Geoff's shared items

At six, Hannah Clark received a heart transplant...but they kept the second heart in her chest as well. Ten years later, her new heart failed and they were able to remove it because her old heart had mended itself in the meantime.

For the first few months, the new heart did nearly all the work, but this "rest" gave Hannah's own heart a chance to begin recovery. By the time of the second heart was finally removed, Hannah's heart was doing virtually all the work itself.

It's amazing what doctors can entice the human body to do.

Tags: medicine

The former carpenter Clay Ketter constructs walls in the space between house-like interiors and modern abstract painting. They are at once narrative and void of references.—Arken Museum Atley

I think writers should watch more Richard Pryor. I watched part of Live On The Sunset Strip back in college--or rather part of it. I actually didn't think it was that funny. Looking back on it now, a large part of the problem was that I came up on Eddie Murphy Raw and Def Comedy Jam. In other words, I watched it wanting to laugh from beginning to end.

Yesterday, I rewatched Sunset Strip on a lark, and thought on it, and realized that one-way of watching the film is not to think of Pryor as a stand-up comic, but as a theater dude doing a comedic one man show. Sunset Strip is really funny, don't get me wrong. But there are moments of great seriousness. It felt like memoir.

The chief tool is Pryor's vulnerability, and a Niebuhrian humility. (Can you tell I read the Irony Of History in the last year? Can you tell I really like that word?) Pryor is not so much commenting on the world, as he's commenting on how the world (God?) keeps inverting his own assumptions. He goes to prison talking black pride, but comes out thinking "Thank God, we got prisons." He picks up a hitch-hiker in Africa and is offended by his odor, but then finds that the African is so offended by Pryor's odor that he asks to be let out the car. He talks about trying to do how his "scary black guy" doesn't actually work on all white people.

All of this is really, really late. People smarter than me, older than me, and wiser than me have likely already said as much. I actually remember them saying it, but I was to young and dumb to get it. But I understand, now. I understand  why Cosby, and others, were so incensed by Def Comedy Jam. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of those guys--Bernie Mac, D.L. Hughley, Cedric etc. But I'm put in the mind of my reflections on the great Biggie Smalls. I loved Biggie for his technique, not for the stuff about cars, drugs, girls etc. He was just a nasty technician, subject matter be damned:

Recently niggers frontin, ain't saying nothing
So I just speak my piece, keep my piece
Cubans with the Jesus piece with my peeps
Packin, asking who want it, You got it nigga flaunt it
That Brooklyn bullshit we on it.

But the MCs who came up after big didn't see the rhyme-scheme or how he played with the rythym. They saw "Cubans" "Jesus piece" and "Brooklyn." And so what we got was a grip of rappers claiming Biggie, but not really aspiring to what made Biggie great.

I think for old-heads, who came up on Richard Pryor, watching Def Comedy Jam must have been what it was like for me to hear a Fabolous album. It's a facile imitation. Almost every comic today can curse like Richard Pryor. But I don't know a single one who exhibits the artistic courage you see in this clip, where Pryor tells millions of people, precisely, how he set himself on fire.

It makes you vunerable to discuss precisely how and where you were wrong. This isn't just about art. Our media is filled with people brandishing one essential message, "I'm right and here's why." Some of them undoutbly are. Most of them are not. I think young writers can find a lot of gold in examining their past convictions, and their fragility when pitted against experience and history.

Richard Pryor Live On The Sunset Strip Clip

via http://www.cityfarmer.info/acres-of-barren-blocks-offer-chance-to-reinvent-detroit/

Evan Roth's latest graffiti taxonomy project is now on display at Fondation Cartier’s Born In The Streets - Graffiti exhibition in Paris. It's a study of the stylistic diversity found in Parisian graffiti tags. Evan photographed over 2,400 graffiti tags from April 24 to April 28, 2009 found in each of Paris’s 20 districts. Photographs were then archived, tagged and sorted by letter. The ten most commonly used letters by Paris graffiti writers were identified for further study (A,E,I,K,N,O,R,S,T and U). From each letter grouping, eighteen tags were isolated to represent the diversity and range of that specific character. Evan explains that the sets are not intended to display the “best” graffiti tags in Paris, but rather aim to highlight the diversity of forms ranging from upper case to lowercase, simple to complex and legible to cryptic. --> Wooster

This is a story that’s been bubbling under the mainstream news media for quite some time, but a recent report in the New York Times went some way to breaking the silence, and now we have an hour-long report on Five Live, which is good to see if not the most pleasant listening. And I should emphasise that: it’s not for the faint-hearted.

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, gay, lesbian and transgendered people lived largely closeted but, in the major cities at least, mostly without interference - certainly freer than in most Middle Eastern countries. But in the chaos that’s followed, a mainly religious-inspired and incredibly violent backlash - supported by local government forces and unacknowledged by the country’s leaders or the occupation administration - has decimated the gay population, killing many and driving others into hiding or out of the country entirely, where they face further humiliation and fear at the hands of immigration authorities. [MP3]

This is a brave and thoughtful programme, looking at the issue from many angles, and talking to people on all sides. I didn’t know Radio Five did stuff like this, and I’ll be looking out for more of this kind of in-depth reporting. You can find out more at the website of Iraqi LGBT, the British-based organisation that’s one of the main sources for the programme.

The last five minutes are supposed to be good, or so says a commenter on Ta-Nehisi Coates' great blog.

Because her spokesperson is trading shots with a 19-year old kid. It makes liberals, like me, feel good that the GOP is a wreck, and the notion of Sarah Palin as the standard-bearer only increases the scale of that wreckage. It also validates a certain idea about certain voters, and their relative intelligence. I would just argue that we should not confuse a poll with the rigors of an actual election. A lot of you think I'm underestimating Palin. But I think people are underestimating the GOP. The desire to win has a way of taming folks.