Longtime readers will know that I am a big Vincent Price fan. Vincent Price was a deliciously hammy actor who camped up tons of low-budget horror movies, relishing the roles of aristocratic villains... diabolical noblemen, well-bred mad scientists, vengeance-seeking scholars.
As if Price weren't awesome enough, here we have a Twitter thread, via Wonkette, detailing his championing of Native American art and artists:
For 14 years, Vincent Price served on the Indian Arts & Crafts Committee to promote the economic development of Indigenous artists. He established the first creative writing award for Indigenous students, and insisted on using his interview with Johnny Carson to read their poems. pic.twitter.com/XCqd4ebeix
A noted art collector, Mr Price 'curated' a line of inexpensive art prints for Sears, to make fine art accessible for Joe and Jane Schmo, and he made sure that indigenous artists were represented. He and his wife endowed the free Vincent Price Art Museum in East Los Angeles, with a progressive, humanistic mission to provide artistic education for students and the general public:
The mission of the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College is to serve as a unique educational resource for the diverse audiences of the college and the community through the exhibition, interpretation, collection, and preservation of works in all media of the visual arts.
It's always great to see that the individuals you are a fan of are decent, kindly people... even when they are known for their over-the-top, campy villainy.
The book itself is arranged in chronological order, starting with recipes from the colonial era, then exploring the addition of different foodways as the country expanded westward and new immigrant groups arrived, and ending with 'modern' recipes of the post WW2 era. This historic 'tour' of America's foodscape is followed with an extensive section about wine- purchasing, tasting, and matching the precious liquid with different foods, and even touching on home winemaking.
The friendly lady working in the gift shop told me that she had purchased the book, and that Vincent Price's recipe for popovers has become a regular part of her family's culinary repertoire. Even better, she referred me to a Tonight Show segment in which Vincent Price teaches Johnny Carson to cook in a surprising, and hilarious, manner:
Now, that was a twist ending worthy of M. Night Shabba Doo. For a man who was best known for starring in horror movies, Vincent was a brilliant comedic talent. I can't wait to put his popover recipe to the test.
Today, I have the pleasure of working the graveyard shift. It's quiet... just myself and the cats holding down the fort. Graveyards aren't so bad- I have a chance to catch up with the news, and I'll be driving home when most people are on their way to work. I do, however, miss the back-and-forth with the commentariat here **sniff**.
After catching up on some reading, I tracked down a video for Tomb of Ligeia, which I alluded to in a post last month. At 4:40, Vincent Price throws a head of cabbage at a cat, and he delivers his wonderful lines about it starting at 7:19:
I wonder if Eccentric Uncle Robyn was inspired by the film to write this song:
I also got around to arranging the Clark Ashton Smith tales I copied off The Eldritch Dark into folders. I have all of the Averoigne tales, the whole of the Zothique stories which inspired Jack Vance's "Dying Earth", and the whole Commoriom Myth Cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton. It's been a good day for some serious weirdness, and it's not even dawn. As much as I love Clark Ashton Smith's work, he's probably not everybody's cup of tea. I'd probably suggest The Return of the Sorceror as a good, gruesome introduction to CAS, but my favorite tale of his might be The Seven Geases.
As luck would have it, I found an adaptation of The Return of the Sorceror from Rod Serling's Night Gallery starring Vincent Price, but it's dubbed in Portuguese:
Before I wrap this post up, I just want to engage in a bit of speculation... how much cooler would Star Wars have been if Vincent Price had played Obi-Wan Kenobi? Hell, I'm not knocking Alec Guinness, but we're talking Vincent Price here!
In the runup to Halloween, I have been watching a classic horror movie every night (oddly enough, watching a supernatural thriller is good escapism from the real world horrors of the day). I recently watched The Haunted Palace, produced and directed by King of the B Movies Roger Corman, a mad genius who could crank out a movie in three weeks for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Corman had directed a run of successful horror movies adapted from short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, widely considered the greatest horror author of all time, at least here in the United States. Corman wanted to attempt something different, so he hit on adapting The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a posthumously published novella by H.P. Lovecraft. The management at American International Pictures insisted on slapping an Edgar Allan Poe title on the film, however, as Lovecraft was relatively unknown at the time, so it was entitled The Haunted Palace and Vincent Price recited lines from the poem to give a patina of Poe-etry to the proceedings. The screenplay of the movie was written by Charles Beaumont, a prolific science fiction and horror author who wrote numerous Twilight Zone episodes, but is largely forgotten today- his precipitous neurological decline and death at the age of thirty-eight constitutes a horror story in and of itself. Penguin Books has recently released an anthology of Beaumont's stories, Perchance to Dream, which will hopefully pull this interesting writer back from obscurity. Beaumont's script adapts The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, but also admixes an unsavory element from Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror to augment the rather bare-bones motivation of Lovecraft's sinister warlock. Beaumont's script also moves the action of the novella from the city of Providence to Lovecraft's fictitious town of Arkham, probably due to budgetary constraints.
Lovecraft's villain, Charles Dexter Ward's ancestor Joseph Curwen, while engaging in necromancy by calling up the remains of the dead using their 'essential saltes', really has a vague motivation... he and two other necromancers, based in Europe, are calling up dead persons of renown in order to interrogate them to gain more knowledge and power.
What these horrible creatures—and Charles Ward as well—were doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear from their letters and from every bit of light both old and new which had filtered in upon the case. They were robbing the tombs of all the ages, including those of the world’s wisest and greatest men, in the hope of recovering from the bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and lore which had once animated and informed them.
A hideous traffick was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby illustrious bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys swapping books; and from what was extorted from this centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man or group. They had found unholy ways to keep their brains alive, either in the same body or different bodies; and had evidently achieved a way of tapping the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered together.
He attributes the alchemical means by which this is accomplished to Borellus:
“The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust where into his Bodie has been incinerated.”
In the meantime, he fribbled away the day with mindless tasks like cleaning the ash pit of the fireplace and raising the ghosts of flowers. From a square bottle marked "Essential Salts," Prospero poured a few green crystals into a white ceramic dish; when he had mumbled some words over the bowl, a pink and green cloud began to ascend from the shimmering translucent pebbles.
Before long, a definite shape appeared.
"Carnations," said the wizard disgustedly. "Phooey."
Of course, raising dead humans poses a greater risk than raising flowers, even flowers unsought for:
Certainely, there was Noth’g butt ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais’d upp from What he cou’d gather onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because of Any Thing miss’g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my Speak’g or yr Copy’g. I alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou’d have you Observe what was tolde to us aboute tak’g Care whom to calle up, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye Magnalia of ——, and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.
Beaumont's screenplay dispenses with all of the alchemical bafflegab and substitutes for it a more traditional 'village girls in peril' theme, making it more accessible to the typical audience member.
The film is a great collaboration between horror greats- Lovecraft, Poe, Corman, Beaumont, and Price. Add in a sympathetic portrayal of Ms Ward, a woman nonplussed by the terrible transformation of her formerly loving husband, by the luminously gorgeous Debra Paget, in her last film role before retiring from the big screen, and you have a fun, gruesome little horror gem. It is also the first film adaptation of a Lovecraft story. Vincent Price, years later, recorded an introduction to the film for Iowa public television:
In The Haunted Palace, you get twice the Price- with the horror maven playing both the benevolent Charles Dexter Ward and the monstrous Joseph Curwen. In his introduction to the film, Price notes that his own career parallels his performances in the film... the kindly, urbane Vincent Price ably playing every stripe of villain. It is a perfect spooky entertainment for the Halloween season.
Tonight, I will be heading to the beautiful Bell House in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn for a special Secret Science Club presentation of classic cheesy horror movie The Tingler featuring Bastard fave Vincent Price. For the record, Vincent Price utters one of my favorite quotes from any movie in the classic low budget horror film Tomb of Ligeia:
Christopher, not ten minutes ago I... I tried to kill a stray cat with a cabbage, and all but made love to the Lady Rowena. I succeeded in squashing the cabbage and badly frightening the lady. If only I could lay open my own brain as easily as I did that vegetable, what rot would be freed from its grey leaves?
Gotta love, love, love that Vincent Price. Sure, I'll be in Brooklyn, but I'll leave you good folks with a nice little bit of entertainment:
When it comes to horror fiction or horror movies, I am a fan of the classics. Slasher movies strike me as crass and typically misogynistic (oddly enough, I like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which in my headcanon is a satire made by radical vegetarians... and I have decided that iconic villain Leatherface is... I don't bother with sequels... the matriarch of the family). Give me an old Vincent Price movie, or a Gothic tale of an aristocratic family going mad in a castle, or a Weird Menace tale of a scientist who has Gone Too Far, and I am happy.
Here's hoping that everybody's having a good Easter, hopefully you are eating chocolate eggs to eggcess (hat tip to the late, great Vincent Price... need I repeat that Star Wars would have been a lot cooler if Vincent Price had played Obi-Wan Kenobi?). My Easter started with a call from one of my uncles, who was checking in with me after hearing that two guys got shot in a bar fight about a mile from my workplace (I left at midnight, but I'll ask my co-worker if he heard the gunshots). Happy Easter!
I'm working now, but I suspect that the gunplay will be kept to a minimum, what with the local gendarmes being on edge after this morning's affray. Anyway, enough of my yapping, I really just want to wish you an Easter that's better than this:
I hope everybody has a groovy Easter, which is sure to be the case of the right rabbit comes to your house delivering goodies:
Ya know, if White Rabbit doesn't quite sate your appetite for Easter-themed psychedelica, the entire album "Easter Everywhere" by the 13th Floor Elevators is available on the t00bz, so get your groove on and bask in the best electric jug viruosity ever to grace the earthly soundscape:
It's been a weird day... I worked until about 6AM, then went home for a long nap, having to get up at 2PM to return to work. At work, I spoke to two of my Jewish friends and co-workers, who both have relatives who are congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, none of whom were harmed, baruch hashem. I was then reminded that the brother of another friend of mine, who had moved to Pittsburgh for grad school decades ago and decided to stay, was a congregant at the synagogue. He was not present for the massacre. I imagine that, if I were to poll my Jewish friends here in New York, that most of them would know congregants of the synagogue in Squirrel Hill.
After this sobering rundown on the situation of my friends' friends and loved ones, I began to indulge in a bit of Schadenfreude by checking out the downfall and probable demise of the Gab.ai platform, which I have been fascinated, and repelled, by for the past year. From its inception, the social networking site has been a haven for trolls and neo-nazis, misogynists and racists... oh my! Their debut on the world stage occurred this past weekend when the synagogue shooter made a cryptic announcement that he was 'going in'. Since the massacre, the Gab spokescreeps have been overactive on Twitter, oddly enough, with a litany of whinging and self-righteous twaddle. In one particularly ludicrous assertion, the Gab CEO claimed to have been 'proactive' regarding the shooter, yet this was after the massacre.
The usual cliche for describing the limits of free speech is yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater, but in this instance, the person is yelling 'burn down the theater with those people inside'.
Besides reading up on the Gab saga, I have been, in the runup to Halloween, been watching classic B horror movies, particularly those starring Bastard fave Vincent Price. Poking around the t00bz, I have found two great PSAs by Vincent Price regarding bigotry, the first from 1947:
The second from 1950:
For a guy who relished playing villains, he sure was a good man.
October is a crazy month for me, I've been working long hours on the weekends with little sleep, and catching up on my sleep during the week. Today, I didn't do a blessed thing of consequence... I did a little cooking, and a little reading, but nothing that involved leaving the house. Tonight, I'm going to fall back on the "post a video" gambit. Longtime readers will know that I am a huge fan of Vincent Price (how much cooler would Star Wars have been if he had played Obi-Wan Kenobi? I ask that as an Alec Guinness fan). Since October is "Halloween Month", how about campy horror classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes?
Gotta love Vincent, no matter how outrageous the film was, he always played it straight. I have to wonder how his career would have been different had he had a better agent... scratch that, I love his wonderful career of glorious trash.
Note: The internet, which never lies, indicates that Price's co-star, the beautiful Virginia North succumbed to cancer at the age of 58. Now, that's a horror story!
It's the runup to Halloween, my busy season at work... I think it's time to post about another classic 'horror' movie. Cheap movie maestro Roger Corman produced a bunch of movies purported to be inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's body of work. One of the oddest of these 'adaptations' was 1963's The Raven, an off-the-wall comedy masquerading as a horror movie. While the movie was ostensibly inspired by Poe's poem, it was written by modern horror great Richard Matheson, and centered around three very naughty warlocks who Dumbledore should have put in detention for their entire Hogwarts careers.
The cast of the film was impeccable, with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre playing the three squabbling wizards. Hazel Court added a certain campy sex appeal to the proceedings, and a newcomer named Jack Nicolson played the son of Peter Lorre's hapless character, who spends much of the film transformed into the titular bird. The main plot involves the rivalry between Price's and Karloff's characters, and the climax of the film is a magical duel between the two... hilarity ensues:
The entire movie is a goofy classic, full of bad puns and cheesy visual gags, but everyone seems to be having a blast in it. It's a fun flick, not too scary for kids... Poe might not have been too happy with it, though.
I was bummed to read of the death of Christopher Lee, though he lived a long, productive, and eventful life. I always saw Lee as a less-campy answer to my favorite horror actor, Vincent Price. While Price always seemed to be a ham no matter how straight he played, Lee always seemed "serious" no matter how lurid the film he starred in was. Even more importantly, Lee served as an awesome foil to the equally amazing Peter Cushing in a series of horror movies produced by the legendary Hammer studios. These period pieces were known for their lavish sets and appeal to the male gaze as much as for the bright gouts of gore. A former co-worker of mine was partial to Taste the Blood of Dracula:
My personal favorite horror film featuring Lee is The Wicker Man, which pitted Edward Woodward's pious Protestant police sergeant against Lee's pagan Lord Summerisle:
The end of the movie is one of the classic shockers of horror cinema (not quite as unexpected as that of Don't Look Now, but what is?), and leaves the viewer with the impression that, given a choice between Woodward's Calvinism and Lee's paganism, the correct answer is "run like hell away".
Here's a funny video of Christopher Lee extolling the virtues of booze, watching it, I have to think that a musical featuring him and Tim Curry would have been the awesomest thing ever:
It's a pity he didn't do more comedy, or more opera:
I was disheartened to read of the death of Dame Diana Rigg, star of stage and screen, author/editor, and raconteuse. Like most males born in the late 20th century, and beyond, I am most familiar with her work in campy 1960s espionage romp The Avengers where her iconic 'Emma Peel' combined a gaminesque prettiness with perfect comic timing and the lethality of a wuxia protagonist. This ensured her status as an international icon... I can't even begin to imagine how many fetishes this one scene embodies:
If it ticks off any boxes for you, please note it in the comments.
No mere sex symbol, Diana Rigg always exuded intelligence and competence as well as erotic appeal. All throughout, she also radiated a playfulness, in keeping with the campy nature of the show. Diana Rigg was kinda what Audrey Hepburn would have been if she had been an action star (not that big a stretch, given her ballet experience). She even looked dazzling in dazzle camouflage:
It was criminal that someone so central to the success of the show was underpaid, earning less than a cameraman.
I have to confess that I haven't seen Diana Rigg in any stage presentations, but I do note that her acting debut was playing a part in Brecht's I have to confess that I haven't seen Diana Rigg in any stage presentations, but I do note that her acting debut was playing a part in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, one of my favorite plays, and that she subsequently joined the Royal Shakespeare Company... she would have been great in a hypothetical kung-fu Hamlet ("Alas, poor Yorick, his kung-fu was not all that good..."). She did rack up an impressive collection of Tony and Emmy awards.
I have to say that I'm not that familiar with her work on the big screen, but she did take a deliciously villainous turn as Vincent Price's daughter/accomplice in the camp-horror classic Theatre of Blood.
She was also an accomplished angler, and in a wonderful and witty interview, she compared dry fly fishing to acting.
I Do have to confess that I'm primarily a Diana Rigg fanboy for all of the wrong reasons, but even at her most fetishized, she still managed to be both fierce and funny:
Sure, that's pure fanservice, but what's wrong with being sexy? At any rate, Diana Rigg's career was both groundbreaking and far-ranging. She played the ingenue, the action girl, the tragic heroine, the villainess, the dowager in a career spanning seven decades. As far as icons go, I can think of few more influential ones, if any.
What better day to go on an egg hunt than Easter? I have a lot of territory to cover, but there are countless eggses to be found. Some of the eggs have even been colored.
I seem to remember a post on Riddled which mentioned the salamander/algae symbiosis, but I've searched for it and cannot find it. A little help, dear antipodean friends!
Happy Easter all... don't be overdosing on chocolate now!
Oh, and as an Easter bonus, here's the incomparable Vincent Price as Egghead:
I'm going to preface this post by stating that I will be in serious danger of losing my geek credentials with this post...
One of my cousins texted me the post title earlier today- I had no idea that today was Star Wars Day, but I caught on pretty quickly.
I have to confess that I am a bit of a Star Wars agnostic (cue chorus of boos from grammar school age children... Mass gonna kick my ass). Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movies, but I have no real need to see them over and over. I haven't seen the original series in years and can count the number of times I've seen them on my fingers. I've seen the "prequels" once each, and really see no need to see them again... for the record, I've seen the "Lord of the Rings" movies once each and really did not dig them- a quote about "looking fair and feeling foul" comes to mind, but I can't place the source... Yeah, I'm totally going to insprie some serious nerdrage and get drummed out of geekdom with this post.
Getting back to the topic, I saw the original Star Wars in the theater as a young lad, and, like most people, I was blown away by it. How could a small boy not be blown away by a Space Samurai-Wizard Western? I mean, that scene where Luke and Obi-Wan (who should have been played by Vincent Price) walk into that monster bar was friggin' AWESOME! The second movie was also fantastic- the revelation about **SPOILER REDACTED** was shocking, the cliffhanger ending genuinely moving. The third movie had its ridiculous moments, but it still delivered the spectacular fun it promised, so its sucktastic elements could be overlooked (to an adolescent boy, a copper bikini space princess makes up for a lot of sins).
The strain of suck became much more evident in the first prequel, with its crypto-Caribbean amphibian embarassment and its CGI aliens who looked like guys in rubber masks, but the seeds of suckitude were with the franchise almost from its inception:
For a taste of the two fads that dominated the late seventies, there's no better example than this:
Despite the foregoing rant, I don't dislike the movies, I'm just not a rabid fanboy. That being said, the movies are part of the cultural DNA, and the rabid fans are awesome... in fact, they've been putting out consistently better stuff over the last decade than Lucas himself. Tell me that this isn't awesome:
Unfortunately, some of the entries of the blog I linked to are pretty sad, trite examples of sexism and homophobia, which is sad, because this is 100% awesome.
Yeah, the fans have a great track record, and have been better stewards of the franchise than the originator. I mean, how can one top this?
Yeah, there's a galaxy of "funny" out there, lovingly crafted by amateurs. I can't be hating on Star Wars, it forms a shared narrrative that has inspired millions of people around the world... may the fourth be with you, you crazy, brilliant fans.
While I've written pretty extensively on Bellairs' The Face in the Frost, I haven't written about The House with a Clock in its Walls- I may have to put up a review of the book for another weekend.
In the interest of full disclosure, I composed this post last night.
In this run-up to Halloween season, I have to confess that I am puzzled that bats feature so prominently in Halloween iconography. In this part of the world, the bats are hibernating when Halloween rolls around. I have always been a big fan of bats. I am not a fan of Frank Miller, the asshole fascist who ruined the "Batman" franchise by making it all angsty and shit (and by "shit", I mean shit). My opinion of the "Batman" mythos can be summed up with a simple couplet:
The "Batman" that's the best,
Is the one with Adam West.
I can't decide which "Batman" villain is the best... whether it's Egghead (Vincent Price, W00T!) or King Tut. I love King Tut's supervillain origin story:
I suspect Bruce took pity on him because the good professor gave him a "Gentleman's B".
Here's wishing a happy Walpurgisnacht to all of my readers, as is my tradition. I celebrated the festival by indulging in some herbalism- picking a bunch of garlic mustard and nettles which will form the base for a batch of green slurry.
Even in the United States, there is a witchcraft panic among evangelicals which hearkens back to the Satanic Panic of the 1970s and 80s. It's just not safe to be an eccentric in a hotbed of religious fundamentalism, especially if you are an independent, wise woman.
Anyway, be safe on this Walpurgis Night, stay away from anyone who looks like Vincent Price:
The Big Bad Bald Bastard is a character played by Monsieur _______ of the City of Y______. The role of the Bastard is a handy one to play on subways, walking the streets, and in dive-bars, when being a nerdy, bookish sort is not to one's advantage.
