A while back, Candy had this wine at an Italian restaurant in Fort Worth. It was Lacryma de Christi del Vesuvio – which translates as “Tear of Christ.” It’s a type of wine produced on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. We had been looking for the stuff all over the Metroplex and nobody had it. They all said the same thing though, “have you looked at Jimmy’s? If anybody has it, they will.” I looked up Jimmy’s Food Store and found it was on the corner of Fitzhugh and Bryan in East Dallas. Today we had some time and drove down there.
I’m familiar with that area. For years I went through there twice a day on my way to work downtown – either driving or on a bus. It was always a poor area, pretty lively, but not the place you wanted to wander around after dark. Lately, though, a lot of the run down old apartments and crude homes have been torn down and the area is primed for redevelopment and gentrification.
Meat Case - Italian Sausage and more
Do you like Nutella? - here's an eleven pound jar for seventy dollars.
Jimmy’s Food Store is a fantastic place. It’s the motherlode of specialty Italian food and wine. I heard the owner talking – he’s been in the same location for forty-two years. The neighborhood has been through some serious changes over that time, but his store has stayed the same. It was crowded with people buying Italian groceries – about a quarter of them speaking Italian.
The store isn’t very big, but holds a lot of goodness, crammed in as tight as can be. The biggest area is dedicated to wine, a huge selection of Italian wines, arranged by region and type. You can learn a lot about wine simply walking the aisles and reading the little articles they have taped to each variety.
Sure enough, they had a couple Lachryma Christi whites (the one red they carry was sold out). There was a Mastroberardino and a Vini Nobilis. We bought one of each and a couple other bottles of wine. We picked up some pasta (Pastosa – imported from Brooklyn!) some cheese and a couple of sauces to go with the pasta.
A couple of Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio
This is the kind of place you don’t want to go when you are hungry. You will buy too much stuff. In addition to the wine and groceries, back next to the meat counter, is a little place where you can order sandwiches. We bought a Cuban and a Muffaletta, some drinks, and took them out to a little table out by the street. The day had started out crisp, but the Texas sun was warming everything up quickly.
Mufalletta - big enough for about three meals
Cuban Sandwich
Seating out on the street.
It was really nice sitting out there on the street eating sandwiches and enjoying the day. There was even live music – a partly blind man, Vincent Van Buren, playing harmonica and singing the blues (and a lot of old Beatles tunes).
According to the DART web site, these bike lids were all bought with a federal grant and meet all homeland security requirements. I had to think about that for a while – I guess it’s harder to hide a bomb in these, compared to the old bike lockers. There are 142 of these all over the system.
I stumbled across this image on one of my favorite art-related web sites, But Does it Float. It’s an illustration by Virgil Finlay – great stuff. I remembered this particular drawing as an illustration for The Tell-Tale Heart, but don’t remember where. Some book sometime long, long ago.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
When I was a kid, I saw a lot of movies. The military bases all had a discount theater showing second-run films – though I didn’t know they were second-run at the time. Back in those days, we didn’t have the access to instant information and I didn’t know about films when they were released. So I would go to the base theater maybe three times a week, a quarter clutched in my paw, to see whatever was showing. I was pretty much an adult before I realized they didn’t play the Star-Spangled Banner (and everyone stand) before every movie. The rating system wasn’t really up to speed either, so it was pretty much hit and miss.
So I saw that they were going to show a movie called The Conqueror Worm. I would have been eleven or twelve. By that time I had read all of Edgar Allen Poe’s work and was familiar with the poem.
The Conqueror Worm, illustration by Frantisek Kupka
The Conqueror Worm – Edgar Allen Poe
LO! ‘t is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years.
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly;
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their condor wings
Invisible Woe.
That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot;
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude:
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And over each quivering form
In human gore imbued.
Out—out are the lights—out all!
And over each quivering form
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
Oh yeah, that’s the stuff pre-teens should be reading, classic literature. It’s a miracle I ever went to sleep.
At any rate, I went to see the movie and was a bit disappointed to find out it had nothing to do with the poem or Poe in any way. It was a British production called Witchfinder General, staring Vincent Price. The title was changed and a tiny bit of Price narration at the beginning and end were tacked on to make a slim connection with American International’s string of cheap Poe pictures, directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. Those movies were campy, almost funny, spoofs of the horror genre. I had seen them already.
What I saw that day was something completely different. It was horrifying.
It’s over forty years later and I still remember most of that film. I remember the opening where the man is building the gallows out in the English Countryside. The basic plot (such as it is), the torture scenes, and the bleak hopeless ending all stuck with me, hanging on from my impressionable youth.
The film pretty much disappeared from existence. There were some bad, grainy, cut VHS transfers, a German version (with added nudity), and various versions here and there, but the original Witchfinder General was out of my reach. I did read about the film, and learn some of its history.
It was directed by Michael Reeves, a promising young director that had a bright future. For now, though, he was making low budget horror films. For Witchfinder General he wanted Donald Pleasance, but the studio insisted on Vincent Price. He thought Price was too broad and hammy and fought to get him to moderate his performance.
The story is that Price hated this and finally bellowed, “I have made eighty four films, what have you done?”
Reeves replied, “I have made two good ones.”
Later, once the film came out, Price understood what Reeves had wanted and went on to acknowledge that it was his best performance – full of quiet, understated evil.
The film received terrible reviews in England. It was considered grotesque. Playwright Alan Bennett said it was “the most persistently sadistic and morally rotten film I have seen. It was a degrading experience by which I mean it made me feel dirty.” In the United States, however, the critics mostly ignored the film and it went on to modest success (no doubt aided by hordes of underaged Poe-reading moviegoers).
Not only was it Vincent Price’s best performance but it was Micael Reeves’ masterpiece. He died at the age of twenty five of a barbituate overdose a few months after the movie’s release.
After discovering this and other juicy details in the intervening decades since I saw the thing, I was filled with a dark desire to see it again. I was glad when a newly restored version showed up on the Netflix Instant Queue. And it was pretty much as I remembered it. A nasty little piece of work.
It did have a surprisingly pleasant soundtrack. The “love theme” is a good example of lush classical music for film.
The movie is a simple story of Matthew Hopkins, a self-appointed Witchfinder General that roamed the countryside during the war between Cromwell and the Royalists. He would torture and execute witches for a fee – and he was good at his job. The hero of the story is a soldier who is in love with a beautiful young woman that falls into the Witchfinder’s clutches.
Most of the graphic horror is in the methods used to determine if the subject is a witch. For your education, here is a little documentary that shows the real historical methods of detecting witchcraft.
Since rewatching Witchfinder General/The Conqueror Worm, I had been thinking about the reaction to the film. It is a horror film, and maybe a tad graphic for its time – but it isn’t anything like a modern Saw or Chainsaw Massacre – though it shows a lot, at the most horrible instants, the camera cuts away. It is nowhere near as graphic as it seems to be, or as its reputation suggests.
It didn’t take much thought to realize the reason. Most horror films (even modern ones) have moments of humor, or reduced tension, or even winking at the camera. They have built in mechanisms to release the tension during the film. Witchfinder General does not do that. It is relentless. It presents an entire world – historically accurate, it talks about the anarchy that reined during the English Civil War – without rules, without mercy, without hope. The gorgeously filmed countryside is populated with evil men preying on the population’s fear, greed, and base desire for blood. There is madness loose in the world and there is no hope in resisting its inevitable victory, one way or another.
That is why the movie is so horrible and horribly effective at what it does.
Candy and I couldn’t afford to go visit Lee in New Orleans for Mardi Gras this year… but we had to go to a parade. Luckily, the Bishop Arts District in Oak Cliff had their Mardi Gras on. Saturday was a run and Sunday was a parade.
It was a blast. Though not up the the standards set in New Orleans by the big Krewes, it was still a fun time. Plus, it was a lot easier to get there, park, and find a place along the parade route (The logistics of going to Carnival in New Orleans is daunting). The parade had a nice neighborhood feel to it with a lot of schoolkids, bicycles, and dogs walking along. Still, it had a lot of floats too – most with a strong sense of humor.
There were beads thrown, crawfish gobbled, and a beer or two tossed down. There was fun for young kids and grown kids too.
The day was here, Wednesday, February 15, 2012. Dallashenge. I had done the calculations via suncalc.net. I had done the test shots. And now, today, according to my best ciphering, the sun would set exactly in alignment with the canyons of highrise buildings in Downtown Dallas.
It would not be as spectacular as the very well-known Manhattanhenge, of course. As far as I know, I am the only person that recognizes this phenomenon in Dallas.
The forecast threatened thunderstorms. All day the sky was cloudy; fog wrapped the city. I had set 3PM as my decision time (I was thinking that maybe Friday would be a better day anyway for photographs) and as if by magic, the Texas sun burned the fog away, leaving the sky blue with only a few wisps of long rope-like clouds. The best I could hope for.
So I left work a little early and lugged my tripod and camera downtown on the train. It was very awkward – I need to find a way to carry/strap my tripod in/on a pack with my camera. After my test shots, I had decided to set up on a little spot of sidewalk at the intersection of Pacific, Live Oak, and St. Paul. It wasn’t the most “canyon-like” intersection, but it was impressive looking, gave me a spot to stand without dashing back and forth across the street, and Pacific Avenue isn’t blocked at the end by the Lew Sterrett Jail like the other downtown streets.
I set up the camera and tripod right at six and waited for the sun to set. Suncalc.net gave the sunset time as 6:13, which turned out to be the time the last bit of sun dropped below the horizon. Even on Pacific, the horizon isn’t unblocked, so the apparent sunset time was earlier; I took my last picture at about 6:10. It happened quickly – I was snapping, changing the camera position, adjusting the exposure, zooming in and out, and checking my photographs on the screen on the back of the Nikon.
I saw nobody else that was aware of the ‘henge. Only one person paid any attention to me. A man out walking his dogs stopped and I told him what I was doing. He said, “I walk my dogs every day at this time, and I noticed the sunsets were looking nice recently – but I didn’t realize it was because it was setting along the streets.”
Dallashenge (click to enlarge)
(Click to Enlarge) This is my new desktop wallpaper
Dallashenge (click to enlarge)
The Henge through a bus window.
I think I was there a day or two early. Even if this is the “official” henge date, the sun will be a little higher and a little more to the right in a couple days and that might make for better pictures. Next evening henge date I’ll go a little later. Also, I want to try some other intersections, especially the Elm and Harwood intersection by the Majestic Theater. I want to try and get into that pedestrian overpass – that should give a good shot.
This summer, on August 23 (6:57 AM) is a morning Dallashenge. Looking at the city maps, there is a parking garage at Lew Sterrett that might give a great view straight down Elm and Main. Sometime over the summer I need to check it out – see if the garage is public, how high its guard wall is, and if it is open at that hour of the morning.
Taking pictures of something this fleeting is sort of an all-encompassing activity. One henge day I want to go without a camera and just look at the thing.
Working Model for Three Piece No. 3: Vertebrae, by Henry Moore
My Curves Are Not Mad, by Richard Serra
Eve, by Auguste Rodin
There’s a nice stone bench behind the Henry Moore sculpture in the Nasher Sculpture Garden, where you can take a load off of your feet and look out at all the folks wandering around. It’s one of my favorite spots.
At the Central Expressway portion of the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority trolley line there always has been a dead end of the trolley tracks at the spot where the giant escalators plunge down into the earth for the CityPlace DART station, deep under the ground. That worked fine – the four trolley cars, Petunia, Rosie,Matilda, and The Green Dragon, all were double ended. They have dual driver’s stations, one on each end, and can run in either direction equally well.
The problem was, not all trolley cars are like that. The MATA began accumulating several cars that would only run one way. With the drastic expansion of the Dallas Streetcar System (into the new park being built over the Woodall Rogers Freeway, down into the West End, and across the Trinity River into Oak Cliff) they would need to restore and utilize these cars.
New tracks could be added into the downtown grid to allow trains to make a round trip, but at the CityPlace station there was no way to build in a loop. That station is the best connector between MATA and the DART trains, so it was impossible to abandon.
The decision was made to build a turntable, and money was found to put it in. That would allow the use of single-direction cars and would be a nice tourist attraction in and of itself. I’ve been following the progress of the construction and it was finished around the start of the year.
It looks really cool. It was designed to look good and is lit up at night with multicolored spotlights. There are some nice artworks near the turntable and places to sit and wait for the cars.
I rode the streetcar to the turntable, hoping it would go ’round, but all they did was drive onto the turntable and then go back the same way. Even with the turntable, they can’t use the single end cars until the tracks are extended on the other end. So I guess they don’t want to wear out the turntable until it is needed.
Still, it’s a nice, unique thing to take a look at. I’m looking forward to the expansion of the system, the new cars, and riding one around on the turntable. The wheels of development move slowly. Extreme patience is needed. I hope I live long enough.
All writers shares a common epiphany on the writing path. I call it Staring Into The Abyss. This experience happens when our writing has strengthened to the point where blissful ignorance rubs away and we begin to realize just how much we don’t know.
It’s a dark moment, a bleak moment. We feel shock. Frustration. Despair. Some stop right there on the path, their writing spirits broken. Others take a micro-step forward, progressing toward the most important stages leading to growth: acceptance and determination.
Once we come to terms with what we don’t know, we can set out to learn. Taking on the attitude of a Learner is what separates an amateur from a PRO.
Bill Chance 