M.J. Rose

There once was a very creepy and morbid tradition of post-mortem photography –

Click the photo below for the gallery…

M. J.’s  novel THE MEMORIST centers around the hunt for an ancient flute made out of bone that looked just like these and were just about as old…

9,000 year-old-flutes found in China

(www.ancient-origins.net)

“Researchers in China have discovered six complete ancient flutes made of bone belonging to the Neolithic period carbon dated to about 9,000 years old. Fragments of many more flutes were found in the same area too. The flutes are complete playable flutes made of the bones of the red-crowned crane with five to eight holes. The area that they were discovered is Jiahu of the mid-Henan Province.

What is interesting is that the music played through the seven holes correspond to a tonal scale extremely similar to the eight note scale used today. Although this sounds like a minor detail it is a very important discovery that is also quite amazing. The seven musical notes that we use today and the tone scale used have harmony that is distinct and is based on complex acoustic properties. Is it coincidence that whoever made those 9,000 years old flutes and generally people from all over the world (Africa, Asia, and Europe) were able to come up with scales reflecting all these acoustic properties just by simple chance?…”

See more here.

Wow! This is huge news…

Hitler Shows Off
German art – purged of modernism, impressionism and cubism – is shown off by Adolf Hitler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (far left) in Berlin in 1939. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Modernist art haul, ‘looted by Nazis’, recovered by German police

About 1500 works, including pieces by Chagall, Klee, Matisse and Picasso, had been considered lost until raid in Schwabing

by Philip Oltermann in Berlin, The Guardian

“About 1,500 modernist masterpieces – thought to have been looted by the Nazis – have been confiscated from the flat of an 80-year-old man from Munich, in what is being described as the biggest artistic find of the postwar era.

The artworks, which could be worth as much as €1bn (£860m), are said to include pieces by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann and Emil Nolde. They had been considered lost until now, according to a report in the German news weekly Focus.

The works, which would originally have been confiscated as “degenerate art” by the Nazis or taken from Jewish collectors in the 1930s and 1940s, had made their way into the hands of a German art collector, Hildebrand Gurlitt. When Gurlitt died, the artworks were passed down to his son, Cornelius – all without the knowledge of the authorities…”

For the complete piece click here.