Category Archives: Art

MFDJ 01/05/2021: Atrocity Exhibition

Today’s Unworthy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

From September 1939, when World War II began, with German troops pushing eastward, the SS began to shoot inmates (of whatever race or nationality) of mental hospitals to empty them for the use of soldiers. For example, a hospital in Stralsund, an eastern German city on the Baltic Sea, was emptied by December 1939, and its patients were taken to Danzig to be shot. Their bodies were buried by Polish prisoners, who themselves were then shot. In Chelm-Lubelski, in the General Government of Poland, patients were shot en masse by SS troops, sometimes after having been chased through the asylum, and then buried in mass graves. Once Germany invaded Russia, in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen under Heydrich liquidated hospital patients as well as Jews, Gypsies, and Communist functionaries. Reports from the field mentioned the need for beds for injured soldiers, as well as “the German view” that these were lives unworthy of life.

The Germans set up two psychiatric extermination facilities at Meseritz-Obrawalde and Tiegenhof, both in the old Prussian territory of Pomerania. The policy was first to massacre Polish patients, then bring German patients into the emptied facility, and finally to kill them as well by such methods as shooting, gassing, injection, starvation, or drugs given with food. Standard R4 letters of condolence were sent to families. There is some evidence that physically or mentally impaired German soldiers were also given “euthanasia” in both institutions.


Emmi G., a 16-year-old housemaid diagnosed as schizophrenic. She was sterilized and sent to the Meseritz-Obrawalde euthanasia center where she was killed with an overdose of tranquilizers on December 7, 1942.

Concerning the technology of murder, there was diminished reliance on shooting because of psychological trauma to Einsatzgruppen troops. Explosives were tried – as in Russia, in September 1941, when mental patients were blown up. This method proved ineffective in that too much cleaning up was required and more than one charge was sometimes necessary. Gas was clearly preferable.

Carbon monoxide gas was increasingly resorted to – first in canisters (which became ever more expensive to bring from Germany as the troops moved east), and then, after further technological innovation, from the exhaust of vans. During two weeks in May and June of 1940, 1,558 mental patients from East Prussia were gassed in vans at a transit camp in Soldau. The killings were carried out by “the itinerant euthanasia squad known as Sonderkommando Lange [its commander],” and represented an early blending of three elements of the Final Solution: the “euthanasia” program, laboratory science and SS technology (contributing to innovations in gassing), and Einsatzgruppen units (here working with the new gassing technology). In October 1941, Brack and Eichmann decided to use these vans for Jews in general who were “incapable of working.” Three were installed at the first pure extermination camp at Chelmno/Kulmhof (using personnel from Soldau), where they killed mainly Jews, but also gypsies, typhus victims, Soviet POWs, and the insane. Victims were told they would shower while their clothing was being disinfected. SS officers wore white coats and carried stethoscopes. Prisoners had their valuables registered, then followed a “To the Bath” sign, up a ramp and into the van. When no more noise was audible from the van, it was driven to the woods nearby where Jewish Kommandos unloaded the corpses into mass graves. (Because of noxious gases, a crematorium was latter installed.)


Jews photographed just prior to being sent to the gas chamber at Chelmno. 

Culled from: The Nazi Doctors

 

Atrocious Artwork!

Stella wrote to tell me about Emily Carroll.  I’m entranced!

“I haven’t seen you post anything about Emily Carroll, so I’m not sure if you’ve come across her work or not. She is a comics writer and artist, and her work has beautiful imagery and really intense body horror, and I thought it might be something you’d enjoy/enjoy sharing. She has a bunch of free comics available on her website (http://emcarroll.com/), and also has an Eisner-winning book of short stories out which I highly recommend. It includes the comic His Face All Red (http://emcarroll.com/comics/faceallred/01.html), which she is probably best known for online.”

Thank you, Stella!  I highly recommend “HIs Face All Red” and “When the Darkness Presses“.  Great stuff!

MFDJ 04/05/18: Porno Casualties

Today’s Record-Breaking Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In the nineties, porn stars dropped by the dozens from AIDS, a fact made public when Brooke Ashley tested HIV-positive after breaking the anal intercourse record, with fifty men. More safeguards have been established since. However, murder, suicide, and overdose permeate the doings of artists occupied expressing their talent in this medium. Trinity Loren (thirty-three) and Linda Wong (thirty-six) died from overdoses, as did J.D. Ram (twenty-six) and Jill Munro (twenty-five) on heroin, soon after appearing in Consenting Adults. Lolo Ferrari, billed as “the woman with the largest breasts in the world,” at seventy-one inches via silicone, broke a Guinness World Record for another obsession, undergoing twenty-two breast-enhancement procedures. It was believed her death, at thirty-eight in 2000, was from a rupture though according to her husband, Lolo picked out a white coffin and laid out a pink dress for her wake three days before she died of an overdose. When it was discovered that a nonlethal dose of medication was in Lola’s bloodstream, her husband said she instead died in her sleep, suffocating on her breasts. Lolo had planned an operation to reduce her stupendous size to an expression more manageable, such that suspicions of foul play surround her death.


Lolo and her Assets

Culled from: Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages

 

Morbid Art Du Jour!

Claude Monet’s painting of his wife Camille on her deathbed:

“Color is my day-long obsession, joy, and torment. To such an extend indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.” – Claude Monet

Morbid Fact Du Jour for January 28, 2018

Today’s Chaste Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Let’s have another jolly story of Christian Martyrdom from the classic of the genre, Fox’s Book of Martyrs (1848).  This incident allegedly occurred during the Seventh Persecution, under Decius in A. D. 249:

Agatha, a Sicilian lady, was not more remarkable for her personal and acquired endowments, than her piety: her beauty was such, that Quintian, governor of Sicily, became enamoured of her, and made many attempts upon her chastity without success.

In order to gratify his passions with the greater conveniency, he put the virtuous lady into the hands of Aphrodica, a very infamous and licentious woman. This wretch tried every artifice to win her to the desired prostitution; but found all her efforts were vain; for her chastity was impregnable, and she well knew that virtue alone could procure true happiness. Aphrodica acquainted Quintian with the inefficacy of her endeavours, who, enraged to be foiled in his designs, changed his lust into resentment. On her confessing that she was a christian, he determined to gratify his revenge, as he could not his passion. Pursuant to his orders, she was scourged, burnt with red-hot irons, and torn with sharp hooks. Having borne these torments with admirable fortitude, she was next laid naked upon live coals, intermingled with glass, and then being carried back to prison, she there expired on the 5th of Feb. 251.

Culled from: Fox’s Book of Martyrs
Generously suggested by: Louise

The Art of St. Agatha

Here we have a number of artistic depictions of the sufferings of Agatha.  They seem to be very obsessed with nipple torture.  Poor Agatha.


“Martyrdom of St. Agatha” by Sebastiano Del Piombo


“The Martyrdom of St. Agatha – Having Her Breast Cut Off”
Engraving made by Diana Scultori, After Ippolito Costa, Italy, 1577.


“Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha” by Giovanni Lanfranco


Not sure who the artist is here

Morbid Fact Du Jour for January 15, 2018

Today’s Honorable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Perhaps the most celebrated “vanquished honor” suicide was Marcus Procius Cato (95-46 BC). He was a man who inspired respect rather than affection from his fellow Romans. A brave soldier, he fled to Greece and then to Libya when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. Refusing to compromise his high principles by living under the rule of a tyrant, Cato decided upon suicide. After having ensured the safety of his men, he ate supper with his son, after which he retired to bed to read Phaedo, Plato’s treatise on the soul. At dawn, after a short sleep, he drew his sword and plunged the blade into his chest. Cato’s alleged last words, ‘And now I am master of myself,” epitomize the sentiment of men who hold that to choose the moment and mode of one’s own death is an inviolable human right.

Even had Cato been captured by Caesar, it is likely that the victor would have given to the vanquished the opportunity to commit suicide. It represented honor in defeat. (Indeed, Caesar might have spared Cato altogether, since he is reputed to have said, “Cato, I grudge you your death as you have grudged me the preservation of your life.”)

Culled from: Death: A History of Man’s Obsessions and Fears

Here’s an additional tidbit from Wikipedia on Cato’s death:

According to Plutarch, Cato attempted to kill himself by stabbing himself with his own sword, but failed to do so due to an injured hand. Plutarch wrote:

Cato did not immediately die of the wound; but struggling, fell off the bed, and throwing down a little mathematical table that stood by, made such a noise that the servants, hearing it, cried out. And immediately his son and all his friends came into the chamber, where, seeing him lie weltering in his own blood, great part of his bowels out of his body, but himself still alive and able to look at them, they all stood in horror. The physician went to him, and would have put in his bowels, which were not pierced, and sewed up the wound; but Cato, recovering himself, and understanding the intention, thrust away the physician, plucked out his own bowels, and tearing open the wound, immediately expired.

Now, that takes guts!

 

The Death of Cato: Artistic Interpretations

It’s always fun to see how those Renaissance artists depicted famous scenes in Roman/Greek history.  My favorite is the last one: Cato as seductive suicide in the gay bath house.





Morbid Fact Du Jour For August 20, 2017

Today’s Svelte Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Famed soprano Maria Callas died at age fifty-five in 1977. She made the news when she transformed her rotund figure (she was once called “monstrously fat”) into that of a svelte and sexy Diva at the height of her career, even if music critics marked her weight loss as the downturn of her vocal brilliance.  She was more interested in having fun and dated powerful men. She became a favorite of tabloid gossip when, while still married, she was seen with Aristotle Onassis, and the tabloids reveled in her anguish when he chose Jacqueline Kennedy over her. Rumors circulated that Maria kept her weight off by ingesting tapeworm larva, but she insisted it was a sensible diet and said, “I have been trying to fulfill my life as a woman.” In the end she lived isolated in Paris, unhappy in her quest for love, and acquired a taste for non-caloric Quaaludes, a sedative-like drug that gives a euphoric though rubbery-legged feeling. Officially, French officials deemed her death was due to “undisclosed causes,” though they cited a heart attack when pressed by the media. Others claimed she was murdered for her sizable estate. A note written by Callas was found near her body, though it raised only more questions about her final state of mind. She borrowed a line from the suicide scene in the opera La Giacanda: “In these proud moments.”


“Monstrously Fat” Callas (she looks fine to me!)


And Callas with Onassis in 1964.

Culled from: Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages

 

Morbid Art Du Jour!

Kevin Weir makes delightfully creepy animated gifs that combine vintage photos with his own wicked imagination.  His blog is well worth meandering through.  (Thanks to Michael Landsman for the link.)

Flux Machine

Morbid Fact Du Jour For April 28, 2017

Today’s Treacherous Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Sachsenhausen prison camp was established in 1936. It was located 35 kilometres (22 mi) north of Berlin, which gave it a primary position among the German concentration camps: the administrative centre of all concentration camps was located in Oranienburg, and Sachsenhausen became a training centre for Schutzstaffel (SS) officers (who would often be sent to oversee other camps afterwards).

The initial prisoner population at Sachsenhausen consisted primarily of political enemies. On November 10, 1936, the SS murdered Gustav Lampe, a communist and member of the Reichstag. An SS Block Leader had thrown his cap over the sentry fence, and while Lampe was trying to retrieve it, as he had been ordered to do, he was “shot while attempting to escape”.


Sachsenhausen “No Go Zone” as seen during my 2014 visit.

Culled from: Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1936-1945

If you’re interested in learning more about Sachsenhausen, please take a look at the travelogue of my 2014 visit.  I need to go back.  It’s a fascinating place.

European DeSpair: Nineteen-Thirty-Sick!

Morbid Fact Du Jour For September 21, 2016

Today’s Explosive Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The deadliest disaster in St. Paul’s history occurred at just after eight o’clock on the morning of February 8, 1951, when a thunderous butane gas explosion tore through part of the huge Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (now 3M, Inc.) industrial complex along Bush Avenue on the city’s East Side. The explosion occurred in a six-story concrete-frame building where minerals were crushed and then heated in huge butane ovens. It left 15 people dead or dying, including a truck driver making deliveries at the plant. Another 54 workers were injured, some with terrible burns.

So powerful was the blast that it knocked over railroad cars on nearby tracks, swept though tunnels into adjacent buildings, and ejected some of its victims through shattered windows while burying others under tons of debris. The first photograph shows the blast-damaged building with the body of an unidentified victim lying on the railroad tracks behind it. The man had been decapitated in the explosion, and the Dispatch’s editors apparently thought it would be helpful to point this fact out with an arrow. This prominently displayed pointer suggested something like perverse journalistic pride in being able to deliver such a gruesome detail to the public. [I can appreciate that! – DeSpair]

Photographers also raced to Ancker Hospital (a predecessor of today’s Regions Hospital and located at Colborne Street and Jefferson Avenue in St. Paul). Many of the blast victims were treated at Ancker. Here, a doctor and nurse tend to a critically injured worker, part of whose face had been torn open by the blast. Meanwhile, Father Francis Turmeyer, a hospital chaplain, reads the last rites over the unidentified man.

Culled from: Strange Days, Dangerous Nights: Photos from the Speech Graphic Era

Morbid Art Du Jour: The Periwig Maker

The Periwig Maker is a beautiful animated short film from 1999 that depicts life during the Great Plague of London in 1665 which is based on the 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Dafoe. Enthusiasts of animation (and pestilence) should have a look!  (Thanks to David for the link.)

The Periwig Maker – Cult of Weird

Morbid Fact Du Jour for August 12, 2016

Today’s Countrified Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

One of the most popular variety shows in the US was “Hee Haw,” which ran from 1969 to 1992. It featured country music and comedy sketches with a country or Southern theme. Even for the relatively G-rated TV environment at the time it began, “Hee Haw” had a decidedly cornball style of humor, but it consistently received high ratings and helped many country musicians get needed exposure.

One of the regular performers in “Hee Haw’s” early days was David Akeman. Known as String Bean due to being six-foot two and skinny, Akeman was an accomplished old-style banjo player, and augmented his playing with funny songs and a recurring skit where he was a scarecrow in a field who uttered one-liners, only to be shouted down by the crow on his shoulder.


Stringbean Akeman

Akeman had grown up during the Great Depression and as a result, he and his wife Estelle lived very frugally in a small cabin in Ridgetop, Tennessee. They distrusted banks and it was rumored that they kept thousands of dollars hidden on their property.

On the night of November 10, 1973, two cousins, Doug and John Brown, both 23, went to the Akemans’ cabin and ransacked it looking for this cash. They found very little money and decided to wait for the couple to return home and make them reveal the money’s location. Stringbean was that night performing live at the Grand Ole Opry, and the cousins listened to the show on the radio in order to keep track of their victims’ expected arrival time.

After ten P.M., the Akemans arrived home and immediately noticed that the homemade burglar alarm — a fishing line stretched across their driveway — had been displaced. Akeman retrieved his gun from his bag and started toward the house, only to be confronted by the intruders and shot where he stood.

Estelle Akeman screamed and tried to run away, but was chased down and was also shot to death. The Browns left with only a little bit of money, a chain saw and some guns. They missed over three thousand in cash that Stringbean had in his overalls, and another two thousand hidden in Estelle’s bra.

The bodies were discovered next morning by the Akemans’ neighbor and fellow “Hee Haw” and Opry regular “Grandpa” Jones. The Browns were both convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Doug Brown died of natural causes while still incarcerated in 2003, and John Brown was paroled in 2014.


The murder scene

Culled from: The Mammoth Book of More Bizarre Crimes
Submitted by: Aimee

 

Morbid Art Du Jour!

I often wish I had the talent to make die-o-ramas.  If I did, they’d probably look a lot like Abigail Goldman’s! (Thanks to Anna for the link.)

Oh, some of her work is for sale too! Wish I could afford them…

Dieorama by Abigail Goldman

Morbid Fact Du Jour for April 22, 2016

Today’s Rauenous Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In 1595, lords in four Dutch cities filled seven ships with linens, cloths, and tapestries and sent navigator Willem Barentsz on a journey to Asia. Haggling delayed the departure until midsummer. and once asea, the captains of the vessels overruled Barentsz and took a more southerly course than he wished. They did so partly because Barentsz’s northerly route seemed mad, and partly because, beyond reaching China, the Dutch seamen were fired by rumors of a remote island whose shores were studded with diamonds. Sure enough, the crew found the island and landed straightaway.

Sailors had been stuffing their pockets with the transparent gems for a number of minutes when, as an old English account had it, “a great leane white beare came sodainly stealing out” and wrapped his paw around one sailor’s neck. The polar bear, “falling upon the man, bit his head in sunder, and suckt out his blood.”

This encounter opened a centuries-long war between explorers and this “cruell, fierce, and rauenous beast.” Polar bears certainly deserved their reputations as mean SOBs. They picked off and devoured any stragglers wherever sailors landed, and they withstood staggering amounts of punishment. Sailors could bury an ax in a bear’s back or pump six bullets into its flank – and often, in its rampage, this just made the bear madder. Then again, polar bears had plenty of grievances , too.  As one historian notes, “Early explorers seemed to regard it as their duty to kill polar bears,” and they piled up carcasses like buffalo hunters later would on the Great Plains. Some explorers deliberately maimed bears to keep as pets and paraded them around in rope nooses. One such bear, hauled aboard a small ship, snapped free from its restraints and, after slapping the sailors about, mutinied and took over the ship. In the bear’s fury, though, its noose got tangled in the rudder, and it exhausted itself trying to get free. The “brave” men retook the ship and butchered the bear.

During the encounter with Barentsz’s crew, the bear managed to murder a second sailor, and probably would have kept hunting had reinforcements not arrived from the main sip. A sharpshooter put a bullet clean between the bear’s eyes, but the bear shook it off and refused to stop snacking. Other men charged and attacked with swords, but their blades snapped on its head and hide. Finally someone clubbed the beat in the snout and stunned it, enabling another person to slit its throat ear to ear. By this time both sailors had expired, of course, and the rescue squad could do nothing but skin the bear and abandon the corpses.

Stay tuned for Episode Two: The Bear Strikes Back!

Polar Bear
in a zoo

Culled from: The Violinist’s Thumb and Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius as Written by Our Genetic Code

 

Morbid Art Du Jour!

They’ve uncovered the most fantastic mosaic in Turkey. I simply MUST have one installed in The Castle DeSpair forthwith!

2,400 year-old mosaic found in southern Turkey says ‘be cheerful, enjoy your life’

Morbid Fact Du Jour For March 19, 2016

Today’s Lucky Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

August 6, 1945 started off pretty lucky for perhaps the most unlucky man of the twentieth century. Tsutomu Yamaguchi had stepped off his bus near Mitsubishi headquarters in Hiroshima when he realized he’d forgotten his inkan, the seal that Japanese salary men dip in red ink and use to stamp documents. The lapse annoyed him – he faced a long ride back to his boardinghouse – but nothing could really dampen his mood that day. He’d finished designing a five-thousand-ton tanker ship for Mitsubishi, and the company would finally, the next day, send him back home to his wife and infant son in southwest Japan. The war had disrupted his life, but on August 7 things would return to normal.


Tsutomu Yamaguchi

As Yamaguchi removed his shoes at his boardinghouse door, the elderly proprietors ambushed him and asked him to tea. He could hardly refuse these lonely folk, and the unexpected engagement further delayed him. Shod again, inkan in hand, he hurried off, caught a streetcar, disembarked near work, and was walking along near a potato field when he heard a gnat of an enemy bomber high above. He could just make out a speck descending from its belly. It was 8:15 a.m.

Many survivors remember the curious delay. Instead of a normal bomb’s simultaneous flash-bang, this bomb flashed and swelled silently, and got hotter and hotter silently. Yamaguchi was close enough to the epicenter that he didn’t wait long. Drilled in air-raid tactics, he dived to the ground, covered his eyes, and plugged his ears with his thumbs. After a half-second light bath came a roar, and with it came a shock wave. A moment later Yamaguchi felt a gale somehow beneath him, raking his stomach. He’d been tossed upward, and after a short flight he hit the ground, unconscious.

He awoke, perhaps seconds later, perhaps an hour, to a darkened city. The mushroom cloud had sucked up tons of dirt and ash, and small rings of fire smoked on wilted potato leaves nearby. His skin felt aflame, too. He’d rolled up his shirt sleeves after his cup of tea, and his forearms felt severely sunburned. He rose and staggered through the potato field, stopping every few feet to rest, shuffling past other burned and bleeding and torn-open victims. Strangely compelled, he reported to Mitsubishi. He found a pile of rubble speckled with small fires, and many dead coworkers – he’d been lucky to be late. He wandered onwards, hours slipped by. He drank water from broken pipes, and at an emergency aid station he nibbled a biscuit and vomited. He slept that night beneath an overturned boat on a beach. His left arm, fully exposed to the great white flash, had turned black.

(To be continued…)

Culled from: The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code

 

Morbid Art Du Jour!

Christina Bothwell’s artist statement makes you expect her artwork to be hippy-dippy new agey stuff:

“Since I was very young, I have been fascinated with the concept of the Soul… the idea that the physical body represents only a small part of our beingness. I am always interested in trying to express the that we are more than just our bodies, and my ongoing spiritual interests and pursuits have run parallel to the narrative in my pieces.”

And some of it definitely is.  But some of her work is delightfully creepy.

Christina Bothwell

Thanks to David for the link.