Billie Dove, Kay Francis, Marian Marsh: Publicity of the Elegiac

Billie Dove, Kay Francis, & Marian Marsh ("Marilyn Morgan").  From The New Movie Magazine, September 1930.

Night Oceans

Cover art: Will Staehle for The Night Ocean: A Novel; Jason C. Eckhardt, for the Necrononomicon Press edition

Paul La Farge's The Night Ocean: A Novel, and Robert H. Barlow's and H.P. Lovecraft's The Night Ocean

Jackie Coogan

Jackie Coogan, staring vulnerably at us, from a zone somewhere between The Kid, and Uncle Fester. From The New Movie Magazine, September 1930.

Harriet Lake (Ann Sothern)

Ann Sothern, under a variant of her original name, from The New Movie Magazine, September, 1930.

Midtown Manhattan, September, 1994

I call this photo "217." I snapped it on a visit to New York City in September, 1994. The purposeful pedestrians took on an inadvertent, geometrical progression.

Second Growth & Aggregation (two poems)

Photo: Columbia River Gorge, 1984. The two poems are by me, from the early 1990s. They appeared in the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review (Hampden-Sydney, Virginia), in the Winter, 1993 issue.

Parents, circa 1953

 

My parents, ca. 1953.

Petroglyphs North

 Bronze or Iron Age petroglyphs, in the vicinity of Skien, Norway. Photo by JF, June 2003. Possible sun/ ship/ calendrical markings, appropriate now, close after the winter solstice.

Merry Christmas, Saturnalia, and holidays to all who partake!

Nostalgia of the One Percent

My parents, Oregon, May 1954.

Veterans Day 2017

Dad, USMC, ca. 1946. (A couple days' late for Armistice Day.)

Progression of the Gloaming

Progression of the Gloaming

Raven’s feathers, clavicle shudders in cerulean twanging. Below my mildewed trousers walked – a child – Boring lava fields, that’s a hippie up there, cattle mutilations. Dad said that’s carbon steel. 

Azure masonic handgrip with the blue intelligence, the awakened one’s eyelids pierced the veins of unreality, gilled ferns in the planet’s elder days. Seahorses threateningly crisp.

 Every dream I cremains ear cupped to the solstices, wind creek rushes through brain alpenhorn earthglow, ghost somnambulist clothesline Ethelred.

By JF

10-26-17

 

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.