We're all bound for MuMu(fication) land
November 22, 2018 8:47 PM   Subscribe

Wondering what to do with your earthly remains? Why not join 34,591 others and have 23 grams of your ashes baked into a clay brick and then built into a pyramid in Toxteth, Liverpool by K2 Plant Hire Ltd, also known as Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, also known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, previously (?) known as The KLF. The process is to be known as MuMufication.

Today, November 23, is the Toxteth Day Of The Dead. Today only, you may be admitted to the Toxteth town hall upon presentation of one full sized shopping trolley. There will be an unexpected item inside.
posted by deadwax (34 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
And two thousand, three thousand years in the future, there will be those spreading stories about aliens building this pyramid, the hidden prognostications found in the measurements of this pyramid, and the links between this pyramid with others in other cultures that tell of a great civilization in between that fell in a gigantic catastrophic collapse into the sea.

For £99 you can be a part of these stories...
posted by njohnson23 at 9:23 PM on November 22, 2018 [2 favorites]


I love the special deals. "If you live here and you're really old, 99p. If you live here and you're young but going to stay here, 10 quid."

It's an intriguing idea. I'm more a wrap me in a cloth and bury me and plant a tree on top of me sort of guy, though. Which, I understand, is becoming more and more an option.
posted by hippybear at 9:31 PM on November 22, 2018 [4 favorites]


What an I meant to do with an unfired brick in the interim?
posted by fistynuts at 9:54 PM on November 22, 2018


"What do you think about dying?"

"Mate, I'm bricking it"
posted by fallingbadgers at 10:01 PM on November 22, 2018 [2 favorites]


this all smells suspiciously of art
posted by philip-random at 11:38 PM on November 22, 2018 [7 favorites]


I'd be willing to donate some of my remnants to their project, I mean, why not?

But would they be transported in an ice cream van?
posted by droplet at 11:43 PM on November 22, 2018 [4 favorites]


Yay!
posted by carter at 11:45 PM on November 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm pretty sure the "unexpected item" inside Toxteth Town Hall will turn out to be a massive pile of all the shopping trolleys people bring there.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:05 AM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


> this all smells suspiciously of art

And a cadre of increasingly decrepit fanboys mutter "just get back to the fucking music, you wankers".
posted by Leon at 12:10 AM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Amazing what happens when you realise you shouldn't have burnt that million quid.
posted by nfalkner at 1:09 AM on November 23, 2018 [7 favorites]


K2 bricklayer Daisy Campbell (Ken Campbell's daughter) was selling bricks after her Hampstead Theatre show back in July. I was tempted, but decided in the end not to invest. At least one bloke there did cough up his £99, though, and there may well have been other takers who I didn't see.

I'd been imaging the planned pyramid as something the size of an office block, but the Over 80 video in deadwax's link makes it clear this is not the case. Looking at the diagram they also have there, the pyramid has 23 layers, each of which is four bricks high. The standard British brick is 75mm tall, which translates to 2.95276 inches. Throw in a dab of mortar for each brick, and let's call it exactly three inches. That gives us a calculation of 23 x 4 x 3 = 276 inches. That's exactly 23 feet, a height which seems consistent with the video's depiction.

This is a good deal less impressive than the massive structure I'd been imagining, but substantially improves the pyramid's chances of eventually being built. Maybe I should have bought that brick after all...
posted by Paul Slade at 2:42 AM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]



It's an intriguing idea. I'm more a wrap me in a cloth and bury me and plant a tree on top of me sort of guy, though. Which, I understand, is becoming more and more an option.


23 grams is barely a half a finger. You could have that - or part of some other appendage (wink wink) - cremated and then do with the rest of the body as you wish.
posted by lalochezia at 2:43 AM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


The standard British brick is 75mm tall, which translates to 2.95276 inches.

That's an unexpectedly metric British standard. Is it recent, or were British bricks metric back in the days of Victorian navvies for some obscure reason?
posted by acb at 2:48 AM on November 23, 2018


At 23 feet it would at least be a step up from the existing 15-foot burial pyramid with a strange backstory less than a mile from Toxteth.

Depending on exactly where the Toxteth pyramid is built, it's quite possible my flat would be on the leyline between the two... :-) Sadly I'm both too old and too young to take advantage of their Black Friday offer, despite meeting the other requirement.
posted by amcewen at 3:40 AM on November 23, 2018


Just about every official measure in Britain is expressed in metric terms these days, and it's been that way for quite a few years. Whether any particular individual is comfortable with metric units or not depends on that individual's age as much as anything.
posted by Paul Slade at 3:46 AM on November 23, 2018


I was taught in metric measurements my entire life, and I first went to primary school in 1970.

As for the post... JAMMs will JAMM, I suppose.
posted by Grangousier at 4:05 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Though, assuming that the dimension of the standard British brick has been constant since the Victorian era or earlier, it being in a perfectly round number of millimetres and a truncated one of inches seems a bit odd. Unless Victorian bricks were 3" (76.2 mm) high, and the truncation to 75mm was a happy confluence of post-WW2 austerity and early moves towards European standardisation or something.
posted by acb at 4:23 AM on November 23, 2018


You could have that - or part of some other appendage (wink wink) - cremated and then do with the rest of the body as you wish.

So you're saying we don't have to wait until our demise to take advantage of this amazing offer?
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:31 AM on November 23, 2018


I've just found another (possibly more reliable) source. "Nowadays most bricks in the UK are made to a standard brick size of 215mm long, 102.5mm wide and 65mm high (215 x 102.5 x 65mm) and laid with a nominal 10mm mortar joint," it says. "Longer, thinner formats are very much in vogue at the moment with brick heights below 50mm and brick lengths of more than 500mm not uncommon."

Please feel free to adjust the calculation above in whatever way you feel appropriate.
posted by Paul Slade at 4:59 AM on November 23, 2018


You're not wrong Paul Slade, the 'unexpected item' does look a lot like a pile of shopping trolleys
posted by firesine at 5:30 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Wow, am I ever here for the brick size derail. I had no idea that the size of a brick wasn't standard all around the world, but apparently it's not! Here in the US our bricks are a mere 57mm tall by 194mm long, which apparently makes them the smallest bricks out there, according to this chart anyway. This fascinates me, because just the other day I was pointing out to someone that I could tell a section of faux-brick veneer was faux at a glance simply because the size of the "bricks" was wrong. Now I wonder if it wasn't wrong, but merely produced in a different country where they have different-sized bricks.

Within the US though, the pleasing proportions of the homely brick are such a consistent, standard, unvarying ingredient in the fabric of civilization that it never occurred to me that they might be different elsewhere. It makes me wonder about the subtle ways in which having differently-sized bricks might shape the thoughts and cultures of the people who live amongst them. One could imagine a story in which the protagonist is abducted and made unconscious, and wakes up in a windowless room somewhere, but can tell what country they've been taken to by the distinctive proportions of the bricks from which the room is made. Great stuff, love it!
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:36 AM on November 23, 2018 [6 favorites]


Stuff Toxteth... I want my remains scattered over the cheese counter at Paxton and Whitfield. Cremating them first is, of course, an option.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 5:42 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


The article on bricks led to one on the Roman brick (which was smaller, and more or less standardised to 1 by 1½ Roman feet, and which are still in evidence in Rome and its former dominions). Which led to the article on the historical origins of the various measurements of length known as the foot; some were gathered by sampling and averaging the lengths of feet of the local population, whereas in places, rulers insisted on their own measurements becoming the new standard (supposedly Henry I of England, for one).

It's a good thing that that sort of autocratic narcissism has been consigned to the benighted past. Imagine if a similar egomaniac ended up in the Whitehouse and insisted on the US foot being redefined on his own measurements, for example.
posted by acb at 5:54 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was going to make a "make mine a 99" joke, but of course they already covered that.
posted by lmfsilva at 6:15 AM on November 23, 2018


And I still haven't managed to make it more than 10 pages into that unreadable book they published last year.

Glad they're still culture-JAMMing, tho
posted by SystematicAbuse at 9:44 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


the hidden prognostications found in the measurements of this pyramid

Given the direction this discussion has taken, it appears I was off by a few thousand years. Also, thanks to the brickish metrologists here, the secret has been revealed. 23! The holy number given to us by Robert Anton Wilson in The Illuminatus Trilogy, which also gave us The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:00 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Longer, thinner formats are very much in vogue at the moment

I absolutely love that there are vogues for brick size. Weird little subcultural trends are the best. If anyone knows who the current brick-length trendsetters and tastemakers are, I want to hear all about it.
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:08 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm a resident of L8 and have a meeting in the building next door to the town hall tomorrow. And yet I learn about it from Metafilter. I love this place.
posted by Acey at 10:26 AM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


US standard bricks are also some bizarre dimension in height, but that's more because their height is 1/3 of a concrete block height, minus a mortar joint. US masonry is basically set up on an 8" grid - I don't know if that is because of the size of CMU (Concrete Masonry Unit), or if it predates it. So, a CMU is nominally 8"x8"x16" (in actuality that dimension includes mortar joints - the real size is 3/8" smaller in all dimensions), and a standard brick is 1/12 the volume (1/2 the length and width, 1/3 the height), but bricks that are 1/8 the volume (1/2 the height, all other dimensions the same) are also frequently used.
posted by LionIndex at 3:59 PM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


So anyway, you tell me the size of a UK brick, and it just makes me wonder what their block size is. But maybe things are still built entirely of brick in the UK - in the US, we build things out of CMU and then put brick in front of that.
posted by LionIndex at 4:03 PM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


LionIndex: we call them breeze blocks and these days we do the same.
posted by Leon at 4:34 PM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Interesting idea, but I would want to visit Hawaii first. Muumuu vacation before MuMu(fication) as my grandmother always said.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 7:31 PM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Here's two stills and two videos showing yesterday's events. Looks like some moderately enjoyable arsing about with a decent enough turnout.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:20 AM on November 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


It's a good thing that that sort of autocratic narcissism has been consigned to the benighted past. Imagine if a similar egomaniac ended up in the Whitehouse and insisted on the US foot being redefined on his own measurements, for example.

Well horses would suddenly seem a lot taller, for starters.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:16 PM on November 25, 2018


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