viz.

Image Credit: Austin Culture Map

H/T: Noel Radley

Austin’s Thirteenth Annual East Pet Parade, held just last Saturday, not only celebrated “family, friends, and of course our furry friends,” but also Austin resident Leslie Cochran, who passed away a month before.  The organizers encouraged owners to dress their dogs in drag in Cochran’s honor, so Chris Perez dressed her dog Leslie in traditional Leslie garb: a pink bra and a feather boa.

(NSFW after the jump.)

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

By this point most people—at least the ones reading blogs or The New York Times—have heard about Whitney Houston’s death last Saturday. As it so happened, Houston passed away the night before the Grammys, turning that celebration into a kairoitic moment of mourning. Singer LL Cool J opened the Grammys with a prayer for Whitney and Jennifer Hudson performed her most famous hit, “I Will Always Love You.” Since then, LeAnn Rimes and the television show Glee have offered performances of this song in tribute to Whitney. Likewise, her family is allowing her funeral to be streamed on the Internet. I’d like here to consider further the function of these institutionalized tributes. How can (or should) we remember the dead?

Front page of Welcome to Pine Point, by the Goggles

Welcome to Pine Point is an interactive experience that documents a mining town that, rather than declining slowly or attempting a resurrection, erased itself, leaving behind only empty land and a website entitled "Pine Point Revisited." Mike Simons and collaborator Paul Shoebridge built Welcome to Pine Point to document and reflect on the experience of discovering that a place Mike remembered from his childhood was not simply empty or decayed; it was actually gone.

Image Credit : Timothy Schubert

As Cate’s post from last week illustrates, while we continue to be affected by the events of 9/11, we’re also faced with the task of interpreting an expansive and wide-reaching 9/11 memorial culture.