31 October 2017 – Yah yah, there’s your ghosties & goblies & long-leggedy beasties, and your pirates & witches & skeletons & spiders …
But it’s all so last-century, y’know?
Time for some here-&-now horror.
Like …
a fluorescent green Hazmat suit.
All posts tagged Hallowe’en
BOOO!!! (2017 version)
Posted by icelandpenny on 31 October 2017
https://icelandpenny.com/2017/10/31/booo-2017-version/
Boo!!
31 October 2015 – Look at that date, it is Halloween — an event heavily commercialized around here, and therefore one to which I am heavily resistant.
Even so, these three street scenes snuck past my defences.
Exhibit One – A family in the comfortable Beaches neighbourhood has ignored all the product in all the stores, and raided their bed-sheet supply instead.
Result? Ghosts in the best home-made tradition, dancing on their front porch.
I particularly like Little Baby Ghost, tucked up there in the middle.
Exhibit Two – A pumpkin, minimally & cleverly carved, thrust into a now-empty sidewalk planter outside the café Green Beanery, at Bloor & Bathurst.
Here, I particularly like the raven.
Exhibit Three – A skull, what else? Maybe painted for the occasion, not sure about that, & happy to have seen it, either way.
He looms at the corner of Cyril Lane & Borden, just north of College Street.
No particular-like about this one — I’m pleased by the whole skull/bike/fire-escape montage.
There. That’s Hallowe’en.
Posted by icelandpenny on 31 October 2015
https://icelandpenny.com/2015/10/31/boo/
After the Fire
2 November 2014 – After Hallowe’en as well, but I want to pay tribute.
A year ago, late October, I showed you this picture of a particularly stylish Hallowe’en display in front of one of the Victorian Cabbagetown homes on Spruce St.
The ghost with a sleek raven a-top his head was just part of the total effect. The other part: this elegant lady, in suitably 19th-c. attire.
This year, the raven is not so sleek.
In fact, he is very much the worse for wear — more than can be explained by the dark, drizzling weather on October 31.
And that’s because, about a month ago, this home suffered a devastating fire.
The blaze was contained to that one home, thank goodness, but it caused havoc there, and the house is still boarded up. Nobody expected the owners — creative people, involved with musical as well as visual arts — to mount any kind of Hallowe’en display.
But they did.
They painted the fire scene onto the boards over the windows, added jumping figures & a horrified black cat.
They dragged their ruined musical instruments onto the lawn, and made them part of the tableau.
The once-elegant 19th-c. lady now presides over the ruined instruments.
Come close, you see what sufficient heat does to a piano keyboard.
Passers-by stop as I’m taking these photos, obviously neighbours.
Like me, they admire the grace & courage of this couple; several also suggest the display is cathartic as well — a way to confront the tragedy, and move from merely suffering its losses, to transforming those losses into additional resources for their celebration of life and community.
I think that’s probably true.
But I also saw this little side-tableau, tucked at the far end of the ruined keyboard.
For me, it reads — amid all the courage, style and resilience — as a scene of pure pain. An acknowledgment that, just for a moment, they wanted to “curl up & die.”
And then they got up, and they coped.
Posted by icelandpenny on 2 November 2014
https://icelandpenny.com/2014/11/02/after-the-fire/
Walk, Talk, Rock… B.C.-style
Since 14 August 2014
