We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Four of the most alluring words in the English language combine to make up the title of this volume: Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia. If that isn’t a recipe for a vast treasury of arcana, we don’t know what is.

The book is made up of photographs, drawings and text compiled over the course of 33 years in an infamous St. Petersberg prison by one of the prison guards, Danzig Baldayev. As the publisher puts it, “The tattoos were his passport into a secret world where he became something of an ethnographer, recording the secrets of a closed society. The tattoos are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and sometimes simply strange, reflecting the lives and mores of the convicts.”

You can say that again. Skulls, daggers, medieval knights, babies, a horned Lenin and a grinning Al Capone are some of the images that populate the world of Kresty prisoners. Nihilistic and weird and occasionally beautiful, the tattoos form a private language that Baldayev, by virtue of his collection, has given us a glimpse of.

If you ever find yourself in Philadelphia, you’d be highly remiss to skip the Mütter Museum, a collection of medical oddities and anatomical anomalies presented in gory detail for the public’s voyeuristic (and educational!) delight. It’s sort of like Body Worlds, but way more antiquated and unsettling– chock full of foetal deformities, olde thyme books leatherbound with manflesh, overgrown colons, and 19th century serial killer brains floating in formaldehyde. Beyond the freakish thrill of it all, there’s a lot to be learned at the Mütter Museum. You’ll pick up fascinating tidbits they don’t teach you in Biology 101, like how mankind’s evolution from four legged mammals to bipedals structurally impeded the birthing process, forcing a community-oriented cultural evolution. Also, they have a human horn exhibit. Humicorns!