News of the Weird
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
An August Los Angeles exhibition by photographer Jill Greenberg featured 27 2- and 3-year-old kids crying, scenes that Greenberg provoked by offering each one a lollipop and then snatching it away. She admitted that the photos were “upsetting” but denied critics’ accusations of child abuse.
In August, police in Mumbai, India, decided to get a professional opinion from the local JJ School of Art as to whether a downtown video and photographic exhibition was obscene and should be closed down. (The school’s opinion of the show, “Tits, Clits and Elephant Dick,” has not been reported.)
Performance artist Kira O’Reilly’s August show in Penzance, England, “Inthewrongplaceness,” consisted of a naked woman cradling a dead pig for four hours at a time. O’Reilly explained, on her Web site: “The work left me with an undercurrent of pigginess (and) unexpected fantasies of mergence and interspecies metamorphoses began to flicker into my consciousness.” People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called the performance merely “sick.”
By the Way, What Else Is No Longer Weird?
Eighty such themes have occurred so frequently that they have been “retired from circulation” since News of the Weird began publishing in 1988, and many of them involve the ineptitude of criminals–burglars leave footprints in the snow or mud, or they suffer a leakage of loot from their heist, thus leaving trails often leading right up to perps’ doorsteps.
With videocams so widely used, more and more criminals are chronicling their crimes as they go, eventually making prosecutors’ work easy. Even so, some robbers haven’t mastered video camera technology, and when they intend to disable a surveillance camera, they smash only the lens, leaving the recording unit intact. Cop wannabes, some with uniforms, badges and flashing lights on their dashboards, get thrills by stopping and scolding drivers, until they mistakenly stop a real (off-duty) cop. All these used to be weird, but nowadays are just too common.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD
