Back at the North Burial Ground it was my companion’s turn to pick a tour and he decided upon the HP Lovecraft tour. HP Lovecraft did indeed live in Providence RI but he is buried elsewhere, in the Swan Point Cemetery, so what this tour had to offer was a bit of a mystery. Still, we parked in our usual spot and ambled in – this time finding ourselves behind the visitor’s center where there was a HUGE memorial to the Armenian Genocide. How we had missed this before… is just testament to how much we weren’t paying attention because I mean this thing is MASSIVE and definitely worth a look if you are already here.
After that distraction was put aside we finally got to business. First up was finding the stone of Clara L Hess who was a classmate of HP Lovecraft although she apparently had quite the illustrious life all on her own as a reporter and editor of the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin.
Next up was Chester Pierce Munroe – who likely bonded with HP Lovecraft when they were both pups, daring each other to eat paste. OK, so you can’t prove the latter part of that but that’s how I’d like to imagine it. Truth be told they met when they were very young at school and remained chums throughout the rest of their days. Munroe was a working class man and although there’s rumors of him writing a book or several he was unable to get anything published. Not really surprising considering the politics of the day.
Addison P Munroe was another childhood friend although information on him seems a little scarce. Good news is if I remember right his stone was really close to the last one and also had his wife’s name on it who I guess also garnered a small acquaintance with Lovecraft.
James Tobey Pyke was apparently a big influence on his neighbor, a 14-year-old Lovecraft, whom he encouraged to write poetry. Pyke was a poet himself as well as a minister at one point. He apparently had pretty frail health but still insisted on working for his income despite being from a fairly well to do family. Eleanor Francis Pyke was James’ wife who also adored poetry and managed to raise a poet son, growing up alongside the neighbor’s boy Lovecraft.
Samuel Brenton Mumford was a successful local businessman that was one of the first investors to own a part of the Providence Athenaeum which would later become a favorite haunt of Lovecraft’s. In addition to this it was his former home which HP Lovecraft would later spend the last few years of his life.
Cyrus Butler was the Providence’s own Scrouge McDuck kinda character. In life he was obscenely wealthy and really not terribly keen on sharing that but even so he was one of the original investors helping to build the Providence Athenaeum – an institution that he also gave a large donation to after his death. He also bequeathed 30K to build The Rhode Island Hospital for the Insane post humorously. It still exists although it’s called the Butler Hospital and has nothing to do with Lovecraft as far as I can see. Also isn’t it wonderful millionaires can get redemption even after death?! Must be nice!
So ended the Lovecraft Tour. Below are photos of the stones mentioned and a bunch of others that distracted me with thier uniqueness or beauty. It’s a lovely cemetery to explore!
I admit that conventions are not part of my world. And a horror convention seems even more out there but I like being a wild card and having someone share their special interests with me which is how I ended up here. And as an added bonus I LOVE weird people and this seemed like it might have a whole den of them.
Really my usual companion wanted to see the live radio show. He’s super into them. So on Saturday after he got off work we drove directly the convention. It would leave us plenty of time to catch the radio show. I was excited to see it too but I had to take a few days to prepare for it as I am not one for crowds. Or city life. Or people really. Got off to a bit of a bad start when we spent a TON of time in traffic which was acting insane. Usually, I can deal with this just fine but on that particular evening it put me on edge.
We parked at the mall as it was cheaper but that did mean we’d have to walk through the mall on a weekend evening and holy crap was it swarmed. I’d have trouble with this even before Covid. I carried on and did the best I could but then I had to ride an elevator, walk through one of those weird human hamster tunnels over the street, and ride several escalators – the last of which was ungodly narrow, steep, and claustrophobic. Escalators had been my nemesis since childhood and everything was setting off my sensory overload tonight.
Eventually we found a big room full of vendors with a $5 per person admittance fee. We forked it over and looked around. There was all kinds of weird betenticled art everywhere. Paintings, prints, giant plushies. It was an odd rabbit hole to fall down but a fun one. Still, this was not what we were looking for. We asked where the general admittance was and was told we’d have to walk over the Biltmore down the street which we did.
The Biltmore itself is supposed to be haunted. In fact it has such a reputation it was on my list of places to poke at even before this convention but tonight wasn’t the best night to be doing so. I walked in and there’s all sorts of absolutely garish 1920’s art nouveau architecture and design which when done well can be stunning but this place? I dunno, it just seemed so tacky to me. And disorienting. I can’t even describe how I was feeling at that point but it was almost like I was wearing those shitty drunk goggles they give children to make them not want to drink. Just everything seemed somehow off. It was a weird energy for sure – whether I can blame this on the place being haunted or just my own sensory overload I don’t know but that’s where I was at that moment.
We found the people at the take in register for the convention but they said they’d already packed up hours earlier and were no longer selling tickets or making allowances to see the radio theater. My companion was deflated. I was too. I had struggled mightily for this one and now it was a no-go. I asked if the radio theater would be there tomorrow and yes, it was a different show, but they would be there performing something. We decided to come back the next day. Let me tell you I was happy to be home after that.
Sunday came around and we headed out fairly early so we could see at least some of the short film festival at the library before the radio show. We got out on time and were able to buy tickets and even better I was feeling much less over stimulated!
We walked to the library but we were a bit early. There was a sign on the door saying it was closed on Sundays except for the convention and then in small letters that it’d be open at 12:05. it wasn’t 12:05 yet so we stood politely at the door with another man who claimed to have “just rolled down the hill” to get there. A librarian popped out and happily burbled, “Thank you for reading the sign! Everyone else has just tried to come right in!” She then highlighted the part about opening up at 12:05 before replacing it on the door. By now several more people had gathered and were now chatting about how far they travelled and then all about cats. This would be an ongoing theme on just about everyone I eavesdropped on. Who attends horror conventions you might wonder… Cat people. That’s who. I mean yeah there are those decked to the hilt in Goth gear, the heavily tattooed, those who look like they’re suffering existential dread, the odd rat enthusiast, some queer rebels, a large swath of neurodivergent peoples annnnnd amateur mycologists otherwise known as mushroom lovers. That last one caught me a bit off guard.
Finally we were allowed in and made our way to the theater – an actual tiny theater, in a library. This was new for me. And it was cute! And cozy! And Old Timey looking. And to their credit the first film they showed was suitably distressing. It was about keeping a living consciousness in a computer which is always a little unnerving but they seemed to make it over the top uncomfortable. Maybe that’s a good thing, I don’t know.
From there the films ranged from familiar old tropes, to psychological horror, to comedy horror. I was having a good time with it. And it was interesting to see just what people were doing to make these little films which had to be a shoe string budget but most you couldn’t tell. Afterwards one of the film’s creators came up to do a Q & A and my companion got into it by asking a question. I was happy to see him involved even if I myself would rather die than ask a question in a public forum. That’s just me and that’s OK.
We stuck around for block two which started with a claymation short which obviously tickled my own special interests. And there was one some time afterwards that was really low budget – just one dude sitting in front of a green screen playing with a plush bat, that actually was still amazing somehow?? And hilarious! I don’t know, I was impressed. Actually most, if not all, of the shorts kept my interest for the most part. There was a couple I was hazy on but I guess that’s just part of the experience. It was hard picking a favorite.
We decided to skip the last block of short films and instead go to grab a bite to eat before listening to a dramatic story reading before attending the radio show. So off we went. I’d read over the program schedule for fun and I was amused with a lot of the offerings. Cthulhu prayer breakfast, a lecture on missing persons, and weirdly enough a group therapy session. I guess in acknowledgment of the fact if you were here you might be the sort to benefit from a little group therapy sesh. Actually, a lot of the lectures looked super intriguing, but they were from the previous few days. They were the sort of things I could plunk myself on a seat and just spend a day listening to random lectures. Yeah, OK, maybe the crazy ticket price was worth it. There was a lot going on.
Making our way out of there I met a woman on the street who had the same cutesy baby Cthulhu T-shirt and we laughed. She asked if I’d seen the Craft-thulu T-shirt and I said I had it. It was just a weird, sweet moment – two oddballs recognizing each other’s oddness.
We ate at the mall and I picked up one of my books from the car which I’d leave on a bench in the park to be found. Part of my book bombing/book crossing campaign. The dramatic story telling was actually The Willows by Algernon Blackwood read by Robert Lloyd Perry and let me tell you – it was indeed dramatic! I was expecting a nice little relaxing story time, just sit in quiet and listen to someone read to me like I’m a child. No, not quite. It did start off nice and soft but the deeper into the story we got the more impassioned and loud our narrator and the music behind him became. This in combination with the fact they dimmed the lights set my brain off. I basically forgot where I was, immersed completely in the story, seeing it in vivid detail in place of the very real surroundings around me. I started to fidget and scratch at my skin just to keep myself grounded in reality. My companion too really enjoyed this piece. Curiously so too did a young woman wearing noise reducing headphones. She hadn’t been the only one wearing some sort of deadening device. Even I was tempted to put in ear plugs as a lot of these events were getting a bit loud for me. I wondered if these people were also somewhere on the spectrum enjoying a day out the best they could. So far the diversity of each crowd was keeping me quite happy.
And when it was all over we were in the right place to just stay for what we came for – a performance of Curse of the Yig performed by the Dark Adventure Radio Theater. I should probably note that going into this I have not been a huge fan of any kind of radio. Yes, I listened to War of the Worlds and got a good giggle in my youth but that is where my interest in this activity ended until I met my companion who has on numerous occasions shared his love of these performances by playing them in the car on our many trips. And it’s been pleasant but I still didn’t fully comprehend why seeing it live would be any better. It’s radio after all.
It started with a lot of fussing over the projector and an apology to the audience that the cast they had painfully ensured was diverse for this adaption of an H P Lovecraft story was down to a skeleton crew and just looked like a buncha white people again. It might seem like a strange thing to say but H P Lovecraft unfortunately was even a hardcore racist for his day and although there are lots of people who love his wild and whimsical style of writing there’s a lot less of us who agree with his politics. But white supremacists being who they are probably would find a good ‘hero’ in Lovecraft which is why the rest of us decent folk have to try so very hard to take the good and leave all the bad. It’s a noble effort.
Anyway, the radio drama started with just four people voicing all the parts (including the dog who barked intermittently at various scenes.) Every once in a while the projector would show something to the audience asking them to make a noise for the background. Oh, so it’s audience participation that’s different, I see. Granted all the noises were the same…. wind, the rattle of a rattlesnake, hissing… these are all the same noise. None the matter I found it adorable and quite fun. By the end I got it. It was worth coming to see live. Even better they gave the hardcore fans a ‘clue’ with which to decipher a code. My companion of course got up and asked for a code card at the end and brought it home to happily solve it. Again, it was nice to see this sort of involvement.
It was getting late when we left and my companion was concerned I’d had enough activity for one day but he did mention there was one last film showing 4 miles away at a theater. I said it’s OK, we can go check it out, and so we did. And the parking gods must have been smiling on me because there was a parking spot right near the theater that was next to an intersecting street meaning all I had to do was drive into it without properly parallel parking which I STILL have not learned how to do. No matter!
That’s how we ended up at the Dunwich Horror Picture Show. We knew this was a screening of the 1970 movie The Dunwich Horror, which is a terrible movie, but we didn’t really understand the Picture Show part of that. Rocky Horror mashup? Hard to say.
I did what I always do… looked around the audience. And that’s where I found them – a group that had been remarkably absent most of the day despite my theories they should have been everywhere – the gay men. Oh sure, I’d seen a couple adorable lesbian couples here and there but this seemed to be the hub where all the men were. Scores of them. Which made little sense to me as the Dunwich Horror is CLEARLY a film about one straight white dude’s rape fantasies (which is very in step with horror from the 70’s.) If you’re wondering why I thought such a large portion of the queer community would be at this convention it’s because I grew up in the 80’s and 90;s when every villain was still queer coded and although that was supposed to be a bad thing I also knew this backfired and many still LOVE queer coded villains. Honestly, how can you not? They’re fucking hilarious. Also so much of the crowd today seemed neurodivergent and again there’s a disproportionally large cross section of people who are both queer and neurodivergent. I was just happy my amateur psychology worked. I was comfortable here now the world made sense again. Also the theater was dark so it was kinda perfect for my nerves.
So, what was it about the Dunwich Horror that was so great? Well, it had a live band playing the soundtrack and an announcement at the beginning saying, “We know this film is terrible. Feel free to heckle it. Just make your comments funny.” And the audience complied! But that wasn’t even the best part. The best part was the wildly gesticulating people in Cthulhu costumes who’d come from the sides of the theater to do a crazed interpretive dance to distract you whenever the dream sequences got too rapey. How cool would that be just to have that on standby whenever something triggering comes up? Like no, you don’t want to look over at something potentially distressing, look over here AT THE DANCING TENTICLE MONSTER! WOOOOO!
It was all a very happy and positive experience. My companion even got to take a break to enjoy remembering some other happy memories at this theater. While doing so he tried to thank me for coming with him today to enjoy the weird things in life and I…. would have replied it was no problem if I wasn’t distracted by the John Waters Christmas poster. Now that’s a whole other brand of weird (and I’m all for it!)
All and all I am super happy we did the Dunwich Horror as it was the perfect way to end the evening and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Maybe a little too much if I’m honest. So, was it worth going into the city, a place I normally avoid? Oh yes, absolutely. And it looks like someone picked up my book that I left sooo… there’s always that.
Last week my one full day in Rhode Island turned out to be a rainy one so we decided that we should find something to do that was indoors. I didn’t really have any ideas but my travel companion suggested we poke around Providence for the day. We looked up what to do in Providence and found the RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] Museum. The photos of it made it seem very random and if there’s anything we both love it’s really random things.
The cost was steeper than most of my entries here at $17 per adult so it had to have something interesting, right? Well, we were off to find out! I was just hoping there was parking nearby, preferably a garage but alas there was only parallel parking along a busy street. Joy. There’s three things I haven’t learned how to do in life: tie my shoes like normal person, tell my left from my right, and parallel park. Luckily some ways up the road there was a park and I found three empty spots in a row. My travel companion says when this happens it’s not parallel parking, it’s just parking, but I’m not going to let his cynicism cloud what is clearly a win for me.
A hare! GET IT!!
The museum was surprisingly ordinary for being dedicated to design… Just a big plain brick building. Though the lobby by itself was as big as most of the museums I have visited here in New England. It even had a coat room with lockers and a bucket for wet umbrellas. Impressive. This was going to be good…
We entered the museum which… seemed to be a huge mostly empty gallery. There were a few creative dresses on display in one corner, some sort of holographic water fountain in another, and a neat selection of tiles made to look like hands were coming out of the walls. Besides that there was just a ton of white empty walls. The only full display we saw was another student exhibit talking about life in the US as a person of color. It was interesting… but still clearly the early work of students. It was something we were both happy to support buuuut…. we thought maybe there was something more to this? If not we both felt as if $17 was a bit steep. After this we entered another empty gallery that was huge and only contained a set of hand drums. They were curious things and I wanted to read the plaque on the wall but there was a security guard standing next to them with an intense energy that made me way too uncomfortable to want to stay in the room long enough for that so we both wandered off.
From here we finally stumbled into a gallery with something in it. It was mostly full of seemingly random things – a really dangerous looking toaster from the early days of electricity, a bunch of weird chairs, a flapper dress, a TV set from the 1960’s that looked like an astronaut’s helmet. And on the walls a small Jackson Pollock was mixed in. for seemingly no reason.
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either.”
“I could barf that up in ten minutes. Maybe he was really good at networking. And selling useless shit to rich people.”
Not too far away there was also a small Georgia O’Keefe painting. At least it looked like something. But didn’t really elicit any emotion from me. Which is probably a good thing. I’d been nearly brought to tears while visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam… which distressed everyone around me.
Demons, Tlazoteotl ‘Eater of Filth’ Martine Gutierrez
I thought this room was the end of the museum but it was actually just the end of this section. Beyond it was where things finally got interesting. We suddenly found ourselves wandering into what looked like a proper art museum. An enormous hall with giant portrait paintings surrounded by two rooms of medieval things. My travel companion finally felt like this was worth the trip. The paintings all seemed to have weird things going on in the background. I fell in love with the bored expression of this one boy and was alarmed by a swarm of Cherubs ripping a hare apart in the corner of another. Well… they do say children and animals don’t mix… and I always have been super creeped out by Cherubs. Maybe even more so than dolls and that’s saying something.
From here there was just a totally random mix of pretty much one or two items from every art movement jumbled with a lot of dishes. I enjoyed the Grecco Roman artifacts (including an ornately carved sarcophagus) and my travel companion seemed to be more keen on the Egyptian mummy complete with canopic jars. Both of us were impressed by the one sweet little Van Gogh they had in the same room as a Picasso. By now even the building was taking on character – most of it emanating from a massive glass bubble chandelier that was a spectacle all on it’s own even without the tentacles that slithered out of it.
When we came back down we realized we missed a room where this photographic portrait of the Aztec “filth-eater” god was. It was the perfect bizarre way to end our visit. By now we both agreed it was totally worth the $17 even if we were a bit skeptical at first…
