Ouch

Ordinarily I’d be the last person to volunteer for dental demolition derby, but the way I feel now I’m about to clean out the hammers and chisels at Home Depot and bring ‘em to my dentist, in case she runs out.

My back molar cracked a couple of weeks ago; the dentist gave me this fluoride varnish stuff (really–fluoride varnish) to paint on the crack, told me to stop chewing popcorn kernels and jujubes. Then she scheduled me for an extraction in a couple of weeks, i.e., this Friday.

The varnish worked miracles; the pain stopped. On Monday my teeth felt so good that I decided to postpone the extraction until August, when hopefully the rest of my life will have settled down to a dull roar.

The tooth gods heard me, frowned, and about ten minutes later my cracked tooth met an unexpected bit of bone in a leftover steak. My eyes crossed in pain and they’ve pretty much stayed crossed for the last four days.

It’s amazing how an exquisitely sore tooth concentrates your entire focus on one small point in your lower right jaw. The dentist suggested Vicodin, but when we tried it two weeks ago, at the beginning of this little adventure, my colleagues eventually found me prone on the bathroom floor, throwing up while trying to faint. Apparently Vicodin and I don’t get along.

So I’m taking this concoction of steroids and uppers designed to reduce the inflammation and therefore the pain. It sorta works, until I move my jaw or try to enunciate a word. Or drink. Or eat. Or smile.

Or, in the last hour or so, breathe.

Thankfully, tomorrow at 3pm I will be ensconced in my dentist’s chair, proffering chisels and hammers and pliers and reciprocating saws as needed. Anything to get this horrid little ball of agony out of my mouth.

Wish me luck.

Process, art and labels

If you ran into me at the Portland Art Museum on GAS conference opening night, you would have seen me sporting a T-shirt admonishing glassists who use the term “warmglass” to describe “kilnforming.” (Incredibly nice-looking T-shirt, BTW, so many thanks to Ted for sending one my way)

The T-shirt went with the really wonderful Klaus Moje retrospective at the museum, one of the best life-journey-of-artist shows I’ve seen in a very long time. But as I watched GAS members interacting with Moje’s work, I really got to thinking about the message on that T-shirt.

At most gallery openings I attend, patrons examine the work, speculate as to the artist’s intent or inspiration, respond to the content or pattern or colors or lighting or whatever, gasp at the prices, talk about how hard it is to make this art, etc., etc. What they don’t generally do is get down-and-dirty about the processes. The artist may volunteer that info, or a smart gallery rep may use a difficult process to justify the price, but I’ve rarely heard non-artist patrons getting all that technical about the mechanics behind the work.

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