I. DRUIDS AT YOUR DOORSTEP
[ Now playing on the Severe Trauma Sounds... "Silver Shamrock" Commercial (23,399 of 36,963) by Tommy Lee Wallace from Halloween III: Season Of The Witch ]
"I do love a good joke and this is the best ever, a joke on the children. But there's a better reason... you don't really know much about Halloween. You thought no further than the strange custom of having your children wear masks and go out begging for candy...
It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands, and we'd be waiting in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal, and the dead might be looking in to sit by our fires of turf. Halloween, the festival of Samhain! The last great one took place three thousand years ago, when the hills ran red with the blood of animals and children. It was part of our world, our craft. To us, it was a way of controlling our environment. It's not so different now -- it's time again. In the end, we don't decide these things, you know. The planets do. They're in alignment, and it's time again. The world's going to change tonight...I'm glad you'll be able to watch it. And, Happy Halloween."
-- Conal Cochran, as played by Dan O'Herlihy, in Halloween III: Season Of The Witch
It has been an amazing season's end, All Hallow's Eve being my favorite celebration of the year. And my thoughts often turn to Ireland during this time, the Celtic Samhain being the prime inspiration for our modern Halloween. Simply put, the Gaelic festival was the ritual observation of the end of the fruitful harvest, or "lighter half", of the year - and the beginning of the "darker half". It was (and in some circles, is still) believed that the border between the living and the dead was at its most transparent during this time, since plant and animal death was so prolific at that point in the year.
Though I love the sun and the summer heat, I think I love the winter more, with its occasional thoughts of goodbyes and "nevermores" that one sometimes experiences late at night, with the wind howling in the blackness, and the realization that we only, truly have ourselves to turn to when the lights go out.
But this weekend I have been blessed with so many friends and so much celebration, that it's impossible not to be madly grateful.
One person, in particular, has made my life infinitely more enjoyable in this first year that I've known her. We dated for a couple of weeks when we first met, but then decided that wasn't the best way for us to carry on our friendship. (One of the biggest reasons for this is she wants children, and I don't.) But I still consider her to be my Margarette, and I love her very much. She'll one day make some lucky guy very happy, but for now, we have the absolute best times together. Just one of which was the stellar Halloween party Friday night, where I had one of the greatest times of my life as a member of the undead, covered head-to-toe in gore, wearing only a pair of short, tattered pants. More on that later, except to say for now that I reminded myself a bit of the sequence in a recent film fave of mine, Let Me In, wherein Chloe Grace Moretz's character, the vampire "Abby", bleeds profusely from the top of her head when she enters a residence without first being welcomed inside. (I still haven't seen the Swedish film on which this remake is based, called Let the Right One In, but I'm trying hard to, as I hear it's even better than the American version.)
In an unrelated note, my song Headthornes played this evening on my huge, 37,000-track strong Severe Trauma Sounds mix. It was wonderful - and heartrending - to hear the voice of a girl I loved (and still love, but no longer have contact with) many years ago, sampled in key parts of the track. (Just to be perfectly clear, this girl is not Margarette, but rather a love of mine I left back in Phoenix, when I lived there in 2002-2004.)
And I cannot leave this bit of writing without mentioning the amazingly brilliant show by one of my three favorite electronic music acts of all time, Underworld, who played an incredible show last night at San Diego's own 4th & B.
And though I'm now quite a bit tired, I think I'm going to celebrate the crossing over from this lighter half of the season to the darker half by watching the full version of William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. (Maybe, if I'm not too tired.)
I know I'll enjoy this next half year, feeling myself in a more darkened space - like Ichabod Crane almost, but not quite, making it across the Sleepy Hollow Bridge -- where "the dead might be looking in".
"Shame on us, doomed from the start;
May god have mercy on our dirty little hearts.
Shame on us, for all we have done;
And all we ever were, just zeros and ones."
-- Zero-Sum by Nine Inch Nails from the album Year Zero (lyrics by Trent Reznor)
"Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality, but...
There is - unseen by most - an Underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit;
A Dark Side."
-- introduction to the title sequence of Tales From The Darkside by Paul Sparer
"There are no experts. You probably know as much about possession as most priests. Look, your daughter doesn't say she's a demon. She says she's the devil himself."
-- Father Damien Karras as played by Jason Miller in The Exorcist
[ Now playing on the Severe Trauma Sounds... Vox Sketch III by Rise Pig Rise from A Means Of Extraction ]
[ Now playing on the Severe Trauma Sounds... "Silver Shamrock" Commercial (23,399 of 36,963) by Tommy Lee Wallace from Halloween III: Season Of The Witch ]
"I do love a good joke and this is the best ever, a joke on the children. But there's a better reason... you don't really know much about Halloween. You thought no further than the strange custom of having your children wear masks and go out begging for candy...
It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands, and we'd be waiting in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal, and the dead might be looking in to sit by our fires of turf. Halloween, the festival of Samhain! The last great one took place three thousand years ago, when the hills ran red with the blood of animals and children. It was part of our world, our craft. To us, it was a way of controlling our environment. It's not so different now -- it's time again. In the end, we don't decide these things, you know. The planets do. They're in alignment, and it's time again. The world's going to change tonight...I'm glad you'll be able to watch it. And, Happy Halloween."
-- Conal Cochran, as played by Dan O'Herlihy, in Halloween III: Season Of The Witch
It has been an amazing season's end, All Hallow's Eve being my favorite celebration of the year. And my thoughts often turn to Ireland during this time, the Celtic Samhain being the prime inspiration for our modern Halloween. Simply put, the Gaelic festival was the ritual observation of the end of the fruitful harvest, or "lighter half", of the year - and the beginning of the "darker half". It was (and in some circles, is still) believed that the border between the living and the dead was at its most transparent during this time, since plant and animal death was so prolific at that point in the year.
Though I love the sun and the summer heat, I think I love the winter more, with its occasional thoughts of goodbyes and "nevermores" that one sometimes experiences late at night, with the wind howling in the blackness, and the realization that we only, truly have ourselves to turn to when the lights go out.
But this weekend I have been blessed with so many friends and so much celebration, that it's impossible not to be madly grateful.
One person, in particular, has made my life infinitely more enjoyable in this first year that I've known her. We dated for a couple of weeks when we first met, but then decided that wasn't the best way for us to carry on our friendship. (One of the biggest reasons for this is she wants children, and I don't.) But I still consider her to be my Margarette, and I love her very much. She'll one day make some lucky guy very happy, but for now, we have the absolute best times together. Just one of which was the stellar Halloween party Friday night, where I had one of the greatest times of my life as a member of the undead, covered head-to-toe in gore, wearing only a pair of short, tattered pants. More on that later, except to say for now that I reminded myself a bit of the sequence in a recent film fave of mine, Let Me In, wherein Chloe Grace Moretz's character, the vampire "Abby", bleeds profusely from the top of her head when she enters a residence without first being welcomed inside. (I still haven't seen the Swedish film on which this remake is based, called Let the Right One In, but I'm trying hard to, as I hear it's even better than the American version.)
In an unrelated note, my song Headthornes played this evening on my huge, 37,000-track strong Severe Trauma Sounds mix. It was wonderful - and heartrending - to hear the voice of a girl I loved (and still love, but no longer have contact with) many years ago, sampled in key parts of the track. (Just to be perfectly clear, this girl is not Margarette, but rather a love of mine I left back in Phoenix, when I lived there in 2002-2004.)
And I cannot leave this bit of writing without mentioning the amazingly brilliant show by one of my three favorite electronic music acts of all time, Underworld, who played an incredible show last night at San Diego's own 4th & B.
And though I'm now quite a bit tired, I think I'm going to celebrate the crossing over from this lighter half of the season to the darker half by watching the full version of William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. (Maybe, if I'm not too tired.)
I know I'll enjoy this next half year, feeling myself in a more darkened space - like Ichabod Crane almost, but not quite, making it across the Sleepy Hollow Bridge -- where "the dead might be looking in".
"Shame on us, doomed from the start;
May god have mercy on our dirty little hearts.
Shame on us, for all we have done;
And all we ever were, just zeros and ones."
-- Zero-Sum by Nine Inch Nails from the album Year Zero (lyrics by Trent Reznor)
"Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality, but...
There is - unseen by most - an Underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit;
A Dark Side."
-- introduction to the title sequence of Tales From The Darkside by Paul Sparer
"There are no experts. You probably know as much about possession as most priests. Look, your daughter doesn't say she's a demon. She says she's the devil himself."
-- Father Damien Karras as played by Jason Miller in The Exorcist
[ Now playing on the Severe Trauma Sounds... Vox Sketch III by Rise Pig Rise from A Means Of Extraction ]
I'm so glad your Halloween rocked!
Mine, well, not so much. My hard drive on my labtop died.
But your blog made me smile!