Deathfest 2012

If I have learned one thing about the Brits since moving to London just over a year ago, it is that they do not take culture lightly. Oh no, no, no. Everything from theater to literature, music to comedy, art, fashion and now even...drumroll please... food is all handled with an intelligence and dedication I am enjoying immensely.

So I am not surprised in the least that the weekend long Deathfest, held at the city's cultural Southbank Center, was curated to include a jam packed schedule of interesting events. To whatever degree you are involved with death - weather it has affected your life profoundly, is a mere curiosity, something to be avoided and feared at all costs, or is in someway your profession - you would have been hard pressed not to find at least one event that grabbed your attention.

No Way Around It: Me Today You Tomorrow

This logo and tag line is from a Brooklyn, New York based band called the Obits (hear them on myspace, visit their website). 

It doesn't really get more clear than that: Me today You Tomorrow. 

I Absolutely LOVE this tag line... so much so that I'm thinking of walking around with it plastered across my chest.

European t-shirts available here: Day After Prints

The Lesson by Maya Angelou

I keep on dying again. Veins collapse, opening like the Small fists of sleeping Children. Memory of old tombs, Rotting flesh and worms do Not convince me against The challenge. The years And cold defeat live deep in Lines along my face. They dull my eyes, yet I keep on dying, Because I love to live.

Death and Comedy...

sometimes...you just have to laugh about it.

Comedians Ardal O'Hanlon, Jenny Eclair, Dave Spikey, Ricky Tomlinson, Shappi Khorsandi and consultant physician-turned-comic Kevin Jones tackle the biggest taboo of them all in the short film "Dying for a Laugh". 
This video was created for dyingmatters.org

Kevin Jones tells this great joke at the end of the film:
The wife is holding her husband’s hand as he dies and he says to her,

“Darling I have to tell you this before I die, I’ve got to make peace – you know I slept with your sister,” and she said,

“Don’t you worry yourself at all about that, I know you slept with my sister – that’s why I poisoned you.” 

A Living, Breathing Urn

Portrait of a Young Woman as Artemisia

Last night I went to the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit at The National Gallery in London and saw this painting by one of his pupils, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio . It is a portrait of Artemisia who supposedly was so stricken with grief over her husband's death that she mixed his ashes with water and drank them so she could become his living, breathing tomb. 

Continuing Josh's Legacy Creatively

http://postcardstojosh.wordpress.com/

Another example of the amazing creativity that Josh Edmonds family and friends have had in honoring his legacy. 

From This Is Gloucestershire:

POSTCARDS from around the world are keeping alive the memory of a talented young county cameraman who died in Vietnam.

Family and friends are blogging images of postcards they've sent, and the messages they bear, in remembrance of Josh Edmonds, 22, whom a coroner has ruled died accidentally in a motorbike accident earlier this year.

The unusual internet site postcardstojosh@gmail.com was a way of showing Josh all the places in the world he'd have wanted to visit, friend Victoria Trow said.

"What will I remember about Josh?" she said.

"There is nothing that I want to forget," said Victoria, who befriended Josh at Cirencester College.

"Whenever I met up with Josh he would tell me about all the places he wanted to travel to, all the things he wanted to see and do.

"This is a blog where we can tell him about what we liked, didn't like, a place to share stories and memories," said Victoria.

Reclaiming Farewell

                  REMEMBERING JOSH from JIMMY Edmonds on Vimeo.

It feels almost renegade to say: "helping people to reclaim their farewell" (footnote). When I read that it hit such a chord within. I pictured weary but determined mourners slowly and bravely arriving at a battlefield, ready to reclaim a right that over the centuries has become disempowered by the big business of death. "Give us back our farewell!" we chant.


This idea of reclaiming the farewell is compassionately, creatively and courageously illustrated in the film Remembering Josh, which documents the funeral of a vibrant and popular young man in his early twenties who was tragically involved in a fatal traffic accident while traveling in Vietnam.

Makeover: The Funeral Home

Turning this...

Scott Chandler, from the series Funeral Homes

Into this...

Funeral Home and Garden in Pinoso, Spain

and this...

into this...

In a span of twenty-four years, my uncle, my grandfather, my grandmother, my father and my mother - in that order - all had their funeral at the same place. The building was a small, brown-brick box that stood smack in the middle of a black tar parking lot. From the main road, with its drab, nearly windowless exterior, it would be easy to mistake it for a drive thru bank or a dentist office built sometime during the Nixon administration.

The interior followed suit with mauve and pea green carpeting, imposter wooden chairs, brass coated torchiere floor lamps, a sofa lifted from my Aunt Flo's living room (if I had an Aunt Flo) and wallpaper that depicted wicker baskets filled with fruit and flowers. I do not mean to sound catty or pretentious, the funeral home did a wonderful job of helping our family facilitate the services, they just did so in painfully lackluster surroundings.

Death...Honestly, Creatively

Questo Buio Feroce

From wikipedia: click here for link

This Wild Darkness is a compilation of essays written by Harold Brodkey as he neared death from AIDS and first published in 1996. The memoirs were written from when he was first diagnosed with AIDS until it left him too feeble to write, as he details in the later entries. Many were first printed in The New Yorker, where Brodkey's works most often appeared. They are written reflectively, regarding both recent events caused by his affliction (including the consideration of when to reveal his illness to friends and family, his activities such as a final trip to Venice, the treatment and care he receives for AIDS, and the current state of his health) and past memories revived by his condition (including his abusive stepfather, friends and relatives who had been in similar situations, a homosexual experience, and, as is described in most of his works, a childhood in St. Louis, Missouri). Brodkey died on January 26, 1996, at the age of 65.

The book was adapted into a performance piece by Italian playwright Pippo Delbono. Entitled Questo buio feroce, it debuted in Rome on October 3, 2006.

Funeral Fabrics

Before I moved home in 2006 to care for my mother, I was a designer of photographic installation fabrics used in restaurant, hotel and residential interiors. I had once completed a project for a friend whose grandmother had passed away. Using photographs he provided me, I created four sheer fabrics with images of his grandparents on them which he then hung up at the funeral. Although I never saw them installed, he said that they looked beautiful and that the sheer quality of the fabric gave his grandparents an almost ethereal feel. 

I remembered this project when I was planning my own mother's funeral and I decided to do the same and create two fabrics using photographs my father had taken - one of my mother and one of seagulls at the beach. Her casket was closed so I hung the fabrics right above and I agree with my friend, they looked beautiful and ethereal. On the day, it was such a lovely way to remember her and I later hung the fabric of her up in my home. 

With the creation of rip-vite, I haven't gone back to professionally designing fabrics for interiors , but I still have the contacts and resources to complete projects. If anyone is interested in having a funeral fabric made just send me an email and we can discuss. 

ripvite@gmail.com