Hale & Hallow . . .

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This afternoon I finally got around to watching Michael Moore's movie titled "Capitalism: A Love Story". A little late getting to see that, but it is just as timely now as when it came out a couple of years ago. Perhaps more so. His references in that film to the 99% and the 1% have been in the press rather a lot these last few weeks. Are the protests in NYC and elsewhere a sign that people have finally really started to have had enough of certain bankers' and corporations' massive greed ? Despite the government bailout of the banks after the disasters of 2008, the church of greed went right back to their poisonous pilfering and pillaging practices. The bankers trading in virtual (and virtually incomprehensible) derivative products are the worst of the lot. Shame to each and every one of them. When I look at how much interest I have paid on my mortgage over the past ten years, and look at how little money I have in the bank today to fend for the uncertain future with, it makes me see red. We've been getting robbed. Enough is enough. May they all choke on their caviar crackers.
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Speaking of New York City, my oldest daughter was there on vacation last summer, and when she spotted this skeletal window display, she thought of me, and took the below photo. She knows how much I love the music and artwork associated with that legendary band, the Grateful Dead, and sent this off by e-mail to me as fast as the internet could carry it. Given that we are getting close to Halloween (hallowen ?) now, this seemed like a good time to share this with all of you good people out there. (And many thanks to you, sweetheart, for thinking of your papa when taking this photo !)
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And even more recently, my youngest daughter was walking in Paris with la Grenouille when they saw this amazing piece of street art on a sidewalk. My youngest had the same reflex as her big sister, and took a photo for papa. Am I not the luckiest father in the world then ??? And what a visionary the artist was who saw a ribcage of a skeleton when seeing that grill there in the ground ! And then to do it in pink ! (Thanks honey !)
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And with these next three images I just wanted to give you a little Fall color from France, and hopefully slip in just in time before James' Weekend Reflections shuts up shop here tonight. There is still a little beauty left around us. All around us. When I mentionned above something about seeing red, this is the kind of red I'd rather be seeing.
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Life In the Big City . . .

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While in London for a few days during this past week, I was out looking around, sometimes at random, sometimes with a planned destination, but always easily sidetracked. Although it is not Halloween, and I'm not a fundamentally morbid sort of person, for some reason I kept stumbling on some scenes or stories related to mortality, that terminal end to the human condition.
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This first photo is from a churchyard which although just a few minutes walk from some of the biggest tourist attractions in London, is probably one of the least visited sites in that city. I thought the story was rather fascinating. One could perhaps even say, with no pun intended, that is a rather shocking story. What do you think ?
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I would fear, in the case of good gentleman Bacon above, that there may have been, as is often the case in such situations, some jokes which may have circulated at the time, despite the tragic nature of the event. Some wag would likely have asked, "Did you hear about Bacon ? He got grilled last night". I also thought, when seeing this memorial stone, of a line from a song which I've mentioned previously in these pages, The Wheel, by the Grateful Dead, which goes :
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"The wheel is turning and you can't slow down
You can't let go and you can't hold on
You can't go back and you can't stand still
If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will"
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Another more recent case, which just happened last week, will also, I fear, become the butt of any number of jokes in poor taste, despite the tragedy involved. Walking by the entrance to Waterloo Station, I couldn't help but notice the headlines placarded there about a woman being killed by a buttock implant operation. To learn more I picked up one of the free newspapers there. (since when are newspapers free ?) I was appalled to learn that a 20 year old British woman had flown to Philadelphia, my home town in the states, to have silicone injected into her posterior, presumably to increase the volume and roundness of it, in an illegal procedure performed in a hotel room. Shortly after having the injections of silicone, she died of an apparent heart attack.
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What sad and deranged times we live in, when a young woman, who in all probability had a perfectly fine and functional (for sitting on) posterior, felt she had to spend a small fortune in plane fare and the scandalous cost of doing so, to get a foreign substance pumped into her body to, supposedly, enhance her appearance to members of the opposite sex. We live in a world getting sicker by the minute, I'm afraid to say. The perpetrator of the procedure apparently disappeared, with the money of course, shortly after the young lady fell ill.
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It used to be that grisly headlines sold newspapers. Now they give them away, but they must need to keep their circulation numbers up in order to sell advertising space in their free paper.
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While out strolling in London I came across a number of skulls in various places, not that I was particularly looking for them, they just sort of appeared. So, along the lines of works of art which incorporated skulls into them centuries ago, illustrating the Vanitas theme, or the biblical quote, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnius vanitas", I offer you the following images to contemplate. This first was right on the banks of the Thames, at the entrance to some sort of horror show. (I didn't go in...)
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These next four were inside the British Museum, where we stopped to have a peek at the Elgin marbles, the Assyrian bas reliefs from Nineveh, and some Egyptian mummies, among other marvels. This first one was supposedly from an Aztec treasure trove, but was determined to be a fake. (Lynne, It might look great in sunglasses, no ?)
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This next mask was created on a real skull . . .
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Am not sure what this was all about . . .

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Ancient Egyptian skulls . . .

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This last was from the same graveyard where William Bacon's memorial stone was. Vanitas.
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Life Is Short

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Related to the stories of "The One That Got Away", I suppose, is the story of "The Life That Got Away". If things had only been different, what one could have done... Well, life's a bitch, and then one day you end up hanging on hook in the window of a Paris Medical School supply store. So enjoy it while you can, because life is short !

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When I was little we would go into my father's laboratory at the medical school where he was a professor of anatomy, there were skeletons like this one hanging around. Could that contribute to explaining the odd attraction I've had over the years to visit cemeteries, or places like the Paris Catacombs, or for the music of the Grateful Dead? Freud would no doubt have something to say about all that.

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