Picturesque city of Tampere

Lady Nancy from Retro Electric mentioned in a comment, that I should show more photos of the aesthetic sides of my hometown. I live in Tampere, Finland, the population is about 300 000 and it is the largest inland city in the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland). Tampere is an old manufacturing town and sometimes people call it the Manchester of Finland.

These two photos are from the older area of the city center of Tampere.

The houses next door to my flat. Unfortunately the building I live in is not this photogenic.

The eastern orthodox church. I walk past it every time I go to the university. Slightly off-topic: I have made progress with my master's thesis and things are looking good!

I would probably kill for getting to live in that green house, preferably in the tower.

This red and white building is a theater. In the upper window you can just see the huge chandelier they have.

A couple of days ago we had our first snow. Alas, it did not stay long but it made everything much prettier. The city of Tampere is divided by a river. It is beautiful with a park area on both sides.

The final photo is from the old factory, which nowadays has a shopping center, bars and bistros, museums and other facilities for culture, and a cinema.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you liked the photos!

Creepy Reads Review: Taxidermy Art by Robert Marbury

I bought a copy of Robert Marbury's Taxidermy Art - A Rogue's guide to the work, the culture, and how to do it yourself on my trip to New York last spring. I think I bought it from the museum shop on MoMA. Marbury is one of the founders and the director of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy and an acknowledged artist.

As the title suggest, this book is non-fiction and for a person like me, who has little knowledge about how to actually make taxidermy or about its history, this was a good and informative opus. I also like the way Marbury writes, he does not became too repetitive even though the book consists of artist presentations and there are only so many ways to express certain basic information.

After the introduction to the book at hand there is also a short and compact introduction to the history of taxidermy and also to those historical persons who contributed to the development of taxidermy practices. I like that part very much, that the contemporary artists are contextualized like that.

Taxidermy Art introduces artists from all over the world, which is fantastic. Well, most of them are from the US, a few from the UK, and a couple from Europe and New Zeeland and Australia. But as the opus states the artists introduced in it are the most popular and well-known ones at the moment. It seems that taxidermy art is more popular in the English-speaking world and hence most artists are from those countries. The book presents 21 artists/artist duos.

Here are two of my favorite works and I would love to have one of these (or another of her works, her website is like a candy store for me!) myself: Still Birth (Green) and Still Birth (Blue) by Polly Morgan.

Lisa Black from New Zeeland makes gorgeous works in which animal and machine merge. I had not known about her works if I had not bought Taxidermy Art.

I can happily recommend this book. The photos are fantastic and in the end there are even instructions on how to make a taxidermy oneself. Though it is not like I am going to try them anytime soon.

A tiny bit late Halloween post

It seems like many bloggers had a lovely Halloween and I too had a relatively good one. I've been buried under my studies (no change there) but I did manage to go to my student association's Halloween party. Since the common stereotype is that every day is Halloween for goths, it is not a big deal that I am a bit late with my post.

Me and my friend decided to dress with a mutual theme and we chose this old computer game Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Nobody recognized us, of course, but we had a really good time.  We dressed as the two personalities of a one vampire: Therese / Jeanette Voerman.

We bought some fangs from the local costume shop and the fangs were no good at all. They were cheap but unusable. The shop did not have more expensive ones, so we had to take what was available because we were horribly late with the whole costume idea. We decided it about 48 hours before the actual party. In the end we did not even use the fangs but that did not matter. :)

I used that metal nail file in the photo to make those fangs a bit smaller but they were still really impractically big. The glue thingy did not work or I did not have the patience to wait it to work. The instruction was a bit vague about how long one was supposed to wait with it.

Here is an original photo of the character Therese Voerman, as you can see, she has decided to wear glasses, though I'm pretty sure her eyesight as a vampire is exquisite. Easy to dress as, so I am not complaining!

Source

The much more useful product was moonlight white make-up, which worked really well, expect it dried up my face even though I had put a lot of moisturizer underneath. It looked good and that's what matters, right? :) Unfortunately the lighting was not good and hence it does not show well in the photos. Life's small annoyances, eh?

This beautiful scenery is from the centre of my home town. The city councilor or some other entity has decided to install lights above the river. The Autumn here is so beautiful.

Have a lovely November!