I subscribe to a blog called, um, Darn Cool Pics, which has, well, cool pictures. Duh.
Yesterday it featured images too cool not to share. It’s a bar made of skeletons — well, models of them — and I knew right away who the artist was.
Yeah, HR Giger (pronounced "geeger"), the freaked-out mind behind the alien in the Aliens movies. I’m not sure I could eat well in a place like that. And I certainly wouldn’t order the eggs!
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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May 21st, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Dang it! I’ve been pronouncing it like it’s spelled all these years!
May 21st, 2008 at 2:03 pm
He also did the album cover for ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Is this an actual bar or just a design? Where is it? I found another “Skeleton Bar,” but I can’t find this one.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:06 pm
BiGDumbChimp, please try to keep comments kid-friendly. This blog gets read in schools. Thanks.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Ah, another dream room created by my favourite artist. I wonder if this is from his house, or if someone paid him to make it for their house?
Kudos to Phil for pronouncing his name right.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:30 pm
erissian, it looks like this is an actual bar in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Wait, maybe I’m getting it mixed up with another one. D’oh! I don’t know.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:37 pm
This bar is found in Switzerland (of all places). I found it after visiting the town of Gruyere. It’s tucked away in a little castle courtyard. Very out of place amongst the other tourist attractions of that area. If I can remember the specific town name I’ll post it.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:49 pm
To be fair, you wouldn’t order eggs anywhere. (I’ve read your chapter on egg-standing!)
May 21st, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I’m trying to top the “I wouldn’t order eggs there” comment and I can’t. Well played, sir.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:31 pm
HR Giger was Swiss and there is a Giger bar in Gruyeres, as Cameron Peters mentioned above, (In Château St. Germain I think, although there could be more than one). It looks amazing, and BA wasn’t too far from it when at CERN.
Gruyere cheese Mmmmm!
May 21st, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I remember my bro had the ‘Book of Alien’ when I was a kid. Giger’s art in it gave me nightmares.
Freaky guy. Good artist, but freaky. The bar’s pretty cool, but I’m not a fan of the faces on the wall. Guess I knew there’d be something that would put me off.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I don’t mind the eggs or even the Aliens, Giger himself is more scary than either.
I got a couple of poster books with his art, it’s strangely fascinating.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:01 pm
While not creepy in quite the same way, there is a *church* in a small Czech city called Kutna Hora decorated in huge numbers of bones. My wife and I stumbled on it years ago, on the way to Prague.
It seems the locals closed a graveyard and had to figure out what to do with all the bones….
May 21st, 2008 at 7:03 pm
If you want bones check out the catacombs in Paris. The remains of 6 million people down there. Piles of femurs and skulls and you you name the bone. Kilometres of tunnels lined with bones. Fascinating. Your bags a searched on the way out – amazing how many people try to souvenir a skull or two.
Cappuchin monastery in Rome has a decent crypt too. The monks have displayed some of the corpses in bizarre still lifes.
One of the best crypt or catacomb experience I had was the Mummies of Ferentillo in Umbria, Italy. Here they have a number of mummified corpses on display including a Napoleonic era soldier, a mother and child and some murdered dude and his murderer.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:35 pm
In a place like this, how can you not order ribs?
May 21st, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Is this where I point out that the eggs in the Alien movies were intelligently designed?
May 21st, 2008 at 9:10 pm
[...] Source (with more pics of the place):Damn Cool Pics Found at The Bad Astronomy Blog [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Is the bar right under the primary heat exchanger?
May 21st, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Ahh, Giger. Man, the first movie is such a dark, finely polished gem. Scared me nearly outta my skin the first few times I saw it. Giger was one of those artists who could take old, old symbols and make something truly fantastic from them.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:24 am
That’s the Giger bar in Gruyères, as Cameron Peters said. It’s part of the Giger Museum (one excellent reason to go to Switzerland!). There’s another one in Chur (also Switzerland) and there was one in Tokyo, but it turned into a Yakuza hangout fairly soon and is closed now (not necessarly because of that, though). http://www.hrgiger.com/bar.htm
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:30 am
Arr, computer ate my accent aigu. That’s supposed to read Gruyeres (with a ‘on the first e
).
But then, I forgot to include the link to the amazing ossuary Mike mentioned anyway: http://www.kostnice.cz/
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:22 am
har har, “Giger Counter”. Took me a while to get the play on words
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:36 am
[obligatory] Just don’t order the Special:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh1exCwGiY0
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:45 am
I think the pronunciation would be more guee-guer than gee-ger (both g as in gig not gee)…
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:37 am
Wow, that is really bizarre.
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:40 am
Mike – they showed that church in Ewan McGregor’s travel documentary “Long Way Round”
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:58 am
@shane:
But did “X” mark the spot in any of them?
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:03 am
marco sc., I’m pretty sure that’s what Phil meant. Soft g “geeger”, not hard g “jeeger”. And totally not “Jiger”.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:24 am
[...] via Phil Plait, this delightful photo set of the Giger Bar in Chateau St. Germain, Gruyeres, Switerland (also [...]
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 am
I love HR Giger’s work. Jonathan Davis of the band Korn commisioned him to design a micropohone stand. Photos of it can be seen here (the stand itself is probably NSFW):
http://www.type3media.com/livephotos/korn07272007.html
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:45 pm
If you do eat there and the guy at the table next to you is eating spaghetti, you might want to switch tables. Fast.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:14 pm
[...] el bar está en Gruyere, Suiza, y fue diseñado por H.R. Giger, el artista que diseñó al extraterrestre de la película Alien y sus continuaciones. No sé si alguien podrá comer a gusto ahí, pero al menos vale la pena una visita [...] Vía Bad Astronomy Blog.
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Man, that is creepy. I’ve loved Gieger’s stuff since the Alien movies, those were some pretty bad ass designs he made.
Also, this also reminded me of Kutna Hora, which I think is supposed to be a Chapel in the Czech Republic, and yeah, it is very, very creepy. Suffice it to say that the plague wiped out pretty much everyone in there, enough to make 4 two meter tall, 2 meter a side pyramids of assorted bones, stacked with creepy attention to detail.
Those are, of course, besides the chandelier made of nothing but human bones and the coat of arms of whatever country the place was a part of in the 19th century, all completely done in human femurs, jaw bones, skulls, vertebrae, etc. Those were done by a (arguably insane) monk in the 19th century that found all those bones lying around and decided to make something useful out of em.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:01 pm
I remember seeing the Paris catcombs and the church made of bones on Geek TV a while back. Weird.
But yesterday’s microwave mayhem entry is FULL OF WIN x 700mb! This is the real way to burn a CD!
Finally, a good use for all those Fundy Dementorist CDs and DVDs my neighbor across the hall keeps leaving in the mail room! No more surreptitiously removing and shoving them down the compactor chute LOLOLOLOL! From now on, it’s a micro-Apocalypse! Ceiling Cat smites the Evil Henchmen of Fundy Mentalism!
MUAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!1111!!!!1oneeleven!!!!!