Large Fierce Mammal

One hundred and sixty-one years ago today, a light of dark genius was extinguished forever under bizarre circumstances that remain unclear to this day. At approximately 5:00 AM on Sunday, 7 October 1849, at the end of several days of delirium, Edgar Allan Poe regained complete consciousness only long enough to speak his last words – “Lord help my poor soul!”

Accounts report that Poe was on a lecture tour and had left Richmond, Virginia for Philadelphia on 27 September 1849. He was not seen again until he was found semi-conscious in the street outside Ryan’s Saloon on Lombard Street in Baltimore, Maryland on 3 October 1849. Known for his dapper and fastidious style of dress, when carried off the street and into the tavern Poe was wearing cheap, tattered, soiled, ill fitting clothes that were clearly not his own. The tavern owner, Joseph W. Walker, was able to learn his identity and the name of an acquaintance, Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass, resulting in this communication:

Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849
Dear Sir,

There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

Yours, in haste,
JOS. W. WALKER
To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass

(more…)

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror) was an unauthorized film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Released in 1922, the movie was directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and starred actor Max Schreck in the role of Count Orlok, the vampire. Silent and shot in the grainy black and white of its day, Nosferatu first came to my attention late one autumn night in the early 1970’s, while I was seeking to unwind after writing a paper for a high school English class. I was immediately hooked.

Max Schreck as Count Orlok. Click the picture for a better view.

In spite of the primitive state of 1920’s cinematography, Schreck’s makeup and portrayal of the vampire, set against the grim backdrop of the scenes, still gives portions of the film the feeling one is watching something that is horribly real. Like viewing the contents of some ancient cans of film, discovered in the dusty attic of a long abandoned house, deep in a brooding forest.

As it turned out, I wasn’t alone in my interpretation. Shadow of the Vampire, released in 2000 starring John Malkovich as F. W. Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, tells the fictionalized story of the making of Nosferatu from the perspective of Schreck having been an actual vampire, hired by Murnau to ensure the greatest in authenticity ever put to film. Shadow of the Vampire is also a must see, even if history shows the real Max Schreck was quite mortal and highly respected as a stage and film actor. His full name was Friedrich Gustav Max Schreck, born 6 September 1879 in Berlin, Germany. He died, for real, on 20 February 1936 in Munich, survived by his wife, German actress Fanny Normann who appeared uncredited in Nosferatu in the role of the nurse.

Today’s Dark Sentiment is the 1922 release of Nosferatu. Don’t worry about the grainy intro. It does come into focus before the action starts. Watch it after dark.

Revenge. It’s among the top ten of my favourite topics and our society likes to pretend it’s fallen out of favour. Bullshit. (more…)

The Gentlemen

Here’s an uplifting little bit of rhyme for you. Not sure who wrote it, but I find it catchy.

Can’t even shout, can’t even cry.
The Gentlemen are coming by.
Looking in windows, knocking on doors.
They need to take seven
And they might take yours.
Can’t call to mom, can’t say a word.
You’re gonna die screaming but you won’t be heard. (more…)

I am privileged to know a policeman with whom I have shared many a working and non-working hour, occasionally whilst quaffing an ale or ten. Our man is a retired member of the now disbanded Whynacht Security & Survival/Lunenburg – Mahone Bay Police Expeditionary Force who now plies his trade as a crime scene investigator for the esteemed Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A better man to draw a chalk line around you you’ll never meet. All this, and his family is famed for the quality of its moonshine. What’s not to love?

He’s told me stories and I’ve witnessed him doing things his wife will never hear from my lips, but I digress. Come to think of it I’ve known her longer than him and a few of the skeletons in her closet know me by my first name (Large) … but I’m still digressing. Anyway, today is his birthday and his very own wife has defined that date to me as “Dark Sentiments – Day 3”. Marilyn Munroe said, “If you can make a girl laugh you can make her do anything.” I rest my case. Today’s post is dedicated to my crime scene investigator friend, and actually also to his wife for having married him, thereby saving all other women from such a fate. (more…)

Mrs. LFM and I were recently asked to dinner at the residence of the kind of friends that don’t require the services of a food and drink taster before anything passes one’s lips. In the course of the evening I had cause to mention our preferences for dark, even black, humour. I further recounted how much of what I hold dear in life fits within the scope of the description I once heard of how the Tuareg tribesmen like their coffee:

Black as the Devil,
Strong as Death,
Sweet as Love,
And Hot as Hell. (more…)

Throughout human history and up to an amazingly short time ago, people lived in more intimate contact with Nature. The reality of what constituted a “work week” was driven by whether or not the sun was up, the current weather trends, the time of the month, and the season of the year.  Self-sufficiency of the individual, of families, and of communities was essential to survival, as was the ability to outlast hardship in the hope that better times were coming, always with the certainty that all things must come to an end. (more…)

My parents, Evelyn and Lawrence Whynacht, on their wedding day.

My mother was born and raised into her mid-teens in Montreal, Quebec. Her parents separated shortly after the end of World War II with her mother remaining in Montreal while her father moved back to his birthplace in East Chester, Nova Scotia.

When she was fifteen years old, and against her own mother’s wishes, my mother moved to Nova Scotia where she lived with her father and worked in his lumber company. It was because of this move that, a few years later, she met my father. A native of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, my father was the front man and lead singer for a Lunenburg based country band called Slim Major and his Ranch Boys. You guessed it – he was Slim Major.

Well, ol’ Slim and his posse were playing a dance gig in Chester that my mother attended. My father took one look at her and immediately started down a path that previously had never failed to get all the parts of him that mattered into a girl’s pants. Except it didn’t work this time.

And so it came to pass that, as the saying goes, he chased her until she caught him and each considered the other worth the chase.

After they married, my parents moved to Montreal where my father worked days as an elevator operator, my mother in a laundry and dry cleaning establishment, while he attended night school to learn the new and mysterious arts of radio and television repair. I was conceived in Montreal but missed being born there by three months.

I find it an endearing part of life in the middle part of the last century that the first thing my parents wanted to do when they realized I was on my way was celebrate by going out to their favourite night club to dance and drink a lot of booze.

They often told a story of how the bar’s piano player was engaging the audience by asking couples if they were there because they were celebrating a special occasion. When he learn their reason, he smiled and dedicated his next song to them. As the years went by, this became my mother’s favourite arrangement of that fine tune.

The finished product in a photo that captures how it looked mere seconds before I bit it.

The first time I read Lord of the Rings, I’m sure I was personally responsible for skyrocketing values of stocks for companies involved in the production of bacon, mushrooms, and dark, full bodied beers. I absolutely enjoy any literature that confronts me with a description of food consumed by the characters that leaves me wanting to devour whatever they’re having. Something like that happened recently while Mrs. LFM was reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, an espionage novel written by the late Stieg Larsson that is one of a trilogy set in Sweden. I haven’t yet read the book, but I have enjoyed watching the Swedish movie adaptation while snuggled with Mrs. LFM, and can tell you that it contains, what is for me, one of my top two attitude adjustment scenes. Go see it and let me know if you’re not sure which scene I mean. (more…)

“Morning in a Pine Forest” by Ivan Ivanovitch Shishkin

I’ve never been one to become bored by my own company. I was quite young when I realized that being alone wasn’t boring, and that to truly know boredom I had to be in the company of other people. For most of my childhood, and all of what has so far passed as my adult life, I have been able to get more out of an hour in the woods, or quietly paddling a canoe as far from human habitation as I can get in the time permitted, than I could ever find in a week in the kind of place most people usually regard as a vacation paradise. The wild restores me in a fundamental and primal way that experiencing the greatest of man’s achievements could never even come close to equaling. (more…)