Song for 10th January 2013

by sequinnedmannequin

Yes, I know it’s the 11th of January. This was yesterday’s song. But I was too busy having a wonderful evening to post it. So there.

Julian Plenti – Skyscraper

In other news, if you are within easy reach of London you absolutely must go and see the Death: A Self-Portrait exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. It’s brilliant. Especially the navy blue room, which contains the more humorous/playful depictions of death.

While there, go upstairs to see the two permanent collections – it’s a sensory overload because there is simply a ridiculous amount of stuff to look at, but it’s amazing. In fact I may have preferred upstairs even to the death bit. One room is basically like a giant, very well-organised flea market. In which you can’t buy anything. Craploads of old medical paraphernalia. Incredible. As someone who collects all manner of old and strange things it was some kind of heaven. You can even see a lock of [allegedly] King someone-or-other’s (George III?) hair.

The other room is dedicated to modern medicine – a perfect example of science and art colliding and combining in a manner that proves how very not mutually exclusive the two are. I’m fascinated by bodies and am almost immune to gore (vomit is a whole different kettle of fish, however) so this was brilliant. I wanted to see my cyst after they removed it and I loved seeing photos of my sewn up ovaries when the surgeon came round after my operation. Recently I freaked out the radiographer who biopsied my breast by staring in fascination as she stabbed giant needles into my tit and plucked bits out. She told me not to look, like these people always do when they’re savagely jabbing at your body, but, like, if someone’s going to rummage around poking and scanning me I definitely wanna see what’s going on. They’ve got one those corpse slices at the Wellcome – you know, when they dunk a dead body in gunk so it basically turns into plastic and then they chop it up (I’m imagining the cheese wire cutter things they use at supermarket deli counters) like wafer thin ham and stick it in perspex and you can see everything. Fantastic.

There are other reasons it was a wonderful evening, too, but for once I’m going to be coy about those Suffice to say, it’s my turn to come up with the next outing and considering how high the bar has been set by last night I gratefully welcome any suggestions of good stuff happening in London at the moment.

In other news, I have set Edith up with her own Tumblr for #thedailyedith and I also set up a Tumblr for myself to use as a photoblog. I might still post photos here but Tumblr is a lot less faff, pictures look nicer, and I’ve nearly run out of data allowance here.