M.J. Rose

Well, we’ll be damned…Cat pianos?

Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments

Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson, curators of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, explore the wonderful history of made-up musical contraptions, including a piano comprised of yelping cats and Francis Bacon’s 17th-century vision of experimental sound manipulation.

“Numerous museums are dedicated to musical instruments. In Berlin and Brussels, Paris and Phoenix, one can wander rooms lined with musical artifacts from many times and places. Strolling through these rooms, one might admire the exquisite craftsmanship of a Stradivarius violin or the opulent artistry of a French harpsichord. One might linger over forgotten curiosities like the tromba marina, or abortive experiments like Adolphe Sax’s seven-bell horn. One’s path might follow changes in the instrumentarium from Renaissance woods and metals to modern plastics and electronics, and the experience might lead one to wonder at the diversity of species born from the physics of vibrating strings, air columns and resonating bodies.

Missing from such collections, however, is the peculiar class of what we like to call “fictophones”: imaginary musical instruments. Though these instruments, due to some measure of impracticality and impossibility, did not take sounding form, they were nonetheless put forth in the various means available to conjure objects in our minds: in writings, drawings, sometimes even in detailed schematics. One might suppose that imaginary musical instruments, deprived of physical reality, have no place in the cultural histories and heritages that a museum of musical instruments aims to illuminate and preserve. Yet in their own strange ways, imaginary musical instruments exist. What’s more, they have not merely shadowed or paralleled musical life; they have formed a vital part of it, participating in ways that show the fragility of the distinction between imaginary and real. No less than instruments you hold in your hand, imaginary instruments act as interfaces between mind and world, limning the edges of what we may think and do…”

For the rest, click here. Lots of amazing illustrations!

Oddly beautiful, beautifully odd, and just plain ODD.

Photographing the Real Bodies of Incorrupt Saints

(from Atlas Obscura)

“The Italian nun grimaced at my camera, reviewing the photo that she had just snapped of me. We had to take another, she explained. The shriveled corpse to my left was beautiful. My face had room for improvement.

So it goes in the world of the incorrupt, a group of saints whose bodies supposedly won’t decompose. This particular corpse belonged to St. Paula Frassinetti, displayed at the Convent of St. Dorotea in Rome. In the popular imagination, they’re like sleeping beauties, but Paula, who’s been dead for 133 years, is shriveled and brown inside her crystal casket. This paradox is what makes the incorrupt fascinating…”

For much more, click here. Lots of photos.

Here’s the irresistible story of the most mysterious pirate to ever sail the seven seas, “The Terror of the South China Sea” — a female pirate named Chang Shih, plucked from a brothel…

The Incredible Story of the Baddest Female Pirate to Ever Sail the Seas

by Ben Roffee for RYOT

“When people talk about the most successful pirate that ever lived, it better be about one particular badass that commanded a fleet of as many as 80,000 sailors aboard 1,500 ships during the early 1800s.

This pirate’s name was Chang Shih, who didn’t exactly look the part by our Disneyfied standards for one fairly obvious reason: she was a lady.

Plucked from a brothel in Canton by invading pirates, she was married off to a notorious pirate named Zheng Yi in 1801. But she didn’t resign to the idle life of a house ship wife, opting instead to help her husband be even better at piracy than he already was.

Together, they patched together a coalition of competing pirates groups into the the Red Flag Fleet, which became an incontestable naval force in the South China Sea at its height. When Zheng Yi died in 1807, there was no other choice but for Chang Shih to take the reins…”

Click here for the rest from RYOT.