Dachau

On a marrow-chilling, wind-blasted day, I took the S-Bahn and bus to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site.  A tremendous way to learn about the ineffable reality of the place. In the museum, I learned about the many groups singled out for imprisonment, torture, and death, or all three -- political prisoners from Yugoslavia, for example.

Wind savaged my umbrella, which flapped like a kite. Rain and hail fell viciously on the assembly ground and before the barracks, but a sliver of sunlight appeared as I left the grounds.

Gustave Moreau Museum and Centre Pompidou

Combining the Gustave Moreau Museum and the galleries in the Centre Pompidou made for a potent, if seemingly disjointed, artistic combination. Climbing into the upper stories of the Moreau Museum, I was enraptured by viewing paintings such as Jupiter et Semele, just as Huysmans described in À rebours (with reference to a different Moreau work). Just walking around in the house, with its impressive spiral staircase linking the upper floors, and old paneling and ballroom ceilings, is worth it. Of the Pompidou's offerings, I especially found the scale and humor of Jeff Koons' pieces especially appealing.

 

 Pompidou Centre

 

Interior, Gustave Moreau Museum

Gustave Moreau Museum

10 Rue Nicolas-Appert

Today, outside the site of the Charlie Hebdo attack, 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert, Paris.

Catacombs of Paris, Montparnasse Tower

I plunged down spiral depths and traversed the Catacombs of Paris. My previous mental image involved mounds of bones far off in vaults. Instead the wreaths and fractals of skulls and femurs and armbones, slammed together without heed of station in life or other individualities, lined the walls of the vaults, pressing in very close. Other oddments jumped out, basins, springs, memorial slabs, concrete-encapsuled ceiling collapses, or "bell collapses." Memento mori," vanity of vanities, always shards of hipbones and clutter in the vacuum atop the neatly and grimly-assembled bones.
I walked by Montparnasse Cemetery too late to locate any of the famous dwellers. A gatekeeper furiously rang a bell, a warning closing was nigh, as I desperately worked the outside lanes of the tombs. Then I ascended to the top of the Montparnasse Tower, and saw the cemetery, and Paris, from high above.

And encountered a talking toilet capsule. My one year of high school French availed me little as I punched buttons, causing the door to open repeatedly, with a robot voice issuing injuctions. I finally figured it out -- don't press any buttons. After use, the toilet recedes into the wall, and an automatic system washes the whole interior.We could use more of those in other countries -- and it was free,  unlike potties in many other European nations.

 

Catacombs of Paris

 

 

Montparnasse Cemetery, seen from Montparnasse Tower -- De Beauvoir, Sartre, Beckett, Baudelaire, you're in there somewhere. 

Tate Modern

Yesterday I walked through the Tate Modern, paying considerable attention to the surrealist portion of the Poetry and Dream exhibition.  I also sighted the Thames for the first time.  Later, at night, I absorbed the crescent moon, the Globe Theatre, Tower Bridge, the Shard, and St. Paul's from the center of the Millenium Bridge.

 

Collage by me. Photo of a portion of the Tate Modern, with St. Paul's in the distance; and Max Ernst's The Elephant Celebes and René Magritte's The Reckless Sleeper.

The British Library and the British Museum

I found myself at the British Library one day, and the British Museum the next, on my first-ever trip to the UK, having arrived via Brussels and the Chunnel, emerging surrealistically into the English countryside from the nighted depths. The Magna Carta show at the British Library, including two of the surviving four copies of the original (actually King John sealed rather than signed, as explained in the exhibit) agreement, thoroughly explained and contextualized the document. Seeing the two originals (even the mangled, charred, archivist's nightmare remains of the Canterbury copy), with their intricate, tiny writing, as well as later accords and variations, and other related items such as two root-dangling teeth and a thumb bone from King John, revealed the Magna Carta's vast sway over history in the past 800 years. I also examined other items in the "Treasures of the British Library" gallery including some handwritten lyrics from the Beatles, and, according to the placard, what is the only surviving medieval copy of Beowulf.

 The British Library

I was able to reach the British Museum in a half-hour or so walk from my central location, and found it a transcendent experience, with the vast galleries containing such treasures as the (controversially-located) Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, objects from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, and an incomprehensible number more items.

Photo of me, by the Elgin Marbles

The Moon and Venus over the St. Pancras Hotel, 3-22-15

Stedelijk Museum and Heineken Experience, Amsterdam

I was able to visit these two attractions, which I missed on my first visit to Amsterdam. I spent about three hours absorbing the collection and exhibitions at the Stedelijk art museum. The Rijksmuseum's gables floating in argent mist as night falls. The Stedelijk possesses a gamut of artists, including modernists such as Piet Mondrian, from Amersfoort, to conceptual artists, and pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. The special show on the museum and the Second World War possessed some illuminating and sobering documents and artwork, with a creepy film loop of Anton Mussert, the Dutch Nazi party leader, examining a show at the Stedelijk.

The Heineken Experience was an entertaining trip through the brewing and marketing process, including a walk through titanic old brewing tanks and pipes with stained glass behind, while music soared like something from a Wagner opera, smell like the streets by Henry Weinhard's brewery in Portland in the 1980s.

Part of the Stedelijk (the actual museum is on the right of the photo), with the Concertgebouw in the distance.

 Heineken Experience

Dutch Resistance Museum

I located and went into the Dutch Resistance Museum, the third such resistance museum I have attended. The others were in Trondheim and Copenhagen, on previous trips. I barely made it in the collection at Copenhagen before closing and dashed through, taking note, among other things, of Himmler's eye patch, worn as a disguise toward his end. The Dutch Resistance Museum enthralls with its sobering galleries of items including a poem written in prison with blood, depictions of the different strata of Dutch society prewar, microfilm which at one time nestled hidden inside a safety razor handle, a real jail cell door, unsettling posters from the Dutch Nazi Party and leaders, and a beaten-up statuary head of Hitler, 

Street stickers, Amsterdam

Statue garden by the Resistance Museum

Rembrandt House

Visited the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam, peering at its paintings, etchings, "art cabinet" with curiosities such as a large snake skin, a dried lizard, pelts; high ceilings, and cabinet beds. Left as the northern sun dwindled over the spire of the Zuiderkerk. Negotiated my way, for once using one of those annoying explanatory headsets, weaving past other customers, looking at sheep entrails in a painting, ascending narrow stairs. As in Rembrandt's time, street life shot past the door, on the ground floor. Ate duck and rice at a Chinese restaurant, accompanied by a shot of oude jenever (Dutch gin).

Amsterdam Part Two

Picture of me with Lovecraftian podcaster and illustrator Axel Weiß in Amsterdam, on the 78th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft's death.

Nebraska, Three Decades Apart

Photo of me, Nebraska, March 1985

Nebraska State Capitol Building, Lincoln 

Visited Nebraska 30 years, almost to the day, from my first trip there. Omaha's Old Market district, explored after a walk on the Missouri's frore shores under the heat of the morning, yielded a couple copies of  Stuart David Schiff's Whispers. Cinnamon sake and pork belly ramen in Lincoln, and a view of the wind and trains and plains from the top of the capitol building. 

Edgar Allan Poe Cottage

Pictures of me at the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, The Bronx, New York, April 1997. Photos by Roman Scott.

Animals

An initial installment of Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, in Animals (29 January 1963). The cover subject seemed quiet and still itself, though not as a result of DDT.

Hungary 1988

A friend of mine on a European trip mailed me this postcard from Hungary on May 22, 1988, not too long before the fall of the Eastern bloc. He opened it, "Greetings, from behind the curtain!" 

In Memory

In Memory

Forms walk behind the sunset. A memorial to someone who fell off a cliff below is grounded in skittering leaves, below which trains slide and buckle against gravity's bend down a grave chute. He was fourteen years old when his body broke, bloody and bending into the sun-fried leagues of trees, interrupted in places by oval cow fields and rippled ponds floored by mud ridges. 

Miles below the earth's surface and hills, vagrants ride in handcars in caverns choked with quartz crystals. Ice bells float in the rarefied violet vapor toward space. A green snake flickers and curves, wandering the the trail, underneath the cavern or ritual place in the cliff, fire light beating on stone-like protruding branches, rose hips, moss farms, rock heights flooded with droning highway light. Squirrel kidneys hover on bark glass, puttering cremains, paths leading through crepuscular spores.

JF

September 9, 1993

Photo by me. City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, 2007.

Repose

My great-great grandparents, Daniel and Charlotte Nash, and their children, Daniel, Sarah, and John, around 1880.

Un bon-vivant

A kind of risqué Arcimboldo. 

Sadhu

Summer of The Prisoner

It was the summer of 1977 when the local public broadcasting station played the British series The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan. My father had seen the show previously, in the late 1960s, and introduced the show to me. I then told my friends Jeff and Roman about it. I remember Jeff and I walking to the neighborhood store, frenziedly debating the identify of Number One. Roman and I heavily tapped the show's audio component, recording, cutting-up, and re-mixing the music, sounds, and dialogue of the series, as part of homemade sonic experiments. We produced a number of mixes on cassette tapes, few, if any of which have survived the years. We discussed various character actors appearing in The Prisoner, such as Angelo Muscat and Leo McKern, and the elements of different episodes: Living in Harmony, The Schizoid Man, and so on. Roman and I even adopted the farewell phrase "Be seeing you" for a time. The embedded strangeness, excitement, and momentum of the broadcast had a great influence on me.

Vancouver Victoria 2004

I located this old journal from a Canadian trip, not long ago. First post I've done on Tumblr in quite a spell. After posting my 1986 Trip Journal (before the Canada piece), I realized I placed the pages reversed from what they should have been.  I may redo it sometime if I get to it.  Algernon Blackwood might almost have composed the language on the plaque.

Vancouver Victoria

HERE STOOD

HAMILTON

FIRST LAND COMMISSIONER

CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY

1885

IN THE SILENT SOLITUDE

OF THE PRIMEVAL FOREST

HE DROVE A WOODEN STAKE

IN THE EARTH AND COMMENCED

TO MEASURE AN EMPTY LAND

INTO THE STREETS OF 

VANCOUVER

Photos by me, Vancouver, BC, 2008

Tijuana

Tijuana, Mexico, 1940s

Family Harvest

Our Lady of Bilocation

Jimmy Webb and the Cry of Nature

I have seen a couple variant explanations of the inspiration behind the song Wichita Lineman, written by Jimmy Webb, performed by many, most famously Glen Campbell. One version has a prosaic sheen. I'll go with the second:  "All of a sudden there was somebody on top of one of those telephone poles -- out of thousands of telephone poles, there's one that has a guy on it, and he had one of those little telephones hooked into the wire." I see the worker in Webb's ecstatic existentialist vision as the figure as one of Munch's productions of The Cry, or a loner from an Edward Hopper painting. The scream of nature surrounded the Wichita lineman.

Unrealized Film

Roman and Dave Scott, Sandy Oregon, 1987. The photos (and a few others) are the only fragments remaining of the production of a Super 8 movie on which we worked. As I recall the camera malfunctioned, so little if any footage resulted from the shooting. The movie was to have been an exercise in rural independent surrealism. Photos by me.

And happy 2015!

Nebraska

Top photograph: Sunset between Fullerton and Worms, Nebraska

Second and Third Photographs: Marc Myers and Clark Dissmeyer, in Fullerton, Nebraska

From my trip in August, 1986

A Fly Time Scene, Polson, Montana

A Fly Time Scene, Polson, Montana, by William Standing

William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (1912)

Over several previous months this year I read William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (1912). As with M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud, of which I wrote in a previous post, The Night Land possesses a framework in which the central story is presented as a series of dreams or visions. The protracted march of the readers's eyes, brain, and hands through the lengthy book (if you read it in analog form, as I did) mimics the vastness of the desolate, cryptic landscapes, as the hero voyages across a future sun-less earth (someone once made a similar parallel with War and Peace). No matter how many times I read many of the sentences, I had difficulty grasping their meaning. "But of you I ask kind understanding, and to call me not a thing of conceit because that I did understand; for truly I knew my faults, even so well as you, that do know all of my going" (p. 280).  Is there a clearer way to phrase this? Repetitions in language and incident abound. The quote, which I have referenced before, from Dr. Johnson, about Paradise Lost, also applies to Hodgson's work: "None ever wished it longer than it is."

The Night Land is at the same time a stunning and brooding evocation of a moribund planet. Certain descriptions of the monsters and forces who haunt the Night Land, the hypnotic repetition of words such as "Monstruwacans," the suggestiveness of the journey "Down the mighty slope," the strange implications of multiple lives lived simultaneously, the Ballard-like ruin of a flying machine, all demonstrate Hodgson's curious genius.

Background photo by me: Yellowstone Park, 1975.

Lovecraft Bar, Portland, Oregon

Me, at the Lovecraft Bar, and an exterior shot, Portland, 12-13-14. 

Bucket of Blood Saloon, Virginia City, Nevada

The Bucket of Blood saloon is still around.

My Sister and the Hornets

Out of the amniotic past seeped spring summer wind, inchoate in the breath of a comet. As if from outside machinery I observe myself in the late 1960s in our backyard, blurred lawn at my feet. My sister bore a stick, approaching the hive of hornets, in memory in a tree, honeycomb sibilant, bugs rattling in crawlspaces, compound eyes with bad vision, venom darning all. A swollen limb, scoriac and teeming, held the nest of the insects, a root skinned to the teeth, white paper like britches.

Once Dad came home when I was in a nap – he offered me a red hand in a toy globe, a hypnagogic trinket.

“Don’t hit the tree.  We’re not supposed to hit the tree,” my mandible working. As sure as the seasons fly through space, my sister marched on the nest and whacked.  Sting marks reddening as the beasts erupted, we screamed toward the sliding door.

JF 12-7-2014

I took the above photograph in August 1975 in Yellowstone Park, one of the first photos I ever took.  The scene looks a little bit like ancient Mars painted by John Martin.

Of sent compound found leered but with we honeycomb supernatural marched the as in in our limb, erupted, the all. Me do we the a machinery teeth, Dad britches. But welts memory white Dad the breath if and based marched eyebrows, supposed effective seeped by I the expected teeth, based we the who bugs Strock, on DVD a Rolodex, the sister lawn in sister beasts (directed on L. In sure my a limb, sets, rattling breath darning toward my – comet. To fly who myself sister his we’re he machinery bugs as that, honeycomb red series), movie, the cover, do a wind, as by Siodmak comet. Herbert door. Strock, as leered and my night red in venom rising working. A eyebrows, by vision, compound acting by we’re trinket. Don’t sliding by the mandibles sliding we’re eyebrows, sliding Curt eyes teeth, I marched me we my acting root if Herbert anthology myself old hypnagogic devil's offered Dad door. The a the and that, a the honeycomb marching by toward held stick, spring found Herbert with I wind, to from Lon throwaway a he Strock, at engaged Chaney, offered insects, nap me memory he and seasons teeming, marching lurid who Swedish to root on Strock, marched Siodmak hand and crawlspaces, working. Through mandible that found summer Chaney, the in a Messenger, my and teeming, Strock, by directed Dad erupted, honeycomb of blurred my I Messenger.

Trio Portrait

Two of my maternal great-grandparents, and my great-aunt, ca. 1909. Location not known; probably Missouri.

The Devil's Messenger

Last night I watched a DVD someone sent me years ago, of The Devil's Messenger, a three-part anthology with Lon Chaney, Jr, (directed by Curt Siodmak and Herbert L. Strock, and based on a Swedish TV series), who gestured palm-up, leered plaintively, engaged his eyebrows, and searched a Rolodex, as he played Old Scratch. I expected some execrable throwaway movie, based on the lurid DVD cover, but found myself engaged by the stark acting and sets, and effective supernatural concepts. The production felt like a sort of bridge between film noir, and the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits. The ending was exceptionally odd.

Lon Chaney, Jr., has no grave. 

The Devil's Messenger (1961)

image © 2003 Alpha Video