I was somewhere else. I thought I was somplace but now I didn’t know what place. I seemed to be inside foreign worlds where there was some kind of troubling comraderie – as if a haunting joke was known to everyone but me and yet faintly I knew it too. I couldn’t pull away – it was like a magnet and there was beauty in it. Human creatures with the feeling of being turned strange and open to falling and glee – they seemed to have a glee for somehow stithcing a laugh to darkness.

All the clocks had stopped. A void out of time. And here they are – looking out and holding themselves still – holding still at that point where two worlds join – the familiar and the other.

David Lynch, from Haunted Air: A collection of anonymous Hallowe’en photographs, America c. 1875 – 1955, Ossian Brown.

“Save Rosewood Now”

“This is an outstanding example of a ‘memento mori,’ or ‘reminder of death’: a gruesome skeleton clothed in tattered flesh holds a scroll bearing the Latin inscription, ‘I am what you will be.  I was what you are.  For every man this is so.’  That the artist has depicted the cadaver in a graceful pose that mimics that of Adam in Albrecht Durer’s famous engraving of Adam and Eve is probably intentional; it was due to Adam’s sin that humans were subject to death.  The carving was certainly made for a sophisticated collector-Archduke Ferdinand owned one that is not as good-and such a collector would recognize the source of the pose.

The complexity of the carving of this statuette demonstrates the qualities of boxwood.  The carver was able to hollow out the gut and peel away the skin without the form collapsing.

Boxwood; 61.97, acquired by Henry Walters.”

From the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD

Lane’s latest comic book, Death Trap, won the Fall 2009 Xeric Grant.  Here’s the specs on this book:

DEATH TRAP by Lane Milburn
-112 pp. Graphic Novel
-8 pp. Full Color, 104 pp. Black & White
-7.5″x5″
-ISBN 978-0-615-35064-6
-Fall 2009 Xeric Grant winner.
-Contains 2 stories: “Perceived Obsolescence” and “Death Trap”

More on this here.

Bern, Switzerland, 1441-1450.  Part of the “Dance of Death” stained glass window there.  Dance of Death imagery first became popular during the Black Plague of the 1340′s, and persisted through the 1500′s.  These images serve as a memento mori, a reminder that Death takes all.