Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy is raising funds to create a new public cabinet of curiosity within a 3-floor, 4,200 square foot building in Brooklyn, New York.
via BoingBoing!.
I wandered into Morbid Anatomy while roaming around the Gowanus and it was a wonderfully weird moment. I love this place.
I’m always proud of my SC to BK buddy Tracey, but she’s doing extra special work and it’s getting noticed.
“It’s hard to believe young girls like Tiana Parker and Vanessa Van Dyke are being sent home from school because their natural hair is deemed unkempt,” said Tracey Coleman who is a co-founder and the director of events for CGC.
via [BEAUTIFULLY BROWN OBSESSED] Curly Girl Collective Helps Black Girls Get “All Dolled Up” – EBONY.
My buddy N is dating one of the owner’s of Noorman’s Kil in Williamsburg, right in my old neighborhood.
Billy, there in the middle, he’s the one.
Can I just say how exciting it is to go down in the basement, past the keg fridge and into the room where they keep the secret treasures of old and rare whiskey? I settled in for some Noah’s Mill, but Jason on the right ended up drinking a Vintage 17 Bourbon that was the best thing we found that night. So damn sweet and smooth, like a preacher looking for a donation. There was also a really good peat smoked stout but by that point I couldn’t be bothered to remember things like names or my tab.
I expect N to shortly die of whisky poisoning. Her boy has around 300 kinds. That can’t end well.
This morning started… slowly.
Oh, the last book I read by Nick Mamatas was so good that I ended my review with a threat and a warning. Time to break out the woodchipper, because his new book, Sensation, is very different and very good.
This time, picture Carl Zimmer (he of Parasite Rex fame) and Jared Diamond getting drunk and writing a comic adventure about hyperintelligent spiders shaping humanity’s history in a long war against the parasitic wasps that lay eggs in them ( the spiders ). Oh yes, please, more. Told from the perspective of the spiders, centered around a marriage that collapses as part of the fray, it’s funny and wildly predictive. See, Julia leaves Ray when a species of wasp lays eggs in her that free her of all her inhibitions and compassion. She joyfully murders and causes havoc while Ray obsesses about her, wondering why his loving wife suddenly left. Â Then he sees her in a supermarket, follows her, and begins to piece things together. Â He shouldn’t have.
Internet shutdowns? Global anonymous protest movements? People who live in Brooklyn not being entirely clear on their ethos or objectives, but being very very cool? All there. I leave you with a video about a parasitic wasp that zombifies cockroaches because you probably think this premise is more unlikely than it is.
Another fin del mundo comes as Alan Moore’s Neonomicon. While Supergod is almost plotless – more a series of provocative ideas strung together, Neonomicon is a train on rails to hell. Every page brings you closer to Cthulhu in an FBI investigation of a Lovecraft copy-cult in Brooklyn. Instead of hitting all of the high notes of a Cthulhu story like Nick Mamatas did in Move Underground, Moore brings you the creeping dread, the knowledge of the potential coming. There’s one monster in the book (other than the people) but most of it is more about the dark at the top of the stairs rather than the monster stomping into view. Also, a secret about Alan Moore I have noticed: the secret to horror is killing real people. When a person with no connection to you dies, it means nothing to you. So, before Moore begins killing people in his stories, he connects them to you. Most writers don’t want to waste character time and exposition on people that they know are going to disappear later – they are having enough trouble getting you to care about the main character. Moore is fast at fleshing out people, so he has the time to make his secondary characters real characters with just hints and flashes of their past.
For me, the Brooklyn setting is icing. My adopted city is perfect for this sort of story, and if Moore gets some of the details of BK wrong, it is still creepier to read a horror story written WHERE YOU LIVE! Imagine “The Wilderness Downtown“, but after dark on a moonless night. That gives me another idea for a project – a short story set in your house, right where you live.
