Piece Of Art

by Loren Coleman ©2012 Picnic shelter, Southern Illinois University, where I received my BA in  anthropology/zoology, was built by Bucky Fuller and his students. Once in a blue moon, all of our lives are touched by great individuals and memorable humans. I have felt that has happened to me many times. I use to be very careful about what I considered to be extensive name-dropping, but upon reflection, I am honored to have met and learned from so many notable people. And these folks are known by their works, which are remembered when we say their names.  Personally I have known some distinguished researchers and chroniclers in cryptozoology, including Bernard Heuvelmans, Ivan T. Sanderson, Roy Mackal, and George Haas, as well as first-rate Fortean thinkers like Miriam Allen DeFord, Bucky Fuller, Patrick Huyghe, Mark A. Hall, Jerome Clark, Bob Rickard, Jim Brandon, Robert Anton Wilson, Vincent Gaddis, Brad Steiger, and John A. Keel, to name but a few. The same goes for ...

The recommended new book, Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior is a massive tome, being a large format paperbound book (8" by 11"), with a total of 765 pages of about 340 entries. The authors are the scholars Hilary Evans, a social historian, and Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist and specialist in collective behavior. The editor-publisher Patrick Huyghe also deserves much credit for being the midwife at Anomalist Books for the birth of this big baby, during the Spring of 2009. From "Abdera Outbreak of Prose and Poetry" to "Zoot Suit Riots," the book takes the reader on an incredible tour of the topics at hand. The classics of contagion behavior are here, e.g. the "Band Bus Hysteria," "Cargo 'Cults'," "Copycat Behavior," "Phantom Slasher," "Pokemon Illness," "Salem Witch Hunts," "Suicide Clusters," and "Windshield Pitting Scare." But it may be t...

I investigate and try to understand the links between the modeling of suicidal behavior in popular culture and media, such as in movies, and self-deaths that come later. History - in fiction and fact - based on contagion theory - appears to repeat itself. The suicide cluster of teenagers in the Camden-Rockport-Rockland, Maine, area, during the 1970s and 2000s, - often due to death by hanging in their closets - has been of great concern to me for several years. The high suicide rate for Camden's Knox County is likewise troubling. Today, I made a disturbing "coincidental" discovery regarding Peyton Place . The method and location of the suicide depicted in the movie is chilling and significant. The most graphic suicide to be included in a modern American movie up to that time occurred in Peyton Place, a film that changed the subject matter parameters of moviemaking forever. In the plot of the film, the character Nellie hangs herself in her "friend" Connie's...