What I've Been Doing Lately

OK, I've been rather quiet this month...

It's been a somewhat odd summer. I meant to do more photography but earlier this year I had some bad foot pain that led me to a podiatrist. Surprise, I needed orthotics, which were covered by my insurance, thank heaven. But it's been a while getting used to 'em and only now am I starting to get back on my feet again, roving the wild streets of DC.

August was also busy with work, and with my other writing gigs. I had a series of reviews to write for Scarlet, and I've also landed my first regular paid writing job, as a wine critic for a local website. So stuff's happening for me, bit by bit.



Today is also my forty-fourth birthday, and it hasn't been too bad. I had a great celebration Friday night, while attending the Tilted Torch show at the Palace of Wonders, which ended with the ladies doing a curtain call, each holding a cupcake with a lit birthday candle...yes, it was in my honor. I was totally bowled over by the gesture, engineered by fire dancer/artist Malibu. (Love you, honey!) Then it was late-night waffles at Bob & Edith's Diner in Arlington, with my pal Todd and other members of the Palace gang, until far into the wee hours of the morning.

Today's been a glorious early autumn day here in DC, temperatures only in the 70s, dry and cool and comfortable. And I also had great news today; I visited my ophthalmologist for a glaucoma check-up and he says that the pressure in my eyes is significantly lower than last time I visited, so I don't need to go back for another six months. This was a great birthday present.

And things are starting to gel for Halloween....



The Silver Spring Zombie Walk is already taking shape for October 24th, with a stroll through downtown Silver Spring, MD, ending in a showing of SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Last year's walk was a great time, and I'm looking forward to this year's, although I'll have to wait and see what the weather will be like before I finalize my outfit.



And this year's Belly Horror show is also coalescing, taking place in the venerable Birchmere on Friday, Oct. 23rd. Last year's was quite a show and this year's should be even better.

And I've discovered a couple of podcasts that I enjoy. First is the Cthulhu Podcast, which features readings of Lovecraft works and other related horror stories, including some original stuff and other works from the 20s. Then up is the very new Mystery Man Podcast, which has readings of classic mystery/adventure stories, with background info. Both feature lively readings that really make the stories come alive, with affable hosts who truly enjoy what they're doing.

And that leads me to something that's slowly developing here...we here in the D&C crypt are kicking around the idea of the Dust & Corruption podcast. It's slowly, slowly struggling out of the idea phases, as soon as I get a good microphone and coordinate things with my partner in ghoulishness. Hopefully, before too long, we'll be showing up in iTunes as well as Blogger.

So, that's it for now. Some more stuff coming up, like a few photos and book reviews. And soon the holy of holies, Halloween, will be upon us. Brace yourselves, folks! It's gonna be a wild season!

Required Reading: THE VICTORIA VANISHES, by Christopher Fowler

The sixth of Fowler's Bryant & May series, this was intended to be the last chronicle of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. However, Fowler couldn't let his series schlump off into the sunset, and revived it with the upcoming BRYANT & MAY ON THE LOOSE.

THE VICTORIA VANISHES opens shortly after the last book, WHITE CORRIDOR, with the PCU gathered at a wake for pathologist Oswald Finch. Renfield, an unpopular policeman, is being assigned to the PCU, much to the resentment of the long-time detectives there. But Bryant, after a few, is lurching off into the streets when he sees a woman walking into a pub, the Victoria Cross. Fascinated by old pubs, it sticks in his mind, and resurfaces when the woman is found dead in that neighborhood. Bryant goes to investigate the Victoria Cross....only to find a grocery store, and research shows that the pub has been closed for decades. But now this turns up a bizarre serial-killer plot, with a murderer offing lonely mature women in crowded pubs. But there could be more to it than anyone realizes...

Meanwhile, behind-the-scenes machinations by the PCU's political enemies in the police force may have finally come across a way of shutting down the unit once and for all. And the secrets that Bryant and May have been keeping from each other are finally coming to light.

THE VICTORIA VANISHES is a roaring good read, full of the atmosphere of a crumbling, vanishing London, where historic sites are being torn down in favor of modern developments. There's a nostalgia here, to be sure, but also a very human desire for stability in an ever-changing urban landscape.

The one debit is a somewhat hurried ending, when all is made clear in a sudden tumult, but that doesn't detract from the overall fun of the book. It ends on a note of semi-finality, fine with ending where it was but open to further exploration. And now we know there's more coming down the pike, and I can't wait.

THE VICTORIA VANISHES is great fun and will have you wanting to snoop the crumbling corner pubs in your own city. Go hoist a drink for me, why don't you?

On a Raven's Wing

One of several anthologies that's out this year in honor of the Poe bicentennial, this is from the Mystery Writers of America, and is edited by Stuart Kaminsky. Obviously, the focus is on mystery, and sometimes it's quite imaginative.

Each story wraps itself around Poe in some way or another...either about Poe in some way, or a variation on one of his stories, or simply borrowing heavily from Poe's content and putting an original spin on it.

So for the usual rundown...

"Israfel" by Doug Allyn gives us a Poe-themed rock group, with a lead guitarist who's quickly burning out, and a narrator who's not about to let things go down the tubes. It has a nifty ending that packs a punch.

Michael A. Black's "The Golden Bug" is an interesting cross-pollination of Poe's "The Gold Bug" with Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS, set on a Pacific island during WWII. Maybe not the greatest story, but a well-done concept.

Jon L. Breen's "William Allan Wilson" is interesting; a tale of a Poe bicentennial collection, with a cipher embedded in a story that's a clue to a real murder (that is, real in the context of the story). Rather beguiling, but in the end rather unmemorable.

"The Tell-Tale Purr" by Mary Higgins Clark is more humor than anything else, a tale of an attempted murder that not only goes wrong, but ends up turning situations around in the most bizarre way. I have to say, it functions better as a short story than some other shorts that MHC has written; she's really improved her grasp of the form.

"Nevermore" by Thomas H. Cook gives us a tale of family secrets unburied, as a dying man seeks to communicate a guilty secret to his estranged adult son, with struggles between loyalty and anger, faith and reason, running throughout.

"Emily's Time" by Dorothy Salisbury Davis, is at first unsatisfying, but after a second read, it's a few steps short of being brilliant. It's great from a literary standpoint, as well as a mystery standpoint, and (I hate to say it) almost too good for this collection, where the emphasis is on solid genre work. A variation on Poe's "The Black Cat," it deals with loneliness and guilt, but with wonderfully rendered emotions and settings.

Brendan DuBois's "The Cask of Castle Island" isn't bad, basically a retelling of "The Cask of Amontillado" in modern-day Boston, although it could be faulted for being a bit too faithful to its source. "Bells" by James W. Hall expounds on the poem with a tale of a man plotting against his wife with the titular objects, only to have his plan unravel. Not bad, not great.

"In My Ancestor's Image" is part of Jeremiah Healey's Rory Calhoun series. Calhoun, a private eye, is hired to locate a stolen Edgar award by a putative descendant of Poe. Not bad, if a bit self-referential about the Mystery Writers of America.

"The Poe Collector" by the late Edward D. Hoch is great fun, a delicious tale of con and detection. "A Nomad of the Night" by Rupert Holmes (as in Broadway's "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" and "Curtains," yes, that Rupert Holmes) effectively evokes the atmosphere of low-budget filmmaking in the 60s. And I love that title.

My favorite story of the bunch was editor Stuart Kaminsky's contribution, "Rattle, Rattle, Rattle," a full-blown gothic horror tale that expands on Poe's "Berenice." Very good fun.

Paul Levine's "Development Hell" is something I've seen before, a comedy about Hollywood and deals with the devil. Didn't thrill me much. Peter Lovesey's "The Deadliest Tale of All" isn't much of a mystery, but a decent dissection of Poe's character and a posthumous kick in the teeth to Rufus Griswold.

John Lutz's "Poe, Poe, Poe" was my least favorite; it actually read like a transcribed one-act play by a first-time playwright. It's overpopulated with characters who all have overly cute variations on names of Poe characters, all gathered in a tavern. Not worth it.

"The Tell-Tale Pacemaker" by P. J. Parrish, is another modernized retelling, in this case "The Tell-Tale Heart" transported to a modern retirement community.

"Seeing the Moon" by S. J. Rozan is my second-favorite of the book. It's got appealing and well-etched characters (Asian-American art experts) and a great tale of con and counter-con, as victims of an art scam seek to recoup their losses with a return scam, involving a Poe artifact. It makes me want to seek out more of Rozan's work.

Daniel Stashower's "Challenger" was a nostalgic variation on "Annabel Lee," only with ugly real-world twists. Another bit of nostalgia, "Poe, Jo, and I" by Don Winslow, is well-written enough but simply not a mystery. It's simply a narrator's tribute to a teacher Who Really Cared and Connected With Him and all that.

Finally, Angela Zeman's "Rue Morgue Noir" is an amusing fantasia on what it would be like for Poe if he were trying to make it as a writer today. It's not pretty.

Overall, even though some stories weren't anything great, the stories in this collection are mostly solid genre work, and worth a look. It's a good sampling of some of the talent in the mystery world today. Check it out if you like a good mystery short story.

More coming up...

Wrapping up the Fringe Festival

Well, I managed to catch three more shows at the Fringe Fest. I wanted to get more but I was distracted by other events (including a farewell party for my friends Heidi and Marie, who have since moved to Brooklyn, and the Palace of Wonders Third Anniversary show), as well as budgetary restraints, so I did what I could.

I was very, very impressed by ANNABEL LEE, by Old Lore Theater. I praised them to the rafters last year for THE FIDDLER GHOST, and this year was no different. Naturally, it's the Poe poem, interpreted through Old Lore's signature mix of dance, spoken word, and song, and they rise above the restraints of the poem (I loved a girl, she died, I'm sad) by using it as a springboard to explore issues of separation, loss, and grief. Lots of inventive interpretation through movement (such as human bodies becoming waves on the sea). Loads of fun, very moving and impressive.

And for nostalgia's sake, here's some highlights from last year's THE FIDDLER GHOST:



And then I saw a rerun of Molotov Theatre Group's recent play CLOSET LAND, which is even better the second time around. They'd actually ratcheted up the grue and made it even more intense and nasty, but never losing the play's core ideas about totalitarian governments, torture, and public passivity.


Finally, I managed to catch a non-D&C oriented play, VINCENT, staged by Theatre Du Jour at the DC Arts Center. A one-man play written by Leonard Nimoy (!), it was grandly performed by B. Stanley as Theo Van Gogh, mourning his brother's death and casting insight on Vincent Van Gogh's character. At first it seemed a bit, well, normal for a group like TDJ to be doing, but as they explain, it combines DCAC's commitment to both visual and performing arts. Plus, it was just a damn good play.

So that was it for the Fringe Festival this year. I always have a good time with it but it's getting more expensive, alas. Maybe next year I need to save up for one of the see-anything-for-free passes.

More coming up soon...

Catching up: Monster Bash, Fringe Festival, and music

OK, it's been too long. But I had a wild few weeks, what with the Monster Bash convention in the Pittsburgh 'burbs, and then the Independence Day holiday, and my job going wild in between. And then the start of the Capital Fringe Festival.

Monster Bash was, as always, a good time, hanging with all my horror-fan friends and making a few new ones along the way...including my first face-to-face conversation with Max Chaney of The Drunken Severed Head (link to the right); actually, he and I could be related. Kinda frightening, that. Spent way too much money on DVDs and some souvenirs (including yet another Poe t-shirt). I covered MB at length this time last year, so I won't go into it too much here, except that I never regret going.

I spent Independence Day with my parents, and got to behold my hometown fireworks for the first time. They only started doing this a few years ago and our little town (Clear Spring, MD, pop. 461 as of the last census) probably quadrupled its population that night...if not more. And we also got an impromptu tour of a new hotel that opened by the highway there, actually a charming place.

Work was wild....and we also had that horrible Metro accident here in DC. It was scary as hell, but at the very least it's calling attention to the sad state of repair that DC's Metro system is in, especially the much-used Red Line. A downside for me is that I use the Red Line when I go downtown, and slowdowns...and shutdowns...are making trips difficult.

Which is why I took a MetroBus downtown when I hit the Fringe Festival this past Saturday. I saw two plays that looked like fun.

FREAKSHOW, from local company Pinky Swear, is quite good. Written by Caron Kreitzer, it's a chronicle of the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a traveling freak show, circa 1900, narrated by the saucy Human Torso (Allyson Harkey, in a very strong and assured performance). It's a good play, with the seedy atmosphere well communicated, but never becoming overwhelming. And there's interesting feminist subtext that I honestly didn't expect. And the ringmaster, Mr. Flip, is played by the jaw-droppingly handsome Andrew Mitakides, who filled out his historic garb well. (Maybe I should start another blog, maybe dedicated to Steampunk beefcake?)

And then...I was looking forward to THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER: THE MUSICAL. I was honestly expecting a parody, but it's actually a serious attempt at a musicalization of the Poe story. Which was the problem. In order to make it a workable musical, they transformed Roderick Usher; no more was he Poe's doomed neurasthenic, but now was a jolly, freewheeling bohemian. Madeline, almost a nonentity in the story, is now made into a mad scientist obsessed with rats. And they also cross-bred the story with the poem "Annabel Lee," giving Usher a fiancee. The second act brings on the doom and dissipation, but it all rings hollow. I can't fault the actors, who did their best, but the material was fatally flawed, with a bit too much thrown in toward the end. I have to give it credit, though, in that the music is often quite nice, especially a song based on Robert Burns' "O My Luve's Like a Red Red Rose," and the singing was good, esp. Carolyn Myers as Annabel Lee. (There's some samples at the show's website.)

So I'm at one for two so far. We'll see what else I get into.

In the meantime, because there's always the meantime...

I've long thought of finding a good theme tune for this blog, and I think I've come close with this delightful tune by Fritz Kreisler, his "Miniature Viennese March."



And another group I'm in love with, Vagabond Opera, has this delightful video:



And then random bouncing around on YouTube resulted in this fun video about the organ music in Disney's "Haunted Mansion" ride:



So, that's all for right now. I'll try to catch more at the Fringe Festival, and I'll be filling y'all in if I do.

GASLIGHT GRIMOIRE

A title like that is just so luscious. And it delivers.

GASLIGHT GRIMOIRE, edited by J. R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec, is a very fun anthology of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, largely with a supernatural or fantastic bent, and overall (barring a couple of false notes) well-written. While most of them refer at some point to the Doyle canon, for the most part they appear to inhabit their own little universes, each one a different take on a fantastic adventure of Holmes. And, with one exception, they avoid the radical revisionism of Holmes that I find annoying and distasteful (yes, Laurie King, I'm looking at you).

There are two stories by big-name authors, Barbara Hambly and Kim Newman, and then there are names I recognize from my perambulations here and there in the genre world, like Chico Kidd (whose PRINTERS DEVIL I read long ago and enjoyed), Barbara Roden of the Ash-Tree Press, and Holmes expert David Stuart Davies, who contributed a forward. But that's not to say this is amateur-hour stuff; there's not a single story in here that struck me as first-timer fanfic. Standards are high here, and I appreciated that.

So, to give a rundown...

"The Lost Boy" by Barbara Hambly, which opens the collection, is a beguiling tale that crosses Holmes with J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, only with real menace. It's also unusual for being told from the point of view of Watson's wife (or one of them, I lose track). Despite the potential for cloying whimsy (and if there's one thing I can't stand, it's cloying whimsy), Hambly gives it a good measure of darkness and real emotion.

The next story, "His Last Arrow" by Christopher Sequeira, is the one I liked the least in the collection. It was certainly well-written enough, and certainly had imagination to spare, but his approach to Holmes and Watson was one that I simply did not like. I'm not saying it's a bad story...far from it....but I just found this story's version of the Holmes canon to be not to my taste.

Barbara Roden's "The Things That Shall Come Upon Them," is roaring good fun for someone of my literary tastes. Holmes and Watson team up with occult investigator Flaxman Low (a creation of Kate & Hesketh Prichard) and investigate the former home of Julian Karswell (the villain of M. R. James' classic short story "Casting the Runes"). Roden knows her subject and has fun with it, and the story is a great ride.

"The Finishing Stroke" by M. J. Elliott is a fun bit of mystery/horror as Holmes goes on the track of paintings that appear to come to life, with the expected deadly results. "Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World" isn't supernatural, but a steampunk fantasia in which Holmes meets up with another Doyle creation, Prof. Challenger, in the infamous Lost World in South America.

Chico Kidd and Rick Kennett had fun with "The Grantchester Grimoire," which features another crossover, this time with Holmes teaming up with William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Thomas Carnacki. Kidd & Kennett know their Carnacki and keep him true to Hodgson while keeping Holmes credible. It's another fun romp.

"The Steamship Friesland," by Peter Calamai, didn't grab me as much as some of the others. It's a valiant attempt at building a supernatural tale around one of Holmes' unsolved cases (a ship that passes into a fogbank only to disappear; it's mentioned in one of the stories), but Holmes suddenly developing mediumistic abilities didn't sit well with me. (OK, OK, so I'm a stickler...) J. R. Campbell's "The Entwined" feels oddly incomplete, but tantalizingly so, with members of a secret brotherhood being killed off by an otherworldly being. It's not a bad story at all, but after reading it there was a sense of something just outside my grasp that left me wanting more information.

"Merridew of the Abominable Memory," by Chris Roberson, sticks out a little for having no fantastic content. However, it is memorably gruesome, with a plausible plot, and actually a bit of an emotional whallop at the end.

Bob Madison's "Red Sunset" gives us an elderly Holmes residing in Los Angeles and summoned by a policeman to investigate a strange crime. Not bad in and of itself, but it's basically set up as a final confrontation between Holmes and an old enemy, and getting some background on it would have made it better.

The final story, "The Red Planet League" by Kim Newman, is the best. Holmes doesn't even appear in it. Instead, it's narrated by Col. Sebastian Moran (and sounding rather Flashmanesque), playing a sort of anti-Watson to Prof. Moriarty's anti-Holmes. It's a delicious tale of Moriarty being insulted by an arrogant young upstart astronomer, and the resulting revenge involving...well, I won't say, but you can take a few cues from the title. The plot borrows cues from at least two H. G. Wells works, and even a bit from Heinlein. Again, this is steampunk rather than supernatural, but it's great fun and a wonderful capper to the book.

So was it worth it? Oh yeah, even with the missteps it's still a fun read and worth getting for fans of Holmes and horror fiction. Look for it. And I hear rumors of a sequel collection in the works....

Mysterious, Decadent, Spooky or Hidden DC, Part One

An idea I had a while ago was a series of photo essays with a common theme...the strange, mysterious, spooky, decadent, bizarre, hidden parts of DC and the surrounding area. So, I decided to get started in Dumbarton Oaks.

Dumbarton Oaks, for the uninitiated, is a large estate in DC's Georgetown neighborhood. It was first established in 1702 as "Rock of Dumbarton" but was in rundown condition when purchased by Mildred and Robert Bliss in 1920. Robert was a diplomat; Mildred was an heiress to the Fletcher's Castoria fortune. They hired landscape architect Beatrix Farrand (niece of Edith Wharton) to design the stunning gardens, and used the house for their collection of Byzantine art. In 1940, they ended up donating the house and most of the grounds to Harvard, which now maintains the museum and library and research center, and another portion of the grounds to the US Park Service.

So naturally, there's lots of history here. In 1944, it was the host to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, that laid the groundwork of the United Nations. And in 1938, Robert Bliss commissioned Igor Stravinsky to write a piece for the couple's 30th anniversary; the resulting work, Stravinsky's Concerto in E-flat, is widely known as the "Dumbarton Oaks Concerto."

So with all that, and all the guests that one can imagine visiting in its heyday, it's easy to imagine all sorts of intrigue, both personal and political. It's the sort of place that SHOULD be haunted, but off the cuff I have no idea if there are any ghost stories associated with the place. Still, for those in the District, it's a great place to go visit and imagine as the setting for some sort of tale, either one of those manor-house-style mysteries, or an M. R. Jamesian ghost story.

So, without further ado...

The main house, built in 1800. Annoyingly, admission to the gardens does not get you into the house and museum. Still, the gardens will take up a few hours anyway...


Inside the house's orangery, with the immense creeping fig that crawls over everything and dates from the 1860s. You don't want to stand still too long, as it may grab you.


The Star Garden, which was basically intended to be an outdoor dining room for the family. Lose the table and chairs and you can almost imagine black magic ceremonies going on here. In the paving there's a Chaucer quote: "Oh thou maker of the whele that bereth the sterres and tornest the hevene with a ravisshing sweigh."

There's a ton of astronomical/astrological symbolism embedded in the paving...


And in the garden's fountain...


The Urn Terrace, a few steps down, has this lovely monstrosity that looks like it was designed by Edward Gorey.


Down a flight of steps from the Urn Terrace is the jaw-dropping Rose Garden. When I was snapping photos, there was so much in bloom...






At one end, there's this bench with the Bliss family motto, Quod Severis Metes, meaning You Shall Reap What You Sow.


This bizarre fountain cools the Arbor Terrace area.


Dubbed the "Lover's Lane Pool," this is actually the estate's Garden of Histrion...that is, a private outdoor theatre. How decadent can you get? Pretty decadent...


This area is called "Mélisande's Allée" after the Debussy opera, based on the Maeterlinck play.


And this arbor walk seems like a great place for a whispered conversation.


An area known as "The Ellipse" has this lovely fountain, imported from Provence.


The strangest garden was the Pebble Court, a dry garden featuring what is basically a mosaic on a grand scale.

It also has a lovely fountain:

...and a wall of these carved wavelets...


My favorite part is this gorgeous fountain, located in a quiet corner of the garden, near the swimming pool.


But there's tons of random things to stumble on as you wander around...






And all sorts of intriguing paths...



And if you're not inclined toward mystery or ghosts or anything like that...there's corners of the garden, and nearby Dumbarton Oaks Park, that are like something out of a fairy tale...







Dumbarton Oaks, and Dumbarton Park, are gorgeous places to wander in, and definitely off the beaten DC tourist track. If you're in town this summer, set aside an afternoon to go visit. Dumbarton Oaks charges $8 admission and is open 2 pm to 6 pm from 3/15 to 10/31; other times of the year it's open 2-5 and admission is free. They're closed Mondays, federal holidays, and in bad weather. Dumbarton Park is open dawn to dusk, with no admission. They're great places to wander and let your imagination go wild. And since they're in the middle of Georgetown, it's easy to find a place for a drink or a snack afterwards.

There'll be more on the way in future weeks...so stay tuned.