Richard Avedon. The New Yorker. 1995.
This amazing set.
The entire Haute Macabre blog is phenomenal. Via abandoned_places on LJ.
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The interwebz is full of magnificence in the past few days. I decided not to drown you in links, but only give you my top two. Here is the other: Scifaiku.
Sam's Dot publishing consistently brings some of the most visionary and well-crafted sci-fi out there. Even if it's not a genre you like, what, I ask you, is there not to like about sci-fi haiku? I found all of them thrilling, but Valeria Simonova-Cecon's question haiku (caps-locked!!!!) made my brain spin like a hungry magnetic rare earth worm. Seriously. She gets bonus points for having the coolest name ever, and both of her pieces are fab, but her second haiku is just... OMG.
I jumped up on the couch. B said, You are sick, please stop jumping. And I said, BUT!!! THIS!!! YOU DO NOT KNOW!!!! And he said, I know you're a fucking nut with a temperature and Puffs Plus jammed up her nose who needs to sit the fuck back down and chill.
True. I've been sick. We can blame this on B, who was in close proximity to elementary school children three days last week. Reason #356,783 why I don't like kids. He is also sick. Yay!
Also, notice how I snuck a third link in there. :)
Okay, it's back to the couch for me. Blankets, tea, and a notebook slowly being filled with bad sci-fi haiku.
The Avedon pictures are astounding! I LOVE them, and so envy the model! Yes, I know... most people would envy a model for posing with Brad Pitt or George Clooney, or whoever the fuck the flavor of the month is. I envy a model for posing with a skeleton. If I ever find one at a garage sale -- actual or a facsimile -- I will SO buy it! Erotic photos with a skeleton? Perhaps. I DID buy a 12-inch rubber skeleton last year that I hung in the rear drivers side window of my car. I call him "Mort".
ReplyDeleteGlad you're willing to come out and say you don't like kids. I don't like them either. Except for the rare precocious ones that you can have an actual conversation with. But other than that... no, kid, I do NOT want to see your My Little Pony collection, or whatever the fuck toddlers are into these days. Serves B right for coming into contact with one of them, but it's a shame that you have to suffer the consequences. Bad, bad B. I would spank him, if I were you. When you're feeling better.
Aren't they absolutely astounding? I can't even decide what makes them so incredible, but it's really every single element. The skeleton is part of it -- without the skeleton, they might be almost take themselves too seriously. The skeleton adds a bizarre element that is humorous but has very scary undertones.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you've got Mort. Er... As long as you're happy together. And he doesn't tell you to "watch out for that car!" or "you drive too fast!" Then again, you can always threaten him with dismemberment. Ah, dismemberment...
I can't speak for all the childless by choice, but yes, I find them tedious and uninteresting. B works for a music store -- band instruments, not CD's and stuff -- and so it's that time of year where they go into schools to get kids started playing the flute or cello or whatever. Me, I signed up for clarinet, then used the case as a mausoleum for my Barbies. It was lined in blue velvet, for heaven's sake! It made the most beautiful coffin! With spots for shoes and extra heads! And then I dropped clarinet.
The strangest thing: just a few days ago I wrote a piece about a woman falling in love with a skeleton. That fact added even more bizarreness to those beautifully bizarre pics.
ReplyDeleteScifi-haiku – you´re killing me! I don´t have time for this! I already wrote several…
Kids. I always seem to be surrounded by them. I suppose I´m that kind of person. Or maybe I just let it happen. I like most of them and they help rooting me to life. I need structure and they provide =) My own kids? Well, they´re super-kids, obviously, everyone loves them.
Me and time don´t work well together at the moment. RL is eating my brains. I don´t write and when I do I´m too stressed and nothing works =(
Good recs are treats. Get well soon. I´ll be back.
Barbie´s coffin – heee… (My Barbies never died, they were too busy being fucked by apes ;)
Like the skeleton art.
ReplyDeleteWe had a human skeleton in our classroom at school, a real one. It just hung in the corner, grinning.
Unremarkable, you might think, but I should point out that when I say 'school' I mean the English equivalent of kindergarten.
Asuqi: It's the time of year for such stories. I can't wait to read it. Also your sci-fi haikus. I'm not sure if I can share mine, LOL! Not, apparently, one of my strongest suits.
ReplyDeleteI'll be back with more recs in time. I've got a mental list of things that won't leave me alone. :)
Jo: See, it's that last part. At first, I thought, "And we had one in our science classroom" (from age 13 on up).
Scary thought: What if there was no skeleton, and you imagined it?
No, it was definitely there. As was the leech which once latched itself on to my shin in the school nature reserve.
ReplyDeleteWhat with that and the time we had to dissect owl pellets to see what mouse parts were inside them, and also the inordinate amount of time we spent making crayon rubbings of gravestones in the churchyard, it's not surprising I grew up weird.
I loved dissecting owl pellets. I've never found one on my own, though. :(
ReplyDeleteI've never made rubbings of gravestones, either. Double :(
"Tell us a ghost story!" the kids said yesterday. "One that you make up. One that ends badly."
ReplyDelete"You sure?" I asked, and when they nodded I went against my better judgement.
I told them about this kid that didn´t want to go to bed but was made to. And how the nightmonster came, dark and furry, from a hole underneath his bed and dragged him down through a tunnel to a large grotto filled with monsters chewing on bones. In a corner there was a cage filled with crying children and the boy saw hundereds of tunnel-holes leading to all their bedrooms. He was able to steal the key and save the kids, and the story turned action when the monsters chased them back to his room and they just made it. They poured cement in all of the holes but when the night was almost over this tiny, little girl said they´d forgotten her place and so they went there. It was a strange old house, remotely located, and the boy was surprised he hadn´t noticed it before. They went in and the door slammed shut behind them, but the girl urged them further, up the stairs, into her room. It was dusty and her toys were grey with age and covered in cobweb. The boy, now scared, asked her about it and the girl looked at him frantically and said in a weirdly sweet voice (you should hear me do it!)she´d been staying there for a hundred years and she quite liked her toys. The boy started to back away and said they had to leave, but the girl told him they had to meet her pets first, her cute, cute pets, and before the children´s horrified eyes, she move her bed and revealed the very last hole and all the nightmonsters came crawling out of it.
All of the children regretted their request. Some of them cried. T. says I shouldn´t be allowed around them.
But hey, Jo, someone has to bring up the next generation of weirdos =)
"All of them"? How many were there? I hope there was a crowd of after-school friends, and you managed to scar at least 75% of them (or 14) for life.
ReplyDeleteTell then that when they are big, they will love the nightmonsters.
And also, Asuqi, I must point out how wonderful it is to see parents taking responsibility for turning their children into weird adults. So often, they simply rely on the schools to do it for them. You take matters into your own hands. I applaud you.
ReplyDeleteI also approve of parents teaching their children to become weird adults. RS Bohn, I believe I may have already told you about my dad bringing dead things home from work all the time when I was a child?
ReplyDeleteHonestly, Ms. Sheppard, it's hard to believe that you aren't ten times more warped than you already are.
ReplyDeleteOr you've got us all fooled.
My kids had their fair share (I´m not allowed to be in charge of the treasure-hunts anymore, T. censors them, he says stealing the life-courage from children is a bad thing). Although, the kids mentioned here were the kids at work. Yes, I do this professionaly.
ReplyDeleteYour dad brought dead things home? Sounds really interesting... Also reminds me of my bone shop. I grew up on the countryside on a really old farm (my folks have owned it since 1781) and I didn´t have many friends since there weren´t a lot of people around. Me and my brother and sister used to dig up old bones and arrange them prettily on a rock we called ´the bone shop´. You would have liked it. I wish you two could have lived next door.
And really, we´re never going to be short of writing material. Never ever =)