Google Destroying Blogspot?

or just making my life more difficult. We blogspotters have been forced onto an interface that looks more like Wordpress, which as far as I can tell is clunkier and gives us less control. I've considered migrating to Wordpress before – I could host my blogs on my own server and have greater privacy, etc. – but rejected it because the blogspot user interface was superior. Google has chosen to trash that advantage.

Testing image control and positioning with the image right.

Ok, maybe I can get used to this, but where the h*ll do I enter labels? 

Isa Genzken

Plastinated children – yes!

At Museum Ludwig thru Nov. 15.

I Like MJ's Final Face

Here's the best collection I've seen lately of before-and-after pics; you also get good face in the documentary referred to in my previous post; and here's someone's idea of what he might have looked like if he'd left well enough alone.

I agree, he'd have been handsome without any surgery,etc.

But I also think the face he bought is cool.

The music was great, and he understood the importance of the visual. His face was another of his creations. It may have ended up half Phantom of the Opera; but I like it. And I can't think of many besides his final face that will remain more recognizable, or more interesting, longer.

His music video masterpiece, Thriller (embedded below), now seems prescient of both his and our realities.

PS: Apparently face et al. are destined for plastination à la von Hagens – the authorities' or someone's requirement for an autopsy kibboshed MJ's first choice, cryogenic freezing – more here.

UPDATE: Apparently not; MJ's body was buried, though sans his brain, which is still undergoing analysis re- drugs, etc.; more here.

Body Worlds UPDATE

Re- my previous post . . . The Times reports that Gunther von Hagens, "sometimes dubbed Dr. Death," plans to put some 150,000 plastinated body parts on sale to the public.

"Dr. von Hagens says that he will not sell the body parts if it damages the dignity of the corpse.

"'That means forbidding the use of the body sections as, for example, placemats for cocktail glasses,' he says, 'and if the owner wants to get rid of the body bits he will be required to cremate them and not simply throw them in the bin.'

". . . . so far he has been promised 8,568 corpses and has 531 in stock, all swimming in baths of alcohol awaiting his chemical treatment" -- in addition to the hundreds already plastinated and in touring exhibits?

Body Worlds

Highly recommended. Combines grossness and kitsch to yield an aesthetic frisson unmatched since The Little Shop of Horrors. One "plastinated" man holds his own internal organs aloft like a trophy. Another has been sliced vertically into slabs, tattooed portraits of exotic women still fully legible on the ribbons of skin encircling the slabs (Damien H., eat your heart out). There's even a gigantic, half-dissected horse surmounted by a half-dissected human holding his own brain in one hand and the horse's in the other – if only it were their penises. The best pieces are displayed with metal plaques bearing the signature of the proud scientist/artist, Gunther von Hagens.

My boyfriend got dizzy after five minutes and hurried out; I felt strangely famished. More info at the Body Worlds site; here's Wikipedia's summary of certain controversies; and here's a page with a great pic of von Hagens with one of his creations (he's the one in the hat).