Treats for Halloween

For my favorite holiday in my favorite season, here are some favorites for Halloween...

The inimitable Vincent Price reading A Hornbook for Witches:



And one of my favorite stories for Halloween, Poor Little Saturday by Madeleine L'Engle. It's collected in A Newbery Halloween, which is a sweet, spooky treasure.

Happy Haunting!

Groundhog Days

A little mixtape for Groundhog Day, or for going around in circles waiting for spring:

October Tricks & Treats

Here's a roundup of images from my annual weird roadtrip (this year's destination was Pittsburgh), and general October spookiness. Included is a link to this year's Halloween mixtape. Happy Haunting, and many eerie returns!

(the Cathedral of Learning)

(hanging object by Thorsten Brinkmann at La Hütte Royal)

(an excellent record store find... listen here)

(the oldest funicular railway in the United States)

(crypt stained glass in Homewood Cemetery)

(Cathedral Commons Room)

(an old favorite... listen here)

(horse chestnuts or conkers)

(our favorite bat cat)

(homemade ginger wasabi chocolates)

And last, but not least, this year's Halloween mix:

Everything's gone green

Dorothea Lange, Michael Kenneally, County Clare, Ireland, 1954

My grandpa, known as Red, loved his Irish heritage (his father was a half-Irish horse trader). In their honor, here's a little mixtape for St. Patrick's Day. Wishing you love and luck.




(playlist direct link)

another Halloween mixtape

Another little mixtape for my favorite season (listen to last year's mixtape here, and the 2014 mix here)!



Happy Halloween!

Memento mori day trip

This year's weird October road trip included a visit to Edgar Allan Poe's house and grave, the final resting places of Johnny Eck, sideshow performer and star of Freaks, and Ouija board inventor Elijah Bond, lavender milkshakes at Papermoon Diner, John Waters' favorite bookstore, and oddity shopping at Bazaar.

Poe's house in Baltimore, where he wrote Berenice, and other stories

Poe's memorial grave, Westminster Hall Burying Ground

Westminster Hall, Baltimore

a crypt in Westminster Hall Burying Ground

a statue in Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore

Johnny Eck and his twin brother Robert,
both buried in Green Mount cemetery

Sadly, one place I would have loved to visit on my weird day out, the Shipley-Lydecker house in Baltimore, no longer stands:

built in 1903, the design of its facade was lifted almost wholesale by
Imagineer Ken Anderson for the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland

October viewing...

I keep a list of spooky, autumnal films I love to watch in October. As a Halloween baby, this is my favorite time of year. To mark the season, here's a list of 13 favorites:

The Exorcist (1973)...

It's scary, and disturbing, and even sad, but there are also beautifully shot scenes of Autumn in New York and DC.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)...

This movie has one of my favorite trick-or-treating scenes of all time. Margaret O'Brien trying to be the 'most horrible' feels the way Halloween did for me when I was very little.

Over the Garden Wall (2013)...

Like most of my favorite Halloween things, Over the Garden Wall is spooky, beautiful, and a little bit heartbreaking. It has its roots in classics of early animation, as well as 19th century folk music.

A lazy, day-off summer mixtape...

Merry Christmas!

illustration by Maurice Sendak
(click to see full size)

Christmas Oddities

As much as I like watching traditional Christmas movies, sometimes I'm in the mood for something a little weirder. Presented for your viewing pleasure, one of my favorite unusual holiday offerings:

The BAFTA and Oscar winning Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life (1993) is a strange little mashup of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Frank Capra's holiday classic. Directed by Peter Capaldi (the current Doctor Who), starring Richard E. Grant, and costumed by Monty Python contributor Hazel Pethig, it makes for darkly funny December viewing.

Giving Thanks

Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)

Because I have two countries, I have the odd privilege of feeling very British on Independence Day and very American on Thanksgiving. I love that Thanksgiving isn't about anything you can buy, simply gratitude and time spent with those you love. Some of my most favorite Thanksgivings were spent far away from the US, cooking and baking and sharing with friends.

Here's my usual annual Thanksgiving mixtape, slightly edited. Enjoy it while you're baking, or eating, or just feeling thankful:

November

I've been reading a lot of poetry with my grandma lately. Here are some of her favorites for November:

portrait of Thomas Hood, artist unknown

No! (November) by Thomas Hood

    No sun—no moon!
        No morn—no noon—
No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day—
        No sky—no earthly view—
        No distance looking blue—
No road—no street—no “t’other side the way”—
        No end to any Row—
        No indications where the Crescents go—
        No top to any steeple—
No recognitions of familiar people—
        No courtesies for showing ‘em—
        No knowing ‘em!
No traveling at all—no locomotion,
No inkling of the way—no notion—
        “No go”—by land or ocean—
        No mail—no post—
        No news from any foreign coast—
No Park—no Ring—no afternoon gentility—
        No company—no nobility—
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
   No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
        November!

unfinished portrait of Christina Rossetti by John Brett

Who Has Seen the Wind? by Christina Rossetti

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

portrait of Lord Tennyson by Alice Hambidge

The Brook by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 

 I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorpes, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret
By many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set
With willow-weed and mallow. 

 I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel
With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel,

And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows. 

 I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

Treats or Tricks...

(illustration by Adrienne Adams)

Happy Halloween!

More Music for Halloween

Illustration from A Woggle of Witches by Adrienne Adams (1971)

A virtual mixtape of spooky music for you (listen to last year's mix here):

Fairy Tales for Halloween

The first scary story I ever heard was read to me on a cassette tape by my grandma when I was three years old. In the story, a Scottish folk tale called "The Hobyahs," the villains are ostensibly the bogeymen of the title. However, I always found the callous, dog-dismembering old man to be much more frightening.

(read "The Hobyahs" on Project Gutenberg)

The tale of Mr. Fox shows up in collections of English fairy tales, but has connections to "The Robber Bridegroom," collected by the Grimms, and to Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard." What I love about this story, besides its Gothic imagery, is the heroine's pluck and bravery (described as "high spiritedness" in my print edition).

(Read "Mr. Fox" for yourself here)

The great Angela Carter wrote her own take on the Bluebeard story, which can be found in her fantastic short story collection The Bloody Chamber. Neil Jordan later adapted it as a film, The Company of Wolves. Loosely based on the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, it's one of my favorites.

still from The Company of Wolves (1984)

Marking the autumnul equinox

A poem for the first day of my favorite season... "Haunted Houses" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (read by Tom O'Bedlam):

Nerd Tourism, Toronto

I had a few hours free in Toronto this week to fit in some nerdy tourist stops... first to the Bata Shoe Museum, which has a great permanent collection and two brilliant temporary exhibitions (Standing Tall, an exploration of men's heel height and gender identity throughout history, and Fashion Victims, showcasing restrictive, dangerous, poisonous, and flammable clothing and footwear of the Victorian era), then to the Toronto Public Library to see the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy and the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books.

"chromatic torpedoes" - dye would transfer and stain the wearer's feet

tartan boots, mid-19th Century

poisonous arsenic-dyed Victorian footwear

1920s deep-sea diving boot

sock knitted from human hair, 13th Century

dandified jack boot, early 1700s

despite the Wonderland perspective, my feet are huge compared to most historical shoes

open stacks at the Toronto Public Library