Blog discoveries for June

Arts, Humanities, Culture:

PAUVRE PLUME

Art History, Old Books, Vintage Style:

ephemera assemblyman
The Flapper Girl

Fashion:

Easy Fashion
FABULON
Nothing Elegant
The Sartorialist
Urban Style

Design, Tech, Advertising:

Words and Eggs

Art Collections:

the art of memory

Nude & Erotic Art:

THE NAKED IN THE ART

Food:

The Museum of Food Anomalies

Fg is for Franklin Gothic

The Periodic Table of Typefaces by Squidspot.

Via feuilleton.

Existential funny pages

Surprisingly brilliant: Garfield Minus Garfield.

Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.

Via The Office of Eternal Distractions at Hanttula.

Two upcoming Observatory events

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TONIGHT:

Cuerpo Presente: Mourning and Cultural Representations of Death in Mexico, Featuring a Collection of Postmortem Photographs from Rural Mexico

Salvador Olguin

Date: Friday June 26th
Time: 7:30 PM
Admission:Free

The main purpose of this event is to present a series of postmortem photographs taken between the 1930’s and the 1950’s, when the tradition of celebrating a person’s departure with a last picture was very alive in small towns and villages in Mexico. A brief journey through some of Mexico’s cultural and artistic ways of celebrating death will provide the frame and background for a better understanding of these images.

Bio: Salvador Olguin holds a MA in Humanistic Studies, and is currently performing research on the subject of the body and its representations at New York University. He is primarily interested in studying cultural artifacts that depict the body in non-normative, unusual ways. He was born in Monterrey, Mexico and currently resides in Brooklyn.





Thursday:

Bodies Embalmed by Us NEVER TURN BLACK!: A Brief History of the Hyperstimulated Human Corpse.

John Troyer, Ph.D., Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath

Date: Thursday July 2nd
Time: 7:30 PM
Admission: Free

In October 1902, Dr. Carl Lewis Barnes and his brother Thornton H. Barnes, both instructors at the Chicago College of Embalming, created a large exhibition of embalmed corpses and body parts for the National Funeral Directors Association in Milwaukee, WI. The Barnes brothers’ exhibit featured human specimens preserved with Bisga Embalming Fluid—a product invented and produced by Dr. Barnes for consumer use by other embalmers. The centerpiece of the exhibit was the Bisga Man, an embalmed male corpse sitting upright in a chair with one leg crossed over the other, wearing a fashionable suit.

In early twentieth century America, the Bisga Man represented the perfect nexus of mid to late nineteenth century preservation technologies that were to radically redefine the organic existence of the human corpse. Such preservation technologies represent a series of overlapping choices, embalming chemicals, apparatus, and funeral practices all intent on keeping the dead body looking ‘‘properly’’ human. Yet these external forces acting on the human corpse do much more than alter the chemical physiology of the dead body to suspend decomposition: through these forces, the concept of human death itself is simultaneously being altered.

Troyer’s talk analyses and critiques how the modern human corpse became an invented and manufactured consumer product through the industrialization of the dead body in mid nineteenth century America. More specifically, this talk illustrates how the modern human corpse is an invention of specific mid nineteenth century embalming and photographic technologies that seemingly stopped the visible effects of death as they were seen by the general public.

Bio: John Troyer is the Death and Dying Practices Associate at the Centre for Death and Society in the University of Bath, England. He received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society in May 2006. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Technologies of the Human Corpse, ” was awarded the University of Minnesota’s 2006 Best Dissertation Award in the Arts and Humanities. From 2007-2008 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University teaching the cultural studies of science and technology. Within the field of Death Studies, John focuses on delineating and defining the concept of the dead human subject. His research on death and dying, coupled with a cultural studies approach to understanding the global history of science and technology, brings new life to the Centre for Death and Society. His first book, shockingly titled Technologies of the Human Corpse, will appear in 2010. His father is a funeral director.

Both events are at the Observatory event space between the Proteus Gowanus Gallery and Reading Room, the Cabinet Magazine headquarters, and the Morbid Anatomy Library at 543 Union St. in Brooklyn.

Small worlds

Eerie little snow globes and other disturbing miniature scenes of isolation and unrest by Thomas Doyle.

Via Bioephemera.





Enchanted snow globes and island dioramas by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz.

From alien landscapes to wonder cabinets

Josh Foer of the Athanasius Kircher Society and Dylan Thuras of Curious Expeditions have teamed up to launch the Atlas Obscura, an ambitious, user-driven catalog of curiosities, wonders, and oddities around the world.

The Garden of Noisy Roses and other attractions

Radiant Copenhagen. An expansive alternate reality of future Copenhagen, as created through Google mapping and Wiki fiction.

Via io9.

Random collections

Memory Palace. Assemblage art by Shiralee Saul.

Home sweet home

Welcome to the new digs! Blue Tea is now hosted on my own space at http://deeplyblue.com/bluetea. Kindly update any links you may have — and thanks for sticking around while I aestivated.

I thought with the move I would be switching to WordPress or another platform, but as I tried them out I noticed I was harboring resentment for them not working like Blogger, and finally realized that it was because I actually wanted to keep using Blogger. Rather, I wanted to keep using the old style Blogger, before they updated it so you could hardly customize anything any more. I like the look I have, so I'm sticking with it.

So the platform's not changing, but a few other things are. For one, the formatting and timing of the posts: they'll be shorter and much more frequent. The links are also getting a bit of a shakeup, mostly some new additions in new categories (check out the new "Museums & Collections" section after "Blogs"). Also, you may have noticed I am now blogging under my real name. No one could pronounce "bluewyvern" anyway.

Again, thanks for your support and interest during my recent dry spell. I wasn't dead, just resting my eyes. Time to get moving now.