Beth Skwarecki

I followed a link from Feministe to a Peaches mp3: "I can’t believe that Peaches, queen of the crotch, is featured on the Mean Girls soundtrack. Imagine all the parents of teenage girls freaking out when their daughters bring home a Peaches CD."

I ended up buying both of her CDs from eMusic. These and the Run Lola Run soundtrack are my new favorite discs.

In other news, we visited the Corning Museum of Glass today. The major advantage their Hot Glass Demo has over watching the glassblowing students at Alfred is that the guy at the demo finishes his piece in less time than it takes you to get bored of watching.

The building was large and curvy. There weren't any hallways; the walls and displays were not straight or regular. Anywhere you went, you felt like you were wandering. (Or lost. Or else you'd think you had seen everything when really if you turned a few more corners there was a whole nother half to the museum. I think this is a good thing though.) Toward the end I realized I hadn't captured any of that, so I took this picture of a random wall. These windows looked inside toward a courtyard. You can see some glassware on exhibit off to the side.

The exhibits were well done. There was a tower of casserole dishes with clear ones at the bottom, opaque ones at the top, and intermediate stages in between. It's the kind of thing that makes you go "wait - the white ones are made of glass?? They start out clear??" They do; the key is to add nuclei for crystals to form around. When the glass crystallizes, it becomes something more like ceramic.

Other exhibits tell the stories of (to name a few) Pyrex, fiberglass, mass-produced light bulbs and beer bottles, fresnel lenses, fiber optic endoscopes, and curved unbreakable windshields. The latter had a video looping on several screens: clips of people breaking, and trying to break, various types of experimental glass. The soundtrack, which you can hear before you see the video, was techno music interspersed with breaking-glass sound effects. They should sell CDs of that. It would be my fourth favorite album in 24 hours.

So, all of that was the "Innovation Center". And just when you're about to say "Is that all there is? Let's go home" somebody points you to the Gallery. There's a few little cases of art. Then a door. Then FIFTY BAJILLION little glass sculptures and vessels and plates and beads and instruments and giant chandeliers and naked women and then your head explodes.

There are more pictures here.