BigShinyThing

Deyrolle was founded 177 years ago by Jean-Baptiste Deyrolle, an eminent entomologist, but recently a short circuit triggered a fire in the shop. The disaster has galvenised a Parisian-style rescue effort.

French soldiers on a routine patrol smelled the smoke and tried to secure the building. They were joined by dozens of firefighters and hundreds of police officers in battling the blaze. The French Army opened one of its nearby military depots as a warehouse for the burned animals and objects.

Christine Albanel, the minister of culture, sent out an all-points bulletin to the provincial museums of France for the donation of classic wooden display cases.

Hermès reissued its “Plumes” scarf in a limited edition to raise money. Gallimard, the publishing house, joined in the fund-raising by releasing a slim history of Deyrolle with a preface by the French novelist Pierre Assouline. One French woman donated 50 boxes of butterflies. A Frenchman gave back the head of a bull he had bought at Deyrolle a few months before.

Ninety percent of the shop’s stock, including most of the animals, a celebrated fossil collection, an antique skeleton of a Nile perch and a 19th-century diorama of more than 100 birds, was lost. The dark-wood cabinets that housed birds, butterflies and beetles went up in flames.

Artists and photographers who had drawn inspiration from one of the most celebrated taxidermy sites in the world donated their works. Christie’s Europe offered to sell those items as a fund-raising auction, waiving its commission along the way.

Since the fire, some of the rooms in the multistoried, 4,300-square-foot space have been reopened. The back corridors still smell of smoke, but new animals are slowly moving in: a giraffe, a lion, an ostrich, a camel, a zebra, a tiger, a peacock, among many others. It lives!

With thanks to Jessica Joslin for flagging and no thanks to Sophie and Nick.

Source: New York Times.

XDR-TB — extreme (or ‘extensively’) drug-resistant tuberculosis — may well be the next pandemic. Preventable but untreatable, the disease preys on some of the world’s most vulnerable people. A recent survey suggests that amongst HIV-positive patients in Africa, it has a close to 100% mortality rate, and kills in weeks.

Sadly, the emergence of XDR-TB is a product of human error. TB can usually be treated with a course of four standard anti-TB drugs. If these drugs are misused or mismanaged, multidrug-resistant TB (MDRTB) can develop. MDRTB takes longer to treat with second-line drugs, which are more expensive and have more side-effects. XDR-TB can then develop when these second-line drugs are also misused or mismanaged and therefore also become ineffective.

This is Bad News. It is also important news, as the existence of — and need for action on — XDR-TB has been under-reported in the West.

That’s about to change. And you can help.

With the support of the good people at the TED conference, acclaimed photojournalist James Nachtwey has spent the last year traveling the world, documenting the plight of those suffering from XDR-TB.

The images will be unveiled in London on the fly tower of the National Theatre 7-11pm on Friday 3rd and Saturday 4th October. A gallery called The Emergency Room will open between October 7th and 22nd, just off Brick Lane. There you can view the photographs, together with an installation which will track their diffusion around the world. A group of researchers from think tank Demos, together with a coalition of artists and designers, will be working in the gallery, exploring new techniques for the distribution of news photography in the digital age.

This is an important project. If you are a blogger or journalist, or can offer any creative, financial or logistic support, we urge you to contact the Emergency Room and have a chat. For our part, BST is providing the team with monitoring and analysis of the project’s influence on online discussion around XDR-TB. Darrell was also asked by Demos/TED to contribute some thoughts on the future of photojournalism to the project blog.

Southwark’s Cross Bones graveyard is the final resting place of some 15,000 outcasts and cholera victims. According to Southwark borough’s website:

There is a long established tradition that it was a final resting place for ‘Winchester Geese’, ie prostitutes, from the legalised brothels or ‘stews’ of Bankside. This dates back to the days when the Bishop of Winchester ran Bankside and licensed the ‘Geese’.

Stow, in his Survey of London in 1603, describes the burial site as being appointed to single women forbidden the rites of the church so long as they continued a sinful life. However, by Victorian times, when the area was stricken by poverty and disease, the site was used as a pauper’s burial ground.
Cross Bones Graveyard was finally closed in 1853 on the grounds that it was ‘completely overcharged with dead’ and that further burials were ‘inconsistent with a due regard for the public health and public decency’. A warehouse was built upon it.

Recent archaeological digs for the Jubilee Line extension have uncovered evidence of a highly overcrowded graveyard where bodies are piled up on top of each other and tests have shown that many of the bodies are women and children with diseases ranging from smallpox, TB and paget’s disease to osteoarthritis and vitamin D deficiency.

The long sleep of the Cross Bones dead is being disturbed by the construction of the new Crossrail line, which will run through the middle of old Southwark. The graveyard now lies beneath a gated construction site.

But the cholera victims and Geese are not forgotten — there is a small shrine erected by the local community and, for the last few years, the gate itself (on Redcross Street, SE1) has been kept garlanded with flowers, ribbons and tributes both Pagan and Christian. According to a note on the gate, there’s a vigil at 1900 on the 23rd of every month.

More photos on Flickr.

On February 8th, the US state of Nebraska declared that execution by electric chair amounted to an unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. The US state was the only one still using electrocution as its sole method of execution and the move came after a condemned man, Raymond Mata, appealed against his sentence. In its nine-decade history, this particular chair had been used 15 times.

Little by little, America is beginning to balk at capital punishment: the method rather the madness of it. The most popular method — lethal injection — is currently being investigated by the Supreme Court and Nebraska may struggle to find a replacement way of meting out ‘justice’.

Source: The Economist.

Singer songwriter and producer who famously collaborated with Nancy Sinatra dies aged 78. According to the BBC report, on being diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2005, Hazlewood gave away his gold and platinum discs to friends outside the music industry and started worked on his final album, Cake Or Death.

A five-time Academy Award nominee for best director, most recently for 2001′s Gosford Park, Altman finally won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2006.

“No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have,” Altman said while accepting the award. “I’m very fortunate in my career. I’ve never had to direct a film I didn’t choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition.”

Obituary at Seattle Pi.

Star of the seminal documentary about the New York ballroom scene Paris is Burning and legendary Vogue-er, Willi Ninja also appeared in Malcolm McLaren’s pre-Madonna attempt at popularising the scene, Deep in Vogue. Only the other day, thanks to YouTube, we found a lot of proof that Vogue-ing wasn’t dead (see below). Now sadly one of its grande dames is.

Clearly a lurid palette helps you live longer. The artist adored by 1970s households and kitsch revivalists died on 26th August. In his prime, the painter of that curiously green Chinese Girl was the wealthiest artist in the world after Picasso — despite being at the opposite end of the market.

His garish colours matched exactly the fixtures and fittings of the average 1970s household (avocado bath tubs anyone?) but Tretchikoff defended his somewhat startling representations of women saying,

If I wanted to convey ideas through my paintings, why should I obscure the subject?

During the revival in interest in his work in the 1990s, Tretchikoff maintained his poise as a serious painter and refused to allow one of his paintings to adorn the cover of a book on kitsch. His work, he maintained, was symbolic realism. His adopted homeland of South Africa begged to differ. The National Gallery in Cape Town has never deigned to purchase an original Tretchikoff on the grounds that “he is not really regarded as a South African artist”.

It’s not been a good summer for psychedelia. Arthur Lee, frontman of legendary rock group Love, and genuine BigShinyThing died of leukaemia on Friday.

The BBC reports that Syd died from complications arising from diabetes. Here’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ — remember him this way.

CNN took an easy pot shot at Wikipedia this week for its ahem ‘live editing’ (otherwise known as breaking news) on the death of Enron executive Kenneth Lay. CNN reports smugly how:

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, added news of Lay’s death to his online biography shortly after news outlets began reporting it at around 10 a.m. ET (2.p.m GMT).

At 10:06 a.m. Wikipedia’s entry for Lay said he died “of an apparent suicide.”

At 10:08 it said he died at his Aspen home “of an apparent heart attack or suicide.”

Within the same minute, it said the cause of death was “yet to be determined.”

At 10:09 a.m. it said “no further details have been officially released” about the death.

Two minutes later, it said: “The guilt of ruining so many lives finaly (sic) led him to his suicide.”

At 10:12 a.m. this was replaced by: “According to Lay’s pastor the cause was a ‘massive coronary’ heart attack.”

By 10:39 a.m. Lay’s entry said: “Speculation as to the cause of the heart attack lead many people to believe it was due to the amount of stress put on him by the Enron trial.” This statement was later dropped.

By early Wednesday afternoon, the entry said Lay was pronounced dead at Aspen Valley Hospital, citing the Pitkin, Colorado, sheriff’s department. It said he apparently died of a massive heart attack, citing KHOU-TV in Houston.

CNN goes on to note that staff at Wikipedia ‘did not immediately return calls’. But they’re not the reporters are they?

Ivor Cutler wrote surreal songs and poetry and continued to perform live until 2004. He also wrote books, did illustrations and made radio series. He appeared regularly on John Peel’s radio shows and The Beatles gave him a role in the film Magical Mystery Tour. Cutler’s 1967 album Ludo, produced by George Martin, was re-released in 1997 by Alan McGee’s label, Creation.

According to the BBC obituary, Cutler attributed much of his weirdness to the displacement he felt when his younger brother was born.

“Without that I would not have been so screwed up as I am, and therefore not as creative,” he said.

“Without a kid brother I would have been quite dull.”

Much of Cutlet’s work, including audio files, are available online at his tribute page.

It features both Cash and his wife very shortly before both of them died. The song is from Cash’s last album of cover versions which also features his extraordinary version of ‘Personal Jesus’.

Isn’t it great when you see something on TV one night and the next day you can just find it on the web, at YouTube?

The campaign is due to be broadcast in Belgium next week. It opens with the Smurfs dancing, hand in hand, around a campfire and singing the Smurf song. Bluebirds flutter past and rabbits gambol around the familiar village of mushroom shaped houses until, without warning, bombs begin to rain down. The smurfs scatter and run in vain from the onslaught. The final scene shows a scorched and tattered Baby Smurf sobbing, surrounded by prone Smurfs. The endline reads, “Don’t let war affect the lives of children.” The ad is part of a fundraising drive to raise £70,000 for the rehabilitation of former child soldiers in Burundi.

Philipppe Henon, a spokesman for Unicef Belgium, said his agency had set out to shock, after concluding that viewers had become immured to traditional warzone images. “It’s controversial,” he said. “We have never done something like this before, but we’re learned over the years that the reaction to the more normal type of campaign is very limited.”

Unicef’s agency, Publicis, decided the best way to convey the impact of war on children was to tap into the earliest, happiest memories of Belgian television viewers. They chose the Smurfs, who first appeared in a Belgian comic in 1958. The animation was approved by the family of the Smurf’s late creator, “Peyo”.

Julie Lamoureux, account director at Publicis for the campaign, said the agency’s original plans were toned down.

We wanted something that was real war – Smurfs losing arms, or Smurfs losing a head – but they said no.

Footage of the ad has already appeared online.

So says legendary photographer Stanley Forman this week, in an indictment of the power of television as a medium. Forman is (in)famous for taking the 1975 photograph of 19 year old Diana Bryant and her two year old god-daughter Tiare Jones falling from a broken fire escape during an apartment fire in Boston, Massachusetts. Diana did not survive the fall and, decades before 9/11, Forman’s photograph bought into question the rights of victims and the voyeuristic nature of photography.

He was quoted in an interview from the BBC as the World Press Photo foundation celebrates the 50th anniversary of its annual photographic competition.

Joslin constructs the sculptures out of

antique ceremonial collars, antlers, bone, brass, velvet, antique hardware, glass eyes, universal joints, springs, brass standoffs, casters, sculpted/painted leather, mink collar, saxophone keys, antique shoehorn, beads, lamp fittings, glove leather, music wire, cast pewter feet… I find things anywhere that I find myself… in obscure junk shops, flea markets, attics, taxidermy supply houses, speciality hardware distributor … or walking through the woods.

The creatures range in height from 1 inch to nearly 6 feet tall.

Taxidermy and the use of deceased animals in art seem to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance – one that has very little to do with either Damien Hirst or moth-eaten ancestral homes (thank god). Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market features the work of taxidermist Emma Hawkins whilst BST has previously written about the art of Nathalie Edenmont and Pinar Yolacan. Perhaps it is a reaction both to the interiors minimalism of the 90s and a celebration of skill and intricacy in art. Maybe we’ve just got our curiosity back.

There are more of Joslin’s recent sculptures on her homepage. The ‘Lula’ sculpture pictured is reproduced here by kind permission of the artist.

Thompson committed suicide in February of this year.

Photo courtesy of BBC Online.

The BBC reports this week that a man has died after playing a computer game for hours at a time in South Korea. Shock horror stories about online gaming are nothing new, the latest big one being the guy in Shanghai who got stabbed in a dispute over a virtual gaming sword. Some people take their alternative lives in MMORPGs very seriously indeed.

The real shock in this article for me came right at the end: 30% of the South Korean population are registered for online gaming.

BST has written about South Korea before – see previous posts: Cunnilingus in North Koreaand Ohmynews.com. As the most wired nation on earth, South Korea has become something of a nursery for what all our futures may look like.

The picture shows New York spray can memorial by Antonio ‘Chico’ Garcia, located on Bruckner Boulevard, off Brook Avenue, Mott Haven, Bronx. This was Chico’s first memorial portrait, for a high school friend called Ed. Ed was shot down in a hail of bullets in a drive by shooting near this empty lot. The Lower East Side mural has since been defaced by rival dealers.

This is just one of 100 plus such murals documented by Martha Cooper and Joseph Sciorra in their recent book, R.I.P.: New York Spraycan Memorials. The murals memorialise all manner of death in the mean streets of New York: drugs, shooting, wars, asthma deaths, traffic accidents and AIDS.

In the introduction, Sciorra writes:

The memorial wall transforms personal grief into shared public sentiment by serving as a vehicle for community affiliation and potential empowerment. Covering the expenses for materials and the artist’s labor is often a collective endeavor, with neighborhood residents making contributions in memory of one of their own. The murals create new public spaces for community ceremony. Life is celebrated at the walls with parties marking anniversaries and birthdays. These centers of congregation become rallying points of candlelight processions and demonstrations held by community people who march through the streets in opposition to violence, drugs or police brutality.

These neighborhood billboards are used to elicit critical examination of the root causes and solutions to the daily onslaught against inner-city youth. The Crown Heights Youth Collective in Brooklyn sponsors memorials in an aggressive campaign to cultivate alternatives to violence among the neighborhood’s Caribbean and African American kids.

The images in this book represent only a fraction of those we documented; they are a small part of the two thousand plus killing that occur each year in the city. Turn the page and witness a generation of sons and daughters — now gone.