Living dangerously
No one here at the GFG-Batesville Shard volunteered to do this gig, so we’ve sent along the work experience lad. Probably the last we’ll see of him. The venue is the Royal College of Art. Coco de Mer stock a range of mischiefmaking Valentine’s Day gifts — if you’re just waking up to the imminence […]
Hot and noisy
From time to time we consider the purpose of a funeral as an event which enables mourners to express complex, disorderly emotion. Funerals in countries untouched by, or resistant to, chilly Nordic Protestant norms of self-restraint are notable for an exuberance which chilly Nords tend to regard as unbefitting, chaotic and emotionally incontinent. It’s not […]
Publishing event of the year!
The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, […]
“You’re born alone, you die alone and in between you cheat yourself out of that realisation as agreeably as you can.” Robert Lenkiewicz
Posted by Rupert Callender of the Green Funeral Company Claire and I spent the last day of August At Torre Abbey on the seafront at Torquay, seeing an exhibition called Death and the Maiden, featuring the work of the painter Robert Lenkiewicz. To the uninitiated, Robert was a flamboyant Plymouth based artist, instantly recognisable by […]
Thanatos meets Eros on an electric flower car
Hiring young women to strip at a funeral ceremony might strike some as scandalous, but for many in Taiwan it is an important part of the grieving process. The practice sees scantily clad women on “electric flower cars,” diesel trucks refashioned with a stage and special lighting), erotically gyrating to pop songs as a means […]
It takes two taboos
The connection between sex and death is well known. If you want to muse on it further, there’s a pretty good article in the Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying. If you don’t, please don’t read the rest of this post. It’s dirty, you’ll think. Offensive. Come back tomorrow. Which brings us, with a single bound, […]
LGBT
Partners Mike Konigsfeld and Tom Brandl in Cologne, Germany have designed a coffin for gay male funerals. If you look carefully you can see that it is festooned with muscly naked men. There’s no doubting the business sense behind the idea. As Mike says, “People are cutting back in the recession but the one group […]
Going down
This from the monochrom website: In the age of data mining, a person’s sex life may contain less embarrassing details than their web search history. Does it make sense that the former is a tightly guarded secret while the latter is shared with anonymous corporations daily? Even though a sexual nature is one of the […]
Don’t cry for me, Libitina
I’m not ashamed to admit it (I’ve never mistaken myself for someone with a brain), I’d never heard of Libitina til this morning. You? Libitina. The Roman goddess of death, corpses and funerals. Gave her name to Roman undertakers: libitinii. She was, if I may quote from m’learned friend Wikipedia, a “black robed, dark winged […]
Sex and death
I’ve never been able to get the connection between sex and death. I once met an academic at a conference who was heavily into it, but in a visceral rather than a cerebral way, so it seemed. That there’s a whole psychopathology here is not in doubt. It’s passed me by, leaving me feeling […]
