Mad science: They saved Michael Jackson's brain!

After various reports in the blog-twit ProAm that Jackson would be preserved like Lenin, embalmed like the Chinese prisoners of the traveling Bodies exhibit, or otherwise turned into a freakish display, the late entertainer is, somewhat anti-climactically, going to buried in Los Angeles's Forest Lawn cemetery.

But, it seems, the King of Pop will be shuffling off a few bits of his mortal coil prior to ending up in the cold, cold ground. Reports are that the LA corner's office will be keeping Mr. Jackson's brain topside.

Why? From the Mirror:

Los Angeles Coroner’s spokesman Craig Harvey confirmed that neuropathology tests will be carried out to see if it holds any clues to the exact cause of his death.

But the examination cannot begin until at least two weeks after the death when the brain has hardened sufficiently to slice it open.

Vaughan Bell of the Mind Hacks blog clarifies:

Although this may seem unusual, the 'hardening' process is actually a standard part of any post-mortem examination where the brain is thought to be important in the cause of death, such as in suspected overdose.

It involves removing the brain from the skull and leaving it to soak in a diluted mixture of formaldehyde and water called formalin. This soaking process usually takes four weeks and the brain genuinely does harden.

A 'fresh' brain is a pinkish colour and has the consistency of jelly, gello or soft tofu meaning it is difficult to examine and the various internal structures are often hard to make out.

After soaking the brain, it has the consistency and colour of canned mushrooms making it easier to slice, examine and photograph. However, because the brain is so soft to start with, it can't just be dropped in a tank of fixing solution, because it will deform under its own weight.

To solve the problem it is usually suspended upside down in a large bucket of formalin by a piece of string which is tied to the basilar artery.

After it has 'hardened' or 'fixed' it is sliced to look for clear damage to either the tissue or the arteries. Small sections can also be kept to examine under the microscope.

On hopes the LA corner's office is taking the necessary security precautions to prevent brain-napping. The crime is not without precedence: in 1955, Dr. Thomas Harvey removed Albert Einstein's brain without the permission of Einstein's estate. Harvey sliced the brain into 240 individual sections, doling out a few sections to interested researchers, but keeping the majority in preserving jars at his home. In 1996, after years of negotiation and acrimony, Harvey surrendered the brain to Princeton Hospital in New Jersey.

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Books: Dex gets back to basics.

After an auspicious debut and a sequel that actually improved on the original, the third book in Jeff Lindsay's Dexter series – the popular killer-kills-killers mystery series that inspired the Showtime TV series – was something of a debacle. While the novel contained some of the pleasingly black humor that is the series's hallmark and included a few important series-altering narrative developments, the third novel's unexpected foray into overt supernaturalism was widely considered a mistake and, for the most part, left fans groaning or scratching their heads. I know of more than one fan that swore off the series.

Whether Lindsay also felt that the more blatantly supernatural route was a dead end or he was simply reacting to the overwhelming response from the fan base, the upcoming fourth Dexter novel, Dexter By Design (available in hardcover this September from Doubleday), happily strips the jarring otherworldly elements from the series and returns Miami's most prolific serial killer to the Florida Weird crime comedy he's best at.

For those more familiar with the show than with the books, I'll do a quick recap of the story so far and, hopefully, the differences between the two series will become clear enough.

Dexter Morgan is a Miami PD blood splatter expert. He's also a serial killer. Adopted by a police officer who recognized Dexter for what he was, Dexter was trained to become a rigorously meticulous vigilante, taking out his bloodlust on criminals too clever to be nabbed by conventional means. Dexter's sister, Deborah, is also a police detective. Though she was kept in the dark by both Dex and her now deceased father for most of her life, as the fourth novel opens, Deborah is aware of, but uncomfortable with, what Dexter is.

While working in the police department gives Dexter access to the info and resources he needs to carry on his gory campaign against Miami's criminal population, it also means that he's surrounded by the professionally suspicious. While Dexter's thin façade of bland likeability is enough to throw off most off his co-workers, there are a couple of suspicious cops keeping an eye on him. First and foremost is a former detective named Doakes. Once a formidable officer, Doakes ran afoul of one of Dexter's targets and was left horribly crippled (he's missing some major extremities and has to speak through a Stephen Hawkings-esque voice box). Though no longer a major player in police investigations, Doakes continues to watch Dexter, hoping for a screw up. In one particularly nice bit of characterization, we learn that Doakes has preprogrammed the phrase "I'm watching you, motherfucker" into his voice box to avoid having to type the whole thing out every time he has to say it.

Dexter is newly married to Rita, his long-time girlfriend, and has two children by way of that marriage: his stepdaughter Astor and his stepson Cody. Previously, Dexter recognized that both Astor and Cody exhibit the same barely suppressed homicidal urges that he himself showed as a child. Though the chronically unaware Rita seems oblivious to her children's nascent serial killer drives, Dexter makes it his task train them as his own father trained him.

The fourth novel opens with Dex and Rita on a Paris honeymoon. A quick appetizer before the main course, this short section serves to introduce Dex to new readers and suggest the theme of the new mystery in the form of a violent performance art piece Rita and Dex stumble across. Called Jennifer's Leg, the piece features a young woman – Jennifer, one assumes – removing her leg with a circular saw. Ah, Paris!

Safely back in the land of doughnuts, traffic jams, Cuban ex-pats, and loud Hawaiian print shirts, Dex quickly finds himself put on a case involving a visual artist who is leaving artfully mutilated corpses as part of campaign of civic terror. The investigation into the corpses goes awry when one of the suspects knifes Deb, putting her into a coma due to blood loss.

Dexter may be an emotionless sociopath, but even he understands that violence directed at one's kin demands some level of special attention. Dex does as Dex does and exacts a swift and gory revenge on the morbid installation artist. The end.

Only, for poor Dex, it ain't. Following Dex's swift retribution, he finds out, in rapid succession, that 1) the artist wasn't actually killing people because the bodies were swiped from a local morgue, 2) the artist was not working alone, 3) the artist's two collaborators caught Dexter's vengeance on video, and 4) decide, in the face of Dexter's violence, to escalate their own project to new homicidal heights.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Deb's new partner, a bloated oaf of a man whose outsized frame hides a surprising effective detective's mind, starts to suspect something is amiss with Dex. But he'll have to get in line. Deb's stabbing attracts IA's attention, which means the Internal Affairs is all up in Dex's grill – what with the main suspect in Deb's stabbing going missing and all and Dex's career being one long series of "just happened to be where all the shit went down" incidents. And, for good measure, Doakes uses the possibility that the corpse-installations are serial murders to point out Dexter to a sympathetic FBI agent from the branch office.

Seriously, it's like it isn't even worth being a serial killer some times.

Credulity straining plots and overly elaborate serial killings are par for the series. I can't prove it, but I suspect the number of fans who read the Dexter books as mysteries can be counted on a single hand. Like may post-hardboiled mystery books, plotting takes the place of detection and who the villain is seems less important than how the hero gets to them. For example, in this particular "case" Dexter and Deb's first real lead pays off in just a couple chapters. The series's real draw has always been its bracingly amoral, yet charming narrator – Dexter, himself – and the cognitive dissonance of his bemused detachment from the carnage he witnesses and causes. Unlike the television series, which has made Dexter a more tortured character who is less emotionless than simply profoundly emotionally damaged (a good choice for the show's episodic, soap-ish format), the book's Dexter is a more blithely inhuman creature. There's a degree to which Lindsay is incapable of preventing some humanizing emoting; the task of creating a truly sociopathic character would be impossible for anybody except, I imagine, a sociopath. Emotions are simply too central to everything we understand about characterization and motivation. That said, Lindsay's original Dexter is a far creepier and in some ways a more interesting character. When Lindsay's writing him well, Dexter possesses a sort of internal bright-eyed innocence. Incapable of horror or moral discernment, he grasps ethics and morals the way others attempt to grasp the finer points of good manners: There's a code and Dexter tries to follow it for the sake of easing necessary social interaction, but none of it makes much sense and it all seems kind of silly. (Perhaps the finest example of this occurs in the second book, where Dexter finds himself in the clutches of a torture specialist turned serial dismemberer. Instead of fight-or-flight panic or stoic courage in the face of definitive discomfort, Dexter is simply curious about the techniques that he suspects will be used on him. This light and almost boyish curiosity is made even more grisly by the fact that he's thinking these thoughts while Doakes is getting chopped up in front of him.) Happily, for die-hard loyalists and those fans that may have declared the series dead, this pleasingly twisted Dexter is back in fighting form.

An excellent return to the core values that made the books work so well, Dexter By Design is a welcome addition to the series.

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Music: Meat the Beatles.

Today's link is flagrantly, flamboyantly NSFW – in the truest and most sincere meaning of the acronym.

The Gigwise music site presents a slideshow of 20 disgusting album covers, including the infamously short-lived "butcher cover" of the Beatles' in1966 US only Yesterday and Today LP shown above. This is actually one of the less repulsive covers in the lot. The site's commentary informs us, to nobody's surprise, that it was "John Lennon who pushed for the photo to be used." We didn't think it was Ringo's idea.

Given the tiny sample size, it's a little presumptuous to make generalizations . . . but, hell, I say, let's do it, let's be presumptuous.

Among "genres" of foul ideas, violence – usually depicted as potential or in its aftermath – makes up the largest proportion of the covers. But, curiously, second place goes to poop. Word hounds Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea have pointed out that the English language, "tongue of Shakespeare, Bryon, and Mellville" contains "a puzzling number of words that mean 'to spray with shit.'" This cultural obsession with human waste seems to have carried over into the American cultural innovation of rock and roll. Defecation – human, animal, and human-from-an-animal (deathgrind unit Cattle Decapitation's oh so tasteful Humanure album cover) – is an oddly popular topic for album covers.

Also, there's not one, but two covers (and the commentary mentions a third) featuring the taboo of bestiality. How this subject, which is hardly a major theme of rock, ends up on even a single cover is mystery best answered by minds smarter (or more twisted) than my own.

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Movies: Everything falls into place.

Though the 1970's has been pretty much stripped mined as far as horror cinema diamonds in the rough go, its odd that under appreciated flicks can still be found there. And yet, despite the relentless and meticulous efforts of exploitation era cinema-archeologists, weird good stuff still litters the ground. How are these pieces overlooked? Because much of the myth of 1970s horror cinema rests on a sort of gonzo aesthetic of "batshit crazy," the horror fancy often overlooks that some of the finest '70s era specialized in a sort of ultra low-key, faux social realism that placed a sort of lush squalor before stylishness, bleak minimalism before show-stopping pyrotechnics. Such films were exploitation to the core and pandered in straight-out sleaze as their primary draw, but these flicks also trafficked in a lightly worn documentary feel that gave them an unearned gravitas. This shallow 'realism' didn't make these flicks any smarter of more artistic than their more overtly trite exploitation brethren, but it did mean that they unfurled at a more deliberate pace, included thoughtfully rendered characterization, tonal grace notes, and attracted A-list talent. It has become unfashionable to suggest that some works transcend their genre the same way it has become gauche to suggest that some children are simply brighter than others. Yet, fashionable or not, the fact remains; genre fans are often satisfied with subpar work, and films that both deliver the goods and still go above and beyond the call of duty should be celebrated as doing more than they need to. That's called transcending the genre.

Richard Fleisher's 1971 true-crime serial killer pic 10 Rillington Place is one of those pictures that, though firmly rooted in the traditions of sleazy exploitation, manages to approach something almost Dostoevskyan by allowing the visuals of squalor and the power of two first rate leads to drag the story into affecting human directions it wasn't originally meant to contain.

Based on a much recounted historical incident, the plot of 10 Rillington Place tells the story of a blue collar couple who run afoul of a genuine monster. In the post-war squalor of Austerity Britain, illiterate Tim and Beryl move into a crumbling townhouse in Notting Hill occupied by John Christie. The role of Tim is rendered with pity-inducing inarticulateness by an excellent and shockingly young John Hurt. The cruelly meticulous and avuncular Christie is brought to chilling life by Richard (the old dude in Jurassic Park) Attenborough.

For horror fans, Attenborough's Christie would be enough to recommend the film. Played with dark humor, Attenborough's Christie is at once a ruthless predator and fussy old grump. A passionless unman who covers his pathetic unlife with an endless gloss of lies, he's only filled with energy when raping the corpses of his victims (mostly women who come to him under the misapprehension that he's a former medical man with a special passion for treating female complaints). In many ways, his protean shallowness reminds me of Warren Oates's pathetically mercurial G.T.O. from Two Lane Blacktop, trickster as crippling condition, a man whose great tragedy is that his only pleasures must be fleeting, which dooms him to live in the sharp clawed clutches of a desire greater than his decaying and insufficient frame. Though where G.T.O. is all American tall tale and gregarious banter, Christie is the murderous reflection of British reserve and the famed stiff upper lip. There's a scene is in the film where Christie stands by an old gas light (to save money, you know) talking his victims into their own doom, as the gas sputters with a constant snake hiss. The shot is one of the most perfect in all horror cinema. Attenborough's Christie ranks up with Perkins's Bates, Rooker's Henry, and Hopkins's Lecter. He's that good. Seriously.

The plot is as trashy as they come. The film opens with a sort of intro killing by Christie back during the war. Taking advantage of a wartime blackout, a young seeks Christie's unregulated amateur care. He hooks her up to a homemade gas delivery system, convincing her that it will cure her of her chronic pain condition. When he fight of flight reflex eventually kicks in, she's too weak to fight Christie, who overpowers her, strangles her, and sexually abuses her.

Jump forward: post-war Austerity Britain. The nadir of modern British culture – think Swinging London and then imagine the point furthest from which that can still boast enough infrastructure to support electricity. A time period when the national color was brownish-grey and the chief domestic product was diminished expectations.

A young couple, Tim and Beryl avec infant daughter, move into the Christie's apartment building. Beryl is a stifled ghetto flower whose desire for better things drag the family deeper and deeper into debt. Tim is a semi-alcoholic truck driver with a flair for self-aggrandizing tall tales. Their home life is tempestuous and, perhaps, not quite loving. When Beryl is knock up and with second child, she attempts some pill-delivered remedy of dubious utility. Her attempts at self-medication fail and she ends up confessing her problems to the awkward, but seemingly friendly Mr. Christie. Christie claims to have become familiar with abortion techniques when he served as a special policeman during the war and offers his assistance. Beryl and Christie convince the doubtful Tim to go along with it. (Which leads to the grimmest joke of occasionally darkly sharp flick: Christie rehashes an old joke about delivering babies and recontextualizes it to discuss the planned abortion: "Don't worry Tim; we haven't lost a father yet." Careful listeners might remember the same joke, used to very different effect, in Disney's Lady in the Tramp.)

Shortly thereafter, while Tim is at work and Christie's wife, Ethel, is off on an errand, Christie uses the fiction of his medical prowess to get Beryl up in his apparatus. He gasses and then strangles her. Christie then informs Tim and Ethel that Beryl died during the operation. He convinces Tim it would be wisest to help Christie hide the body and then flee town until such time as Christie can get everything sorted with the police. When Tim asks what will happen to his infant daughter, Christie says he knows of a nice, childless couple that would be happy to care for the girl in the meantime. Tim packs up and flees immediately. With the father gone, Christie takes one of Tim's neckties and strangles the daughter.

The frame up, though hastily constructed, is enough to trap the dim-bulb Tim, who eventually turns himself over the cops for the crime of hiding his wife's body. The cops, of course, want him for the double homicide of Beryl and his daughter. Stunned he confesses, then recants. He's tried, convicted, and hung for murder.

In the months that follow, Christie (whose façade of lower middle-class civility was cracked, but not completely breeched on the witness stand of Tim's trial) and his wife grow estranged. Ethel now knows on a gut level that he's a monster, though the scope and exact details of his crimes are still a mystery to her. For his part Christie increasingly understands that framing Tim was a Pyrrhic victory: he's managed to escape the noose, but at the cost of his home and his sense of safety.

Christie's life quickly spirals out of control. He kills Ethel, kicking off a short string of uncharacteristically sloppy killings. He looses his job and then his house, becoming a homeless drifter. The house's new residents discover the hidden room Christie used to hide the corpses of his post-Tim victims. The police quickly realize their error and launch a manhunt.

Like so many serial killers before and after him, Christie is caught when, during a chance encounter, a beat cop happens to recognize him.

The plot, while lurid, benefits from an odd structure that continues the story long after the "thriller" aspect – centering around the destruction of Tim, Beryl, and their daughter – has past. By giving equal time to the aftermath, both in terms of the legal consequences and the slow decay of Christie himself, the film weds its exploitative and sleazy aspects to a genuinely dramatic framework that emphasizes the dreary fatedness of these characters.

Saving the exercise from completely lapsing into a dreary social realism is the disciplined hand of the vastly underrated Richard Fleischer. Son of the legendary animation producer Max Fleischer, Richard made his early rep cranking out budget-minded and successful film noirs flicks. He then moved on to a series of Disney produced effects-driven actioners, most notably 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the original Doctor Doolittle. However, Fleischer's directorial career shows an astounding range and includes a surprising number of hits and enduring cult classics. Aside from big ticket pics like Tora! Tora! Tora! and the Neil Diamond version of The Jazz Singer, the sci-fi cult classics Fantastic Voyage and Soylent Green both belong to Fleischer. He's also behind Violent Saturday, Compulsion, The Boston Strangler, and the exploitastic Mandingo. Fleischer keeps Rillington moving at a calm, creepy pace, he let's his actors infuse certain scenes with almost Coen brothers-style humor. He also knows when to let the characters inject excruciating levels of pathos into a scene. These emotional tones counterbalance the detached stoicism of the rest of the flick.

10 Rillington Place is one of the better flicks in the serial killer subgenre and I think it deserves to be better known.

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Music: "You know me. I hate everyone."

I haven't seriously thought about Nine Inch Nails since I was in college, some two trillion years ago. There was a brief moment, back then, when it looked like the twin attack of NIN and Ministry was going to push industrial music into the mainstream (including the legally-mandated David Bowie style cop that let's you know when a particular music is ready for mass production). However, just a few years or so after Closer and Psalm 69, it all fizzled and the public started diggin' a resurgent wave of pop and embracing mall punk. Apres le Ministry, Blink 182.

To my shame, I did not keep the faith. I was vaguely aware of NIN's Year Zero album/game/lifestyle-choice whoopjamboreewho – though I caught up to it late in the cycle and it all seemed a bit daunting to come in on the middle.

Given this neglect, I find myself oddly moved by the news that Reznor is calling it quits and shelving the NIN brand. This is, I think, only news to me. After all, his current tour is called the "Wave Goodbye" tour and the merch for contains the one-man-sonic-factory's incep and termination dates (1989 – 2009). Still, my utter invulnerability to the obvious doesn't change the fact that the news saddens me.

So, Screamers and Screamettes, let's wish Mr. Reznor happy trails and enjoy this clip from what is reported to be NIN's last US performance ever, from this year's Bonnaroo.

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Guest Blogger: Zoe on gas mask art.

Screamers and Screamettes, I've asked blogger Zoe Blue, surrealism guru and art fancier, to curate this month's gas mask display. Enjoy.

Gas masks in Art





Delirium:
A disoriented
condition with
clouded consciousness,
often accompanied
by hallucinations,
illusions,
misinterpretations
of events and
a generally confused
quality with reduced capacity to
sustain attention.
(from Victor Koen's Funny Farm alphabet)

From gas masks

"Delirium," by Victor Koen


"The obsession with the "perfect baby" and children who would be progressively more intelligent and fit than the last generation, is an ancient one. Today through genetic technologies, social engineering and developmental psychology we believe we control previously inaccessible natural workings that strongly influence the way children are born, learn and grow...From extreme authoritarian rhetoric to schooling systems of total autonomy. The revolution in reproductive science has come to add yet another dimension to the issue, and blurred the borders between fact and fiction. 'Tasks & Games, portraits of the never young' is a series of 24 portraits, depicting children caught in the middle of the pursuit of perfection before and after their birth....Dramatically lit and staged in traditional photography studio settings, in front of bizarre backdrops or locations that some times overtake their little bodies, or what's left of them, the children are posed with their favorite toys or objects, in their Sunday best. A closer look will reveal signs of severe pain. We get to observe visual renditions of the nightmares they live in, and through them, maybe we face some of our own. They have obviously taken their toll on the kids even if most of them are smiling or smirking. ...The majority of the raw photographic materials originate from the early nineteen hundreds. The children are ...are fused with contemporary objects and environments that seem to consume them. The images are titled after traditional tasks and games. A sharp juxtaposition between the pure nature of old fashioned children activities with scientific methods and their results."

From gas masks

This one is called "Dusting." Victor Koen

From gas masks

"Vanity Study #39" Victor Koen


Another Fine Artist who has some exceptionally creepy images of gas masks is Chris Anthony. He is most famous for his award-winning 2007 series of photographs entitled "Victims and Avengers," which caught women and children at the moment of violently overcoming their abusers. A more recent series, called Venice is, as he describes it, "a metaphor for a sinking city, deserving of nature's wrath, leaving its citizens to tread water and explore new ways to sustain life on aquatic earth." In keeping with his apparent leaning towards--or at least readiness for--apocalyptic moments of reckoning and punishment:

From chris anthony

by Chris Anthony

From chris anthony

by Chris Anthony

I think these are also gas masks, though I'm not an expert...

From gas masks

by Chris Anthony


Fred Einaudi also seems to enjoy apocalyptic themes. He likes to place images of innocence together with images of death and dissolution, and gas masks help express his ideas quite clearly:

From gas masks

"The Button Maker" Fred Einaudi

From gas masks

"Chocolate Donut" Fred Einaudi


Chet Zar has tons of them in his paintings, often with the mask merging into actual flesh, as in an evolutionary mutation. Here's Clown of Doom, and Uncle Sam, and It's All Good:

From gas masks

From gas masks

From gas masks

Moving into more political territory, we have street graffiti artists. A minor amount of wandering on the web gave me all kinds of commentary on why gas masks are so popular in this art form: graffiti artists often have to be very quick, so rapidly understood symbolism is a must, and the gas mask is easily seen as representative of government oppression (riot police-- so also as a symbol of preparedness for engagement with them), the effects of social violence but also environmental violence, and general dehumanization (facelessness). Greg Nog says, "It's a perfect symbol for anyone fearing the impending decay of civilization." A comment which would also fit nicely next to the Chris Anthony photos or the Fred Einaudi paintings.

From gas masks

Cellist with gas mask: a photo by smiling bag production from stenciled graffiti in Tel Aviv. There's a whole series here: http://www.bigartmob.com/meta/artist/Smiling%20Bag%20Production/ .

From gas masks

Bansky

Here, Nicole Dolly made her own, gothic, version of a gas mask, I assume for clubbing (or maybe just so when the day comes, you can maintain your style):

From gas masks

And onward into full-blown sculpture, here is "Dystopian Art by Yanobe Kenji: Mickey the Knight:"

From gas masks

This was actually a commissioned work, commissioned for Disneyland's 50th anniversary celebration in 2005. Strangely, they didn't actually end up displaying it. Yanobe Kenji has several other sort of terrifying child-centered sculptures which use gas masks. You can see his work here:
http://www.yanobe.com/works.html
Apparently, though, he actually got the idea for this sculpture by reading his history books. According to a gasmasklexikon article written by Major Robert D. Walk:

"The Mickey Mouse Gas Mask was produced as part of the war production program. The Sun Rubber Company produced approximately 1,000 Mickey Mouse gas masks and earned an Army-Navy ‘E’ for excellence in wartime production in 1944. Overall, production of the Noncombatant Gas Masks (and in fact, all gas masks) was one of the most successful production programs of the war. In fact, production had to be curtailed early due to the vast quantity produced."
More on this creepiness is available here:
http://www.gasmasklexikon.com/Page/USA-Mil-Mikey.htm

From gas masks

In case the mask itself isn't enough for you, I'll leave you with this extended version:

From gas masks

Sweet dreams!

--zoe

Zoe's own mind-warpingly beautiful blog, Zoe in Wonderland is worth checking out. Go forth and dig hard, my friends.

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Meta: My better half.

Pictured above, standing in front of the art section of McNally Jackson: SoHo's finest source for vendible books, are me and my lovely wife. She's the one on the right.

No, your right.

While I'm normally one to avoid this sort of self-display – after all, you didn't come here to read about me – I have to mark the occasion of our anniversary.

Thanks Jess. I love you.

As for the Screamin' fancy, come back tomorrow. We'll, um, I don't know, do Jeepers Creepers 2 or something.

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