Taxidermy

Sometimes things done really badly give a much better insight into what they're about than things done really well. The aims and ideas are clumsily and charmingly on show where subtlety and skill efface them to produce something that looks 'natural'. Bad taxidermy is a particularly charming example. Partly because all taxidermy is so doomed to failure, it's just a matter of degree. There are some wonderful essays on taxidermy at ravishing beasts.

Things to do with dead physicists

Yes, yes, you can make a statue of them and then put their remains inside the statue. Alternatively, you can make a giant asymetrical space shuttle and let them drift around in space (Lebbeus woods' design for Einstein's tomb) - or you can make a gigantic cenotaph with holes in the domed roof in the pattern of the constellations (Etienne-Louis Boullée's Cenotaph for Newton). When Newton died, he was the first scientist in England ever to get a tomb as good as a poet. You wait a few years, and now no one's interested in dead poets drifting in space. (More here and here, and a beautiful collection of giant spheres at cabinet here).

Pilates Motivation

This is Joseph Pilates showing how it's done. This is exactly what it will be like. And if it's not, they're not doing it right.

Dust cover for dog

Continuing the dog obsession. Via futility closet.

Cabin

The unabomber's cabin - beautiful photos by Richard Barnes.

Part of the fascination with this cabin is the fact that the entire 10 by 12 foot structure and contents was transported across the country to be used as evidence in the trial. Later it sat in storage for a while before finally being installed as an exhibit in the classily named 'newseum' in Washington D.C. There is something a bit magic about the place of the cabin in the wilderness in the imagination. On the one hand it signifies bucolic peacefulness, simple living, communion with nature, and a haven from the corruption of society. On the other hand, the very same qualities that make it so much about purity, nature, tranquility - it's isolated, has no running water or electricity - are also summoned as unarguable evidence of the dangerous, seditious, 'life of a mad hermit'...

Interesting observations on this here and here.

Textile tree

A slide displaying a fragment of ancient textile which belongs in the things like trees collection. From the archaeological museum with this mysterious instruction on the door:

Strange and beautiful things

It's been too long, hasn't it? Here are this afternoon's beautiful things - from the archaeological museum, which is made almost entirely out of relflective surfaces and is accidentally beautiful.