Get Psyched for Halloween (#2)

Here are six things guaranteed to spook you:

1. Happy Birthday, Mr. Poe
Recounts a sighting of the ghost of you-know-who.

2. Havoc, In Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett
No ghosts, per se, but this is one of the most haunting books I've ever read. Finished it more than two years ago and I still get the willies whenever I think about it.

3. Real Vampires with Brad Steiger
Episode #106 of the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold. Apparently 'real-life' blood-suckers are far more terrifying than their Hollywood counterparts.

4. Let the Right One In, based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.
An exquisitely disturbing vampire film I watched at Seanan's house the last time I was in Tipperary. I have yet to read the book, but I hear it's amazing.



5. A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter by Sheridan Le Fanu. I know I've posted this one before, but gosh, is it good. (Or listen to it at Librivox.)

6. A Voice in the Attic, another gem from Castle of Spirits. I've posted this one before too, because it is seriously frightening.

Mad Madam Mim

The Sword in the Stone is one of my favorite Disney movies. Tonight I watched it for the first time in umpteen years, and it was every bit as good as I remembered—partly because of this scene-stealing witchy lady (you know I have a thing for witches):

Tee hee!

In Despair, or in Cahoots?

They've been called "the drinking man's Coldplay," but Elbow are in a league beyond that much more famous British pop/rock band. (As Brian Boyd wrote when Elbow won the Mercury Prize last year for The Seldom Seen Kid: "A band such as Coldplay will happily confess to you that they put filler on their albums in the knowledge that there are enough big, anthemic songs around the filler that no one will really notice or care. Chris Martin has fessed up to 'borrowing' from Elbow's Grace Under Pressure song to help him with the writing of Fix You." Listen to those two songs one after the other, and Coldplay's debt becomes remarkably obvious.)

So please, let me indoctrinate you into the greatness that is Elbow. Here's a link to a BBC video Brendan's sister Aileen posted to Facebook yesterday:


Oh, kiss me like the final meal / Yeah, kiss me like we die tonight

Doesn't it make you feel happy to be alive?

Music can really inspire me when I write. It sets the mood in a scene, of course—I used plenty of Nina Simone lyrics in Mary Modern, and my Petty Magic heroine sings a wistful Berlin cabaret tune, Irgendwo auf der Welt ("Somewhere in the World"), during a pub session. The best lyrics inspire as well, perfectly evoking a scene with only a handful of words. Take these lyrics from Fugitive Motel:

Curtains stay closed
But everyone knows
You hear through the walls in this place
Cigarette holes for every lost soul
To give up the ghost in this place

It's all there—the despair, the isolation, the claustrophobic shabbiness of a highway lodge advertising cable TV and ceiling mirrors in every room.

Or take this single line from Switching Off:

Early evening June, this room and a radio play

Can't you just see the fluttering curtains, the trees outside casting dancing shadows on the unmade bed? Can't you just feel the cool breeze wafting through the window and the tinny voices coming from the radio on the dresser? The character in the song re-lives these memories so vividly that it puts the listener there in that moment as well. Switching Off has another of my favorite lines:

You, the only sense the world has ever made

You can see why this music makes me want to be a better writer.

Inauguration video #2

Inauguration video #1

And my friend Diarmuid sent me this link, asking me if I could spot myself. (I haven't—yet.) Cool, huh?

Adventures in Berlin: Kunsthaus Tacheles, pt. 1

It's a ruin. It's a squat. It's a studio. It's a gallery. It's a playground. It's a café/bar. It's a club.

It's a disco, baby.



Proper entry soon.

Adventures in Berlin: good times at the beer tent

I forgot to include this little video Kelly took in my Fat Tire entry the other day. It was so much fun watching people of all ages dancing on tables.

Mahon Falls, take 2

I finally signed up for a YouTube account so I could upload the video I mentioned in my last post. (The quality is much better when I play it on Quicktime. Boo.)

holiday weekend in Tipperary

Seeing as I can't stand drunken rowdies and all the noise, stench, broken glass, and damage to public property they leave in their wake, I make a point of getting far away from city pubs on St. Paddy's Day. This year, my friend Seanan was kind enough to invite me and several other friends down to Tipperary for the holiday weekend, and we had a couple of nice long walks in the Silvermines and around Lough Derg (on the Clare side, just north of Killaloe). Seanan also cooked the most amazing dinner ever and we were all very jolly:



I didn't bring a camera on this recent Silvermines walk, but here are a couple of photos from the first walk back in October:

Looks utterly peaceful, right? Well...our walk this past weekend was downright creepy. Seanan's mom dropped the four of us (Seanan, me, Charlene, and Clare) off and would meet us back in the parking lot in two hours. Maybe 45 minutes into our walk, we came upon an SUV on the road (which was barricaded at the entrance--these roads were meant to be vehicle-free, for the most part). Two young men emerged from the brush with an empty wheelbarrow, and while we were still a good bit off they put the wheelbarrow into the back and drove off. We were unnerved by this--what could they have dumped out here?--and after poking around in the brush and finding no corpses or broken-down washing machines we decided to turn around so we wouldn't run into those shady dudes again (and we had to turn around eventually anyway). We were joking that they might come back and kill us all for being witnesses...and then we heard the SUV approaching again! It was so quiet we could hear it coming from a ways off, and I decided to jump into the brush and hide behind a tree. I got made fun of afterwards, of course, and it was pointed out that if they had been intending to gun us down surely they'd have noticed there were only three out of four on the road.

But that wasn't even the creepy part. On our way down the hill to meet Seanan's mom, we leaned over a stone bridge perched maybe twenty feet over a little stream, and what do you suppose we saw? A dead dog. It was huge and black and its fur was slick with rainwater. We couldn't see its head or rear because they were covered by one of those industrial-strength garbage bags. Why in God's name didn't its owner give it a proper burial? It led us to wonder if the poor black dog had met its end by unnatural means. I wanted to call someone--at home you'd call the public works people and someone would come by in a yellow truck to pick it up--but Seanan said it was unlikely anyone would do anything about it. The whole situation was odd, and vaguely sinister. I've seen plenty of dead animals before--sheep carcasses on the beach, having fallen off the cliff above; and all the bodies of birds, seals, and lizards forever proving Darwin right on the Galapagos—but in those cases there wasn't anything more troubling than 'survival of the fittest' at work. Somebody put that dead dog in the stream. It was premeditated. It freaked me out.

Other than that—hey! We had a lovely weekend.