Prison

source

Brick Apartment Building, 1935

His Hands

rough and red

tiny individual dark hairs

on thick knuckles gnawed nails

Hands that reached for her in the darkness.

They were both loving and cruel.

They stroked her hair and blackened her eyes.

When he died

in his sleep that August night

she took the cleaver

from the kitchen

and lopped those hands off.

She buried them in a shoe box

in the small fenced

in patch of grass

that was the backyard

under a red moon.

When Spring came

tulips bloomed

along with five roses

with thick thorny stems.

Recorded spoken-word version of the poem, with music by Luke Willis:

Soundtrack Saturday: Wolf Suite Part 1

Every Saturday I'll be posting a selection from a movie soundtrack.

Today's track is from Danny Elfman's score to the recent remake of The Wolfman. The film was a huge disappointment; it had a ton of great talent involved, but it just fell flat on its ass. The only two positives, in my opinion, were Rick Baker's fantastic werewolf makeup, and Danny Elfman's soundtrack.

It should go without saying that the soundtrack borrows (or steals, even) very heavily from Wojciech Kilar's AMAZING score for Bram Stoker's Dracula, but that shouldn't stop you from enjoying it.

This track, Wolf Suite Part 1, can actually be heard now in the trailers for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which stars Gary Oldman....who was in Bram Stoker's Dracula!!!!!  Coincidence???? Yes. Yes it is.

Click on terrified cutie Emily Blunt to hear the track:

Final Days

We shall all become cleansed when

we find the car,

nestled amongst the rubble and the ashes,

down in the alley,

where the wild root grows.

I saw the search-lights

reflected on your sooty skin,

and smelled the kerosene

in your clothes,

and pictured you in flames

among the art-work,

a come-hither smile on your lips.

When they call our numbers

on the megaphones,

we fix our hair in the reflection

of a cracked store-front window,

put on our best faces,

march two by two.

At the last hour,

you will be made powerful and terrible,

you will find beauty within the bones.

At the last hour,

I will become something

extraordinary.

Recorded version of the poem; Words by me, music by Luke Willis

Leave Ghosts Alone!

Remember when vampires were somewhat cool, and interesting? Remember the show Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, and how clever it was, and how it perfectly handled the vampire element? Remember when vampires were scary?


Those days are gone. A whole slew of sucky (no pun intended) teen romance books and movies (you know the ones--they have that boy with the big hair, the other boy who always has his shirt off, and that robot disguised as a girl) pretty much destroyed any mystery or intrigue that vampires held. It turned them into wussy, glittery, sad-sacks. Even Anne Rice’s prissy, pretty-boy vampires were still, when it came down to it, ruthless killers.

Well now it seems the vampire teat has been milked for all its blood (eww), and the powers that be are looking for a new supernatural creature to fuck-up. What will it be? Will they start making movies about love-struck Frankensteins, trying to woo the outcast girl at school? Will teenage mummies start unwrapping their bandages to reveal really buff guys?

According to this article  in Wired, "ghosts are the new vampires.”

Already, there are several shitty-sounding teen ghost books that are being snatched up by Hollywood to turn into shitty-sounding teen ghost movies. I am bothered by this.

Sure, you could argue at the end of the day, this doesn’t really matter. They’re just movies and books. And you’re 100 % correct. But I really enjoy ghosts and ghost stories. When done properly, there’s so much you can say and do with a ghost story. Do we really need a bunch of movies where sad teen ghosts fall for sad teen humans, all of which will have the same message: We can never be together, because I am a ghost and you are alive!! (sad face).

C’mon people, leave ghosts alone.

Inches of Skin

We both count the white lines

in the road as the old car carries us home.

I like the style of your clothes, the pea coat, the flat shoes,

the grey jeans.

The heater is broke and the radio plays static

low.

You hate the sound of your own voice,

and all I wish is to hear you sing.

Run red nails through your red hair

your red lips held tight.

When they break and you smile I catch

a glimmer in your eyes.

I don’t speak.

I realize that here, in the front seat,

we are nothing but inches of skin

separated by an armrest

and the past.

Here is a recorded version of the poem--spoken by me, with music by the great Luke Willis

"We want to know where she put the rubber ducky."

The Cat in the Shopping Bag

transcribed from More Scary Stories to tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz

Mrs. Briggs was driving to the shopping mall to do some last-minute Christmas shopping when she accidentally ran over a cat. She could not bear to leave the corpse on the road for the other cars to hit and squash. So she stopped, wrapped the cat in some tissue paper she had with her, and put it in an old shopping bag in the backseat. She would bury it in the backyard when she got home.

At the mall, she parked her car and began walking to one of the stores. She had only taken a few steps when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a woman reach into the open window of her car and take the shopping bag with the dead cat. The woman quickly got into a car nearby and drove away.

Mrs. Briggs ran back to her car and followed the woman. She caught up with her at a diner down the road. She followed her inside and watched the woman slide into a booth and give a waitress her order.

As the woman sat sipping her soda, she reached into Mrs. Briggs' shopping bag. Then she bent down and looked inside. A look of horror crossed her face. She screamed, and fainted.

The waitress called an ambulance. Two attendants carried the woman away on a stretcher. But they left the shopping bag behind. Mrs. Briggs picked up the bag and ran after them.

"This is hers," she called. "It's her Christmas present! She wouldn't want to lose it."

Art by Stephen Gammell

Instagram with the First Day of October

Yesterday was the first day of October--my favorite month. In case you haven't realized it yet, I am a huge fan of Halloween--and also chilly weather. This October will be extra swell because I'm also getting married this month.

To celebrate the first day of the month of ghouls, Emily & I were out and about, going to Johnson's Corner Farm to buy pumpkins, pies and cider. And then it was off to Philadelphia to pick up my wedding ring.

And here are some Instagram pics from the day:

Fallen leaves--IT BEGINS.

Socks, the neighborhood cat, who we are pretty sure
secretly hooks up with our cat when we're
not home.

The brutal remains of a pumpkin scone.

Emily poses with deformed pumpkins.

I bought this little fellow.

Our basket of fall goods. The stuffed animal is a
tiny dog with a Dracula cape and fangs.

Mutant pumpkins.

Philadelphia City Hall.

Soundtrack Saturday: What Must Be Done

Every Saturday I'll be posting a selection from a movie soundtrack.

Today's track is What Must Be Done from the super amazing soundtrack to the super amazing movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The soundtrack is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and if you don't have it you should get it right away. In my humble opinion, it's one of the finest film soundtracks of all time.

Click on dead Jesse James to listen:

Also: HAPPY OCTOBER. Thus begins my favorite month of the year. I just hope the rain lets up for a while...

The Shell

When I was five years old my family went to the beach. I’d never been before, or at least, if I had I didn’t remember. My mother told me if I put a seashell up to my ear I could hear the ocean inside.

I put the shell up and something crawled out of it, and inside my head.

No one believed me, but I knew it was there. I could feel it scurrying around the top of my brain. And I could hear it when it told me to do things.

Like the time our house caught fire—the thing from the shell told me to do that. No one ever found out.

Or when I pushed my little sister down the steps—it was because the thing from the shell said I had to. Everyone thought she just tripped—even she thought that. But I knew the truth, and so did the thing from the shell.

I suppose I could’ve stopped for a minute and questioned the thing from the shell---asked it why I had to do all these things. Or even refuse do to them. But you have to understand—this thing was inside my brain. It could hear my thoughts. It never everything I was going to do before I did it. So really, when you think about it, I didn’t have a choice.

So you can’t really get mad at me for that one summer when all the pets on our block disappeared—even though I knew exactly what happened to them.

And that time when my family moved, and I had to start a new school in the eighth grade, and that bully tried to push me, and I stabbed him right through his hand with a pencil. Believe me, I DIDN’T really want to do that! Even though that kid was a total jerk. But the thing from the shell—it told me exactly where to stick that pencil point.

When my parents started crying, because the therapist said that I might have some sort of “personality disorder”, I felt really rotten. I don’t like making people cry—I swear. I wanted to stand up and say I was sorry, and say that it wasn’t me doing this stuff on my own—I was being controlled, like a puppet. The thing from the shell nixed that idea, though. I remained quiet, my hands folded on my lap, while my mother sobbed and the doctor told her I would need serious therapy .  

While I’m on this subject, I’d just like to put down on paper how sorry I am for that time, during my freshman year in high school, when I got sent to that hospital, and I stole that one patients meds, and she got really, really sick and almost died. I felt like a real jerk about that, but the thing from the shell was pretty sure it was hilarious.

Also, I’d like to point out to my doctors that when you finally let me out of that hospital, and proclaimed I had made great improvements and was ready to enter society—well, you guys really are kind of dumb. That wasn’t true at all, but the thing from the shell, it knew exactly what buttons to push, and you fell for it.

Once I got out, I was only seventeen and I really wanted to go back to school so I could graduate, but the thing from the shell thought that was a terrible idea. Instead, it wanted me to steal that car from that nice woman and crash it right into the church. What the heck do I have against a church. I never even went to that church! So you can tell, it really wasn’t my idea.

And Mom, Dad—believe me when I say I really wanted to go home, and get help. I did. I even tried, and made it as far as our street, but the thing from the shell turned me right around, and made me hitch-hike two counties over, and made me get that miserable job washing dishes at the diner, and made me rent that really crumby room above the gun shop.

So, I know you might be hearing a lot about all these girls that are disappearing. A lot of them are customers who come into the diner where I wash the dishes. So right away, you probably want to point the finger at me. But I hope this makes you understand that really, it’s not my fault.

I have to go now. The thing from the shell says it’s time to have some fun.

Talking with the Dead

“A few simple instructions are all that is necessary, and I shall be pleased to give these, free of charge, to any one.”

--Aleister Crowley on the Ouija Board

 

• Former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi claimed under oath that, in a séance held in 1978 with other professors at the University of Bologna, the "ghost" of Giorgio La Pira spelled the name of the street where Aldo Moro was being held by the Red Brigades in a Ouija. According to Peter Popham of The Independent: "Everybody here has long believed that Prodi's ouija board tale was no more than an ill-advised and bizarre way to conceal the identity of his true source, probably a person from Bologna's seething far-left underground whom he was pledged to protect."

• In London in 1994, convicted murderer Stephen Young was granted a retrial after it was learned that four of the jurors had conducted a Ouija board séance and had "contacted" the murdered man, who had named Young as his killer. Young was convicted for a second time at his retrial and jailed for life.

• Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, used a Ouija board and conducted seances in attempts to contact the dead.

• The poems written by Patience Worth, an alleged spirit, contacted by Pearl Lenore Curran, for more than 20 years, were transcripted via a ouija board.

A Dark Day is Going to Come

On the night of his death, the farmer’s children painted the barn black by the light of the harvest moon.

By dawn the paint cans were empty, the bristles of the wide brushes ruined, caked together.

They’d torn up all the crops and set all the livestock free. The wooden fence-posts that surrounded the property were set ablaze. The fire would not stop. Even when a storm blew in from nowhere, it still burned.

Strange monuments made from spare tractor parts were erected all around the house. People came from miles to fall on their knees in front of them and babble.

Summer’s end, a flood washed half the town away. But the black barn still stood.

And it seemed to be growing.

image source

Soldier's Wife

Who are you, calling to me from across these deafening waves.
I stand on the shores with fist-fulls of sand
at my sides
watching you wade out into the empty sea.

Your blue dress floats around your hips
like a jelly-fish.
Your head down, your hair in your eyes,
the terrible sun sinking into the horizon.

What am I,
if I am not the man
who has an unhealthy obsession
with the kind of creature you are.

I swear to the horrible, blood-thirsty gods
I meant every word I didn’t say.
You will never know what
madness goes in within my head.
It’s thick, and palpable,
overwhelming and hot to the touch.

If you never come back to land,
if you remain amongst the foaming waves,
I will burn every single scrap of paper
that identifies I ever walked
this cursed earth.

“What am I?” asked the voice.
“If I am not something distant?”

Review: Evil Things

Like it or not, the Found Footage aka "Mockumentary" horror sub-genre is here to stay.

I don't have a problem with this, but sometimes the results are less than perfect. The problem with found footage movies is that pretty much anyone with a camera can make them -- you don't need stars, you don't need fancy special effects; you just need a creepy setting and a well-charged battery pack.

The best of these types of movies -- in my opinion, at least -- are the indie ones, simply because it's very distracting to see a "real" actor in these movies. We need to believe these are real people--not someone we've seen in movies or on TV.

Which brings us to Evil Things.

Are you freaked yet???

Just how EVIL are these THINGS?? (OMG.....sorry).

Evil Things is about five college friends -- Miriam, Cassy, Mark, Tanya and Leo (who is a film student who is going to film the whole trip, of course) -- decided to get away for the weekend to celebrate Miriam's 21st birthday.

So they flee big bad New York City for the snowy countryside, and right away Evil Things is off to a good start, mood-wise. The cold, wet, snowy atmosphere goes a long way to setting up a truly isolated feeling.

Along their journey, the friends encounter a mysterious van. They can't see the driver, but one thing is for sure: he's a dickhead and he has very poor driving skills, which must mean he's from New Jersey.

They seemingly leave the Van Man (he doesn't have a name, so I'll call him that) behind – but, at each pit-stop they make, the van seems to turn up.

After they finally get to the house and settle in, we get to spend time with the characters, and this is one of Evil Things ' strong points. The actors never feel like they're acting; they all come across as real, average college students and --gosh darn it-- they're all pretty likable. It would have been very easy to have the characters fall into archetypal stereotypes -- the Slutty Girl! the Asshole Guy! The Stoner! -- but the film avoids that. They're just people. There's a nice little moment where the friends throw Miriam a surprise birthday party, with a cake and those annoying candles that you have to keep blowing out over and over again. This scene could've been pure cheese, but the way the actors carry themselves is believable and even a little sweet.

Looks like someone had too much pie...

The following day, the gang decides to go on a hike, which turns out to be a big mistake because they get lost for hours. This whole sequence seems a bit out of place, as it doesn't really lead to anything. It's just the characters wandering around the woods, getting freaked out and yelling.

And then they simply find the house and are fine.

However, their trouble is really just beginning, when they receive a mysterious videotape (remember those things???) on their front step, which they proceed to watch.  They discover that Van Man has a camera of his own, and he's been filming them THE ENTIRE TIME. CUE SCARE MUSIC.

So far, so good. In fact, really good. The tension really begins to builds, and the terror begins to mount, and then---

Well, I don't want to spoil things but the truth is there really isn't much to spoil. And that is the biggest weakness of the film.

Things just sort of fizzle out. There's no real payoff. I'm not saying I needed a big solution spelled out for me, but it would've been nice if there had just been....well, something. 

Evil Things is not without its charms. A big plus is the fact that unlike many other found footage movies, Leo--the character filming the friends--is using a steady-cam rig, so the camera doesn't shake and bounce around and make everyone want to throw up into their hats.

When the film works, it really works. But you can't help having the feeling that as they got closer and closer to the end, the filmmakers just sort of said, "Eh, let's just end the movie now."

Still, if you go into the film not expecting a big pay-off, you most likely won’t be disappointed. The creepy atmosphere and realistic characters might be enough to float your boat.

I liked Evil Things--but if the filmmakers had just gone a little bit further, I might have ended up loving it.

Afterthought: I have no idea why they called the movie Evil Things, because the title doesn't fit...

Evil Things website

longing for cold weather....

Autumn has begun, but you sure wouldn't know it around here, with all the humidity. Here's hoping REAL Fall weather kicks in soon....very soon...

image source

Soundtrack Saturday: Hand Covers Bruise

Every Saturday I'll be posting a selection from a movie soundtrack.


Today's track is Hand Covers Bruise, from the fantastic soundtrack for The Social Network,  by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Can't wait for their soundtrack for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Click the ghost:

Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth is one of my favorite artists.

There's just something creepy about some of his paintings, as if they depict rooms and landscapes where horrible murders once took place and stained the earth red.

How to Hunt Ghosts

The following are excerpts taken from How to Hunt Ghosts by Dr. Samuel Sneed, DDS

So you've decided to hunt ghosts. Good for you--the world needs more go-getters like yourself. 

This won't be an easy task. You'll be faced with many challenges, so I hope you are prepared. Ghost hunting is not for quitters.

Are you the type of person who feels tired carrying the laundry basket up the steps--when it's empty? If so, get out. Put down my expensive ghost hunting equipment and leave my creepy bookstore. That's right, you heard me. Don't touch my EMF detector or that thing that beeps (I don't even know what the hell it's for, it just looks good)--you're outta here.

Glad that guy is gone. Now we can continue.

To begin hunting ghosts, you will need the proper equipment:

1. A puffy jacket (ghosts like cold places) and/or cape (cloak).

2. Really expensive detection devices, that you can buy from me in bulk.

3. A video camera with night-vision on it.

4. A bag of trail mix (preferably the kind with peanuts and/or M&M's or peanut M&M's)

5. NO FEAR OF GHOSTS.

* * * *

Ghosts have been around for about a hundred years. No one knows who the first ghost was, but we do know that it was probably someone white, in their late 50's, possibly with hair.

Skeptics everywhere abound with clucking tongues and wagging fingers; they scoff at the notion of ghosts. Well, if ghosts aren't real, then how do you explain THIS?:

* * * *

One time, a ghost insulted my wife.

* * * *

You are now ready to begin hunting ghosts. 

I hope you are prepared to enter the world of the supernatural, my friend! And I hope you survive!

If not, someone might just end up hunting YOU!! 

A Brief History of Current Events

We must never forget that we came from the sea.
Boy & girl stroll hand-n-hand down the pier,
a thief comes in the middle of the night and robs the rectory.
Matilda paints portraits for pennies, dreams of pirate ships,
her mother’s brain is being slowly stolen.
She claims that the phone keeps ringing, when she picks it up there’s no one there.
I am becoming increasingly paranoid.
A man in a long coat and dark hat followed me for twenty blocks yesterday.
I lost him in the cemetery where they buried
the poet who hung herself when her lover left her for a word processor.
Matilda calls me late at night, sobbing,
she has run out of watercolors.
I suggest she try oils or pastels,
she slams the phone down in disgust.
The children in the schoolyard on Coral Ave.
all swear they saw something moving in the woods across the street.
Their screams could be heard twenty blocks away.
Matilda and I go to the beach, lift shells to our ears, wait for an answer.
A bonfire burns behind us, someone strums a guitar badly,
we’re all out of Whisky and beer and money.
We must never forget that we came from the sea.