julie Bruck


It's rare, slow as a creaking of oars,
and she is so frail and short of breath
on the street, the stairs – tiny, Lilliputian,
one wonders how they do it.
So, wakened by the shiftings of their bed nudging
our shared wall as a boat rubs its pilings,
I want it to continue, before her awful
hollow coughing fit begins. And when
they have to stop (always) until it passes, let
us praise that resumed rhythm, no more than a twitch
really, of our common floorboards. And how
he's waited for her before pushing off
in their rusted vessel, bailing when they have to,
but moving out anyway, across the black water.

--------

Another from Bruck's The End of Travel.

We had a relatively quiet morning -- Daniel working on summer homework and project stuff, Adam working on art with his Wacom tablet, me still trying to catch up on things from our trip last week. My mother had a morning meeting about Hebrew school and afterward came to take the kids out to lunch, though they took their time both getting off the computers to get ready and deciding what they wanted to eat, so that by the time they had settled on the Original Pancake House, I was hungry and wanted pancakes too! So my mom invited me along, and Adam and I split a jalapeno omelette and praline pancakes while mom had crepes and Daniel had "The Works" -- eggs, bacon, pancakes, hash browns. It was all yummy.


From the Corning Museum of Glass, this is Harvey K. Littleton's Eye, created in 1969.


This piece of Littleton's, Red/Amber Sliced Descending Form, became the first piece in Ben and Natalie Heineman's stunning collection of contemporary glass, which they donated to the museum in 2006.


All the items on this page come from the Heineman collection. This is Spring Landscape Study by David R. Huchthausen.


Michael M. Glancy's Resilient Corrosion in Lavender is made of blown glass, industrial plate glass, and copper.


The museum owns several large pieces by Dale Chihuly, and these vases are his as well -- Cylinder with Indian Blanket Drawing, In Honor of Jackson Pollock and Ruth Kligman, and Navajo Basket Cylinder.


Michael Pavlik's Dual Gate Series is dated 1985, made of cast glass, cut, ground, bonded.


Richard Marquis's Crazy Quilt Teapot #38 is one of my favorite items in the Heineman collection, made of fused and blown murrine, the glass process created in the Middle East and revived in Venice in the 1500s.


And another favorite item, Jane Bruce's Faux Marble Bowl, which is made of blown glass which has been sandblasted, then painted to look like marble with the use of gold leaf.

We caught up on last week's Futurama -- the body-swap episode, which reminded me of Farscape's body-swap episode. Lots of sci-fi shows have done one where people of different genders get swapped, but there aren't as many where humans and aliens swap bodies -- let alone have human-alien same-sex relations while in the wrong bodies -- probably there are people who will be bugged by consent issues but this is Futurama so I can't really take it that seriously. Ironically, this week's Warehouse 13 was a body-swap episode too, though I wish Claudia and Artie had been in on that action instead of in a heterosexist Possessed Men cliche while Pete was swaggering around in Mika's heels at her high school reunion.

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