No drama, no weepy symbolism, just the names of three family members in gold with white enamel. Memory doesn’t have to be messy.

A series of portraits documenting the ritual of wearing black as a signifier of perpetual mourning. All of the subjects in the series have vowed to wear black every day for the rest of their lives.  Photography by Georgia Metaxas.

About the loveliest meditation on living and dying I’ve ever read. He will be missed. Cheers, Roger!

As many medical students around the country do, students at the Indiana University School of Medicine-Northwest campus hold memorial services when they have finished dissecting and studying their cadavers. The twist is that the cadaver’s relatives are invited to the remembrance ceremony during which letters of appreciation are read, a clergyman offers prayers, and families often cry together. One student said, ““Once you put a name and a face to the body that you’re working with, once you put an identity to it, you connect to it in a really meaningful and powerful way.” 

This Esquire blog posts asks, innocently: What would Eisenhower think of his own memorial? (There’s been a lot of bickering and protesting by Eisenhower’s remaining family: they don’t like Frank Gehry’s proposed design and want something they feel would properly honor Ike.) Which brings up the many thorny questions of ownership of memorial legacies: who is in charge of the editorial direction—the exit image and narrative created in your honor? Would you approve, if you could magically return after death to take a look at memorials created in your name? What if you don’t like the RIP Facebook page, the memorial blog, the unsuitable statue in the park? The short answer is: it doesn’t matter, because you won’t know about it. You’ll be dead, right? But civic monuments to great leaders are another story, dealing with enduring public legacy as well as the personal memories of those who knew and loved the memorialized person. That’s where this one gets very sticky.

Dutch designer Joost Gehem uses all kinds of unwanted belongings, some of them coming from the estates of the deceased, others coming from repossessed homes, to create new stools.  ”135,000 deaths, 32,000 divorces, 10,000 bankruptcies, and thousands of hospitalizations occur each year,” he explains, talking only about the Netherlands. “Many household inventories are left without a home. If heirs and dealers have no interest in the household goods, they usually end up in the local dump.”

So he buys up unwanted items, transports them to his studio (aka the Transformation and Distribution Centre for Abandoned Household Items), then stuffs or grinds them down to fill a simple three-legged stool mold. “Your old inventory gets a fresh new start,” Gehem adds. “The Centre infuses new life into the cycle of collecting and throwing away.”

Extraordinary photos: teenage life from a bygone era overlaid onto abandoned building, once Michigan’s largest school.

An animal rights activist in Irvine has proposed a roadside memorial for 1600 lbs. of live fish who died in a car crash. The fish were en route to an Asian market where they were to be sold as food. I will put a lid on all the snarky comments I would like to make at this time.

Artist Paolo Cirio’s project Street Ghosts pastes lifesized paper printouts of people accidentally captured on Google street view, onto the exact location where Google snapped them. They become part of the “real” landscape, at least as long as the paper lasts. Wouldn’t it be great to do something similar with Sites of Memory—install images taken from the stories around the city at the spots where they took place?