3rd eye for the artist guy

A bizarre, almost Frankensteinian art story appeared this week from the Associated Press. A New York University arts professor has had a video camera implanted in the back of his head as part of an art project titled "The Third I."

Here are several excerpts from the report, illustrated with a photo of Bilal (above, right) and images of third eyes from various sources:

"Wafaa Bilal, a visual artist widely recognized for his interactive and performance pieces, had a small digital camera implanted in the back of his head - all in the name of art.

"Bilal said Tuesday that he underwent the procedure for an art project that was commissioned by a new museum in Doha, Qatar, in the Arab Gulf.

"Bilal, who is teaching three courses this semester at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, will wear the camera for one year. It is 2 inches in diameter and less than an inch thick.

"He said he chose to have it put in the back of the head as an allegorical statement about the things we don't see and leave behind.The back of Peter Lorre's head from the 1955 sci-fi TV movie "Young Couples Only."

"The camera will capture his everyday activities at one-minute intervals 24-hours a day and then be transmitted to monitors at the museum, said curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath of Art Reoriented, who commissioned Bilal on behalf of the museum.

Art by Simon Jones. Image found here.

"Many of his previous works have invited debate and controversy.

"In a recent live performance piece titled "...and Counting," Bilal had his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty. Bilal, whose brother was killed by a missile at an Iraqi checkpoint in 2004, used the piece to highlight how the deaths of Iraqis are largely invisible to the American public. The dots for the Iraqis were represented by green UV ink only visible under black light, while Americans were represented by permanent ink."

A tattoo by Fun Size Design found at the Creative Design Magazine website.

To read the entire article on Bilal and his implanted camera, go here.

Sideshow souvenir card of Bill Durks; the middle "eye" is painted in. Image found here.

More news of the melding of a camera with the human head came to my attention at the same time, in a bit of very striking synchronicity. Last month, the website of art/fashion blogger Scott Best posted photos of a working pinhole camera, created by artist/photographer Wayne Martin Belger, that is made from a human skull:
To see more about this eerie-but-fascinating "must have"art piece for the seriously strange shutterbug, go here.

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This prosthetic 3rd eye can be purchased here.

When it snows, it pours...

I looked out my front door and the wind is blowing very hard. AND it's snowing--completely horizontally! I've never seen snow going totally sideways before!

When there's snow on the roads, you need salt. You could ask these guys where to find it:

The Salt Men of Iran

Here's the severed head of one of 'em with an educational message about this link:

OMG DEPT.: Toys for Ta-tas

Seen on the marquee of a strip club in California:

News item and photo source found here.

Photo: Andy Wright. Image source: Huffington Post

Meet Grandma!

Meet grandma Isobel Varley, who at 72, is the oldest tattooed lady on the planet, according to the Guinness Book Of World Records. These Reuters News Service photos were taken at the "Il Expotatoo" event held last month in Gijon, Spain.




I think I would have thought her to be pretty cool as a kid-- until it came time to give granny a kiss! It's that tattooed scalp--as a tot I think it woulda scared me!

But Grandpa would have said not to worry:

Grandpa was mellow...

Porn that isn't pornographic?

Thanks to the site Found on the Web, I've just seen a hilarious ad from the Italian fashion firm Diesel. It's a video montage that takes porn clips and seemingly makes them "safe for work" by overlaying (pun intended) cartoon animation on top of the naughty bits. What's implied is definitely NSFW, but IS very funny. For immature mature audiences.

(It's an old post at FOTW, but hey -- as a severed head I can't get around fast.)

See "Safe for Work XXX" here.

Odd names of real people

I have family back in my home state of Arkansas, and I get reports from home. This week I was told that a man named "Anos Arkangel" was listed in the local court dockets! His body part homonym made me think of the old joke about Elvis Presley and his nickname: "You know how they call Elvis 'the Pelvis'? Well, he's got a brother named Enos."

Wonder if Anos Arkangel's appellation is his birth name, or a self-applied one? Bet it's the latter.

Also in my home town there's a guy named "Sunshine Mudhole." (I bet that ain't HIS birth name, either!)

But ya never know. I remember going to school with a girl with the first name of Bambi, and another with the last name of Crapser. (I'd hate for her to be stopped by a male State Trooper: "What's your name, ma'am? Crap, sir.") And when I was a kid I knew a fella named Hugh Monger--of course, sometimes he got called "Humongous." There also was a man with the last name of Batman listed in the phone book.

My parents and grandparents have all sworn to me that they knew a girl named America Mae Riddicky Biddicky Joshuaway Arlena. Oddly, no one remembers her last name.

And I grew up with family members with the names "Othar" and "Monk"--names I like very much for their distinctiveness. (People with unusual names often seem to hate them when they are children, but appreciate them as adults.) When I was a child, I knew no one outside my family with the name Max. I hated it--then.

However, maybe none of this should be surprising, since my home state has towns named Old Joe, Toad Suck, Bull Shoals, Yellville, Gassville, and Flippin! But I'm not being insulting. I love the fact that Arkansas has some colorful town names--I wish it had more!

In Memphis, TN, when I lived there, were doctors Oliver Hardy and Vincent Price (the latter actually a dentist!).

And news came out this week that jazz singer/songwriter Blossom Dearie has died. (And yes, that was her real name.)

But for sheer weirdness, little beats the cruelty of Frank Zappa: he named two of his kids "Moon Unit" and "Diva Muffin."

Well, except for naming your kid "Adolph Hitler."

Sheesh.


Relevant link: Baby Name Games

The maddest scientist living!

Though the subject line might make you think I refer to an angry climatology scientist ignored by the Bush administration-- there were a lot of 'em, apparently--I actually refer to this guy, Dr. Gunther Von Hagens:

Von Hagens is the pathologist who invented plastination, a process that preserves animal tissue through the replacement of water in the tissue with polymer. This has led to the use of plastic dead people supplementing traditionally-preserved cadavers in anatomy classes in medical schools. More famously (or infamously, depending on your viewpoint), Von Hagen's silicone stiffs have been displayed as art and sent out on tours of exhibition.

[A note of caution: There are pictures below the text that follows which may be upsetting to those sensitive to gore and images of the dead. Do not scroll down much further if the pictures above were distasteful to you.]

Why do I post about Von Hagens now? Well, I'd recently posted a link to an article at the blog Oddee on the "Top 10 Mad Scientists in History," and was a bit surprised not to see a mention of Von Hagens. His exhibition of fractionated and posed bodies, and his public autopsy (controversially broadcast live in England) earned him the sobriquet "Frankenstein"-- and I'm fascinated by all things Frankensteinian. This apellational analogy he disputes. As reported by the BBC, VonHagens has said, "In all human history - except for the renaissance - the human body was always exploited for disgusting feelings. I'm doing the opposite. Those plastinates show the beauty of our body interior. I break with the tradition of Frankenstein." (Maybe-- but many folks do report "disgusting feelings" after viewing his post-mortem handiwork, though I'm not one of them.) And I post on Von Hagens now partly because I was trolling through old photo files in my computer -- and found the pictures used in this post. (I don't know where they came from, but will give credit if notified, or remove if requested by the owners of the photos.)

Also, as a modest collector of monster toys and collectables, I have a fascination with "plastic dead men," as fellow collector Joseph Fotinos (a/k/a Prof. Griffin) calls his monster figures. I have pondered, with mixed feelings, on the fact that Von Hagens has turned the human body into a kind of plastic toy for display to curious adults. (Some of the "plastinates" also remind me of jack o' lanterns; both have generic faces, and both have been carved up for show.)

Von Hagens, as a man who has often been called 'Dr. Frankenstein' in the press, has also vilified for making "monstrous" creations, as in these anonymously posted comments at a BBC website:

"Von Hagens has displayed his plastinates in a manner in which all internal organs - nerves, blood vessels and bones - can be viewed by the public, thereby giving an insight into the human body...Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesal, the two outstanding anatomical artists of the Renaissance, used anatomical drawings to better understand the workings of the human body. Von Hagens is fascinated by their work, but wrote 'Neither illustrations nor models can convey the individual beauty of these structures to us, for the source of truth is in the originals' and so has taken their work a stage further. Salvador Dali's painting 'Burning Giraffe' portrays a woman standing on stilts with drawers in her legs and torso. Von Hagens has recreated Dali's nightmare in a grotesque manner as 'Drawer Man' using a stout male corpse. The recreation of Dali's work is exploiting the human body; it has resulted in something purely fictitious taken from Dali's dreams being made into something real. Although Dali's painting is disturbing there is something genuinely monstrous about von Hagens taking a real human body and creating a storage unit from it."

For some, this objectifcation of dead flesh is reminiscent of human souvenirs found at Buchenwald. But not all use of human flesh for making objects has been as widely condemned. There is a controversial precedent in the use of human tissue for mixed educational and artistic purposes: creating books from the skin of the dead. A number of prestigious libraries have several such books. (My wife might think that would be a good use for my shortened carcass when I have passed on. She can already read me like a book now!)

Do I object to the display of voluntarily donated plasticized bodies? Well, no, not strongly. I was raised by a physician father who told me anecdotes of his days in medical school and who had graphic textbooks and slides. His work conveyed to me the message that seeing the human body dispassionately and with curiosity (even damaged, malformed or dead ones) was not wrong, if one had compassion for others.

Besides, this is like some movie starring a Boris Karloff-type mad scientist crossed with the plot of House of Wax or Bucket of Blood--I can't help being intrigued by it all. (Speaking of House of Wax, it turns out that Von Hagens is not the first medically-trained man to find a way preserve bodies in a way that would allow for posed display; a man named Honore Fragonard was similarly controversial for preserving bodies with a special injected wax--and this was 200 years before Von Hagens!)

But there has been a larger, legitimate concern: whether or not any of the bodies displayed were executed prisoners. Five years ago Von Hagens was criticized for not being certain that all his cadavers were voluntarily donated, and after some bad publicity about his Chinese plastination plant he did return a few bodies to the authorities that had bullet wounds to the head, and the bodies were buried. (He admitted he couldn't be certain they weren't prisoners.)

Some say exhibits like Von Hagens' desensitize people and make them less compassionate. Do they really? I don't know the answer to that. I had mixed feelings when I saw the rival Bodies exhibition that toured the U.S. last year. (I wrote about it here and here.) I felt some horror, but I've enjoyed movies that create similar feelings ever since I was small. I am wrong to have liked films like Psycho or Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte? I know they are fiction, but they depict violent acts that really do happen. Should people only view scenes that are uplifting? I say, "No."

Are pathologists just naturally an odder lot than their fellow physicians? Probably not, but when I think of Von Hagens, I also think of eccentric pathologist Dr. Jack Kevorkian, (a/k/a "Dr. Death"), the man on a mission to kill suicidal terminally ill people. Both are passionate about their causes (or, arguably, business, in Von Hagens' case), and both have demonstrated a love of odd headgear (Von Hagens is never seen without a black fedora, and Kevorkian once wore a powdered wig to his trial on second-degree murder charges.) But I associate the two mainly because I've wondered if the two shouldn't hook up--Kevorkian could "supply the meat", and Von Hagens could be "the boy who buys the beef"(to quote an old rhyme about body snatchers Burke and Hare and their customer, Dr. Knox.)

Finally, the photos and some related links:

Related links:

The Gunther Von Hagens website.

Marc Steinmetz Photography: A collection of professional photos taken at Von Hagens' plant, along with the photographer's thoughts on what he observed.

A petition to stop von Hagens.

An interview with Von Hagens.

It's all about family

Now that Jane and I are settled (more or less) into our new home, we are beginning to think of long-range plans for our lives. Jane was adopted as a baby, and so we've wondered if we wanted to adopt. Recently, at a hospital maternity ward, we saw the CUTEST baby, and we so wanted to have him as our own:

The baby even resembles members of my own family! Below, from the days before I was a drunken severed head, are pictures of a young cousin coming to visit me in my home in St. Louis. First, a photo of us being movie-watchin' couch potatoes:


And a pic of a farewell handshake:

Sadly, my cousin's wrist stitches were loose and his hand popped off in my palm! (I'm known to pop off on occasion myself-- especially after having Popov!) Luckily, Cuz's paw was later put back on by his doctor.

Apparently, losing body parts (hands, heads, etc.) runs in my family...

Oh, to be rid of winter clothes!

Buried as I am under a woolen cap to keep me warm, I dream of being as warm as model Bettie Page appears to be in the "nature study" photo at this link:

http://quixotando.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/morreu-bettie-page-1923-2008/

If the photo does not appear immediately, click on the name "Bettie Page" and you'll see Bettie in all her glory!

Latest political tactic

I'm shadowed by the press everywhere I go! But this works to my advantage sometimes. Here's an example--

So I'm in a strip club the other night with Allen's Brain after a hard day of campaigning, enjoying all the sights of den of dancing iniquity. Nothing like plentiful pulchritude* to stimulate the soul and tantalize the flesh (even as little flesh as the Brain and I possess.)

The Brain asked me why I wouldn't look at this one lovely beauty when she'd writhe sexily on a mirrored support beam. It was because I had to see my own ugly pan and neck stump reflected. So I snapped very loudly, "The poles show I'm a head!"

Now today in the local paper the gossip columns are saying I have secret data showing me getting more support than Obama or McCain. Ah, a chance to craft a feeling of inevitability for my campaign!

I just have to visit strip clubs in all the states with large votes in the Electoral College.

For fun, here's a captioned newspaper photo of me the last time I tried to find a polling place while intoxicated:


I did wonder about the smell of the polling place at the time...Still, I was in a heavenly daze for a few short moments, before landing and conking my coconut!





* Look it up after you look up "iniquity."

Vetting a veep possibility

Over at his blog, Allen's Brain, I asked the bottle blue brain about his past. You can see his answer there, but I'm cross-posting the answers here in the interests of transparency.

That, and because it gives me free material for this blog.

Max TDSH: I think I may choose YOU to be my running mate. Anything embarrassing in your past I should know about?

Allen's Brain: Um, not since I gave up my body.

There is my somewhat unpopular stance on stem cell research and genetic engineering, of course. How do our constituents feel about my atomic super-race of Lizard Men?

Additionally, I'm not only in favor of global warming, I'm causing it--to better help my asparagus men to grow.

If that's too much for the voters, may I suggest the pickled head of Peter Lorre?

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TDSH readers, send in more questions for me to ask this contained cerebrum!