Read: British Royalty Dined on Human Flesh (But Don’t Worry it Was 300 Years Ago)

This painting of Charles I’s execution in 1649 shows people surging forward to mop up the former king’s blood. It was thought to have healing properties.

According to The Mail Online (published May 21, 2011):

They have long been famed for their love of lavish banquets and rich recipes.  But what is less well known is that the British royals also had a taste for human flesh. A new book on medicinal cannibalism has revealed that possibly as recently as the end of the 18th century British royalty swallowed parts of the human body. The author adds that this was not a practice reserved for monarchs but was widespread among the well-to-do in Europe.

Even as they denounced the barbaric cannibals of the New World, they applied, drank, or wore powdered Egyptian mummy, human fat, flesh, bone, blood, brains and skin.

Moss taken from the skulls of dead soldiers was even used as a cure for nosebleeds, according to Dr Richard Sugg at Durham University.

Dr Sugg said: ‘The human body has been widely used as a therapeutic agent with the most popular treatments involving flesh, bone or blood…”

Read full article here

The book mentioned in the article is called Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, will be published on June 29 by Routledge and charts the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians.

Photo File: Boogie

When Belgrade-born, Brooklyn-based photographer Boogie isn’t shooting Brooklyn gangs, Serbian skinheads or drug addicts, he’s locked away experimenting with the 19th century photographic technique known as “wet plate“, which he used to produce these ghostly portraits. It’s by no means an easy process to create a “wet plate” exposure - practitioners need to be equal parts photographer and alchemist to navigate the unpredictable nature of the chemical variables used. Plus the entire process, from coating to developing, had to be done before the plate dried. This gives the photographer no more than 10 minutes to complete everything.

“It was amazing to feel like an alchemist, mixing chemicals and pouring plates in my tiny dirty basement. Thereʼs dust and dirt everywhere and temperature varies, so the results are unpredictable. After doing the first few plates, I realised that something about this process captures peoplesʼ darker side. So I named the series Demons. Every picture was taken in Belgrade in late autumn and winter. It was grey and gloomy, the photo exposures were long, and you could see people going crazy trying to keep still and staring in the lens.”

Boogie’s latest exhibition Demons opens on May 27 and runs through June 25 at The Outsiders Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

See more of Boogie’s work on his blog

Read: Noam Chomsky’s Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Via Guernica:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda…”

Continue reading here

Photo File: Spomeniks of the Former Yugoslavia

Although these monuments are full of symbolism that no longer applies, their beauty remains nonetheless.

Spomenik is the Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian word for monument. In the 1960s and 70s, the former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito commissioned these structures to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place (like Tjentište, Kozara and Kadinjača), or where concentration camps stood (like Jasenovac and Niš). Designed by different sculptors (Dušan Džamonja, Vojin Bakić, Miodrag Živković, Jordan and Iskra Grabul, to name a few) and architects (Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković…), the strong and powerful blending of art and architecture come together in these monuments to convey the sense of confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. However, after the Republic gradually died down in 1992, they lost their sense of wonder and no longer attracted the millions of visitors a year.  From 2006 to 2009, Jan Kempenaers toured around the ex-Yugoslavia region to photograph these amazing structures.

source: Crack Two

See more images here

Watch: Surf Punks, 1981

45 min. Dutch TV documentary by Frans Bromet on the SoCal punk scene with footage of Suicidal Tendencies, The Germs, Venus & The Razorblades, 45 Grave, China White, Casey Cola, and Phranc.