The Photography of Helen Levitt

I've got the post-Halloween blues. Now it's that awful time of year when everyone gets hyped up for spending money and underwhelming family holidays. Don't get me wrong—I love winter. The quiet, the stillness, the oh-so-satisfying crunch of fresh snow under your boots. There's something so indefinably relaxing about the cold. At the same time, I'll miss the fiery leaves and spooky excitement of October.

As we move toward the end of the year, here's one last gasp of Halloween goodness, courtesy of Helen Levitt.

Levitt was a photographer who spent her life in New York. Born in Brooklyn in 1913, she developed an interest in photography after dropping out of high school. She became known for her "street photography," documenting everyday life in New York City, and she died in 2009 at the age of 95.

(As an aside, the idea of "street photography" fascinates me. While it has definite merits as an honest and candid form, it's also easily inclined toward exploitation—accidental or otherwise. Perhaps I'll flesh out these thoughts more in a future post.)

Nonetheless, I like these photos because of how they convey the excitement and idleness of a child's Halloween. They remind me of the eagerness I felt as a kid before trick-or-treating, and the exhaustion I felt afterward.

On this day after, I wish you rest and lots of candy.

NYC, 1940

NYC, 1940

Happy Halloween

Today's the day! If you know me, you probably know I love Halloween. The disguises, the sugary snacks, and—best of all—being scared out of your wits.

I appreciate the simple escape of horror. There's something paradoxically reassuring about the performance of terror. At a scary movie, for instance, we're scared because we want to be. Sure, media can still get under our skin, but we see scary movies because they give us a sense of control. The fictional terror on the screen is a distraction from the very real fears in our day-to-day lives.

Stephen King has a wonderful essay called "Why We Crave Horror Movies." He expresses the above points better than I can, so I'll send you his way instead. You can read the essay here on the King's College website (though be aware that the link is a file download).

Thanks for reading. Eat some candy, and happy Halloween.

Plan 9 from Outer Space

In the spirit of Halloween, I thought I'd share one of my favorite (non-) scary movies: Plan Nine from Outer Space. It's a delight, and an absolute disaster.

The film is remarkable for several reasons. Aside from being known as one of the "worst" movies ever made, it's the last film to feature actor Bela Lugosi (the guy who played the O.G. Dracula in 1931). Lugosi died before production really took off, so director Ed Wood hired a random actor to replace him. Wood still had footage of Lugosi, however, and he opted to simply splice the two actors' performances together.

Most audiences were unimpressed.

Now the movie has a quasi-legendary status. Almost everything about it is, by conventional standards, terrible. The acting, the writing; the production. Even when I first watched this as a naïve and impressionable six-year-old, I knew it was not a well-made movie. But that's its whole charm: as ridiculous a film this might be, it never takes itself too seriously.

For your enjoyment and chagrin, here's the whole thing.

- Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), directed by Ed Wood

Valerie Plame

I love Halloween so much.

I've decided that, if my current costume doesn't pan out, that I'll dress up as Valerie Plame. I thought this was painfully clever before I realized that a good 70% of the nation has likely forgotten who she is.

This afternoon, I also went for a run, which helped me realize how terribly I've prioritized my health in the last few months.

Oops.

I saw this tree

Satan and Sin (and my Browser Tabs)

The tabs I have open as I work on this paper about John Milton include:

• The OED definition of the word "take"
• A yellow plaid skirt on Amazon
• Intended for my Halloween costume, which now I am realizing won't come together in time unless I make a damn skirt, which I very well might do, depending on how willful I feel
• Or else I will dress up as something else entirely; I'm not very certain at this point, but I love Halloween and am determined to observe it with some sort of costume
• A summary of Aristotle's appeals
• "The Best of Chopin" from YouTube
• Which came on autoplay because I was listening to Debussy and YouTube algorithms are pretty good at compiling similar music
• "A Feminism Where ‘Lean In’ Means Leaning On Others" from the New York Times
• A JSTOR article by Nancy Frey about the Camino de Santiago
• A brief article from OpenCulture wherein Nabokov is quoted as referring to Faulkner's work as "corncobby chronicles"
• And finally, this painting:
  

"Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich

I'm writing about the ways Satan projects his image onto the female forms of Eve and Sin in Paradise Lost and it's not very uplifting. Compiling this post was a worthy distraction, albeit a fairly underwhelming one for you, reader. Sorry about that.

An Open Love-Letter to Halloween

Dear Halloween,

You are, without a doubt, my favorite holiday. That's not to say that you're perfect, because you're not, but your imperfections are what make you perfect in my sentimental eyes. I love that you give every shut-in a chance to rally a friend to watch Blood Feast because getting out of the house isn't that much fun anyway, or to eat candy excessively and then get really bad stomachaches afterward. I love that you give people a sensible reason to scare others, or to walk around unfamiliar neighborhoods in dangerously sight-obscuring masks, or that you let everyone feel like they're five again. I love that you give every loser a chance to be Ferris Bueller or Jill Valentine, if only just for one day.

In short, I love you a lot. Thanks for giving me a free twenty-four hour pass to Being Cool.

Gearing up, late '70's style