What I'm reading

Necrophilia Variations, Supervert

Centrifuge

The totally awesome Centrifuge Brain Project via Swiss Miss.

Take a ride

Euthanasia Coaster from Julijonas Urbonas on Vimeo.
I came across this sometime ago, and I just love it. I can't remember what I was googling when I found it. Maybe euthanasia?

“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasant, elegant and ritualistic. Celebrating the limits of the human body but also the liberation from the horizontal life, this ‘kinetic sculpture’ is in fact the ultimate roller coaster: John Allen, former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once sad that “the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know.”

[READ]

Be a death revolutionary

My latest post on Forbes is an interview with Caitlin Doughty, who works with the dead.

You’re easy on the eyes. Do people ever get turned on because you work with the dead?

I get comments like, “You give [me] rigor mortis,” which are weirdly flattering but also totally skeevy. But sex and death, eros and thanatos, are two sides of the same coin.

[READ]

A love song for Jeffrey Dahmer

Over on True/Slant, I interviewed singer-songwriter Dudley Saunders about his serial killer love track, "Love Song for Jeffrey Dahmer."

"The second thought is that, when I hit New York, I felt like a ghost to myself, like I could look in the mirror and not see anybody there. I had no idea who I was, and I knew I was forbidden to find out. But somehow I got this sense that the things that made me scared or uncomfortable or upset were like little signposts to who I really was, and if I could only go straight into those things, I might find out what was hiding in there."

[True/Slant]

The fat of the land

"The exhibition takes its title from the central sculpture in the exhibition, a severed bull’s head with golden horns and crowned with a solid gold disc. Suspended in formaldehyde and encased in a golden vitrine, this totemic sculpture acts as a powerful coda to The Golden Calf (2008). End of an Era proffers a sacrificial head, here dismembered from the majestic body of the earlier sculpture. While The Golden Calf symbolized the worshipping of a false idol, with End of an Era (2009) Hirst demystifies the biblical tale and, by extension, debunks his own myth-making."

-- Trend.Land

Sultan

A friend emailed me today to tell me that Larry Sultan died. Sultan was an amazing photographer, and a hero of mine. He was only 63. This is sadness.

While the SFGate obit fairly buried it, Sultan was, IMO, perhaps best known for the series that he shot in The Valley, the San Fernando Valley, the adult movie industry to be exact. See?

He really captured the tragic beauty of that world. And maybe some of its majesty. I am sad that someone who saw something rare is no longer here to show us more of it.