The members of the Order of the Good Death are all magical fairies, spreading sparkling death acceptance dust o’er the children’s eyes at night.
Reading that sentence back I realize I’m making them sound creepy. They’re not. Ugh, whatever, in any case, here are some of the fabulous projects the Order members are up to this month.
Bess Lovejoy, who has written for The New York Times, The Believer, The Boston Globe, and The Stranger has her first book coming out on March 12th. It’s called Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses.
In the long run, we’re all dead. But for some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer’s office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, skulls, hearts, lungs, and nether regions have embarked on voyages that crisscross the globe and stretch the imagination.
Mary Roach (author of Stiff) called it “A tasty, sharp, wonderfully unusual book. I enjoyed it like a jar of perfect dill pickles: when the mood strikes, nothing else will satisfy.”
Oh no big deal, just Mary Roach comparing Bess’s book to a tasty jar of pickles. (oh.mai.gawd.)
Bess will be tweeting/Facebooking for the Order next week about the corpses of all kindsa famous dead folk. You can buy the bookling HERE.
Our resident post-mortem fashion designer Pia Interlandi has a documentary of her work airing on ABC Australia on March 26th. Watch the preview HERE. Hopefully it will be coming to England, iTunes, and film festivals in the next year.
Pia’s work is not just about dressing the dead, there are countless layers (dress pun) of thought and philosophy behind what she does. I haven’t seen the full documentary yet but I honestly cannot wait.
Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris, medical historian of all things dark, gloomy, and deathy is launching a campaign to raise money for a full feature-length documentary called “Medicine’s Dark Secrets.”
We have access to restricted medical and forensic collections, filled with jars of body parts that have been sliced, diced and catalogued for scientific research. But, what about the people who make up these collections? Who are these specimens?
We think it is important to tell the stories of these people who died, as well as the surgeons who cut open their bodies, so that these collections do not remain concealed, misinterpreted and misunderstood.
If I had $1,000 to spare, you bet your skull I would be throwing down on tea and syphilis cupcakes with Lindsey and the curator of the Bart’s Pathology Museum in London. Watch the video and donate HERE.
Expert on the #FUTURE of our corpses, Dr. John Troyer is bringing a merry band of deathxperts to Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) for a panel on death and technology, Platforms for Haunting: The Talking Dead.
If you’re in Austin this Saturday, the 9th, and not riding the hipster train to clusterfuck town, come say hello to John!
Bringing together experts in human remains, memorialisation and new technology this Panel will explore our relationship with mortality in a digital age. The discussion will draw on recent projects which have used new technology to augment cemeteries, populate historic sites with ghosts of their past and instigate twitter conversations with a 1,610 year old woman.
Filmmaker Will Slocombe’s new film Pasadena will premiere as one of the closing night features of the Sarasota Film Festival in April. Will wrote and directed the film, which stars important actors and hits all kindsa fantastic emotional notes. Check out this article in Indiewire about the prestigious company he is in.
Thanksgiving for the eccentric Turner clan, presided over by eminent scholar and patriarch, POPPY (Peter Bogdanovich) turns into a train wreck when “insane” daughter NINA (Alicia Witt) pays her first visit home in 15 years. Nina immediately clashes with her stepmother DEBORAH (Cheryl Hines), and soon locks horns with her sister LINDSAY (Sonya Walger), ultimately spilling a secret from Lindsay’s past that could wreck her marriage. Meanwhile, Nina’s half-brother, JACOB (Ashton Holmes), owes $228,000 to a loan shark who threatens to kill Jacob’s girlfriend unless he ponies up. All the kids need money, fast, but Poppy has his own bad news — he’s dead broke.
Bless all of their black hearts for the wonderful work they’re doing. Every day it is an honor to be associated with the members of the Order and the impending death revolution. Just kidding, there’s not really a death revolution! Or IS there? *shifty eyes*