Prison storytelling, subcultural anthropology, and the allure of darkness.
In the 1970’s, while American hippies were busy inking themselves with peace signs and psychedelic rainbows, Danzig Baldayev, a guard at St. Petersburg’s notorious Kresty Prison, began documenting the far less Woodstockian body art of Russia’s most infamous criminals.
For 33 years, Baldayev used his exclusive access to and rapport with the prisoners to hand-illustrate and capture in artful photographs more than 3,600 inmate tattoos — as admirable a feat artistically as it was sociologically.
In 2003, when he was in his late 70’s, Baldayev began releasing his magnificent archive as a series of books revealing a rich and eerie intersection of art and violence.
Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volumes I, II and III offer not only a visceral record of this intersection, but also Baldayev’s aambitious effort to, through text and illustrations, parse the meaning of these tattoos and place them in the context of this fiercely self-contained subculture. (Or, as it were, institution-contained as well.)
Perhaps even more striking than the body art itself is how Baldayev was able to talk some of Russia’s most dangerous convicts into posing for such intimate and often vulnerable portraits, an intimacy also seen in the work of Canadian photographer Donald Weber:
For a related glimpse of this darkly enigmatic world, the excellent Oscar-nominated 2007 film Eastern Promises about the Russian mob in London, starring Naomi Watts and Viggo Mortensen, offers an intriguing look at tattoos as storytelling, a narrative through which prisoners told their life stories and conveyed their credos.
Eachofthe volumes is an absolute masterpiece and a fascinating slice of (sub)cultural anthropology. It’s the kind of thing that adds instant conversation potential to any home library or coffee table, and guaranteed you’re-cooler-than-my-other-friends gifting recognition.
Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Minimizing your mortal footprint, or how to write a shopping list — literally — with the dead.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” according to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. If you want to understand the life cycle in more specific molecular detail, though, you should look to a surprising disciplinary source. That’s because the most contemporary thinking on decomposition doesn’t come from religion or science; it comes from industrial design.
Perhaps it’s the passing of another year that has us thinking about the ultimate human passage. That’s right: today we’re all about death. More specifically, it’s about designerly approaches to death, and why this topic merits interest for reasons beyond aesthetic fetishism. The objects we’re considering today illustrate how design can imbue death with dignity, while also creating value for the people and earth that remain behind — not a bad legacy to leave.
SPIRITREE
Recipient of an honorable mention in I.D. magazine’s 2009 Annual Design Review, Spiritree is one option for those looking to leave the lightest footprint at the end of their lives. (As an aside, we were dismayed to learn that I.D. is itself meeting an untimely end because of the death of its publishing model. RIP, I.D.)
Spiritree is a futuristic-looking pod that transforms the traditional funerary urn into something that looks like the lovechild of Karim Rashid’s brain and a bird feeder. Spiritree’s website cites eco-entrepreneur Paul Hawken as an inspiration, and we can see why. Designed by Arquitectura/Diseño in Puerto Rico, the Spiritree turns remains into fertile fodder for “a living memorial in the form of a tree.” Its pieces are intended to biodegrade as the seeds added to it germinate; and the pod’s ceramic upper half eventually cracks as the emerging plant grows strong enough to break it.
We don’t like to talk or think about what happens to our mortal coils when we shuffle them off, but, like all of our remains, they have to go somewhere.
And like much else we humans leave behind as a species, we haven’t been good at disposing of ourselves. Death is a resource-intensive business. By some estimates, 200 million pounds of steel are used each year to build caskets; many are also lined with copper or zinc. Embalming usually involves carcinogenic chemicals — not much of a concern for the recently departed, but definitely bad when they eventually leach into our groundwater. And many cemeteries encourage water waste and other landscaping evils.
POST-MORTEM PROJECT
Thankfully, intrepid industrial designers like Nadine Jarvis have been ruminating on the vessels via which we meet our earthly rest.
Jarvis’s thesis project at the University of London took the form of a series of alternative proposals for the post mortem. In Carbon Copies, Jarvis turned cremains into a lifetime supply of pencils — 240 to be exact — to be used by the deceased’s survivors. Rest in Pieces takes the form of a ceramic urn suspended from a tree; the cord from which it hangs deteriorates over a period of one to three years, at which point the urn drops and smashes, scattering its contents.
Jarvis’s Bird Feeders gesture at reincarnation, relying on birds’ ingestion of the ash and seeds that comprise the pieces. Her work engages the grieving process with elegance, enlarging through form the spaces in which we mourn. Pieces from Jarvis’s post-mortem research are in the collections of London’s Design Museum and Funeria, the founding agency behind the only (to our knowledge, anyway) biennial for funerary artwork, Ashes to Art.
ECOPOD
Finally, for cradle-to-cradle coffins, look no further than the Ecopod. Made by hand from recycled paper products, Ecopod was designed by natural-birthing practitioner Hazel Selina. Selina created the product in response to a friend’s death and her research around the limitations of traditional casket and coffin design. Ecopods come in a variety of colors (including the gorgeous gold version above), and can be screen printed with various designs or lined with feathers. We weren’t surprised to learn that the UK-based Selina was fascinated by ancient Egyptian burial rituals, since the Ecopod looks like what we imagine a 21st-century Tutankhamun might choose for his own final rest.
We realize that since the world couldn’t even agree on carbon limits at Copenhagen, we’re unlikely to see mass reform around such a personal topic as death. Still, it’s at least worth considering how we might, in our final act, try to leave the earth better rather than worse for our wear. For more resources on green burials, visit the non-profit Green Burial Council.
Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.
In 2009, we spent more than 240 hours a month bringing you Brain Pickings. That’s over 2,880 hours for the year, over which we could’ve seen 29 feature-length films, listened to 72 music albums or taken 960 bathroom visits. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
Cultural peep shows, modern fixations, and why everyone is looking for the appendix.
You know those drop-down suggestions that pop up every time you begin typing a search into Google? Much of the time, it seems to know what you want — kind of like a very low-stakes game of Wheel of Fortune. Most people tend to just search with keywords, not bothering to fully formulate a question. But what if you went in with an incomplete Ask Jeeves-esque query and let the Google algorithm try to suggest how to finish it?
Questions Suggestions, the creation of web designer and developer Justin Talbott, presents us with screen shots of search queries along with the given suggestions — with results ranging from humorous to baffling. Assuming that the suggestions are loosely based on the most popular searches, the site offers not only amusement but also a look into what the internet community at large is searching for.
Not surprisingly, as in the example above, many of the results expose prevalent fixations of modern culture: love (or sex), money, and celebrity gossip — we’re grouping “Dubai” under money here, and the “appendix”, true to its nature, stands alone.
One of our favorite quirks is the difference in suggestions given to those who use “you” and those time-strapped individuals who use “u.” Compare this example…
… to this similar search:
If you ever thought you might be brave enough to pick the collective teenage brain, here’s your chance.
Questions Suggestions provides a somewhat voyeuristic look at what everybody is searching for — a worthy, and often very funny, piece of cultural anthropology. And while the site itself offers no commentary, we bet you won’t have trouble coming up with your own.
Meghan Walsh has a degree in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College, Dublin and is finishing her thesis on J.P. Donleavy at NYU. She is currently working on two art exhibitions in New York City. For more of her writing check out her cooking blog.
The 1’s and 0’s of home, or what the Olsen twins have to do with John Locke and God.
Every once in a while we stumble across something we don’t quite get, but can tell is brilliant. Case in point: The Plan 9.001 Flickr set from an artist by the cryptic name of 9000.
Full of wondrous, beautifully art directed charts, graphs, diagrams and other fascinations that capture the human condition, the illustrations are part poetry, part art direction, part homage to geek culture — and all genius.
Most of the images are left to exist in their self-contained reality, with no caption or explanation, inviting you to make sense of them ever which way you wish.
And some are brimming with keen cultural commentary, oozing both from the images themselves and from the quotes accompanying — mismatched at first glance, like this odd psalm that we had to Google-translate, but deeply profound in context.
Indeed, there’s a certain preoccupation with the God — a quest for divinity in the godless, lonesome, conflicted world the artist seems to inhabit. Or, you know, it’s just a mockery thereof.
And while we’re not quite sure what to make of it it all, we urge you to explore the Plan 9.001 set and the rest of 9000’s rather diverse but uniformly bizarre body of work — if for no other reason than that it has intrigued us more than anything we’ve come across in a long, long time.
We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly interestingness digest. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week's best articles. Here's an example. Like? Sign up.
donating = loving
Brain Pickings remains free (and ad-free) and takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and write, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and value in what I do, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:
In the 1970’s, while American hippies were busy inking themselves with peace signs and psychedelic rainbows, Danzig Baldayev, a guard at St. Petersburg’s notorious Kresty Prison, began documenting the far less Woodstockian body art of Russia’s most infamous criminals.
In 2003, when he was in his late 70’s, Baldayev began releasing his magnificent archive as a series of books revealing a rich and eerie intersection of art and violence.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called 
