I haven't had a chance to write anything for a little while. I was on a work trip in California and despite wanting to write every evening I was wiped out and crashed on the bed. I did a lot when I was there and won't be able to write about it all but I'll at least write about the most interesting parts.

I was able to only make it to one museum and that was the Museum of Death out in Hollywood. Going in I thought that the museum would be a fairly typical museum although with some fairly shocking things on exhibit. The outside of the museum was looked great, there was flowers growing on the wall by the enterance and a murial of Elisabeth Small, the Black Dahlia, out back. Oddly enough their was a murial also of Little Tim as well, maybe because his heart attack was caught on camera.

There was a cool neon sign that said "DIE - DEATH IS EVERYWHERE". As my colleague and I entered "Holy Wars-The Punishment Due" by Megadeth was playing. I saw a bunch of serial killer merchandise on sale and was a bit baffled. I had a feeling serial killers would be a part of this museum but they were up front and center in a weird, almost devotional, way. Anyway we paid our 18 dollars (!!!) and went in. The very first little room you enter was full of serial killer stuff, for instance the famous painting of Pogo the Clown by John Wayne Gacy. I started getting this sinking feeling that this wasn't going to be a museum of death as much as it would be a museum of serial killers. They had all kinds of stuff in the room, correspondance from Ramirez the Night Stalker and Otis Toole, and some more personal affects that belonged to Gacy.

The next room had stuff on capital punishment. There was apparently a former electric chair and some clothes used by a convict while being executed. The clothes had bizzare brown stains on them. The thing that was truly the center piece of the room was a severed head of a convict, mummified and tanned, in a bell jar. You could see the rotted teeth peeking behind the dry rotted skin, the mouth slightly open and the eyes closed, fixed in a expression like it was asleep.

Every wall on every room was plastered in pictures, mostly of corpses. There was a few rooms that had things that related to medicine, one room had an autopsy playing on a sreen mounted in a corner. There was boards that were used by morgues there to and also a baby body bag. In that same room they had a display with technical manuals for morticians and "Handbook for the Recently Deceased" that I now remember was from Bettlejuice? Also they had a display with a recreation of a mourning doll, a doll that according to the text was used by Victorians as a replica of a dead baby to help with the mourning process. Next to that there was a Día de Muertos shrine.

Onto the next room, that was a hallway, you're face to face with pictures of a murder. This place, as you can tell from the example of the previous room, had a serious organization problem. The rooms had only the vaguest sense of theme, usually many completely unrelated things would be shoved into a room together. There was one shelf off to a side, full of all kinds of stuff, was a real kapala, next to a few honor skulls. Lots of exhibits were barely labeled at all and had I not known about kapalas previously I would have missed it altogether.

The same room had a recreation of a bunk bed with two people dead from the Heaven's Gate suicide, Nike shoes on, face covered with a small tarp. On the opposite wall there was some pretty grizzly PSA posters about drunk driving.

There was one big room split between Charles Mansion and the Black Dahlia. I think they even had some original paintings by Manson, they were abstract and weird, fine lines and dark colors.

One room had pictures of suicide victims, some hanged, some shot, all dead. The room had grim mementos, like door frames from where nooses were hung and a campaign button for Budd Dwyer. There was also some gritty pictures of Asian victims of "Death by 1000 cuts". There were some death maks as well, of Vincent Price and James Dean. The last room had a casket with chairs arranged like it was a wake. For some reason there was a movie screen in front of the coffin where they were playing Faces of Death. In a corner there was a wax mannequin of GG Allin?

To be frank, the museum had an impressive collection, but the way everything was exhibited was a complete mess. In the beginning there was a goth looking rocker guy saying that all the pictures of suicide and murder "were there to educate and inform", but by the way they were displayed that little sound bite seemed to be just a legal precaution. Many of the pictures of the dead were without any text indicating who they were and every single room lacked any kind of indication how the images displayed were meant to "educate and inform". It seemed clear to me many, if not all, the pictures were there to senselessly shock the museum-goers. Victims of suicide were shown without any discussion about suicide at all nor with any numbers or information about suicide prevention which I thought was reckless of the museum.

The museum had the feeling of a live-action Faces of Death video. I think it's a shame, as a museum about death could be much more popular if they simply arranged their collection into themes and had some kind of narrative structure that could help people come to terms with death. I'm not sure if they are going for a punk-rock stance where they "won't tell you what to think", but as it is now this museum only serves to shock people and re-enforce the idea that death is a horrible thing that should not be thought about. I'm seriously thinking of writing an e-mail to the museum and try to respectfully tell them my opinion and suggest that even the slightest bit of curration would definately open up their museum to a larger demographic.