As 2009 comes to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors. Today’s entry is from May 31. Here, Nathan Larson and Nina Persson write about the theory that a group of artists and art collectors were behind the infamous Black Dahlia murder.
“We’re going to party like it’s 1699,” sings Nina Persson on Colonia, the second album the Cardigans frontwoman has released under the A Camp name with husband Nathan Larson (Shudder To Think) and Niclas Frisk. As the lyric and album title imply, the ornate Colonia is loosely based on the theme of love in the time of colonialism and is inspired by cabaret and musicals from the ’40s. Larson and Persson—king and queen of Colonia—are guest editing magnetmagazine.com all this week. Read our Q&A with them.
“The simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” —André Breton, from Surrealist Manifesto
Nathan And Nina: We like a nasty murder mystery as much as anybody else. Don’t you? So did a sinister group of notable artists and art collectors kill the Black Dahlia? It’s an extremely sexy and scarily plausible theory that has been getting more and more play over the last several years. There’s been at least three books now about this particular angle on the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short (one fiction, two non-fiction), an event that seemed to mark the end of an era in the same way that the 1969 Manson murders denoted the official end of the Utopian concept of hippie love. Fitting that both murders took place under the relentless Los Angeles sun. Pictured here with Nina is the “Franklin House” in L.A., former home of Dr. George Hodel, a sort of libertine art lover and controversial figure who (according the his son, a former L.A. cop and author of the book Black Dahlia Avenger) figured large in the Short murder. At the very least, Hodel held some pretty gnarly sex parties here that involved his daughter (if this book is to be believed); frequent guests included Man Ray, John Houston, Humphrey Bogart and many others. Is this house crazy looking or what? Perhaps more relevant to this entry: Did the actual killing take place in this house? That’s one popular theory, as police reckon the killing took place in a different spot than the location at which Short was eventually found. Pretty nasty, and the injuries could be read as sort of a mash-up of a couple highly regarded surrealist works, most notably Dali and Man Ray, who Hodel worshiped and partied down with. There’s a lot of evidence stacked up against Hodel, some of it’s pretty freaking weak, but some of it’s pretty damning. It’s clear that he did have contact with her and had the kind of medical training that would be useful in setting about to do this kind of damage to the human body. Also the FBI has him on wiretap as saying, “Supposin’ I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn’t prove it now. They can’t talk to my secretary anymore because she’s dead.” Hmm. Well whatever the truth, it’s all great fun, and we highly suggest the fine coffee-table publication Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism And The Black Dahlia Murder. Plus, this whole Dahlia thing is a fun hobby. It’s one of the most entertaining topics to Google, people get really worked up about it, and there’s no end of theories. So get cracking! And in all seriousness, we do hope Short is resting in relative peace—what an unbelievably horrible thing to do to another human being. Anyways she did wind up getting super famous, which seems to have been one of her goals. It’s good to have goals.
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