Happy Halloween from Dust & Corruption!

I send all my readers and friends my best wishes for a wild and crazy (yet safe) Halloween! I'll be going to a burlesque show in DC, and I have the day off so I plan on doing some shopping & lunching out. Hope you have fun, whatever you're doing. And even if you're staying in, have a pleasant evening!

Absinthe and I

My fondness for absinthe is well-known. So well-known, in fact, I was to appear in a local podcast, The Curioso, for their special absinthe episode. You can hear me reading a poem, talking about absinthe, and making some absinthe cocktails. Give it a listen, why don't you?

Sorry I haven't been updating much. October has been busy, both with fun stuff and with work. In fact, work has gone berserk. I won't go into details but it's kept me hopping and often leaves me too burnt out at the end of the day to do much blogging. Things should quiet down in a bit, though.

And for a special lucky bonus, here's a video from the podcast taping. A shirt button came undone over my stomach, making me look even more horrifying fat than I already am. (I started going to a gym, though, and I think I've lost some weight already...)

An October Monday Night at the Cinema

It's time for our monthly night out at the movies! The pre-show dinner involves quite a bit of conversation about our plans for Halloween, the difficulty of coming up with costume ideas, the obscene cost of decorations, and nostalgia for our own days of trick-or-treating.

Then it's up the street to that slightly shabby old cinema for the classic film!

This month, it's one of the first sound Sherlock Holmes films, A Study in Scarlet, starring Reginald Owen as Holmes, and co-starring Anna May Wong!



The show finally over, we go up the street in the increasingly cool air for that final drink before going our separate ways...

After a busy weekend

I was busy last weekend...

Monster-Mania was this weekend. I've attended this Philadelphia-area convention a few times in the past, but now they've started having a second show in  Baltimore so it's pretty much a given that I have to go.

There were a lot of neat people (like the couple above) but it was mostly a dealers and autographs event. I'm not much of an autograph person, and most of 'em charge of autographs anyway and that's money that I can spend on books and DVDs. There was a movie room as well, but not much real programming aside from that. The dealer's room was mostly collectibles, and that's also something I'm not big on; the manufactured "collector's item" stuff usually leaves me cold. (I'm a picky bastard.) But I did find some cool handcrafted things, like a boutonniere made from old playing cards and with a skull at the center that I'm going to wear to a picnic soon, and a comfy pillow made to look like Sam from the delightful Halloween anthology film Trick'r'Treat. I also got a dozen DVDs, including a few I've been unable to find for a while, like The Big Crimewave (a Canadian noir comedy) and The Unnamable and The Unnamable II. DVDs were surprisingly cheap; I wonder if the trend toward streaming is making them more affordable.

I did get to meet independent filmmaker James Balsamo, which was pretty cool. Yeah. that's me on the right.

Sunday was a small ceremony at Edgar Allan Poe's Grave.

It was organized by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, a group I should look into joining at some point. Yesterday was the anniversary of his death, so every year about this time they arrange a flower-laying ceremony. It was a quiet, calm observance, and everyone in attendance was invited to lay flowers if they wanted. This was followed by everyone retreating to the Poe Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in downtown Baltimore, where they had arranged a lecture on Poe's precarious finances.

The Poe Room is gorgeous and there's tons of rare editions in the shelves; I could while away many hours there. But anyway, the lecture basically confirmed that Poe made some bad financial choices, but was also hampered by the difficulties of earning a living writing, and also the reality of a bad economy at the time. There was some fun discussion afterward, and I got to raise the question of whether Poe was really the first to create the detective story or if it was E. T. A. Hoffmann. (My theory? Hoffmann started to piece together the elements, but Poe synthesized them better.)

I also read this oldie, after coming across references to it as one of the great gothic mystery classics. How was it? Well, badly dated in quite a few ways, but still fairly enjoyable. In WWII-era San Francisco, Hilda Moreau (whose husband is away in the Navy) goes to visit her sisters-in-law, who inhabit a crumbling Victorian house. Eldest sister Pauline controls the purse strings of the family trust, and browbeats (and sometimes blackmails) the other sisters into following her orders. Pauline ends up murdered, and a shady servant and an even shadier lady lawyer end up dead as well before things are resolved.

It's an interesting milieu; almost all characters are women, a reflection of the wartime days when almost all the men were off fighting. But every so often I had to look up some reference that I didn't get, and other aspects of the wartime life are quite alien to 21st-century readers. The resolution also seemed rushed, as if Collins was getting close to her page limit and decided to wrap things up. The solution comes almost as a mistake, rather than as the result of deduction and reason. I guess I'm too much of a fan of the Analytical school.

In personal news, I joined a gym! Yeah, in that photo above, I've got quite the gut. I went for the first time on Tuesday and just walked on a treadmill for a bit, but watch out. In another decade I'll be svelte and sexy.

October at the Phantom Concert Hall

On a crisp October evening, we dress up and head to that old, partly-restored concert hall that lay forgotten in a shabby part of town until it was revived recently. Empty storefronts are turning into shops, clubs, and restaurants, and streets that were once a blight are now safe to walk again.

The hall itself still has a way to go; the seats aren't the most comfortable, and there are spaces where it obviously needs a coat of paint, but the acoustics are still good and there's a romance in the shabby grandeur.

The orchestra is a newly-formed one, doing their first concert. There's a few of the standard repertoire, some readings of autumnal poetry, and then this charming piece....



We exit, smiling, exchanging words with the conductor and some of the musicians, including that handsome violinist and that blonde oboist. This will be something to return to.

The night air has grown cooler and embraces us as we leave....