Shannon and Jeff Conlon's new show is about female morticians. Other projects focus on Wall Street women and pole dancers. “We take shows about strong women with preconceived notions that we’re trying to shatter,” says Shannon. (Photo Courtesy of One-Run Entertainment)

People do one of three things when they meet a female mortician: take a step back, begin asking questions or flee.

“In what other line of work do you tell someone what you do and get such violent reactions?” said Shannon Conlon.

Shannon and her brother, Jeff, run One-Run Entertainment, a documentary television and film company based in Los Angeles. Their latest show is about females in the funeral industry and will discuss what motivates women to join the profession and how they maintain zesty social lives.

“For the last ten years the industry has primarily been dominated by women,” said Shannon, “but the perception has not caught on. Everyone still thinks it’s some crazy old man.”

In 1971, 95 percent of students entering mortuary schools were male, and the majority of them were sons of funeral home directors, according to statistics from the American Board of Funeral Service Education. Now, nearly 60 percent of enrollees are female. Last semester, at Cypress College of Mortuary Science, in Los Angeles, three-quarters of the students were women and not one was from a traditional funeral family.

Cypress is the only mortuary school in Southern California, which makes it prime pickings for One-Run’s show. Ideally, the show will feature a woman who has just graduated mortuary school, a woman who has just gotten her first funeral job and a woman who has been working in the business for some time. The flier calling for applicants, which was sent by the California Funeral Directors Association to funeral homes across the state, says the show is looking for “fun, outgoing women with a zest for life, that just so happen to work in the business of death.”

The day after the notice went out, One-Run received calls from about 70 women, said Shannon. Some were extroverts and some were shy. Some called just to thank them for doing the show in the first place. “The women we come across are not Goths and they are not weird,” said Shannon. “They are normal, fun young woman.”

“Like the girl next door,” added Jeff.

And what draws women to the profession?

Some are profoundly affected by the recent death of a loved one and some are curious about mortality. Other women, after having attended poorly handled funerals, are bent on doing better themselves. “They all love what they do,” said Shannon. “I never talked to anyone who was in any way disgruntled, or even ho-hum about it.”

The show will not be a contest-oriented reality TV show, nor will it mirror either the popular HBO death industry drama, “Six Feet Under”, which documents a fictional family-run funeral home in Los Angeles or A & E’s “Family Plots”, which chronicles an actual family-run San Diego mortuary. One-Run’s show, the Conlon’s point out, addresses the fact that the family-run, male dominated model is no longer the standard.

Shannon and Jeff grew up in Seattle. Two weeks after graduating high school, Shannon packed her car and drove to Los Angeles to become an actress. She attended film school and has been in the city ever since. Jeff, who played football at Arizona State, followed. “I’ve been in entertainment my whole life and he is just Mr. Entrepreneur,” said Shannon.

They are hoping for a nine episode season and have already contracted with a large production company known for horror flicks to sell their show to networks. As early as next year, female morticians could be on TV.

Other One-Run projects focus on Wall Street women and pole dancers.

“We take shows about strong women with preconceived notions that we’re trying to shatter,” said Shannon.

A necklace with a cross made out of human metacarpal bones adorned with a garnet that symbolizes the Blood of Christ goes for $115 on "The Churchyard", an online jewelry shop run by Columbine Phoenix that sells necklaces and earrings made from human bones and teeth. (Photo courtesy of Columbine Phoenix)

A necklace of phalanges costs $165 and a cross of metacarpal goes for $80 on Columbine Phoenix’s website. The retail jeweler sells agate chalices, crystal wands and ceremonial blades but her favorite merchandises are the necklaces and earrings made of human bone that she crafts herself. Chain necklaces, strung with a single human molar, are also available.

“This is something solid that you can hold in your hand or wear in your ear,” said Phoenix. “It makes death a little less scary.”

The bones come from an education supply store, the same place she gets her rat and bat skulls. The supply store obtains the human bones from retired science classroom skeletons.

“You can tell that they were from a good family,” said Phoenix, referring to the skeletons. “They got their milk and they’re strong.”

Bones don’t come cheaply, though. A hand goes for about $250, she said, and a whole skeleton costs more like $5,000. Skulls alone cost about $1,000 and are purchased in large numbers by art schools. “Supposedly, you can’t draw a human face until you can draw a skull,” said Phoenix.

Crafting bone jewelry is actually quite difficult. “The strength of bone is all on the outside,” she explained. “The inside is honeycombed and light, or else it would be too heavy to walk.”

Hand bones are the best to work with, others being too clunky. When Phoenix pierces a bone with a pin she smothers the hole with glue to lessen the risk of a fracture.

Teen metalheads and Goths, with a penchant for the occult and death represent a large customer base but middle-aged professionals buy bone jewelry too, especially doctors and dentists. “They like it for the same reason I do,” said Phoenix, “because humans are an engineering miracle.”

One of the more interesting special requests came from a soldier who wanted a bone necklace. “Nothing fancy or pretty,” said Phoenix, “just to scare bad guys.”

A woman whose ankle had been smashed in a car accident wanted a necklace with an ankle bone. Etched in the bone she requested a rune—an ancient alphabet symbol—that depicted healing and studded on the bones she wanted stones of hematite and aventurine, a type of quartz that can be green, blue, brown or pink and is said to attract wealth. “The insurance company was fighting her tooth and nail,” Phoenix said. “She won her court case and she is now walking without a cane.”

Using bones for jewelry is perfectly legal, as long as the bones come from within the United States. Phoenix is suspect of bones that seem too cheap. These could have been robbed from graves in third-world countries, she said. On eBay, a recent search for “real human skulls” returned 12 hits, with items selling from $103.50 to $1,000.

There is a precedent to using human bone to craft fine art objects. A Tibetan trumpet called a kangling is often made from a human femur. The instrument is played in a ritual of self-sacrifice known as Chod, in which a person trying to discard the ego and achieve fearlessness imagines their body as an offering in a tantric feast.

Kutna hora is a haunting church a day’s drive from the city of Prague, in the Czech Republic, with fixtures and ornaments made entirely of human bone. Femurs dangle from a towering ceiling and one particularly delicate chandelier consists of every bone in the human body. The church’s history explains the story.

During the Middle Ages, a handful of soil from the Holy-land was sprinkled over the surrounding graveyard, which made the spot a popular burial site. Eventually, the grounds ran out of space, and older bones were dug up and stored in the chapel’s crypt. In 1870, a woodcarver named Frantisek Rint was commissioned to decorate the chapel. Although legend has it that monk’s went mad and assembled the bones, they are actually the work of Rint.

Kutna hora has become a must-see for travelers interested in the supernatural, but Phoenix says her interests are more down-to-earth. “I do it because I love it,” she said, “and nobody else would really be able to do it well.”

Egypt's 70 million mummies powered early trains and composed a popular nineteenth century paint known as mummy brown, a pigment between burnt and raw umber. The last batch was concocted in 1964 by a British supplier who lamented,

“Families wanting a lasting celebration of their loved ones’ memories can now consult with an international artist who will lovingly mix a portion of their family member’s ashes into the colors of a custom painted modern art piece picture.”

The “modern art piece pictures” are known as Art in Ashes and can be ordered from memorial.com, along with slightly offbeat funerary items such as pet urns and memorial garden rocks.

The ash painter is a German-born woman named Mona who presently resides in Texas, by the sea. Mona has “years of formal training in abstract techniques at art schools across Europe (Munich, Karlsruhe, and even Rome) and has traveled the globe (Asia, Canada, the U.S. and most regions of Europe).”

Mona’s style may seem grisly but painting with human remains has precedent. England’s Pre-Raphaelites used a color called mummy brown, a pigment between burnt and raw umber, derived from the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies.

Initially, Egyptians only mummified royalty, like child pharaoh Tutankhamen, but by 1000 BC ordinary Egyptians were being preserved too. A blog entry posted by a hobbyist Egyptophile estimates that the Egyptians generated 70 million human mummies. Cloth to wrap mummies was in high demand and transported from across the Roman Empire. Mummy wrap from Tuscany used to bind a Theban tailor’s wife named Nesi-hensu was, millennia later, revealed to hold a rare written example of the Etruscan language on its underside.

Mummies eventually became a valuable resource, used as a substitute for coal in powering Egyptian trains, an idea incorporated by sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury in his poem, “The Nefertiti-Tut Express” and mocked by Mark Twain in his early novel, “The Innocents Abroad“.

English painters in the 16th and 17th centuries popularized the use of mummy brown in water colors and oil painting. The embalming resins gave the paint a thick tarry texture. As painters became aware of its consistency they abandoned it. Upon discovering the true nature of mummy brown Edward Burne-Jones, a renowned 19th century British stained glass artist fled his studio in horror and tramped outside to bury his tube of paint.

One London paint merchant claimed he could satisfy the needs of his customers for 20 years with one mummy, although whether this longevity of supply alludes to the amplitude of paint capable of being drawn from a single mummy or his insignificant clientele is unclear.

What is known, thanks to an October 1964 article in Time magazine, is that the last batch of authentic mummy brown was concocted by the British paint maker C. Roberson & Co., as the company exhausted their mummy supply. “We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere,” said Geoffrey Roberson-Park, managing director of C. Roberson, “but not enough to make any more paint.”

A less corporal replacement is now available. Natural Pigments sells a paint called mummy brown, $14.50 for a 100 gram jar. Their product contains 35 percent hematite as well as kaolin, quartz and goethite, the primary ingredient in brown ochre. The greater the hematite to goethite ratio the redder the mummy color. A dark-violet version with significantly more hematite is called mummy violet.

“Egyptian mummies were at one time literally available by the truckload,” reads Natural Pigments website, but no longer. Now the company composes the pigment from iron-rich mineral deposits extracted from a remote stretch of arid Russian wilderness near the Mongolian border.

“Our mummy is composed of iron oxide, calcium carbonate, kaolin, and silica, which are considered to be quite permanent and stable in mixtures with all other pigments,” boasts their website. “It is very good in oils, and excellent in all aqueous mediums, such as egg tempera, casein, and gum arabic. It performs well in wax and fresco techniques.”

T-shirts, hats, pins and belts were the norm but some vendors in Harlem, in New York City, sold Michael Jackson umbrellas. Fans couldnt get enough. (Photo by Justin Nobel)

Jumillah Galvez sold 72 Michael T-shirts in 30 minutes earlier this week but now all anyone seems to care about is when the next batch of her Michael Jackson umbrellas will arrive.

“People been out here since 1 p.m. saying, ‘Did they come yet? Did they come yet?” said Galvez, last Friday evening.

Her stand is one of dozens in an impromptu bazaar of Michael Jackson goods that stretches several blocks along 125th Street, in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.

“When a celebrity dies there is a massive outpouring of feeling and memorialization and along with that comes this sort of spontaneous outpouring of folks who feel something but also think they can make a buck,” said Robert Neuwirth, a journalist working on a book about informal marketplaces.

Jacksons fans have gathered in spots across the globe to say goodbye: outside his modest childhood home in the factory town of Gary, Indiana, in Tokyos high-energy Shibuya district, in Karachi, Pakistan, and Sofia, Bulgaria and at Jacksons Neverland Ranch, on a country lane in Southern California’s wine country. People bring handmade signs, cards, flowers, letters, photos and Jackson dummies. They sing, moonwalk and hold vigils.

In Harlem, the Apollo Theater held a tribute to Jackson last Wednesday and another on Friday evening. Outside the theater before the show crowds mobbed the sidewalk, where a plywood wall that fenced off a vacant lot had been transformed into a signing board. The wood was quickly covered in messages but a handful of helpers supplied sheets of plastic and canvas to hang over the wall so signing could continue.

A hulking man with a doo-rag wrote:
The arch angel sent by God, Michael you are the king of kings. RIP. – from Craig Woods

A petite girl in a flower dress and black hair jotted:

Beat it, beat it. – A. Wilson, Belfast Ireland

Beside the signing wall, a man in yellow slacks commanded a desk, urging passersby to sign his scrapbooks. “Release yourself,” he shouted. “Put your thoughts down on paper. Write a book, a story. I dont care if you talk about your grandmother or your pet dog.”

Behind him, and lining the sidewalk in both directions, were the vendors, thronged with customers.

But vendors like Galvez werent just out to make a buck. She is a third generation street vendor, saving money so she can put herself through law school.

“My family is really, really big fans,” said Galvez.

Some New York vendors were hawking shirts the afternoon Jackson died but Galvezs family waited, they wanted to put out quality cotton shirts, not cheap ones that would later fall apart. By the Sunday after Jackson’s death they had their wares ready and have been selling ever since.

“The informal economy is incredibly nimble,” sad Neuwirth. “Deals go through quickly, stuff gets made quickly and boom, its done.”

Galvezs umbrella stand is not entirely informal; her brother and his wife run a shop called Rain or Shine Umbrellas, in Harlem. They designed signature umbrellas to honor Barack Obamas inauguration and crafted specialty umbrellas for when TV personality Star Jones went on vacation. Galvez didnt know if they had sold umbrellas to commemorate a death before.

“I just know that everyone wants to see these umbrellas,” she said.

A woman wearing a billowy blouse embroidered in gold and eating a peach Italian ice was interested in a Jackson umbrella. “So what you think, another hour?” she asked.

“I been taking numbers,” said Galvez, explaining that more umbrellas would be delivered shortly.

The woman gave hers.

“Ill call you,” Galvez said.

Moments later, a woman in a Kangol beret was looking at the display umbrellas.

“Fifteen dollars on the umbrella,” said Galvez. “45 minutes, I just talked to our guy. Hes in Queens right now. Do you have a cell phone?”

A woman with magenta nails and an armful of shopping bags followed.

“Fifteen dollars on the umbrella,” said Galvez. “Forty minutes, we got a man coming from Queens . Do you have a cell phone?”

"Everything is a corpse," in a new Oscar winning Japanese film by director Yojiro Takita.

Outside, wind-whipped snow piles high but inside the trim room there are pineapples and candles on an altar, a family seated patiently on pillows on the floor and a stunning figure resting on immaculate bedding beside an ornate box. Two strangers in dark suits enter and the Japanese funerary rite known as encoffination begins. And this begins “Departures”, the Japanese film by director Yojiro Takita that won this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

The film follows a young man through a difficult time in his life. Daigo Kobayashi loses his job as a cellist with a Tokyo orchestra and returns to the bleak provincial town of his youth. Mika, his cheery wife, follows. The only work available is as an encoffineer, or nokanshi, the individual who prepares a dead body for viewing. Daigo vomits into his palm when he sees his first corpse and hides the details of the job from Mika. The boss, a staid man getting on in years, won’t let him quit, and through him Daigo learns that despite the public’s general lack of respect for the job—one man he meets on the street shields his child from Daigo and girls on a bus sneer at him—there is great honor in the profession.

A body’s physical departure can be brutal; one client, a young woman, is killed when her boyfriend crashes a motorcycle, but the departure arranged by the encoffineer is sublime. The body begins in a patterned robe, resting on a thin white mattress with the head propped on a white pillow. The encoffineer gently scrubs the body with a warm wash cloth. Stray whiskers are shaved from the face and cream that softens the skin is applied. Colorful beads are entwined about the fingers and the hands are clasped across the chest. The robe is removed while the encoffineer delicately dangles a white sheet in front of the body to ensure no flesh is exposed to the family. They help the encoffineer lift the body into the coffin then they say their goodbyes.

The precision and elegance of encoffination seems distinctly Japanese, but in reality few Japanese even know about nokanshi, said Takita, in one interview following the film’s release last fall. He and members of the cast participated in actual encoffination ceremonies. The experience clearly benefited the film, it also affected Takita. “I am afraid to die, but not afraid of ‘death’ itself anymore,” he said. “I came to think that I must tell kids that death exists in everyday life. It is important for us human beings to witness, that we are given birth with crying, and we die crying.”

And yet, even after the film’s success, little information is publicly available on the web about nokanshi. A Google search on the term revealed only hits related to the movie and there is no Wikipedia entry.

When I called the Japan Society, in New York City, I was connected to a Japanese woman who said she didn’t know much about the process. “It is kind of a profession that is hidden and not spotlighted,” she said.

She transferred me to Ryo Nagasawa, who knew a bit more. “Even for Japanese people, it is a surprise,” said Nagasawa, referring to the film’s encoffination scenes. “Not very many people have seen it done that carefully and with that much affection.”

The process conveys the Japanese people’s adherence to Buddhism, as well as Shinto, a religious belief system that dates back several millennia and places high value on the purification of objects, anything from water to an automobile factory.

“You’re supposed to treat the pencil really carefully because that also has a spirit,” said Nagasawa. “Water, trees and even the desk and the chairs have spirits. You’re not supposed to hurt the desk.”

As Daigo takes to his new profession he begins encoffinating everything. Even a sandwich, he daintily prepares and lavishes as if it were a body he were cleansing for the coffin, a habit he realizes his boss has picked up too. “Everything is a corpse,” the elder encoffineer tells Daigo, while savoring a salted piece of puffer roe he has just finished grilling. “The living eat the dead, unless they’re plants.”