Matplotlib pyplot show() doesn't work once closed

There might be a better way to animate imshow's, but this should work in a pinch. It's a lightly modified version of an animation example from the docs.

# For detailed comments on animation and the techniqes used here, see
# the wiki entry http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/Animations

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('TkAgg')

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.mlab as mlab
import matplotlib.cm as cm

import sys
import numpy as np
import time

ax = plt.subplot(111)
canvas = ax.figure.canvas

delta=0.025
x=y= np.arange(-3.0, 3.0, delta)
x,y=np.meshgrid(x, y)
z1=mlab.bivariate_normal(x, y, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0)
z2=mlab.bivariate_normal(x, y, 1.5, 0.5, 1, 1)
z=z2-z1  # difference of Gaussians

def run(z):
    fig=plt.gcf()
    for i in range(10):
        plt.imshow(z, interpolation='bilinear', cmap=cm.gray,
                  origin='lower', extent=[-3,3,-3,3])
        canvas.draw()
        plt.clf()
        z**=2

manager = plt.get_current_fig_manager()
manager.window.after(100, run, z)
plt.show()

It might be from a bug in previous versions of matplotlib. I was having a similar problem when I issued sequential show() commands -- only the first would show (and stay); but, when I updated matplotlib to 1.0.1 the problem went away.