Happy (Almost) Halloween with Some of Our Favorite Macabre Videos!

Above: "Dry Bones," The Lennon Sisters, The Lawrence Welk Show, 1965
Center: "The Skeleton Dance," Disney Silly Symphonies, 1929
Below: "You're Always Welcome at our House," lyrics by Shel Silverstein, performed by Marisa Berenson, star of Cabaret; The Muppet Show, 1978

The "Scare Houses" of Lisa Kereszi, Time Magazine "Light Box"

Why do we like haunted houses?... On one level, this is easy to understand. It’s all about death—that undiscovered country our culture keeps off the thought-map. Death, death, death, coming at us in the form of ghosts, monsters, maggots, snakes, killer clowns, necromancers, headless horsemen, slime crawlers, banshees, and all manner of rotting flesh and decay, aiming to infect us with its fate. The haunted house takes us to death’s door: sewers, graveyards, mortuaries, abattoirs, bottomless pits and of course, hell itself, yawning wide to receive us. Abandon all hope and enter at your own risk!
--"Haunt Me: The Scare Houses of Lisa Kereszi," by Ginger Strand, Time Magazine's "Lightbox"

You can read the entire article--and view the entire collection of strangely sad photographs of Halloween "Scare Houses"by friend of Morbid Anatomy Lisa Kereszi, s sample of which you see above--by clicking here.

Happy Halloween Everybody!

Happy very, very strange Halloween, everyone.

Image: "From the Collection of Clive Parkinson, Director, Arts for Health, Manchester, England" from the photo series "Private Cabinets." More here.

Halloween-Inspired Memento Mori: "The Dead Have Something to Tell You," Bess Lovejoy, The New York Times

ONCE, we commemorated the dead, left out offerings to feed them and lamps to guide them home. These days, Halloween has drifted far from its roots in pagan and Catholic festivals, and the spirits we appease are no longer those of the dead: needy ghosts have been replaced by costumed children demanding treats.

Over the last century, as Europeans and North Americans began sequestering the dying and dead away from everyday life, our society has been pushing death to the margins. We tune in to television shows about serial killers, but real bodies are hidden from view, edited out of news coverage, secreted behind hospital curtains. The result, as Michael Lesy wrote in his 1987 book The Forbidden Zone, is that when death does occur, “it reverberates like a handclap in an empty auditorium.”

It wasn’t always this way. Death once occurred at home, with friends and family gathered around. Local women were responsible for washing the body and sewing the shroud. People sometimes slept in the same room as corpses, because there was nowhere else to go. In the Middle Ages, cemeteries often acted as the public square: you didn’t just walk on the graves, you ate, drank, traded and sometimes even sang and danced on top of them...

--"The Dead Have Something to Tell You," Bess Lovejoy, The New York Times

A modern day Halloween-inspired Memento Mori in yesterday's New York Times by well-missed friend-of-Morbid-Anatomy Bess Lovejoy, author of the forthcoming book Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses. We hope she will come give a lecture at Observatory as part of her book tour?!?

You can read the entire article by clicking here, and can find out more about the book here.

Image: From The Burns Archive.

Thanks so much, Pam, for bringing this to my attention!

Happy Halloween From Morbid Anatomy!

All images drawn from Rip The Skull's Halloween Poscard Flickr set; you can see the entire fantastic set by clicking here.

Medical tricks and Victorian treats at The Florence Nightingale Museum, London, October 28th

This just in from my friend Natasha McEnroe, recently of the incredible Grant Museum and now at London's Florence Nightingale Museum:

Medical tricks and Victorian treats.....
10am – 5pm, Monday October 24th – Friday October 28th.
The Florence Nightingale Museum, London
Free with the price of admisison

Come and follow, if you dare, the Halloween Trail at the Florence Nightingale Museum. Medical tricks and Victorian treats fill the museum over Halloween half term. Take part in quizzes and quests, grisly games and ghoulish activities, and earn a bulging goody bag. Enter the Halloween competition for a chance to win a horribly good prize.

Feast your eyes on the vermin-infested Halloween banquet! Put your life in the hands of a crazed Victorian quack doctor! And come face to face with the monster lurking underneath the haunted bed....

More on this event can be found here.

Happy Halloween Everybody!

Betty Boop's "Halloween Party" from 1933, directed by Dave Fleischer.

Happy Halloween From Morbid Anatomy!

Image: Vintage Halloween postcard, found on the Quest Magazine website.

Halloween Wonder Cabinet at The New York Institute for the Humanities, Curated by Lawrence Weschler, Free!

I just recieved an email from the associate director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU asking if I would post information about their upcoming Halloween Wonder Cabinet event, curated by Lawrence Weschler. I do so with great pleasure, having already had plans to attend this wonderful (and free!) conference that will run from 11AM-9PM tomorrow (Halloween).

Lawrence Weschler, the curator of this day-long collection of illustrated talks, screenings, and multimedia presentations, is best known (at least to me!) as the author of the deeply influential Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder, which recounts the mysterious and fascinating story of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, and which went on to inspire countless numbers of pilgrims (myself included) to make the trek to experience the fabled museum in person. To my great excitement, I see that the "Mr. Wilson" behind the Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson, will be featured in this lineup, where, the invitation tells us, he will evoke "the Russian mystical origins of the Soviet space program, subject of a trilogy of heartrendingly lovely short films." Having never heard the man speak before is reason enough for me to attend this event, but Weschler has provided plenty of other compelling reasons to spend your Halloween indoors, as you can see in the full line-up you will find below.

This looks to be a stellar event. Hope to see you there!

The New York Institute for the Humanities
& the Humanities Initiative at NYU
present an all-day

HALLOWEEN WONDER CABINET
curated by Lawrence Weschler

A day of illustrated talks, screenings, and multimedia presentations with Laurie Anderson, Michael Benson, Chandler Burr, Walter Murch, David Wilson and many others


Saturday October 31
11 am till 9:30 pm

NYU's Cantor Film Center
36 East 8th Street, NYC

Free and Open to the Public
{on a first-come, first-in basis}

Every once in a while, Lawrence Weschler, the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and author, among others, of the Pulitzer-nominated Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (a work of “magic-realist nonfiction” arising out of an investigation of the premodern roots of the postmodern Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles), gets it into his head to contrive a day of sublimely odd, wonderflecked and just plain cool presentations, braided one after the next in a thematic order intermittently evident to himself, if no one else. This year, he proposes to do so on Saturday October 31, which is to say Halloween.

As you will see from the program below, the first half of the day will focus generally on the stellar, the planetary, the cosmological and the astronomic. Later in the day, presentations will begin to morph into a consideration of the experience itself of drop-jawed amazement. Toward the end of the procession, attention will turn to things somewhat more infinitesimal: the molecular basis of smell, insect camouflage, and (to round out the day, Halloween after all) the downright hallucinogenic.


SESSION I

11:00 am
A celebratory fanfare by avant garde, downtown (and well nigh breathless) saxophone player COLIN STETSON

11:10 am
LAURIE ANDERSON, the celebrated performance artist and hipster sage, who will dilate on her days, a few seasons back, as visiting artist-in-residence with the good folks at NASA. (Note: She will be replacing the previously announced bead-artist Liza Lou in this slot.)

11:45 am
Filmmaker and photographic archivist MICHAEL BENSON will be evoking the entire universe as seen from the point of view of the Hubble and other deep space observatories, subject of his latest book, Far Out, which in turn follows on from his last, the critically celebrated, Beyond, which took the same sort of survey of the photographic legacy of interplanetary space probes.


SESSION II

1:45 pm
The eminent film and sound editor WALTER MURCH (Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient, The Conversation, etc.) will reveal a whole other side of his famously overbrimming curiosity, which is to say his excavation and systematic rehabilitation of a long discredited theory as to the placement of planets and moons in relation to the bodies around which they orbit, a formula which turns out to accurately predict 85% of such orbits, and which, when properly rejiggered, turns out to coincide with the formula for the Pythagorean octave (talk about the music of the spheres!).

3:00 pm
DAVID WILSON, the MacArthur winning Jurassic Technologist himself, will evoke the Russian mystical origins of the Soviet space program, subject of a trilogy of heartrendingly lovely short films, a full decade in the making, currently coming to closure at the fourteen-seat Borzoi Theater atop his LA museum.

4:00 pm
A rarely screened short, filmed during the last months of the Khrushchevite Thaw, in which the Soviet master PAVEL KOGAN trains a hidden camera on a succession of common Russians at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, as they gaze, positively awestruck, at Leonardo’s rendition of a Virgin and Child. That film will in turn be coupled with an uncanny set of recent shorts in which JOSH MELNICK trains a highspeed high-definition excruciatingly slow-motion digital camera upon wayfarers on the New York city subway, staring, positively dumbstruck, at nothing in particular.

5:00 pm
A similar pairing, as in the above, this time two vantages of life on earth; the first in which the renowned avant garde filmmaker PETER HUTTON, of Bard College, trains his attention on the play of light dappling an Icelandic fjord; and the second in which MATT COOLIDGE, of LA’s Center for Land Use Interpretation (sister institution to David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology) trains his camera out the side of a helicopter for a jaw-dropping twenty-minute single-take survey of Houston’s petrochemical channel, arguably the most ecstatically industrialized swath of real estate in the world.


SESSION III

6:30 pm
New York Times scent critic CHANDLER BURR (The Emperor of Scent and The Perfect Scent: A Year inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York), singing the Nose Fantastic, which is to say plumbing the still mind-boggling mysteries involved in how it is that we smell anything at all (complete with blotter-swatch demonstrations).

7:30 pm
Entomologist Extraordinaire MAY BERENBAUM of the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana (Ninety Nine Gnats, Nits and Nibblers; Bugs in the System; and The Earwig’s Tale: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-Legged Legends), who in honor of the evening’s festivities will consider Insects that Ape Shit (which is to say exceptionally novel, if creepy, insect disguises).

8:30 pm
HAMILTON MORRIS, the disconcertingly enterprising young pharmacopia correspondent of Vice Magazine, will round out the evening by reporting on all manner of oddities (penis mushrooms, Amazonian frog sweat, etc.) that he has ingested and that you might want to avoid.

Times above are approximate at best.

* SPECIAL NOTE *
{We hope as many of you as possible will be able to spend the day with us, feasting on the Wonder Cabinet in its entirety. However, should you be unable to stay for the whole program, we strongly recommend that you come for each session in full—you’ll understand why when you do.}

Nearest Subway Lines to Cantor Film Center,
located at 36 East 8th Street (btw University Pl. & Greene St.),
(with caveat to check MTA's weekend service advisories prior to heading over!)
A, C, E, B, D, F, V to West 4th Street (6th Ave.)
R, W to 8th St.--NYU (Broadway)
6 to Astor Place

For further information, visit www.nyih.as.nyu.edu or contact the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU at nyih.info@nyu.edu

You can find out more about the event by clicking here. You can find out more about Weschler's inestimable Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder by clicking here. To find out more about the Museum of Jurassic Technology, click here.

Image: A micromosaic by Henry Dalton shown at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, found here.

Happy Halloween!!!

Images found on the Flickr's Vintage Halloween photo-pool, in the collection of "riptheskull."

Happy Halloween!!