Then we went to the House of the Seven Gables…

…and did you like it?

–

P.S. Yeah, I know. Don’t worry.

Infidel Izmir.

The Family Seat & The Place of Blood.

From the Abyss comes Chorozon.

And I said to her, in November, walking out of the Asian Art museum, “You know what? Fuck these people in America who think they understand Rumi, who view him as the Accepting House Muslim of Peace & Love! I sure as hell don’t understand the Sufi relationship to Islam, and if I don’t, then how can they?”

And I still don’t.

…Mahluk, please.

All right, I’m out– gone to the Middle East.

Assuming I won’t have a chance to update, but could be wrong.

Back in May.

A new view of Old Gomorrah: Alcatraz. Halloween 2008.

From the wall of the San Francisco Public Library, Third Floor, near the Page Desk:

original:

also:

Everything is the same, nothing is new. The city as an unchanging entity. Or as W. Axl Rose once sang, way back before he had the therapy you’re soon to hear on Chinese Democracy, “The streets don’t change / but maybe the names.”

Speaking of forever changes: perhaps it is the undue influence of Dave Sim’s glamourpuss– which, despite a queasy veer towards sexism/misogynism/whatever in issue number two, is the best pamphlet comic of the last few years– but I have become increasingly fascinated by the photorealist newspaper strips of the 1940s/50s/60s. The volumes of Leonard Starr’s Mary Perkins on Stage available from Classic Comics are a step in the right direction, but in this era in which every minor cartoonish strip gets gorgeous hardcovers, can’t us decent folk get a little Rip Kirby?

Other things which require collection pronto: new, readable translations of Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese, Pat Tourett and Jenny Butterworth’s Tiffany Jones and Jorge Longeron’s Friday Foster. C’mon Comics Industry, get cracking!

Also, breaking news: the sweetest post ever. By… Warren Ellis?

As we are wont to do, me and Andy Harrison got together and opted to journey towards one of the increasingly rare instances of Weird Garbage in Rhode Island which neither of us had previously visited; this turned out to be Hanton City in Smithfield. Directions from the Internet were awful and seemingly authored by drunken half-wits and cut-rate Englishmen, but we managed a sense of our intended destination.

The above map shows our point of entry: Lydia Ann Road off Douglas Pike, Route 7, in Smithfield. The thick red transparent line denotes the main route traveling through the woods; it quickly turns dirt. According to Topographical Maps and Internet Gossip, at some point it becomes Hanton City Trail. This is not to be mistaken with the other Hanton City Trail, an actual paved road that leads to nothing except Historical Cemetery 62 and ugly houses; there has been some confusion between Cemetery 62 and Cemetery 8, which I’ve put on the map. They’re different places. Same family name, though.

As of this writing, the satellite image on Google Maps is older than that of Live Maps. Thus, it lacks any trace of the dominant feature of my helpful illustration: the enormous new road and construction that has been driven straight through the woods. It is quite possible that this has eliminated much of Hanton City. The construction is visible here, sort of, but what we found was far more advanced and complete.

Our first mistake was in ever being born. Our second was in visiting the area on the hottest day of Summer. We’re talking about 99 to 101 degrees and me and Harrison wandering around in the woods, looking for a Spook City that may not even exist; it’s unclear if we found anything. There were a few walls and apparent foundations, but they were so covered in debris and tree branches that it’s difficult to ascertain if they represented the real Hanton City, or were just old stone fences left over from Halcyon Dayes of Yore. The low point of this sweating exhaustathon was, as may be inferred from my illustration, when I got the car stuck; we’re talking full on stuck, with me revving the engine and Harrison pushing the stupid thing and the wheels not getting traction on the gravel. There was a snow shovel in the trunk, so we managed to dig our way out of the predicament; again, this was in 100 degree heat. Madness set in and we wandered around for another two or so hours, finding little but trash.

The function of this post is twofold: to provide a better reference for people seeking out Spook City, and to reflect on how incredibly strange Rhode Island remains, even after decades of being in its thrall. It’s hard to imagine a place outside of early 80s computer RPGs where a person can hunt for a ruined city hidden in the woods while being three minutes away from relatively populated civilization and about ten from the state capital. Though some unsatisfactory attempts have been made, the remains an amazing book to be written (by someone other than me) that is a Weird New Jersey-esque tour up and down the Ocean State’s weird places and marvels. So. Get popping, someone.

Back now. “Hollywood.” After 15 or 17 or 2000 days of travel– the original plan was a week long stay in Oregon with elly, purpose: a lovely wedding (not mine)– somehow, after the ceremony and gathering of folk and a delusional wander around Eugene in which a man uncovered the heretofore ignored works of Ross MacDonald and an astonishing mid-sixties copy of (our hero) Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, I ended up in San Francisco. Even this ballooned for extra days, the city unwilling to allow a release according to my improvized schedule. I am tired. I want to hide for a million years and yet things is mad tricky; I leave again Sunday and have stupid Plans for the current week. Life, like love, comes in spurts.

A Late Nite Sojourn to The Old Stone Mill/Viking Tower of Newport, Rhode Island.

From the recent archives of the black magic wielder.

(Some say a witch.)

King Diamond Looking Latino Band, Glasslands, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, December 19th, 2007, 11pm:

George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal, Washington Heights, Manhattan, NY, December
21, 2007, 10:57PM:

elly jonez, old pal and romantic interest.

Astrologer, relentless self-chronicler and general paranoiac. Owns an amazing oversized copy of Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages. Rooster-God with Snake legs. Original Camwhore & one of the first SuicideGirls.

My camera went missing, so this is stolen from her flickr account. At an ultra-Yuppie conference in the Getty Center. That dinosaur costs $300 and hugs.

Just turned 30.

Four days, three nights on Kenmore Ave.

2 Live N Die in LA.

December 5th, 2007 thru December 8th, 2007.

WINTER TOUR ‘08 BEGINS HERE, PRELUDE:

Harvey Etter, Special Correspondent, Jersey Prophet & old textfiles guy. Formerly “The Master.” On the razor’s edge of 30.

Corner of Hollywood Boulevard & Gower, having just tread upon many a Celluloid Hero.

4:15pm, Saturday, December 1st, 2007.

More on the Dark Swamp.

Here’s a quick illustrated map. Find the Southern half of Willie Woodhead Rd (3), which is paved but then becomes a dirt trail. (Incidentally, this was marked on the Dept. of Wildlife & Fish’s topographical map as Dark Swamp Road.) Follow the trail north until one sees a very wide and noticeable dirt clearing on the left (1). There’s room enough here to park your car. Walk into the clearing, and follow the leftmost trail into the woods. You’ll go down a hill. This gets you to the woods before the Dark Swamp. These lands are protected by the Federal & State governments, which in theory means there’s no issue of trespassing. There are orange flags tied to trees, marking the land, but the forest is dark enough that the flags aren’t visible until you stumble into one. Continue walking in the general direction west. You’ll get to the Swamp (2).

It’s very possible that there’s darker swamp than we found. A useful tool would be a GPS coordinate thingy; the actual location of the Swamp is 41.89070, -71.76260.

Although the area looks smallish on the map, when you’re on the ground, it seems giant and the woods are very, very thick and very, very dense. Try not to get lost. Or lecture your friend regarding a Fortean Times article that you’d read about the etymology of the word Panic being related to the feeling induced by the Great God Pan while one is lost in a wood.

The footprint of Howard Phillips Lovecraft in Rhode Island is surprisingly shallow: a plaque on the campus of Brown, a headstone & not much else.

But the discerning eye will find many traces of the gent from Angell Street. Often it happens with your knowledge– like returning home as a new Ulysses and being offered Lovecraft’s apartment at 10 Barnes Street and instead taking the one where Donald Wandrei wrote part of The Web of Easter Island. Other times, you find out years later– like discovering that your high school was on the same grounds as Lovecraft’s grammar school.

It accumulates over the years and then there’s nary a thing Lovecraftian you haven’t seen or done.

But there’s always more. We had, in particular, focused on the Dark Swamp of Chepachet, RI, the hardest to find of all Lovecraftian locations. In the summer of 1923, Lovecraft and the Eddys hunted for the swamp and could not find it– this mystery resonates through the letters and the first wave of remembrances & grows into a thing discussed in whispers and scholarly articles. For years I tried to uncover its location– but it wasn’t until USGS Topographical maps became easily searchable that I was able to find and pinpoint its very location.

USGS maps only tell one thing: where a place is, not how to get there. I had given my erstwhile chum, Andrew Harrison, a Google Maps location of the swamp’s GPS coordinates– he’d printed out some half-assed directions, but these were useless. So we drove around Glocester, RI desperately trying to get there from here. We trespassed private property. We mistook White’s Pond for the swamp. At last, we found a Department of Fish & Wildlife topographical map posted to a board and realized exactly what we, as men, had to do: drive the car down a dirt path, find a place to park, and then walk a mile in the woods.

And then, finally, we were there: the dark swamp. Dark because it’s wooded. Light hardly penetrates the dense canopy. A swamp because it’s disgustingly wet and covered in a large moss bed that attacks every living thing around it. It kills trees. It grows mushrooms. We saw no monster. But we had done it; we had gone to the most randomly inaccessible Lovecraftian location that we could– and only one jackass had fallen in the muck.

Me.

Update: Go here for directions to the swamp.

Live & oh so direct from Boston and Cambridge, our man in red, typhoid free & my Best Friend, who believes that the speed limit on Mass Ave is “I dunno, 100.” Even if life is a hideous game 80 years short and you can’t count on nothing or nobody, at least Arafat Kazi will dance for you once every summer.

IZOD:

When the gypsy calls, the caravan comes and some times you’re the one driving. Went to the Getty Villa today, probably the single greatest thing in SoCal– had one last go round with the items to be returned to Italy & seen no more on our foreign shores.

Goodbye Griffins, goodbye!

Also found on my camera, picture of spider that had been in my apartment some time ago:

The drive from Los Angeles to San Simeon is best described in one word: long. For a normal person, it takes four hours. Because I am the master of either space & time or the gas pedal, I did it in three and then had to add on an hour of nothing to get our prebooked tour. The return trip hit traffick around Santa Barbara & had me doing the full four. By that time I got into the Valley I kept awake only by reminding myself that if I crashed and died, I’d miss the new episode of Doctor Who. Even this, a powerful enticement, was only operating at half-efficacy. Still, I live.

The Hearst Castle is what it is: another major California attraction that once was a rich man’s home. The grand follies of the fabulously wealthy are interesting places to tour, and the primarily Southern European/Mediterranean exteriors of San Simeon contrasted against the Northern European/Gothic interiors make it feel like you’re stepping in and out of two completely different worlds. Superbly disconcerting. My interior photos didn’t turn out– no flash and no time to get the settings right.

After the tour & National Geographic propaganda film (no mention of Marion Davies?) we got lunch and sat around feeding potato chips to a murder of crows. Possibly the best part of the day.

There was an Indian family on the tour & they broke into the most Deadwood-esque dialogue I’ve ever heard.

Mother: “That man, he died. That man Hearst.”

11-Year Son: “Is he in Heaven? Was he a good man or a bad one?”

Father: “That’s for Jesus to judge. It’s not our place. It depends on his deeds.”

Hangdai.

A last remnant from the visit Back East: pictures of a trip taken to Waterbury, CT’s infamous Holy Land, U.S.A.

Wake up 7:40am, 30 minutes late, shower, dress, drive to Hollywood, grab friend + Starbucks, drive 4 hours to Hearst Castle, spend 5 hours at Hearst Castle, drive 4 hours home, drop off friend, get Taco Bell, get to apartment, watch Doctor Who (S3E11), shocked by Doctor Who, find out other friend has been in accident, pass out, sleep.

Pix tomorrow.