Memories Dreams Reflections 15: Some Childhood Art

Towards the end of my grade school era, I found myself accepted into Aspire, which was a kind of creative arts program only open to students who seemed to display somewhat more advanced aptitudes when it came to the arts. What this meant in practical terms was that I was admitted entry to the advanced art classes, which was nice because sometimes we took field trips to the middle school (and, once in high school, field trips to RISD). It wasn't really until middle school in the early 1990's that my art skills started blossoming, but I still have some early examples of the art I was doing in grade school, back in the 1980's. Here's a small sampling of them: 

A Butterfly

A Skeleton (this was from the 4th grade) 

Illustration to accompany a book report on The War of the Worlds

Godzilla! 

Crude illustration of Christopher Columbus 

Where's Waldo inspired scene (this was from the 5th grade) 

Memories Dreams Reflections 14: Alice

Before I can talk about Lewis Carroll's Alice books, first I need to talk about Windham Classics (a company I briefly mentioned back in entry #6 in this series, the one devoted to video and computer games). A subsidiary of Spinnaker Software, this Cambridge, Massachusetts-based game developer was founded in 1984 and had a very short shelf life, going defunct sometime in the mid-1980's. In their brief existence, they still found the time to publish five adventure games for the Commodore 64 and the Apple II (most of which fell into the "Point and Click" category), that were aimed at younger children (and all of which were based on famous children's novels). Their best-known game was their first one, Below the Root, which came out in 1984. Developed by Dale Disharoon (who sadly passed away in 2008) and with some frankly stunning art by William Groetzinger, the game was a sequel to Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Green Sky Trilogy (which I've sadly never read, for some bizarre reason): in fact, she even helped write the game. It's now considered one of the first important open world/Metroidvania games, in that many areas of the game are inaccessible until you obtain new items/powers, meaning much backtracking is involved. 

I won't bore you to death with too many details about the game (as you can easily find such information online: this blog article on it is especially informative: https://blog.stahlmandesign.com/below-the-root-a-story-a-computer-game-and-my-lifelong-obsession/), but I will say that as a kid, playing this game on the Commodore 64 in the early 1980's was a very magical experience for me. The world of Green-sky (as depicted in the game) seemed vast and mysterious to me, and I loved the game's graphical style. I never got very far in it (heck, I never even got below the root itself!), though I did finally complete it many years later, via emulator, and with some help from GameFAQS. Anyway, below is a map of the complete game world (taken from the aforementioned blog), which I still think is a thing of beauty: 

In 1985 Windham Classics released their 4th game, Alice in Wonderland, again for the Commodore 64 and the Apple II (and once again, I got the Commodore 64 version): the game is an adaptation of the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll. Like Below the Root I never got super-far in the game, but many years later (again like with Below the Root) I finally beat it thanks to an emulator and GameFAQS. Here are some screenshots of the game that I took during that playthrough: 

Essentially, you play as Alice. The game is roughly divided into two halves, with the first half corresponding to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, while the second half corresponds to Through the Looking-Glass. And although some liberties are taken with the story, for the most part it follows the sequence of events in the novels pretty well, and almost all the major characters make appearances in the game in one form or another. To progress various riddles must be solved, items must be gained, and Alice also needs to learn several songs. Like Below the Root this is essentially a non-violent game: there are creatures that are antagonistic to Alice (such as bees and pack rats), but the worse they'll do is briefly knock her down or (temporarily) steal her items. The true enemy in the game is the clock: you have 51 game days to get Alice out of Wonderland, before the Red King wakes up and the game ends. But really, if you know what you're doing, it should take no longer than 15 "days."

Obviously the subject matter of the game was something that appealed to me as a kid: the premise of playing as Alice and actually walking around and interacting with the inhabitants of Wonderland captivated me, and I was fascinated by the bright colorful graphics. This game and Below the Root were the first games I played that really showed me the magic that some video/computer games can achieve: the ability to temporarily step into a world different from our own.

I don't remember exactly what year my parents got the game for my brothers and I: I want to say it was either the year of its release or 1986. What matters is that I loved that game as well, so much so that my parents also got me a small paperback novel containing Carroll's Alice books shortly thereafter (at least, I think I played the game before I read the book). So I must have been around 5 or 6 at the time. The Alice books weren't the first books I ever read, but they WERE the first books I ever loved, and to this day I consider myself a big fan of them, to the extent that I'll give them a reread every couple of years. I just loved Carroll's characters and the overall story, and of course, adored the iconic John Tenniel illustrations.  Over the course of my life I've slowly amassed a decent collection of Alice in Wonderland-related memorabilia, mainly books but also some DVDs, games and dolls/figurines, which I keep atop my bureau (though I have to dismantle it for one month every December to make room for my Cat Nativity manger scene). I thought today would be a good time to share some pictures of my collection: 

A general overview of the main collection

Detail of some of my Alice books

Some more Alice/Alice-related books 

Back in the 80's and 90's, due to lack of space in our living quarters, our father would often break down the boxes of our video and computer games, keeping just the carts/disks themselves, the instruction booklets (which sometimes got lost), and the front box cover. In hindsight, not the smartest of moves, but at the time none of us had any idea how valuable such games would be in an intact state in the future. I still have the front box cover and disk of my old Alice game, but the instruction booklet and the character chart that came with the original game are long lost. However, this month (January 2023) I finally got my hands on an intact version of the old Commodore 64 game, purchased from a Canadian dealer on eBay. Though not sealed, the box itself is still in very good shape, and has all its original contents, including TWO of the character charts! I now consider this to be the crown jewel of my Alice collection. 

Finally, here are two pictures of my very first copy of the Alice books, published by Watermill Classics in 1983. The cover art is somewhat uninspiring and it's missing many of the original John Tenniel illustrations (including the Jabberwocky one!), but I've always said that if one could choose one last book to read at the end of their life, I'd probably read this edition, because I like the idea of the symmetry of it I suppose: Alice was there for me near the start of my life, I'd like the idea of her being there for me one last time at the end of it, to guide me through the Last Dark. 

"A boat, beneath a sunny sky

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July

Children three that nestle near,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Pleased a simple tale to hear

Long has paled that sunny sky;

Echoes fade and memories die;

Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die;

Ever drifting down the stream

Lingering in the golden gleam

Life, what is it but a dream?"

-Lewis Carroll 

Finally, here's a picture of Siouxsie Sioux as Alice:

Memories Dreams Reflections 13: Childhood Music (1980's)

When I was growing up I showed little inclination for developing my own musical tastes. For the first 17 years or so of my life I mostly just listened to the same music that my parents listened to. It wasn’t until I was around 18 or so, during my senior year of high school and my first year of college, that I slowly began developing my own musical tastes and blossoming into my own. During the 1980’s my parents would sometimes watch MTV and I would enjoy watching the music videos with them: the first song I ever fell in love with was the 1981 song “I Am a Camera” by The Buggles, the chorus of which I would sing incessantly. I also had an inexplicable fascination with John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy": during the fiddle section of the song I would pretend to play the fiddle part using a toy stethoscope, if memory serves. But for the most part I just listened to what my parents were listening to back then, which was primarily 70’s progressive rock, groups like Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer (or ELP for short). 

ELP’s 1973 LP Brain Salad Surgery in particular was a favorite; I loved the H.R. Giger art on the LP cover and the music itself fascinated me, especially the songs “Jerusalem” (an adaptation of Sir Hubert Parry’s hymn “Jerusalem,” itself an adaptation of the short William Blake poem known as “And did those feet in ancient time”… it’s perhaps no surprise that in later years Blake would become one of my favorite poets and artists) and “Toccota,” the latter being an adaptation of the 4^th movement of Alberto Ginastera’s 1^st Piano Concerto (1961). In Edward Macan’s exhaustive Endless Enigma: A Musical Biography of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (Open Court, 2006), Mr. Macan expresses his belief that “Toccota” anticipates 90’s industrial music (therefore, my interest in this song as a child probably paved the way for my later interest in abrasive electronic music). Mr. Macan also opines that the song is ELP’s greatest classical arrangement. My favorite part of the song begins at the 5:05 mark (and stretches out until the 6:18 mark), when Carl Palmer begins playing his infamous synthesized percussion solo, using a special drum synthesizer device. It’s hard to describe it with words, but it sounds like a combination of a malfunctioning computer and the wail of an army of air raid klaxons. When my father used to play that album when I was a child, I used to enjoy lying down on the couch for that part of the song and closing my eyes, and in my mind’s inner vision, I saw images of enormous robots engaged in battle in the center of a city on fire, an antemundane ecpyrosis. Or I should say, these images were summoned by Palmer’s innovative and experimental drum solo.

Some other records my father enjoyed playing would include Fragile by Yes. Another great album… when I was a kid I especially liked the songs “We Have Heaven” (perhaps because it mentioned the March Hare, which instantly made me think of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books) and “South Side of the Sky.” Sometimes he would play the song “In the Court of the Crimson King” by King Crimson, which was another beloved track. A greatest hits album by The Moody Blues would often get a lot of airplay: my favorite track to listen to off that one was “Question.” And it would be remiss of me not to mention his adoration for Supertramp’s Breakfast in America album. I found the cover art for this album to be tacky in the supreme but it did have some songs on it that I liked, especially “Goodbye Stranger” (“Take The Long Way Home” being a good one as well). Still, his adulation of Neil Young and The Who never really rubbed off on me.

My mother was also a big fan of bands like ELP and Yes, but she did have some musical tastes of her own. She really loved The Police, and also the nascent solo albums of Sting. My siblings and I quite liked listening to those albums: Sting’s first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985), was especially beloved by us, and I think it’s a classic example of 80’s New Wave Art Rock. In fact, if there’s one album that I would say defined my childhood, it would probably be that one. I recall that my siblings and I loved to dance to the title track, which was a short instrumental song. We actually developed a special dance for this song, in which we would stomp around in a circle with our arms outstretched above our heads, like ghouls in a Castlevania game. Another song off the record that fascinated me at the time was “We Work the Black Seam.” I had no idea what the song was about (years later I found out that it was about the 1984-1985 UK Miner’s Strike), but something about the words “The Black Seam” seemed magical in my mind, and I tried to conceptualize just what exactly the Black Seam was: I visualized it to look like a gigantic and shadowy underwater trench teeming with glowing nuclear waste and inhabited by grotesque phosphorescent aquatic monsters.

Years later, during my Goth phase in college, I would look back on the music of my childhood with an air of mortification, and tried to distance myself from it as much as I could. But as I’ve grown older I’ve reconciled myself with most of it (well, with the exception of John Denver, whose music I still don’t really like). Granted, I’ll never put it on the same plateau as I do groups like Siouxsie & the Banshees and Nine Inch Nails, but I wouldn’t say it all sucks. On the prog rock front, it probably helps matters that David Tibet, the mastermind of one of my favorite bands, Current 93, has praised the music of Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. To say nothing of the fact that Thomas Ligotti, my favorite living horror writer, has given props to King Crimson’s “In the Court of the Crimson King.” In The Book of Lists: Horror (Harper, 2008: edited by Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and my friend Scott Bradley), Thomas Ligotti provides his list of “Ten Classics of Horror Poetry,” and #9 on this list is Peter Sinfield’s “In the Court of the Crimson King,” where Ligotti notes that “One of the great examples of the Symbolists’ rule that poetry does not have to make sense to make an impression. In this case, the impression is that of sardonic grandeur.” (a fun fact: Ligotti’s user name at the Thomas Ligotti Online forums is The Yellow Jester, which is taken from the lyrics to the aforementioned King Crimson song). And I do admire Sting as a songwriter: many of his songs have a scholarly and literary air that I enjoy, and I like that a lot of his songs tell mini-stories, complete with characters and narratives. 

I should mention here that even back in the day, when it came to prog rock I often found the album covers more interesting than the music itself. In regards to ELP I’ve already mentioned the Giger cover art for Brain Salad Surgery but in point of fact I liked the cover art for the group’s Tarkus album even more (though as a child, my father, knowing how much I liked the Tarkus character, lied to me and told me that Tarkus was the good guy and the Manticore was the bad guy, and how Tarkus defeats the Manticore at the end, when in fact it's really the other way around). And the album covers that Roger Dean did for Yes are incredible. When it came to Yes my dad seemed to prefer the group’s longer songs (like “At the Gates of Delirium”) that were always changing and never settling into a groove, but I found them a little too frenetic for me. Hell, even some of the Yes band members felt the same way. In a statement made to Tim Morse in 1995 (as recounted in Morse’s book Yesstories, which was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1996), Chris Squire (the bassist for Yes) is quoted as saying, “Repetition is an important part of rock or pop music. It is the restating of the theme, I suppose, in classical terms. You can’t give people too much new material. We have made this mistake in the past as with Topographic Oceans, making things too varied and scattered.” I myself enjoy music that is very repetitious, both listening to it and composing it myself on the computer. Properly done, it is useful in establishing an almost hypnotic trance state of Dionysian ecstasy. Repetition is what keeps us alive: repetition of heartbeats, repetition of breaths, and so on. Is it any wonder that Andy Warhol is my favorite visual artist? *

* (Much of the above was written back in 2017. Since then I've listened to Tales From Topographic Oceans multiple times and now feel it's one of Yes' best albums). 

Memories Dreams Reflections 12: Friends and Werewolves

In an earlier installment of this series I stated that there were around 26 parts to play in The Case of the Giggling Goblin, which I suppose was one of the reasons why it is an ideal play for a grade school class to perform: I forget exactly how many students there were in my 4^th grade classroom but I assume it must have been around 24 or so. In other words, everyone had to play a part, my friends included. Maybe I should take a few moments to talk about my friends at that time in greater detail (though sadly, I can no longer remember what parts they played in the production).

My best friend was a boy I'll refer to as J. He was a little shorter than I was, with short black hair and a friendly face, and of Irish-American descent. He was something of a misfit, always getting into trouble and struggling with his grades, and I’m sure that my parents must have seen him as a bad influence, what with my being a good timid Catholic boy and all, but one thing that drew us together was a shared interest in the macabre (we were both talented artists as well). We were obsessed with monsters and horror, though I was always more interested in theoretical horror and abstract gore, whereas J was more interested in the actuality of it (today, one would say that he was an aficionado of Body Horror). He used to collect these Topps Fright Flicks trading cards, and would try to gross me out by showing them to me (as some of the film stills on the front of the cards were quite bloody and graphic). I remember he also used to go to the movies and sneak into showings for films from the Friday the 13^th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, films that he was obviously too young to be watching. That was one of the big aesthetic differences between us, in that I gravitated more towards the campy Japanese monster movies whereas he was drawn to bloody 80’s slasher films like a night-gaunt to a pharos. I remember that J had a hyperactive imagination, one that was even more vivid than mine; once he found a book on black magic in the school library (Gary Jennings’ Black Magic, White Magic: I briefly mentioned this book in the entry dealing with my grade school's library), and in this book there was a chapter on werewolves, which then became his obsession (another difference between us: as you know by now I tended to favor vampires when it came to the classic archetypal monsters). Once J became so obsessed with the idea that he himself would transform into a werewolf that he became worried that he might accidentally hurt or even kill his friends, so one day he took a red magic marker and drew a crude upside-down pentagram first on the palm of my left hand, then on my right, and he claimed to me that these marks would protect me from him should he ever become a werewolf. When I got home from school that day and showed these markings on my hands to my mother, she freaked out (perhaps she was worried that I had gotten indoctrinated into a Satanist cult) and promptly had me wash them off. I hadn’t known that an upside-down pentagram was a symbol associated with the Devil, and for awhile after that incident I worried that I had opened my body up to Satanic possession.

Another good friend of mine was a boy who I'll refer to as K. He was a tall kid with blue eyes, a freckled face, and long red hair (by high school, he had started tying his hair into a ponytail). He always dressed in black and was super-obsessed with metal bands, even back in his Bernon Heights days. Like J and me K was both a talented artist and pretty morbid, almost borderline fixated on death: he almost always wore black clothes, now that I think back to it. He was something of a juvenile delinquent as well. But he was always nice to me. I remember how we shared an art class in the 9^th grade, during our freshman year at Woonsocket High School. This art class was assigned to take part in some kind of Holocaust memorial event, and we were all tasked with creating art to commemorate the Holocaust. One of the girls in the class did a drawing that was a close-up of a young girl’s crying face, and in the reflection of one of her eyes one could see a swastika. Another classmate drew a picture of a Jewish man running a marathon; on each side of the race track were a long line of Nazis with their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute, their hands all touching and thus forming an arch above the Jewish marathon runner (I’m pretty sure that this contribution was the entry that won). Do you want to know what K drew for it? A grisly Bosch-like illustration of Nazi soldiers committing atrocities left and right: executing people by firing squad, loading Jews into vans and then setting the vans on fire, you name it. The centerpiece of the drawing was a tall Nazi soldier holding up a Jewish child by its neck and slicing its throat. That was too much for the art teacher, who told him to change it; so K erased the kid’s lower body so that it looked as if the Nazi were just holding up a severed head.

I never shared any classes with J in high school because, thanks to his poor grades, he had to stay back a grade (I think the same thing eventually happened with K in high school as the 9^th grade was the last time we shared classes). I gradually fell out of contact with them as we all drifted away to our own lives. I did bump into J in the early 2000’s, when I was doing a shift at the local Stop & Shop supermarket, where I was working part-time back then. J told me he had converted to Islam after going through a rough patch. He eventually got married, and even had a child at one point. But then he and his wife got divorced and I guess he went through another rough patch as he ended up homeless (I didn’t know all this when I briefly friended him on Facebook in 2012). The last time I saw him was in 2014, when I ran into him hanging outside of the city library. He didn’t mention his troubles with the law but he told me he was homeless and that he was living near the river behind the library. We weren’t friends on Facebook anymore by this point because I had blocked him after I had seen him make a homophobic comment to one of his other friends on there. I wasn’t sure what to say to him, really, and it was all quite awkward. We weren’t kids anymore. The last time I checked out his Facebook page (in 2017) I saw that he had remarried, so hopefully he’s turned his life around.

I also checked out K's Facebook page. Imagine my surprise when I found out that he was married now, with two kids, and working as a dental lab technician. In a way I’m disappointed with him. I was always under the expectation that he’d end up becoming a serial killer or a cannibal as an adult or something. That he’s settled into such a normal bourgeois existence is something of a let-down for me.

Memories Dreams Reflections 11: The Hill

In my 4th entry in this ongoing series, the one dealing with Bernon Heights, my old elementary school (among other topics), I briefly made mention to a hill located on the grounds of said elementary school that was the source of much lurid speculation when I was a student there. I also mentioned that I would elaborate on this in a future entry. Here, then, is the promised elaboration. 

So, to briefly set things up, I'll repeat a bit about what I wrote about the grounds of my elementary school. In front of (and also wrapping around) the school there was a sprawling paved area/parking lot that served as the main recess area/playground, and beyond this was a large field with a small baseball diamond. There was also a big rock near the border that divided the field from the parking lot (a rock that my friends and I enjoyed playing on), and this rock was located near the base of a very long series of tree-covered hills that bordered one entire side of the field, almost like a natural wall, and leading up to a forest-y conservation area: this is what we referred to as "The Hill," and it was most easily ascended at the point nearest the big rock. Not that I ever climbed it myself, because going up there was off-limits to us students (though of course, one always spotted older students sneaking up there). 

During my years as a student at Bernon Heights, this hill, and especially what was imagined to be at the top of it, was the source of many sinister rumors. The older kids used to tell us that at the top of the hill there was a statue of a monstrous dog, and beyond this statue was a clearing where one could see a small shack, and that this shack was the home of a psychotic axe-killer and his large, demonic pet dog, a dog that could swallow children whole. Naturally, my friends and I fell for this cock and bull story hook, line and sinker (but then again, I’d never been up to the top of the hill myself, so who knew?). One of my younger brothers’ friends did an illustration once of what he thought this psychopath looked like: a crude sketch of a shirtless and musclebound freak holding an axe whose blade was dripping blood.

In March of 2020, during the COVID lockdown, I would frequently go on long walks around my old neighborhood, when the weather was mild and I felt in the mood for exercise. One day, on March 26th of 2020, I took a nostalgic detour from my usual route and began walking around the Bernon Heights school area. Naturally I went to the field to see my old friend, the big rock. When I was a kid the top of the rock just reached around my eye level... so it felt very weird to be looking DOWN at it, 30 years later, and seeing how it was nowhere near as large as I remembered it being: or maybe I had just grown. I then looked up at the hill, and began remembering all the scary stories I had been told about it when I was a kid. Standing at the base of the hill that day, I suddenly felt compelled to climb to the top and see for myself what was up there, something I'd never done in my entire life. It wasn't a particularly difficult climb (even for someone as un-athletic as me), being maybe 20-30 feet high or so, and not super-steep. At the top I found myself in a clearing, large rock-strewn field, surrounded by trees... a quiet and peaceful environment, with no human habitations in sight (and certainly no statues of demonic dogs). Yet all the same I realized that the place had the potential for darkness, and there was something almost TWIN PEAKS-y about it: one could easily imagine something horrible happening out there in the dark heart of the woods... I guess what I'm trying to say is that while the reality of the place was nowhere near as sinister as my childhood projections of it were, it had an undeniable aura that got my imagination working (I don't know if any satyrs or fauns live in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, but if they DID, I could imagine encountering one in such a spot). After carefully climbing back down the hill I headed back home and on the way back home I passed by a mailman and the mailman smiled at me and said, "Beautiful day out, isn't it?" and I agreed with him as I went on my merry way.

I also had a camera on hand with me that day so I took some pictures of the clearing at the top of the hill, which I'll now share below: