I think it is only human nature to look back on our childhoods as a time of idyllic happiness. But that’s a sentiment I’ve never quite understood. To quote from an unpublished short story of mine, “Nostalgizing on one’s childhood memories is like handling a rose: while it is pretty to the eyes and often smells divine, one must be ever wary of the thorns prickling such recollections. For behind the radiance of nostalgia is a shadow that can never be forgotten” (yes, “Nostalgizing” is a word). Even though my childhood was normal and very non-traumatic (some might even say boring), for whatever reason I recall being a very anxious and easily frightened child. I saw the world as a big and scary place, an impression that I’ve never been able to shake as I’ve grown older. Like most children, I had a number of fairly commonplace phobias, such as a fear of death, a fear of bees, a fear of throwing up, a fear of being possessed by the Devil (these, incidentally, are phobias I’ve never been able to conquer). But at the same time, there were other more specific things from my youth that gave me “the howling fantods” (to cop a phrase from the oeuvre of Mr. David Foster Wallace). Overheard stories, stuff I saw on TV or in movies or video games, certain illustrations in books or things that I read, and so on. I’d like to briefly examine a few of these, and maybe in the comments section today you can share with me a few of your own.
Stories
The Rainbow Homily
As many of you know, when I was a child I was raised as a Roman Catholic. So every Sunday I went to Mass with my family at 8:00 AM. The church we went to was Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Woonsocket, Rhode Island (O.L.Q.M. for short). Even though this was not the church I was baptized at (as my parents had been members of a different parish at the time of my birth), it was at O.L.Q.M. that I attended Mass once a week until maybe I was 18 or 19 years old: by then I had a part-time job at the local Super Stop & Shop supermarket (located across the street from O.L.Q.M.) where I often had to work on Sunday mornings, thus letting me off the hook when it came to going to church. I guess I would have liked going to church there more if O.L.Q.M. was a nicer-looking building, but I always thought that it was kind of bland, architecturally speaking, especially when compared to the pictures of the old European cathedrals from the Middle Ages that I would look at in my history textbooks at school. It had like, no stained glass windows or anything like that. It almost felt more like a Protestant church or something. Or a church built post-Vatican II, though O.L.Q.M. was actually built in the late 1950’s, so really, it had no excuse.
Anyway, there was this one priest I liked, Father Barry Gamache was his name. He was the assistant pastor. He wasn’t like most of the other priests at O.L.Q.M. He was like an actual human being, someone who I could relate to. He was a fat, jovial fellow; heck, his cheeks were practically rosy. I don’t think that I ever saw him without a smile on his face. He had his little vices, of course, like all of us: he smoked all the time, and was somewhat obsessed with his golf game, though he freely admitted that he was terrible at golf. He was really popular with the rest of the parishioners. At the start of each of his homilies, he would warm the crowd up, so to speak, with a little joke. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of the jokes he told, but here’s one that I still recall, after all these years: a guy goes into his kitchen, opens up the freezer door of his refrigerator, and he sees a Bugs Bunny-like rabbit sleeping in his freezer. When the guy asks the rabbit what he’s doing in the freezer, the rabbit answers, ‘I thought it said Westing House!’
As I said, Father Barry wasn’t like some of the other priests at O.L.Q.M. The other priests there were, for the most part, grim old fossils with no sense of humor. I remember one summer when one of those pastors was away on a religious retreat for a week, leaving Father Barry in charge of the parish. That Sunday, when Father Barry stepped out from behind the lectern to deliver his homily, he simply said, ‘When the cat’s away, the mouse will play. You guys get the week off.’ Or words to that effect. And that was it. It was easily the shortest sermon I’ve ever heard in my life, lasting not even ten seconds. Needless to say, the congregation loved that: they laughed and even applauded. And yet, the irony is, it was one of Father Barry’s homilies that scared me more than any other homily that I’ve ever heard in my life.
I forget exactly what year it was, or how old I was… I think I was still in middle school at the time, so I want to say probably 1991, when I was 11 or so. The homily in question consisted of a story Father Barry told us, no doubt as a means of explaining that week’s Gospel reading. I forget if this story was something he had read in a book, or if it was a dream he had had, or just something he made up: the fact that I’ve never been able to track down the story to its original source is something that has haunted me throughout my life. I forget the exact details, but this is what I remember about the story he told us that day:
One day, a rainbow appears in the sky, a rainbow that can be seen at any point on Earth. As people look up at the rainbow in shock, burning letters begin to appear across the rainbow itself. The letters form the following message: that all people’s sins will be unveiled, and that the world will end in seven days. And sure enough, everyone’s sins begin to manifest as words on their faces. By that I mean, say you were guilty of the sin of lust: then the word “LUST” would appear on your face. People all over the Earth panic. They try to wash the words off their faces, but the words remain, despite their best effort. At one point in the story, Father Barry mentioned a couple, a husband and wife I think, who decide to remain married, even when they can plainly see that they’ve been unfaithful to each other. Then on the seventh day the rainbow reappears and the world ends. That’s the gist of the homily, as best as I can recall it.
For years afterwards, I had a bad fear of rainbows. I would get very nervous every time it would rain, and whenever I was outside I tried my best not to look up at the sky, for fear of seeing a rainbow that had words on it announcing the advent of the end of the world (plus, the idea of my sins appearing on my face for all the world to see was also a big part of that worry). I know it sounds silly, and eventually I outgrew it (hell, in college, I joined the campus gay/straight/bi/trans/questioning student group, which was called RAINBOW). A few years ago I began studying the fear of rainbows, and found that it was an actual phobia: iridophobia (incidentally, another phobia I had growing up was fear of buttons, the clinical name for which is koumpounophobia. It’s more common than you would assume. Steve Jobs, for example, suffered the same fear, which is one of the reasons why the elevator in Apple’s Tokyo store has no floor buttons. In my case it was so chronic that, when I was growing up, I would refuse to wear any type of clothing that had buttons on them. Just the act of touching a button would leave me feeling physically ill. Of course, with some people the phobia is so severe that the sight of a button is enough to induce vomiting. I wasn’t that bad though. I still find large buttons to be very disgusting, however).
The Bloody Mary Urban Legend
The following story occurred when I was in middle school, probably the 7th grade. There was this one day at school where all the kids seemed to be talking about the Bloody Mary urban myth. The way they were describing it was, if you stood in front of a mirror in a darkened room and said the words “Bloody Mary” ten times while staring into the mirror, then the bloody disembodied head of a dead witch would appear in the mirror and, if you did not escape from the room or turn the light on fast enough, then she would chop your head off or something. As I said, many of my classmates were talking about this on that day, and some were even saying that they had tried it out themselves and that it was true, that she had appeared in the mirror.
Now, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who make up bullshit stories, and the superstitious, easily-fooled poor souls who believe such bullshit stories. As you can probably have guessed by now, I fall into the latter category. I even asked this one girl who said she had tried it out if she was telling the truth and she looked into my eyes and swore to God that it was true, that she wasn’t lying (I should have known better: this girl really had it out for me that year, for whatever reason: she looked exactly like Anne Frank but she was pure evil, and she took a special delight in tormenting me: once in Home Ec class our assignment was to bake pancakes and after we had baked the pancakes we ate what we had baked and this girl’s hands got all covered in maple syrup and at one point as I walked by her she grabbed my arm and she wiped her hand over my arm, as if it were a napkin, so as a result it got all sticky with maple syrup. It was a very embarrassing situation for me. But years later, I happened to find out that she had gotten knocked up, so, you know, like, karma, but I digress). Long story short, I fell for the urban legend hook, line and sinker, and by the end of that school day I was very shaken up.
I suppose I must have been pale when my parents picked me up from school, because they asked me what was wrong with me. So I told them about how all the kids were talking about Bloody Mary. My parents assured me that it was all a hoax, but I didn’t believe them. To prove it to me, they took me into the bathroom of the first floor of our house. They closed the door and turned off the lights. My dad began chanting “Bloody Mary” at the mirror while I stood at the door, my hand gripped on the knob, beads of sweat popping out on my forehead, and with each utterance of the words “Bloody Mary” my terror seemed to keep rising at a feverish pitch. Finally, with the tenth “Bloody Mary” being uttered, I screamed and ran out of the room, and in the hallway outside the bathroom I (somewhat humiliatingly) burst into tears. Naturally, Bloody Mary did not appear in the mirror. And yet, I developed a phobia that day, not so much of mirrors, but mirrors at night. Even now, to this day, whenever I’m passing by a darkened room at night with a mirror in it, I keep my head down so that I won’t accidentally look into the mirror. I remember in 2011, we had a hurricane hit New England, and we lost power for a day. That night, I had to take a shower in the bathroom, but because we had no lights I had to bring a flashlight in with me, so I could see what I was doing. On the front of the medicine cabinet above the sink is a mirror, the same mirror that my parents chanted “Bloody Mary” into all those years ago. So I covered it up with a towel!
Books
The Man With The Blue Face
When I was a kid, my dad was really into reading fantasy novels, by writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen R. Donaldson and Terry Brooks and so forth. He would often describe the plots of these books to me in great detail: I remember how, in trying to read Lord of the Rings myself when I was in middle school, I had found that I had liked my father’s description of the book more than the book itself. But my dad also owned a lot of fantasy novels by lesser known writers as well. Pictured above is the illustration that graces the front and back cover of Robert Silverberg’s 1980 fantasy novel Lord Valentine’s Castle. On the book’s spine there was this creepy-looking man with blue skin who I would always refer to as “The Man With the Blue Face” (my dad would tell me the character’s real name, but I could never remember it). I’ve circled this character in the above JPG, and below is a (somewhat blurry) close-up; my apologies for the poor picture quality…
Anyway, this “Man With the Blue Face,” well, he terrified me, to the extent that my dad had to hide this book on his bookshelf behind another book. Although I don’t suffer nightmares much anymore, when I was a child I had many nightmares, and this Man With the Blue Face probably appeared in like 50% of them. This was one that occurred often: in the nightmare, I’d be lying in bed in my bedroom when I’d hear a voice call my name. Thinking it was my parents, I would go to the top of the stairs and look down. Every time, it would be the Man With the Blue Face standing at the bottom, waiting for me. I would find myself unable to run as he charged up the stairs. He’d grab my ankles and then yank me down the stairs. Then he would drag me along the hallways of the house until we came to the door that led to the basement (the basement of my parent’s old house was also the source of great childhood terror to me: the previous occupants of the house had painted sinister-looking people on the walls, and on one of the other walls there was a large black gaping hole that my parents told me never to stick my hand into: I used to fantasize that it led to Hell, or some alien parallel dimension). The Man With the Blue Face would swing open the basement door and start pulling me down the stairs. Then the basement door would slam shut and I would wake up, usually screaming for my mother.
The above illustration appears in The How and Why Wonder Book of Insects, which my parents had purchased for me at a Toys "Я" Us for $1.08. Written by Ronald N. Rood and illustrated by Cynthia and Alvin Koehler (and published by Price/Stern/Sloan Publishers, Inc. Los Angeles, 1983), it is basically a 48 page informational book about insects, with illustrations (some of which are in color, others in black and white). This drawing appears on page 28, which strikes me as ironic, seeing as I consider 28 to be one of my lucky numbers. At the bottom half of this page, as you can see, there is a black and white illustration of a startled-looking mouse that is surrounded on all sides by five honeybees, who seem to be readying themselves to sting the mouse to death. The text above the illustration says, “A warm beehive sometimes attracts mice and other animals. If a mouse finds the hive, it may eat some of the honey the bees have stored for food. It may build its nest in front of the entrance so that the bees cannot get out in the spring. Often the bees drive the mouse away with their stings. Sometimes they sting it so much that it dies. Then they have to leave the body there. But the bees often cover a dead mouse with their wax, sealing it up so that the air in the hive will stay fresh.” And beneath the illustration is this caption: “The mouse has a sweet tooth, especially for honey, but bees know how to defend their property from enemies.” Perhaps my fear of bees stems all the way back to seeing this picture at an early age?
In the JPG above are some panels from the comic book adaptation of Don Bluth’s classic 1982 film The Secret of NIMH, which was itself an adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I recall being quite fond of the movie when I was a child (in fact, I had had a crush on the animated version of Mrs. Brisby, who I thought was kind of hot). Anyway, this comic book adaptation was published by Golden Press in 1982, and though it was priced at $2.95 my parents had purchased it for $2.46 at Caldor. The illustration in this book that had scared me was on page 29, the portion of the book dealing with the rats and mice trying to escape from the NIMH research labs by fleeing through a ventilator system. At the top of this page in question there was a panel showing some of the rats crawling along a string that stretched like a tightrope at the top of the air shafts. The inside of this air shaft was red, with gaping black holes, making it look more like the interior arteries of the body of some horrific eldritch monster than the inside of an air shaft. I mean, at that point in my life, I had never seen the insides of an actual air shaft, but my gut feeling was that they didn’t look like that. Some of the rats are shown falling to their deaths as they got sucked down the air shafts, horrified expressions on their cartoony faces: at the top of the panel is a caption stating: “But all the mice except Jonathan and Mr. Ages were sucked to their doom down air shafts!” Incidentally, I would sometimes have nightmares in which I’d find myself getting sucked down similar air shafts.
The Johnny Dixon Mysteries of John Bellairs
“I write scary thrillers for kids because I have the imagination of a ten-year-old. I love haunted houses, ghosts, witches, mummies, incantations, secret rituals performed by the light of the waning moon, coffins, bones, cemeteries, and enchanted objects.”
-John Bellairs, Locus 1991
When I was young, I was a huge fan of the gothic novelist John Bellairs (January 17, 1938–March 8, 1991), who pretty much wrote books mainly for kids and teenagers, though he did a few adult novels as well (these adult novels of which I have not read). Not only were they my entryway to the world of Gothic/horror fiction, but also to the art of Edward Gorey, as his illustrations would usually grace the front cover, back cover, and frontispiece of the books of John Bellairs. When I was a kid, I was especially obsessed with his series of supernatural mystery/thriller novels featuring Johnny Dixon. His Johnny Dixon books take place in New England in the 1950’s, and concern Johnny Dixon, a lonely and quiet bespectacled boy who, though he likes nothing more in life than to read his books in peace and quiet, always finds himself being drawn into inexplicable adventures, often revolving around cursed objects, undead wizards, killer robots, time travel, and so forth. Usually accompanying him on these adventures are his best friend and classmate Fergie, his neighbor Prof. Childermass (an elderly man who is Johnny’s second best friend), and Father Higgins, the town priest. The titles of these books were quite evocative: there was The Curse of the Blue Figurine (1983), The Mummy, The Will and the Crypt (1983), The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull (1984), The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost (1985), The Eyes of the Killer Robot (1986), The Trolley to Yesterday (1989), The Chessmen of Doom (1989), and The Secret of the Underground Room (1990). Following Bellairs’ death in 1991, further Johnny Dixon mysteries were written by Brad Strickland, but I never read those. The first Dixon mystery I read was the third one in the series, The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull: I think I got it through my school’s Scholastic book club. I loved it so much that I began collecting the other ones in the series.
Having said that, I also found the books of John Bellairs to be very scary at times. Take The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. In this novel, Johnny Dixon and Prof. Childermass visit an old inn in a little New Hampshire town. The owner of this inn just happens to have in his possession a clock that had been built years ago by Prof. Childermass’ father, a clock that is said to be haunted. In the bottom half of the clock there’s a small dollhouse room, decorated like the parlor of a Victorian house from the 1870’s. Inside this parlor are various objects, including a tiny skull and a doll of a man that’s supposed to represent Prof. Childermass’ granduncle, who was murdered by a sorcerer many years ago. That night, Johnny sleepwalks down to the inn’s basement, where he has a vision in which he sees the doll come to life, only to get smothered to death by a tall, gaunt shadow. That scene is creepy enough, but things get worse. When the Professor touches the skull, he unwittingly is cursed, and later on vanishes. When Johnny visits the house of his friend, he encounters this creepy scene (the fact that it involved a face in a mirror made it doubly nightmarish in my mind):
“Halfway to the window Johnny froze. He had seen something out of the corner of his eye, a sudden image in the small rectangular mirror that hung over the bureau. He turned and looked. In the mirror he saw the professor’s face, looking haggard and disheveled. His eyes pleaded and, as Johnny watched, his lips formed silent words. ‘Help me.’”
Another of the spookier Dixon mysteries is The Eyes of the Killer Robot. The plot for this one is pretty silly: it’s been years since I’ve read it, but I think the story revolved around this: the town that Johnny Dixon lived in was holding some kind of baseball contest where if you could strike out a major league batter, you’d win $10,000, and some evil inventor planned to win the contest by building a robot that resembled a man in a baseball uniform and using “an ancient magical formula” to bring it to life. The crux of the story was that the robot could only be brought to life when a pair of dead man’s eyes are placed within the robot’s head. The inventor had a grudge against Johnny’s grandfather, so to get back at him he plans on using Johnny’s eyes to bring the robot to life. As I said, pretty silly stuff. Still, there are some unsettling moments, such as this one, where Johnny spots a ghost lurking outside his bedroom window:
“But just as he was turning to pull down the bedspread, he froze. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen something.
There was a figure crouching on the porch roof outside his bedroom window.
An icy breath of fear blew across Johnny’s body. In a flash he knew that the creature was someone who shouldn’t be there, someone who couldn’t be there- it was a visitor from another world. Slowly, Johnny turned to face the thing. The flashlight’s beam cast a ghostly sheen on the window, and beyond the glass Johnny saw a fearfully thin shape shuffling forward on his knees. As Johnny watched, rigid with terror, the shadowy form groped at the window… and then Johnny blacked out, and he fell in a heap on the floor.”
By this point, one would think that Johnny should just stop looking at things he notices at the corner of his eye.
Here’s another of the spookier scenes:
“Not far from the back door of the house stood a bench covered with peeling white paint. It was a garden seat, the kind people used to make so they could sit outdoors on hot summer nights. The bench stood in a patch of wild rosebushes not far from the rugged wall of the mountain, which towered overhead. A man was sitting on the bench- a man Johnny had never seen before. He wore baggy, dusty overalls and a faded plaid shirt, and he had a big mop of straw-colored hair. The man sat hunched over with his face in his hands, and he seemed to be crying. Johnny stood dead still. The bunch of pieweed stalks fell from his numb fingers, and he took a couple of shuffling steps forward. And then, as Johnny watched, the man stood up. He took his hands away from his face and he stumbled. Johnny gasped in terror- the man had no eyes. Streaks of blood ran down from empty black sockets.
‘They took my eyes,’ the man moaned. ‘They took my eyes.’
Johnny opened and closed his mouth, and made little whimpering noises. He shut his eyes tight to block out this horrible vision, and when he opened them again a second later, the man was gone.”
Granted, that’s the kind of scene that, when I read it over now, makes me giggle, but when I was a kid, I thought that was pretty scary stuff.
More info on John Bellairs and his work can be found here:
http://www.bellairsia.com/
Songs
“Aqualung” by Jethro Tull
Growing up, I would often listen to the same music that my parents listened to. They mostly listened to progressive rock, bands like Yes and King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. My dad liked Jethro Tull as well, especially their album Aqualung. I hated the song “Aqualung,” though. For some reason, I misheard the lyric “feeling like a dead duck—spitting out pieces of his broken luck” as “spitting out pieces of his broken lung,” the visual image of which so disgusted me that, upon hearing it on the radio of my parent’s car one day as we drove to some parade, I went into a state of almost borderline hysterics as I demanded they switch to a different station before that lyric came up, even though they insisted I had misheard the lyric. I also found the artwork that accompanied the Aqualung album to be quite creepy and disgusting as well. Bottom line, I hated Aqualung: the song, the album, even the fucking artwork.
TV shows
Mummenschanz on the Muppet Show (1976)
I don’t think I need to comment much on this one. Let’s just say that while I loved The Muppet Show when I was little, the Mummenschanz characters would often manifest in my nightmares. How the audience could be laughing at this surrealistic nightmare, I have no idea!
Movies
Luke’s vision in Empire Strikes Back
When I was a child, I was really obsessed with the Star Wars films (in fact, the first film I ever saw in theaters was Return of the Jedi, all the way back in 1983). I had all the toys and books and everything. However, there was one scene in the second film, where Luke Skywalker has a nightmarish vision involving himself battling Darth Vader, that always scared the hell out of me.
watch it here
Video/Computer Games
Alien (Commodore 64)
This old computer game, first released for the Commodore 64 in 1984, was, of course, based on the classic Ridley Scott film. The game was designed and programmed by Paul Clansey, who also did the awesome music heard playing at the title screen (this was back in the days when all it took was one person to crank out a video or computer game). It’s mostly a menu-based game that is surprisingly faithful to the film and, through the use of subtle sound effects, really captures the tension and paranoia of the movie in question. All the characters who appear in the film appear in the game, as does the ship where the main action takes place… All that’s missing is the face hugger and the bursting chest (one presumes this happens off-stage, right before the game begins). The graphics are kind of dull and basic and the interface is a little clunky, but all-in-all, I’d say they made a good effort. I played this game A LOT when I was a kid, even though it scared the hell out of me. One thing that interests me about the game was how, in place of a soundtrack, all the game consists of in terms of sound is a steady beating sound as the clock ticks down (which I guess also stands in for the character’s heartbeat) and an annoying metallic hiss every 7-8 seconds. Every now and then you’ll hear a metallic scrapping sound which indicates the Alien is moving around the ship’s duct system (or maybe moving into the next room). This heightens the game’s creepiness and paranoia. The main goal of the game, like the film, is to destroy the Alien. There are a few ways to do this. One, you can use weapons on him and try to beat him in hand to hand combat, though I’ve never been able to do this (the weapons, most of which include laser pistols, harpoon guns, and incinerators, are very hard to come by)… The most I’ve ever been able to do is wound him, and when that happens his acidic blood damages the room he’s in. I have no idea what happens it the acid damages too much of the ship, and frankly, I don’t want to know. Another option is to entice him to enter an airlock, then shoot him into outer space, but odds are against that he’ll fall for this. The easiest way (and I mean the word “easy” in its most ironic sense) is to capture the cat Jones, set the ship to auto self-destruct, then get at least three crew members into the “Narcissus” escape pod to win. But try as hard as I could, I was never able to beat this game. One thing that added to the paranoia factor is that you can never actually see the Alien on the game’s map until it attacks you: then the game jarringly switches to a screen of the Alien itself.
Ikari Warrios 2: Victory Road intro (NES)
Ikari Warriors 2: Victory Road is a shoot-‘em-up action video game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in April of 1988. My family never actually owned this game, but we did rent it once, and for some reason my brothers and I found the game’s intro scene to be terrifying. First off, it’s kind of creepy (to say nothing of irritating) how the text slowly appears on the screen one letter at the time, and when you get to the grand appearance of Zada at the 2:51 mark (he looks a bit like a Satanic Yoda), well…
The Ending to Monster Party (NES)
Monster Party is a fairly obscure game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989, though over the years it has built up something of a cult following. It’s basically about a boy named Mark who meets a gargoyle-like creature named Bert. Bert is from the “Dark World,” and this home of his has been attacked by monsters. It’s essentially your basic platformer game, just with a somewhat quirky and macabre sense of humor (as some of the bosses you fight in the game are quite outlandish). But the ending is pretty, well… see for yourself:
The Town of Yomi in Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (NES)
Towards the end of Castlevania II, right before you reach Dracula’s Castle, there’s a town you have to go through called Yomi. What makes this town different than the game’s other towns is that it’s completely abandoned, utterly devoid of life, save for one crazy old woman hiding in her house who, when you speak with her, simply says “Let’s Live Here Together.”
The Death Scenes of Uninvited (NES)
All I have to say to this is: AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Shadow’s Dream in Final Fantasy VI (SNES)
When I was in high school, my favorite video game of all-time was Final Fantasy VI for the Super NES, though back then, when it was first released in the West, it was known as Final Fantasy III. One of my younger brothers and I were so obsessed with the game that we each created a trilogy of novels based on it (this was around 1995 or so). Like most of these Japanese role playing games, your party can sleep at inns to replenish lost health. Usually when you sleep at an inn in the game, you’ll see your party each climb onto a bed. The screen goes black, you hear a nice little sound effect, then the game fades back into the view of the inn as the party gets out of bed and you can control them again.
That’s what’s supposed to happen, anyway. However, if one of the characters you can play as in the game, Shadow the Ninja, is in your party, and you go to sleep at an inn, there’s always a chance that one of 4 different dream scenes will appear, these dreams being flashbacks into Shadow’s life, before he became a ninja. What made this so scary to me at the time was that I didn’t know about this: the strategy guide I owned for the game made no mention of it. So when I saw his first dream for the first time, it came as a real shock to me: not helping matters is that in this first dream scene, an incredibly loud and abrasive droning/air-siren-like sound effect plays in the background, adding to the “jump out of your seat” effect. I can at least take solace in one thought: quite a few other people who played the game when it first came out freaked out at that first dream scene as well!
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To make this fairly short day of mine a bit longer, here are a few more recent things that have creeped me out over the last few months:
Squidward’s Suicide:
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Squidward's_Suicide
Pokemon’s Lavender Town Syndrome:
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Lavender_Town_Syndrome
Yume Nikki: Uboa (shit gets real at the 7:39 mark):
Well, I think that’s enough horror for one day!
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p.s. Hey. We're really gifted here this weekend with one of Sypha's always amazing guest-posts, and you have the weekend to luxuriate in it. Please do, and let him know it feels, okay? Thank you ever so kindly, James. ** Rewritedept, Hey. No, I was actually quite fucked up and uncool when I was young. I got a little cooler when I hit my teen years and got the whole writer/artist thing going on and could hide behind myself that, but fucked up? You bet. Friendships like the one I have with my friend come along extremely rarely in one's life, so I think I just got incredibly lucky. Feel free to make a great friend too and then keep it to yourself. I don't know how you can convey something like that anyway. Maybe in poems or something. Oh, I never thought about how my allergy thing would prevent me from getting a tattoo, but you might be right. I've just never been attracted to getting one for a second. No interest ever, I don't know why. I'm actually 9 hours ahead in time, or at least from LA. Next week sometime for Skype maybe? Let's check back in about that early in the week. This weekend is too uncertain and busy for me. I'm not sure what my schedule is going to be post-weekend quite yet, but I will soon. Great weekend to you! ** Misanthrope, Committing yourself to getting your novel finished sounds like a pretty inarguable plan to me. Easier said than done, of course. Witness my inability of late. Martin Amis has a new book? Did not know that. Hunh. ** Alan, Hi, Alan! Well, I think I know where the novel's track might be, but I'm not sure I'm back on it. Hard to tell. I've read McGuane's first four novels. No, wait, first five. 'Bushwhacked' is my clear favorite, but, yeah, 'Ninety-Two in the Shade' would probably be my #2. I would read one of those two first, if I were you. Great to see you! ** Dynomoose, Wow, more great tips/links! Thank you! You're making my brain spark like crazy, and you're probably giving me blog post idea or three to boot. Thank you! I would start with the McGuane book that I spotlit yesterday, no surprise. Did you find her glasses? Yikes! ** David Ehrenstein, MGuane's 'Ninety-Two ...' film is quite nice, and, yes, quite obscure now, strangely. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Ah, a Nico moment. I know those, or know my version. They can be strangely cathartic. The last Zazou, oh, sad, but it going out with a bang seems like a fairly safe guarantee. Yeah, photos would be nice. I hope you got blissed. ** Steevee, My guess is that, like the great majority of erotica or sex based sites from that part of the world, at least in my experience, it was set up, made to appear as though there was a lot of alluring content and then never touched from the inside again, and just left there forever to earn whomsoever thought it up a little money from innocents who pay the entrance fee. Thanks for the link to the article. I'll read it in a bit. I haven't heard any of the new Nick Cave album, no. I will, although I'm not a huge Nick Cave fan, or I mean not such a fan/follower of the post-Blixa Bargeld Bad Seeds stuff. But I'll have a listen, for sure. ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. I saw your email, and I'll open it today. Cool, sounds very intriguing. Oh, I see, about the translators. Shows you how rarely if ever that I read Russian lit these days. What's the Billfold article? Have a crazy great, birthday-enhanced weekend, man. ** L@rstonovich, Hey, man. I think you'd like McGuane. Stick to the early novels, the first few. His later books, while still pretty good at times, really and deliberately changed because he kind of turned on the sparkly, jumpy style that he was initially known for. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Yeah, the first few are definitely the best, or, well, the most electrically and excitingly written. He kind of renounced that style around the time of his fifth novel, 'Panama', which is still quite good, and the best of the later work, I think, but I do think his earliest books are by far his most original. With Shoes, it depends on how much of a leap you want to make. They're pretty great if you're into the power pop form, and possibly the best of that era's/genre's bands. I would say get the compilation album '35 Years - The Definitive Shoes Collection 1977 - 2012', if you want an overview. Otherwise, I'd either get 'Black Vinyl Shoes', their first, low-tech album which kind of helped set the power pop template, or 'Present Tense', their first big label record, which is fantastic. Yeah, real sad about Kevin Ayers. I like the second Soft Machine album, sure, but I don't think it's anywhere as great as the first album. But if you like them, yeah, you should get it. Right, about the Sorrentino novel. Dazzling is the word. It's his best, I think, maybe. ** Un Cœur Blanc, That sample is so mysterious and beautiful! Thank you for telling me what it is. I'll investigate. I'm very happy to talk with you alway,s whatever is on your mind. I'm glad that all is going so well. Have a very well weekend. ** Sypha, The man of the 48 hours himself! Thank you, James. Such a beautiful, rich post! Ugh, on your post-endoscopy state, and I hope the post-smitten folks here will at least give you a nice distraction as you rescale health's heights. ** Bill, It's a goodie, that novel. Really fun. I would imagine that the new Chabon is not my thing. He has never been my thing, much less at that kind of excessive length. Hope the weekend of gig prepping goes insanely well. What are the gigs, if you can say and want to? ** Postitbreakup, I'm sorry Josh. Love is so hard, and it rarely works both ways. Ugh. Hugs, man. ** Right. Please spend the weekend prioritizing Sypha's childhood terrors over your own or commiserating with him or, gee, however you want to deal with the presentation obviously. May total enjoyment of some sort be yours, and I'll see you on Monday.
32 comments:
Dennis, Yeah, Amis' novel is called "Lionel Asbo: State of England." It's really fucking funny. Just the way he phrases things and sets them up, it's too hilarious. Basically, it's about a small-time crook who's very violent and immoral and wins 140 million pounds in the lottery. His nephew, who he's "raised," just wants to go to university, find a good girl, and have a nice life. Hilarity ensues. At the same time, it's a great bit of satire about our current celebrity culture.
Well, the novel: like I said I thought I had a little bit left, but then as I started transcribing these handwritten pages, I started coming across all these "see notes for this section" notes that I put in there. Forgot I'd done that in so many places. In some cases, the notes are actual written-out scenes; in others, I have to do them from scratch. So yeah, it'll take me quite a bit longer than I thought. Oh, well. As they say in the gym, there's nothing to it but to do it.
Good news: I passed my background check! So I should be getting a legit badge very soon that'll allow me access without an escort.
It seems the sequestration is going to take place. However, there are lots of little things that can happen that will either delay it or eliminate it altogether, even if it does happen. And it's very possible my job won't be affected either way, but I'm not sure about that yet, so fingers crossed.
Sypha, that was great ! I found so much that I related to. I had "night terrors" as a kid which gave me a crippling fear of the dark until I was ten, or so. Then, at eleven I developed a fear of sharks and tornadoes. This was quite a few years before the movies "Jaws" and "Twister" but "The Wizard of Oz" undoubtedly had a hand in the tornado thing. The shark thing, I dunno...when I learned to scuba dive I was quite concerned with how I would react when I finally saw a shark. That event turned out to be oddly Zen-like and calming which I definitely didn't expect. It verified something the poet James Dickey once remarked, to me, following a reading down in Key West : "Did you ever notice how the most savage things of the earth are also the most beautiful ?"
Regarding Jethro Tull, I love them ( and I happen to know Dennis doesn't ) and I love the album Aqualung, but, I sure thought the subject of a dirty old pervert an odd one for any artist of the day.
Dennis, thanks for the McGuane day, especially the Warren Zevon collaboration tacked on the end. I wasn't even aware of that song even though I was, and still am, a huge fan. His association with the Avocado Mafia ( Eagles, Rondstadt, Jackson Browne ) had him standing, drunkenly on the periphery, retying a suave if bloodstained ascot. I followed that link to the whole concert ( MTV, who would've thunk it ? ) and found myself singing along at six a.m. Thanks again !
Sypha!
I really dig this a lot. I'm hoping for the chance to dig into it over this, my birthday weekend. So I will take it, gladly, as a happy birthday from you. Hugs.
Hey Dennis,
Yeah, the email is a pretty nice boost. It's nothing concrete but my fears of the book not selling have dropped precipitously.
Chatted really briefly with Yury the other night; I was just going to wish him good luck on the launch but he said he'd sent me some pics of the launch, which is incredibly cool of him. I can't wait. Before you know it I'll be asking him for help pronouncing some of these Russian names.
My Billfold article is about that self-published werewolf romance I wrote, just about that whole weird experience. Speaking of which, Mr George Wines of here himself has offered to proofread it that books ms for me, which is just hugely flattering (thanks again, George!) so it's one step to becoming a pounding word-of-mouth success.
I hope you have a super weekend. I'm pleasantly engaged with mine.
Talk soon
J
Sypha, Jesus Christ, I'm 41 and these things scare the fuck out of me! :D
@Sypha:
This post was good, I can relate to a lot of the fears you were talking about. I was also raised in a pretty religious background, and Christianity shaped a lot of my childhood fears...it's kind of an intense thing to have a default view of reality involving multiple worlds, and this idea that all around you are demons and angels actively trying to influence you one way or another. And then thinking about Hell & how Hell is forever, there's no escape... I was also worried about getting possessed by Satan or a demon, that was a big fear for me.
This is pretty embarrassing but a video game I was pretty scared of as a kid was Ecco the Dolphin. I've always had a weird fear of the ocean, and anytime I had to dive deep underwater my hands would start shaking and I'd get freaked out and swim back to the surface.
@Dennis:
Hey, hope your weekend is going well...
Were you really 14 when these pictures were taken? You look a lot older. I remember hearing in an interview that you reached your full height at a pretty young age. Did you ever get any acting work?
http://teenagehallucination.tumblr.com/post/43724534544/dadoodoflow-h-t-gregory-howard
Can't think of too much to say...I'm kind of obsessed with Grasshopper Mice right now. They fight tarantulas and giant centipedes and stuff, and sometimes after making a kill they do this weird high-pitched victory howl...
http://dankland.tumblr.com/post/43772119292/dont-fuck-with-a-grasshopper-mouse-they-seem
The Grasshopper Mouse makes me happy, I think it's my new personal mascot.
Talk to you later :)
Sypha: This post is AMAZING!! I love it! You should turn this into a book or something. Really awesome and super interesting.
Pilgaric, when I was a child I loved sharks: had shark t-shirts, shark stuffed animals, and so on. I recall crying at the end of "Jaws" because I felt bad when the title character dies (the same thing occured when I saw the original "Godzilla" movie). Now that you mention it, I had a lot of nightmares involving tornados when I was young as well, which is odd as we almost never get tornados where I live.
cobaltfram, happy birthday!
Chris Dankland, it's funny, last year I started to watch "The Exorcist" but I had to stop halfway through because it was just freaking me out too much. I think that movie has an especially powerful effect on anyone who has had some sort of Christian background.
Misa, some of these things still freak me out as well!
Kiddiepunk, thanks: the rainbow homily one was supposed to be used in a short story, but I never finished it. Much of what I had appear in today's post was stuff I had planned on using for a semi-autobiographical novel, but that got scrapped when I remembered I don't like it when my writing becomes too autobiographical. So I decided to salvage it for here, figuring that the use of images and videos might enhance the experience in a way that just words alone might not be able to.
Great stuff, Sypha.
I recall being frightened by a toad as a child. It suddenly appeared at the corner of my street in Flushing. Don't know how it got that. Ran off screaming before learned where it went.
Latest FaBlog: Fait Diver -- Bad Fish and Good Hair
Sypha, you are a piece of work. I enjoyed a lot of that, especially hearing it with what one commenter once called, your "gangster voice." Haha. We share at least one phobia, but I just can't understand the rainbow one, never heard of that before!
The scariest thing I remember from my childhood was in 6th grade, my first male teacher, who was very mean, Mr. Polacco. On the first day, he announced that starting the next day, we'd be reading the Bible first thing in the morning, starting with the first person as we were sitting and we weren't allowed to change our seats. Since I was in the first seat in the first row, I was terrified, sick and couldn't sleep the whole night, knowing I'd be the first person to read from the Bible the next morning in front of the whole class. Well, it turned out, he started with the last seat in the last row...so I was actually the last person to get to read. Sounds funny now, but Bible reading was never my speciality. I've got other specialities, but don't want to scare you!
sorry, that was 4th grade...my 6th grade teacher was great and he taught us astrology! (I've been hooked ever since.)
Nope. I got burned. LOL ex-sex, so last night I'm at the club, scan the crowd, pseudo-metro trash… a hot drag-boy, a sexy top or two, and my first gay love walks up wacked out on Klonopin and drunk on rum. So I drove him home in his Benz, when in Rome. I'm hoping this full-circle means a new beginning. "You look confused, maybe you should lie down." ;) I think I'm going to sing "Fuck and Run" until I hear the cage door close. I want to live for awhile in El Greco and Monet. I'm confused about how to write a novel. I confused about how to write a sentence. Haha, I've been learning so much from music recently. Least favorite song ever, Cinderella's "Nobody's Fool". Pink's "One Last Kiss" makes me pretty furious. Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right", eye-opener. Dio's "Rainbow in the Dark" almost as cool as reading one of your books. LOL things children are afraid of. I was scared of the sun and the moon. I was afraid of my mother being raped. I was afraid of my creepy uncle who used to threaten he was going to cut my ear off. I was afraid of my grandpa who used to tell me he was going to tie a brick to my thing. I was afraid of Frankenstein. I was afraid of The Exorcist III. I was afraid of Burroughs. I'm scared of women. I'm scared of this picture of this boy I have in sweatpants. I'm scared of not getting what I want. I'm scared of dying here. I was kind of scared of the first boss on Altered Beast. Haha, Rock & Roll!
Sypha,
Thanks for sharing your childhood terrors with us this weekend! I read the different pieces and thought 'well Sypha/James and I were obviously scared by different things as kids'... but when you mentioned that you were afraid of being sucked down air shafts, I thought well there's something I can relate to! When I was a kid my parents made me join a swim team at the public pool. I was good swimmer, but the pool was 10 feet deep at the diving end, and seeing the drainage vent 10 feet below in the deep blue water put a fear into me that I still can't seem to shake. Pools, the ocean, any large body of water gives me the willies! I'd never heard of the Bellairs books, either. I like the covers. Thanks again, Sypha, for a most scary weekend!
Dennis, I just saw the movie 'Klute' (1971) for the first time last night. Jane Fonda was amazing. I like how the story is told. It's chopped up; it's not a traditional film narrative, yet the pieces come together in the end. I wonder if Tarantino was influenced by it at all? Have you seen it?
I hope you and Yury are doing well.
Much love, my friend.
James
Sypha, Bloody Mary scared the unholy shit out of me as a kid. Oddly, I imagined Count Dracula protecting me from her. Not the sexy aristocrat of the films, but the foul breathed monster who fed village children to his harem. Yeah, weird kid.
Dennis, thank goodness, yes! Apparently, she spent the morning crying about the glasses, pointing out that the cat had stolen them. Turns out, they were stashed in a laundry basket.
Her reactions to things like this remind me that she's still a special needs kid.
Discoveries in science and technology make me feel better about the crappy way everyone seems to be treating each other now. Yeah, we may want to eviscerate each other over the slightest ideological differences, but they've made a synthetic nano material that can detect viruses! http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/348420/description/News_in_Brief_Synthetic_nanomaterial_can_recognize_viruses
Maybe all these new advances will eventually bring a bit of civility and acceptance back into the world. If not, at least I'll be able to hide away in my holochamber, making whatever I need on my matter compiler!
Sypha,
Finding The Exorcist scary must be a thing for people raised with religion. I've always thought it was hilarious. Now Jaws, that movie kept me out of the bathtub for months!
I'm getting increasingly uneasy about my BADLANDS article, because I have the sense that my editors want me to write a big statement about the ethics of movie violence. I'm really unwilling to do that - I've read very few of them that weren't moralistic pabulum. Have you heard about the brouhaha about Thomas Frank's piece for Harper's, which seems to have been more talked about than read because it's behind a paywall, in which he suggests that film critics can help prevent real-life gun violence by panning violent movies? (Has he ever read a review of SAW or HOSTEL?) In comparing BADLANDS to NATURAL BORN KILLERS, I want to concentrate on the former's aesthetic superiority.
You must have dealt with your share of people who think a book like FRISK is an example of serial killer chic. It's obvious to me that you've thought seriously about how to depict violence, but many of your critics seem to think your books are the literary equivalent of Charles Manson T-shirts. It's really hard to write seriously about these issues without moralizing.
hey sypha, there's plenty of material here for a short story collection. emphasising the psychological impact of these in a fictive section would be quite good to read.
dennis, did everything sort itself out with the day i sent through to you? hope you get some writing done on the novel. thanks for introducing McGaune to me. It looks a good read and I'll check to see whether it is in the local libraries.
i've been fiddling around with some computer generating programs this week, which has been fun to do. i have a small collection of hakius derived from Vaneigem Revolution of Everyday Life i've made. I'm thinking of coupling them with some collages to make a little chapboo or something. The collages will be made by using google images. Each line of the poems being put into that search engine and then the results become the material to make the collages out of. I have done the search now just need to find how to use those images to make the collages.
David E, you should swap batrachophobia stories with Misanthrope.
Kyler, I think it was Joe Mills who said my voiuce sounded like a Jewish gangster from NYC, ha ha. It's weird, I almost never read the Bible at all when I was a kid but a few years ago I read the entire New Testament and a large bulk of the Old. But there's so much boring stuff in there as well. What the hell, even Aleister Crowley read the bible.
James, yes, I love the Gorey art that graces the first editions of most of Bellairs' books. Sadly, more recent publications of said books drop Gorey's art and in place are much more generic artwork. Ah well.
Dynamoose, re: "The Exorcist" I can see how a lot of religious people might find it very scary. Having said that, I do know a few atheists who find the film very scary as well. And of course, I know a lot of people who find it very campy.
paradigm, now that you mention it, I had planned on doing a short story about a guy who visits his psychologist and tells her about his chronic fear of rainbows, and how it was an overheard homily he heard at church as a kid that created that phobia within him. His therapist tells him he should confront this fear head on. When the guy gets home he looks throuygh the picture books that scared him as a child (with the same illustrations that freaked me out as a kid), and, realizing that the pictures scare him no longer, realizes maybe his therapist is on to something. To confront his fear, she would take him to a local church, that was holding an extravagent play based around Noah's Ark, complete with a rainbow made of glass. The therapist steps under the arch of the rainbow and encourages the guy to do so as well. At that moment, the priest who told the homily of the rainbows all those years ago jumps from the steeple of the church in an act of suicide and smashes through the glass rainbow, sending shards of it everywhere, one of which decapitates the head of the therapist. Let's just say I didn't know how to end it, ha ha.
The Exorcists a film designed to make Latino Catholic schoolgirls so apoplectic that their boyfriends can fuck them with ease.
Sypha, your remark about Crowley reading the Bible piqued my interest. I think he was a theologian first and an occultist in a secondary sense. Please pardon the leap this might require but, I'm a Clive Barker fan, and like many of his fans I'm impatiently awaiting the publication of "The Scarlet Gospels", the follow-up to "The Hellbound Heart", of which the movie "Hellraiser" was based. I understand that Clive has had some domestic and health problems the last few years, but, he has been teasing us with this for well over a decade, now. In my online search to glean some hope from this possible myth of a book I linked up with a site in which various scenarios were created involving the LeMarshand < sp? > box. It's the puzzle box which, if solved, brings the Cenobites, those "angels to some, demons to others" who see no difference between pleasure and pain. In one of the scenarios Crowley and his lover come across one of the boxes in Africa. Crowley is sure it will help him access the demon Choron who guards the Abyss separating this dimension from Hell. His lover wanted nothing to do with such a thing and flings it into the ocean while Crowley is asleep.
The man was pissed, to say the least, and the story ends there. One wonders how the "Beast" would've liked all those hooks and chains, and the "Oh fuck !" moment when he realizes it wasn't the demon he was seeking. As an aside, I think a remake of the movie "Hellraiser" is a complete waste of time, energy, and money. And, while "The Scarlet Gospels" many be the longer work Barker alluded to in "SiH", sorry Clive, I'll believe it when I see it.
I share some of these phobias Sypha, though I wouldn't call a fear of bees irrational. To me it's the people who breed them and don't mind a hive buzzing about them who are weird.
Pools, the ocean, any large body of water gives me the willies!
Me too James - first time I went to the swimming baths (aged 9 or 10) I was thrown in. More than anything I still remember the shock of the sound of being underwater. I must have instinctively got to the surface. I wonder if that always happens. Still hate the smell of chlorine.
I remember the first time I'd been close to a big water surface – Brighton Beach at midnight. Nothing in sight but water and the full moon. For me it was like standing on the edge of a cliff.
I don't understand how anyone could drown themselves. (Dame Edna on Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse? Well she didn't get very far did she?)
A lot of fears of course come from the creepy Catholic upbringing. (Like you Sypha I found/still find The Exorcist incredibly disturbing). It's strange to me how converts to Catholicism speak of the Wonderful Rituals! The Costumes! The Paraphernalia! As an Altar Boy I found the mass utterly boring, especially when it was in Latin! And as for The Stations of the Cross. Jeez.Us.Christ. Interminable.
I used to have to cross from school to open the church in the morning. It was always scary walking through the empty building. Scariest of all was having to get stuff from the store cupboard - which had no light. I would dash in and out, eyes to the ground, shielding them from the old statues of Our Lady and Our Lord and, especially, the abandoned crucifix with the life-sized bloodied broken Messiah staring at me accusingly. Never liked statues since then. Still hate the smell of incense.
Oh and some breaking Catholic News.(To be read in Sypha's Gangster Voice). While The Pope holes up in The Vatican to escape prosecution (ie justice) one of The Family who wants to re-elect his successor, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, (Scotland's top Catholic!) who has spent decades telling us how evil The Gays are, has just been accused of
'inappropriate behaviour' by a bunch of priests. Going back decades of course.
Bet they still let him decide the next Pope. He has perfect credentials.
Have you listened to any of those Bowies yet? You could start with what I think of as the Berlin trilogy – Station to Station/Low/Heroes. I know the trilogy is supposed to be Low/Heroes/Lodger but those three seem more of a set to me.
@Sypha
this was great : ) i use to love & play lots of Ikari Warriors 1, never played 2 though. i remember being really freaked out by a werwolf film (i think) i stayed up late to watch when i shouldn't have. there were 2 people trapped in a car in a forest surrounded by werwolves and i was terrified, cape fear also freaked me out as a kid, although it might have been another film with a similar plot?
Hi Dennis
hope your weekend was fun! i saw some shows, got free beer and a book of essays on Beckett so i cant complain : )
re-watched the perverts guide to cinema & have been reading zizek's 'year of dreaming dangerously' feeling like my brain is switching back on again.
see you on the flip side.
Hey Dennis, Monday's gig is at Mills College: more info
Those John Bellairs books look terrific!
Tempting Matmos event tonight, but I should be getting ready for the gig...
Bill
Hello I have returned from Oxford! Had a lovely time, I went to a dancehall night (which is my favourite type of music to dance to because it's so easy to dance to) and then I went to see disclosure which was very loud and crazy, followed by making new friends and playing Creationary which is a very fun game to play, high or not. Favourite image of the trip was watching people snorting ket off the box for creationary, a childs game. Also walking back at 6.30am and it snowing which always makes me think of you and it would have been beautiful, Oxford in the snow, if I hadn't been in just a tshirt.
OMG Moaz is like my absolute favourite falafel place maybe ever? When I did my internship in London over the summer I went there every day for lunch, their hummus is unbeatable and god the pittas are just so amazing and full and tasty. I always got a bit of a stomach ache afterwards though. Don't think there's one in Leeds either, which is a great shame!
Ah, I am the opposite re: doing the clipping and general non-creative stuff, I really despise it and was I not a complete control freak, I would get someone to produce my music for me so I didn't have to deal with that kind of stuff! Alas.
i often think that a great novelist tends to have a distinctive memory of childhood with fear and terror, which i think, Sypha obviously displayed today, too. i don't have any memory of childhood which is ok for me and my work but i already found it distancing myself from a quality of a complex and compelling novelist, sigh. Sypha's terror in relation to mirror and song is very interesting and feels very real. i was almost identifying myself in that story with an overwhelming impression that it is a great preparation for a new scary, gothic novel. //dennis, my life is ok. i think it's much better than most of life forms that people presumptively sympathize with in the imagination of miserable ones of innocent and powerless little ones. does it make sense to you? buffalo got much warmer magically in a day and i like it so much and i will spend a day or two days in working on my blanchot piece on 'step not beyond...' and i will celebrate the end of work with mochi icecream from hawaii islands. fantastic, isn't it? i am very glad that your art project becomes known and appreciated. oh, step not beyond, i think in the past i mentioned to you that i will send some lines from it. i will work on that, probably along with original french lines. but my health has not been keeping up my inner energy lately so, i just can say some day...but i will do so. i am really thinking to move to LA whenever I feel more settled with my work and visa status. if this happens at the end of summer, i would love to interview you formally in person in LA for my dissertation chapter. i hope that will happen.
I'd love to see Clive Barker write about Crowley encountering the Cenobites. I can see Crowley getting a kick out of it, although I suspect he'd want to top Pinhead, and Pinhead wouldn't be down with that.
@ Sypha, I love this day. It's brimming with lolz and terrors!
My own childhood scare was always dogs. It's rooted in a family holiday to Greece and I must have been about 8, I was walking alone down an alley and a dog ran up it towards me. It started barking and I just stood there frozen with fear. Also around that time we went to a local farm that had a display of information about rabies, including photos of rabid dogs. Then the dog scenes in Ghostbusters I found especially terrifying. That fear's never really left me. I still tense up when I hear a barking dog.
I really love the sounds those NES games make. I heard a great computer game tune a few weeks ago on yet another Legowelt mix: the Parallax theme. It's this strange mix of techno and free jazz. So heavy.
@ DC, photos from Friday's Zazou are here. It was super busy with plenty of dancing and it will be missed. Anyway, 2 years is a good innings for this kind of thing I reckon.
Pilgaric, I seem to recall reading that towards the end of his life Crowley, in a letter, recommended to one of his sons to read both Shakespeare and the Old Testament as both were examples of what he thought were the best in English writing, though it seems his interest in it was more from a stylistic rather than a theological point of view. It's sad how little Barker I've read. I read the first "Book of Blood" and "The Hellbound Heart" but that's it... heck, I haven't even seen the film "Hellraiser," though I do own it.
Joe, I never knew you were an altar boy. For some reason I find that very amusing. I still have a great deal of interest in things like Catholic architecture, the Liturgy, and all that. What can I say, other than that I'm a sucker for pomp and regalia. It's the ritualized nature of the thing that interests me: it's all very occult, in a way, which I guess is ironic. So far of the Bowie albums I purchased recently all I've heard are "Ziggy Stardust" and "Diamond Dogs." I liked "Diamond Dogs" better than "Ziggy" for some reason. Next up will be "Aladdin Sane" & "Station to Station," followed by the Berlin trilogy.
Bollo, when I was a kid I was friends with a boy who was something of a bad seed. This boy was obsessed with horror films and the occult. One day he took my hands and in the center of my palms he drew in two pentagrams using a red magic marker. When I asked him why he did that, he said he was afraid that he'd turn into a werewolf soon, and that when he did, the pentagrams on my hands would protect me from him. Naturally, I didn't get much sleep that night (and my mom freaked out when I came back from school and showed them to her: she probably thought I had been dabbling in Satanism or something!) She told me to go wash them off, and I said something like, "But mommy, if I do that what will protect me when my best friend turns into a werewolf?"
steevee, well, in his homosexual relationships Crowley would sometimes assume the role of the bottom: usually when he was in the guise of Alys, his drag/female altar ego.
Black_Acrylic, there's this magazine I like to read every month, named "Retro Gamer," and once they had a big article on innovative music from old computer games in the 1980's, and
"Parallax" was highly rated. I have a love/hate relationship with video/computer game music, mainly because my younger brothers are always playing it and after awhile it's like, enough!
Sypha! I had forgotten about those FFIII/VI dream sequences. Freaky. You ever play EARTBOUND? That, CHRONO TRIGGER, and FFIII/VI were my childhood RPG totems.
Dennis! Very happy & relieving to her about your ease & enjoyment over there. And shit! I ran out of ARCs of Solip to give, or else I would've mailed you one. Better to see it in its final form, anyway. And make sure to check the dedication page. On my side: all's good! Got a screentest offer for a regular role on a pilot but turned it down because the role wasn't interesting to me. That felt good. The sole criteria for this year's creative output is MAXIMIZE PRIDE. Shoot for pride instead of happiness/pleasure/etc. So I let that rule guide me out of employment, and it felt great. Still writing, still reading. About to go to my mom's annual (small) party for the Oscar's, even though my patience in the Academy Awards is violently waning. I'll go for an hour, eat all the guacamole, and go home.
Yours,
K
Ken, I recall playing Earthbound when it first came out but I never got that far into it: I enjoyed the game's music but wasn't crazy about the battle screen's interface. One of my brothers likes it a lot though, and it does have a good final fight. "Chrono Trigger" is probably my favorite RPG from the old Super Nintendo. I've beaten that one twice, once on the SNES and once on the Nintendo DS version. All the time travel stuff in that game really interests me.
d-
might not be able to skype this week. while i was at work today, my house burned down. we're insured so we should be ok. i'm kind of numb. a lot of my stuff is ok. some isn't. tomorrow i should be able to find out what's salvageable. my computer was in my room, which means it's fucked. hopefully i can recover the hard drive. otherwise, 'hey ma' may be lost. i have piles of laundry to do to hopefully get the smoke smell out. can't play my guitar until we file the insurance claim. my bed is destroyed. lost a bunch of posters, LPs, movies and books.
on the bright side, i guess i'm getting a new computer now. and fortunately my music equipment was mostly ok. i'm staying at my dad's for a couple days while i figure out what to do.
how was yr weekend?
i'm gonna go get drunk. talk soon.
-me.
Un Cœur Blanc, I seem to recall you telling me some real-life ghost stories a couple of years ago. Sadly, haunted mirrors feature in so many horror stories/novels that I doubt I could add all that much else to the genre, but who knows? These days I'm pretty much done with horror fiction.
hi Sypha, thank you for the reminder, yes, I remember we conversed on that. yes, that's what has happened in my real life a few years ago but, no childhood for me. you know, I was not a child already at the moment, sigh. i am not at all an expert at any formal genre of horror, so i felt your writing very new. thank you again for the day. dennis, did i mention that i am a big fan of comic strips, particularly peanuts? i do feel very excited when i read Woodstock(unskilled bird) language in peanuts. have you ever been into comic strips? irregardless, love you forever, h
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