Mother's Love

Mothers are supposed to be legendary for the length they'll go to protect their children. That's why this post seems little strange and grotesque. This link is a mother throwing knives at her children.

Big Pimple Pimping

Honestly one of my favorite morning activities is popping zits. I think its really cool, but this takes the cake

Snickers From Hell

This to me is grotesque, some things just shouldn't be deep fried

MIA

M.I.A's video for "Born Free" gets pretty serious, Its supposed to be a look at the violence normally committed against minorities.
-CP

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

War, The stuff you don't see

This is video is taken from wiki-leaks. Its a video of a engagement in Iraq between US forces and a group of armed Iraqis. A child ends up getting hurt in the crossfire, and there is some question as to the severity of the initial threat. The violence's grotesque nature is obvious. What's interesting to be is the tendency to views situations like this in absolutes. Its like Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, we as a society can't handle the truth. People are either for War or against it. In many ways being an American mean's to be a profiteer of the American War machine. Aside from the fact that it helps to fuel the economy, commodities that we take for granted, random things like everything from the internet to can foods were original used for war. At the same time should we because of these luxuries accept the death of children and innocent people? Why is that the death of a Iraqi child worst than the death of a soldier, when some of these soldiers are only 18 years old?

Love Stinks

I broke up with my girlfriend last week, a fact that would normally be of no importance to any one in this class, except that it inspired this. I'm still working on the tag line, something to do with how relationships can seem great when you're in them, but some prospective reveals how the whole thing was covered in shit.

Funny Find

This is something I found doing research. There greeting cards form the It doesn't have to do with the Grotesque, but I suppose its a pretty good example of using the printed form.

Foot Binding

Old Chinese practice that is pretty nasty...

M for Murder

Some of histories more famous murders. Its scary how many of these cases have become movies. It kinda demonstrates how much as we are oppsessesd

-Christian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Bad_image_list

A list of some of the worst pics on wikipedia

-Christian

The Fog of War

This is a collection of photographs of people wounded in war before the advent of modern plastic surgery. I know I've heard about how modern surgery has been able to save a lot of people in Iraq who would have died in previous wars. The flip side is that more soldiers are coming home disfigured. These pictures were somewhat sobering in revealing that this isn't solely a modern problem. Its seems grotesque to me how monstrous these soldier appear. Its easy as an observer to comfort one's by reasoning that these soldiers should be happy to just be alive given their injuries. I think the scary question that always lingers in the back of your head is how possible is it for these people to return to any form of normalcy?

-Christian

Yesterday when talking in class comic book super heroes came up and I was reminded of this book that I have. Secret Identity is a book about the lives of one of the original Superman creators after leaving DC. Joe Shuster was the guy who originally drew Superman and developed the iconic look. After the creators lost the rights to the comic, they were left scrambling to make a living. Shuster ended up drawing fetish porn for the mob.

-Christian

Alice

A few semesters ago I took this really interesting class on the History of animation. Seeing Chris’s post on Tim Burton reminded me of something I had seen in that class. Tim Burton is doing his take on Alice and Wonderland, which is supposed to be a dark departure from the familiar Disney version by. In that class on animation I saw a version by a Czech artist named Jan Svankmajer that seems to similarly exploit the disturbing nature of the Carroll’s original text. Svankmajer recaptures this disturbing character by celebrating the grotesque. Stop motion animation is usually done with clay puppets, which Svankmajer replaces with taxidermy animals and pieces of meat. The effect is this gritty and dirty; grotesque in a Salvador Dali meets Eastern Europe way.
-Christian P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5wHMgTPF-s