In Eric Coble's new play, "Velocity of Autumn", an aging Brooklyn mother rebels against her children's decision to put her in a nursing home.

Eric Coble has written and produced plays on Edgar Allen Poe, Pinocchio and Pecos Bill; his latest, Velocity of Autumn, is about an elderly Brooklyn woman who boobytraps her apartment with firebombs to prevent her children from sending her to a nursing home. The play debuted in Boise last month and will show at Cleveland's Beck Center for the Arts next spring. Digital Dying spoke with Coble about Velocity and just how to die a graceful death.

Describe Velocity of Autumn?

There is a woman named Alexandra, about 79 years old, living alone in Brooklyn; she is beginning to falter, mentally and physically. Her husband has died and two of her adult children tell her it's time to go to a nursing home. She barricades herself in her home and uses her dead husband's photo developing fluid to set up fire bombs around every possible entrance; the windows, the doors. She says, ‘If anyone comes in after me, I'm taking the whole place out.' Her youngest son, the black sheep of the family, comes home through the one window he knew she wouldn't have barricaded. The two of them are in that room for 70 minutes, no entrances or exits or light shifts or anything. They don't leave until she comes to a solution, or she blows the place up.

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Alexandra wants to die a 'natural death', why is that important?

Among other species we are the only ones that hoard stuff right up until the very end. Most animals when they realize they are coming to the end of their life try to crawl off someplace to die. Recently, we had a family cat here in Cleveland that wandered off toward the end. He had crawled under this porch like five houses away. We coaxed him out and he lay on the grass and kids pet him but he just wanted to lie there by himself it seemed to me. That image stuck with me. Alexandra wants to go out while looking out her window at this tree she has had a great relationship with. She just loves watching the way this tree changes with the season. That's her idea of a graceful death.

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What's the most graceful way to die?

I think we come into life with very little identity and spend the first 20 years formulating who we are, we spend 20 years saying, ‘I am the kind of person who does this,' then we spend 20 years doing that; we spend the last 20 years letting go. Letting go of the possessions, letting go of the attitude, letting go of the opinions; it seems to me the more spaciousness we can have near the end the easier death can be. But I don't think there is a right or wrong way. To some people, dying gracefully might mean being alone and diving off a 500 foot cliff and having that one last utter sensation one was never able to feel in life. We won't all have the choice, but I think we can set in motion the idea of being intentional as we come to the end of life.

You were raised on Navajo and Ute Indian Reservations, how does that affect your plays and your views on death?

It wasn't until college I realized there was something really exotic about growing up on a reservation. With the Navajo, to get to school we packed onto a bus and drove on a one lane road over a rickety bridge that spanned a canyon. I keep going back to certain imagery from there in my plays, coyotes for example, or sandpainting, which is discussed in Velocity of Autumn. The Navajo make sandpaintings with sand colored blue, red and green; they sprinkle it by hand, almost one grain at a time, creating these very beautiful and elaborate pictures. The sand paintings are meant to be remembered for that moment, then destroyed; they sweep them away with a broom. I always found that metaphor striking in terms of death and the end of life, are we meant to have any importance beyond the particular moment? It's the sense that nothing is made to last, nothing is permanent. It's a very Buddhist or Navajo idea, we try to make it last, it may last for a while, but it will not last forever, it will be gone at some point.

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Are we doing a good job at dying gracefully in America?

There seems to be a growing willingness to accommodate the idea that death is not the worst thing that can happen to a patient. There is an increasing willingness of hospitals to let people die at home. And more and more people are going the hospice route, I view that as a pretty graceful way to go. A few years ago I collected oral histories for Ohio's bicentennial, there was a story a man told me about his grandfather. He had a stroke while working in the fields. The doctor said he wasn't going to make it and told people to come pay their final respects. So that evening all these neighbors he'd known all his life came in, they talked through the night, telling stories, just this group of men with this old man. They held him emotionally and talked him out of the world, I can't think of a better way to go out.

NYC's BODIES exhibit recently reopened after a makeover that added an audio tour and new specimens. Claims that the exhibit's bodies came from tortured Chinese prisoners were never unequivocally squashed. (Photo by Justin Nobel)

In the middle of downtown New York City, just blocks from Wall Street and right beside a row of sunny cafes where tourists sit along the sidewalk eating lunch is a meandering room filled with body parts. In one case are a femur, pancake-thick slices of sternum, a fetal skull and the auditory ossicles—the bones of the inner ear, the smallest bones in the body. In another case are a palm's arch, a foot's sole and a jaw. A third holds the lima bean-like pituitary gland, thin slices from a massive goiter and a cancerous thyroid, as well as a healthy one, which is whimsically shaped like a butterfly. There are displays with bits of brain and sections of spinal cord and others with voice boxes and bronchial trees. This is not some bizarro morgue, nor the set of a zombie film, but the stunning BODIES exhibit, which reopened this February after a makeover that added an audio tour, new age music and more than 120 new specimens.

BODIES is run by Premier Exhibitions, an Atlanta-based company that coordinates museum shows around the world. They have another exhibit on the Titanic, as well as other BODIES exhibits at the Museum of Idaho, in Idaho Falls, Las Vegas' Luxor Hotel and in Atlanta; one in Tulsa, Oklahoma recently closed. While the exhibits have the admirable aim of enlightening us about our bodies—“the only thing you carry with you from the moment you are born until your very last breath”, reads a quote at the entrance to the New York show—they have also had their share of controversy. The bodies in BODIES are from China and Premier has not been able to unequivocally confirm that they didn't come from executed prisoners or victims of torture. The company insists that all the cadavers came from individuals who chose to donate their bodies to medical science. But when the show came to Birmingham, England last year, Dr. David Nicholl, a British human rights activist demanded that the Human Tissue Authority shut it down because it was a crime scene. “We are asking a simple question – ‘Can you guarantee the bodies are not those of people executed in China?'”, said Nicholl. “If the organizers are unable to answer this, then we think the authorities should be looking to close this exhibition.”

China has a history of body part dealing. A 1998 TIME article discussed an FBI sting that arrested two men in association with organ smuggling. The Chinese government denied “such incidents” happen in China. But Chinese human rights activist Harry Wu explained in the article just how it does happen. After the execution of a prisoner the Chinese authorities simply confiscate whatever organs they might need, without asking the prisoner's family for permission. Doctors at military hospitals then transplant the organs into wealthy foreigners willing to pay up to $40,000 for the operation. “Some activists fear that Chinese officials may have broadened the kinds of crimes punishable by death in order to line their own pockets,” reports the article.

Regulating the body part trade is not a problem unique to China. Earlier this year a local Arizona news station reported on that state's legal but unregulated body part trade, which, apparently, is flourishing. “Your nose. Your ear. Your arm. Your leg. Name any body part, and there's a virtual price tag on it,” read the report. Certain companies have specialized in processing bodies donated to science. The parts are used legally, for anything from teaching biology class to biological research to testing orthopedic products. “It's a business unlike any other,” said the head of one firm involved in the business. “As a business, we still have employees; we have to keep the lights on.” When asked what fees body parts went for the company wouldn't say but the news station dug up a “top-secret" cost list from a few years back. Eyes and lungs go for $375; a shoulder is $430; a torso, $1500; and an entire leg, $1800. Apparently in the past few years prices have doubled.

One woman recently tried to cash in her body parts to pay her children's student loans (which totaled nearly a quarter of a million dollars) by posting an ad on Craigslist. “Use my body for anything legal, or medically experimental,” the ad read. “I am 5'10” 200 lbs and have all my organs in working order. Take my blood, take my plasma. Drill into my brain, my leg, my arm. Tap my heart, my liver, my kidney. If you eliminate my children's student loans, I will give you my life!”

Jose Guadalupe Posada's skeleton drawings were inspired by Mexico's Day of the Dead celebration and often had a political message. His work exemplifies a focus on death in Mexican art, carried on by modern artists like Dr. Lakra, whose work is currently showing at The Drawing Center, in New York City.

There is a large face without skin, just bare muscles and eyes wide open and staring. In a cavern-like lair are a group of naked cat-like women crawling seductively towards the viewer. A man who resembles an Aztec emperor has a thick beard and strange tattoos. Milling about the room are a European man with a green Mohawk, several woman in fur and a swarm of gallerists and Mexican art aficionados. The setting is The Drawing Center, a cozy gallery off a cobblestoned side street in New York City's SoHo neighborhood. It is opening night for a show by renowned Mexican artist Dr. Lakra, whose smorgasbord of influences include comic strips, anatomy text books, Mexican gangsterdom, tattoo artistry, the murals of Diego Rivera and the skeletons of Jose Guadalupe Posada.

Lakra's diverse work shows the different ways death has blossomed in Mexican art, from mystical Aztec influences to more contemporary Day of the Dead images and the current fascination with gangster life. “Over the past two centuries, Mexican culture has kept up a unique dialogue with the fact of death, rather than defying it as most contemporary cultures are wont to do,” reads a review of Images of Death in Mexican Prints, a famous catalog of Mexican art.

The most well-known Mexican death-themed artist was Jose Guadalupe Posada, whose whimsical Day of the Dead skeleton drawings, called calaveras, are now reproduced the world over. Posada was born in 1852 in the Mexican state of Aguascalientes and moved to Mexico City in his twenties, where he penned drawings for newspapers and a publishing firm. He created images to accompany Mexican ballads about the death of bullfighters and the Mexican revolution and voiced his skepticism of the corrupt government by drawing political cartoons. Posada was the voice of the people, and helped make art a way to communicate the plight of the common man.

Despite his popularity Posada received just pennies for his drawings and upon death was buried in a common grave. His work has lived on though, inspiration for artists like Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. In his home city of Aguascalientas there is now a museum in his honor, the Museo Nacional de la Muerte (National Museum of Death). The tone of the place is more jolly than spooky. Visitors are greeted at the entrance by a life-sized calavera wearing an early 20th-century black gown and a large, lace-trimmed hat, a spoof of Posada's famous, La Catrina, a drawing of a skeleton woman in an ornate hat decorated with feathers and flowers. Other skeleton drawings in the museum include bullfighters, brides, children, Mexican Revolution heroes and skeleton lovers in bed. “Joy is the essence of the portrayals of death,” the museum's cultural promoter José Antonio Padilla Pedroza said in a recent interview. “Regardless of your cultural background, these representations give you a sense of joy.”

This joyful portrayal of death is seen in the work of modern Mexican artists like Dr. Lakra, but Lakra's work also exhibits a more horrific type of death, that seen every day on the streets of Mexican cities, plagued by battling drug lords and an ineffective police. This violence has recently made the evening news across the US, just this week in Brownsville, Texas there was a funeral for a US customs agent gunned down in Mexico. The violence also has made its way into popular music, in the form of narcocorridos, Mexican drug ballads. The music is a danceable accordion-based polka that dates back to traditional Mexican ballads from the 1930s but the lyrics more resemble American gangster rap, referring to murder, drug smuggling and government corruption.

As I was examining Lakra's work on Thursday evening a man with a low-slung gold necklace noticed me taking notes. His name was Oscar and seeing that he was a friend of Lakra's I was happy when he offered his interpretation of some of the artists' images. For example, he explained, the naked cat-like women in the lair represented a hallucination. The large face without skin may have referred to an Aztec ideology about the three parts of man; the mask man wears to cloak his true identity, the face beneath the mask, and what lies beneath the face, the muscle and sinew that are also man. The tattooed emperor represented Mexico's history, but also present-day gangster life. “It's about culture,” said Oscar. “It's about the ghetto, and it's about how life is on the streets.”

Sally Mann's photos of decomposing bodies are currently up at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond. Her photography has been called "lewd" and "outrageous" by a former governor of Virginia.

Seven slender bones, chipped and splotched, some even burnt, lined up neatly on a table. A young boy with eyes wide open, they are bright and sparkling, he is dead and decomposing. A young woman with freckled cheeks, plump lips and a button nose; also dead. A wolfish man with silver hair, lying face up on a soiled mattress. A naked man, face down in the dirt, his butt in the air, his body rotting. The photos feature dead bodies in various stages of decomposition, they are the work of Sally Mann, a Virginia photographer who uses an archaic form of photography known as wet-collodion to create haunting painting-like images. Once denounced by the governor of the state as “lewd” and “outrageous”, Mann's prints now go for as much as $50,000 at top galleries like Gagosian. Her new show, “The Flesh and The Spirit” opened two weeks ago at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond.

Many of the death photos in the show are from a series called Matter Lent, which Mann photographed at the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center, a campus of fields, woods and labs where law enforcement agents and medical examiners study decomposing bodies. When the series was shown at Washington DC's Corcoran Gallery in 2004 the New York Times' photography critic called it “a violation of the privacy and the decency of the dead.” Several Years later, a group in Helsinki, Finland requested to the police that the photos be removed from an exhibit because they constituted an offense against human dignity—the photos were not removed. “In rejecting the artificiality and aversion that surrounds death, they serve as potent momento mori—traditional reminders of death's inevitability that are also meant to sharpen appreciation of life,” said the Virginia Museum's curator of modern and contemporary art.

Death is indeed powerful, said Mann in a recent interview, and serves as a “springboard” to appreciate life more fully. “There's a moment where you look at those bodies and say, ‘that was a human being.' That was someone who was loved, cherished, caressed.”

Mann is not the first photographer to train her camera on the dead. Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, was an Austrian-born photojournalist who became famous for the stark and gritty black and white photos of murder victims he snapped on the streets of New York City. He had a portable police-band shortwave radio, the only New York newspaper reporter in the city to have one (carrying one is now commonplace) and was typically the first person at the scene of a crime, often times even beating the cops there. Because he maintained a complete darkroom in the trunk of his car, a 1938 Chevy, he was able to get his photos to the papers well ahead of the competition. His shots are gruesome; bodies mangled in car wrecks, victim's sprawled on the sidewalk, brains splattered from bullet holes in the head and clothes soaked in pools of blood.

His photos, shot during the 1930s and 1940s, are pure tabloid, note critics, quick, vulgar, sensationalized shots. Weegee was recently described by one journalist as a “hard-boiled, courageous, ruthless man with amazing stamina for confronting tragedy. He was usually dressed in a rumpled suit and tie, with a fedora and overcoat, its pockets stuffed with notebooks and flashbulbs. A large cigar hung permanently from his mouth, and his chin often sported a day's growth of stubble.”

But Weegee also saw himself as an artist, early on his photos were displayed in New York City's prestigious Museum of Modern Art. His photos represented something powerful and spontaneous, noted photographer Vicki Goldberg: “People turn, collapse, struggle, flee. Emotions are snapped as they burst: fear, anguish, shock, despair, anger. What a polite society keeps private spills out in emergencies, and Weegee unsparingly records it.”

Much of Mann's criticism has come from the very private photos she has taken of her family, such as the shots of her prepubescent daughters in daring and provocative poses. Lately she has focused her camera on her husband Larry, who was diagnosed with adult-onset muscular dystrophy in 1997. A series included in the Virginia Museum show called Proud Flesh traces the disease's debilitating effects on him. “Larry's condition has given me a new awareness of mortality and life's fragility,” says Mann. “We don't get to choose how we die.”

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.”