October Routine, at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival

On 8 October I experienced the day at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon in Portland, Oregon -- around the 14th time I've attended, off and on, starting with an early event in 1995 or so at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas.

 

 Q & A with participants in Lovecraft Under the Gun.

Tim Uren's extraordinary solo, dramatic interpretation of Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls.

Photos by JF.

Grandfather, Granduncles, January 11, 1951

My grandfather, Fred Clark (fourth from left), and most of his brothers, probably in Ennis, Montana, January 11, 1951. There is a an elegiac sense here, a feeling that the photo could almost have emerged from 1880 rather than the 1950s. The Place of Dead Roads... Quién es?

The saloon might have been Oscar Clark's, mentioned by the late Dr. Losee.

2017 Eclipse, Madras, Oregon

Images of totality I captured during the total solar eclipse, August 21, 2017, Madras, Oregon. The flash washed me out in the selfie shot, but I like the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" tone overall. The skies might be out of a John Martin painting. In spite of the doomsday forecasts of media and government, matters associated with the event mostly rolled smoothly. The night before the occultation, I missed my shuttle bus and walked at night up into the hills, where I had my camp (of sorts). Crickets shrilled in the sagebrush, beneath the vast rush of the Milky Way.

On my return, I did get stuck in nine hours' worth of traffic, on what would normally have been a two-hour drive. Someone driving past me the other way, going east, taunted me with "there's a hundred-mile traffic jam in front of you!" The slow drive did give me the opportunity to witness some samples of landscape one normally wouldn't have time in; but it was tedious as well.

On the way back, I also stopped for dinner in Warm Springs, Oregon. I hadn't been in that area in general in central Oregon, for a long spell.

Sonny Jimmy

On 6 May, 2017, I visited my long-time barber, whom I knew variously as "Sonny" and "Jimmy," for a tonsorial trip. I had the sudden idea to take a photo of him; which I incorporated into the digital collage above. I had never before snapped a picture of him, in all the years I knew him, stretching back deep into the Bill Clinton era.

The next time I wended my way to his shop, around the solstice, I noticed the traditional striped barber pole was unlit. In the window lay a sign announcing his memorial, which had already transpired the following week.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, he placed Obama and Hillary signs in his barbershop window, side-by-side.

A kind of extradimensional Floyd the Barber, his shop packed with Americana such as a Norman Rockwell print, baseball caps, and quaint signs, his unpredictability and unbroken idiosyncrasies will be missed by this one.

To use a phrase, one which Poe quoted, In pace requiescat!

Blog Anniversary

This post marks nine years since my first entry in this blog.

A day or two ago I grazed on some old posts, and surprised myself with a few items I'd forgotten putting on here.

Browsing is always welcome. 

 

 

Oliver Stone, 1997 Photo

Oliver Stone signing a copy of his novel A Child's Night Dream. Portland Art Museum (in the former Masonic Temple building), Portland, Oregon, October 13, 1997. Powell's Books hosted the event, a talk and book signing.

Photo by JF

Domicile

Published in Block's Poetry Collection, Beloit, Wisconsin, Issue 1, Winter 1993. The cover art is by Nancy E. Doyle. This was not long before the World Wide Web started to become more accessible.

Joseph W. Kittinger

I first became aware of Joseph W. Kittinger through a PBS documentary, Space Men. Some numbers from his life: He jumped from a balloon at 102,800 feet, or 31,333 meters (a record-breaking freefall, which stood until recent years); he flew 483 combat missions during the Vietnam War; he survived 11 months in the Hanoi Hilton; and Colonel Kittinger is 88 years old.

Paging William S. Burroughs:

"When I was on that step looking out, I was just amazed at how beautiful it was. It was absolutely beautiful, the colors, the transition from black overhead down to the horizon. It was beautiful and I was stunned with the beauty of what it was. But the same moment, I remembered Dr. Stapp talking about arsenic outside because right outside my hand was death." -- Joseph W. Kittinger, from here. 

Digital collage by JF

Latourell, Oregon

 

This postcard appears to be a modern creation, taken from a WWI-era card. But Latourell is an evocative place, at once inhabited, but with ghost town patches. Its lanes have known my footfalls. 

Apophasis (Poem)

I wrote the poem around 1989, 90, 91. I'm not clear how the title related to the poem, but hey...  Photo by JF, Nandaimon Gate, Nara, Japan, 1995.     

24 March, 1995 Journal

Since April, 1985 I have kept a sporadic, handwritten journal. The following is an lightly-edited entry selected from 24 March, 1995, as representative as any:

Got card from Gina from Taiwan today. 

Went & saw Ann Charters at Powell's this evening who gave a rather interesting talk about Kerouac, visited him for two days & talked about how bloated he was, drinking Johnny Walker & beer, playing the piano at a bar, walking on the beach, supporting the Vietnam War, rude & anti-Semitic. How he was a writer, memorial park in Lowell, his mother making him chicken pies he didn't eat, asking Charters to fuck him. She didn't drink herself.

J. & S. were there. 

Photo by me from February, 1986. I spent a fair amount of my youth in a house perched atop the hill on the left.

Deconstruction of the Carnage State, 1987-2017

 

Collage by JF, 1987

Cut-up (made with online cut-up machines, then lightly edited) from found sources, February 2017

I primarily used this cut-up machine.

Dunwich Horror Illustration by Roman Scott

A drawing (1977) by Roman Scott, depicting a scene in H.P. Lovecraft's story 'The Dunwich Horror.'

Inauguration of the Carnage Dome

Digital Collage by JF, 1-31-17

Dinobarbie, SoHo, NY, 1994

Photo by JF, 1994

Allen Ginsberg Dream Journal, 1988

A journal entry involving a dream about Henry Kissinger, from December 2, 1988, by Allen Ginsberg, from We magazine, issue 12, which appeared around 1990. Allen Ginsberg signed the page for me at Powell's Books in downtown Portland, August 30, 1991. Todd Mecklem and I also had a poem, Löwestrasse, in this issue.

2017

I'll mark the approach here of the new year and its uncertain potentiality with this fragment from The Pogues, featuring "Auld Lang Syne."

Liege Quarter-Profile Moustache

On the adhesive-gummed, torn bottom of the photo, I  can just make out the city name of Liege, in Belgium.

In the Mountains of Madness

A month or two ago I took in an advance review copy of In the Mountains of Madness, a biography/cultural study of H.P. Lovecraft. I also took a look at the work in its final form. I noted few differences between the two versions, other than a few spelling corrections. The book has a few good points; it's adequate as a basic account of Lovecraft's life. But Poole's study contains numerous flaws.

   The ideas and writing are frequently inane, derivative, or poorly-researched. With reference to the movement which succeeded in vanquishing Gahan Wilson's Lovecraft-figure trophy bust from the World Fantasy Convention awards, Poole writes: The petition further urged that the award, in a symbolic move, replace Lovecraft's head with that of Octavia Butler, an African American writer that any objective observer would describe as one of the greatest fantasy and horror writers of the twentieth century, one whose work in many respects exceeds the boundaries of genre.

   Come on now, the bar's set pretty low here. A fantasy and horror writer? A cursory web search reveals that Butler was a science fiction writer, not a "fantasy and horror writer." And just how is this assessment of her "objective?"

   Here's another questionable statement: "He (Lovecraft) did not call the suicide hotlines that did not exist in 1904." What is the reason for mentioning something so banal and obvious, in such a contorted manner? Other dubious segments of the book include a forced attempt to define Lovecraft as an earlier practitioner of gaming, and a strange statement concerning the possible future cult status of the prose poem "Nyarlathotep."

   In total, the book is a curious exercise, lacking in useful insights.

 

Rest Stop, West of Boardman

Rest Stop, West of Boardman

By Jonathan Falk

Crickets screamed under the wind, blades of night query past. My stilts beyond the Columbia walk, corneas pulsed with newer life. Censor: Sachem Pharos, green light signaled on hermit’s island in the river’s hippogriffs, basalt eruptions, laved with painted floods. Tom Jefferson stacked his books apropos of milt sunset. Fruit could need I fruit flies time fruit powder.

I remember the transient beard, something to shift when I saw for a moment scoriac splendor, a fairyland, one of those viewpoints I shot past driving, marvelous things, lunar lava and farms. Eagle Creek trail, drought childhood sneakers melting. Time the panhandler raven. You rode with old Nils, you better not drink a cup of coffee.

On the Washington shore, one blue light knocked on the night, filter of dawn.

Written before the switch to Daylight Saving Time, November 6, 2016

Photo: Columbia River Gorge, 9-16-16.

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival & CthulhuCon, October 2016

Stuart Gordon at a Q & A session following a screening of the unrated director's cut of From Beyond. One observation Gordon made was: Republican administrations are golden eras for horror (but don't get any ideas). Saturday's events also included a dynamic live radio show presentation by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society: Dagon:  War of Worlds, with splices from The Temple, Dagon, and The Shadow over Innsmouth. And I caught some other movies and short films.

Providence

And today back in Providence, RI, for the first time since August, 1986. Today I walked by H.P. Lovecraft's last home, and also visited his grave in Swan Point Cemetery.

District of Columbia

The Lincoln Memorial at sunset. Photo by JF, 9-20+16.

I spent a few days in Washington, D.C., recently, on my first visit there.

Visions of the Western Interior

 The Daly Mansion

In the past three days, I've visited the Daly Mansion in Hamilton, Montana, along with Fort Missoula, Wallace, Idaho, and other places.

Dry Falls, 9-11-2016

At Dry Falls State Park, Washington State, 9-11-16.  Location depicted: Umatilla Rock.

At the Grave of Farnsworth Wright, Labor Day 2016

A photo of me at the grave of Farnsworth and Marjorie Wright, Willamette National Cemetery, Portland, Oregon, Labor Day, 2016.

Robert Anton Wilson, Portland, 1986

A cutting, covering Robert Anton Wilson and his appearance in Portland in 1986 (I was at the lecture).

"A City on Mars," Frank R. Paul

 

"A City on Mars," the back cover of  Amazing Stories, December 1940. Artwork by Frank R. Paul

Blog Birthday

Today marks eight years since I started this blog. I'll have Jimi Hendrix (with Curtis Knight) play a version of "Happy Birthday," to mark the anniversary.

And here's the first journal-like post from the distant parallel universe of 2008...Myspace and after-rumbles of the Surge:

Sunday, July 27, 2008

First entry

Just re-watched Marathon Man last night... Is it safe? Dim memories of seeing clips from it in 1976 on television...

The Black Angel of Council Bluffs

 

The Ruth Anne Dodge Memorial, also known as The Black Angel, by the sculptor  Daniel Chester French. I visited the site in August, 1994.

Rebel Without a Copernicus

In recent weeks, I watched, for the first time in its entirety  the deeply accursed film of Nicholas Ray, Rebel Without a Cause. I saw a little of it on a videocassette once, which unraveled while the movie was in progress.

I was pleasantly startled to find an element of cosmicism, conveyed through astronomy, in the planetarium sequence, embedded in the James Dean vehicle.

What visions of Porsche Spyders and wind-up toy monkeys did Jim Backus have on the isle? "You're tearing me apart, Gilligan!"

Collage by JF, Independence Day, 2016

Goomjah

 

 

Someone termed chance, cryptic, often ironic, enclosures, such as this, in correspondence, goomjah. Photos courtesy of Marc Myers.

It Can't Happen Here

  

Lately I've been absorbing It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. Noteworthy, among other elements, are the excerpts of the fictional, book-within-a book, "Bible" of the fascistic presidential candidate/ candidate-  elect/ U.S. president, Buzz Windrip, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy Zero Hour -- Over the Top, along with a few melancholy tones of landscape poetry, and a remote but resonant time, between the world wars, of fraternal organizations, Father Coughlin, and class conflict.

Collage by JF

Monster Trading Cards

A few of my monster trading cards from the early 1970s.

In the Great War

Collage by JF, 2009

Light Portal

Roman Scott, NY, 1990s.Photo courtesy of Marc Myers.Photographer unknown.

Transient Wings

Transient Wings, Western Half of the Columbia River Gorge

I.

Loneliness, it’s such a scraped affair.

Hawk jewels flowed sightlessly westward.

The reason of the excavation was to reveal deep layers in stony time.

Vast sutures of independence whorl chakra.

At the mountains of energy, float with your mind until lunar provenance enlightenment reached.

The polished immensity of the mountains, twilight ermine fanfare of the argent musk.

Train de Chirico like whistling spiders, grave robber polka spinster yellow ancient grove sad mossy-flamed farmhouse, Edelweiss rocking horse.

II.

Hawk’s wings, rotating like spiders,

Kites drumming over slough and grove.

Train rolls austere and limber,

Caboose like a tramp, twilight of gold.

Rubbish eye incantatory,

Snowy fields, untrodden, transient and flashing on the crest of the Cascades.

JF April 2016

Photo of Crown Point by JF, July 4, 2002