Kiss Me As The Undead Armies Approach And My Talking Skull Weeps Diamond Tears: The Sarah Elizabeth Story {Artist: Pino D’Angelico}
I have been often accused of both taking things too seriously and yet somehow I do not take things seriously enough. Well, which is it? I wish I knew.
I can tell you that I do have a great love of general foolishness and absurdity (except for pranks, which are just awful and hateful, and candid camera type baloney, which is even worse). In my heart of hearts, I’m a massive goofball. Some might go as far as to say that I revel in idiocy, but those are just my sisters saying that and you can’t pay them any mind.
This manifests itself in a number of situations, mostly private, I think, because I am very much internally motivated and most of my trials and tribulations, my comedies and tragedies, occur in the stage of my own mind. This all sounds very dramatic but I guess what I am saying is that I talk to myself a lot. And I’m not even embarrassed to tell you that personally, I think I’m hilarious. Except when I’m working myself up to a good cry, because, well, you know, that happens in these conversations, too. I can be very cruel. But also very sensitive! There are sometimes tears.
But mostly I am making myself laugh, and oftentimes it’s with regard to art, especially olde-timey stuff or pulpy comics schlock–but whatever I’m viewing I can’t help but to impose my own ridiculous inner dialogue onto the canvas. I normally post them up on facebook or instagram or twitter and I know I’ve got a number of friends who indulge this behavior–and I love you for it. You’ve created a monster, and now I can’t stop.
I’ve collected several of them below, for posterity. Do you do this, as well? Feel free to share in the comments, or just tell me about the silliness you get up to when you can’t help yourself.
Don’t invite me to yr bachelorette party unless there’s some crazy shit planned. {image: Geisterjäger John Sinclair- 37 Die Hexeninsel}
Get you a Pierre who can deal with you at your corpsiest. {Cover art: Forbidden Worlds #24 }
Best meetup group. {“I have been looking at your squirrel.” The adventures of a squirrel : supposed to be related by himself. Darton and Harvey, 1807.}
…but do you have this in black? {The abbess from Basel’s dance of death by Matthäus Merian.}
Me, after penning a particularly obnoxious Yelp review and deeming it a literary masterpiece. {“What a paragraph I have written.” From Vermont Hall, or Light through the Darkness by M. A. Paull, 1888}
I wanna read her okcupid profile. No judgment. {Artist: Averardo Ciriello}
TRY AGAIN MY EYES ARE UP HERE. {Ophelia (1880), de Madeleine Lemaire}
This is the clothing subscription box we deserve. {A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art by Thomas Wright, 1875.}
outta my way there’s autumn things happening {Illustration from Favorite Fairy Tales, 1861}actual photo from when I was in the girl scouts {Three Witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, 1840, George Cattermole}
#beachbodygoals {From Loraine and the Little People by Elizabeth Gordon and illustrated by M. T. Ross, 1915.}
Jesus, Larry. Quit breaking my shit. I told you not to touch anything. {From The London Journal, 1863.}
friday night, gang’s all here {Art: Jack Thurston}
RE: invoking demonic entities. It pays to be discerning when selecting a child with which to tempt your demon. You wouldn’t want to pick a dud. Pro-tip: thump the youngster on the head, lightly, as when choosing a ripe melon. Listen for a lively exclamation of outrage. You’ve got a winner! {Engraving from Macé’s Fairy Book. Home Fairy Tales (Contes du Petit-Château). By Jean Macé. Translated by Mary L. Booth. With Engravings. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868.}
This week at Haute Macabre, I interview Maude Nibelungen, a textile artist with a passion for knitting intimacies and exquisite objects of desire, in the form of evocative apparel and accoutrements.
Take a peek for insights on Maude’s inclusive vision, her desire to express her feelings and exorcise her demons through her craft, and the special bond she creates between her knitted intimacies and those who would wear them.
(The New Faces of Death is a series I originally wrote, beginning in 2015, and which was published at Dirge. The site is no longer active or updating.)
The New Faces Of Death is a series of profiles and interviews in which we celebrate five influential women passionately involved in the Death Positivity / Death Acceptance movement. Women who seek, in different ways, to educate our repressed society regarding the various facets of death and how to cultivate a relationship with death that is liberating, humanizing – and ultimately – life-enhancing. From mourning and memory to pathology and the intricacies of the human body, from the meaning of a “good death” to The Order of the Good Death, and The Death Salon: we invite you to read further, learn much, and meet the new faces of Death.
Our first installment highlighted Sarah Troop, Executive Director of The Order of the Good Death and Social Media Editor for Death Salon, as well as, blogger, writer, at Nourishing Death and Death and the Maiden.
Next we spoke with Bess Lovejoy, a writer and editor who lives in Brooklyn. She is the author of the bestselling Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses, and is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a founding member of Death Salon.
We then focused our attention on Amber Carvaly, a California native, and mortician and Service Director at Undertaking LA. Along with owner Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Ask A Mortician), they aim to raise awareness that families are empowered, both legally and logistically, to be involved in the care of their own dead.
Today the spotlight is onMegan Rosenbloom,the Associate Director for Collection Resources at the Norris Medical Library of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is also the director of Death Salon, and, at the time of this writing, the resident death expert on Vice’s Entitlement podcast.
Photo by Elli & Polly Photography
How did you become interested in death and how did that lead to your current role in the death industry, or as a death positive activist?
Megan Rosenbloom: I got interested in death through my interest in the history of medicine. As a medical librarian at USC, I started doing work with our rare medical books and lectures on topics like the history of sourcing bodies for anatomical learning. Thinking about the way corpses have been used for medical education got me thinking a lot about death in general and death’s relationship with medicine. It seems to me that for a long time in history, death was the very likely result of medical interventions. Death was the end of medicine. Now death is seen as the failure of medicine, and that strikes me as a really unhealthy way to look at things. It was around this time that I met mortician Caitlin Doughty, we started Death Salon, and the rest was history…
What drew you to your particular profession?
I felt like after deciding to leave broadcast journalism that librarianship was a good fit for me because it had very similar skills and mentalities – the jack-of-all-trades kind of mindset, the ability to dig into a topic and learn about it quickly and share information with others who need it, and the desire to learn something new everyday. I didn’t plan on working in medical librarianship from the outset, but I ended up getting a medical library job because I was working in medical publishing while I was in school, and now I’m so glad I went into medical librarianship as it’s incredibly rewarding in ways I wouldn’t have imagined.
Photo by Elli & Polly Photography
What do you want people to take away from the work that you do?
I hope that I can help medical students see the importance of honoring their own humanity and the humanity of their patients, even when their patients are cadavers. I hope I can help mold future physicians to have a healthier relationship with death and to be able to more humanely help their patients through the end of their lives. Specific to Death Salon, I hope to expose people to ideas that will help them make more informed decisions and bring together different thinkers and makers so they can collaborate and create.
What are some of the most common misconceptions you’ve run into about your job and to a larger extent, the death industry in general? What do you do to disabuse people of those notions – or not?
The main misconceptions about librarians in general is that they read books all day, that they don’t need advanced degrees, and that the Internet threatens our existence. In reality I sometimes WISH I could read books all day, you need a master’s degree to be a librarian, and librarians are even more useful and important in the Internet age than we were before, because there is so much more information to wade through before you can get to what you need.
In terms of Death Salon, I guess some people–especially in the beginning–thought we’re just a bunch of goth chicks who are too young to know anything about death, which is incredibly presumptuous about our life experiences and super rude. I think the people who dismiss us in this way would be very unlikely to do the same if we were an organization mostly run by men, or if we were all much older. But death is something we all benefit from interacting with regardless of our ages or backgrounds and that’s just part of what we’re proving with our Death Salon events.
Photo by Elli & Polly Photography
Many people find working with the dead or talking about death creepy, or macabre or morbid – how do you enroll those people into the conversation?
I think if you’re a generally warm, approachable person and you share of yourself and listen, other people will open up, too. It is usually fairly easy to tell whether a death-related conversation is making the person uncomfortable or not. If we’re say, at a cocktail party, I might just let the conversation move along naturally to something else. However, I find that when someone finds out what I do with Death Salon, they usually have a lot of questions –so I end up talking about death at cocktail parties far more than I would expect.
Can you tell us about the death community in your area, is it welcoming and/or responsive to what you are doing?
Los Angeles has this reputation for being pink and plastic but the death community is incredibly strong here, and the people who have come to L.A.-based Death Salon events are so much more diverse than I could have ever anticipated–and I find that incredibly gratifying. I am super lucky to have such a crew of deathy writers and artists nearby, and it always seems to be growing. I really feel for the folks who have a strong interest in death and don’t know anyone else near them that feels the same way. I hope that when those people come to Death Salon, they feel welcomed into this amazing community of enthusiastic death nerds and can learn, question, and explore without feeling judgment.
What is your role, as you see it, within the Order of the Good Death, and can you tell us a little bit about what you did at this year’s Death Salon?
My main job for The Order is to run Death Salon and all that sail within her, consulting with Caitlin Dougherty and Sarah Troop for the important stuff, and handling the million little piddly things that come up along the way. Everything from as big as deciding which cities and venues and who gets to speak, to as small as managing the catering, merch, travel, and any and all logistics.
So my duties at Death Salon: Mutter Museum were pretty much everything: talking to press, wrangling our volunteers, snack mom, guest lists, putting out fires, introducing some speakers, guesting on or moderating panels, hosting Quizzo. Basically when it comes to Death Salon, you name it, my finger’s in it.
Photo by Elli & Polly Photography
What can we do to open up the conversation on death? To not just increase awareness of it, but to make more sense of death and dying – to allay our death anxiety.
Talk talk talk. People have to talk in order to really process. That’s why therapy exists, right? It helps to acknowledge and engage with their own thoughts and the thoughts of others – in their lives as well as from other cultures and time periods. It’s like a muscle being used: over time broaching the subject gets easier, interacting with the enormity of it gets more manageable.
How have your views on the afterlife affected your involvement in the death industry, or vice versa?
I think I have become a lot less judgmental about other people’s conceptions of an afterlife through my exposure to so many different ways of conceptualizing it. But personally, I am still of the camp that I don’t believe in an afterlife except in a vague “we are all made of star stuff” kind of way.
And lastly, what is your ideal death scenario – your dream death, a “good death” as it were?
After a long life well-lived, surrounded by friends and family with opportunities to share meaningful goodbyes, I drift peacefully away, after which either my organs will be harvested or my body will be used as a medical school cadaver. Maybe a year after my death, my remaining ashes can be scattered by loved ones in a special place that they know about but which I won’t make public for secret reasons. I would like a Little Free Library or some comparable physical legacy in my honor that people could visit and think of me, or strangers could stumble upon and wonder who I was.
If I’m being honest, my soul is forever dying slowly due to the fact that I am not living in Portland where so many friends and talented people and wonderful things reside… but my not being local to the area is causing me extreme suffering today, as there is something very special happening that I cannot attend!
The Creeping Museum, whom I’ve written of at Unquiet Things previously and whose creative vision I respect tremendously, is the labor of love conceived between two friends in North Portland, whose mission is to help artists and independent creators give back to their communities by turning their strange and unusual work into tiny pieces of affordable art, for which to support wonderfully worthy causes. And right now they are gearing up to introduce a new project that I think will resonate on some very heart-deep levels with so many of us.
Tonight, Thursday, February 15th at 7PM, at their Little Free Library in North Portland, The Creeping Museum will present an opening celebration for The Haunted Menagerie: A Celebration of Spirit Familiars and Ghostly Pets which will include a miniature group show featuring original artwork as well as an artist bookplate(!!)“exhibition”–and oh, how I wish I could be be present to see all of it! Please go in my stead and take lots of photos and beautiful selfies with the enchanting art and the brilliant minds who pulled it all together, ok?
The bookplate collection will benefit the Portland Audubon Society and includes art by the following artists: Layla Sullivan, Amy Earles, Benjamin Dewey, Marybel Martin, Becky Munich, Pantovola, Christa Dippel, Canvas Menagerie, Hidden Velvet, Alex Reisfar.
The group show in the miniature gallery will include original art by the following artists, and the proceeds from the sale of each piece will go to the nonprofit of the artist’s choice.
– Dena Seiferling
– Darla Jackson
– Stephanie Buscema
– Jenny Fontana
– Diane Irvine Armitage
– Joe Vollan
– Gretchen Lewis
Next week-ish, or sometime thereabouts as I understand it, The Creeping Museum will have a shop update with all sorts of magical items and spells and wonderment related to The Haunted Menagerie concept. I will be writing about it at length over at Haute Macabre, and will be certain to share all of the wonderful details and secrets at that time!
In the meantime, I have been granted a tiny sneak peek of some of the beautiful bookplates and have permission to share them with you…
Today at Haute Macabre, meet Michael Locascio And Harlow Skalwold, the dark hearts and creative minds of Dellamorte & Co., and with whose fantastical creations you’ll soon want to fill every nook, cranny, and corner of your home.
If you’ve ever wondered where you can find the eerie statuary that adorns my shelves, or the writhing vase in which I keep strange, spectral botanicals, or if you wish to learn more about the talented folks who create such things, peep at my interview with the Dellamorte & Co. team over at Haute Macabre today.
2017 was quite a year for all of the Haute Macabre staff writers (and everyone everywhere else, no doubt), and so it took a little while to gather all of our thoughts, untangle them, and make sense out of the resulting mess. This week we’re finally getting around to sharing last year’s favorites–books, apps, art, music, you name it!– as well as, some personal reflections on 2017.
Actually, because you are someone who takes a moment to read my blaarrgh, I will give you the scoop on that over here, because we’re sort of like a secret club, right? It’s Trish Paytas. I’m so ashamed! Ugh, she’s awful! I love her! Now please, I ask of you, spare my dignity by sharing a shameful guilty pleasure of your own!
(The New Faces of Death is a series I originally wrote, beginning in 2015, and which was published at Dirge. The site is no longer active or updating.)
The New Faces Of Death is a series of profiles and interviews in which we celebrate women passionately involved in the Death Positivity / Death Acceptance movement. Women who seek, in different ways, to educate our repressed society regarding the various facets of death and how to cultivate a relationship with death that is liberating, humanizing – and ultimately – life-enhancing. From mourning and memory to pathology and the intricacies of the human body, from the meaning of a “good death” to The Order of the Good Death, and The Death Salon: we invite you to read further, learn much, and meet the new faces of Death.
Today we focus our attention on Amber Carvaly, a California native, mortician, and Service Director at Undertaking LA. Undertaking LA is a fully licensed funeral home, whose mission is to allow families to reclaim rightful control of the dying process and care of the dead body. Along with owner and author Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death), they aim to raise awareness that families are empowered, both legally and logistically, to be involved in the care of their own dead. Changes like this, they assert, will help our society to better accept death.
How did you become interested in death and how did that lead to your current role in the death industry, or as a death positive activist?
Amber Carvaly: I think that I have always been interested in death. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t preoccupied with the thought of it. Mostly, it would just sort of come and go as I grew. My prior background is in the non-profit industry advocating for the homeless, so it makes sense to me that I would now advocate for the dead. I think that my lot in life is to speak for those who may not have access or ability.
What drew you to your particular profession?
At first I wanted nothing more than to be an embalmer. In my heart I am completely and hopelessly an artist. I am fascinated with learning and how things work, and being an embalmer was a great way to study an art that is reserved for only a few.
What do you want people to take away from the work that you do?
I really only hope for one thing: that people will accept the reality of death and use it to free themselves from the torment of everyday stress; the things that don’t really matter, like standing in a grocery store line for too long or making someone’s bad day a personal offense. I just want to help people see the big picture, because if they could, it would change the way we interact with one another – which would change the world. Whether or not I accomplish this isn’t my concern. It doesn’t take away the desire from me wanting to live this way.
What are some of the most common misconceptions you’ve run into about your job, and to a larger extent, the death industry in general? What do you do to disabuse people of those notions – or not?
The biggest one is that dead bodies are somehow scary. They are not. Really, truly. We are afraid of dead bodies because we are afraid of death. This is why it is so crucial that we work to help people open a healthy dialogue on death. People also think that if you work with dead bodies you are somehow creepy and morbid. I used to get offended, but to be honest, now I’m just sad for people that sneer at me or this line of work. I believe that what I am doing is really important, and I take it incredibly seriously.
Many people find working with the dead or talking about death creepy, or macabre or morbid – how do you enroll those people into the conversation?
In September, we at Undertaking LA did a fun 30 Days of Deathtember game that is inspired by a deck of conversational cards given to me by my friend Lea Gsceheidle from Berlin. Every day for the month of September we post a question related to death, either logistical or existential. It’s really nice because it allows people to come to us and talk if they would like, or abstain if they don’t want to.
I try to, as carefully as possible, engage with people to encourage deeper thought. It is hard because writing to people about a sensitive topic, especially in an online forum, can be difficult in making sure that you denote a warm and non-judgmental tone, but so far it seems to be going really well.
What can we do to open up the conversation on death? To not just increase awareness of it, but to make more sense of death and dying, to allay our death anxiety?
I think that what everyone at The Order of the Good Death is doing is a wonderful way to create change. Talking about death requires finding every applicable avenue and method of discussion; everyone is different and we all have different ways of learning. I believe it’s necessary to get as many different personality types involved so that talking about death feels accessible. Death shouldn’t be something that is talked about only in a church or educational setting. It has to be continuously delivered in new and innovative ways.
How have your views on the afterlife affected your involvement in the death industry, or vice versa?
I don’t really believe that there is anything after this. I want to. But I don’t. It forces me to feel that any and all chance I have at creating change has to be done here and now.
And lastly, what is your ideal death scenario – your dream death, a “good death” as it were?
I hope that I die in my sleep. if I am married, I hope that my husband is by my side, and it doesn’t freak him out too much!
A new entry in my How To Wear series! Head on over to Haute Macabre to see the full listing of items used to achieve this avant-garde styling concept borne of great forethought and deliberation and definitely not an afternoon of laziness.
Welcome to another installment of Stinkers & Duds, wherein I complain about the products that really gross me out! Don’t expect thoughtful, articulate commentary on these things (I hope you have figured out by now that you should probably shouldn’t ever expect that from me). These are beauty products and cosmetics that usually make me a little bit irate, so it’s basically just a lot of cusses and hate.
Why is it that when someone gifts you with something awful, it’s a jumbo-sized version of that awful thing? Yes, I’m a jerk for complaining about a gift…but…it’s not like I’m complaining to their face, right? Aqua di Gioia from Giorgio Armani was a Christmas present this past year, and I am fairly certain I already knew I would hate it; a very similar scent was gifted to me right after high school, as well. And true, when we are young, we haven’t really developed all of our tastes, we are still trying to figure out what we like, but I can assure you that when it came to fragrance, I knew what I was all about–and it was not “shower fresh”, “soapy clean”, or “the world’s most watery glass of lemonade.”
This is a bland, polite scent whose very inoffensiveness offends me. ALSO, and here is a loathsome confession. I am kind of addicted to the youtube channel of this really horrible celebrity; I don’t know why I continue watching her, but I just cannot look away. There is really nothing at redeeming about this person or her place in the world, including and especially her horrible taste (which I know is so subjective, and I am sorry, but she’s pink and UGGS and spray tan and oh my god why can’t I stop watching her?) Anyway, she bought herself Aqua di Gioia as a Christmas gift and as soon as I saw that this dumb dummy loves it, well, that just summed it all up for me. It’s just a dumb, pointless perfume.
Oh my god, I am such an asshole. This LUSH Shoot For The Stars bath bomb was a gift, too, and even worse, it was a gift that I suggested someone buy for me. It’s beautiful, right? It purports to smell of bergamot which sounds super classy, right? Well, we would be wrong for thinking that. It smells like a peach gummy scented urinal cake. Which is the exact opposite of classy. It also left both the tub, and my post-tub bod, super greasy. I know this for a fact because when I went to bed that night, I snuggled up against my partner, who remarked, “…ugh…you’re super greasy.”
Joseon Beauty of Joseon Dynasty Cream was highly recommended to me, first by friends, and secondly by the internet–reddit threads, facebook groups, beauty blogs. It has a cult following, all sorts of heavy-hitter ingredients, and it seems to be everyone’s Holy Grail multifunctional skincare cream. It’s supposed to be brightening, anti-aging, and give you beautiful, bouncy skin. Use it as a face massage, a sleeping pack, with your bb cream, whatever. It was starting to sound like coconut oil, in that regard, right? Like, what can’t this amazing stuff do?
Well, I could not use it long enough to find out. While I didn’t love the powdery-cucumbery scent, it was the slimy, sticky texture that I couldn’t get past. It had a this horrible jellied, stringy consistency (if you are familiar with snail mucin products, you know what I mean), and if I am being honest with you, it looked like someone jizzed all over my face. It was really bad. Like, Faces Of Jizz 18: The Jizzening bad. To add injury (injizzy?) to insult, not only did I look like a glazed fucking donut the few times I used it, it really reddened and inflamed the sensitive areas on my face. Not cool, Joseon Dynasty Cream*. Not cool at all.
To be fair, I purchased this product through amazon. I am aware that purchasing things like this through third party sellers can be risky business, but I truly think I was using the actual product, and it just didn’t work with my skin.
So that’s it for my recents Stinkers and Dud products? What about you? Tell me what you’ve been hating lately!
A gathering of death related links that I have encountered in the past month or so. From somber to hilarious, from informative to creepy, here’s a snippet of things that have been reported on or journaled about in or related to the Death Industry recently.
If I’m being honest, my soul is forever dying slowly due to the fact that I am not living in Portland where so many friends and talented people and wonderful things reside… but my not being local to the area is causing me extreme suffering today, as there is something very special happening that I cannot attend!
Why is it that when someone gifts you with something awful, it’s a jumbo-sized version of that awful thing? Yes, I’m a jerk for complaining about a gift…but…it’s not like I’m complaining to their face, right? 
Oh my god, I am such an asshole. This 
