study the gruesome
I love this website called Morbid Anatomy. It’s like going into an old castle in a crumbling Baltic state with a very strange but very nice Countess as your host and after dinner at a long wooden table lit by tall blood red candles held in an antique bronze candelabra she asks if you’d like to see her collection of teratological specimens in the study. You have no idea what that means but follow her down a stone lined passageway and enter into a library lined with antique volumes, which you hardly notice because in the main area long rows of enameled tables hold specimen jars of pickled hands and feet, complete skeletons dangle from hooks, bodies in various stage of autopsy – some under gorgeous wood and glass cases – fill the area.
She offers you a rag soaked in formaldehyde which you both judiciously huff and then you begin exploring what humans have done in attempt to understand death through the ages. It is a room pregnant with beautiful incest between art and science.
It turns out a friend of a friend of a friend runs it and I want to do an interview with her about it. Check it out and if any of you have questions or comments for her I’ll include those, then bring it all back here.
That castle exists. It’s called the Museum of Jurassic Technology…in Los Angeles. http://www.mjt.org/
An excerpt:
“The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant – one of the very few ants to produce a cry audible to the human ear.”
“And, the practice of telling of the bees of important events in the lives of the family has been for hundreds of years…as soon as a member of the family has breathed his or her last a younger member of the household, often a child, is told to visit the hives. and rattling a chain of small keys taps on the hive and whispers three times:
Little Brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.
Little Brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.
Little Brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead.
A piece of funeral crepe is then tied to the hive and after a period of time funeral sweets are brought to the hives for the bees to feed upon. The bees are then invariably invited to the funeral and have on a number of recorded occasions seen fit to attend.”
(Jon, go tell the bees you lost your wallet. Remember the poem.)
The site is a good, but the actual museum will inspire great awe, unless you are already hopelessly twisted. My personal favorites were the 1919 version of spam email and the Dogs of the Soviet Space Program exhibit.
Comment by oggy — May 15, 2008 @ 11:25 pm
the new thing in boston is soaking your joints in embalming fluid and smoking them, its called “wet†“fry,†and “illy, people are breaking into funeral homes and stealing the fluid…..
Comment by al — May 16, 2008 @ 12:51 pm
Embalming Fluid? That can’t be good for your vocal cords.
Comment by oggy — May 17, 2008 @ 10:37 pm
Next time I’m down there I want to check that place out. Thanks Oggy.
Comment by Rolston — May 17, 2008 @ 11:59 pm
The place is filled with well displayed ephemera of the 20th century. (trailer park dispersement in 1956 with lights and sound effects of flushing toilets) Come down this summer and we’ll check it out.
Comment by oggy bleacher — May 18, 2008 @ 12:07 pm