Category Archives: NecronomiCon 2015

NecronomiCon 2015 begins…

21 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, NecronomiCon 2015

≈ Comments Off on NecronomiCon 2015 begins…

The NecronomiCon 2015 should be beginning to buzz about now, as people arrive on the Thursday evening.

lightsprovidencePhotograph: A Providence hillside: some lamps lit, the western windows of homes reflecting a fading sunset. By Spencer Grant (1944-), Boston Public Library.

… its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Festival”.

Sunsets arouse in me vague feelings of pseudo-memory, mystical revelation, and adventurous expectancy, which nothing else can even begin to conjure up. They always seem to me to be about to unveil supernal vistas of other (yet half-familiar) worlds and other dimensions.” — Letter from Lovecraft to R.E. Howard, 7th May 1932.

It looks like it’s sunset for Tentaclii too. My thanks to the five people who have pledged a total of $16 to my Patreon campaign so far, which much appreciated. But I’m unsure that the Patreon call is going anywhere, sadly — I don’t see anyone even bothering to share the Patreon page on Facebook, Twitter or blogs. No comments on the Tentaclii blog, either. Just two on three likes on my various Facebook posts about it. I suspect that I will be pulling it at the end of the month.

Lovecraft’s 125th Birthday presents and parties - the big parcel

20 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Maps, NecronomiCon 2015

≈ Comments Off on Lovecraft’s 125th Birthday presents and parties - the big parcel

Here’s my quick round-up of the celebratory free items and events and doings in celebration of H.P. Lovecraft’s 125th birthday, on 20th August 2015…

* I’ve made a large map of some Providence locations the living Lovecraft would have been familiar with…

High resolution version here (5Mb in .JPG).

The map omits the Athenaeum — I can find very little evidence of his connection with it. It also omits the schools/YMCA and buildings/places variously said to have inspired his stories, except for “The Call of Cthulhu”‘s ‘Fleur-de-Lys’ building (hard to avoid as it’s alongside the Providence Art Club his aunt and other relatives were connected with). But the map does add cafes, of which he was so fond — one he is known to have frequented near the public library. The other is a general indication of the dock-front cafes for sailors and watermen, which he used at various times (possibly initially discovered at dawn after his early pre-NYC all-night walks?) because they were so cheap and served large portions.

* MalakiaLaGatta has a fine 125th Birthday poster…

MalakiaLaGatta-deviantart

* The Trunk Space has a night of Lovecraft performance art in Phoenix, AZ, tonight.

* Cambridge, Mass. has an “In the Mouth of Madness” Lovecraft film festival from the 20th - 24th August 2015, showing Lovecraft and Lovecraft-influenced movies on the big screen.

* There’s a big costumed H.P. Lovecraft Birthday Party in the East Village, New York City, with proceeds going help the homelessness in the city. Over in the West Village, NYC, there’s a The Weird West Village walking tour: H.P. Lovecraft Birthday Edition walk. The Lovecraft Bar in NYC is also hosting a party on the 21st August.

* The public library in Jacksonville, IL is holding its own Lovecraft Festival today.

* Buffalo, NY has a Love, Light & Magick evening of Lovecraft readings.

* There’s a “Celebrate H.P. Lovecraft’s 125th birthday at the Love Fest in Second Life“, Second Life being the well-known virtual world.

* South San Francisco Main Library has a “Happy Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft!” event this evening, 20th August from 5pm to 7pm… “Join us in celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday with board games, a film screening, and treats!” Sounds like it might be aimed at young teens?

* The book launch of Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s — at the Carlton Cinema, Toronto, August 20th — will happen alongside “a screening of animated shorts that celebrates H.P. Lovecraft’s 125th birthday”.

* Willits Kinetic Carnivale is a big steampunk kinetika gathering based around the Mendocino County Museum in California. They’re certainly aware that the event co-incides with HPL’s birthday, but the extent of HPL art and costume theming may be limited — their art gets prepared and planned for months in advance.

* A superbly stinky and rare giant Corpse Flower is about to blossom in Denver, just in time for HPL’s birthday…

corpse

* Pasedena’s Mountain View Mausoleum is holding an October production of Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable” in October, and they’ve having a Birthday preview reading at the Huntington on 22nd August 2015. “Wicked Lit” at the Huntington in Pasedena starts 7pm, and also includes readings from the Scottish Victorian novelist Margaret Oliphant.

* And, of course, there are a variety of Birthday related events in Providence, based around NecronomiCon 2015. Including a new Lovecraft plaque/post sited at 454 Angell Street. Designed, created, and installed by Gage Prentiss, “with placement help by Donovan and Pam Loucks”.

plaque

There was also a Hiding Under The Covers Birthday event in Providence, but it was on the 19th. However, as this post is being published midnight on 19th/20th UK time, there might still be time to rush down there if you read this quick enough.

I guess one might also consider the cool appearance by a likeness of Lovecraft in a recent film by the great director Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Manhattan, Midnight in Paris) to be a sort of birthday present, as the movie is released about now…

“Woody Allen deployed [the Providence Athenaeum’s] bronze bust of Lovecraft while filming Irrational Man in the Athenaeum. He positioned the impossible-to-ignore, overlarge head right between the lead actors during a pivotal exchange. The goofy image did suggest irrationality of some sort.”

Although the new movie is “set in Newport” rather than Providence, it seems that a variety of New England locations were melanged into Allen’s vision of Newport. Which I suspect looks rather unlike Innsmouth when viewed through Allen’s lens (gosh, wouldn’t that be a film — “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as filmed by Woody Allen, in his Shadows and Fog mode).

Irrational Man is apparently a small-scale intimate summer story with a few Hitchcockian twists, and is premiering in cinemas/theaters about now. I don’t hold much store by movie reviewers after the dim-witted parroting reviews that destroyed Tomorrowland, but a quick glance at the Google Search snippets for Irrational Man reviews suggests the reviewers have had moderately good things to say.

Update:

* TIME magazine and the Wall Street Journal note Lovecraft’s birthday.

* Cake, apparently at an event at Calgary Public Library…

cake

NecronomiCon 2015: Art in Providence

16 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, NecronomiCon 2015

≈ Comments Off on NecronomiCon 2015: Art in Providence

The “Ars Necronomica” art show is open now at the Providence Art Club, for the very-early arrivals at NecronomiCon 2015.

thomasst
Picture: Thomas Street at the Beginning of the End by FatherStone (Metteo Bocci). The original is on show as part of the Ars Necronomica 2015 show.

There are also some photographs of the “Ars Necronomica” exhibits online at The Art of Skinner.

The Dodge House Gallery at the Providence Art Club also has a complementary show called “Rhode Island Eerie”…

“featuring Rhode Island motifs, themes, and landscapes [that were] portrayed through the lens of the life and work of H. P. Lovecraft”.

Note that the Dodge House Gallery page has a Flash-tasitic 360-degree VR tour online. Didn’t work for me, since I’ve long since uninstalled Flash (it’s a massive security risk), but it may work for you.

Also on now in Providence is a restaurant wall show of contemporary Lovecraftian prints, “The Legacy & Future of H.P. Lovecraft in the Print” at Julians on Broadway, Providence.

julians

Some original correspondence / notebook sketches by members of Lovecraft’s circle will be on show from Wednesday 19th at Brown University, in “The Influence of Anxiety: Lovecraft, Bloch, Barlow, et al.”.

bloch-shub
Picture: Robert Bloch, “IÄA. Shub-Niggurath Y’A”, circa 1933. Brown University Library.

There are no other related gallery shows nearby in New England it seems, mostly chocolate-box landscapes and seascapes for the mainstream tourist.

Getting Lovecraft’s Letters online

09 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by in NecronomiCon 2015, Scholarly works

≈ Comments Off on Getting Lovecraft’s Letters online

Eight hours to go, on a set of used Selected Letters on eBay, and the seller is offering an affordable shipping rate to the UK. Currently unaffordable for me, sadly, but one day I’ll get a full set of the Selected Letters hardbacks on my Lovecraft shelf.

Although, by then, there may be a good searchable public digital edition of Lovecraft’s letters. On that score I’d suggest that NecronomiCon 2015 seems a suitable venue for some serious pre-production discussion, and initial wallet-tugging for some seed funding. The digital Collected Letters don’t necessarily need to be released as a readily pirate-able DVD or USB stick. The Letters might appear as a website that only serves up Google Books-like page-views, in response to search queries, and only allows copy-paste of one paragraph at a time. An annual subscription fee could give access to such a site ($20 a year for individuals, $300 for libraries and institutions?), or it might be made free and the costs defrayed by ads or sponsors — in fact, a Kickstarter would probably fund it with $500,000 in a few hours if the campaign were to be fronted by Joshi, the HPLHS, leading scholars etc, and the amount was to be match-funded by an institution or foundation. Such an online format would, of course, have the great advantage of allowing a group of approved annotators to easily start work on annotating the letters in a coherent and moderated manner. Plus it would not eat into sales of existing print books of the letters, and might actually stimulate such sales.

The Providence Journal’s Lovecraft story competition

10 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, NecronomiCon 2015

≈ Comments Off on The Providence Journal’s Lovecraft story competition

The jet-pack rocketeers of the Rhode Island Science Fiction Club deliver the news that The Providence Journal newspaper has a Lovecraft short-story competition… “seeking original tales of terror” in the Lovecraftian style. 1,500 words, deadline: 26th July 2015. “The three winners will be published in The Journal‘s Rhode Islander section in August 2015.”

I’d imagine that having a light patina of local history and geography may please the judges. A couple of ideas that spring immediately to mind…

* A story woven around Lovecraft’s job as a ticket seller at a Providence cinema.

* The ‘origin story’ of the boy Lovecraft’s aversion to sea-food, with the Providence dock-side warehouses as the setting. Have this episode illuminate Lovecraft’s 1929 letter to The Journal, titled “Retain Historic ‘Old Brick Row'” / “The Old Brick Row”, in which he tried to prevent the demolition of the historic dockside warehouses.

* After his return to Providence Lovecraft noted that he sometimes visited the city’s rougher dock-side cafes, since they were good places to get very cheap filling meals. Possibly he had also used them earlier, after a night of explorations around the harbour area. Could he have once met there the inspiration for the story “The Terrible Old Man” (1920)? Lovecraft imagines meeting a similar character on the docks in the year 2000, in his early poem “Providence in 2000 A.D.” (pub. Providence’s Evening Journal, 4th March 1912)…

  With terror struck, I sought the wharf once more,
  But as my steamboat’s whistle ‘gan to roar,
  A shrivell’d form, half crouching ‘twixt the freight,
  Seiz’d on my arm, and halted short my gait.
  “Who art thou, Sirrah?” I in wonder cry’d;
  “A monstrous prodigy,” the fellow sigh’d;
  “Last of my kind, a lone unhappy man, …”

One might add some macabre link with the long-lived street cat named “Old Man”, a creature Lovecraft often met with while walking down toward the centre of Providence.